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Kim Hollis: First off, I agree that Mystic River is an overrated film, but then again I often find Eastwood's films to be...clinical and cold. I also think that Gone Baby Gone is a terrific although flawed film. Finally, I didn't really see any sort of natural progression from Mystic River to The Departed to The Town, other than setting, so I hadn't really made any sort of connection between them at all (and I would say it's very superficial to most people). Thus, I will be the only person to admit that The Town did better than I expected it to. It's not a huge, significant number or anything - I was expecting maybe $18 million. Still, low-mid 20 millions is quite fine.

Reagen Sulewski: What we've seen in the last five or six years has been a careful resurrection of Ben Affleck as a standard bearer for some type of quality. Between things like Reindeer Games and Gigli, he almost destroyed his career through over-exposure and hubris and he seems to have made a turn towards Clooney-ville. Hollywoodland really started him rolling back (he was in the mix for Oscars there, remember) and Gone Baby Gone got him the rest of the way back. The biggest question to me now is whether he gets in there for Best Direction contention.

Well, maybe this is a B

Kim Hollis: Easy A, the Emma Stone comedy with the clever premise, opened to $17.7 million. How should Screen Gems feel about this result?

Josh Spiegel: They ought to feel pretty good. Sony - especially Screen Gems - has been lighting up the box office for the last two months, from Salt and The Other Guys to Takers and Resident Evil. Easy A continues the streak, and is a genuinely entertaining teen comedy. As I'm not the target demographic, I have no idea if Easy A was marketed well, but I was interested solely because the majority of the reviews acknowledged, correctly, that the movie was far better than it deserved to be, thanks in no small part to performances from Stanley Tucci, Patricia Clarkson, and of course, Emma Stone. If we're lucky, she'll become as big a star as she should be. Fingers crossed.

Bruce Hall: Believe it or not I find this gratifying. I am not in the target demographic either but considering the fact that fewer people consider reading an important past time, seeing literary classics turned into teen oriented movies is a good thing, I say. Clueless, She's all That, O...I could go on...these may not necessarily be great works of art but they serve to expose young audiences to material that for its time was transformative material. And that Jane Austen, Shakespeare and Nathaniel Hawthorne endure to the present day suggests that there was something in their works that speaks to people beyond their own generation. Some messages are timeless and for that reason it is hard for me to get on the Remake Hate bandwagon, because the retelling of great stories is a big part of what makes storytelling such an intrinsic part of the human experience. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but has always been the nature of the craft and it always will be.

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