Welcome back to Movieline Attractions, your regular guide to everything new, noteworthy and incorrigibly flamboyant at the movies. This week, an Austrian import threatens America's transforming-auto industry, Hayden Panettiere is loved (sort of), and a bounty of great new indies avail themselves at the art house.
WHAT'S NEW: You know by now that Brüno isn't stimulating much critical consensus around the Movieline campus. That said, no one here is going to argue it won't be a hit. But how much of a hit? Opening on three times as many screens as Sacha Baron Cohen's predecessor Borat (which bowed to nearly $28 million in the fall of 2006), yet facing holdover competition from Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Universal's other R-rated summer entry Public Enemies (not to mention The Hangver), Brüno boasts strong if confounding potential. I've seen conservative estimates around $30 million for three days, which seems insanely low for a much-anticipated film (R-rated or not) with a star and a marketing campaign this inescapable, but I do expect women's defection to Enemies will keep this just below $40 million by Sunday.
Only one film dared to open wide against Baron Cohen (I'll get to that), but a bundle of nifty, smaller titles are trickling out in limited release. The buzziest is Humpday, the existential pseudo-gay bromance storming out of Sundance and into exactly two theaters (and not likely the two you'd expect) before platforming nationally. The spectacularly cheesy, weirdly charming manga adaptation Blood: The Last Vampire arrives as well, along with the Bollywood offering Shortkut: The Con is On, the career-meltdown romcom Weather Girl (L.A. only), and Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Goldberg (NYC only), a documentary about the pioneering Jewsih radio host Gertrude Berg.
OSCAR QUALIFYING ALERT: Lionsgate has yet to slate a release date for its documentary Facing Ali, which features 10 of Muhammad Ali's former opponents paying tribute to the Greatest through recollections of their fights. But! You can gain now from Academy's asinine documentary qualification rules requiring L.A. and Manhattan engagements before Aug. 31; the film will spend a week at both the Laemmle Claremont 5 and the Coliseum Cinemas in Washington Heights.
THE BIG LOSER: Maybe I haven't been looking hard enough, but did Fox actually print posters or produce any spots at all for I Love You, Beth Cooper? Chris Columbus's teen comedy features Hayden Panettiere as her high school's hottest girl, to whom her geeky class valedictorian pledges his affection during their graduation. Everyone likely knows how the rest goes -- right down to its box-office fate opposite Brüno, with which it shares its young target audience. It's hard not to think this isn't some collusive Universal/Fox ploy for kids to have a PG-13 ticket to buy before theater-hopping to Brüno; Fox keeps the lowly $7.5 million gross, Uni keeps the word of mouth. Either way, that's the half-assed win-win they can each look forward to.
THE UNDERDOG: If you do decide to check out Facing Ali, consider making your own impromptu Ali documentary double feature with the superb concert film Soul Power. Director Jeffrey Levy-Hinte assembled the doc from outtakes of the Oscar-winning When We Were Kings, Leon Gast's portrait of the historic Ali/George Foreman "Rumble in the Jungle" that restored Ali to greatness in 1974. Levy-Hinte edited that earlier film, and here he revisits the event's corresponding concert that brought James Brown, The Spinners, B.B. King, Celia Cruz, Bill Withers and other soul and funk legends to Kinshasa, Zaire. The performances are extraordinary -- to say nothing of Ali's incendiary theatricality, the cultural tension between Western blacks and their third-world hosts, or the genius eyes of cinematographers Albert Maysles, Roderick Young, Paul Goldsmith and Kevin Keating. All told, a must-see.
FOR SHUT-INS: This is the wrong week to be in the market for new DVD's, unless the Nicolas Cage stinker Knowing, the overlooked telekinesis actioner Push, the horror crapsterpiece The Unborn, or complete-season sets of Reno 911, Murder, She Wrote, Kath & Kim or Matlock get your blood racing. Sorry.