Lost weekend

THAT AND MY TWO CENTS WILL GET YOU: This is all there is?

LINKS: The world's best Boss; a movie with Kevin James that's a whole lot worse than Zookeeper

Crack open a bottle of Heinz, folks, it's a ketchup weekend at your local multiplex. There are a lot of movies that get released during the summer season, and it's tough to keep track of them all. If you missed seeing Super 8 or Kung Fu Panda 2, or even Thor or X-Men: First Class, then this is your big chance to catch up. (See what I did there?) If you haven't gotten around to seeing Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides or Cars 2, eh, read a book or mow the lawn. And if you haven't gotten around to seeing Transformers: Dark of the Moon, um, take all of the four-fifths empty bottles of (wait for it) ketchup out of the fridge, stand them upside down and see which one drains all the way to the top of the bottle first. I promise you'll be much more entertained than if you wind up languishing in a darkened auditorium with Optimus Prime and the fellas, wondering whether your brain cells are dying faster than they would if you were stuck above 26,000 feet on Mt. Everest.

Summer is traditionally Hollywood's golden goose, so who knows how it happens, but once in a while you get a prime weekend in the middle of June of July when there's just nothing new that's worth anyone's moviegoing dollar. This weekend, we've got Horrible Bosses and Zookeeper. No, really, that's it. I checked. Anyone remember the scene in Better Off Dead where John Cusack winds up in the back of a garbage truck that's passing a couple of tree trimmers? One of them says to the other, "Now that's a real shame when folks be throwin' away a perfectly good white boy like that." What gives, movie studios? I say it's a real shame when folks be throwing away a perfectly good weekend in July.

Horrible Bosses looks bad in a garden-variety sort of way. Three dudes have rotten managers at work and decide that the only way of making their office hours bearable is to kill the jerks lording it over them. Ho, ho. The movie's rep is that it's the latest film to equate boundary-breaking vulgarity, crudity, obsenity, etc., with humor, which means that it's merely the next in a very long line of films to go for the gross-out gold. There's a scene, for example, involving Welsh actor Ioan Gruffudd — an entirely respectable sort whose performance in the excellent historical drama Amazing Grace is absolutely worth digging up on DVD — that's basically a joke about how his character makes a living by getting paid to urinate on people. Don't you sometimes wish that you hadn't lived to see the all-bets-are-off, anything-goes era of movie comedy?

As for Zookeeper, well, Kevin James is fat, which is always good for a laugh, and he plays a guy at a zoo who discovers that he can talk to the animals, which is like throwing a bucket of water on the comedy flame. A "bucket of gasoline" is what some of you are thinking that I meant to say. Trust me, I've had plenty of experience not laughing at live-action films where a doofus interacts with all creatures great and small. Maybe there's some catsup in the fridge.