Pablo Larrain’s Unnerving, Brilliant Tony Manero
A stark counterpoint to Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino’s utopian fantasia of messianic cinephilia, this bit of Chilean miserablism (hopefully no longer a pejorative descriptor) burrows underneath the intersection of motion picture idolatry and fascist art making. What emerges is a harrowing masterpiece.
In a watch-and-follow handheld aesthetic – shot on Super16mm with a color palette reduced to a pasty shade of mortar – sophomore director Pablo Larrain’s camera stays closely behind Raul (co-writer Alfredo Castro, who from the three quarter view recalls a Panic in Needle Park-era Al Pacino, all eye sockets and fierce Latin angularity. Shot straight on, he’s Lou Reed at his most disconcertingly blank), as he pursues the monomaniacal quest to become Augusto Pinochet-era Chile’s foremost Tony Manero (John Travolta's iconic character from Saturday Night Fever) impersonator in the waning days of disco.
A local television station holds weekly contests to determine the Chilean equivalent of a rotating cast of American celebrities – at the outset of the film Raul mistakenly shows up at the Chuck Norris lookalike contest – which gives Raul a way of parlaying his Saturday Night Fever fixation into national notoriety and artistic legitimacy. Concurrently, he’s been managing a group of amateur dancers in a series of painfully mechanical reiterations of Fever’s key sequences for paltry, drunken crowds. The Manero character’s effect on Raul’s world is total, bringing him to tears at its tender moments while also inspiring him to commit a string of impulsive, remorseless killings.
Devoutly, studiously attending screenings of the film (his plastic-wrapped imitation of Fever’s iconic white suit takes up the adjoining seat), Raul sets about internalizing each detail and nuance of Travolta’s performance in an effort to assimilate the character entirely. Accurate impersonation is no cheap endeavor, and the jobless Raul shows no mercy in brutally slaughtering innocents who can provide him with the gold chains, television sets and dance floor panels capable of legitimizing his apery. Nor is his masquerade profitable: the television’s grand prize is a scant sum that would scarcely cover the cost of the accoutrements required for Raul’s ardent verisimilitude. There is no benefit to this charade but the opportunity for control.
Lest we entertain the notion that the obsession is with Travolta himself, as a performer, the local theater swaps out Fever for Grease one afternoon (with an uptick in attendance), provoking Raul to throttle the owner against the projector and thieve the cash register. To the aging Raul, Manero represents the immortal, an attainable, perpetual youth. When the permanence of his idol’s grace is threatened by the theater’s crass acquiescence to fickle popular demand, that is, when the constituents of his own identity are exposed as mere pop culture artifacts, Raul can only compensate with violence in an effort to keep his carefully composed self from disintegrating.
“How the financially pinched 70s generation that grew up on TV attempt[ed] to find its own forms of beauty and release,” was how Pauline Kael perceptively described Manero’s original appeal to American audiences (1). In Chile, however, Manero’s pursuit of release and freedom becomes Raul’s template for merciless control and two-bit fascism. Twentieth century despots are famous for their cinephilia, and Raul, underneath the umbrella of Pinochet, parlays his cinematic fantasies into fascistic impulses on the grandest stages available to him, first a decrepit theater, then, briefly, a claustrophobic soundstage (2). Pinochet is the lion and Raul is the termite, but the film makes explicit the mutuality of their gluttonous ambition. Both Larrain’s photographic schema and Raul’s broken features recall cornerstones of Italian Neo-realism, and, most perversely, Tony Manero’s protagonist functions as the Fascist Everyman.
Paradoxically, the more avidly Raul consumes the film, the more carefully he notes the Saturday Night Fever’s most quotidian details, the more he’s unable to comprehend them accurately. A few running jokes have characters arguing with him about the number of buttons above Manero’s zipper or the color of the heroine’s dress in a key sequence. The pathetic equation of Raul’s life: the more firmly he impresses himself upon the film, the greater is his rejection from it, the distance between the two increasing upon every viewing. As he closely inspects a filched 35mm print of Fever, isolating each move and scrutinizing each successive image as a translatable code, the two younger members of his company intrude upon him and introduce an original number they propose to feature in the performance. Disinterested, Raul removes his eyes from the stilled Manero only once, to say that their efforts were wasted, as their steps are “not in the film,” that is, not fit for inclusion because their genesis lay outside of the sanctioned fantasy. Susan Sontag defined the fascist aesthetic as one that “… flows from (and justifies) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain; they endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude.” (3) Fittingly, Raul’s life is one of performance – embodiment is his art – and his servitude to the idea of Tony Manero and his total control of others encapsulates Sontag’s conception of a binary fascist aesthetic, which in Raul’s case is noxiously based on a misguided ideal of freedom and grace.
