These visions dance before the poor journalist's eyes as he slogs through his grind, visions of Ed Helms locked in Heather Graham's embrace haunting his days. Whom among us, in his shoes, would not cover The Hangover's DVD release press day?

There's a lot of ways to get favorable media coverage, but perhaps the easiest one is to offer to fly reporters for an all-expenses trip to Sin City, where what happens in Vegas certainly won't influence your coverage in any way at all.

Warner Brothers would like to fly you to Las Vegas and put you up for a night. "Re-live the bachelor party gone wrong"...the invitation promises, summoning them to the press day for The Hangover's DVD release. The full text of the invitation sent out to selected media elites is below:

To celebrate the highly-anticipated release of The Hangover on Blu-ray and DVD on December 15, we're headed to the scene of the crime -– Vegas –- and we want you to come! Re-live the bachelor party gone wrong with a press day and launch party on Thursday, December 10 in Las Vegas. We hope you are able to participate in these exciting events – don't forget your Polaroid camera!

Warner Home Video will fly you to Las Vegas the morning of December 10 so you can participate in the press day, cover red carpet arrivals and attend the event. Accommodations will be provided for one night, and you will return home the following day, Friday, December 11.

Below, please find details for the press day and launch party.

Thursday, December 10, 2009
• 1:00pm – 4:00pm: Press Day
Location: Caesars Palace, Las Vegas

1:1 and Roundtable interviews available with director Todd Phillips, Justin Bartha, Heather Graham, Ken Jeong and Rob Riggle

• 7:15 pm: Red Carpet Arrivals

• 9:00 pm: DVD Launch Party
Location: PURE Nightclub, Caesars Palace, Las Vegas

Todd Phillips, Justin Bartha, Heather Graham, Ken Jeong, Rachael Harris and Rob Riggle will be in attendance

Note: Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis are TBD

Galifianakis also revealed how Todd Phillips used the "you pussy...Will Ferrell would do it" taunt in order to get him to do a scene wearing a jockstrap in The Hangover. Don't you hate it when directors do that?

About Zach Galifianakis—you know how people are always saying that such and such celebrity would be someone they'd like to have a beer with? Well, not saying that Zach Galifianakis wouldn't be a fun guy to drink a beer with, but we've been thinking about this and we think it's be so much more fun to have breakfast with Zach Galifianakis than it would be to drink a beer with Zach Galifianakis. Breakfast at a Waffle House preferably, one located in a rural area, maybe somewhere out in Oklahoma or Nebraska or something, somewhere where there's a good chance our server would be a 50-ish woman named Charleen. Not sure why, but it just seems like it'd be fun to have a long breakfast in a rural Waffle House staffed by saucy middle-aged women with Zach Galifianakis. Somebody make this happen, okay? Thanks.

• Just when you think that Lindsay Lohan couldn't possibly come up with a way to shock you silly with some new staggering act of human stupidity, she goes and gets herself sued for allegedly stealing the formula to a spray-on tan product so she can produce one of her own. Simply unbelievable. [Daily News]
  
  
• In even more unbelievable Lindsay Lohan news, the can't get an acting job to save her life actress was apparently offered the role Heather Graham played in The Hangover, but turned it down because she thought the script "had no potential." [Page Six]
  
  
• Meryl Streep and Amy Adams both put on considerable amounts of weight during the rehearsals and filming of Julie and Julia, as they were forced to eat almost constantly. [Gatecrasher]
  
  
• Porcupine-domed producer Brian Grazer has taken a new lover and apparently she has a sordid past filled with jail time for shoplifting charges or something. [Page Six]
  
  
• While the world mourned the death of the King of Pop yesterday, Britney Spears was living it up in Paris, touring the Eiffel Tower with her kids and just refusing to shed tears like the rest of us. Evil. Pure evil. [Sun]
  
  
• So we all watched the Michael Jackson memorial yesterday, right? But where will he be buried? The Mirror is reporting that the family plans to keep his burial spot a secret, but America demands to know where Michael's corpse is dammit! [Mirror]
  
  
• Mischa Barton has gone from being dangerously skinny to downright bloated in a short period of time. She claims it has something to do with wisdom teeth. [Daily Mail]
  
  
• The Brits are all in a tizzy about an Armani dress that Megan Fox wore to attend a fashion show in Paris yesterday. And, really, it is pretty hot. [Daily Mail]
  
