Break out the cherry chapstick…the reign of the Perry is over!  Katy Perry’s 7-week stay atop the Billboard Hot 100 chart for her song, “I Kissed a Girl,” has ended, and the new #1 song is…(drumroll)…Rihanna’s “Disturbia.”  After selling 148,000 downloads, the song leapfrogs over Chris Brown’s “Forever” (which remains at #2) to take the top spot.  So…how long will we get disturbed by the Rihanna song now?  “Forever” has a bullet, so it could be a contender.  The other contender is M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes,” which is the week’s Sales Gainer, jumping from #16 to #5 with a bullet.  the song is in the trailer for the movie Pineapple Express, but is not in the movie itself or on the soundtrack (an interesting aside: I went to Best Buy to buy the soundtrack, since my favorite artist, Huey Lewis & The News, performs the movie’s title track…and they had already deleted it out of their system!  I had to order it online.  Maybe if the producers of the soundtrack had known that the movie’s trailer song would be more popular than the music within the movie, then they could have included it as a bonus track or something.) (more…)

The number one movie over the weekend of 8/8-8/10/08 was…surprise…again The Dark Knight in its fourth weekend atop the box office chart with $26,117,030, bringing its overall total to $441,628,497, putting it in third place of the all-time film grosses.  To become the second highest grossing film of all time, it will have to make more than the $460,998,007 gross of 1977’s Star Wars IV: A New Hope (a.k.a. the “original” Star Wars), but analysts are saying that there is virtually no chance of beating the $600,788,188 gross of the number one movie of all time…1997’s Titanic.  Coming in second place for the weekend was Pineapple Express…the R-rated, violent, Judd Apatow comedy starring former “Freaks & Geeks” co-stars Seth Rogan and James Franco.  I’ve noticed that every production Apatow has done since 2005’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin has been R-rated, with the exception of this year’s Drillbit Taylor (which was rated PG-13.)  I’ve seen all of them, and Drillbit is the only one that I didn’t think was hilarious…so Apatow should only be making R-rated comedies, because Pineapple was a black stoner comedy that cracked me up (and I’ve never smoked the wacky weed before in my life.)  Franco was practically channeling Sean Penn’s Jeff Spicoli from 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High.  Rogan proved again that an overweight, schlubby guy can lead a movie effectively.  My girlfriend didn’t like the end, but I did.  Bonus: the greatest rock band of all time (in my mind)…Huey Lewis & The News…sings the theme song of the same name!  I’m so getting the soundtrack! (more…)