Daily Archives: September 29, 2008

Shia LaBeouf Has His (Eagle) Eye on Your Wallet, Girlfriend

Box Office

Shia LaBeouf will continue to make cheddar and mack on starlets, thank you very much. That’s what this weekend’s top gross of the very pedestrian thriller Eagle Eye confirmed. Following up on the $22.2 million debut of last spring’s Disturbia (we’re discounting the record-setting bows of Transformers and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, due to the influence of exploding robots and Harrison Ford), LaBeouf again made good as box office catnip, delivering $29.2 million for the DreamWorks/Paramount release, costarring Michelle Monaghan. Counter-programmed adult romance Nights in Rodanthe, starring Richard Gere and Diane Lane, finished a distant second for the three-day frame, with $13.4 million.

Rounding out the top 10 were Samuel L. Jackson’s bad-neighbor drama Lakeview Terrace, with $7 million ($25.7 million overall); Kirk Cameron’s Fireproof, with a debut haul of $6.8 million; Burn After Reading, the Coen brothers’ follow-up to the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men, with $6.2 million ($45.6 million overall); the animated Igor, with $5.4 million ($14.2 million overall); My Best Friend’s Girl, with $3.9 million ($14.6 million overall); Al Pacino and Robert De Niro’s Righteous Kill, with $3.7 million ($34.7 million overall); Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna, with $3.5 million in its debut frame; and Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys, with $3.1 million ($32.8 million overall).

Sliding out of the top 10 together in their 11th and second weeks of release, respectively, were Christopher Nolan‘s The Dark Knight and David Koepp’s Ghost Town. In limited release, meanwhile, Fox Searchlight’s Choke grossed $1.3 million on 435 screens, while the Iraq-veterans-come-home road movie The Lucky Ones pulled in just over $183,000 in 10 less theaters.

W. Gets Taken for Spin By Talking Heads

Politics, Trailer Watch

The previous trailer and TV ads for Oliver Stone’s W., opening in a few weeks from Lionsgate, were wrongheaded things, a bit too centered around Shakespearean-level Bush family grappling, and cutesy introductions of all the made-up bit players. This new trailer, blending quick-cut news footage with footage from the film, and set to Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime,” is a gem. Ignoring the fact that the same song was notably used as part of The Truman Show‘s advertising push, this qualifies as a top-notch sales job, because it both firmly establishes the film’s authorial point-of-view and advances the narrative itself, in miniature. The moments all fit together — beautiful wife, beautiful house — right down to the “how did I get here?” shrug and the dizzy scream of madness at the end — a placeholder for national opinion about the flaming wreckage of the Bush 43 presidency. It compels multiple viewings, this trailer. Nice adjusted tagline, too: “based on a true story.” The question, of course, is whether any of this translates into an iota of increased general audience interest in actually seeing this movie. With the economy so prodigiously in the crapper, I have to think not. For more information, click here.