Heroic Dog Fends Off Vampires in Deadly All-Ages Box-Office Duel
Welcome back to Defamer Attractions, your weekly guide to everything new, noteworthy and otherwise avoidable at the movies. Today offers a little more variety than last week's Bond! Bond! Bond! World Tour, but only a little — a total of two major new offerings are crashing the multiplex this week, with a scrappy smattering of indies and upstarts shuffling onto screens behind them. And if that's not doing it for you, there are always a few thrilling DVD's to pick up the slack. As always, our opinions are our own, but you'll never see them schlepping off to Washington for a bailout. Invest wisely after the jump!WHAT'S NEW: Hopefully you enjoyed your mildly adult pleasures last week while you could, because it's an all-puberty weekend this go-around. Twilight finally crashes theaters after a hormonal, high-pitched tidal wave of anticipation, packing tween girls (and not just a few of their mothers) into as much as $70 million worth of sold-out shows. We don't have much to say about the vampire swoonathon that we haven't thrown your way already, but we will go ahead and call it for a $68.8 million gross, 237 fainting spells and a record 455 million shrieks drowning out the dialogue. Disney will represent as well with its 3-D canine superhero opus Bolt, voiced by John Travolta and Miley Cyrus among others. Tracking is close to $40 million, but with reviews well-above average and the imprimatur of ex-Pixar chief John Lasseter, we could see it overlapping quadrants a bit and maybe peaking around $45 million. Also opening: Actor Robert Davi's doo-wop/heist-flick directorial debut The Dukes; the imploding Irish marriage drama Eden; and the ethnically-charged lesbian love story I Can't Think Straight. THE BIG LOSER: For the second consecutive week, the box-office is America's last remaining growth sector. No losers to speak of here, though talk to us next week about Australia.
THE UNDERDOG: The documentary Toots first premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2006; in the two-and-a-half intervening years, director Kristi Jacobson's paean to the legendary NYC saloonkeeper (and her grandfather) Toots Shor has only appreciated in its bittersweet regard for the lost high-class, hard-drinking cafe society of 1950s Manhattan. Less a hagiography than a delayed, definitive act of posterity, Toots nevertheless glows with anecdotes from Mike Wallace, Yogi Berra, Walter Cronkite and a bounty of archival footage showcasing the gregarious subject himself. It's nostalgia worth bingeing on, and it won't leave you with a headache the morning after. FOR SHUT-INS: New DVD's this week include three different versions of WALL-E, two versions of Tropic Thunder, a single version of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2, the complete series set of The Odd Couple, and just in time for the holidays and/or a 100-foot-tall bonfire, Hannah Montana: The Complete First Season. So are you braving the Twilight tide this weekend? Does Bolt have street cred worth your dime? Are we missing something, anything to help bulk up this flimsy week? Enlighten us! Please!