Another week, another weekend. It’s funny how they keep operating in tandem like that. This week: the illogical Ocean’s Thirteen debuts in the top spot, followed by a broken and beaten Pirates. Knocked Up continues to hold strong, while debuts Surf’s Up and Hostel: Part II might finally prove that America is sick of both penguins and torture porn, respectively.

All numbers found on a street corner somewhere, nowhere near where the movies.com box office report hangs out.

1. Ocean’s Thirteen

There are only twelve guys on the Ocean’s Thirteen poster. This bothers me way more than it should. Ocean’s Twelve made sense — well, it did, at least until people actually saw it — because they had eleven guys and then they added Catherine Zeta-Jones. She was 12. That was the whole deal.

But now, they’re not even close to having 13 guys in the gang. The poster has Andy Garcia, who is a dubious inclusion if I ever heard one. He’s still a bad dude! He was really mean to Julia Roberts. Maybe the movie explains the significance of the titular ‘thirteen’ but I kind of doubt it.

I should probably just let it go.

In any case, it feels wrong to have a movie like this released in the summer. The Ocean’s movies are decidedly winter fare. The kind of movie you see over Christmas break when it’s cold outside and you just want something to do with your friends for two hours that doesn’t involve freezing your ass off. For some reason, it’s harder to relate to a bunch of guys in suits doing casino heists when it’s a bazillion degrees outside. It’s like “Jesus, where do they find the motivation? It’s hot.”

But then again, the movie did bring us this hilarious interview with George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Ellen Barkin. It’s so funny that it makes all of it — the unseasonalness and the weird counting — worth it.

Choice quote:

PITT: Jaws came along and proved you could make huge money with blockbusters, and it set this thing in motion that has lowered the subject matter. People like George have been getting good stuff out there, but it’s an industry that pushes people out on the big stage too fast, before they’re ready, and it eats them up as well. It’s a different kind of arena now.
BARKIN: Think about it. Do we know anything about Robert Redford’s children? Does he even have any?
DAMON: I worked with him, and I don’t know.
PITT: I have four, if you haven’t heard.

2. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End

You’d think after typing that title so much I’d know how to spell ‘Caribbean’ now. But the truth is still that I get it wrong every single time.

Did you guys hear that Johnny Depp is a fashion icon now? What the hell is with that? He’s not an icon; he’s barely a pirate.

Johnny will be okay, though. I’m pretty sure this will mark the end of this franchise forever — though not pirate movies; expect to see about a dozen pirate movies released over the next few years, each to dwindling returns — but both Depp and director Gore Verbinski will go on to do bigger and, at least in Verbinski’s case, better things. I actually thought Verbinski’s The Weather Man was underrated. It was a neat little film, even during the slightly outlandish sequences in which Nicholas Cage aimed his bow and arrow at people and wished death upon them.

It’s only Orlando Bloom that will suffer from this relative box office failure. He pretty much has no career beyond big franchises he contributes nothing to. And even in those, Orlando Jones would have been funnier.

3. Knocked Up

I saw this on Friday Night at a packed house, sitting beside a couple of elderly women, one of which got a nose bleed ten minutes in and made wheezing sounds for most of the show. It was amazing. The movie, I mean. Not the old woman. Though she could have been, I suppose. I didn’t really get to know her that well.

Movies like knocked up are not supposed to be as funny as they are. Maybe I’m just a pretentious asshole (“Maybe?”) but I don’t like to be laughing along with a bunch of freaking high school kids to a movie that’s sure to get glowing recommendations from frat guys everywhere. It feels weird.

It’s not that I have taste I would describe as “high class.” I thought Withnail and I was boring as hell, and didn’t understand any of the jokes. But at the same time, it’s a rare occurrence that Erin and I find ourselves laughing with the audience. We were, for example, the only people in the theatre still in a good enough mood to find the gold-weighing scene in An Inconvenient Truth to be hilarious. And, later, we were amongst the scant few in an audience watching the David Duchovny/Julianne Moore romantic comedy Trust the Man to laugh at pretty much every scene.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that our tastes aren’t so much high art as they are kind of weird. But Knocked Up truly has something for everyone. Those who find ridiculous profanity and marijuana use to be funny are covered. Those who love bizarre pop culture references and exaggerated dialogue are taken care of too. And if you’re one of those people who just thinks prosthetic vaginas are the bee’s knees then, well, this movie has your hook-up, too.

It’s almost unifying, in a way. It brings people together.

4. Surf’s Up

This, however, brought no one together. Apparently the penguins genre loses its appeal when you combine it with the surfing genre. Proving once and for all that Point Break would have been way worse if Patrick Swayze had been played by that giant penguin from Billy Madison.

I don’t really have a lot to say about this one’s weak opening. Except, well, how deep did they think the penguin well was? Eventually people move on.

I’m calling it right now, though. The next big animal is going to be the ostrich. They’re hilarious.

5. Shrek the Third

Mike Myers won a lifetime achievement award at the MTV Movie Awards, which is like the metaphoric equivalent of a bunch of teenagers pointing at you and screaming “You’re old!” But he seemed to take it in stride. The saddest part was not his age, but rather his highlight reel, which made it abundantly clear that Myers has only played four or five characters in his career, one of which was a giant dancing cat.

Also worth noting: Hostel: Part II didn’t even crack the top five. I blame the title. Was “Hostel 2″ just not descriptive enough?

And Next Week

This weekend will see Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer which — and fuck you — looks kind of awesome. Nancy Drew is also showing up, and hopefully paving the way for a Hardy Boys movie — a real one, not one that stars Ben Stiller and Tom Cruise — or maybe Bruno and Boots. And, finally, and most thrillingly of all, next week sees DOA: Dead or Alive, a movie based on a video game that was based on the precept that when chicks with giant breasts fight each other it’s kind of, actually, really hot.

And the summer rolls on.