Free Refills

Comedy sleeper of the year to premiere

Knocked Up opens on Friday, and if you liked "40-Year-Old Virgin" and "Wedding Crashers," this R-rated comedy has GOT to be on your list.

I am surprised/shocked/pleased about the critical reviews that are circulating on this film:

Knocked Up is uproarious. Line for line, minute to minute, writer-director Judd Apatow's latest effort is more explosively funny, more frequently, than nearly any other major studio release in recent memory. --Joe Leydon, "Variety

Knocked Up feels very now. The banter is bruisingly funny, the characters brilliantly childish, the portrait of our culture’s narrowing gap between children and their elders hysterical -- in all senses.  --David Edelstein, "New York Magazine"

What do I already know after just one screening? That this belongs on the short list of the best comedies of the last twenty years. --Erik Childress, efilmcritic.com

This is probably a breakthrough role for Seth Rogen, who was in the television show "Freaks and Geeks", and has had smaller roles in "Anchorman," "40-Year-Old Virgin," and is currently the voice of the Ship Captain in Shrek the Third. (By the way, Shrek has had a very strong two weeks at the Eagle, getting good word-of-mouth and selling a lot of popcorn.)

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Georgia Rule begins its second week at the Eagle. Normally, we would have had to let this movie go, but it is sharing screen time with Spiderman 3. Pirates completed a very strong week and it will be interesting to see what the drop-off is in week two. Spidey dropped off more than 70 percent, much larger than nationwide. My guess is that Pirates has broader appeal, but as always, you get to decide.

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Our summer kids series starts next Wednesday, and we are grateful to Marathon, Monical's Pizza, and First Robinson Savings Bank for making the free series possible. The first show next Wednesday will be Open Season. Doors open at 9:15 a.m., and the show will start at 10 a.m.

We have room for about 340 people, but you must stop at the concession stand to get a ticket so we know how many seats we have left. WTAY/WTYE will be out at the theater next Wednesday for a live remote to kick off the summer.

In a few days, I will post the season schedule on the blog. I am still getting over a hard drive crash, and a lot of information stored is in California where white-coated lab techs are standing by for a high fee to restore the bytes and bits.

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We hosted 22 students from a Sullivan, Indiana day care the other day. We are so grateful for business from that side of the Big Muddy, as we know they can choose to go to Terre Haute (hiss! boo!) or a smaller theater in nearby Linton.

Avast, mateys!

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End opens at the Eagle at 8 p.m. Thursday night. The Chicago Tribune gave it a rave review, and critic Michael Wilmington thought it was the best of three. You can expect non-stop adventure, a twisty plot, and 2 1/2 hours of entertainment for less than $7.

We expect a sell out on the Thursday night showing, especially since the movie comes with free popcorn that night if you bring your own bowl. Our shareholders would appreciate if you buy a BIG drink. If you don't want to fight the crowd Thursday night, be aware that we will have two prints running beginning on Friday.

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Georgia Rule will also premiere here for a one-week run. We've cut Spiderman 3 down to a single screen to make room for this Lindsey Lohan movie, which critics say is studded with good performances in a surprisingly tart/dark plot.

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Shrek the Third got off to a big start at the Eagle, and will probably do about $10,000 worth of business in its first week. If you read the papers, you will see that the average box office per theater is above $30,000, which just goes to show you what a small market we live in. Our maximum box office for any movie for an entire run is in the neighborhood of $25,000.

For the year, box office receipts at the Eagle are down about 4.5 percent from last year, compared to nationwide numbers of being up by a similar amount. Up until now, we have pretty reliably mirrored national box office trends.

Our biggest goof was not booking "300" at its premiere. That film has done more than $200 million in box office and may be the logical explanation of why our numbers are slightly down while the industry is slightly up.

Still, if you own a business, you have to wonder. If we have stopped meeting your expectations and you find yourself seeing fewer movies locally, we would sure like to know about it. We don't want to take our guests for granted, and we sure hope our community doesn't take a theater for granted. Drop me a line at eric@eagletheater.net if you have stories (good or bad) that you want to share. You can also post them here on the blog.

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Not enough trivia entries for our contest to declare a winner, so we are taking the week off.

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One of the quirks of sending out an email newsletter is that it travels at the speed of light, but can arrive in your email mailbox at the speed of snail mail. We send out a newsletter on Thursday, and it can be Friday afternoon or even Saturday when some people get it. How is that possible?