Impossibly reticent, the only sound he emits is the shuffle of his footsteps as he ambles through depopulated slums, occasionally stooping to avoid the eye of patrolling military goons. The famous opening of Saturday Night Fever has Travolta’s boots strutting down a Brooklyn sidewalk with The Bee Gees' disco anthem “Stayin’ Alive” on the soundtrack. Tony Manero is without non-source music; consequently, Travolta’s silenced footsteps are translated to the hard grind of Raul’s shoes against gravel roads. Music dominates all the dance sequences of Fever, eliminating all sonic evidence of labor or strain, but Larrain never forgets Raul’s feet and muscles. The ersatz Manero’s attempt at providing the appropriate disco soundtrack to his company’s performances is undermined by the blaring, graceless clapping of their feet against the splintered wooden floor. In keeping with a fascist preoccupation with tightly organized (controlled) bodies, the dancers’ rote memorization of Travolta’s steps renders each performance a perfunctory march.
Pinochet’s coup was CIA-sponsored, and the film contains the implication that Saturday Night Fever itself is also exemplary of American meddling and imperialism. The murderous fascism of both the dictator and the dancer is propped up by the monolithic United States, but Larrain is careful not to suggest that U.S. hegemony manufactures such tyranny outright, at least in this instance. The relationship is instead one of facilitation, not construction, and a less nuanced film (and certainly one by an American filmmaker) would not have realized this. Larrain thus creates a narrative successful at both the interpersonal and political levels while tangibly, though subtly, articulating the interplay between. In fact, the film’s calmest moment – fleeting as it is – features the troupe relaxing after a performance by listening to traditional Chilean music. The sequence quickly devolves into a sex scene of Tarr-ian alienation in which would-be lovers are reduced to masturbating side-by-side and passing out, but the respite of Chilean culture registers with the characters strongly, if only for a moment and followed quickly by further misery wrought by their leader.
The respective realms of lion and termite eventually converge as the two insolent dancers bent on inserting original passages into the performance become budding anti-Pinochet activists, simultaneously wrenching themselves away from two forms of concomitant fascism, the artistic and the political. Raul’s nervousness around the authorities (always crouching, always ducking, always avoiding scrutiny) is never fully explained, but it’s worth asserting that the lion need never fear the termite, but the termite would be advised always to fear the lion, regardless of their commonality. The film ends as the authorities descend upon the theater to interrogate (and presumably execute) the young lovers for the subversive behavior – they’d been finked on by the girl’s mother, who was jealous of Raul’s attraction to her daughter. Blessed with a rat’s sense of impending trouble, Raul slips out the back door in his Travolta garb, headed for the television station.
Tony Manero / Chile, Brazil / Color / 98 min. / Directed by Pablo Larrain / Written by Alfredo Castro, Mateo Iribarren and Mr. Larrain / Starring: Alfredo Castro, Paola Lattus, Hector Morales, Amparo Noguera and Elsa Poblete
Notes:
1 - Collected in 5001 Nights at the Movies. New York: Henry Holt, 1985
2 - Despots seem particularly enamored with movies (or at least we’re enamored with the connection). Kim Jong-Il’s fetish for James Bond is well documented, as was Stalin’s fondness for musicals. Hitler preferred Chaplin until The Great Dictator. The connection between artistic fantasy and political fantasy must be tempting, and these dictators being at the helm of state film industries must make those two arenas less distinguishable. An interesting, cursory overview of Stalin’s command of state cinema (certainly the most prolonged and strongest of a tyrant over a major film industry) can be found at:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3618310/Why-Stalin-loved-Tarzan-and-wanted-John-Wayne-shot.html.
