Indie Box-Office Roundup: Weekend of March 28-30, 2008

Paul Clark — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

One of the realities of box office is that, the more screens your movie is playing on, the harder it gets to maintain a high per-screen average. Exhibit A is this week's Indie Box-Office Roundup, in which the top 9 per-screen averages for the past weekend were for films playing on one or two screens. So if you're rooting for the film that's playing around the corner, I'm afraid you're out of luck.

That is, unless you live around the corner from New York's Angelika Film Center. In which case, good news- the Angelika exclusive Chapter 27 (Peace Arch Entertainment) ruled the indie box office. J.P. Schaefer's drama about Mark David Chapman (better known as the scumbag who murdered John Lennon) weathered a barrage of middling-to-poor reviews to bring in an impressive haul of $13,910 on a single screen. Credit both the historical interest and the hype surrounding the performance (or at least the DeNiro-like weight gain) of star Jared Leto. If nothing else, the upstarts at Peach Arch deserve props for doing what many major studios could not- they actually made money off a movie starring Lindsay Lohan.

The weekend's top holdover was Laura Dunn's documentary The Unforeseen (Cinema Guild), which was filmed in Texas and opened solely in Austin, attracting $12,877 worth of local fans over the weekend.

Other notable new releases included the gay-themed A Four Letter Word (Embrem Entertainment), ThinkFilm's Italian-language My Brother Is An Only Child, and Aleksandr Sokurov's latest film, Alexandra. It's a little strange to see a film by a director like Sokurov embraced by audiences, even if they're big-city arthouse audiences. But hey, I'll take it.

Finally, coming in at #10 was the only film playing on more than two screens to make the list, The Weinstein Company's Under the Same Moon. The film continues to be an arthouse crowdpleaser, with its weekend take of $2,250,081 putting it just below the overall top 10 for the weekend.

Top 10, Weekend of March 28-30:
1. Chapter 27 [Peace Arch Entertainment] ($13,910 per screen)
2. The Unforeseen [Cinema Guild] ($12,877)
3. A Four Letter Word [Embrem Entertainment] ($12,101)
4. Alexandra [Cinema Guild] ($9,401)
5. My Brother Is An Only Child [ThinkFilm] ($9,357)
6. The Singing Revolution [Abramorama Entertainment] ($8,244)
7. Love Songs [IFC Films] ($6,651)
8. Hats Off [Canobie Films] ($6,570)
9. Backseat [Truly Indie] ($5,816)
10. Under The Same Moon [The Weinstein Company] ($5,769)

Source: IndieWire.

World Film Beat: "My Brother Is an Only Child"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The Italian director Daniele Luchetti's new movie, My Brother Is an Only Child, has a script that the director worked on with Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli; Petraglia and Rulli co-wrote The Best of Youth, a sensational six-hour family saga, spanning four decades, that played American theaters in 2005. At first glance, My Brother could pass for The Best of Youth: The Portable Edition. Like the earlier epic, it deals with the political battles of the sixties, and their implosion in the terrorist-ridden Italy of the seventies, as reflected in the relationship of two brothers. The central figure is Accio, the brother who, as a boy teetering on the brink of puberty, wants to be a priest. For a few scenes I was afraid that the movie was going to be one of those European mood pieces that traps you in a monastery with some dumb cluck who takes the whole movie to figure out that he needs to get the hell out of there, but once Accio becomes both confused and emboldened by his hormonal urges, he rethinks his career plan gratifyling quick and moves back in with his family. Disillusioned from age thirteen on, Accio (who's played by Elio Germano from around the time that his skin breaks out), has little choice but to declare himself a fascist, especially since his older brother Manrico (Riccardo Scamarcio) is both an announced Communist and a natural born heartthrob who effortlessly secures the undying romantic devotion of Francesca, played by Diane Fleri, a twenty-three-year-old French actress who could probably persuade Richard Dawkins to run for president on the Flat Earth Party ticket.

Despite its pedigree, My Brother Is an Only Child isn't in the same league as The Best of Youth, a brazenly unfair comparison if ever I've made one. But on its own more modest terms it's smart and affecting, with the conflicts of years ago treated with all the wisdom of hindsight but a minimum of sentimentality. (Luca Zingaretti, who plays the beefy older knucklehead who indoctrinates the hero in Mussolini worship, comes across as a likable sort of harmless eccentric--until he grows a contingent of thugs to order around.) The filmmakers' sympathies may be with the political left, but their funniest scene is a piece of campus lunacy where Manrico and his comrades perform a politically corrected version of Ode to Joy. (The performance is disrupted by Fascists who burst in yelling, “Leave Beethoven alone or we’ll bust your ass!”) Part of the charm of the movie, as with other Italian films such as The Best of Youth and Marco Bellocchio's Good Morning, Night, is that it carries the reassuring message that America isn't the only country that can't seem to get past arguing who was driven crazier by the sixties.

The Screengrab : my brother is an only child

Indie Box-Office Roundup: Weekend of March 28-30, 2008

World Film Beat: "My Brother Is an Only Child"