Monday Morning Quarterback
By BOP Staff
September 25, 2008
The Cars are now Dane Cook's mortal enemies
Kim Hollis: My Best Friend's Girl, the latest attempt to shove Dane Cook down our throats as a romantic lead, opened to $8.3 million. Shouldn't a film co-starring Kate Hudson do better with this? Do you place the blame with Cook?
Daron Aldridge: My point of reference is how it was advertised. All the commercials I saw featured Dane Cook prominently acting like a tool and Kate Hudson had about five seconds of screen time in a 30 second spot. Therefore, I happily credit this failure to Cook. But let's not overstate Hudson's box office appeal. She has really only had three romantic comedies that earned more than $70 million or even close to that (two of which co-starred Matthew McConaughey and the other with Owen Wilson) and that isn't exactly a proven draw. A few hits does not make a star. So, I would argue that Hudson is also being shoved down our throats as a romantic lead.
Jason Lee: Cook and Hudson really are not big box-office draws, in my opinion. On top of that, films about men with one eyebrow rarely perform well.
Sean Collier: You can't blame Cook; frat boys and sorority girls who have never watched any actual stand-up comedy have always been his core audience, and those people still exist. Like his other films, it just seemed too damn unremarkable. I mean, how would you explain this movie to a friend? "Oh, it's a romantic comedy about...you know, it's a romantic comedy. About romance. And...humor." He should probably just pick a movie with a plot.
Scott Lumley: With regard to Cook, do we have to stop with blame? Can we move right into mob hit territory?
Tim Briody: I'm very glad there are diminishing returns from Good Luck Chuck. Dane Cook can go away any time now, thanks. And have we really established Kate Hudson as a draw? Not yet, sorry to say.
Les Winan: I think this result underscores the way the bulk of the American people feel about Dane Cook..."who"?
David Mumpower: John Hamann made a good point in the Weekend Wrap-Up with his comment that Matthew McConaughey makes Kate Hudson a bigger star than she is on her own. If we look at films where she was the draw instead of him or Owen Wilson, the results are disastrous, save for Skeleton Key, whose concept was the selling point. This title promptly joins Raising Helen, Alex & Emma, and The Four Feathers as would-be romantic films of hers that North American audiences soundly rejected. And Cook is like her save for a $15 million opening in his career. He's just riding the wave until his inevitable role as an acerbic maverick mystery solver in some 2012 television series. Until then, he'll just keep proving that people do not want to see him in movies.
Calvin Trager: His detective will need a quirky characteristic or disorder of some kind. I'd like to go on record with the suggestion of Asperger's Syndrome. Because Dane Cook is an ass burger, this will not require him to stretch his already thin acting ability.
Max Braden: Blame the advertising on this, unless they really had nothing to work with. You'd barely know Kate Hudson was in the movie based on the trailers which featured Cook behaving like an ass with no story. I actually thought Cook performed well as a romantic pair in Employee of the Month. This was an awful ad campaign.
Shane Jenkins: It's become something of a national pastime to dump on Dane Cook lately. And who am I to be anti-American? He's the worst. Maybe he should keep his rants about the lameness of the movie's poster to himself. And who exhumed Jason Biggs? Are Freddie Prinze Jr. and Mena Suvari in this too? I've got Rachel Leigh Cook on speed-dial. Let's party like it's 1999!
Les Winan: Shane, Chris Klein is on line one for you.
Reagen Sulewski: I'm worried that the lesson Cook's learned here is that his next movie will have to be *more* misogynistic.
Pete Kilmer: Who's Kate Hudson again?
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