Audiences go to 'Town' with Ben Affleck

By Sarah Sluis

In just three days, Ben Affleck's The Town managed to outperform the entire run of his first directorial effort, Gone Baby Gone. Ringing up $23.8 million, the Boston-accented bank robbing tale tapped older

male audiences eager for thrills. The pairing of Boston townies and crime hearkened back to 2006's The Departed, but The Town was a few million shy of beating that film's opening weekend.

In second place, Easy A amassed $18.2 million, on the high end of openings within the teen comedy genre. It couldn't beat Mean Girls or Superbad, but the Emma Stone picture wowed a primarily young, female audience. Word-of-mouth could propel this movie further, so its

week-to-week drops will be a number to watch. Stone herself is an up-and-coming actress: She has roles in upcoming comedies Friends with Benefits and Crazy, Stupid, Love (both in post-production), and will host "SNL" on Oct. 23. Her biggest coup is landing the lead in The Help, a popular book club selection that has a huge built-in audience.

M. Night Shyamalan's blockbuster cred weakened with the $12.5 million debut of Devil, his lowest yet. Horror movies usually drop 50-60% in their second weekend, so this movie will be unlikely to top $25 million during its run. However, how expensive could a movie that takes place almost entirely in an elevator be? With an unknown cast, it couldn't have cost that much--right?

The animated feature Alpha and Omega made a respectable showing with $9.2 million. It was no match for last year's Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, which opened to $30 million at this time last year. Given the movie's so-so animation and measly 15% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it fared well.

With the highest per-screen average of the week, Never Let Me Go earned a stellar $30,000 per screen playing in four theatres. Leading the pack of potential Oscar contenders, this movie may remain fresh in the minds of Academy voters--it seems likely to pick up a couple of nominations. Social networking documentary-thriller Catfish, which opened to a $21,000 per screen on twelve screens, debuted lower but arguably better. It's tough to carry that high of a per-screen average across so many screens. Though this movie was a Sundance Festival pickup, Rogue is marketing it as a mainstream, hyper-relevant mystery, a tactic that seems to have appealed to the YouTube generation.

This Friday will be another crowded one. Oliver Stone's Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps leads along with romcom You Again, 3D animated feature Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole, and a limited release of teen sex comedy The Virginity Hit. Specialty releases (take a deep breath) making their debut will include Waiting for "Superman," Woody Allen's You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Howl, starring James Franco, and Ryan Gosling in a coffin in Buried.

Trio of 'Easy A,' 'The Town,' and 'Devil' vie for the box-office crown

By Sarah Sluis

Following up a quiet week at the box office, four wide releases and two hyped small releases enter the fray.

A snappy teen sex comedy with a chance at the top spot, Easy A (2,856 theatres) stars Emma Stone as a high school student who gets mistakenly slapped with a reputation for being "easy." Despite such misses as the "age-blind casting" noted by critic David Noh (the leads are in their early twenties), this movie has drawn comparisons to Mean Girls and Clueless. Screen Gems ran hundreds of advance screenings for the movie, a sure sign this comedy is expected to generate "oohs" and "aahs" from its teen and college base.

Ben Affleck stars in and directs The Town (2,861 theatres), the story of working-class bank robbers who wear chilling Halloween masks while on a job. Rebecca Hall makes a departure from her plain-Jane appearance in Please Give as a "toonie" (yuppie) bank professional Affleck sparks to after holding her

hostage during a robbery. While the movie doesn't break much new ground, "[t]he robbery and chase sequences are fast-paced, tense but not overly graphic, and crisply choreographed," according to critic Kevin Lally, and "the film is so well-cast, you happily go along with the genre ride."

What's worse than being stuck in an elevator? Being stuck in an elevator with the devil! M. Night Shyamalan's Devil (2,810 theatres) serves

up shaky elevators alongside some accidental shrieks.

Horror aficionados should turn out in force for its opening weekend,

putting it on similar footing with The Town and Easy A. But could an elevator really plummet to the ground? Have no fear: According to this unintentionally hilarious interview with a buttoned-up Otis executive and New York Magazine, elevators are very, very safe.