3 – Sontag’s essay, “Fascinating Fascism,” from which these quotes were taken and which is more than anything a far-reaching discussion of Nazi documentarian Leni Riefenstahl’s work and legacy, appears in her collection:
Under the Sign of Saturn. New York: Vintage, 1981
Showing posts with label Hollywood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hollywood. Show all posts
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
DUDES GONE WILD
The Hangover, reviewed
Batchelor party becomes recon mission as three uber-dudes are forced to retrieve the groom-to-be from the clutches of Vegas after he disappears mid-debauchery in Todd Phillips’ The Hangover.
Justin Bartha plays the groom, excised from most of the running time, and Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis play the three amigos scouring Vegas for their fallen comrade. Cooper is the straight man, the balance between Helms’ neurotic clicking and Galifianakis’ autistic jabbering, and the overall dynamic of the film suffers as only the latter two deliver any sort of juice. After a curiously and unironically morose title sequence (one wonders if we were meant to believe initially that a film advertised as the ultimate Vegas comedy would actually turn out to be an existential thriller by the Coens or John Dahl), The Hangover introduces its characters posthaste – each united by an expediently proffered need to escape their emasculated lives – and gets them to Vegas within fifteen minutes.
The nonentity played by Bradley Cooper is the ostensible star of the whole thing, and perhaps the most relatable to the target audience’s idealized self: good-looking, with a bit of money and taste for wine, women and song. He is the lovable, hunky scoundrel, full of common sense and sex appeal: the utterly straight man. Both the screenplay’s languid character beats and Cooper’s hollow performance erase the character from memory almost immediately, and his continued presence onscreen only perturbs when it could and should facilitate the story or underscore the insanity of his costars. One hopes, on the other hand, that Galifianakis and Helms form a lifetime cinematic bond and remain inseparable onscreen until they’re remaking Grumpy Old Men in forty years. Each playing a variation of an established persona – Helms’ high-strung, if naïve, drone on NBC’s The Office and Galifianakis’ absurdity-spouting standup creation – the two strike a hilariously off-kilter tone throughout as comic foils, reminiscent of Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels in Dumb and Dumber, albeit on Ritalin and Ketamine, respectively. Their antics, particularly those involving Galifianakis and an infant, appear largely improvised, whereas all hilarity provided by the script feels labored and unconvincing by comparison. We can only hope that Helms and Galifianakis each find a better forum for their work in the future.
The rest of the film’s (presumably scripted) jollies involve a swishy Asian gangster, a bumbling drug dealer, a dimwitted hooker and two of Vegas’ finest on a taser bender. If it seems disingenuous merely listing the supporting players as the film’s roadside attractions, it is in keeping with the spirit of The Hangover, which ambles lazily from loony character to zany situation and back again without much in the way of transition or rhythm. Accordingly, trotting out Mike Tyson, as himself, mid-film, feels desperate, the same sort of pretzled irony that makes Chuck Norris jokes so tedious: Dude, it’s Mike Tyson... in the movie! Playing himself! That’s so random! There’s something very safe about this kind of rote transgression; ten years ago a Mike Tyson cameo could have been a ballsy move in a mainstream Hollywood comedy, but at this historical remove it’s about as benign as a guest appearance by Mr. T or MacGyver.
Unfortunately engineered to be exactly as daring as is permissible for a contemporary studio film and not a single degree more, Phillips’ proudest visual achievements are parodies of notable Vegas movies, though the referenced films (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Casino, Rain Man) exhibited much greater insight concerning the pleasures and terrors of sin city. If the film had a more modest set of ambitions for itself, its failures could be forgivable, but the film is so loud and bombastic in its self-definition as a comedy of ultimate excess that it buckles under the strain of its own ambitions, which Galifianakis and Helms prove unable to support, though not for a lack of trying.
