Attractions: Eclipse and Airbender -- A Tale of Two Tentpoles

Welcome back to Movieline Attractions, your regular guide to everything new, noteworthy and/or cash-hoarding at the movies. It's a light week for new releases, with nobody really coveting the roadkill role opposite a certain teen-friendly Brinks truck of a franchise. Well, nobody except for Manoj Shyamalan, apparently. But even he won't be truly flattened, regardless of the reviews. Let's explore the box-office potential, whaddya say?

WHAT'S NEW: I'm not going to spend a long time on this. There are only so many ways to say The Twilight Saga: Eclipse is going to sink its teeth (har!) into its squealing prey (oy!), sucking up (ugh!) around $112 million for the five-day holiday frame, which becomes an even $180 million if you add on Wednesday's windfall. That's just... insane, and would be neck-and-neck (oof!) with Spider-Man 2 for the all-time Fourth of July weekend record. We wouldn't know who's tops until the pennies are counted Tuesday, but if I had to bet, I'd say Eclipse breaks it.

Guess what won't be breaking any records -- unless you count the level of floors through which it crashed en route to becoming the worst-reviewed studio film of the summer, maybe even the year? Give it up for The Last Airbender, the anime adaptation that Paramount offered up as "counterprogramming" when it might have been better off pushing to August and letting Eclipse and the third week of Toy Story 3 fight it out the way nature intended. Don't get me wrong: Manoj's Folly is not shaping up as a Jonah Hex-level flop, but nor is it in any condition to reach the most generous estimates currently circulating in the industry. Thursday's $16 million take suggests a pace slowing to $56 million by Monday, which I can't imagine will be enough to overtake TS3 for second place for the full holiday, but who knows? Not me, not you, just a few million American families who have to decide if they really want to explain to their kids afterward that this director actually made respectable films back when Mommy and Daddy were dating.

Meanwhile at the art house, the prostitute-y Helen Mirren/Joe Pesci melodrama Love Ranch finally reaches screens after protracted distribution limbo, and in New York, anyway, there's the fannish filmmaker profile Great Directors and the Brazilian ballet documentary Only When I Dance. In L.A., look for Oliver Stone's South of the Border to finally make landfall alongside the self-explanatorily titled doc The Nature of Existence.

THE BIG LOSER: Last Airbender will no doubt disappoint for Paramount, but nothing that flirts with a $60 million opening (even on a holiday weekend) is exactly what I'd call a loser. So! Take the the weekend off, underachieving movies! Have some barbecue or something.

THE UNDERDOG: I increasingly get the sense that The Agony and Ecstasy of Phil Spector might develop into one of those infamous lost films eternally hung up on copyright matters -- not unlike Los Angeles Plays Itself, Urgh! A Music War or Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, all of which feature footage and/or music their filmmakers could never reasonably expect or afford to license. As told yesterday to Movieline, director Vikram Jayanti had his own tricks for getting around that problem in his transfixing exploration of songwriter/producer Phil Spector's genius and self-destruction: Jam critical notes about Spector's music into the final cut, thus legitimizing the film's soundtrack under fair-use statues.

Good luck with that. Yet to the extent it's admittedly tacked on, cheap and distracting, the stunt also gives Agony and Ecstasy a weirdly impressionistic quality; it complements the "What the hell is going on here?" sensation of Jayanti's cyclical interview-murder trial-archives storytelling approach. It also befits Spector's own legacy as a manipulative, credit-hogging bully who, in the studio anyway, literally had an answer for everything. New Yorkers should check it out this weekend while they can; the film travels to San Francisco, Los Angeles and elsewhere in the weeks to come. I'd link to a Web site with dates if I could find one, but its elusiveness suggests perhaps even Agony and Ecstasy's own producers might have an insight into their film's imminent infamy. Either way, it's well worth a look.