Box office boasting rights were too close to call Monday morning, what with two new PG-13 films, The Last Exorcism and Takers, separated by a mere $300,000. That's less than the cast of Jersey Shore spends on tanners.

According to boxofficemojo.com's early estimates, The Last Exorcism wound up on top, scaring up $21.3 million. The stylishly predictable caper flick Takers, playing on 700 fewer screens, snatched $21 million. Final figures, due out later today, will tell the tale. The Expendables and Eat Pray Love, movies which have walked hand-in-bloody-hand on the box office charts since their release earlier this month, slid to third and fourth place, respectively. Meanwhile, the much ballyhooed re-release of Avatar, what with its nine minutes of extra footage, barely cracked the top 12 with a $4 million take.

I was "lucky" enough to see both Exorcism and Takers, and both struck me as late-summer filler: Exorcism, plotted around a sham-artist exorcist who runs face-first into some apparent powers of darkness, had the most promising premise, but I didn't think the movie pulled it off. And Takers, I thought, was just ... dumb.

A little sliver of me is actually relieved Sly's gunfire won out over Roberts' navel-gazing. Eat Pray Love, based on the real-life memoir by Liz Gilbert (played by Roberts), details Liz's yearlong international quest to find the perfect foods, self-acceptance and spiritual balance after her divorce.

You see, at 32, real-life Gilbert was bored. Bored with her dream house in New York City.  Fed up with her devoted but unfocused husband. Tired of the "unfulfilling" but perfectly wonderful life she'd so carefully built to satisfy herself. So she escapes this (so the director would have us believe) miserable, color-inside-the-lines life. She finds and leaves a lover, divorces her husband (against his heartfelt wishes) and eats pasta and pizza in Italy until her skinny jeans groan when they see her coming. Then, after deciding in India that God lives in her "as" her, she has another affair with a Brazilian man in Bali. These two seem to live happily ever after, thus "justifying" Gilbert's self-interested search for spiritual fulfillment and carbs.

Apparently, it's the stuff bored women everywhere dream of, since the book was on the New York Times best seller list for years, not months. And it's reported that hoards of disappointed middle-aged ladies have followed in Gilbert's international footsteps looking for their own extrication from "misery."

Let it be known: I really wanted to like Eat Pray Love because I've done my own share of world travel and soul-searching over the years. But I left the theater irritated because Gilbert's spiritual and emotional trek was all in the name of herself, not God or others. Rather than seeing the adventurous heroine that Columbia Pictures wanted me to see in Gilbert, I saw a self-absorbed quitter who inconsiderately broke hearts and vows.

I doubt The Expendables is much more redemptive than Eat Pray Love, but at least there's not as much needless angst involved.

Inception

Plugged In didn't much like Dinner. Reviewer Bob Hoose said that "raw gags and sleazy sexual imagery are scattered around this pic like an overabundance of mouse droppings—leaving the whole film reeking with that dirty cage funk." But the freshman film still outperformed two other more family-oriented newcomers—Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore and Charlie St. Cloud. So does this mean that 2010, which thus far had been dominated by family-friendly flicks, taking a turn for the "adult?"

Well, perhaps. But Despicable Me, now in its fourth week, outperformed Cats & Dogs and Charlie St. Cloud by about $3 million. Cloud, starring Zac Efron, felt like a film that had a limited draw and modest expectations. And though Cats & Dogs was released on more than 3,700 screens, perhaps the public's desire to see CGI-enhanced talking animals has finally been sated (as if we didn't learn our lesson from Marmaduke).

Holdover Despicable Me scratched to second place with $32.7 million, while another newcomer, Disney's The Sorcerer's Apprentice, conjured up a disappointing $17.3 million for third. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse and Toy Story 3 rounded out the top five.

But while Eclipse and TS3 pushed their collective 2010 takes to $265 mil and $363 mil, respectively (TS3 is the year's highest-grossing film), the story this weekend was Inception: A live-action, high-concept, original film released in (gasp) the summer. Isn't summertime supposed to be the days of sequels and reboots and movies featuring1980s playthings? Could Inception be the start of a trend?

Color me skeptical. The high-wattage presence of DiCaprio and the pedigree of Nolan (the guy behind the camera of The Dark Knight) made Inception a reasonably safe bet for Warner Brothers. Still, I think the premise of the film (and the eye-catching trailers) drew lots of folks to the theaters, and the fact that it was pretty well crafted (well, I thought so, at any rate) may keep them coming back.

Or maybe Inception owes its success to teams of dream-agents scouring the country, invading our dreams and planting ideas like, "I've just got to see Inception! I don't care if it'll cost twelve bucks, not counting popcorn!"

Come to think of it, my sleep has been a bit restless …

With that kind of payday, you wouldn't think there'd be moviegoers left over to see anything else. Au contraire, my friend. Avatar: The Last Airbender conjured its way to more than $70.5 million for second place, while Toy Story 3 managed to squeeze another $42.2 million from the box office: The Pixar film earned $301.5 mil in three weeks.

