Gina Rodriguez’s “Miss Bala” has opened with a modest $650,000 at 2,050 North American locations on Thursday night. Sony’s drug-cartel thriller, which expands to 2,203 sites on Friday, is the weekend’s only new wide release. Forecasts have estimated “Miss Bala” will draw between $6 million and $10 million over the weekend. Sony’s guidance has been for a debut in the $5 million range. “Miss Bala” marks “Jane the Virgin” star Rodriguez’s first starring role in a studio film. The movie, based on the 2011 Mexican title, is competing with the Super Bowl on Sunday. “Miss Bala,” which cost $15 million to produce, portrays a woman who is forced to take on Mexican drug lords after her friend is kidnapped. Catherine Hardwicke, the filmmaker behind “Twilight,” directed “Miss Bala.” Universal’s third weekend of “Glass” will be aiming for its third box office crown. The M. Night Shyamalan thriller has pulled in $78 million in its first 13 days in North America. STX’s fourth weekend of the Kevin hart-Bryan Cranston comedy-drama “The Upside” will be competing with “Glass” after grossing $66 million in its first three weeks. Year-to-date domestic box office has plunged 16% to $797 million as of Jan. 30, according to Comscore. Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst with the box-office tracker, noted that business should pick up in February. Warner Bros.’ “The Lego Movie 2” and Paramount’s “What Men Want” open next weekend. “As the industry closes the books on a rather depressing January at the box office, February will kick off with another rough weekend as bitterly cold weather and the major distractions of the Super Bowl will continue the downward box office spiral that will thankfully reverse course later this month when some potential hits will finally start their run at the multiplex,” Dergarabedian added.<doc-sep>What follows are two reviews of Miss Bala, a new movie starring Gina Rodriguez that was released last Friday. If you’re very busy today, I might encourage you to jump past the first one and just read the second one. I say so because the second one is a straight-line review of the movie and only about 230 or so words. The first one, however, is not only considerably longer (more than four times longer, in fact), but also it’s probably not even really a review of the movie (even though it definitely is). Thank you. The First Review Back during my fifth or sixth year of teaching, I had a kid named Charlie in one of my classes. (That’s not what his real name was, but it’s the one I’m going to use here.) Charlie was the very best. He was not that great of a student (he was almost always failing), and his personality was unquestionably grating (he was almost always a couple sentences away from getting beat up by someone in the cafeteria or gym locker room), and I’m almost certain that he stole money from me early on in our relationship. But none of that mattered. I liked him a great, great deal. And the reason I liked him a great, great deal was because he looked very much like a younger cousin of mine. That’s really and literally the only reason I liked him. I’d look at him, be reminded of my cousin, and forget all of the reasons that I should’ve not liked him. I mean, it was uncanny how much Charlie looked like this one particular cousin. He had the same eyes, the same nose, the same walk, the same everything. If I squinted, it was impossible to tell the difference between the two. He looked so much like him, in fact, that there were a handful of days when I was certain that I was living inside some kind of Looper situation. And because I like that younger cousin so much in real life, that meant I liked Charlie so much in school life. And since I liked Charlie so much in school life, I absolutely gave him preferential treatment. If he wanted to turn in an assignment late, that was fine by me. If he felt like coming to my classroom during lunch and eat in there with me and the co-teacher I shared the room with, that was fine by me. We had a special rule in class called The Charlie Rule that stated that he could, at any moment, for any reason, any number of times a period, get up and walk out of class and go to the restroom without asking for permission. If he failed a worksheet or a lab or a test, I’d arbitrarily announce that we were grading on a curve that day. Charlie was my guy. I rooted for him and I was not quiet about the fact that I was rooting for him. One day—this was during those dead weeks between Thanksgiving break and Christmas break—Charlie showed up to class with a poster he’d drawn for me. He said he’d worked on it at home for a couple days and he wanted me to have it to hang up in my classroom. And listen, I don’t mind telling you that I was touched by the sentiment. It meant a lot to me that he did that. I knew that it meant, among other things, he was going to try to harder in my class than he might have otherwise, and that made me happy. But I also don’t mind telling you that that poster was goddamn terrible. It was so bad. It looked like he drew it when he was very drunk, is what it looked like. It looked like he was mad at me when he drew it, is what it looked like. It looked like it was a prank, is what it looked like. But when he came to class with it that Monday and handed it to me, his smile full of slightly crooked teeth and his posture full of pride, I promise to you I sure did celebrate it like it he’d walked in carrying a true and authentic masterpiece. I told him it was the best art that I’d ever seen in my life, and that maybe he should consider selling it “for a million dollars in New York City.” I laminated it and hung it up near the entry door so that everyone would see it when they walked in. I told all the students that they could earn an extra five points on whatever assignment they wanted in exchange for saying something nice about it at the front of the class. If anyone said anything bad about it (which happened often, because, again, it was awful), I would argue otherwise with the same kind of impassioned fury that the Rock argued with during his court case in Walking Tall. For a small period of time, I even instituted a pre-class ritual in which all the students in the class had to stand up and stare at it in silence for 