Second week at the top for 'Hop'

By Sarah Sluis

The animated Easter bunny picture Hop enjoyed its second week in first place, dropping 42% to $21.7 million. Its performance is on par with March's Rango, but Hop will probably do better financially due to the live-action/CG hybrid's lower budget. With two more weekends until Easter, Hop should continue to play well but will have tough competition next week when Rio, which opened #1 in a number of international markets this weekend, debuts in the U.S. this Friday.

Russell Brand provides the voice of the bunny in Hop, but his other new release, Arthur, opened to a disappointing $12.6 million. In comparison, Get Him to the Greek, which featured Brand as a co-star, opened to $17 million last year. Critics were not kind to the tale of a lovable billionaire alcoholic, giving it just 25% positive Rotten Tomatoes rating. Brand, a beloved U.K. star, has been trying to break out in America for several years. If the movie plays well in the U.K., Arthur's flat performance stateside will confirm that Brand just can't cross over in a live-action vehicle--although I don't understand why, because I find him extremely funny.

Hanna opened third with $12.3 million, an impressive opening for an assassin film intended for a more arty, indie crowd. Focus Features went for the same auteur action formula with last fall's The American, which opened to $13.1 million with a considerably bigger star on the marquee, George Clooney. Teen star Saoirse Ronan will be seen next in The Hobbit, if you believe what you see on IMDB (she hasn't been confirmed in the role yet).

Following closely in fourth place, Soul Surfer rode in with $11.1 million. The largely young, female audience raved about the film, giving the religious-themed sports picture an A+ CinemaScore rating. The areas in the U.S. farthest from the coasts did the best, including Nashville and Oklahoma City.

The loser of this week's quartet of new releases was Your Highness, which finished with $9.5 million. The stoner adventure film underperformed, earning just a fraction of the $23 million opening weekend attained by director David Gordon Green's last comedy, Pineapple Express.

One spot above Your Highness, haunted house movie Insidious did what horror movies almost never do. Instead of dropping 50-70%, the movie's audience went down just 27% to $9.7 million, another win for distributor FilmDistrict, which picked up the movie for a song and spent heavily on marketing.

Among specialty releases, IMAX film Born to be Wild made the biggest splash, earning $850,000 from 206 locations. The well-reviewed Meek's Cutoff proved to be more of a critic's gem than an audience favorite, settling with just $11,000 per screen on two theatres, a modest debut for a film with a 86% positive Rotten Tomatoes rating among critics.

This Friday, American audiences will be able to catch Rio, which had the highest international debut of the year. Horror fans can white-knuckle it for Scream 4, and historical drama The Conspirator will open in select theatres.

'Hop' provides tough competition for 'Arthur,' 'Soul Surfer,' 'Hanna'

By Sarah Sluis

Four new movies will be hitting theatres this weekend, but last week's Hop is a near-lock for grabbing first place again. The Easter-themed CG/live-action film earned $37 million last weekend, and will likely drop less than 50% this weekend, standard for animated, family-driven movies.

The remake of the 1981 comedy Arthur (3,276 theatres) should approach $20 million but fall short of beating Hop. Russell Brand, who also lends his voice for the bunny tale, stars as a rich alcoholic who finds love just as he's being pushed into a marriage to a cold high-achiever. While the first Arthur was a word-of-mouth hit, the remake fails "to recapture the magic," according to critic Kevin Lally. One highlight is Greta Gerwig as Arthur's love interest. She goes from "Mumblecore darling" to "very endearing and natural as the down-to-earth Naomi," the role originally played by Liza Minnelli.

Soul Surfer (2,214 theatres) is my pick for an overperformer. Based on the true story of teen surfing star Bethany Hamilton, who lost her arm in a shark attack, the drama also incorporates Hamilton's faith strongly, a surefire way to attract the religious crowd that helped make The Blind Side a hit. One problem the movie will have to overcome is the 127 Hours curse--people that don't want to see a movie with a gruesome amputation. However, I saw one of those "test screening" television commercials this week that featured enthusiastic pre-teens raving about the movie. I was a convert, and critic Doris Toumarkine confirms that the movie is "paradoxically, remarkably uplifting."