A B-list 3D animated film, Alpha and Omega (2,625 theatres), is expected to be the box-office loser this weekend. The cute premise centers on star-crossed lovers, one an alpha female wolf and the other a bottom-of-the-pack omega male. However, "the flat picture-book quality of its backgrounds has an old-fashioned appeal but might disappoint viewers used to more pop and dazzle," according to critic Sheri Linden, and the first third of the movie is "devoid of charm." Woof.

What the New York Times cleverly called "the other Facebook movie," Catfish (23 theatres in NY, LA, San Francisco and Austin) may be the first of its kind to document how the Internet, specifically Facebook, facilitates deception. After Nev Schulman meets a young girl and her family on the Internet, he develops a romance with her older sister. Like a true thriller, your imagination runs away with all the possible outcomes, but the truth is weirder and more painful than anything you can dream up as a viewer.

The spare and sad Never Let Me Go (4 theatres) opened on Wednesday to a $6,000 per-screen average,

and is poised to ring up additional business over the weekend. Featuring a "unique comingling of genres," the movie centers on three students (Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightly and Andrew Garfield) who have been raised to serve as organ donors in an alternate history version of Britain circa the 1970s. According to critic Rex Robets, it may just be the rare movie that is better than the book. Showing impeccable restraint, "the moral question at the heart of the story is unspoken�but loudly heard."

On Monday, we'll see which film landed as the box-office topper and if Catfish and Never Let Me Go wowed general audiences as much as festival crowds.

Movies to look forward to: 'Never Let Me Go' & 'Somewhere'

By Sarah Sluis

Focus and Fox Searchlight, those dependable distributors of specialty fare, recently released trailers for Somewhere (trailer) and Never Let Me Go (trailer). Both of the trailers are moody and exciting and fabulous, and I can only hope the movies match up to the previews.

Never Let Me Go (Fox Searchlight) stars Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan, and Andrew Garfield (The

Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus) as '70s boarding school students with an unusual purpose. In a kind of parallel Britain, they are clones that are educated and then donate four organs before "completing." The movie is based on an acclaimed book (that I couldn't get through) by Kazuo Ishiguro, who was born in Nagasaki a decade after the A-bomb went off (read a great review of the book here).

What sets this world apart from other dystopias is the characters' belief in the system. They don't question what they've been instructed to do, even though they want to live longer than they've been told they will. In the trailer, they seem to be under the impression that if they find true love, they will be given a few more years to live. It's been said that the British love to form a queue, and this adherence to the rules even when the audience clearly sees evidence to the contrary is maddening, creepy, and sad. The director, Mark Romanek, last directed the dark movie One Hour Photo. The trailer offers a first look at the cinematography and costuming in the film. It's odd to see a futuristic movie set in '70s Britian, and the hairstyles sported by Knightley and Mulligan are priceless--who knows, maybe they'll even inspire a trend. The movie will be out October 1st.

The trailer for director Sofia Coppola's Somewhere (Focus) follows the formula of her trailer for Marie

Antoinette--great indie music, decadent locales, and people walking down halls while crazy things are happening. Coppola's movies make really good trailers, but they don't always match

up to the preview highlights. I still remember the excited feeling I got watching

the trailer for her Marie Antoinette (with the great New Order

song "Blue Monday"), but the movie didn't have the same effect on me.

This trailer starts out with music by Phoenix before shifting to the lower-key song "I'll Try Anything Once" by The Strokes. Elle Fanning looks great in the role of a movie star's abandoned daughter, enough to quiet my thoughts of sibling nepotism (she's the younger sister of Dakota). The movie star is played by Stephen Dorff, who has two decades of movie credits without a role that I remember him in. It's great casting--a suitable blank face with movie star looks, and not someone that the audience would have any recollection of from the tabloids. Coppola has been criticized for her lonely-people-in-glamorous-locales theme, but who cares? Audiences like seeing what it's like from a higher perch. The trailer also reveals her fantastic eye for details and looks. She can tell so much by showing father and daughter getting into a car together wearing matching sunglasses, or playing the swimming pool game tea party. Likely pursuing an awards campaign, Fox Searchlight has the movie aimed for a December 22nd release.