Can you feel the passion?

"The Twilight Saga: New Moon" benefited, I think, from the source's near-total permeation throughout an entire segment of the population. In other words, if you're a teenage girl, you had to see the movie this weekend, to weigh in, to pay tribute, to root for vampire-boy or wereguy (oh, sorry, "shape-shifter") -- and. most important, to not be caught looking like a Loser Loser Double Loser come Monday morning. So I'm guessing that the actual percentage of all American women age 12 to 18 attending "New Moon" was as close to 100% as theaters would hold. I wish that many people voted in elections.

Anyway, records broke or were threatened: Largest first-day haul ever ($72.7 million); best-selling midnight showing ever ($26.3 million); biggest fourth-quarter opening ever; third largest opening weekend, period ($147 million, bumping "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" but still behind "The Dark Knight" and "Spider-Man 3"). Seventh-largest opening worldwide when you factor in the $118 million "New Moon" made overseas. Oh, and the weekend overall was Hollywood's second biggest in history, since the "The Blind Side" opened with $34.5 million, the best ever for a sports drama and a Sandra Bullock vehicle. My sense is that mom and dad dropped the teenagers off at the vampire flick, the kids off at "Planet 51," and went to "Blind Side" on their own.

But back to "New Moon" -- how pumped was the target audience? About half the movie's opening weekend grosses came on Friday night; I'm surprised ushers weren't trampled in the melee. The sequel doubled the grosses for the original "Twilight" on each day of the weekend, and this is starting to look like standard operating procedure: If you can plant the franchise successfully in the first film, you can really reap the benefits in the second. Worked for "The Dark Knight," among others, and worked here; indie studio Summit took the gamble when the major companies wouldn't and is reaping the rewards. Another token of "New Moon"'s must-see factor: a $35,000 per-house average -- at over 4,000 theaters.

Not doing so hot was "Planet 51" with an okay $12.6 million -- trailers correctly positioned as antic CGI kiddie fodder without the manic invention of DreamWorks product or the high-end elegance of Pixar. But "Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire" (you can just call it "Precious") continued on its canny stealth opening, widening from 174 theaters to 629 and holding on to a super $17,000 per-theater average. It's at $20 million total gross now, remarkable when you consider the downbeat (though ultimately inspirational) subject matter and lack of stars. The irony is that most of the young women swooning over Edward and Jacob would be blown away by "Precious" -- if the industry promoted it even half as heavily as "New Moon."

More numbers from Box Office Mojo and Movie City News.

Think about this, America, as you waddle off to see "New Moon" this weekend: Those multiplex snacks you're paying too much for are also turning you into an extra from "WALL-E."

The non-profit Center for Science in the Public Interest -- basically a bunch of lab-coated spoilsports who have a thing against obesity and quintuple bypass surgeries -- released a report and a news release today that claims a medium popcorn and soda combo at your average movie theater contains as much as 1,610 calories and three days of saturated fat. Yum! That's about the same as three quarter pounders from Mickey D's -- before you even start ladling the "butter" on top.

According to the report, the Regal Cinema chain is the worst offender, with AMC close behind; based on CSPI's independent lab tests, both chains drastically underreport the calorie counts in their snack food. At least the smaller Cinemark chain pops their popcorn in canola oil instead of artery-busting coconut oil.

Feeling greasy already? Me too, but good luck sneaking crudite into the movies. Most multiplex theaters rely on snack-food sales for the profits they need to stay in business. To them, a happy customer is a moviegoer with vestigial limbs digging into an extra-large tub of orange vinyl nacho cheese.

Would you like a stent with that?

The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Directed by: Chris Weitz
Written by: Melissa Rosenberg, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer
Starring: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Anna Kendrick
At: Boston Common, Fenway, suburbs
Running time: 130 minutes
Rated: PG-13 (violence and action)

**

By Ty Burr
Globe Staff

Sorry, girls: The thrill is gone.

“The Twilight Saga: New Moon,” the second installment in Hollywood’s adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s mega-selling vampire romance series, is an anemic comedown after the full-blooded swoon of last year’s “Twilight.” Where the first film’s director, Catherine Hardwicke, plugged into Meyer’s vision of supernatural teenage lust with abandon, Chris Weitz is stuck with a sequel that’s a morning-after mope-fest.

The new movie has two things going for it: a relaxed and likeable Taylor Lautner as Jacob Black, the newly buff Native American kid with a hairy secret and a crush on Bella (Kristen Stewart), and a wicked sense of humor about the story’s sexual subtext that doesn’t surface often enough.

In most other respects, the movie’s a drag – paced like a dirge and cursed with dialogue and a goopy musical score (Alexandre Desplat, how could you?) that bring out the book’s worst daytime soap tendencies. But what can you expect from an installment that keeps the central duo of human Bella and vampire Edward (Robert Pattinson) apart for an extended 500-page sulk? Even my impromptu focus group (two adolescent daughters and one friend) voted “New Moon” the least involving of the four books.

In the film, Edward leaves Bella after a birthday party goes horribly wrong – funny what a little paper cut can do to a room full of vampires. Stewart’s an actress of narrow abilities, to put it kindly, but in “Twilight,” she worked beautifully within her limits, lighting up with newly discovered love. In “New Moon,” she’s playing a spurned and devastated woman, and Stewart just doesn’t have the skill set to do much more than stare woodenly into the middle distance.