  
• Halle Berry and her male model dude husband Gabriel Aubry were photographed hanging out in a pool in Miami and good Lord are they an attractive couple. [DListed]

1) Transformers: Rise of the Fallen — $112 million
Well, actually, the damn thing grossed $200 million over its five-day opening weekend, making it the second biggest five-day haul ever, after last summer's The Dark Knight brooded through the box office. While the film doing well isn't a surprise in the least, the film doing this well is, um.... OK, not a surprise either. It has giant smashy robots! And pyramids! And, oh who the fuck cares about anything else, it has Megan Fox running and running and running and bouncing and running. Her hypnotic jiggles lulled the first Wednesday audiences into a stupor, compelling them to buy ticket after ticket after ticket this weekend. Actually, only about 500 people saw the damn thing nationwide. She's just that good.

2) The Proposal — $18.5 million
Girl, do they love them some Sandra Bullock! Holding on strongly with a mere 40% decline, this romantic comedy (with the emphasis, as is the case with most Bullock pictures, on comedy) has racked up a tidy little $69 million in just two weeks, which means it ought to teeter over the $100 million by the end of its run. Easily, perhaps. Good news for everyone involved, but most of all for Mary Steenburgen. Because why the hell not. She's just swell. Melvin & Howard 2, anyone?

3) The Hangover — $17.2 million
Naturally, the Hangover comes after the Proposal. But not too much after! As America stumbles its drunken way through yet another boozed-up summer (drinking outside = A. the reason man exists B. simply the best thing ever C. yes) they've turned to this wackadoo comedy to get the shakes off by shaking with laughter. Because he's weird in a funny way, we bet Zach Galifianakis is taking a bath in money right now. Ed Helms is probably just sitting on his porch in a rocking chair, whistling. And Bradley Cooper? Well, Bradley Cooper is probably on some sailboat right now, knee-deep in strange, writing love letters to his oft-beleaguered agent.

4) Up — $13 million
Because the little ones will get scared by giant robots chasing giant mammaries, confused by naked 45-year-old ladies chasing naked 32-year-old Canadians, and scarred by Mike Tyson chasing middle-aged men around Las Vegas, there had to be something else for them this weekend. Luckily Up has drifted through the box office for the past few weeks, collecting some $250 million in coins on its way. While children might end up being frightened of and made ponderous by the film's melancholic portrayal of the pains of life and loss, well pretty soon they're going to feel that every day of their lives, so they might as well get used to it in 3D animated form, dammit.

5) My Sister's Keeper — $12 million
This was the weekend's other "big" opener, a Jodi Piccoult weeper starring the strangely-cast Cameron Diaz and Jason Patric. Oh, plus Alec Baldwin, Abigail Breslin, the kid from Sarah Connor, and some other girl. It's about disease and dying and family and responsibility. But mostly it is about weeping. Yes, weeping in offices, weeping in cars, weeping at dinner tables, weeping in bedrooms, weeping with your arms outstretched as you ride a bicycle or something, weeping as you hug someone, weeping as you don't hug someone, weeping while on the can, weeping while not on the can, weeping for the future, weeping for the past, weeping for the ticket prices, weeping for the always-awkward moment when everyone has to shuffle out of the theater at the end of a sad movie (how are you supposed to act? so awkward!), weeping for pretty much everything there ever was. Mostly, weeping for yourself.

1) The Proposal — $34.1 million
Dag, you guys. People just really like Sandra Bullock. Ever since she nervously steered a speeding explode-O-bus around Los Angeles and everyone said "awww", the woman has been near-unstoppable. Yes there have been the sad little failures like Premonition and many other movies that exist that she's done, but here's something! A mid-summer romantic comedy with, yes, little competition that just barnstormed the fucker and won the weekend pretty handily. She beat the drunken, sad, lonely ugly boys of The Hangover, as she should have, and I guess you've Ryan Reynolds' chiseled Canadia-O-physique to thank too. Everyone likes to see Canadians pretend to be Americans while Americans pretend to be Canadians and then there's a party in Alaska with Betty White. That's just what people like.

