photo credit: Comic-Con Magazine

More from Comic-Con International: In other big business at the convention, fanboy god and “Sin City” creator Frank Miller previewed his solo directing debut, “The Spirit,” his adaptation of a classic, noir-lite comic strip by late, pioneering creator Will Eisner. Here again, it was hard to project what fan reaction will mean for the mainstream – but there was certainly a big response to flashy footage of masked crimefighter Denny Colt (Gabriel Macht, “Because I Said So”) slugging it out with baddie the Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson) in muddy waters, employing an increasingly, surreally brutal collection of props. Picture Miller’s visual stylings as co-director on “Sin City” pushed in new directions (and, for this scene, tinted brown). “I always wanted to hit somebody with a giant wrench,” joked Jackson, appearing with Macht and co-star Jaime King. “That’s so Wile E. Coyote.”

Universal also previewed its ode-to-Lon Chaney Jr. remake of “The Wolf Man,” with star Benicio Del Toro, damsel in distress Emily Blunt (“The Devil Wears Prada”) and effects makeup legend Rick Baker (“An American Werewolf in London”) all on hand. The period horror flick was teased with a trailer filled with flashes of fangs, claws, viscera, and lots of furry silhouettes shot against backlit forests. Del Toro had one of the most refreshing responses of the day to the usual fan vetting of the actors’ intentions in venturing into geeksville with a movie. Why redo the Wolf Man? “Why not?” shrugged admitted Chaney buff Del Toro. “And the money was right.” Depending on how Universal fares with next month’s Mummy sequel, a lot could be riding on this one to rescue the studio’s classic monsters franchise from “Van Helsing” limbo.

photo credit: Warner Brothers

Tom Russo here in San Diego, gearing up for another day of diving into the increasingly chaotic (but always addictive) pop culture fray that is Comic-Con International. Friday actually saw the geekfest’s main event, an hour-long presentation on Warner Brothers’ “Watchmen,” a superhero deconstructionist tale being adapted by director Zack Snyder from the landmark mid-’80s graphic novel. Rock-star-vibing Snyder was on hand, basking in all the fan love still coming from his last comics adaptation, “300,” and was joined by his calculatedly low-profile cast: Billy Crudup (Mission: Impossible III); Jeffrey Dean Morgan (“Grey’s Anatomy”); Jackie Earle Haley and Patrick Wilson (“Little Children”); Matthew Goode (“Match Point”); Carla Gugino (“Entourage”); and Malin Akerman (“27 Dresses”), decked out in some sort of vaguely superheroic, definitely fan-fetishy red leather heels-and-leggings ensemble.

Structured as a murder mystery with a literally explosive climax, the highly literate comics story by writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons wrestles with thorny moral issues about social protectors’ responsibility, entitlement, and sometimes misguided purpose in doing what they do. Or, put another way, Moore and Gibbons chew over the idea that a guy would have to be a little nuts to put on a Halloween outfit and go play superhero. (Sound familiar?)

So if you’ve quickly paddled out to catch “The Dark Knight” cultural wave and been surprised by just how, well, dark it is, know that “Watchmen” is just as dicey. In fact, “Watchmen” is almost always cited as one of contemporary comics’ sacred texts in tandem with writer-artist Frank Miller’s 1986 graphic novel “The Dark Knight Returns,” one of the influences on the new Bat-movie.

At Comic-Con, an SRO crowd of 6,500 in the San Deigo Convention Center’s giant exhibit hall cheered an extended “Watchmen” trailer – more so than the partly intrigued, mostly perplexed audience I caught a more basic trailer with a couple of weeks ago, before the “Dark Knight” promo screening at the Jordan’s Imax in Reading. Still, you wonder if the core audience is really a gauge for how “Watchmen” will hit the mainstream – or how it will hit its intended creative marks.