Just when you’re about to give up on her, Lautner’s Jacob appears on the scene, helping Bella rebuild a junkyard motorcycle. (Why? So she can drive recklessly and somehow make the spirit of Edward appear to her. Trust me, kids, this does not work in real life.)

The raging hype around “New Moon” has divided the planet between Team Edward and Team Jacob, and everyone's forced to take sides. On the basis of the movie itself, it’s not much of a contest. When he’s onscreen, Pattinson’s Edward is all emo posturing under a trembling bouffant – the actor suddenly seems to be embarrassed to be here. Lautner’s performance, by contrast, has the warmth of an actual human. (And, yes, when he takes off his shirt to aide the wounded Bella, the crowd goes nuts.)

All right, there’s that little matter of Jacob being a werewolf – oops, did I spill the beans? This is taking the old Betty-and-Veronica dichotomy to new levels, and when “New Moon” breaks out the special effects, placing a frazzled Bella between wolfmen to the left of her and bloodsuckers to the right, the movie rouses itself to an enjoyable lunacy.

Other castmembers lift the movie’s pulse above the standing level. Michael Sheen takes a break from playing historical figures like David Frost and Tony Blair and gets to overact shamelessly as Aro, the head of the vampire council known as the Volturi. Better yet, there’s Dakota Fanning, God bless her, showing Stewart how it’s done in one nifty scene as a vampirette with sadistic mental powers and old-school movie presence.

Anna Kendrick also walks away with her one scene as Bella’s tart high school pal, Jessica. (It’s a thankless role but no one will remember after the George Clooney drama “Up in the Air” comes out in a few weeks and Kendrick picks up a supporting actress Oscar nomination. You heard it here first.) Too bad the humans get short shrift in “New Moon,” taking a back seat to overcooked vampire-fu and supernatural Hatfield-vs-McCoy booshwah.

The “Twilight” books are all about sex, of course – about wanting it but not having it, and about the tension that comes steaming up from the cracks between. About boys who can ravage you but insist on protecting you from the beast within, even when you don’t want them to. About chastity and its discontents. Hardwicke got that; the first movie was about a shy nobody ennobled by a lust that dared not speak its name.

In “New Moon,” the stakes are both more obvious and sneakier. Bella wants to be bitten so badly, and why shouldn’t she when female vampires like Alice Cullen (Ashley Greene) and villainous Victoria (Rachelle Lefevre) are such self-confident hotties? Poor girl – when she gets on an airplane to rescue her lover, she’s stuck riding Virgin Air.

Hey, Chris Weitz, you just helmed the second installment of one of the most lucrative movie franchises on the planet -- what are you going to do now?

Oh, quit. Wait, what?

Weitz tells Moviemaker magazine (whose site gives us only a teaser of the interview; the Film School Rejects blog has more) that he's hanging it up after directing his penultimate film, "New Moon," and a final labor of love he describes as "an homage to 'The Bicycle Thief'" that's set in Los Angeles. (Is your reaction to that last tidbit Uh-oh? Mine too.) Then he's going to go be a better surfer. Really.

I think what's happening here is that Weitz still hasn't gotten over having "The Golden Compass" taken from his hands by the New Line studio brass and beaten into a mishmosh not even fans of the fantasy series could get behind. In the Moviemaker interview, he clearly feels that movie coulda been his shot at glory along Peter Jackson and "Lord of the Rings" lines, despite the fact that Weitz is not, last time I checked, Peter Jackson. The critical and commercial pummeling "Golden Compass" took was so dispiriting that Weitz even e-mailed me, one of the few reviewers to express sympathy for what he must have been up against, to gently vent off the record. (Reality check: Directors almost never respond to reviews, if they even read them. As for actors, there's some question as to whether they can read.)

When you consider how many people in the movie business don't make it (especially those who didn't have a mom who was nominated for an Oscar), Weitz has had a solid little Hollywood career. In collaboration with his brother Paul he created the "American Pie" movies, co-starred in the dark indie "Chuck and Buck," and adapted and directed "About a Boy." He's had his hand in producing too. I'm sorry he feels bruised by the business, but if that's the case, he probably shouldn't be in it.

That said, if "New Moon" turns out to be the real thing -- I'm seeing it tonight -- how much you want to bet Chris Weitz's surfing plans never materialize?

(A typical scene of nuanced, intimate human drama from "2012")

It's the end of the world as we know it, and America's moviegoers feel fine. "2012" raked in $65 million over the weekend by giving audiences what they want: unparalleled global disaster in which no one really important (John Cusack, for example, or that cute l'il dog) gets hurt. The movie played on 6,500 screens in 3,404 theaters (that's a $19,000 per-theater average and a still-impressive $10,000 per-screen average), so there was no place to run. Imagine if "2012" had been released in 3D, as will no doubt be the norm within a few years' time -- we'd all be ducking as Africa sailed past our heads.

That said, the opening take for Roland Emmerich's latest Ragnarok-o-rama washed up just short of "The Day After Tomorrow" ($68.7 million in 2004) and doesn't compare with "Independence Day," which back in 1996 opened with $50 million in less than half the theaters "2012" did.