Even as the film fails to provide enough laughs across its running time, it is refreshing in its utter disdain for all manifestations of maturity, which gives it a defiant leg up on the recent spat of “bromance” comedies, making them appear duplicitous in contrast. In the past few years, Judd Apatow has reinvigorated the lovable loser to his greatest proportions in decades, having grown the archetype outward in both directions, simultaneously leaving it relentlessly crass and hopelessly (painfully) maudlin. In a sense, what Phillips does is much harder: he makes movies, often very funny movies, about privileged white males behaving like regressed, adolescent versions of their privileged white selves. Lovable losers they are not; rather, they are aggressive, hormonal and largely unsentimental frat types carefully driven down a peg or two for comic relief while still emerging as sympathetic heroes. This is not a feat worthy of canonization, and The Hangover’s homophobia and sexism should not go unnoticed, but one can’t help but admire a body of work that revels so thoroughly in its own stink, bereft of the sentimental concessions that mar far superior works. Phillips’ films have thus far lacked the saccharine anesthetic that dilutes the sting of Apatow’s work, making them a pleasant alternative to the chick-flicks in cargo shorts that have become so lucrative and ubiquitous in recent years. Somewhat ironically (at least at first glance), The Hangover has resonated with female audiences, perhaps as a result of this refusal to placate or condescend to them as a demographic ripe for conquest, the obnoxious, market-driven ploy that hampers the efforts of Phillips' contemporaries (1).
Despite the dramatic trappings that require him to punish all transgressions and reaffirm the family life as the ultimate aim for American males, it is to Phillips’ credit that he never truly betrays his instincts. He provides a hurried sense of domestic tranquility with a largely uninteresting denouement, but the associations he’s provided between betrothal and misery are not so easily ameliorated. Helms’ character drowns in the P.C. universe constructed for him by the emancipated, domineering and unfaithful (the portrait implies the conflation of all three traits without getting too specific) fiancée played by Rachel Harris, while Cooper describes his married life as utter hell at the slightest provocation. Galafianakis remains blissfully unaware of romantic entanglements, and indicates only the most rudimentary understanding of sexuality (his characters’ poor imitations of adult behavior at time recall a more subtle variation of Peter Sellers’ Chauncey Gardiner.) It’s not insignificant that the only character content to exist within his long-term monogamous relationship disappears for all but ten minutes of the film’s running time.
The film could, perhaps, be read as a journey of domesticity reclaimed by its malcontents, but the actual search at the story’s core is merely pretext for three men behaving badly (or struggling to recall the previous evening’s bad behavior), as opposed to a semiotic field worth mining. Whereas most recent mainstream comedies (romantic and otherwise) seem to believe earnestly in the normalizing, stabilizing power of domestic partnership and true love, Phillips is far more at ease detailing the hideous side of interpersonal commitment and the consequent regression of grown men to the earlier, unbound stages of their development. This commitment to the noncommittal has its cringe-worthy excesses –Helms triumphantly jettisons his feminazi (the shrew whose freedom has been achieved at the expense of his own) at the film’s end to woo a hooker, overcoming his disgust at the latter’s low socioeconomic status, and thereby indulges the privileged white male’s most idiotic fantasy of social, sexual and economic transience – but it is mostly harmless. While there is much to be said for the place of stability and domesticity in the overall development of young men, The Hangover’s lack of pretension in this arena is refreshing. Here is a film that is unafraid of its desire for a purely homo-social civilization, and it is absolutely shameless in the most fantastic sense. Phillips understands that ruminations on the lure of family life are not quite the best proposition for screen comedy. His more talented peers would be well-advised to take note.
Despite a plot twist (leading up to Phillips’ most hilarious directorial flourish: a pitch-perfect Rain Man homage/parody) requiring big casino winnings, there’s nothing to convince the audience that the film couldn’t have happened anywhere. For all of its supposed (and heavily advertised) Vegas-ness, The Hangover is more or less After Hours in the desert: not a bad idea in and of itself, but the result feels like the film missed an opportunity to make an indelible Las Vegas comedy. It narrowly avoids coming across as merely a 80-proof episode of Comedy Central’s Reno 911!, which is about the extent of its achievements. Sadly, Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s trifles are far funnier, cleverer and more enjoyable than this would-be romp, which never fully exploits Vegas for all its worth. Vegas may be the ideal setting for rutting white guys, but these dudes fail to capitalize on its true possibilities.
The Hangover / USA / 2009 / Color / 100 min. / Directed by Todd Phillips / Written by John Lucas and Scott Moore / Starring: Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis, Ed Helms, Justin Bartha and Heather Graham / Warner Bros.
