These days it's actually the law that you can't get to the top of the weekend box office unless your film a) isn't very good and b) ends in '3', 'Three', 'III', 'The Third', 'At World's End (3)', or 'Thirteen', which is probably just as well for Ocean's Thirteen.
Ocean's Thirteen is the top movie at the US weekend box office, finally dislodging Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End from the number one spot. And Ocean's Thirteen thoroughly deserves its weekend box office position, because even though it's too long and there isn't really a story and nobody acts especially well in it and the jokes aren't funny and the whole thing stinks of relentless rich-bloke smuggery, it sort of looks quite nice and the soundtrack's OK. And at the end of the day, isn't that the main thing.
Perhaps we're doing Ocean's Thirteen down a little here; after all, enough people wanted to see it to take it to the top of the weekend box office, and it isn't quite as bad as Ocean's Twelve. Although, having said that, to be as bad as Ocean's Twelve, Ocean's Thirteen would have to be about George Clooney jet-skiing across a lake of raw sewage for two hours, with Brad Pitt water-skiing behind, trying to keep his mouth and eyes closed as Clooney's outboard motor flicks fist-sized clumps of three-day-old shit and piss into his face at a hundred miles per hour. What are we saying? We'd pay good money to see that. Here's the US weekend box office top five:
1 – Ocean's Thirteen (As bottom-numbing as Ocean's Thirteen is, let's all just be thankful that nobody listened to Clooney and Pitt and set the movie in effing Darfur or whatever) $37,080,000
2 – Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End (Don't forget that there's a secret ending after the credits of Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End where you realise that Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom have been married for ten years and still aren't able to have a fully eloquent conversation between the pair of them) $21,316,000
3 – Knocked Up (Knocked Up was supposed to be the film that announced Seth Rogen as a comedy superstar, but the weekend box office says he isn't as funny as Keira Knightley yet. That puts his comedy level somewhere between shitting blood and slamming your fingers in a car door, by our reckoning) $20,017,000
4 – Surf's Up (Surf's Up may have had a disappointing showing at the weekend box office, but it will still go down in history as being the millionth film about funny cartoon penguins to be released since Christmas) $18,000,000
5 – Shrek The Third (Fingers crossed that the Shrek The Third buzz dies off quickly, because that way the Odeon adverts where Shrek turns the 'o' in Odeon into a Shrek logo will stop. And that'll stop us running up to the cinema screen and punching it until we're ejected) $15,750,000
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Gilbert Wham says
Will ending your title with any prime number do, d’you think? I have my nerd hat on today.