But the big story is still Twilight and its legion of rabid, movie-going fans—perhaps the world's mightiest army not on a government till. You mess with Twihards at your own peril, as I learned after I posted a less-than-vampire-skin-sparkling review of the film. Lots of angry girls and women promptly wrote Plugged In to tell me how completely clueless I was: Several were particularly put out that I took issue with Jacob's oft-shirtless presence on screen, including in a driving snowstorm (I called it "abs-solutely silly"—a line since removed), seeing as how Jacob perpetually runs a 108-degree temperature.

Which makes me wonder why, if the body temperature is such an issue, Jake bothers with pants. Particularly those heavy jeans.

Others thought that Bella wasn't at all hasty in wishing to be undead, or quibbled with the degree to which characters lie to one another ("they just didn't tell the whole truth," one said), or my argument that the film gives viewers a slightly distorted view of what love's all about. Wrote one young reader:

Which is great, and maybe even true! Edward does treat Bella just like I'd want my 16-year-old daughter's hypothetical boyfriend to treat her. Edward is "old school," as Bella says—big on courtesy and a massive proponent of abstinence before marriage.  He seems like a pretty cool guy, despite the fact he's technically dead and all. All I'm saying is that we all get morning breath and leave the toilet seat up sometimes: Endless love is possible. Endless bliss … well, that might be a stretch.

Many of the letters I received were pretty polite, others less so. But I really, um, appreciated all the passion and thoughtfulness that went in to each and every one of 'em (though I'm also quite thankful Twihard nation doesn't know where I live).

Not that I'm taking anything back, mind you. Eclipse has some stuff going for it, but it's got its problems, too. And I can't help but wonder … if Jacob ever got a job at, like, Plugged In, will he be allowed to come into work shirtless? I mean, given his high body temperature and all?

But Toy Story 3 didn't just make good at the box office. It's just plain good. Plugged In's Bob Hoose added his own love to a wave of critical acclaim (the film has, as of now, a 98% approval rating on the movie review aggregate rottentomatoes.com), and audiences gave TS3 an A, according to CinemaScore. I haven't seen the film myself yet, but I've already been warned to bring a hanky or two.

Now, I've been known to give some Pixar love on this very blog, but I have to make a confession: I wasn't so sure if I was going to make a special trip to see TS3. I'm always a little leery of the third chapter in a long-running franchise, and I worried a bit that this threequel might've leaned closer to money-making vehicle than a superlative story.

Well, it looks like I was just being a big ol' curmudgeon. There are those who say that TS3 is the best of the entire series—and maybe Pixar's greatest movie ever. Pretty high praise. Did you see Toy Story 3? Does it go to infinity and beyond?

All of the newcomers finished below expectations and sent movie executives scurrying for their Maalox. Get Him to the Greek was the most successful of the floppish four, scoring $17.4 million for second place. Killers was killed, finishing third with $16.1 million. Marmaduke had a ruff outing, scratching out $11.3 million for sixth place. And the sci-fi Splice finished eighth with $7.5 million. Box office prognosticators will ponder these results over the coming weeks, offering theories as to why moviegoers have deserted the theaters this summer. The economy? The weather? Are they all watching Avatar at home?

Me, I tend to think that the reason is a bit more simple: None of these films looked, at least from the trailers, very good. Do I really want to see Jonah Hill (Greek) throw up on himself? Katherine Heigl (Killers) fumble with a gun? A mutant creature (Splice) terrorize Adrien Brody? A CGI dog (Marmaduke) do … well, anything? I wouldn't have seen any of these flicks, had my boss not made me.

If I made more than $70 million over a weekend, I'd probably be pretty happy about it. When a big, green, 3-D ogre makes that much coin, he's kinda bummed.

Not that you'd know it immediately. The folks at DreamWorks are surely putting a brave face on Shrek Forever After's $71.3 million box-office triumph this weekend, which pounded Iron Man 2 ($26.6 million) into second place after a two-week run at the top. It's the third-biggest opening of the year (right behind Iron Man 2 and Alice in Wonderland), and enough money to send 1,400 college-age ogres to Harvard for a year, including books. It's already made more than several films nominated for Best Picture last year.

But considering Shrek 2 made $108 million and Shrek the Third pocketed $121.6 mil in their opening weekends, respectively, the only conclusion we can draw is that the franchise may be reaching its saturation point. Despite its family-friendly rating and opening on a massive number of 3-D screens, which had previously been a surefire way to break the bank, this supposed final chapter of Shrek performed well below the $100 million that many box-office prognosticators were expecting it to earn. But how much ogrish behavior can moviegoers stand?

More to the point, how much can you stand? Did you see the green galloot in action this weekend? And if so, what did you think?