Daily Archives: October 27, 2008

High School Musical 3 Rides Youth Dollars to Weekend Box Office Crown

Box Office

Previous evidence of the crossover potential of the powerful Disney brand can be found in the Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds
3-D concert release earlier this year; never playing in more than 687
theaters, the movie opened to $31 million, and finished with over $65
million domestically. Similarly relying upon its huge built-in
audience, High School Musical 3 broke the record for highest-grossing musical opening of all time, raking in $42 million on approximately 5,900 screens. That was more than enough to best the still-strong franchise staying power of Saw V, which, in keeping with Lionsgate’s historically ridiculous schemes to tamp down advance reviews, didn’t screen for critics, but still pulled in an estimated $30.1 million on 4,100 screens. In other wide new releases, cop drama Pride and Glory finished fifth for the weekend, with $6.3 million.

Rounding out the top 10 were videogame adaptation Max Payne ($7.8 million, $30 million overall); Beverly Hills Chihuahua ($6.9 million, $78.1 million overall); The Secret Life of Bees ($6.1 million, $19.3 million overall); Oliver Stone‘s W. ($5.1 million, $18.5 million overall); Eagle Eye ($5.1 million, $88 million overall); Body of Lies ($4.1 million, $30.9 million overall); and horror flick Quarantine ($2.6 million, $28.8 million overall).

In limited release, Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, starring Angelina Jolie, pulled in $489,000 at 15 venues; Rodrigo Garcia’s Passengers, starring Anne Hathaway, grossed just over $172,000 on 125 screens; writer Charlie Kaufman‘s directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York, grossed $172,000-plus on nine screens; Noah’s Arc: Jumping the Broom grossed $151,000-plus at five theaters; French import I’ve Loved You So Long, starring Kristin Scott Thomas, grossed $72,000 on nine screens; and striking, vampire-inflected Swedish coming-of-age tale Let the Right One In grossed $42,295 at four theaters.

Passengers

Film Reviews

A handful of eerily staged scenes and a surfeit of passably evocative production design can’t save the otherwise muddled Passengers, in which Anne Hathaway stars as a grief counselor assigned to help survivors of a fiery plane crash. In trying to tick a wide variety of genre boxes, the movie ends up servicing none that credibly.

Assigned by her boss (Andre Braugher) to
help walk a quintet of airplane crash survivors through their shock and
grief, psychologist Claire Summers (Hathaway) encounters particular
difficulties with one of them, Eric (Patrick Wilson). While others display
behavior more consistent with massive trauma, Eric is bouncy and
charged by a newfound energy. He flirts with Claire, and asks her out
on dates, which strikes her as odd. As her other clients begin
to disappear, though, Claire finds herself swimming in paranoia,
suspecting a strange airline employee (David Morse) of having a hand in their
disappearance, possibly to cover up the real reasons for the crash.

Narratively, Passengers marks a departure from the past films of Colombian-born director Rodrigo Garcia (Nine Lives), whose recent small screen work on HBO’s In Treatment showcased a level of psychological engagement not on display here. Passengers‘ mystery never takes hold, mainly because Ronnie Christensen’s script
is a thinly sketched mood-piece of appropriated motifs and
characterizations. Almost a decade on, the huge success of M. Night
Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense is still spawning mystery-thrillers
that seem chiefly backwards-plotted, with gimmicky point-of-view pivots
that are meant to draw appreciative audience reactions out of a
re-framing of the narrative.

Given the loose, unrealistically pitched nature of some of the characters in Passengers,
though, it’s quickly apparent that the movie isn’t a straight dramatic
telling, and only a small handful of scenarios seem plausible. Rodrigo,
accordingly, is left to try to imprint and impress a unifying visual
strategy on this forestalled revelation, with only fitful success. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Sony/TriStar, PG-13, 93 minutes)