May the worst movie win. Yes, it happened again. On a box-office weekend where the race should have been between the silliness of I Love You, Man with Jason Segel and Paul Rudd and the sophistication of Duplicty with Julia Roberts and Clive Owen, the winner is Knowing! That's right, Knowing, the sanctimonious sci-fi parable starring a hangdog Nicolas Cage in a one-note performance as an astrophysics professor at MIT who learns that the world may be ending and damn soon. With tacky special effects, a scarily done plane crash excepted, Knowing drones on like a sermon that makes you root for the world to end just to put you out of your misery.

And yet Knowing raked in a kickass $24 million as opposed to barely respectable $18 million for I Love You, Man and a deadly $14 million for Duplicity, prompting a Variety headline to shout: "Nic Knocks Julia—Knowing Throttles Roberts' Return." Ouch! Which of the three big movies that opened this weekend do you think deserved to wear the box-office crown? And how about an even more pertinent question: How does Nic Cage do it? Once a powerful actor who delivered astonishing performances in films as diverse as Leaving Las Vegas, Raising Arizona, Moonstruck, Face-Off, Wild At Heart and Adaptation, Cage has been turning out a series of unwatchable flops—you trying staying awake during Captain Corelli's Madolin or The Wicker Man or Bangkok Dangerous.

Even worse are the lousy Cage films that score big at the box-office. I'm not just talking the National Treasure films that are at least fitfully entertaining. I'm talking junk, from Gone in Sixty Seconds to Ghost Rider, that manages to deliver big numbers despite a quality level so low it's barely measurable. Am I wrong? What did you think of Knowing and Cage's acting? What drew you to see Knowing in the first place? What titles represent the best and worst of Nic Cage?

Don't get me started about the experts who say the critics are wrong for feeling wronged by Quantum of Solace. The reasoning goes that since Quantum delivered the biggest opening of a James Bond movie ever—that's $70.4 million compared to $47.7 million for the previous record holder, 2002's Die Another Day (the one where Halle Berry joined Pierce Brosnan)—it must be the best. That kind of thinking suggests Beverly Hills Chihuahua has a good shot at a Best Picture Oscar. My theory is that audiences flocked to see Daniel Craig as 007 in Quantum because they were totally pumped by Craig's debut in 2006's Casino Royale, one of the very best Bond movies. I'm thinking their disappointment will be reflected in next week's box office. And even if I'm wrong, there's no way in hell Quantum matches Casino Royale on any level. So let Quantum take the title as best ever Bond debut and, at $200 million, the most expensive Bond movie ever to produce. I'm interested in something more lasting. Like what's the best Bond ever in terms of quality? Of the 22 Bond films, here are my three favorites.

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I can't wait till next week's box-office report so I can see how Pixar's Wall-E holds up with audiences. Early reports struck dire ticket-selling notes for this futuristic tale of a garbage-compacting robot, WALL-E (for Waste Allocation Load Lifter: Earth class), who was left on Earth to clean up the mess we made of it. Words like gloomy, sorrowful, dystopian and dull filled the air. And yet this groundbreaker in the art of animation swept in with $62.5 million to hit the No. 1 spot. That's puts it behind only The Incredibles ($70.5 million), Finding Nemo ($70.3 million) and Monsters, Inc. ($62.6 million) in the Pixar pantheon of nine consecutive opening-weekend winners. Second place went to the R-rated Wanted, taking in $51.1 million to show that some trash (the sexy, jolting, fun kind like Wanted) also has a place at the multiplex and should be spared being tossed in the dumpster by the G-rated WALL-E. It's quite a weekend when two non-sequels representing the scariest word in Hollywood—originality—can rack up such huge numbers. But here are the questions of the day for those of you've seen WALL-E:

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Look, it's bad enough for the career of Mike Myers that The Love Guru lost the weekend box-office battle to Steve Carell and Get Smart, but look at these numbers: Get Smart took in $39.1 million to Love Guru's $14 million. That's a beating, mister. What makes it worse for Myers is that Guru wasn't even a close second to Smart. Kung Fu Panda, the animated kids flick that won't die, took the No. 2 spot with $21.7 million, amassing $155.6 million in just three weeks. And No. 3 went to The Incredible Hulk with $21.6 million, repping a huge slip of 61percent from its debut. There is some solace there since Ang Lee's Hulk in 2003 dropped 70 percent in its second week. But face it Hulk fanboys, your giant green rage hero is on the wane. At least Guru beat The Happening, which plunged 67 percent to gross $10 million and take the No. 5 spot before hitting the fast track to DVD oblivion. Make no mistake, the story here is Mike Myers. Is the failure of The Love Guru merely a slip or a sign of dire things to come?