In second place, the returning "A Christmas Carol" dropped only 26% of its opening week take, both a sign that the 3D extravaganza might have decent legs and an indication that holidays are upon us, no fooling. Coming in fourth, after "The Men Who Stare at Goats," was the surging "Precious," which went art-house wide and expanded from 18 theaters to 174, pulling in an astonishing $6 million and $35,000 per-theater average. Reviews help, and so does Oprah, but the buzz is building from the film itself. It opens (finally) in Boston this Friday; not sure what took it so long. or why Texas is getting the movie before we are.

"Pirate Radio" sank like a rusty tub in a North Atlantic gale: $3 million at 900 theaters. Things look good for Wes Anderson's stop-motion Roald Dahl adaptation "The Fantastic Mr. Fox," though -- it opened at four theaters and averaged $65,000 at each. Again, we're going to have to wait a few weeks for the film to open here, but mostly because Fox (the studio, not the character) wants to take advantage of the long Thanksgiving break. Good luck selling the film to families -- it's as flaky, if not as morose, as "Where the Wild Things Are." That's not to say it isn't very good. I've seen it, and it is. But more on that later.

More grosses at Box Office Mojo and from Leonard Klady at Movie City News.

(Tsai Ming-liang's "Face," at the HFA Saturday night)

The gifted Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang is in town this weekend at the Harvard Film Archive. He's best known in this country for the allusive and beautifully filmed "What Time is it There?" (2001) and "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" (2003), but the HFA series spotlights his lesser-known work and -- tomorrow (Saturday) at 7 p.m. -- his newest movie, "Face," which stars Fanny Ardant, Jean-Pierre Leaud, and the Louvre. The director will be present tonight (hurry!) and tomorrow night. Here's a nice thumbnail review of "Face" from Chris Kriofske of the Chlotrudis Society.

Uh-oh -- Friday the 13th comes on a Friday this month. (Tip of the hat to Churchy LaFemme for that one.) What better way to celebrate the unluckiest day of the year than watch Planet Earth swirl down the toilet in Roland Emmerich's disaster-o-rama "2012"?

Actually, I can think of plenty better ways, but this noisy, silly comic book of a movie does give you your money's worth in high-end apocalypse and the supporting players are a juicy bunch of hams. (Particularly Woody Harrelson parodying his crazed hemp-boy pop image and George Segal dusting the mothballs off his shoulders as a cruise ship entertainer. All that's missing is Helen Reddy as a guitar-playing nun.) Cusack is fine enough as the harried lead, but you want him to hoist this movie over his head the way Lloyd Dobler did that boombox, and it ain't happening.

That's a good description of what Philip Seymour Hoffman does with "Pirate Radio," an extremely colorful and rather shaggy chunk of Britpop history. His Royal Hoffman plays an American disc jockey on board a fictional version of one of the illegal radio station ships that broadcast rawk 'n' roll to England in the 1960s. Writer-director Richard Curtis seems more interested in tall tales than history and the movie goes on too long, even in this US version cut by at least 10 minutes from the original British release (titled "The Boat That Rocked"). Still, pretty good fun and unimpeachable soundtrack.

"The Maid" is definitely worth seeking out at the Coolidge -- A domestic-servant character sketch from Chile's Sebastián Silva that's ultra-creepy and strangely touching as it examines a Santiago housemaid (the fantastic Catalina Saavedra, a prize-winner at Sundance) undergoing a quiet psychotic break.

Also at the Coolidge -- and this weekend's pick hit -- is the loving tongue-in-cheek blaxploitation spoof "Black Dynamite," playing midnights today (Friday) and tomorrow, and every weekend through the month (and more, if it catches on). Warning: This movie contains Arsenio Hall.

Wesley really likes the dry art-world comedy drama "(untitled). I haven't seen it yet but I want to now. It's at the Kendall Square and the West Newton.

The Boston Jewish Film Festival wraps up this weekend, and "The Bicycle Thief" is at the Brattle in a new 35mm print. You haven't seen it? You should. One of the cornerstones in any moviegoer's education.

(Greta Garbo and Leo the Lion, back when MGM roared)

Poor MGM, up for sale again. Variety reports that what's left of the beleaguered film studio -- basically a 4,000-title movie library the trade-paper terms "geriatric"* a couple of films in production, and the Leo the Lion logo itself -- will be auctioned off in the next few weeks by the various equity firms that control it. Business Week points out one asset that might have other film studios circling: MGM owns the film rights (along with Warner Bros.) to "The Hobbit," currently in pre-production with producer Peter Jackson and director Guillermo del Toro.

So much for the vaunted "MGM is back in business" deal with the Weinstein company in 2007, a push that gave us, um "Lucky Number Slevin" and "Clerks II," and the distribution deal with the Tom Cruise-led United Artists, a company whose own fortunes are now up in the air.

There are still a few MGM films in the production pipeline for 2010: a remake of the Commie-invasion 80s anti-classic "Red Dawn," a CGI kiddie carton called "The Zookeeper," and the deathlessly-titled " Hot Tub Time Machine," starring John Cusack and Crispin Glover. Maybe it is time to turn out the lights at the house Louis B. Mayer built.

