The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn might have held onto the #1 slot during the Thanksgiving frame, but holiday buzz lifted those plucky Muppets to a strong second place showing; with $24.7 million over three days, Jason Segel, Kermit, and Co. should ride the Rainbow Connection all the way to a very nice pile of green by weekend's end. Meanwhile, Happy Feet Two continues to slide and Aardman Animation's fellow wintry offering Arthur Christmas opened with a modest $4.5 million Friday. Martin Scorsese's 3-D fall family flick Hugo, on the other hand, enjoyed a strong debut on a fraction of the screens. Maybe audiences weren't quite ready to ring in the yuletide cheer?
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We rarely think of as great movies as breezy ones: Breeziness is supposedly only for disposable entertainment, though achieving filmmaking greatness in the way we normally think of it -- with impressive sets, heavy-duty acting and ultra-polished cinematography -- is probably easier than brushing a movie with just the right amount of gold dust. Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist is a gold dust movie, a picture whose very boldness lies in its perceived lightness. This is a silent movie in black-and-white, and if it were only that, it would be a pleasant novelty. But The Artist isn't a nostalgia trip, nor is it a scolding admonishment to honor the past. Instead, it's a picture that romances its audience into watching in a new way -- by, paradoxically, asking us to watch in an old way. The Artist is perhaps the most modern movie imaginable right now.
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The Artist, the silent film that has emerged since Cannes as one of the year's presumptive Oscar front-runners, finally makes landfall in the States this weekend: Following tonight's East Coast premiere at the New York Film Festival, Michel Hazanavicius's tribute to old Hollywood rolls out for audiences at the Hamptons Film Festival. And if today's early reactions at the NYFF press screening were any indication, all signs point to success.
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It's week three of the 2011-12 Oscar Index, and the latest measurements, readings and conclusions are in from Movieline's Institute for the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics. And aside from a few startling exceptions, they don't look that different than the ones disseminated here last week. But make no mistake: Like it or not, stuff is happening! Read on for the latest developments.
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