This is Boston, not L.A.

Adam Robot:
—MLK should have worked harder, that way this would have been a holiday everyone gets off

I first saw the trailer for Coach Carter in front of Team America: World Police.

Since then, I have seen (among other things) Samuel L. Jackson pretend to coach two gamers on the Spike TV Video Game Awards, Samuel L. Jackson sit in ESPN's Budweiser Hot Seat, Samuel L. Jackson count down his favorite music videos on BET, and a Coach Carter countdown of the top basketball movies of all time on MTV in addition to a barrage of promotional clips.

Well, it worked.

Coach Carter debuted at number one this weekend with a gross of $29.2 million. It is the third MTV film released in January to debut at number one. The other two were Varsity Blues in 1999 and Save the Last Dance in 2001.

January is usually the month during which studios burn off movies they don't expect to succeed.

Not so for MTV.

To them, apparently, with enough aggressive imprinting, any January movie can be a hit.

The only early first quarter MTV film to flop was last year's The Perfect Score, probably because it was released on February 1 instead of in January and did not feature a main cast with either one black person amidst a bunch of white people or one white person amidst a bunch of black people. The inclusion of that Asian pothead to the group disrupted the balance of one black and four white.

MTV is not hopeless. They released Election and Better Luck Tomorrow and Jackass: The Movie, all of which I enjoyed. However, I cannot bear another winter break with the network shoving a lame movie in my face. Please, MTV, either stop making January movies or let your January movies die January deaths.

Why, yes, I do listen to Cursive.