*I don't know if I'd call MGM's film holdings "geriatric." Deeply weird is more like it. Since Time Warner, through Ted Turner, owns the cream of MGM's output from the glory days (along with the classic Warner, RKO, and UA libraries), the entity we now call MGM controls a patchwork conglomeration of assets absorbed and purchased over the years, including the Cannon canon of 80s schlock cinema, the films made by the late, lamented Orion Pictures, and the Samuel Goldwyn library, the latter an undeniable crown jewel.

My pal Mark Feeney offers this appreciation of cinematographer Gordon Willis, who’s slated to receive a long overdue and vastly deserved lifetime achievement award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences this Saturday. Three years ago he interviewed Willis at his Falmouth home and, later, provided this, well, illuminating transcript.

The name “movies” is misleading. Before they are anything else, movies are appearance, not motion. That being the case, few people alive have so fundamentally affected the movies - have so influenced their appearance - as the cinematographer Gordon Willis. So fundamentally or so variously: The warm and sinister earth tones of the “Godfather” pictures could hardly be more different from the toxic fluorescent blues of “All the President’s Men” (1976) or the lustrous black and white of “Manhattan” (1979) And that’s not counting how Willis made the daunting technical gymnastics of “Zelig” (1983) seem as effortless as screwing in a lightbulb.

This Saturday Willis is to receive an honorary Oscar, as are John Calley (recipient of the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award), Roger Corman, and Lauren Bacall. It’s an especially impressive list. Calley is one of the most respected of Hollywood executives, a key figure during the ‘70s at Warners, later the head of both United Artists and Sony, and an independent producer whose films have run the gamut from “The Remains of the Day” to “The Da Vinci Code.” Corman, of course, is a unique figure in Hollywood history, for decades an impresario of subversive schlock who helped foster the careers of Jack Nicholson, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, and Jonathan Demme, among others. ">Lauren Bacall you know about - you do know how to whistle, don’t you?

The reason the list is so impressive is, presumably, the same reason the awards are being given now instead of March 7, at the regular awards ceremony. The Academy is trying to sex up the broadcast (and increase television ratings) by doubling the number of best picture nominees to ten and off-loading the honorary awards. But even the Academy isn’t so stupid as to fail to realize that those are often have the worthiest, and most distinguished, recipients. So the last thing it wants is to make the honorary awards seem like a superannuated version of the technical awards (which got off-loaded some time ago).

So it’s a great list – but if you care about the movies, the greatest name on that list belongs to Willis. Bacall’s is the biggest, of course, and she’s great, too. But few people in the history of film in any field have had the kind of run Willis had between 1971, with Alan J. Pakula’s “Klute” (has New York City ever looked more matter of factly kinky?) and 1985, with Woody Allen’s “The Purple Rose of Cairo.” Willis earned his nickname, “the Prince of Darkness,” with the first two “Godfather” pictures. But he was no less good with radiance – “A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy” (1982), for Allen, or Pakula’s “Comes a Horseman” (1978), an otherwise forgettable movie whose glorious exteriors make one mourn the western Willis might have photographed for Sam Peckinpah, say.

Willis’s most celebrated shot is probably the long, long Library of Congress reverse shot in “All the President’s Men” (not his idea, and disapproved of its showiness). His most celebrated achievement, and rightly so, has to be the look of the “Godfather” movies: the alternation between shadow and light, the use of tableau-like long shots, etc. Conversely, the accomplishment he gets least credit for, and in some ways it’s his most impressive, is single-handedly making Woody Allen a visual director. Before “Annie Hall” (1977) the first movie Willis shot for Allen, none of his pictures had anything approaching a look. Contrast that with how distinctive, distinguished, and utterly different from each other are the visual presentations of “Annie Hall,” “Interiors” (1978), “Manhattan,” “Stardust Memories” (1980), “Sex Comedy,” “Zelig,” “Broadway Danny Rose” (1984), and “Purple Rose.”

And that leaves unmentioned Willis’s sumptuous, one-of-a-kind evocation of the Great Depression in “Pennies from Heaven” (1981), how in Pakula’s “The Parallax View” (1974) he codified a visual grammar for the paranoid thriller, or how John Houseman credited Willis’s visual scheme for helping “create” Houseman’s character in James Bridges’s “The Paper Chase” (1973). Houseman offered that tribute in the acceptance speech he gave when he won his best supporting actor Oscar. Now Willis will finally get to give one, too.

(Lenny Kravitz and Gabourey Sidibe in "Precious")

"Disney's A Christmas Carol" made $31 million over the weekend -- sounds like a success, yes? Hardly. When you consider that the Jim Carrey full-motion capture 3D extravaganza opened on 6,500 screens at over 3,600 theaters, that number looks a bit more temperate. "Elf" made the same amount when it opened in fewer theaters in early November 2003, and "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" earned much more ($55 million) on the weekend of Nov. 17, 2000. (Keep in mind, too, that grosses for the new movie are further inflated by higher ticket prices for 3D and IMAX screenings.) On the plus side, "Christmas Carol" outperformed Robert Zemeckis' last holiday-themed full-motion widget, "The Polar Express," which opened to $23 million in November, 2004.