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Can we talk? Not about The Incredible Hulk—we all knew that the mean green machine would take the No. One spot at the box office. The big news was The Happening, reviled by critics and preceded by the worst buzz imaginable, ostensibly driven by moviegoers who felt burned by everything M. Night Shyamalan directed after The Sixth Sense in 1999. Me, I got way into Unbreakable, and also liked Signs and a lot of The Village. It was Lady in the Water, two years ago, that drowned Shyamalan in the poison tide of audience and critical backlash. The box-office performance of The Happening was supposed to reflect the bile. Here was a chance for ticketbuyers to stay away in droves as karmic payback for Shyamalan's failure to please with Lady in the Water. And just look what happened:

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It's big news when an animated movie aimed at tykes cuts into Adam Sandler's fan base and whups his ass. That's what happened this weekend when Kung Fu Panda, with Jack Black doing the voice of a roly-poly Chinese bear, took in $60 million from 4,114 theaters, leaving Sandler's You Don't Mess With the Zohan to eat its dust with $40 million from 3,462 theaters. OK, $40 million is nothing to blow hummus at, it's only the fifth Sandler movie to debut at that mark (The Longest Yard is the No. One Sandler opening at $48 million). But who could have guessed that 71 percent of the Panda audience would be over 17 and that 51 percent would be over 25? Also, Panda won much better reviews, 85 percent favorable according to the rottentomatoes Website, as opposed to 35 percent favorable for Zohan, starring Sandler as a Mossad agent who chucks commando work to cut and style hair in New York. Sharp idea for a comedy with a sting—and Sandler is quite good in it— but oh the sloppy execution. Now that Sandler is stuck with a panda's sloppy seconds, it might be time to consider a few questions: Is Sandler talented?

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In one of the few shocks in no-surprises-please Hollywood, Sex and the City unmanned Indiana Jones into the shame of second place. That's $55.7 million for Sex at 3,285 theaters and $46 million for Indy 4 at 4,264 theaters. Sex enjoyed the biggest weekend debut ever for a romantic comedy, doubling the $27.5 million debut of The Devil Wears Prada, and scoring the fifth best debut of all time for an R-rated film. Sex easily topped other R-rated comedies, such as The Wedding Crashers and Knocked Up. Which means Dr. Jones was thoroughly pussywhipped. Instead of giving the ladies their due—what's wrong with a victory for females in a male-dominated summer?—the beancounters keep putting up a biased macho defense:

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Holy bad box office! Chim-Chim the chimp has a right to go bonkers. OK, no one really expected Speed Racer to beat Iron Man, still selling like $50 million worth of platinum in its second week. But to see the brainchild of Andy and Larry Wachowski in a photo finish for second with romcom crap like What Happens in Vegas is just effing depressing. Look, I felt Speed Racer couldn't find the human touch that would make its visual pyrotechnics stick. Even Chim-Chim, who hangs with Speed's younger brother Spritle, mugs way beyond the call of chimp duty. But the Wachowskis are real filmmakers. Watching them, even when they fail (see the conclusion of The Matrix trilogy), is far more edifying an experience than enduring Cameron Diaz shrieking at Ashton Kutcher for two enervating hours. So why did Speed Racer hit the wall? The know-it-alls give these reasons:

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His name is Tyler Perry — that's him above in drag. He's a writer, director and actor. And if you've never heard of him, you better get busy. His plays, videos, books, TV shows and movies have made him a one-man industry. Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns came in at No. 2 at the box office over the weekend, behind the family flick Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who. Dr. Seuss took in $25 million on 4000 screens, while Dr. Perry grabbed $20 million on only half the number of screens. You do the math. Perry, 38, is kicking major ass.

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There he was, Jim Carrey, a $25 million a movie star, sitting in the audience at last week's American Idol results show, in an elephant costume. It was a pandering plug for Carrey's new animated film Horton Hears a Who in which the comic voices the elephant title character created by Dr. Seuss. The movie debuted big at $45 million, making it No. 1 for the week, the best opening so far this year for any movie (driving Cloverfield to second place), and the fifth biggest opening ever for animated film, behind Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc, Cars and Ratatouille. No bitching from me. Horton is better than decent family entertainment. What made me sad was seeing Carrey reduced to selling himself out for a Fox movie on a Fox TV show. Carrey's had a tough time of it of late with such flops as The Majestic, Fun With Dick and Jane and—yikes!—The Number 23. But does he deserve this—being forced (I hope) to shill for a kids flick on a massively popular TV show? If I'm being honest, to quote Simon Cowell, it was a pathetic sight. Carrey is a gifted actor who deserved Oscar nominations that never came for The Truman Show, Man on the Moon and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. You could probably think of other examples of primo Carrey. Let's do it, just to wipe way away the bad taste of the Idol debacle.

[Photo: FOX]