Most of the questions during the audience Q&A session were of the “Is it gonna be cool” variety, glossing over the complexities of the material. The story’s intelligence is what’s actually made it a landmark, but among the faithful, it’s the story’s violence that often seems to get the credit. One fan wanted to make sure that the adaptation will be genuinely hard-hitting, mature-audiences material – and voiced his concern clad in the costume and ink-blot mask of Haley’s character, the vigilante Rorschach. “It’s cool you’re saying ‘a more mature audience’ with that outfit on,” Snyder joked.

A.O. Scott wrote an interesting piece in The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/movies/24supe.html?ref=movies this week wondering whether the superhero genre has been played out – and while Scott gave “The Dark Knight” a partial pass for its seriousness, he faulted it for raising provocative issues without following through by truly exploring them. Still, the movie’s record-breaking grosses seem to indicate this is a non-issue. But Batman is an icon – and “Watchmen” riffs on icons, but features none. Will “Watchmen” work for the face-value crowd? The subtext crowd? Either? Both? To quote Rorschach’s signature, contemplative mumble, “Hurrrmmm.”

What's new and worthwhile in movie theaters this weekend? A whole lot of not much, actually. "The X-Files: I Want to Believe" is awful: dank and slow and self-important, running solely on the fumes of long-ago glories. "Step Brothers" is crassly amusing but mostly just crass; if your inner frat boy is hungry, you'll be well served. (But keep the kids away, please, unless you consider a close-up of Will Ferrell rubbing his testicles on a drum kit a formative experience. I guess it is, but probably not in a good way.)

"The Last Mistress" is worthwhile if you want the full sexy/academic French art movie brain massage -- it's a period piece from director Catherine Breillat that stars Asia Argento (in photo above), who seems more dangerous the older she gets, as a misused Spanish mistress in 1830s Paris. And there's "Brideshead Revisited," which I haven't seen but which seems to be getting a muted reception from most critics. It's there if you're starved for class, or you can always curl up with the beloved miniseries version, a huge hit on PBS in 1982.

Or you can finally catch up with "The Dark Knight" and decide for yourself what the fuss is about.

Your best bet might actually be at the MFA tonight (Friday), where the French Film Festival is winding down with a sneak preview of "Tell No One," a twisty thriller that has been picking up rave reviews elsewhere; it opens at the Kendall Square next Friday, when Wesley will weigh in. The Harvard Film Archive continues its Joseph Losey survey and also coughs up a rare chance to see the final Beatles movie, "Let It Be," on a big screen.

And if you're looking for something completely different this Sunday afternoon, drive up to Wilton, NH (cross the Massachusetts border and turn left at Nashua) where the town hall is playing the 1927 Gary Cooper silent "Nevada" with live music accompaniment.

My favorite trailer of the week: the short, sharp preview for "Burn After Reading," due in early September from the Coen Brothers. Their first effort after the triumph of "No Country for Old Men," the film looks like a return to manic comedy for the bros, and those few of us who made it through "The Ladykillers" may rightly start worrying. But, hell, that cast: George Clooney, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, Richard Jenkins, Tilda Swinton, and in what looks like a big, broad goofball change of pace, Brad Pitt. If the movie's half as funny as the preview, we're in for a treat.

And the new hosts of the Disney/ABC syndicated show "At the Movies" are... Ben Lyons and Ben Mankiewicz.

Lyons and Mankiewicz. Mankiewicz and Lyons. Doesn't exactly trip off the tongue like "Siskel and Ebert" once did.

All right, now that Roger and Richard have taken their thumbs and gone home, who are these guys? Lyons (above left) is the son of TV film critic Jeffrey Lyons and did stuff for "Hip-Hop Nation" and MTV's "Your Movie Show" before installing himself as E!'s resident "movie dude" on the "Daily 10" show. He reviews movies on the show but the "Lyon's Den" website indicates why Disney wants him on "At the Movies": he's young, cute as a button, and has a propensity for interviewing Big Hollywood Stars that puts him squarely within the studio marketing machinery. Not exactly where a critic should be positioned, but look who owns the show.

