Welcome back to Movieline Attractions, your regular guide to everything new, noteworthy and/or distracting you from Super Bowl weekend. This week, slim pickings belie an outside shot at a box-office milestone, while one of the year's most ambitious efforts to date arrives on US shores for your review. Read on for a look at these and everything else happening this February weekend at a theater near you.
WHAT'S NEW: Opening opposite the Super Bowl isn't exactly the best-case scenario for any movie hoping to make a giant opening-weekend splash (the big exception: Taken, which opened to $24 million in this frame a year ago). But if you have to do it, your best bet is with an easygoing, female-targeted romance like Dear John. It doesn't hurt that the Nicholas Sparks adaptation is actually watchable, even pretty good in parts; the story of an Army loner's star-crossed, long-distance relationship with his sweetheart back home eschews a lot of the patronizing, tear-jerking histrionics previous Sparks films tended to slump into. Channing Tatum actually gets a chance to do something other than brood, brawl and/or strip on camera, and Amanda Seyfried matches him with winning chemistry. Sure, they're under-resourced scriptwise and periodically trapped in the forced tenderness of the Sparks milieu, but director Lasse Hallstrom rescues them when and where he can with class and restraint. Between the stars and the coastal setting, the whole thing's a little too pretty at times. Still, I'm not the real audience here, and if Screen Gems can position all this beauty between the Big Game and Avatar, it might coax a $20 million viewership (or more) from the ladies. If it really takes off, and if Avatar experiences a Super Bowl slide of its own, it may be a closer final tally than anyone bargained for. But don't bet on it.
Part of the reason not to bet on it would be the box-office wild card From Paris With Love, which apparently really exists and was not just a succession of mock trailers churned off the Funny or Die assembly line. Yes: John Travolta really does play a special agent named Charlie Wax, on the trail of a terrorist while by-the-book sidekick Jonathan Rhys Meyers looks on/pouts sexily/draws a gun when Travolta's power scarf loses its wallop. And to help replicate maximum blockbuster conditions, Taken director Pierre Morel is at the helm. For all I know this is a masterpiece or, at the very least, a future Bad Movie We Love, but for now, let's just agree it's third place at around $14.5 million.
That's pretty much it for wide releases. Oscar nominees An Education, Precious and Crazy Heart are expanding, however, while ongoing engagements for The Blind Side and Up in the Air should see post-nomination boosts of various sizes as well. Limited openings include the Parkour actioner District 13: Ultimatum, the droll Danish import Terribly Happy, Jackie Chan's violent Spy Next Door penance The Shinjuku Incident, and the recent B-horror Sundance alum Frozen.
THE BIG LOSER: Hopefully the Colts. Kidding! OK, I'm not kidding. No hard feelings, Indianapolis.
THE UNDERDOG: After Variety practically wept with praise and David Thomson went off calling it "better than The Godfather" (don't think you won't see that blurb in every ad and DVD box in perpetuity), The Red Riding Trilogy finally comes to IFC Center in New York. (L.A., you get it next week.) I don't know about better than The Godfather, but the three films -- screening for one week only as a five-hour event -- follow a very similar qualitative arc. Based on David Peace's Red Riding Quartet of novels about the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, the first, director Julian Jarrold's 1974, is the best of the set, featuring Andrew Garfield as a young journalist mired in the dreary, hopelessly corrupt crime culture of Northern England. Director James Marsh takes over for the even more haunting (if dramatically overextended) entry 1980, and Anand Tucker stalls and starts with the finale 1983. Characters come and go and drop off fairly seamlessly in screenwriter Tony Grisoni's loving adaptation, but the experience of following them through this kind of epic looking-glass is such an irresistible privilege that the long sit is worth it. Not to mention it (mostly) flies by and I think they throw in a free bag of popcorn at some point. It's hardcore moviegoing for hardcore moviegoers who'll be glad they took the journey.
FOR SHUT-INS: New DVD releases this week include the fun, nasty hit Zombieland, the un-fun, flaccid flop Amelia, the pleasant Aspergers love story Adam, the grindhouse horror throwback The House of the Devil, the forgotten romance Love Happens, and a "special edition" of Air Bud: Golden Reciever. Can't. Miss.