In an effort to thwart SPAM, internet service providers look very closely at incoming mail. Our newsletters get caught in the Mediacom spam filter regularly, and no amount of talking with them seems to fix the problem permanently. One of my email addresses is on AOL, and I usually get the newsletter a day late.

The easiest trivia question ever

Cristi Schiller was the 10th person this week to know that "The Education of Max Bickford" was the answer we were looking for last week. She wins a free pass.

Want to win? Easy question this week, so we are looking for the 33rd correct answer. Send your answer in the subject line of an email you send to trivia@eagletheater.net. One entry per email address, yada, yada, yada.

Katherine Heigl stars in Knocked Up, which premieres at the Eagle on June 1. You may not recognize the name, but if you watch ABC television, she lights up the screen as a doctor in a soap opera medical drama. She co-stars with Ellen Pompeo and Patrick Dempsey. Heigl's character name is "Izzie." Your job is to supply the name of the show. Spelling counts.

Calling all ogres

Summer hours begin Monday, meaning a full slate of shows beginning in the early afternoon and heading off into the night.

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Shrek the Third has been hitting the airwaves with television teasers, interviews, and product tie-ins, including one with McDonald's. It opens Friday. It must be summer, when the blockbusters bloom. Shrek is the second in a troika of big May releases. Spiderman 3 started the month, and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End will be released NEXT Friday.

Check that. Good news alert! Good news alert!

We will show Pirates at 8 p.m. Thursday, May 24 as an alternative to a midnight showing. The best news of all is that the movie will premiere on popcorn Thursday, and if you bring your own container, you get free popcorn. That's our special program to celebrate the end of the movie-showing week and provide some valuable.

Sometimes, however, Thursday is not the end of the week, but the beginning. That happens when we  have a Thursday holiday (Thanksgiving), and movies premiere on that day.With the early Thursday, May 24 showing of Pirates, we are in a similar situation, but we don't want to cancel Popcorn Thursday. That puts us in a ticklish spot...

As most newsletter readers are aware, we pay 60 to 70 percent of the gross ticket sales for film rental during the first week of a blockbuster run, so concession revenues are very important to us. With the studio allowing us an early Thursday showing, effectively giving us a Thursday release, we run the risk of having the worst of both worlds next Thursday night--high film rental and low concession sales.

How can you help? Buy a drink when you get your free popcorn next Thursday! Buy candy! Buy ice cream! Gorge and help us stay in the black for the Pirates premiere. We can seat about 160 people for this Thursday night showing, so you may want to get your tickets early. If you show up and we run out of seats, tickets will be on sale for the following days, when we will show the movie four times a day on two screens.

With Shrek starting the week and Pirates ending it, we are looking to see a lot of faces. Spiderman blew out of the gate with a record first weekend, and the second weekend, it dropped 60 percent nationwide. Locally, it dropped 72 percent.

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The summer looks pretty bright for moviegoers. One June 1, we think we will be showing Knocked Up, a fairly adult R-rated comedy that is expected to have similar appeal as "Wedding Crashers" and "40-Year-Old Virgin." R-rated violent movies generally tank locally, but a bawdy comedy often packs people in the doors. If you click on the link to Knocked Up, you not only go to the official website, but there is a hilarious trailer there. (Parent alert--the trailer is rated for ALL audiences.)

One June 8, Ocean's 13 and the animated Surf's Up will premiere, and that will mark a return to the balanced schedule we love so well. That week, Knocked Up, Shrek 3, and Pirates will be part of the lineup, meaning something for everyone. We like those weeks.

The week after, Fantastic Four 2 premieres, and on June 22, Evan Almighty comes to town. It is going to be a busy June.

Obscure trivia question this week

Joy Keys won last week's trivia contest by knowing that Tobey Maguire starred in Seabiscuit. Way to go, Joy!

This week is a tough one, so we are looking for the 10th correct entry. Send your correct answer in the subject line of an email to trivia@eagletheater.net, and keep your entries down to one per email address.

(Note to Kelli Newlin--remember to open your hotmail account and copy and paste the address into the address line. If you just click on the link above, you will be sending your entry on the company email account, and Gayle McKee of Crawford County Real Estate will find that you are answering trivia instead of making the next sale!).

Here's the question...