Mankiewicz (above right) was a host of the left-wing radio/internet show "The Young Turks," bounced to sleazy gossip show "TMZ on TV," and continues to hold down a weekend daytime hosting spot introducing old movies on Turner Classics. Sounds a bit bipolar, no? And he's the grandson of "Citizen Kane" writer Herman Mankiewicz and the great-nephew of writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz ("All About Eve," among many others).

So we have one empty infotainment zygote with a cute punim and one prematurely grizzled journeyman pundit. There are DNA bona fides on both sides, but not, interestingly from the worlds of print criticism or real movie scholarship; clearly, such things no longer matter. Yet Ebert and Siskel were (and are) dyed-in-the-wool newspapermen and film fanatics whose knowledge of cinema ran broad and deep. They could knowledgeably discuss the latest blockbuster and the boutique indie, yes, but also the miniscule labor of love, the Iranian drama, the obscure off-Hollywood oldie, the Japanese horror flick, and they knew why such things mattered. "At the Movies" popularized thinking about movies, but it also broached the notion of thinking about -- and enjoying -- different kinds of movies, and that, I fear, is what will get lost as Disney's hip young film dudes take the show in the direction of hyping whatever's in the marketplace this week.

But I could be wrong. Prove it to me, guys.

...because in El Paso last week she appeared to be on sale.

In ethnic-sensitive casting news, Variety reports that Sacha Baron Cohen has signed to produce and presumably star in "Accidentes," a comedy about an ambulance chasing Latino lawyer written by "Borat" co-writer Peter Baynham. Me, I'm still reeling from the news that Cohen will be playing Sherlock Holmes opposite Will Ferrell's Watson. (Could have been worse; imagine if they had cast it the other way around.)

Cohen will next be seen in "Bruno" (above), and to that end has recently been freaking Texans out with a few bouts of gay cage-fighting.

So the "At the Movies" as we knew it is dead. Richard Roeper's last day on "At the Movies with Ebert & Roeper" is scheduled for mid-August. There was some kind of contract dispute with Buena Vista television, which produces the show. This is according to Associated Press out of Chicago. Having done the show with Richard, I was always impressed by his professionalism and his politeness (From my first minute on the set he treated me as though we'd been doing the show for years). His wit is much quicker than TV conveys (television never tells the whole truth, ever), and he never messed up while we taped (I made several gaffes). This won't be the last of him. Roeper has promised to bring good, serious movie talk back to television. All I can say is: Dude, hurry up.

(Not much later in the day Roger Ebert, who's been ill and recovering from cancer, announced he'd be leaving the show, too. But like Roeper, he vowed he (and Roeper and their thumbs) would be back on the air on some future show. Stay tuned.)

Yesterday morning I went to a memorial service in Mt. Auburn cemetery for the sister of a family friend. Afterwards, as the group milled around drinking iced tea and eating finger food under a small tent next to the chapel, word got out among the teenagers and college kids that there was a movie critic present. One by one, they came up to me and asked the same question, with almost the same wording.

Is "The Dark Knight" the best movie of all time?

I cracked wise in most cases, saying, no, it's the best movie this month, or this summer. I talked about how much I liked the movie, with reservations, and Heath Ledger's performance, without reservations. But, of course, what was really being requested of me here was validation -- a professional media-guy's acknowledgement that "Knight" was in fact the pop tsunami so many moviegoers, primarily young ones, saw it as and needed it to be.

We knew the movie was going to be big, but not this big. Records fell like blades of grass: Biggest opening day and one-day take ever ($66.4 million). Biggest Friday midnight-show gross ever ($18.5 million; take that, George Lucas). Biggest three-day opening weekend ever ($155.3 million). Most theaters ever -- 4,366 -- which helped offset the 152-minute film's comparatively fewer showtimes.