Still, what went "wrong"? It's possible that the 3D hand that gaveth all summer (with films like "Up" and "G-Force" benefiting from exposure in the format) can also taketh away. A huge 74% of the movie's grosses came from the 32% of theaters that were able to show it in 3D, meaning that audiences realized they had to see this with the funny glasses or not at all. Add to that a whoop-de-do marketing campaign (posters featuring a manic Carrey aboard a Victorian rocket) at serious odds with the film's more reverent tone, and possible word of mouth that this wasn't the kiddie thrill ride it was being sold as, and you have a Christmas cracker that didn't pop all that loud. "Polar Express" ultimately built to a very solid $162 final US gross, and it's possible that "Carol" may yet do so.

Other new releases fared passably but not spectacularly. "The Men Who Stare at Goats" made $13.3 million, about as good as could be expected for a George Clooney movie with a weird title. The aliens-are-among-us shenanigans of "The Fourth Kind" sucked in $12 million worth of credulous viewers and "The Box" -- a paranoid thriller from "Donnie Darko" director Richard Kelly that was gingerly mishandled by Warner Brothers (which sold it as a Cameron Diaz "Twilight Zone" episode and only screened it for critics at the last minute) -- made $8 million.

Michael Jackson in "This is It" held on strongly its second week -- dipping only 40 percent from opening weekend -- but "Paranormal Activity" seems done now that Halloween is over and with nearly $100 million in tickets sold overall has nothing to be ashamed of.

The story of the weekend in limited-release land was "Precious" (photo above), the tough inner-city inspirational drama that has been building steam ever since its debut at Sundance last January. Reviews were over the moon (mostly) when the film finally was released in New York, LA, and elsewhere last Friday, and the buzz was such that the talk was of little else at a dinner party I attended Saturday night in suburban Boston -- two weeks before the film opens here. (Usually, movies don't land on that radar until well after they've debuted locally.) "Precious" made $1.8 million at 18 screens, which is a $100,000 per-screen-average, the 12th highest on record. Yes, a big thumbs up from Oprah and Tyler Perry and a glowing feature article in the New York Times magazine certainly helped. Is this the year's Oscar winner? I think its too unpolished and melodramatic at points -- arguably one of the movie's strengths -- to take the big prize, but the real win for "Precious" is that millions of people are going to see it.

More numbers from Box Office Mojo and Leonard Klady at Movie City News.

I've been meaning to blog a heads up about this since Friday but it's still not too late: IF you're a fan of the Fab Four AND you have serious Rock Band chops AND/OR you want to see the 1964 classic "A Hard Day's Night" -- rockfilm 101 -- for the first or twenty-first time, the Somerville Theatre is where you want to be today (Sunday) at 4, when the Independent Film Festival of Boston hosts "Meet the Beatles/Rock the World". The movie starts at 4 p.m. The Rock Band videogame competition starts at 6 p.m. Go: Live vicariously 60s-style then a la 2009. Just try not to get blisters on your fingers.

A couple of weeks ago, I complained that the Chris Rock, black hair documentary "Good Hair" was hard to find if you lived in Boston. Roadside Attractions, the movie's distributor, has informed me that it's exiled no more. It's now at the AMC Boston Common. I just cancelled my two-hour bus excursion to Randolph. Thank you, Roadside. Thank you, AMC.

(Meet your new Oscar hosts)

It sounds like a rat pack-era comedy duo, doesn't it? As if Dean Martin had jettisoned Jerry Lewis and picked up, um, author James Baldwin. Hopefully the Steve and Alec show will be funnier than that; it certainly won't be as risky. With last night's announcement that the white-haired comedian/banjoist (still beloved despite prostituting his immense talent in so many horrific recent films) and the smart, mercurial actor (newly beloved for his ongoing "30 Rock" brilliance) will share hosting duties for the 2010 Oscar ceremonies on Sunday March 7, Academy telecast producers Bill Mechanic and Adam Shankman have gambled on... well, nothing, actually.

These two will be very funny, very professional, and very comforting. Given the other announced changes coming down the pike -- ten best picture nominees for the first time in 66 years, honorary awards shunted off to an earlier banquet -- it makes sense that we'd get a pair of known quantities to guide us through the earthshaking changes. With luck, we should expect an extra-special, star-studded edition of "Saturday Night Live," a show that Martin and Baldwin have hosted a total of 29 times combined. With even more luck, Baldwin will have an unscripted hissy-fit when Dakota Fanning cuts off his Teleprompter sight line.

One of the undying frustrations of this job involves hoping an audience will see a film I like only to discover that, contrary to the popular tagline, it's not playing near a theater anywhere near them. Such is the case with "Good Hair," the smart and very entertaining documentary in which Chris Rock pulls the curtain back on black hair-care culture. It opened in Boston last Friday and is virtually nowhere to be seen. As of today, it's playing only in Revere and Randolph, which is wonderful, but not at a single theater in Boston or Cambridge (it did spend a week at the lackluster Fresh Pond Cinema).

I'm not arguing that the movie would set the box office on fire (it's holding its own around the country), but it doesn't even appear to be given a chance to do so here. A lot of the audience for it - black folks and their many curious friends - lives in town and has real interest in seeing "Good Hair," at least judging from the confused emails in my inbox asking when it's opening. Should we cry documentarism? Until today, "Capitalism: A Love Story" still occupied a screen at the AMC Boston Common, and "This Is It," more of documentary than I, at least, was prepared for, occupies several, not to mention a few at the Regal Fenway.

