'Money Never Sleeps,' 'You Again' and 'Owls' enter crowded weekend

By Sarah Sluis

Corporate raider Gordon Gekko is back in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (3,565 theatres). Oliver Stone's sequel to his 1987 film centers on young financial analyst Shia La Beouf and includes many

references to the current economic crisis. Critic Doris Toumarkine praised the movie's "snappy script," "fantastic performances all around," and "unblinking look at the high-stakes financial players�the greedy, sneaky bankers and traders and their enablers." Though the movie will have tough competition from its 3D-animated owls (see below), it's a contender for the top spot.

Legends of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole (3,575 theatres) sounds like it will appeal mainly to kids who have already seen their fair share of age-inappropriate movies to build their scare tolerance. If I put my kid shoes on, I see a movie that's very darkly lit (one of my childhood pet peeves, I hated it when characters were

obscured by shadows), scary, and confusing--kind of like the spooky animated film The Secret of NIMH, only worse. Critic Frank Lovece points out that the movie includes such "nightmare-inducers" as "genocidal ambitions, medieval slashing tools, child slavery, [and] child soldiers," all of which lead him to question the movie's PG rating. Based on a series of young adult books, the adventure centers on a group of young owls caught up in a fight of good vs. evil. The comparatively more cheerful Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs opened last year to $30 million, and Owls should come close to that figure, landing somewhere in the mid-$20 million range.

Despite the snappy premise 'my brother is marrying my high school enemy,' You Again (2,548 theatres) plays like "one more promising idea ground into bland, tasteless Hollywood sausage," according to critic Maitland McDonagh. For the under-25 females expected to turn out for the movie, however, I can't think of a more appealing premise. Everyone has a little bit of an inner geek and would love to show up the mean girl, so the idea of watching a successful Kristen Bell spar with her former torturer (Odette Yustman) should be enough catnip to put the movie in the teen-million range.

Sneaking into 700 theatres, The Virginity Hit adds a twist to the typical teen sex comedy--webcams and YouTube. But wait! 1999's American Pie also included a webcam sequence in the plot, but the teens seeing The Virginity Hit were learning their A-B-C's when that movie came out. By releasing under the radar, this comedy is aiming for a viral success fueled by word-of-mouth.

Five prominent specialty releases enter the fray today, many of them buoyed up by positive receptions on the festival circuit.

Woody Allen makes his annual directing appearance in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (4 theatres, NY/LA). The movie, which explores aging, infidelity, and faith, stirred up this observation from critic Kevin Lally: "Perhaps someday Woody Allen will again appear onscreen in a truly satisfying movie. For now, it's comforting to know this prolific writer-director can still deliver good, insightful material for the many actors who keep lining up to work with him."

James Franco stars as Allen Ginsberg in Howl (6 theatres, NY/LA/SF), a movie that melds an animated reading of the titular poem, Ginsberg's obscenity court case, and his life--each element better on its own than as part of the whole, according to Toumarkine. A murdered drug junkie comes back to life in the graphic and psychedelic Enter the Void (4 theatres, NY/LA/Chicago), directed by Gaspar No. In Buried (11 theatres), Ryan Reynolds plays a man trapped in a coffin in Iraq with a cell phone as his only tool for escape.

A moving documentary about America's failing public schools, Waiting for "Superman" (4 theatres), makes its debut. Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) directed the polemic, which inspired Shirely Sealy to speculate "if it [will succeed] in reshaping the national debate about how to fix our broken educational system."

On Monday, stay tuned for a recap of which small releases distinguished themselves, and the winners in the battle of Wall Street vs. owls vs. revenge-seeking women.