But even that doesn't convey what happened this weekend. Audiences applauded the opening credits, cheered every one of Ledger's lines, shrieked with delight at the action setpieces. Standing ovations at the end, packed houses full of instant friends. As happens only once every decade or so, the entire moviegoing population of America became welded into a single breathless entity, and the result was a pop event on the order of the Beatles appearing on Ed Sullivan. Go ahead and scoff at the analogy, boomers, but one of the kids at the memorial service likened the opening of "Dark Knight" to the JFK assassination and the Challenger disaster as quintessential where-were-you defining moments of his generation.

That says much, about both this movie and the callowness of smart young men -- the correct analogy is to "Titanic" or the final installment of "The Lord of the Rings" -- but a pop event has always created its own sense of necessary immensity. "The Dark Knight" has to be the best movie of all time because it feels that way right now, and because it feels impossibly exhilarating to share that thrill with everyone you know and millions of people you don't.

Although hype played a critical part, this is less about hype than the gentle madness of crowds. The response to "Dark Knight" represents a perfect storm of studio publicity, public mourning, epic seriousness of filmmaking purpose, and the unspoken need for something in this crass tinsel culture to mean something. Without Ledger's performance -- and more properly, without the tragedy of his accidental death lending a glow of belated triumph to that performance -- I doubt the response to this movie would have been so impassioned.

But that's okay. In a strange way, the past weekend saw the kind of cultural mass wake usually reserved for deceased rock stars: Kurt Cobain, say, or John Lennon. Because the grief and amazement were tied to a commercial artifact -- a superhero movie -- they built and built over the months from Ledger's death in January to the release of both the film itself and all our withheld emotions. The tragedy lent gravitas to the movie but it worked the other way around, too: I don't think people would be mourning the actor nearly so deeply without the movie (and his performance) to focus their sense of loss. So did Warner Brothers manipulate us into theaters by trading on our feelings? Of course: that's their job.

In any event, the weekend allowed a mass audience to file past the casket of a very good actor's career and pay its respects, and it's clear that being at the front of the line counted for more than just bragging rights. (Although, in its lurking sense of rubberneckery, it counted for that too.) It doesn't matter right now whether "The Dark Knight" is the best movie or action movie or superhero movie of all time. (It isn't, but it's pretty darn good, and, anyway, time will sort that out.) What matters is that it matters and that over the past few days it mattered to almost everyone, young and old(er), male and female, jock and geek, Republican and Democrat.

One final thought: There's relief to be found in such pop-cult unification and also the elation of not having to think for yourself -- the joy of being picked up in a boundless groundswell of excited, committed response. That this has been brought about by a movie about people in tights blowing things up (all right, a thought-provoking movie about people in tights blowing things up), rather than any of the vexing issues of our actual world, isn't accidental. Not in the least. "The Dark Knight" is over in two and a half hours, and would that you could say the same about climate change or the presidential election. I know: bummer, Captain Bringdown. But it does make an interesting question to mull over when the glow finally fades. Why do we rally around a movie rather than the things that actually do matter? Because it helps us forget what we feel powerless to change? Or because it allows us to agree on something, no matter how ephemeral?

I went to see "Hellboy II" at the AMC Boston Common the other night. The crowds. The chaos. The nacho troughs. People, it's just monkeys in a rocket ship. And they're not even real! Fine, so nobody there at 9:30 p.m. cared about "Space Chimps." They wanted to watch "The Dark Knight," and I've never really seen the Common so under siege -- for legal, moviegoing reasons, anyway. But to the credit of the thousands of people who helped sell out four shows on Friday night and at least one of the early-early Saturday morning shows: no one was dressed like Batman. (Sadly, no one was dressed like Bruce Wayne, either.)