Notes:
1 – Though its presumptions are based solely on the grosses of the film’s opening weekend, the article located at http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-bigpicture9-2009jun09,0,1401760.story cites the enthusiasm of female audiences (though somewhat anecdotally) as one reason for the film’s unexpected financial success.
Batchelor party becomes recon mission as three uber-dudes are forced to retrieve the groom-to-be from the clutches of Vegas after he disappears mid-debauchery in Todd Phillips’ The Hangover.
Justin Bartha plays the groom, excised from most of the running time, and Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis play the three amigos scouring Vegas for their fallen comrade. Cooper is the straight man, the balance between Helms’ neurotic clicking and Galifianakis’ autistic jabbering, and the overall dynamic of the film suffers as only the latter two deliver any sort of juice. After a curiously and unironically morose title sequence (one wonders if we were meant to believe initially that a film advertised as the ultimate Vegas comedy would actually turn out to be an existential thriller by the Coens or John Dahl), The Hangover introduces its characters posthaste – each united by an expediently proffered need to escape their emasculated lives – and gets them to Vegas within fifteen minutes.
The nonentity played by Bradley Cooper is the ostensible star of the whole thing, and perhaps the most relatable to the target audience’s idealized self: good-looking, with a bit of money and taste for wine, women and song. He is the lovable, hunky scoundrel, full of common sense and sex appeal: the utterly straight man. Both the screenplay’s languid character beats and Cooper’s hollow performance erase the character from memory almost immediately, and his continued presence onscreen only perturbs when it could and should facilitate the story or underscore the insanity of his costars. One hopes, on the other hand, that Galifianakis and Helms form a lifetime cinematic bond and remain inseparable onscreen until they’re remaking Grumpy Old Men in forty years. Each playing a variation of an established persona – Helms’ high-strung, if naïve, drone on NBC’s The Office and Galifianakis’ absurdity-spouting standup creation – the two strike a hilariously off-kilter tone throughout as comic foils, reminiscent of Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels in Dumb and Dumber, albeit on Ritalin and Ketamine, respectively. Their antics, particularly those involving Galifianakis and an infant, appear largely improvised, whereas all hilarity provided by the script feels labored and unconvincing by comparison. We can only hope that Helms and Galifianakis each find a better forum for their work in the future.
The rest of the film’s (presumably scripted) jollies involve a swishy Asian gangster, a bumbling drug dealer, a dimwitted hooker and two of Vegas’ finest on a taser bender. If it seems disingenuous merely listing the supporting players as the film’s roadside attractions, it is in keeping with the spirit of The Hangover, which ambles lazily from loony character to zany situation and back again without much in the way of transition or rhythm. Accordingly, trotting out Mike Tyson, as himself, mid-film, feels desperate, the same sort of pretzled irony that makes Chuck Norris jokes so tedious: Dude, it’s Mike Tyson... in the movie! Playing himself! That’s so random! There’s something very safe about this kind of rote transgression; ten years ago a Mike Tyson cameo could have been a ballsy move in a mainstream Hollywood comedy, but at this historical remove it’s about as benign as a guest appearance by Mr. T or MacGyver.
Unfortunately engineered to be exactly as daring as is permissible for a contemporary studio film and not a single degree more, Phillips’ proudest visual achievements are parodies of notable Vegas movies, though the referenced films (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Casino, Rain Man) exhibited much greater insight concerning the pleasures and terrors of sin city. If the film had a more modest set of ambitions for itself, its failures could be forgivable, but the film is so loud and bombastic in its self-definition as a comedy of ultimate excess that it buckles under the strain of its own ambitions, which Galifianakis and Helms prove unable to support, though not for a lack of trying.
