Gopher

Where have you been? Everybody likes Drive.

I'll take the arthouse over the AMC most days of the week (the other days are reserved for tentpoles). The Landmark Theaters never have any horrible texters or talking teenagers or loud families. Their customers respect the movies and the rest of the audience, and Landmark respects them back.

Yep. Dragon Tattoo is also doing very well so far.

I know, I know, just preliminary tabulations.

The preview reel didn't impress me either. Doesn't look like the characters are going to become any less stereotypical.Ratings-wise, god knows NBC needs a hit, but I'm not sure this is it. Seems like it's at heart a show for a narrow demographic (again, Studio 60). Glee was all the rage with teenagers and even that had a finite audience (one that's dropping off quite a bit now). This won't be nearly as big, and it's on NBC to boot...I kept thinking during the pilot how interesting it would be if they brought on Michelle Williams as herself in an episode. The movie will be on the minds of plenty of viewers, I'm sure.

Interesting results from the first batch of lists. So far, there's about 20 movies that people seem passionate about. Not that many of these are unexpected, but I'm surprised we haven't seen more support for others. Also, lots of people with good taste!

I know this won't be a popular opinion 'round these parts, but I thought that this and The Rock were Bay at his absolute finest. I'm surprised that during the Transformers trilogy he didn't look at his own movie and remember that this is how you do a really big stupid movie. Don't believe me? Tell me these aren't some of the best quotes in blockbuster history- "Sir, the override is overriden" "The fate of the planet is in the hands of a bunch of retards I wouldn't trust with a potato gun." "Sire, tis a continental breakfast." "And last thing, these guys don't want to have to pay taxes again... ever" "I know the presidents' chief scientific advisor, we were at MIT together. And, in a situation like this, you-you really don't wanna take the advice from a man who got a C minus in astrophysics. The presidents' advisors are... wrong. I'm right." "Have you ever heard of Evel Knievel?" "No, I never saw Star Wars." "I ain't gonna kill him. I'm just gonna take a foot off of him. A man can work with one foot."

Thing about The Artist is that its PTA hasn't been all that great the last few weeks. Slumdog pre-Golden Globes was doing better per site in 400 more theaters, and The King's Speech was ahead of both. It should obviously start picking up some steam this and next week, but bottom line is you can't convince the masses to see a black and white silent movie, no matter how many awards it wins. The 50m or so it finishes with will be a gigantic success. Descendants and Hugo will be looking at decent bumps next week. I expect 60m-65m totals for each. In the end, the lowest nominee total will either be Artist or Midnight in Paris, which isn't bad, but only two out of seven/eight movies will be above 100m.

That's not gutty, he's been nominated for many awards, including Critic's Choice

Sure.

Bridesmaids gets a BP nodExtremely Loud and Incredibly Close gets a BP nod Dragon Tattoo is snubbed outside of score TOL is snubbed entirely Tinker Tailor is snubbed entirely Ides picks up an acting nod and maybe even a screenplay one

Looks like Hugo and The Descendants are going to receive nice Oscar boosts. Golden Globes helped considerably (look at Tintin, too).

I'm fine doing them! But I would leave you to figure out who would do a writeup for each movie.

And a bunch of key films won't be on DVD until February, March or even April. But frankly, I don't care to wait. Rate what you've seen.

Guys, don't worry about missing movies. No one has seen every 2011 movie, and I'm sure others will be picking up your slack! I'll get the ball rolling (I saw 75 movies last year)- 1. Drive 2. Tree of Life 3. 50/50 4. Hugo 5. Moneyball 6. Beginners 7. The Descendants 8. Rango 9. Win Win 10. Bridesmaids 11. The Muppets 12. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy 13. Midnight in Paris 14. Weekend 15. The Artist

Each week, I'm tabulating everyone's top 15 lists for a respective year, and at the end of the week I determine by a points system what BOT's favorite movies of ____ were. Your job is to post your top 15 of whatever year is in the thread's title.

I'll get on that!

You may have talked me into seeing We Bought a Zoo, Shawn. It's also the only movie on your list I haven't seen. I agree with the love for Moneyball, 50/50, Hugo, Muppets and the like. The rest of your list is filled with relative disappointments for me (Potter, Ides, Warrior, Horrible Bosses, Super 8), though I did like Puss in Boots a lot- way, way more than I would have expected.

The pilot's a free download on iTunes. It has plenty of promise, but I'm worried it's going to fall into the Studio 60 trap of taking its behind the scenes goings-ons too seriously for the show to be any fun. I'll keep watching until it inevitably becomes insufferable.

Bring on the dog from The Artist as next year's host. He would be way more shocking than Gervais was last night.

But they also only had five slots. The reason they expanded it in the first place was to give more commercially appealing candidates a better chance. That hasn't really worked so far.

Contraband does much better than it should. We get this kind of movie all the time and they usually open to about half this much. When people are coming out to see anything (not naming names (The Devil Inside)), I guess everything does really well. Beauty and the Beast isn't The Lion King but even in the 90s TLK doubled Beauty's gross. It's still doing extremely well for a re-release. An underwhelming hold for MI4 considering it loses IMAX next weekend. Still, it should reach MI2's total, which is stellar. Joyful Noise, whatever, I just learned it existed this week. Sherlock is still holding on, 200m is unrealistic but it'll certainly get close. Dragon Tattoo should end near 110m after Oscar nominations give it a slight boost. TDI falls just as much as everyone expected and won't break 60m. Alvin will end around 135m, maybe not quite enough for a fourth movie. War Horse is still doing just okay and probably won't pass 90m. Nothing unexpected from Zoo or Tintin, Iron Lady expands well but probably won't do much better after this weekend. Carnage expectedly flops.

2008 was an incredibly weak BP field. I guess I'll be the minority here and say that this is a pretty good crop of candidates in my eyes- I loved Hugo, Descendants and Moneyball, really liked Midnight in Paris, liked The Artist and Dragon Tattoo, and thought The Help was fine. It doesn't measure up to last year, but that was a really special year.

1. The Artist 2. The Descendants 3. The Help 4. Hugo 5. Midnight in Paris 6. War Horse 7. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 8. Moneyball 9. Bridesmaids 10. Ides of March 11. Tree of Life 12. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy 13. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (stranger things have happened) Key difference between Bridesmaids and Hangover/Star Trek is that the guilds are loving the movie. It has PGA, WGA and SGA nods and will likely pick up Original Screenplay and Supporting Actress noms. With a relatively weak field this year, I could see Bridesmaids sneaking in, and it would definitely make the cut with 10 noms.

Seeing Thomas Horn give his acceptance speech at the CCAs was enough for me. I don't think I could take two hours of that.