Box Office - 'Chihuahua' Runs With the Big Dogs

I could throw out any number of dog-related puns to describe the weekend box office numbers, but we're both better than that, aren't we? Instead, we'll just tip our hat to Disney for doing what they do best: Create a family-friendly comedy that does great business in its first week at the box office. According to Box Office Mojo, Beverly Hills Chihuahua was the easy winner this weekend, exploding with a $12.4 million Saturday, to earn $29 million in its debut. Last year around this time, Disney achieved similar success with The Game Plan. The new releases were kind of all over the road; Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist finished in third place, just a little bit below its projected total. A handful of limited releases piled up at the bottom of the top ten, with An American Carol, Religulous, Flash of Genius, and Blindness running ninth - twelfth. Of these, only Religulous could be deemed a success, because it opened in just 500 theaters. Appaloosa, the Ed Harris western, is not technically a new release, but this is its first weekend in more than a dozen theaters, and audiences helped it move from 37th place to fifth place in one week. You wonder when seeing a movie expand like this if it will ever show up in 2,000 theaters or 2,500, which would help it be more competitive. The movie deserves it, so hopefully, New Line will push it a little harder towards the end of the month.There will be time, I imagine, to discuss what an absolute failure How to Lose Friends and Alienate People is, but we'll wait to detail the whole mess. Instead, just know that it made $1.4 million. Of the top 20 films this weekend, only Igor had a lower per-screen average. Using the 30% estimate (a movie's opening weekend accounting for roughly a third of its total box office), How to Lose Friends is setting up for a whopping $4.2 million. I would suspect it won't quite get that far; a debut performance like this gets you pulled out of theaters rather quickly.The Top Five: 1 - Beverly Hills Chihuahua ($29 million)
2 - Eagle Eye ($17.7 million)
3 - Nick and Norah ($12 million)
4 - Nights in Rodanthe ($7.3 million)
5 - Appaloosa ($5 million)

Box Office - 'Chihuahua' Wins Friday, 'Lose Friends' Loses Big

Beverly Hills Chihuahua is well on its way to getting a treat at the end of the weekend. The family-friendly talking animal comedy from Disney raced out to nearly $8 million on Friday, according to Box Office Mojo. That number is a little shy of what it would need to average on Saturday and Sunday to get near the $30 million ballpark analysts had predicted. No other new release made even 70% that much on Friday. Eagle Eye is having a strong second weekend; its Friday totals were about $1 million over third-place finisher Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, which should wind up in the $12 - $14 neighborhood by Monday morning. There were two notable surprises: Appaloosa, the Ed Harris western that expanded into more than 1,000 theaters this weekend, is on pace to finish in fifth place, while the more aggressively marketed How to Lose Friends and Alienate People is simply one of the biggest bombs of the year. The comedy is currently looking at a sub-$2 million weekend after scraping together less than half a million bucks on Friday. Ouch. Barring some massive turnaround, How to Lose Friends will make less than $8 million total during its domestic run, and even then, $8 million is a really liberal finish line. We'll have full weekend box office results tomorrow.

Movie Review - 'Appaloosa'

Appaloosa

Starring Ed Harris, Viggo Mortensen, Jeremy Irons, and Renee Zellweger
Directed by Ed Harris
Rated R