I live in Boston. I don't drive. If I wanted to see "Good Hair," I'd have to borrow a car or beg someone to take me, which in several cases would involve soothing the culture shock of my designated driver. (But that's partly what the movie wants.) Public transportation turns out to be a less than realistic option. I think I broke the usually reliable MBTA Trip Planner, trying to find the optimal route from my house to Revere. "The following error occured with your choices," it told me. "Unable to return an itinerary. There is no service available at the date, time and/or location you requested or the system is being updated." Trip Planner's suggeted route to Randolph hilariously produced a two-hour journey (the movie is only 98 minutes!) that culminates with a 33-minute walk to the theater.

As it happens, Howard Cohen and Eric d'Arbeloff, the two men who run Roadside Attractions, the distributor of "Good Hair," are from the Boston area. And when I called, Cohen told me, sympathetically, that he tried to get the movie downtown but that AMC, which runs the 18-screen megaplex on the Boston Common, didn't have room. He says he's willing to take the chain at its word (which didn't stop my eyebrow from going up). But, Cohen says, the real crime here isn't so much that one exhibitor didn't play Rock's movie. It's that there aren't enough theaters for Rock's movie to play, a problem Ty Burr addressed in a story yesterday about the new Stuart Street artplex in the theater district. And Cohen is right. There's an exhibition crisis. And it tells several stories about Boston.

It's the one major city in America where "Good Hair" isn't playing near a black neighborhood - or at least a theater heavily frequented by black moviegoers. Of course, the backhanded beauty of this situation is that we all wind up watching movies at the Common by default, mixing, even by default, than we would at the MFA, ICA, or Fenway Park. Boston isn't Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, or Los Angeles. According the census bureau, it's about 25% black, but the truth is that Boston is a town defined, in part, by its surrounding suburbs, where there are a lot more theaters and smaller black communities. In the rest of the state, blacks account for about five percent of the population.

For what it's worth, this business with the Chris Rock movie is an exception. You can always find a Tyler Perry movie at the Common. And when "Precious" opens next month, it's likely to have long, healthy life somewhere in Boston. But "Good Hair" is also the exception that proves a rule. There's also a possibility that it could show up at the Landmark theater in Kendall Square in a week or two.

So somewhere around the sixth inning of Game 1 of the Turnpike Series, Warner Bros. decided to give America a look at Clint Eastwood's annual slab of Oscar chum. It's "Invictus," apparently the story of how Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon learned to give speeches with South African accents. Freeman is Nelson Mandela. Damon is in a tight shirt. And this movie is kidding, right?

Freeman turns to Damon's rugby star to win the country a World Cup. It's a true story, and the World Series is the place to promote it. But when Damon, locked in a scrum, his face squirted with blood, screams to his fellow players that "This" - sigh - "is our destiny," you have to wonder when post-apartheid South Africa turned into "Braveheart." He could be talking about the championship. He could be talking about the Academy Awards. Who knows: These rolling eyes of mine might be all wet come December. But that poster to the left, made by a fan, apparently, with the movie's original title, shows that no matter how unpromising things now look, they once were worse.

The announcement earlier this year that Michael Jackson would be doing 50 concerts in London was greeted with equal parts euphoria and cynicism. Was he doing it for us? Was he doing it for money? Then in June, less than a month before the start of the sold-out engagement, Jackson died of drug-related cardiac arrest, and the news that a film of the show’s rehearsal footage was on the way added another of layer ambivalence. Awesome. Creepy. But, for now, “This Is It” is the fierce last word on the matter. Jackson had no apparent plans to phone, fax, text, or IM it in.

The movie itself still arrives, screened for critics only hours before opening, with an eerie taint. It comes days before Halloween; its star, while far from death at the time, a diminished version of his electrifying self, his face a wan mask. Next weekend, that popular chiller about the couple in the haunted house won’t be the only paranormal activity at the box office. Yet, watching Jackson pop, lock, rock, writhe, thrust, and clutch his crotch, even at 50%, leaves a feeling of woe: This show really would have been major.

Over the summer, news outlets heavily ran some of the footage – or footage very much like it. The question is whether an hour-and-a-half of the same would be any fun, especially when so much of it is barely camera-phone quality. The opening minutes seem doubtful. Jackson chops, poses, and slides his way through “Wanna Be Starting Something.” He doesn’t commit to any sort of vocal styling. And you can see him thinking about how to work the song out.

Watching a great artist decide where to move doesn’t seem much more exciting than watching a waiter set a table: When’s dinner? That, of course, is the terrible punch line of this entire experience: This is it. So, instead, we devour even Jackson’s lassitude. It’s our last supper. (Besides, what waiter is going to serve you wearing a tuxedo jacket with one sequined lapel and two shoulders that look like something from a Tim Burton movie?)

Lest anyone get the morbid sense that the film is a necrophiliac’s delight (though, in part, it is), Jackson often feels vibrantly, reassuringly human. He sashays with one of his female dancers at one point. He puts the spotlight on his band and dancers, and his perfectionism never approaches divadom. When Jackson stands over the keyboard of the show’s musical director, trying to coax a single, right note out of him, and says, “I just want to hear it the way I wrote it,” what’s so funny is how little it is for him to ask. But also, it’s a side of Jackson we never got to see. His Peter Pan syndrome and his professionalism truly coexist. He wants the show to be flawless. He also wants every element of the experience to appear to emanate from his every gesticulation. He’s a life force. He’s the Wiz.