The trouble came mostly at the level of maintenance. The management devised a queuing system that, for the most part, remained orderly. But apparently the average "Dark Knight" enthusiast is a slob, news that seemed to have taken the theater by surprise. My 10:30 "Hellboy II" didn't seat until 10:45. According to the inexplicably good-humored usher Angela (Angela, if I'm misremembering your name or anything we talked about, please correct me), house number 11 previously showed "The Dark Knight," and it took a while to clean. Of course, by the time we entered, the trailers were on, so who would have noticed? But standards matter, and the Common kept its admirably high. As the night wore on, the half-awake throngs seemed to keep their cool, too. (By the time we exited "Hellboy 2", the folks in line for the 1 a.m. show looked pretty miserable.)

Maybe they all knew that, from a moviegoing standpoint, things could have gone worse. Near Chicago, a blackout kept one Batman audience from seeing the last reel. As news papers and every other publication to report that story has already observed: a dark night, indeed.

I just turned in my "Dark Knight" review and I'm still breathing hard (in a nutshell: Ledger's amazing, Bale's good, Gyllenhaal thankfully ain't no Katie Holmes, and the film's ambitions get the better of it but not ruinously -- read the rest on Thursday). So for now, some filler links!

You think you've seen "The Godfather"? You haven't seen "The Godfather". But you will this September.

Was that Senator Patrick Leahy I saw in "The Dark Knight"? Why, yes, it was.

Hayao Miyazaki fanatics (of which I am one), take note: the master's new film just opened in Japan. No one's quite sure what it's about. I think you'll have to take a bunch of five-year-old kids and ask them.

Is Heath Ledger the new James Dean? Shame on you for asking, but maybe. Or maybe not.

And Glenn Kenny weighs in on A) why you should remember Evelyn Keyes (in photo above), and B) why "Mamma Mia!" made his flesh crawl. While I sympathize with his pain, I don't empathize; despite being an unholy mess, a gravity-sucking quasar of camp, and an unparalleled exercise in white Bollywood, the upcoming film actually gave me great, demented pleasure.

If opening weekends are elections, Eddie Murphy just lost in a landslide. "Meet Dave" grossed $5.3 million at 3,300 screens -- that's a $1,606 per-screen-average, downright pathetic for a heavily marketed comedy featuring a major star. (Can we still say that about Eddie? Maybe not.) The comic can take heart that "Dave" did marginally better than "The Adventures of Pluto Nash" (a $2.1 million opener in 2002) -- but it also did much, much worse than "Norbit" ($34 million in February of 2007). What's the lesson here for Murphy? Stay away from sci-fi themes? More dramatic supporting roles like "Dreamgirls"? Hide under a rock for a few years?

The weekend's big winner was "Hellboy II: The Golden Army," buoyed by a wave of great reviews and a want-to-see primed by the first film's DVD success. $36 million in grosses put it well above the 2004 opening weekend for "Hellboy" ($23 million), and the per-screen-average was $11,200, far above "Meet Dave."

The big smackdown, in fact, was between "Hellboy II" and "Hancock," which made $33 million its second weekend out and has grossed $165 million to date. Fine; with a $150 million budget (not counting marketing costs), the Will Smith vehicle will need to rake in major dollars (and euros and yen) to break even.

"Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D" made a very tidy $20 million, 57% of which came from the 854 theaters (or 30% of the total) equipped with RealD projectors. Which makes sense, since why would anyone want to see a movie with "3D" in the title in a 2D version?

In limited release, the twisty French suspense chiller "Tell No One" is doing bang-up business with a $13,388 per-theater-average at 18 theaters; Boston gets it on August 1. Before then, of course, comes the one-two punch of "The Dark Knight" and "Mamma Mia!" this Friday -- perhaps the most demographically balanced double tsunami of the summer.

Here's the Box Office Mojo chart and here's Leonard Klady at Movie City News.

One of my favorite filmmakers, Bruce Conner, died the other day. His work won him "avant-garde" classification, and while that seems right, since he was experimenting on his own movie island, it keeps - and has always kept - his films at a misleading distance from ready access. Stock footage and original and found film were the raw materials for his collages, and they probably kept him from getting his due as a seminal artist. His bewitching blend of archival material (what did Conner film; what did he find?) is used, most famously in 1958's "A Movie," not simply to tell stories but to critique culture while worrying your conscience.

