DC in Ed Zwick's DEFIANCE

[Thelma]

Conversation With... Ed Zwick

Film director calls Defiance "A necessary historical redress"

WESTPORT - On January 16, "Defiance" opens in wide release across the U.S. and around the world. Starring Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber, the film is based on the true story of the Bielski brothers, Tuvia and Zus, who led a Jewish partisan group in the forests of Nazi-occupied Belarussia, and helped keep alive more than 1,200 Jewish men, women, and children until war's end. The Bielskis' heroism represents the largest rescue of Jews by Jews during World War II.

The film is based on the book, "Defiance: The Bielski Partisans," by Westport resident Nechama Tec, professor emerita of sociology at UConn Stamford. (See "Conversation with...Nachama Tec," Jewish Ledger, Jan. 2, 2009). Director Ed Zwick spoke by phone with a group of invited journalists from Jewish publications around the U.S., including the Ledger.

Q: How did making the movie affect you as the child of a Holocaust survivor?

A: I was raised as an assimilated Jewish kid in Chicago and it's not as if I did not have awareness of those who had come before and of those who were lost. I think every kid growing up as I did in the late '50s and early '60s was exposed to any number of things. Certainly, as I grew older, I came to know much more. But it's one thing to be from afar and to be very much insulated in the popular culture which celebrated all sorts of other kinds of heroes, and quite another to go to the place and to walk that ground - it is hallowed ground - and to see a city like Vilnius which was once a Jewish city, and to see the fact that it is anything but that now and to be in forests where suddenly you discover you're walking on places that were mass graves and are not even marked or known because there's such denial in Eastern Europe. So I think finally it became very personal in the projection of myself: But for an accident of birth and a generation, to think of who I might have been in that situation and how I might have been affected; what might I have done, and would I have done anything at all? So it inevitably spiraled into something very personal.

Additionally, there's also the recognition of people who reminded me of those I had known so clearly and so dearly but so long ago: their faces, their accents, their bodies, their humor. A lot of times you forget what you know or you forget what you once knew and then you're reminded.

Q: Was it always on your agenda to someday do a Holocaust or Jewish heritage film?

A: I actually think that it probably was antithetical to an agenda, because so much brilliant work had been done, whether by artists, historians, or philosophers. So I think I was almost averse to it. There was a childhood friend of mine, Clay Frohman, whose grandfather formed a Conservative synagogue with mine in Highland Park, Ill., named Beth El, and he and I had been to Hebrew school together. When he said he'd read an obituary in The New York Times about Zus Bielski's death, and that he believed there was in it a story about the Holocaust, I said, "What could I possibly have to add?"

But it really wasn't until I read that story and then read Nechama Tec's book, and then that led me to the family of the Bielskis and to many of the survivors, and to much of the literature of resistance, which in fact has grown increasingly over the years; it's a real scholarship now. That's when I determined that it was something I really had to do, and that was about 12 years ago.

I realized in that moment that I had made movies about African-Americans and Africans and about Japanese and about Arab-Americans, and I'd never really done anything about the Jews in film. I certainly had in television but I felt that it indeed was something I needed to do and I didn't know it would take me 10 years to try to get it going.

Q: How difficult was it to adapt Nechama Tec's book into a script?

A: Nechama's book is a book of sociology in which she tries to identify certain themes and the dialectic between rescue and revenge and there's very little in it that in fact has cohesive narrative so it behooved us to try to identify all these different events from her book and from other sources. We met many other survivors of the group; the family gave me an unpublished autobiography that Tuvia had written at the end of the war, and also several hours of videotape that they had recorded of him talking about his life at that moment. And so it really was the dramatist's job of trying to weave together some kind of coherent narrative that imputes psychological motive to these anecdotes. The surprising and gratifying thing to me was, after having done it, sons of the Bielskis felt that we had so closely identified characteristics of their parents and some of the assumptions we had made that were brash at times turned out to be borne out.

We very recently had a screening in New York at the Jewish Heritage Museum where we brought together 19 of the survivors to all see the movie with their children and their children's children and they too were very validating of some of those assumptions and more than that, they were very emotional thinking that we had given a voice to something that had never had a voice, that they had never adequately been able to express to their children - it could now be understood. That was particularly gratifying. Since that time, I've shown the movie in San Francisco, Boston, Toronto, Philadelphia, London, and Paris, and in every place that I have been, it turns out that at least one or two of these survivors have appeared - some from the Bielskis themselves and some from various other forests, whether in Poland or the Ukraine or what have you.