The first University of Texas at Austin graduate to win an Oscar, Marcia Gay Harden, has a starring role in The Invisibles, which opens Friday at the Eagle. A versatile actress, she has had movie roles in movies as diverse as Mystic River and Welcome to Mooseport. Today, we are looking for the name of a short-lived, but well-done 2001 television series in which she played the colleague of a college professor played by film star Richard Dreyfuss. Take an educated guess: What was the name of that television series?

Thrillers abound

The weird thing about having two prints of a movie (Spiderman 3) is that the crowds are spread out and we didn't seem busy. Almost five hundred people showed up to see Spidey on the first day, but that was spread out over seven showings. If you want to see this webspinning yarn on our biggest screens, this would be a good week to do it, because Shrek 3 invades on May 18.

If you suffer from arachnophobia, then we've got some other new choices for you this week. 28 Weeks Later is an R rated thriller which follows on the success of 28 Days Later. Here are the genre descriptors for the new film, which sometimes are all you really need to know: horror, suspense, zombies, military, sequel, London, England.

Now the genre may not be your thing (we will see you at Spiderman...), but if it is, you need to know that the movie is getting pretty solid reviews. Here is my favorite from David Edelstein of "New York" magazine:

"It validates my faith in the disreputable."

Three cheers for zombie movies! More than 60 percent of the critics quoted at www.rottentomatoes.com liked the film.

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Less well-reviewed, but more of a PG-13 thriller, is The Invisible, which has a supernatural premise and some great previews. Its two week gross has been $12.4 million. After a low opening week, it was pummeled by Spidey, and it probably deserves better. Come out and rescue the movie from the Box Office Humane Society, where decent movies are either adopted or put down.

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Our summer film series is coming up. Watch for more information about it next week in the blog.

Tobey Maguire trivia

Julie Rutan won the trivia contest again. Congratulations to her for the being the 22nd person to know that "The Longest Yard" was the movie that included a small role by Stone Cold Steve Austin.

Speaking of Stone Cold, that pretty much describes audience reaction to "The Condemned." Might put his career in the deep freeze...

We are looking for the 24th correct answer to this week's question. Put your answer in the subject line to an email addressed to trivia@eagletheater.net. One entry per email address, yada, yada, yada. And Julie is hereby banned from winning until Sept. 1 of this year!

Tobey Maguire has made a career out of playing Peter Parker/Spiderman, receiving more than
$30 million for the three movies. However, young Maguire is not a one trick pony, as evidenced by his 2003 role as jockey Red Pollard in a true story set in The Depression. What was the name of the movie, which was also the name of the horse that moved America's heart?

Web spinning

It's all Spidey, all the time.

For the first time in our brief history, we are getting TWO prints of a movie this week, and of course it's Spiderman 3. If you check out the showtimes at www.eagletheater.net, you will see that you can show up at about any time and Spidey will be starting within a reasonable amount of time.

The reviews have been positive, giving the movie its due as a summer blockbuster with lots of action, special effects, and even points for character development. Critics are divided on whether the movie is the best of the trilogy, but that's not really the point for most people, is it?

The main question for most people is whether the movie is worth seeing, and that is getting a near unanimous "yes."

Spiderman marks the beginning of the summer for us. That's a good thing. The only downside we have seen is that the early blockbuster schedule has cleared the movie release calendar somewhat, and if you are not interested in the blockbusters, there is not as much variety to choose from. We're coming off one of the worst weeks ever, with holdover products and a weak opening of The Condemned.

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If you are not up to seeing a BIG movie, then we suggest a small one, In the Land of Women, starring Adam Brody from the television series, "The O.C." It's a romantic comedy and drama, the first film for director Jon Kasdan.

We hesitated to book this movie because we really don't expect it to do big things. Critics have been divided on it, so it doesn't qualify as an Eagle Choice film, but it looks, well, interesting. The movie is an additional pain in the butt for us because we have to go to another theater and pick it up ourselves rather than get it delivered.

We are hoping we have earned some good customer karma for the effort and those looking for a Spiderman alternative will show up in enough numbers to balance out the cosmic wheel.

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As I write this, we are entertaining 103 students from Parkside Elementary in Lawrenceville. They have stopped by to watch Meet the Robinsons, another fine superhero alternative. We love special showings and we will be hosting the RHS after prom this weekend. Hutsonville and Casey students are showing up next week for a visit.