Like Andy Warhol, Conner was a pop-art polymath, having, for example, made his own deconstruction of Marilyn Monroe (1974's "Marilyn Times Five") and sculpted, sketched, and inkblotted, too. His early pieces were kaleidoscopic assemblages of found material that put him closer to Robert Rauschenberg's combines and straddled the line between chic and junk. Seeing them was like visiting some decomposing thrift shop, and his self-photograms were surreal phantasmagorias. One of the happiest things he ever did was filming Toni Basil dancing to her song "Breakaway" in 1966.

But Conner was probably never ambitious enough to become a brand, an industry, or an icon. He didn't have Warhol's star quality. He didn't want it. He gathered his creative strength during the atomic age at the early height of the Cold War and during the early apex of television advertising, and he was active in 1960s countercultural San Francisco. So on the one hand his films were playful (cool: found footage!) but his mood often headed into an exhilarating combustion of awfulness: they erupted with these apocalyptic orgies. Even by the time he was working with David Byrne and Terry Riley and making films out of Devo songs, he was still giving us nuclear TV nightmares.

Conner was using the movies not as a medium of entertainment or escape but a tool for kaleidoscopic critique, and being ahead of his time it took forever for the culture to catch up with his perceptions, his suspicions, his fears, and, even then, it never truly did. He died still ahead of his time.

The Boston French Film Festival begins at the MFA -- your chance to see all the fine, frisky, provocative French films our few remaining arthouses don't have room or inclination to show. Wesley breaks down the offerings; do yourself a favor and go to a few.

Otherwise, what to see this weekend? The hordes will be watching Eddie Murphy employ his sizable physical-comedy talents to no discernible purpose in "Meet Dave" or they'll be donning the 3D specs for "Journey to the Center of the Earth,"a formulaic Saturday matinee adventure with or without the T. Rex drool in your face.

You, engaged and informed pop moviegoer that you are, will spend your ducats on "Hellboy II: The Golden Army" (photo above), knowing that director Guillermo del Toro is a visionary who's not afraid to be a geeky comics fanboy. The movie's funnier than "Meet Dave," more 3D than "Journey," and it whips "Hancock"'s butt.

A delicate art-house movie it ain't, though. Come to think of it, neither is "My Winnipeg," Guy Maddin's tour through the subterranean Freudian underchambers of his Manitoba home town. It's another black-and-white camp horror-comedy fantasia from the director of "The Saddest Music in the World." but more personal than before. Film noir fanatics need to check out Ann Savage (photos from then and now, below) as the hero's mother: 63 years ago, the lady played one of the great anti-heroines in the movies in the pulpy B-flick classic "Detour." Welcome back, Ann -- you haven't mellowed a bit.

If you're up for a good if familiar coming-of-age-in-the-city story, or you miss 1994 in a big way, or you want to see Josh from Nickelodeon's "Drake and Josh" have sex with the best friend from "Juno," or you just want to revel in another grand, off-kilter Ben Kingsley performance, I'm here to tell you The Wackness" is your film.

Speaking of surprisingly twisted old movies, "Leave Her to Heaven" (1946) is at the Harvard Film Archive tonight at 7 pm. Gorgeous Technicolor, beautiful homes, and spooky Gene Tierney (in photo below) letting her crippled brother-in-law drown so she won't have to share him with husband Cornel Wilde. And that's just the half of it. Did Glenn Close study this movie before making "Fatal Attraction"? Like the dialogue says, there's only one thing wrong with Ellen -- she just loves too much. The Archive's Joseph Losey series starts on Saturday.

