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Ben Stiller and Robin Williams in Night At The Museum: Battle For The Smithsonian The weekend is coming: Is Night At The Museum: Battle For The Smithsonian the movie you'd most carefully avoid, or would you go another way? Twentieth Century Fox
 

by Linda Holmes

I apologize for ending the titular question with a preposition.

But really. The upcoming weekend's wide releases are:

• Terminator Salvation, which I used to think was Terminator: Salvation, but it turns out that it does not contain the colon, meaning that it is about the salvation of terminators or possibly salvation by terminators, as opposed to just being the next movie in the Terminator franchise and also named Salvation. (This may seem like a small point, until you realize that, for instance, Batman Returns would be a very different movie if it were called Batman: Returns, which would almost certainly make it about whether you can write off your cape as a business expense if you are self-employed as a late-night doer of good deeds.)

• Night At The Museum: Battle For The Smithsonian, which boasts a remarkable triumvirate of guys who are sometimes funny but also really annoying: Ben Stiller, Robin Williams, and Hank Azaria. Just the commercials make me tired.

• Dance Flick, the latest parody of other films from the various Wayanses who brought you Scary Movie and its sequels. Based on the ads, a good part of it seems to be taking shots at Save the Last Dance, a reasonably popular, but hardly iconic, movie from eight years ago. (It also takes on the more recent Step Up films.)

Some of you are undoubtedly eager to see at least one of these movies, and I'm not criticizing if that's the case. But of the ones you are not planning to see voluntarily, if you were going to be trapped in one of them, which would you dread the most?

If you didn't come to see Terminator Salvation, that's going to be a lot of explosions. If you didn't come to see Night At The Museum: Battle Of The Smithsonian, that's going to be a lot of Robin Williams. If you didn't come to see Dance Flick, that's going to be a lot of...that kind of joke.

So I put the question to you: If you could only avoid one, which would you avoid?

categories: Movies

1:25 - May 19, 2009

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