15 seconds after attendance before we could get started with our actual work. It was this whole thing. “I’ll brainwash the kids into thinking it’s good,” I told my wife at dinner one night when she asked why I was doing it. “I don’t know but I’m gonna keep doing it,” I told my wife immediately afterward when she asked me if I thought that spending time on something like that was a good idea. And I want to be clear here: This wasn’t one of those “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” situations either. I knew—the same as everyone else knew—that what we were looking at was dreck. I knew that, by any real measurement, the poster was a disaster. The proportions were bad and the shading was bad and the general composition was bad. But it just didn’t matter, and I just did not care. Charlie reminded me of someone that I knew, and that was enough to make me lie about the whole thing. Gina Rodriguez has a new movie out. It’s called Miss Bala. It’s not very good. The Second Review In Miss Bala, Gina Rodriguez plays Gloria Fuentes, a Los Angeles–based makeup artist who accidents her way into the middle of a war in Mexico between a drug cartel, the DEA, the CIA, and the Mexican police. And as much as that sounds like a good premise for a movie, and as much redline tension as there is in the 2011 Spanish-language version of Miss Bala, this new version just isn’t that, and doesn’t feel like that. It’s bad. And not bad in a fun way. It’s bad in a boring way. And to be sure, Rodriguez is as good as she’s allowed to be in the movie—there’s a part in it where she has to decide between letting an innocent woman get murdered in front of her or expose herself as a mole for the DEA and Rodriguez packs an undeniable amount of emotion into that moment. And there’s an interesting story line that begins to peek its way out in which Gloria grapples with the idea of not being American enough to live in America and also not being Mexican enough to live in Mexico, but it doesn’t quite deliver. (More trenchant, unfortunately for her and also somewhat ironically, are the accusations of expressing anti-black sentiments she’s faced in real life these past few months.) But that’s about where the goodness ends. The rest of the movie feels inert and is inert.<doc-sep>
Forget “Jane the Virgin.” Meet Gina the action hero. Gina Rodriguez makes her debut as a lead in a studio film with Sony Pictures’ drug cartel action thriller “Miss Bala,” which hits theaters Thursday evening. “Miss Bala,” based on the 2011 Mexican crime drama of the same name, is expected to gross a modest $6 million to $9 million during a slow Super Bowl weekend, according to people who have read pre-release audience surveys. It remains to be seen whether “Miss Bala,” which cost $15 million to make, will have the firepower to knock off “Glass,” the latest hit from M. Night Shyamalan that has dominated the box office for the last two weekends. The movie from Universal Pictures and Blumhouse Productions, a $20-million sequel to “Unbreakable” and “Split,” has grossed $73 million in the U.S. and Canada so far, including $19 million last weekend. “Glass” easily prevailed over last week’s two new releases, 20th Century Fox’s “The Kid Who Would Be King” and Aviron’s “Serenity,” which both flopped. Miss congeniality The new film will test whether audiences are ready for a stark career reinvention from Rodriguez, who is best known as Jane Villanueva, the titular character from CW’s telenovela-infused satire. Although Rodriguez made her name in TV, she has recently expanded her resume with film roles, co-starring in the Alex Garland sci-fi horror film “Annihilation” and the oil spill drama “Deepwater Horizon.” In the PG-13-rated “Miss Bala,” Rodriguez’s character is thrust into the middle of a cross-border drug conflict, forced to do the bidding of both a Mexican crime ring and the Drug Enforcement Administration while trying to save her kidnapped friend. “Miss Bala” is also notable for being a rare studio-released action film made by a female director, at a time when studios have been widely criticized for not putting women behind the camera. Catherine Hardwicke — known for dramas such as “Thirteen” and “Lords of Dogtown,” as well as the first “Twilight” movie — directed “Miss Bala.” Sony timed the release so that audiences could turn out after Super Bowl weekend, which is a historically slow period for movies. The film could appeal to Latino moviegoers, who tend to visit theaters more frequently than other demographic groups. Reviews for “Miss Bala,” which was filmed in Mexico, had not been published as of Tuesday afternoon. Oscar bait While “Miss Bala” and “Glass” duke it out, Oscar hopefuls will continue to try to solidify themselves in the public eye after nominations were announced Jan. 22 ahead of the Feb. 24 awards ceremony. Disney on Monday said Marvel’s “Black Panther,” up for best picture, will head back into 250 AMC Theatres locations for one week starting Friday, after collecting $700 million domestically last year. Tickets are free, coinciding with Black History Month. Audiences may catch up with other best picture nominees still in theaters, including Annapurna Pictures’ Dick Cheney biopic “Vice” ($42 million) and 20th Century Fox’s hit Queen film “Bohemian Rhapsody” ($205 million). Fox Searchlight’s “The Favourite” ($26 million) expanded its theatrical run to more than 1,500 theaters last weekend to take advantage of its nominations, while Warner Bros.’ “A Star Is Born” ($206 million) was re-released nationwide. The movie with the most to gain from its nomination is probably “Green Book,” which won the Golden Globe for best picture comedy or musical but had a slow start commercially. Universal Pictures is hoping the target demographic of older viewers will turn up for the film, starring Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali. It has slowly but surely grossed $49 million in the U.S. and Canada so far, and it is playing in more than 2,000 theaters. Perhaps the most surprising box-office story for 2019 thus far has been the anime “Dragon Ball Super: Broly,” released by Sony Pictures Television’s Funimation Films. The movie has grossed nearly $29 million domestically, after opening at No. 4 two weeks ago.