2) The Hangover — $26.9 million
Dude. WTF. Could a summer comedy ever hope for this? Will a summer comedy demand this again? Yes, and yes, probably. Now that one alchemy witch-moment of summer film magick has occurred, like an incident at Owl Creek, ey'body's gonna try and reproduce it. I've said this before and will continue saying it so long as I'm under the employ of the Gawker Media thunderdome: Dudes like other dudes who like ladies and get drunk a lot. This is a fact like rain or terminal rickets. Some things exist in this world, other things don't. The Dudes abiding will always exist, like sand in your shoes at the end of the summer. Or like bearded men running, wild and frothing, through the Nevada desert. A constant. The Northern Star.

3) Up — $21.3 million
Oh, and people also like magical-mystical-wonderful-sad animated 3D movies about old men who learn to be young again. Everyone knows that Pixar films do well at the box office—they're basically guaranteed quality, and every parent from potato chip-sucking Decatur little league mom to NPR-marinated hippie-dip castoff Brooklyn dad will take their youngins—but this is a special case. Special because it's not based on anything and its concept, while High, isn't really the same as Cars Come Alive or Robots In Love. This story is weird and a bit sideways. But no one seems to mind. Because, look, balloons! And other wonderful things. That old man is learning to love again. Love!!

4) Year One — $20.2 million
Hm. Well, this didn't go as well planned. This is a movie that cost $60 million to make, which is ridiculous, and probably a lot more to market. Plus Jack Black is such guaranteed comedy money. Oh, well, wait. No, I guess he's really not. That was just a dream some of us had. Ah well. So was it the unreliable Black factor that made this movie underperform? Was it the headlining of minnowy nobody Michael Cera? Was is that Harold Ramis decided to make a romp through biblical stories and wayyy revisionist prehistory that no one really got the whole thrust of? Yes. To all of that.

5) The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 — $11.3 million
Oh dear. Something about this movie just didn't quite stick. Denzel fatigue? Travolta apathy? Perhaps yes. Also, what the damn hell is that title all about? I know it's been explained to me, and I believe it. But c'mon folks. You just don't title a summer movie like that. You just don't. No one wants to do a math problem here. We just want fucking popcorn.

Image via Getty

1) The Hangover — $33.4 million
Dude. Proving that word-of-mouth is more powerful movie mojo than any marketing trick, tool, or stratagem combined, this $35 million film has earned three times that much in just two weeks. Dropping only about 25% from last weekend's debut barnstorm, this thing is likely to keep going and going and going until it's earned over $200 million and everyone is fattened and wealthy and, yes, drunk. Would you have ever guessed that Heather Graham would be back in the top spot again? Or that Rachel Harris would ever be there for the first time? Or Mike Tyson? This is the stuff of comedy weirdo dreams and, oh lord yes, you can expect a long string of knock-offs. The K-Hole starring Breckin Meyer, anyone?

2) Up — $30.5 million
Lordy, this one can't be stopped either. Pic's already hauled in nearly $190 million, and it hasn't even opened overseas yet. Pixar has a proud history of stomping the international yard, and this flick ought to be no exception. Unless they can't get a good foreign guy to do a decent Ed Asner impression. Because that's really key. Also, Belgian people just don't like balloons. Don't ask them why. They just don't like 'em. And we all know how much the Japanese hate fat boy scouts. A lot.

3) The Taking of Pelham 123 — $25 million
Am I an idiot that I can't figure out just what the fuck subway car the thing is supposed to be? Is it on the 123 line? It doesn't look like it in the trailers. Maybe everyone else was confused too, because this movie just didn't open the way people had hoped it would. And it actually got some decent reviews. I guess the lesson is this: Denzel opens well in the spring or fall or winter, when he doesn't have slobby belching comedians and magic houses to contend with. And John Travolta? Well, I fear the era of John Travolta may have been mortally wounded around the time of Battlefield Earth and never quite recovered. That was when he finally teetered over the brink from kinda unhinged in a cool way (so great in Face/Off!) to just fucking weird and indulgent and completely unhinged in unpleasant way. That said, Old Dogs will do a billion dollars when it opens.

5) Land of the Lost — $9.6 million
Yeesh. This thing is basically dead now. With only some $35 million earned so far, the hundred-million-dollar movie will have to go big overseas (it won't—ferners don't really get our funny stuff) or do crazy on DVD (it won't—people will forget it even exists) to make any sorta profit. So, sad for everyone, but hopefully at least one good thing will come out of this. One hopes that the hideous trend that began maybe fifteen years ago of people looking at kitschy old TV shows and making movies out of them will end. I mean, yeah, The Brady Bunch Movie was kind of funny and... um... wait is that it? What am I forgetting? Lost in Space: Unbelievable trainwreck. Beverly Hillbillies: Un-fucking-watchable. Bewitched: Will, why? Starsky & Hutch: Maybe one funny joke. Miami Vice: Maybe sorta interesting, maybe also extremely boring. Basically what we're saying is: You sure you wanna do this, people producing The A Team?