And speaking of demented classic noirs, "Gun Crazy" plays the Brattle Saturday morning as part of the "Elements of Cinema" series, and I do believe my Pulitzer-winning colleague Mark Feeney will be on hand to dissect the film in his usual calm but freakishly lucid manner.

Executive Director Joe Zina is leaving the Coolidge Corner Theatre at the end of the year, and a new chapter in one of the few remaining Art Deco moviegoing jewels will begin.

From the press release: "After an incredibly active and prolific 10-year career as the Executive Director of the Coolidge Corner Theatre Foundation, Joe Zina will be stepping down from his position at the end of the year. Zina, who was previously on the Board of Directors at the theater and took the position of Executive Director in 1998, will be moving on to pursue personal artistic projects including consulting with community cultural centers on dance and film. During the past ten years, Zina initiated and oversaw extensive upgrades and renovations to the theater which included a stunning restoration to the original Art Deco details of the historic cultural landmark. During this period the Coolidge launched a successful $2.5 million capital campaign and expanded capabilities for live performance and community programs in the two main auditoriums. Included were the installation of new Dolby digital surround sound systems and two renovated stages. In May of 2002, the theatre made the first public announcement of the renovations and capital campaign with the unveiling of the award-winning art-deco-style marquee, a celebration which drew thousands of participants and sparked a revitalization of the Coolidge Corner business community."

All true and still not quite getting to the heart of the matter. The Coolidge, once upon a time a cherished neighborhood movie theater, then a classic revival house, then a hulk that came this close to the wrecking ball, is now a Boston institution -- one of the rare picture palaces that has made the transition to art-house success with its big screen mostly intact. (Here's the theater's Cinema Treasures entry, plus the history page at the Coolidge's website.)

Even better, it has thrived, anchoring not just Coolidge Corner but the Boston independent scene (along with the comparatively battered Brattle). Zina has had everything to do with this, bringing the energy of a former dancer and the people skills of a born macher to raising the Coolidge's profile and financial base.

When he arrived, the Coolidge was $350,000 in the hole and wasn't making its rent. In the years since, attendance has steadily climbed (against a downward national trend) and membership is through the roof. Without Zina and the people he has hired, would there have been a Coolidge Award bringing Meryl Streep and Thelma Schoonmaker to town? Not likely. Is there anywhere else in town you can see "Lawrence of Arabia" -- last night's offering -- in the 70mm splendor it deserves? Nuh-uh.

In addition, the Coolidge under Joe has programmed the best of the new off-Hollywood films, not an easy task when the Landmark chain is eating into the programming and profits of independent moviehouses. And that's not even mentioning the midnight shows and book readings and burlesque revues and other events that have made the theater a vital (and nicely twisted) fixture on the local cultural scene. The theater is irreplaceable; I worry that Joe might be as well. The search for a new executive director begins immediately.

I know Will Smith is Mr. Fourth of July and all, but, yoiks, $107 million for "Hancock" since last Tuesday? And $66 million over the long weekend alone? At almost 4,000 theaters, that's a mighty fine $16,600 per theater average -- not bad for a movie that commits hari-kiri at the midway point and falls over stone dead. (I mean, you've seen the movie -- did you really buy that? Really?)

This was the kind of opener the industry's been hoping for, even in a stronger than expected summer, and it managed the feat of throwing "WALL-E" into the box office shadows of second place with $33 million. (Leonard Klady at Movie City News believes the latest from Pixar will ultimately get outgrossed by the simpler and more broad-appeal "Kung Fu Panda." You may start weeping now.)

"Wanted," interestingly, added a few more theaters but still dropped off by 60%, meaning those who wanted to see it saw it opening weekend. Jolie may have legs but I'm betting the movie doesn't. Also roadkill was "Kit Kittredge: An American Girl," which expanded from 15 theaters to almost 2,000 and eked out $3.6 million. Guess the warm advance reviews weren't able to get audiences out of the Will Smith habit.