What’s left for the western? Hollywood has had an on-again, off-again relationship with the genre for over a century, technically longer than the American West itself existed in the format depicted so often on screen, and seen again in Ed Harris’ new film, Appaloosa. The good guys wear white era has forever shattered by John Ford’s The Searchers, which perfected the art of the morally ambiguous hero in the cowboy movie. More important modifications were made in the 1960s with the Sergio Leone movies, The Wild Bunch, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Clint Eastwood’s westerns have their own distinct arc, running from High Plains Drifter to the savagery of Josey Wales to the ultimate redemption in The Unforgiven of both the western hero and the western in general. For years after that film, Hollywood didn’t know where to take the western. It was as if Eastwood had closed the book on it, just Saving Private Ryan redefined war movies. Though there have been attempts to tell those same stories in new ways over the previous 15 years, it wasn’t until 2006 and 2007 that the western regained its swagger. Movies like Australia’s The Proposition and the very strange but effective Seraphim Falls played on the perimeter of our experience with the genre, while 3:10 to Yuma masterfully polished and old gem an The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford gave an almost lyrical and elegiac quality to the western, raising it again to an art form. It could even be argued that two Best Picture nominees, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, are at worst first cousins of the western. Though it does not look to radically alter our perspective on one of the most familiar genres of American movies, there is a place for Appaloosa in this new renaissance. The plot is overwhelmingly simple: A traveling and just lawman named Virgil Cole (Harris) has come to the town of Appaloosa to protect it from Bragg (Jeremy Irons), a cold outlaw who killed the previous sheriff. Cole always travels with Evertt Hitch (Viggo Mortensen), who maybe a better shot than his friend, but would never admit it. This is your standard good guy walks into town, swings the saloon doors open wide and puts the bad guys on notice movie, at least on the surface. Underneath, though, Harris has given Appaloosa a few new wrinkles. Working from the novel by Robert Parker, Harris has made Cole an uncomplicated man, because simplicity serves him best. He doesn’t know big words and often asks for assistance finishing his sentences, and his code is simple: Don’t draw on me and we’ll be OK. The communication between Cole and Hitch underscores how long these two men have been traveling the west, finding themselves in these exact situations. There’s also a refreshing sardonic tone to a lot of their dialogue. After a quick shootout leaves Cole, Hitch, and their opponents clutching at various injuries, Hitch remarks, "That didn’t take long," to which Cole says, without missing a beat, "Yeah, well, we were all good shots." Cole even looks for and finds love with the rather untrustworthy Allison French (Renee Zellweger). Perhaps he’s just at the age when settling down sounds better than the alternative, or perhaps he really loves her. Then again, perhaps he just needs to love for once.

Virgil Cole won’t tell you exactly what the reason is. He’s a man of few words. That’s something that’s been as tried and true as tumbleweeds in western movies for over a century.

Four Character Posters for the New Western 'Appaloosa'

Ed Harris' new Western, Appaloosa, will get the Toronto treatment over the next few days at the best film festival in North America. The film is an adaptation of a book by Robert Parker and it has some pretty intense characters, which along with  terrific cinematography, are the real reasons to see this movie. Incidentally, the director of photography on this film (and it was a great hire) is Dean Semler, who has shot plenty of desolation in his time, lensing The Road Warrior, Young Guns, Dances with Wolves, The Alamo, and Apocalypto. He even won an Oscar for the Costner movie. Because the stark nature of the American West is such a huge part of any good Western, the cinematography has to be there. Witness Robert Elswit winning last year for There Will Be Blood, and two other Westerns, both photographed by the best in the business, Mr. Roger Deakins, being nominated, as well. Having seen this film, I think these posters are a touch too bleak, although on their own, I like them a lot. They certainly don't misrepresent the cut-and-dry story in Appaloosa, but there is a certain edge to these one-sheets that I wouldn't say the story reflects. In spots, it's actually one of the more sardonic Westerns you'll see, and I mean that in the most flattering way possible. So there are Ed Harris, Viggo Mortensen, Renee Zellweger, and Jeremy Irons. Like I said, it's great work, and I'm sure they'll be plastered all over Toronto for the next ten days or so. If you're not going to take in the festival, however, you can catch Appaloosa in theaters on October 3rd.

Toronto is ViggoFest '08

I saw Anne Thompson's Variety article about Viggo Mortensen's incredibly promising fall slate of films. Two of his new movies will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival within the next few weeks, and the third, an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, will be released in November. The first of Viggo's two Toronto films is Appaloosa, a western co-starring and directed by Ed Harris, Viggo's co-star in A History of Violence. They're on the same side of the law in this one, and having already seen the film, I can tell you that Mortensen and bad guy Jeremy Irons are the highlights for me. The cinematography's good, but I think a lot of its impact is due to the impeccably chosen locations. That film will be released on October 3rd. There are tons of images over at IGN for the western, but here are a couple to get you started: The second part of the Viggo doubleheader might be the real standout, however. Watch the trailer for the drama Good, in which Mortensen plays a German author whose views on "compassionate euthanasia" are used as propaganda during the rise of the Nazi party. Needless to say, he has to face some difficult choices along the way. Not only does he look outstanding in this role, but I don't remember Jason Isaacs ever being this good. Good is based on a play by C.P. Taylor and I'm pulling for it, because the film has been on the books for several years and actually shot in the summer of 2007, so I'm hoping it's as compelling as it looks and picks up some steam during the awards season. A good showing in Toronto would no doubt be a boost.