He’s also a man with too much integrity to let anyone else call the shots. Indeed, the director of both the concert and this movie, Kenny Ortega, seems more like a jolly personal assistant, repeatedly telling Jackson how much he loves him. It’s the sort of thing you expect to hear a fan seated way at back of the Kodak Theater blurt out as a star accepts an award. Jackson actually responds in kind: “I love you, too.” Ortega is a Hollywood veteran (he choreographed “Dirty Dancing” and directed the “High School Musical” franchise), and the movie is a dutiful tribute to its star. The crosscutting of different footage isn’t seamless but we get a decent sense of how most of the numbers would go. The crew filmed an inspired sequence in which Jackson inserts himself into classic Hollywood movies like “Gilda” and “The Big Sleep,” alongside Rita Hayworth and Humphrey Bogart. The sequence is for “Smooth Criminal", and it now posthumous logic. Of course a legend plays with legends.

Clearly, Jackson expected just enough of himself to aim for some highpoints, even in these run-throughs. He tells the dancers and crew begging him to let go and really sing that he’s saving his voice for the actual performances. But you get the sense that he had to test how hard he could push that complex instrument of his. So even as he demurs when the band breaks out the gospel tambourine at the end of a Jackson Five medley, he still puts his foot into some of the songs. His singing voice is rarely more beautifully acrobatic than on the movie’s version of “Human Nature.”

This all calls to mind the comeback concerts of Jackson’s friend Liza Minnelli, who hit Broadway last year at less than her best but was determined to bring the house down every night. There was no reason to think that Jackson wouldn’t have accomplished the same thing. Even if he didn’t manage to blow the crowds away 50 times, he would have risked it all trying.

It's official: "Paranormal Activity" is a phenomenon. In its fifth week in release, the plucky little $15,000 horror movie (just look at those production values!) finally went seriously wide -- onto 2,500 screens in 1,985 theaters, up from 760 the week before -- and held its water. The weekend's $22 million take took the total gross for "Paranormal" to $62 million and the $11,000 per-theater-average means there's still a lot of want-to-see for this movie.

Much more to the point, "Paranormal Activity" rolled right over "Saw VI," which took in a measly $14 million in its debut weekend. Rarely do you get two variations on the same genre going head to head with so clear a winner: the unnerving single-camera suspense of "Paranormal," a movie that can scare you silly while basically showing you nothing, versus the cynically explicit gross-outs of the bottomed-out "Saw" franchise. Time to hang it up, Jigsaw -- we can frighten ourselves just fine.

"Where the Wild Things Are" took a sizable 56% drop in its second weekend, which makes sense, really: It's a market correction that filters out the family audience with younger kids that went last weekend and got burned by the film's dark whimsies.

"Astro Boy" ($7 million) and "Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant" ($6.3 million) were toast, but the weekend's biggest loser may have been the aviation biopic "Amelia," which taxied into 800 theaters and made -- ouch -- $4 million, with a $5,000 per-theater-average that was about the same as "Saw VI." Not quite the reception star Hilary Swank is used to; the crippling reviews didn't help. By the way, which two movies had a higher PTA than "Paranormal Activity"? "An Education," Lone Scherfig's witty coming-of-age tale, is averaging $13,000 at each of its 31 theaters, and -- from the sublime to the ridiculous -- Lars von Trier's "Antichrist" is raking in an average $12,000 at each of its six venues. Which proves there's a larger audience for genital mutilation than previously thought. Don't tell the "Saw" producers.

More box office numbers from Box Office Mojo and Movie City News' Leonard Klady.

Chris Rock in "Good Hair," opening today

Two local doings this weekend --

The Boston Bike Film Festival comes to the Brattle today and tomorrow. If you push a bipedal piece of metal around the city on a regular basis and/or want to make Boston better for bikes, it's worth checking out this high-spirited collection of shorts, videos, films about the bicycle lanes on Comm. Ave (now they're talking my language) and even an auction. Here's the schedule -- Mayor Menino, I expect to see you there, with helmet.

On Saturday over at the West Newton Cinema in, um, West Newton, the director of the excellent inner-city-school documentary "Heart of Stone," Beth Toni Kruvant will host a Q&A after the 3:45 and 6:15 shows. The film's also playing at the MFA.

Among the major new releases, "Amelia" is a big, glossy, half-empty bio of Amelia Earhart starring Hilary Swank. "Astro Boy" is a slick, half-full CGI attempt to rescuscitate the beloved manga/anime figure. "Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant" is an interesting male "Twilight" variation sunk by a boring male ingenue and a fun but not particularly scary John C. Reilly. That leaves the genital-mutilation hijinks of "Antichrist," Lars von Trier's latest blow against the empire -- remarkable moviemaking, deeply screwed-up gender politics, laughable pretensions even when they work. Oh, that Lars. "Motherhood," the Uma Thurman comedy, is a dud says Wesley, but the secret sleeper of this weekend may be Chris Rock's "Good Hair," about the triangular relationship between black men, black women, and black women's hair.

All right, I'm impressed. I know, the book is encoded in everyone's DNA at age 3 and Warner Brothers has been giving it the full market push and the upscale/boho/intelligentsia mediaverse has been going nuts for months now (I mean, the New Yorker? Really?). But personally I wasn't sure if Spike Jonze's marvelous, haunting, melancholy film version of "Where the Wild Things Are" would translate to middle America. It's an art film about childhood that plays best to audiences willing to plumb their own deep emotions on the subject, not little kids and parents who just want more shiny things thrown at their heads.

