This is, to be blunt, pretty easily the worst Friday for new movie releases that I can remember in a very long time.  There are a grand total of two fresh options hitting screens tomorrow, both of them only in limited release and one of them - Amos Kollek's Restless - so absolutely wretched that the only limited release it deserves to receive is to the bottom of the sea.  I hate this film.  The other fresh release - French effort Le Tueur (The Killer) - is considerably better but playing on only one screen in Toronto and very much an arthouse thing which means it will likely die an ignoble death no matter what I or anybody else says about it.  What happened?  Why the crap week?  Distributors - wisely as it turned out - fled in terror at the wave of lovesick goth preteen girls losing their panties over Twilight and stayed the hell out of the way, that's what.

So, what to do?  Well, here at the Tattooed Man household we're grooving to the oldies.  I introduced the Not Yet Tattooed Boy to The Goonies last night and plan on revisiting Gremlins and if that's not enough to make the wee lad's brain explode with ecstacy we'll move on to The Monster Squad soon after that.  But for the recent stuff your options are more limited.  Vince Vaughn continues to waste his talents with Four Christmases. Australia is winning raves but I just can't get excited for Baz Luhrmann any more, which is weird since I actually like his films.  Of the kid's stuff Bolt is quite good - certainly far, far better than Madagascar 2, which I didsdain so much I shall not link to it - though not really brilliant.  All of which leaves me saying thank god for Wednesday releases and the wonderful world of counter-programming.

See, someone out there knows that not everybody in this world is a lovelorn preteen goth girl losing her panties over Twilight.   Furthermore, they know that for the rest of us, the very thought of all those love-lorn goths inspires fantasies of violence and fast cars. And so they cleverly give us Jason Statham in Transporter 3.  I'm not reviewing this one because there's really no need.  All you need to know is contained in this trailer. Teabag bad. Statham good. Car go vroom. Man get kicked in face.  Aaaaah ... suddenly I feel so much better.

Here's the thing about Jason Statham movies.  Nobody is ever likely to convince ol' bullet-head with a real, live actor.  That just aint gonna happen.  But the guy's got a certain kind of natural charisma and enough self awareness to play to his own strengths.  He's an entertainer, not an artist, and he entertains with homoerotic topless shots of himself and causing people pain.  His movies are stupid, yes, but they're also generally a good amount of fun and the Transporter series are pretty much the cream of the Statham crop.   And so in a weak week it's really no contest:  Transporter 3 wins by a mile.