If you’re fortunate, your life includes a friend or two with whom you can pick up a train of thought immediately, no matter how many miles, months or even years have gone by since your last encounter.
You know what I mean. The friend walks into the room. You haven’t seen each other since the last wedding/funeral/can’t-miss birthday. The friend points at you.
“And Mr. Jones really had your number that day,” the friend says, bringing back a familiar college ruckus.
“It was you that got the whole class screaming,” you reply.
In “The Best Man Holiday,” the lone major film opening this pre-holiday weekend, there are nine such folks entangled in a long and complicated history.
The comedy, written and directed by Malcolm D. Lee, brings this group together for the first time in 15 years. It’s Christmas time. There is a wedding on the schedule. Old feelings surface.
The trailer to this sequel — 14 years have gone by since the original, “The Best Man” — features enough amusing drama to fill a season of the best soap opera that used to run back in the day of the first offering. Love is in the air. Sex, too. Scrambling. Perhaps a cover-up.
Central New Yorkers will plug into the work of Syracuse University alum Taye Diggs. He’s joined by Morris Chestnut, Harold Perrineau and Terrence Howard to complete the male crew. Monica Calhoun, Sanaa Lathan, Regina Hall, Melissa De Sousa and Nia Long play the women in their lives. Eddie Cibrian plays the newcomer to the circle.
Box office report
Movie-goers love Thor plenty. “Thor: The Dark World” opened to the cha-ching of $85.7 million the weekend of Nov. 9, easily topping the box office parade, according to boxofficeguru.com.
The No. 2 grossing film for last weekend was “Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa,” with a take of $11.3 million for the weekend. That raised the MTV-inspired reality comedy’s overall numbers to $78.7 million.
“12 Years a Slave” took in $6.6 million on the weekend it opened in Syracuse, putting it at No. 7 on the list. The tale of the upstate man abducted into slavery had opened elsewhere earlier, so its overall gross totals $17.4 million.
That beat the British romantic comedy “About Time.” The sensitive and amusing time-travel affair stood at No. 9, with an opening-weekend gross of $4.7 million. A slightly early start inched its overall number to $6.2 million.