So it's nice to report that in very busy week at the box office -- 40 percent up from last weekend and thank the weather gods for that -- "Wild Things" landed atop the pigpile with $32.5 million at 5,000 theaters. The data broke down in interesting ways: Unlike a lot of family films, this one skewed older, with 43% of the audience 18 and older and only 27% made up of parents with children under 12. That means the word was out that this was not "Shrek 4" but something darker, richer, and maybe not for the tater-tots (unless your five-year-old is a fan of "Being John Malkovich"). Still, we'll see next week whether the opening for "Wild Things" was the real thing, when word-of-mouth factors more heavily than marketing. (You can get a fascinating preview by reading the user comments over at IMDb.com: totally polarized, with the 10-star raves for now outnumbering the angry one-star tantrums. Let the wild rumpus start!)

Thriller "Law Abiding Citizen" cruised past lousy reviews to an unexpectedly beefy $21.3 million and second place on the strength of stars Jamie Foxx and Gerard Butler; it'll probably fall off sharply next weekend on its way to On Demand and a long afterlife as Blockbuster New Release shelf filler. Both "Wild Things" and "Citizen" had strong per-theater-averages ($8,693 and $7,353 respectively) but the third-place contender, "Paranormal Activity," a.k.a. the little horror movie that could, was the weekend's PTA champ, expanding from 160 theaters to 700 and scoring a $26,500 average take per theater. The movie's $20 million gross for the weekend brings its total up to $33 million, or three hundred times its $11,000 budget. How about that? A DIY movie that actually pays back its investors.

The only other major release, chiller remake "The Stepfather," made a pretty good $12.5 million all things considered, and has already has been entirely forgotten by everyone who saw it.

More box office numbers at Box Office Mojo and Leonard Klady of Movie City News.

Without entering too far in the fray over what anyone was thinking regarding that flying-saucer balloon and the boy who was, then wasn't (ever), in its basket, a few things struck me. I watched it all unfold on one of the monitors at my gym. As has been noted by all the coverage of the coverage, every news outlet had something, even MSNBC's "The Ed Show," whose host interrupted his rant on President Obama's not doing enough to get health care passed to talk to a woman who knew the boy from their time together on TV's "Wife Swap" (although that interview might have been Wolf Blitzer''s). In any case, we feel due for a Baby Jessica incident. We got, instead, farce worthy of Alexander Payne.

The looping footage of the runaway balloon (it looked something from a 1950s science-fiction film) tapped into our obsession with a particular method of flight. (I'm just ruminating I guess, since really what everybody wanted to know was where the boy actaully was). But visually, the images of the incident reminded me of, among other things, the opening sequence from “Everlasting Love,” with Daniel Craig and Rhys Ifans, which begins with a hot-air balloon accident that winds up have nothing specifically to do with the same-sex stalker movie that follows. “Up,” too, sprang to mind, with its motley million of balloons carrying aloft a geezer and a scout. The movie, of course, has a happy ending (anticlimactically enough, so did yesterday’s incident). The scout in “Up” finds himself airborne by happenstance. But he takes to the adventure nonetheless. You sense that this is fantasy the little boy wanted to experience for himself: a trip in a balloon that might have taken him to a distant land of talking dogs and mothering birds. His name, of all things, is Falcon. But that Falcon turned out not to be in the basket but hiding, (allegedly) in the Heene family nest suggests a kind of fear of punishment for flight that is the antithesis of what movies about boys and balloons are about. What is the opposite of the Icarus myth?

The balloon lends itself to cinema. The Heene’s actually lent itself to an abduction show on the Fear Network (we do now have a Fear Network, don’t we?) That seems apt, as well. The national fear was that Falcon, in a sense, was being abducted. But there is also a degree of foolishness about the balloon. It can just seem reckless. Beautiful, too. Its contents are also an apt metaphor for what all the coverage produced: helium and hot air.

Behold the coming attraction preview for "Edge of Darkness," a wronged-daddy action movie slated for release next January (in the same slot where this year's "Taken" did dandy business). A few things to note: Mel Gibson's back in righteous kickass mode! He's even adding new shades of crazy to his portrayals -- step away from the shaving cream, Mel. It's been a while since Gibson dealt out a whole lot of hurt onscreen rather than inflicting it on moviegoers. Remember "Payback"? I do.

Second, there's a local hook, since the script's co-written by hometown boy William Monahan ("The Departed") and since director Martin Campbell shot all over the Bay State in August of 2008. (Not that shooting here necessarily results in a good movie. In fact, I wonder if it ever does. Really. I mean it.) It does indicate -- and this is amply evident in the trailer -- that there will be more bad Bahstan accents onscreen this January than you can shake an overpriced Fenway frank at.

The film's adapted from a well-regarded 1985 BBC miniseries, and the remake gets points for casting Ray Winstone and Danny Huston. It also gets those points removed again for casting them as, respectively, a menacing hit-man figure and an evil corporate smoothie. I'm looking forward to "Edge" -- in a guilty-pleasure way, mostly -- but I wish casting directors would start thinking outside the box.