Weekend box office: Reality bites

A good overall weekend at the movies -- total box office was up three percent over last year -- but, honestly, the most compelling, inspiring, horrifying human drama wasn't on the big screen or TV screens but in the news blogs and video sites covering the historic standoff in Iran. I spent Saturday in a surreal looking-glass double existence, glued to the updates of the ongoing street battles between demonstrators and police as reported by the HuffPo and other sites, then coming up for air into a lazy weekend America that didn't seem to care about what was going on on the other side of the planet other than that Obama should say something stronger about it. (He shouldn't have, actually.) Why the disconnect? Is it because so many of the amateur street videos and photographs of the violence are long-shot and low-res, denying us the close-up heroes we need to sit up and pay attention? Is it because there's not one figure to root for here but merely the majority of a nation? A single figure is drama; a crowd is just current events? If so, the uprising may have finally found the human face it needs in Neda Soltani, but the horrifying video of her murder in the streets of Tehran was, ironically, too extreme for mainstream consumption. Make no mistake, though: that video is to the Iranian revolt of 2009 what the man and the tank were to Tiananmen Square: a governing image through which all the event's meanings implacably stream. RIP, Neda.

Back to the shallow end of the pool. "The Proposal" won the weekend race with an estimated $34 million -- a career peak for both Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds and proof that the former isn't just the queen of in-flight entertainment but can still take the box office with the right (high) concept and the right (younger) co-star. A dullish $20 million for "Year One," by contrast, hints that Jack Black's appeal is fizzling out and that Michael Cera's not quite there yet, if he ever will be. Really, though, this is one movie where the trailers made it look just as bad as it actually was.

Among limited releases, Woody Allen swung like a champ, with "Whatever Works" taking in $281,000 at nine theaters for a big old $31,000 per-theater-average. That's a lot of egg creams. I'm guessing Larry David in the lead (i.e., the Woody role) raised the movie's profile, but Allen is coming off one of his better films, "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," and a much-read New York magazine cover story on director and star sold "Whatever Works" to the core New York/Los Angeles constituency. It opens in Boston and other cities this Friday.

The more interesting story is how well some of the summer's previous releases are holding up. "The Hangover" ($153 total gross to date) off only 18% from weekend two to weekend three; "Up" ($224 million) off 30% from weekend three to weekend four; "Star Trek" ($239 million) and "Night at the Museum" ($156 million) keeping their drops under 25% while movies like "Land of the Lost" and "The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3" slump over 50% from the previous weekend. That's four films with legs -- rare beasts in the unforgiving summer shuffle.

More weekend numbers from Box Office Mojo and Leonard Klady.