The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert was first released in North America in five theatres. Now, three full weekends later, and playing in 61 theatres as of October 5^th, it has earned $750,000 in gross box office receipts. In comparison, The Game Plan, a sentimental kids' comedy with a former wrestler as its star, earned 42 million dollars in two weekends. This film debuted in 3,105 theatres at once. At week two, it's still the B.O. champ.

Other films that earned tons of lucre over the last couple of weeks include The Kingdom, another blot—along with Stealth—on Jamie Foxx's reputation. The Kingdom is rapidly nosediving at the box office—business is down 45% at the end of the second week—a hopeful sign that word-of-mouth still rules. Mr. Foxx is becoming the African American Nicolas Cage. One can only hope that he will pull out of his artistic free fall the way that Mr. Cage did (Lord of War, The Weatherman) and commit to worthwhile projects in the near future. We miss Max. We miss Ray.

Resident Evil: Extinction and The Brave One, both of which the less said the better, are raking in moolah, too.

3:10 to Yuma has earned nearly 50 million clams in five weeks, an average every week of more than 10 times the entire business that "Jesse James" has done. The costumes and production design of this James Mangold (I Walk the Line) film are excellent in the best, lavish Hollywood way. The faces of the actors, right down to the ones in small roles and bits, are a rogues' and angels' gallery. Unfortunately, these visual pleasures cannot disguise the hollowness of the film, the fact that it is a loud, violent, unnecessary, save-your-money-and-see-the original re-make that lacks all the charm of the original. Meaning that it lacks Glenn Ford's wonderful interpretation of the villain, Ben Wade, which is the very thing that makes the still-tops b&w 1957 version so unusual and interesting. Peter Ford, Glenn's son, complained about the remake in a letter to the L.A. Times a couple of weeks ago. He's right. Charm and wit inflected the tension in the original. Mr. Mangold's version has no charm and wit whatsoever; instead, we get multiple psychopaths shooting each other down in an overblown scenario that tries to pump up the film with noisy action and music. But the gun wranglers and squib makers must have been happy and hectic on this empty exercise. Mr. Mangold's film has served a good purpose though. It has brought the original back: A DVD of the film in letterbox has just been released.

Good Luck, Chuck an ostensible comedy, resides in the top ten box office yet again despite being pilloried in public by everyone with a knowledge of film beyond Crossroads, the Britney Spears "vehicle" of 2002. Crossroads, you may be interested to learn, gets a 2.8 out of ten rating at IMDb, lower than Necromania: A Tale of Weird Love, and Plan B From Outer Space, two Ed Wood follies.

Bang! Bang! Yippee-tie-yo-tie-yay!! Another body floats to the surface.

Shooting fish in a barrel is fun!

It's easy to shoot down the sorts of cinema values that the box office mostly represents. You could take this "Commentary" and run it five years from now with different titles and it would still be valid. So it's perhaps useful to be repeat that bilge pretty much rules in mass art, just the same as in mass everything. Which is why it's such a delight when great work triumphs at the numbers game, is it not? A Melville, a Godard, a Bugatti, a Van Gogh are exceptions. This must be our mantra when we are in danger of losing our friends with our tirades on the moronic aesthetics of others.

Plus, the world, one supposes, needs bilge both to measure the clear, sweet stuff by, and because the world cannot just be The Seventh Seal or Aston-Martins. We need Chevys, comic book plots, The Spice Girls, and candy floss, too. We need diversions for the tots.

And, let's face it: The Game Plan must have been a blast to make. It has good energy. Dwayne Johnson has the grace to be able to make fun of himself and do it well, and he doesn't sing half bad either. The kid in the film (Madison Pettis) acquits herself reasonably, though her dialogue is often beyond her years. The ugly dog's a hoot, especially in a tutu. The script has the wit and courage to love ballet and say that men can love it, too, and the dance performance near the end, with The Rock as a tree, is winning. Monique Vasquez, a sort-of Sandra Bullock look-alike with a sexy Spanish accent, is a find as the ballet teacher, and she has so much more presence and élan than Ms. Bullock has had in some time. More of Ms. Vasquez, please: She deserves a lead female role in a good script. The script, written by three women, encourages men to be a strong presence in their daughter's lives and proclaims that daughter's need strong, loving fathers. It values the athleticism necessary to both football and dance and demonstrates the relation between these pursuits in a fine montage. And finally, the end-credits have for accompaniment by far the best version of "Burning Love" that you'll ever see. That's the good stuff.

Unfortunately, The Game Plan is also pumped way up in that clean, irritating Hollywood commercial-feature way; a number of dialogue and plot points are phony, pure manipulation; the plot in general is utterly predictable, cliché. and often plain unbelievable (even in its mise en scène charade); and the music at times is so irritating, so false, so saccharine, so treacly that it makes you want to throw a lemon at the screen for balance and to be sure to memorize the composer's name (Nathan Wang) so that you'll never hire him for your film's music track. Busby Berkeley provided distractions from the Dust Bowl ("We're in the money!/The skies are sunny!"). The Game Plan, as fun as it is, sometimes seems like a phantasy diversion from the war that never should have been and yet never ends. Cheery American movies as invidious instruments of brain and heart death that sell us instead a fake, haute bourgeois, sentimentalized version of America that it wants us to take seriously, even as it plays it both ways while seeming to mock itself. You know, super-rich athletes are actually sweet and just like anybody, even those way down the class ladder in the classless society without a $10,000 bed. This is the sort of film that makes you root for it and yet makes you want to puke at the same time.

The superlative artists—not "talent," an ugly word that is wielded in Hollywood like a shillelagh—who made The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford will be comforted that film is doing well in its platform release and is now number 18 at the box office, even if The Game Plan has made 60 times more dough. Brad Pitt deservedly won a Best Actor award at the Venice Festival. The film is going to do some cleaning up at the Oscar nominations, including Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Cinematography, Best Sound Editing, Best Picture Editing, Best Music, Best Costumes, Best Production Design. A re-release after the Oscars in March seems likely.

In the future, Sydney White (which last week was in the top 10 and now is nowhere, praise be word-of-mouth, again) or The Kingdom will draw a "Say what?" or an "Oh yeah, that's from when Jamie really sunk low."

Bang! Bang!

Mr. Pitt's superlative film, from the superlative novel by Mr. Hansen, however, will be among the Top Ten Westerns ever made, along with Unforgiven and Dances With Wolves. Consequently, those who love films will be seeking it out and watching it decades from now when Mr. Pitt is playing Lear in 99-seat houses because he can and because he is of an age to.

Beauty is slowness, said the great Anglo-Irish poet W.B. Yeats.

Beauty, with maybe a dash of sweet revenge tossed in for the sheer juiciness of it, is also knowing that what you made, what you put your heart and mind into, as Mr. Pitt and his friends clearly did in their movie , will slowly accumulate position and wear very, very well.

[For a full review of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Ford, see "The Death of the Soul Is Not Virtual" under "Films-General."]