Down in indieland, "The Wackness" opened at six theaters with a very strong $25K per theater average, which bodes well for its Boston opening this Friday. Those of you who've been waiting to see A) Josh from Nickelodeon's "Drake and Josh" play a pot-dealing high schooler in 1994 Manhattan and B) Mary-Kate Olsen and Ben Kingsley having wild monkey sex in a phone booth will be well served. "Gonzo," the Hunter S. Thompson docu, actually outgrossed "Wackness" $190K to $180K, but played in over four times as many theaters, so you do the math.

The Box Office Mojo chart has more numbers.

I'm way late off the dime on this, but flipping through Paul Sherman's book "Big Screen Boston" has been so much fun I just have to logroll it in this space.

You'd think that, aside from the recent flurry of Hollywood-on-the-Charles action, there wouldn't be enough Boston set and shot movies to fill a book. And you'd think wrong. Sherman, a former Boston Herald film critic and past president of the Boston Society of Film Critics, exhumes all sorts of fascinating forgotten films, like 1950's "Mystery Street" (aka "Murder at Harvard," photo above) and 1979's "Billy in the Lowlands." Of course the usual suspects are here: "The Departed" and "Boondock Saints," "Charly" and "Good Will Hunting." And 1973's "The Friends of Eddie Coyle," which Sherman rightly cites as the best Bahston movie evah. "Big Screen Boston" gets into the history and into the vast gulf between real Boston and screen Boston; he lays out everything that got left on the cutting room floor in "A Civil Action."

The Harvard documentary axis is fully represented, as are all those indie strivers making neighborhood movies that seemingly went nowhere. They went into Sherman's memory banks is where they went, and now they're between the pages of his enclusive, smartly-written book. An essential purchase for Bay State cinemaniacs, this does what all good movie books do: Makes you want to run out and see the movies.

There's a nice interview with Sherman on the New England Film website.

Congratulations to whoever's distributing this movie overseas. And my condolences to the people desperate enough to rent it. Also thanks, Ryan Landry for your nice note when the movie came out in February.I'm sure you'll appreciate it.

I was on my way into work the other morning, listening to the soundtrack for "The Wackness," ye olde coming-of-age comedy opening here next month. It's redolent of New York City circa 1994, and you can smell the urine and other indecencies that Mayor Giuliani gleefully wanted to purge from his Big Apple. The music in the movie takes you back to that high-school dance/summer-before-college house party, where you first heard Biggie Smalls and Craig Nice. The soundtrack happens to include DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince's surprisingly durable "Summertime." Listening to it got me thinking about two amazing things: the Fresh Prince is now the biggest movie star in the world and that this song is 20 years old.

The interesting news this Monday isn't that "WALL-E" kicked metallic butt at the box-office -- $62.5 million at just under 4,000 theaters -- but that the R-rated "Wanted" (above) kept pace. The Angelina Jolie action orgasm made $51 million at 3,175 theaters, which means its per-theater-average ($16,100) was actually higher than the Pixar movie's ($15,656). Give the people what they want, and they'll turn up, especially the women; surprisingly, 52% of the audience for "Wanted" was female. And 22% of the audience for "WALL-E" were adults without children, so forget the cliches about Pixar attracting only family audiences.

It'll be interesting to see how these two fare in the coming weeks: "WALL-E" is getting a rapturous response from most moviegoers but I'm expecting a right-wing backlash against its eco-friendly message to kick in any day. Oh, wait, it already has.

The rest of the chart is the same old same old: "Kung Fu Panda" holding steady in its fourth week and closing in on $200 million total gross, "Get Smart" also hanging in there in its second week, "The Happening" and "The Love Guru" tailing off fast with 60-plus percent drops from the week before. So far the big dog of the summer isn't "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" ($299 million total) but "Iron Man" ($309 million). It'll be interesting to see what "The Dark Knight" does to the playing field when it arrives in a few weeks.

Here's the full chart, courtesy of Box Office Mojo, along with Leonard Klady at Movie City News.