Your Highness (2,769 theatres) is an "earnest, messy and often quite funny" spoof of "'80s-era medieval romps," according to critic Ethan Alter. That's a nice way of saying "stoner Princess Bride comedy." Oddly populated with both an Oscar nominee (James Franco) and a winner (Natalie Portman) from this year, Your Highness also stars Danny McBride and Zooey Deschanel in "one of the oddest comedies to emerge from a major Hollywood studio in recent years." The only R-rated film of the week, this fantasy-comedy-adventure should at least top $10 million.

Rounding out the bunch is Hanna (2,535 theatres), which stars Saoirse Ronan as a teen assassin. Director Joe Wright fills the film with stylistic and musical flourishes, but critic Rex Roberts bemoaned that the actioner "starts out edgy and fresh, but runs out of steam and imagination." I predict that young film buffs will be entranced with the movie's showy use of sound, long takes, and other cinephile big-ticket items. Unlike Sucker Punch, this girl-driven action movie is far from being a purely male fantasy, which should broaden appeal.

The most notable specialty release is Meek's Cutoff (2 theatres), which comes from director Kelly Reichardt (Wendy and Lucy). Set on the Oregon Trail, the story centers on three families lost on a difficult route. Alter praised Reichardt for "telling an epic story in an astonishingly intimate fashion." She "immerses you in a way of life long since vanished without feeling like a dry history lesson."

On Monday, I'll see where the quartet of new releases landed in the top ten, and which films drew moviegoers.

Release spotlight: 'Meek's Cutoff' brings indie sensibility to the Western

By Sarah Sluis

I was more than a little surprised to find out that director Kelly Reichardt's next film would be set in 1845. On the Oregon Trail. Like her previous film, Wendy and Lucy, the movie takes place in Oregon and centers on a journey, but all those bonnets and wagons in Meek's Cutoff threw me for a loop. The film centers on three families traversing the Oregon Trail in the route's early days. They have enlisted a wilderness man as a guide, but he has them lost in the middle of the desert without water. One of the settlers (Michelle Williams) spots an Indian, and fights against having him killed. She wants him as a guide. But will he be able to get them to water in time?

Meek's Cutoff touches on certain aspects of the Western genre, but lightly. Reichardt isn't trying to make an anti-Western, but rather provide a window into the day-to-day life of settlers. The days on the trail unfold with the precision, detail, and quiet of an Italian neorealist film. You feel the significance and tedium of the daily chores as if you were a settler yourself. Meek's Cutoff is also unique for its portrayal of women. Williams displays some of the spunk and initiative of the young Mattie Ross in True Grit, but Reichardt takes care to point out how customs exclude the women from decision-making. In more than one scene, the men discuss what to do next, while the women stand back a distance, unconsulted. Instead they listen, but with the concentration of someone calculating their next chess move.

As with Wendy and Lucy, watching Meek's Cutoff can feel a little tedious, since the movie focuses so much on minute details. While the tension builds, the ending is abrupt, which I kind of expected. There were no signs that the narrative would end up tied in a bow. Meek's Cutoff is best viewed as an experience, a museum exhibit with a point-of-view. While I was unclear on the historical background at the time, the title refers to a "shortcut" that guide Stephen Meek took 200 wagons and one thousand people through. Though they eventually navigated through the treacherous terrain, over twenty people died. I assume that the movie limited itself to three wagons for budgetary reasons, but it ends up providing added dramatic impact. With just nine people on the screen, it's easier to see how alone and lost these settlers are. In the desert, I'm sure the settlers felt alone even with a thousand people, which registers as a giant crowd on screen.

The Oscilloscope Laboratories release premiered at Sundance, where the wild landscape of the surrounding area must have provided a pause--how the West has changed in the past 150 years. The movie will release this Friday in New York City, with additional cities to follow.