It’s been previously established that Tom was (is?) a glue-eater. I thought it might be kind of fun to explore the impetus of that.

Smart People came out this weekend and failed to impress at the box office. It only did about $4.2 million worth of business. That’s kind of disappointing. You think the focus that was being put on Ellen Page post-Juno would have attracted some interest. And where’s the love for Dennis Quaid? To me, he’s one of those quintessential American actors. He doesn’t get the showiest parts, but he’s always reliable to turn in something interesting.

Quaid gets more and more interesting to me the older he gets. When he was younger, he played a lot of arrogant hot shot in movies like The Right Stuff, Enemy Mine, Innerspace and the Jerry Lee Lewis bio-pic Great Balls of Fire! Now that he’s older, he’s settled on this more quiet, dignified persona. Someone who may not like the situation he’s in or the attention being directed toward him, but he does his best and trudges through.

I think the turning point was somewhere around The Rookie, which is probably the best sports movie I’ve ever seen – and I HATE sports movies. After that, he turned in performances in Far from Heaven and In Good Company that I really liked. You can also see part of that transformation in Frequency, although that came out before The Rookie.

I don’t know… Now that he’s older and he kind of has this gravity behind him, there’s this authority to him. He’s kind of like America’s Dad at this point. Maybe it’s his roles in the remake of The Parent Trap and Yours, Mine and Ours that’s giving me that impression. Anyway, it’s a theory I’m kicking around.

Back to Smart People… critics have been tagging it for being too pretentious – and I guess I can see where they’re coming from. From the trailers, it looks very dry and very much about it’s own indie-cred. I can understand why that would be a turn off.

I didn’t get a chance to see the film, but I was eager to check it out because I thought throwing Thomas Haden Church into the mix as a kind of blue-collar spoiler was a bit of interesting casting. I never anticipated that the dumb-ass mechanic from Wings would be an actor I would ever be invested in, but there you go.

Not much else to talk about this morning except that I encourage everyone to check out The Triple Feature talkcast tonight at 9:00 PM CST at TalkShoe.com. Tonight we’ll be talking about Smart People and more.

The last couple of weeks we’ve had really good success answering user-submitted questions. We’d prefer to talk to you in person if you have a question to ask, so don’t be shy about calling into the program! You can do that, you know – because we record it live!

But if you’re uncomfortable calling in or don’t have the resources to do so, feel free to e-mail your questions at theaterhopper@hotmail.com and we’ll see what we can do about getting you an answer on-air tonight!

It can be about anything – The movies we’re anticipating in 2008, our least favorite films, most quotable films… It doesn’t have to be about movies, though. Maybe you want to ask us a question about our web comics or what we do in our downtime. The sky is the limit! So don’t be afraid to ask!

At any rate, it’s going to be a great show. We hope to see you there!

Take it easy!