6) Imagine That — $5.7 million
Buried by an almost completely-silent marketing campaign and then a raft of shitty reviews, the latest Eddie Murphy flop isn't even surprising. During his brief regaining of the BO crown—around the Nutty Professor/Dr. Doolittle age—Murphy's blend of crazy! and family seemed unstoppable. Now it's... entirely stoppable. Like less than $2,000 per screen on an opening weekend stoppable. I guess you have to respect Murphy for keepin' on plugging away. Maybe for every Imagine That or Meet Dave or Norbit there's also a... disappointing Oscar lose for Dreamgirls. Hey, at least you have The Incredible Shrinking Man and Beverly Hills Cop IV to look forward to, Eddie! At least there's... that.

You see, we've picked up on a trend amongst "the intelligentsia" of an almost kid-on-Christmas-morning eagerness to run to the theater to see this film just so they can trash it on their blogs and Twitter accounts and in doing so feel superior to the doltish masses who actually derived some sense of pleasure from it. Of course, we have no actual data to back this up, there's just a palpable snobbishness wafting through the air right now that our finely-tuned cultural antennae has picked up on.

Some members of the aforementioned "intelligentsia" who we actually like and hold in high regard have written about the film without really making much mention of the film itself, choosing to focus instead on the "ugly and thoughtless" clothes worn by the other moviegoers at a screening in a notably unhip Manhattan neighborhood instead.

What's perhaps most perplexing about the gripes we've read and heard about The Hangover coming from members of "the intelligentsia" are their genuine professions of profound shock over how "fratty" and "juvenile" the film struck them. It's almost as if they truly expected that a film titled "The Hangover" might actually be some sort of Fellini-esque neorealist high art film.

Another common trait shared by members of "the intelligentsia" who hated The Hangover is that they invariably loved Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience, a film we desperately wanted to like but truly thought was one of the biggest steaming piles of cinematic dung to emerge out of the 21st century.





One last thought about The Hangover—Yes, it's a silly movie, but it's not completely devoid of intelligence, and silly movies seasoned with just a sprinkle of intelligence can often do wonders for the soul. If, that is, you're willing to unclench your anus just over the course of the couple of hours it takes to watch them.

With that said, go see The Hangover and judge for yourself.

Bret Easton Ellis' Tweets via Bret Easton Ellis' Twitter

Aside from the obvious "well, Land of the Lost looked terrible" factor, The Hangover's success may hint at something more expansive, a change sweeping the old comedy flick rubric. Hasn't there been something of a paradigm shift away from the days when broadly funny, nice-ish actors made those broadly funny nice-ish movies?

Sure we still do have some star-vehicle garbage like the milquetoast Yes Man quietly banking a hundred million dollars here and there, but those sorts of movies don't really have much in the way of cultural currency these days, do they? Really, does anyone remember a single quote from the last few (still successful) Jim Carrey movies? What about Adam Sandler's Click or Bedtime Stories? If the old, chumily caustic breed is dying out, and a new comedy—small, viral, angry, left-of-center—is blossoming, The Hangover might represent the first time that the new kid really did best the old-timer, head to head.

The more underground or "risque" comedy has been beating mainstream stuff in the funny department for a while now, but until recently it's been mainly relegated to cult status at the box office. Little sleepers, pleasant surprises, that sort of thing. But $45 million's worth of people happily showing up to be exposed (wittingly or unwittingly) to the bizarro antics of someone like Zach Galifianakis? That represents a real change.

Perhaps what we once thought of as too weird, subversive, or cerebral is beginning to become just plain old American-style profitable. Could it actually be that all of our college cynicism and snotty in-jokes and internet circle-jerking has actually pupated into something undeniably, universally both funny and appealing? Looks to be.

The 90s and early 00s were so boring and fatty and toothless, so we got the big comedies we deserved—dumb manic fare like Liar, Liar and Happy Gilmore. Even the absurdism of something like Anchorman (which came pretty late in the curve) was fairly light and airy. But now! Now the good stuff is dark and mean and lean and strange. While those kinds of comedy sentiments seemed mostly niche and cultish once not long ago, they now seem almost de rigueur.

