It’s a horse race at the box office this weekend, with two major new films and the second weekend of “The Social Network” largely chasing the same demographic — women over 25 — with predictions that all three will end up in a photo finish with tallies in the mid-teens.
That’s not great news for one of the newcomers, Disney’s “Secretariat,” which the studio hoped would pull out of the pack like “The Blind Side,” opening at $34 million a year ago en route to a Best Picture nomination and a Best Actress Oscar for Sandra Bullock.
The Mouse House is betting a bundle that history will repeat itself with “Secretariat,” the New York Times reported the other day. But while “Secretariat” is being heavily marketed to the same Christian conservatives that made Bullock’s movie a surprise hit, I don’t think that’s a duplicatable phenomenon for a number of reasons.
First of all, even thoroughbred racing at the highest levels is not anywhere near as wholesome a sport as the high-school football depicted in “The Blind Side,” actually described as a “religion” in some parts of the country. There are millions of dollars in bets being placed by sometimes shady characters at racetracks, for one thing. And it’s a rich person’s game — they don’t call it “The Sport of Kings” for nothing.
Bullock’s character is a working mom (an interior decorator) who spends lots of time with her kids while Diane Lane’s Penny Chenery Tweedy is a housewife abandons her four children in Denver for long periods to run her ailing father’s horse farm in Virginia — where, much to her husband’s chagrin, she uses her maiden name instead of his.
Lane is a very good actress, but she’s just not as likeable a presence as Bullock. It doesn’t help she’s saddled with terrible wigs and costumes — and more important, doesn’t have as good a script and direction as John Lee Hancock provided Bullock in “The Blind Side.”
“Secretariat” screenwriter Mike Rich received credit for an earlier, better sports movie that Hancock (himself a screenwriter) directed for Disney, “The Rookie.” Rich’s new film is loaded with clunky dialogue, and director Randall Wallace’s direction is heavy-handed indeed.
If I were a Christian Conservative, I’d be wary of any Hollywood movie panders to me and my fellow travelers by wrapping itself in the Bible the way “Secretariat” does — opening and closing with quotations from the Book of Job and the gospel hymn “Oh Happy Day” breaking out on the soundtrack when Secretariat wins the Triple Crown.
Like “The Blind Side,” “Secretariat” is not exactly a critics’ darling — it’s currently running 64 percent positive reviews at Rotten Tomatoes vs. 66 for the earlier film. I gave it 2.5 stars, largely because I liked the rousing racing sequences. I don’t think it’s going to play any better to hip academy members, who are probably not going to be impressed by its box-office performance.
Disney has to be dismayed that the most talked-about review of “Secretariat” is a hilarious pan by Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir that compares Wallace to Hitler’s favorite filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl and labels the movie a Tea Party fantasy of white entitlement. This over-the-top (and tongue in cheek, I think) attack has drawn outrage from commentators as politically diverse as Roger Ebert on the left and John Nolte on the right. But hey, I think O’Hehir is just borrowing a page from the Armond White playbook to grab some links and page views by being outrageous.
“Secretariat” has been tracking so disappointingly in advance audience surveys that Disney offered paid sneak previews last week to try and build word of mouth. Studios don’t use this tactic much anymore, because it tends to siphon away the most motivated audience segment from the opening weekend gross.
As it happens, Warners has the same visibility issues with its sitcom “Life As We Know It,” and sneaked it directly opposite “Secretariat” last week, hoping to goose its opening today. The reviews for this opus with Katherine Heigl (who has been known to open a movie) and Josh Duhamel (who hasn’t) are pretty dire; 29 percent positive at RT, 2 stars from me.
The only other wide opening this weekend is “My Soul to Take,” a horror movie that Universal didn’t screen in advance for critics. There aren’t enough reviews yet for an RT rating, but it’s not exactly surprising that Edward Douglas, in one of the handful of pans, calls this dump job “the worst film of [Wes] Craven’s career.” Box office prognosticators think it will open under $10 million — making it something like the sixth 3-D movie in a row to post disappointing or worse opening numbers.
