What can you really do with a box office topped by a Zemeckis animated Christmas Carol starring Jim Carrey and a Michael Jackson concert film, except stay home? This is a weekend so bad that otherwise mediocre performers like The Men Who Stare at Goats and The Fourth Kind are pulling in decent numbers, mainly because there is nothing else. It's either that or watch the brain dysfunctions represented by Law Abiding Citizen, a movie as incomprehensible as if it was as dipped in cocaine as Xanadu back in the day, and Couples Retreat. Yes it really is that bad.

Aside from Richard Kelly's The Box, which suffers from the same problems as his other movies, but without any of the glamor of Donnie Darko, or the ill fated kids movies, Where the Wild Things Are and Astro Bay, that actual kids hated, there really is nothing else. And while you might think that game releases solve the problem, I mean everyone seems to be playing Borderlands, Dragon Age or getting ready to play Modern Warfare 2, I don't see a lot of enthusiasm for any of those games.

Bioware doesn't have all that great of a track record with high fantasy, and what I saw of Dragon Age looked dull and drab. Yes it's getting praised everywhere, but the same went for Mass Effect, until those same reviewers got around to finishing it an hour later, only to realize what an incredibly overrated game it really was. Borderlands might be briefly entertaining, but the art style rubs me the wrong way, and it's basically Fallout 3, without even the pretense of anything but run and gun play. No thanks, I'll wait for Fallout Las Vegas. And then there's Modern Warfare 2, another multiplayer extension to the Call of Duty universe, poorly disguised as a game.