In a neck-and-neck race at the Friday box office, horror holdover The Final Destination (No. 1, $3.58 million) narrowly edged out Sandra Bullock’s All About Steve (No. 2, $3.57 million) to take the lead at the beginning of Labor Day weekend. But the win might be short-lived: Horror movies traditionally play strongest at the start of a weekend, while a female-focused pic like Steve has a better shot of wooing daytime audiences on Saturday and Sunday—and in this case, Monday, too. Third place went to the sci-fi action pic Gamer, starring Gerard Butler, which took a lukewarm $3.3 million. Still going strong thanks to good buzz, Inglourious Basterds (No. 4, $3 million) and District 9 (No. 5, $1.75 million) rounded out the top five, while the weekend’s other wide release, Extract, only managed $1.4 million for seventh place. Be sure to check back tomorrow for three-day estimates, and again on Monday for the final Labor Day numbers.
1. The Final Destination — $3.58 million
2. All About Steve — $3.57 million
3. Gamer — $3.3 million
4. Inglourious Basterds — $3 million
5. District 9 — $1.75 million
More box office news:
Box office preview: Will ‘Gamer’ shoot to the top?
Box Office Report: ‘The Final Destination’ scares up top spot with $28.3 million
‘The Final Destination’ slays Friday box office with $10.9 mil
The September Issue, R.J. Cutler’s dishy, glitzy, vibrant, and sensationally fun documentary about Anna Wintour and the inner workings of Vogue magazine, is the rare nonfiction film that is now poised to cross over — that is, to become a mainstream conversation piece and bona fide indie hit, like last year’s Man on Wire or, before that, An Inconvenient Truth, March of the Penguins, and the films of Michael Moore. (I don’t necessarily expect it to be that big; I’m just trying to sketch in the possibilities after its huge limited-run opening last weekend.) The film’s appeal seems obvious enough. Wintour, as I said in 
It’s been four months since Wolverine 
They’re both adorable actresses in their 20s. They’re both early contenders for a Best Actress nomination thanks to their strong performances in period films, from female directors, that are screening at the Toronto film festival later this month. And they’re even both represented by the same PR firm, WKT Public Relations. So it’s understandable that some people might get Abbie Cornish and Carey Mulligan confused. Like the folks at Variety, who, in touting their upcoming screening series in today’s issue, listed Mulligan’s name under Cornish’s photo. (Oops.)
Well, you’re going to be hearing their names in the same sentence a whole lot over the next few months, so let’s get this out of the way now. Abbie Cornish, the leading lady of Jane Campion’s Bright Star, is Australian and has lighter hair. Carey Mulligan, the breakout from Lone Scherfig’s An Education, is British and has darker hair. I have a feeling we’ll all be able to tell them apart before too long.
Is there a right or wrong way to watch a movie?
According to experts at RunPee, a cute bladder-centric website dedicated to the proposition that we’ve all got to go some time (even while at the movies) so we might as well plan ahead, it’s safe to take a four-minute bathroom break approximately 40 minutes into Inglourious Basterds. That’s when (I promise I’m not giving anything away) a young woman stands on a ladder, changing the sign on a movie marquee. The RunPee correspondent suggests that missing the scene, a self-contained exchange between two characters, “won’t jeopardize the movie.” That is, you’ll still understand what’s going on after you’ve flushed and returned to your theater seat. (For other movies/other stall tactics, click around the site.)
Hey, it so happens that if you take RunPee’s Inglourious advice, you’ll miss one of Quentin Tarantino’s zingiest lines of dialogue. But that, I think, is the least of what’s lost when we fit a movie to suit our whims and schedule, rather than the other way around. All compassion and understanding to folks with serious issues who would otherwise be deprived of equal access to the pursuit of movie happiness if they couldn’t step out of the movie theater when need demands; by all means do what you gotta do. But admit: That’s not most of us, for whom reasonable run/pee (not to mention run/popcorn and run/TXT message) planning ought to result in a block of time cleared for uninterrupted attention to what’s on the screen, unspooled at the pace the moviemakers intended. READ FULL STORY »