There are few things more numbing than reports about the latest blockbuster (in this instance Oblivion) earning serious coin on its opening weekend. Oblivion is a bothersome but moderately decent time-killer with a fine performance from Tom Cruise, and (as I said earlier) is less annoying than Prometheus. But reporting that X millions of Eloi heard the sirens and were persuaded to walk into the Morlock caves and fork over whatever amounts of money…it doesn’t matter.

Okay, it matters to those who are profiting — director-writer Joseph Kosinki, Cruise, the producers, Universal Studios, exhibitors, popcorn industry. But what’s in it for me? I wasn’t in pain when I saw it, and now I’ve already begun to forget it. I won’t buy the Bluray, I can tell you that.

What matters, as always, is what happen attendance-wise during the coming week and especially next weekend, but that’s my standard Saturday mantra.

I like this 4.19 N.Y. Times Magazine riff about Cruise from Taffy Brodesser-Akner:

“How odd that our shiniest celebrity, the man whose image once flashed most easily into our heads when we thought of the words ‘movie star,’ a man who, throughout his career, has grappled with all sorts of questions of privacy and secrecy and image control and damage control, has somehow emerged at this late date as the movie world’s most unlikely symbol of old-fashioned authenticity.”