Even as the film fails to provide enough laughs across its running time, it is refreshing in its utter disdain for all manifestations of maturity, which gives it a defiant leg up on the recent spat of “bromance” comedies, making them appear duplicitous in contrast. In the past few years, Judd Apatow has reinvigorated the lovable loser to his greatest proportions in decades, having grown the archetype outward in both directions, simultaneously leaving it relentlessly crass and hopelessly (painfully) maudlin. In a sense, what Phillips does is much harder: he makes movies, often very funny movies, about privileged white males behaving like regressed, adolescent versions of their privileged white selves. Lovable losers they are not; rather, they are aggressive, hormonal and largely unsentimental frat types carefully driven down a peg or two for comic relief while still emerging as sympathetic heroes. This is not a feat worthy of canonization, and The Hangover’s homophobia and sexism should not go unnoticed, but one can’t help but admire a body of work that revels so thoroughly in its own stink, bereft of the sentimental concessions that mar far superior works. Phillips’ films have thus far lacked the saccharine anesthetic that dilutes the sting of Apatow’s work, making them a pleasant alternative to the chick-flicks in cargo shorts that have become so lucrative and ubiquitous in recent years. Somewhat ironically (at least at first glance), The Hangover has resonated with female audiences, perhaps as a result of this refusal to placate or condescend to them as a demographic ripe for conquest, the obnoxious, market-driven ploy that hampers the efforts of Phillips' contemporaries (1).
Despite the dramatic trappings that require him to punish all transgressions and reaffirm the family life as the ultimate aim for American males, it is to Phillips’ credit that he never truly betrays his instincts. He provides a hurried sense of domestic tranquility with a largely uninteresting denouement, but the associations he’s provided between betrothal and misery are not so easily ameliorated. Helms’ character drowns in the P.C. universe constructed for him by the emancipated, domineering and unfaithful (the portrait implies the conflation of all three traits without getting too specific) fiancée played by Rachel Harris, while Cooper describes his married life as utter hell at the slightest provocation. Galafianakis remains blissfully unaware of romantic entanglements, and indicates only the most rudimentary understanding of sexuality (his characters’ poor imitations of adult behavior at time recall a more subtle variation of Peter Sellers’ Chauncey Gardiner.) It’s not insignificant that the only character content to exist within his long-term monogamous relationship disappears for all but ten minutes of the film’s running time.
The film could, perhaps, be read as a journey of domesticity reclaimed by its malcontents, but the actual search at the story’s core is merely pretext for three men behaving badly (or struggling to recall the previous evening’s bad behavior), as opposed to a semiotic field worth mining. Whereas most recent mainstream comedies (romantic and otherwise) seem to believe earnestly in the normalizing, stabilizing power of domestic partnership and true love, Phillips is far more at ease detailing the hideous side of interpersonal commitment and the consequent regression of grown men to the earlier, unbound stages of their development. This commitment to the noncommittal has its cringe-worthy excesses –Helms triumphantly jettisons his feminazi (the shrew whose freedom has been achieved at the expense of his own) at the film’s end to woo a hooker, overcoming his disgust at the latter’s low socioeconomic status, and thereby indulges the privileged white male’s most idiotic fantasy of social, sexual and economic transience – but it is mostly harmless. While there is much to be said for the place of stability and domesticity in the overall development of young men, The Hangover’s lack of pretension in this arena is refreshing. Here is a film that is unafraid of its desire for a purely homo-social civilization, and it is absolutely shameless in the most fantastic sense. Phillips understands that ruminations on the lure of family life are not quite the best proposition for screen comedy. His more talented peers would be well-advised to take note.
Despite a plot twist (leading up to Phillips’ most hilarious directorial flourish: a pitch-perfect Rain Man homage/parody) requiring big casino winnings, there’s nothing to convince the audience that the film couldn’t have happened anywhere. For all of its supposed (and heavily advertised) Vegas-ness, The Hangover is more or less After Hours in the desert: not a bad idea in and of itself, but the result feels like the film missed an opportunity to make an indelible Las Vegas comedy. It narrowly avoids coming across as merely a 80-proof episode of Comedy Central’s Reno 911!, which is about the extent of its achievements. Sadly, Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s trifles are far funnier, cleverer and more enjoyable than this would-be romp, which never fully exploits Vegas for all its worth. Vegas may be the ideal setting for rutting white guys, but these dudes fail to capitalize on its true possibilities.
The Hangover / USA / 2009 / Color / 100 min. / Directed by Todd Phillips / Written by John Lucas and Scott Moore / Starring: Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis, Ed Helms, Justin Bartha and Heather Graham / Warner Bros.
Notes:
1 – Though its presumptions are based solely on the grosses of the film’s opening weekend, the article located at http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-bigpicture9-2009jun09,0,1401760.story cites the enthusiasm of female audiences (though somewhat anecdotally) as one reason for the film’s unexpected financial success.
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