So with this new type of funnee stuff beginning its ascendancy, those big glossy laff-man pictures are starting to fade. Now, it's not necessarily time to play blame the actor—Ferrell's Land of the Lost fizzled, sure, but last summer his giddily profane Step Brothers scored—but producers may want to rethink how their movies are shaped and packaged. Go for the sharper angle, and some unexpected people just might bite. (And, yes, we know that Hangover isn't exactly Dr. Strangelove and are aware that the soot-black Observe and Report didn't fare so well, but, you know... baby steps. In the case of O&R, we're not quite ready to laugh at maybe-date-rape yet. Well, most of us aren't anyway.)

Whatever the reason, it does seem, increasingly, like old Nelson Mandela was right. It really is our light that most frightens us. Leaving our darkness to make us laugh.

1) Up — $44.2 million
Well, Pixar continues its terrifying and complete reign of supremacy. Their 3D South American jungle adventure—about an old man who captures a little boy in his floating balloon house and dangles him in front of dangerous animals—raked in another hefty sum. Part of that was due to the higher-priced 3D tickets, which are becoming all the rage. Pretty soon you'll be seeing Michael Haneke or Wong Kar Wai making meditative weirdo foreign films that Jump. Right. At You!

2) The Hangover — $43.3 million
Once the actuals are determined, this bro-bait sleeper hit could end up going over the top and beating those two gay balloon lovebirds. Either way, it's still an astoundingly strong debut for a movie that doesn't have any stars and has a strong R rating. Will this finally make Bradley Cooper a movie star? Will director Todd Phillips ascend to the ranks of Apatow and Stiller? "No" and "Maybe", would be my guesses. Who I'm most excited for, though, are Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis, two funny gents who ought to finally have some weight to throw around dusty old Hollywood. Since audiences gave the thing a can't-be-beat A CinemaScore, and as there's no direct competition on the near horizon, these drunken buffoons ought to stumble and belch their way safely through the next few weeks, unmolested.

UPDATE: Final tallies are in, and The Hangover did, in fact, beat Up this weekend, $45 million to $44.4 million. A photo finish! [Variety]

3) Land of the Lost — $19.5 million
Oh dear. Will Ferrell was back in the game with Step Brothers, but now he's right back out. Playing on almost 300 more screens than Hangover, it managed to gross less than half of that made-on-the-cheap flick's haul. Was it the bad reviews? Was it that no one could quite tell if it was a children's movie or for grownups? Was it that every gag in the commercials and trailers was gross and had to do with either blood, snot, or pee? I mean, "Matt Lauer can suck it!" was sorta funny, but that was... about it. I like Ferrell, so don't wish him failure, but this whole project always seemed a bit iffy as a bigtime summer competitor. Maybe if it came out in March or something. Then again, maybe not even then. It got a lousy C+ CinemaScore, which means no one will tell their friends to go and the thing will quickly disappear. Some call it banished to a land where things are... lost.

6) Terminator Salvation — $8.5 million
John Connor: The Yelling Chronicles finally crossed the $100 million mark! So good for them and the giganto Arnie robots and the filthy, soot-covered cherub nymph that is Anton Yelchin, and Moonwalker Bloodypants or whatever her name is, but most of all good for McG, who managed to take a great at best and decent at worst franchise and run it straight into the ash-strewn ground. Do you think he and Brett Ratner ever get together and talk about X-Men: The Last Stand and Salvation and sort of half chuckle, half weep for an hour or two, then drive off in their fancy cars to their mansions and eventually forget all about it? I'll bet they do.

9) My Life in Ruins — $3.2 million
A depressingly apt title. Poor Nia Vardalos flew so high seven years ago when her cheesy (feta!) little indie-that-could My Big Fat Joey Fatone slowly stormed the box office and, presumably, made her very very rich. But a failed TV series and a short string of guest spots later, her new sad Greek lady rehash has stumbled out of the gate with a lowly sum. Or has it? The flick's only playing on 1,164 screens, giving it a higher per-screen average than the number five film this week, the unstoppable Star Trek. So that could bode well for a slow burn, though the reviews haven't been as buoyant as they were for Big, Fat, plus there's no John Corbett. So maybe it is a fizzle. Ah well. Onto I Hate Valentine's Day, also about a sad Greek lady and... oho! John Corbett. Dynamite.