Q: Hollywood makes many movies about the Holocaust, but not about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Would you ever consider making a movie that shows the Jews as the moral protagonists of that conflict?

A: As a dramatist, I don't want to set off making any film with an agenda. My background is first as a journalist, and it's the research that's the most important part to me. So were I to make any story of that sort, it would evolve out of what I discovered in that particular story. To set out with a political agenda, saying, "I'm going to show the Jews in Israel only as the moral side," would be a kind of agit-prop that wouldn't really appeal to me as a dramatist. Not that it might not come out that way, but I can't say that that's the film that I would make, finally. God knows, at this moment certainly it is very difficult to parse morality. If ever there is anything in the world right now that is full of moral complexity, it would be the Middle East, and not only the events of this week but of the past number of years.

I don't know if we could encompass it adequately in a two-hour film, because a film is so necessarily reductionist and I would hate to do something that was painting with so broad a brush and would not adequately serve all of the complexity. I'm not sure that I see much out of Hollywood that describes what's happening in the Middle East.

Even in the midst of such moral clarity of the Shoah, there even was moral complexity in the behavior of the Bielskis. But when you're talking about the Middle East, we're not talking about genocide. You're talking about any number of very vexing and very upsetting circumstances.

It was pretty easy to talk about those whose lives were in this moment of absolute peril as a result of a very systemic, orchestrated plot against them by those who were their neighbors and those who were creating an enormous policy. For me, I was trying to talk in this movie about the difference between powerlessness and passivity. The mythology is of the passivity of the Jews. What I've discovered is that, in every circumstance where there was some possibility of resistance or escape, particularly in the natural world - the forests of Bialystok or Lithuania or Yugoslavia or Romania, these places where Jews could take to the woods - they did. To me, to add the impulse to resist to the deaths of the six million only makes the tragedy greater. But I'm loathe to analogize between this situation and the contemporary one.

Q: What was your political motivation to make the movie?

A: There was some necessary historical redress. We have inevitably and necessarily devoted thousands of pages and thousands of hours of film, and whole institutions and organizations to the memorialization and the commemoration of the six million who died, but there has been remarkably little about the impulse to resist. I think that that kind of corrective would add a necessary complexity to the portrait. Movies, finally, are a set of very strong iconic images; that's what you take away. The iconography of the Holocaust has been pretty monolithic when it comes to Jews, and no group is a monolith. It was important to me to make that a much more complex portrait.

Q: Was the screenwriter inspired by Biblical characters?

A: Clay [Frohman] and I wrote the screenplay together and there are sets of brothers that occurred to me. One was Moses and Aaron because one spoke through the other often and together they formed a unit. But in the moment of staging when they have a fight and Daniel reaches for that rock and holds it above his brother, certainly that Biblical image of Cain and Abel is evoked. But there were a lot of images that were evoked: the image of those people going from one place to the other, forced to leave, and being pursued, that to me is the image of the Diaspora and an image out of Exodus, and certainly that was in my mind. When you go back to Biblical sources, you read the Book of Judges or the Book of Joshua, and there are so many warriors - Judith and Deborah and David.

Q: Why did you decide to end the film when you did, and not include the entire Bielski story?

A: I felt that the fact that they got through their first winter, and they made it from one place to the other, and there was the possibility of them surviving, that that was enough. Indeed, there's a story about what happens the next two years, there's a story about them when they're in Israel, and then there's a story about when they're driving trucks and cabs in New York. At a certain point, you just have to decide that this is the story we're telling and it's implicit in this story that there are other themes that resonate outward. I always hope that a movie can be not just the final word on something but rather a goad or a prompt for those to read more and to look more deeply and that's all available to be learned.

http://www.jewishledger.com/articles/20 ... news02.txt

[Thelma]

Crave Online: How did you develop a brotherly bond with Daniel Craig?

Liev Schreiber: We were in the middle of the woods in Lithuania. I was just so impressed with the fact that this major motion picture star wasn’t going back to his trailer. You know, in between takes. It was freezing out. Some of those set-ups took an hour and a half, two hours to accomplish and he’s out there the whole time. We were out there with nothing to do but sort of spend time with each other. Telling stories, having snowball fights, we were very childish. There was a lot of goofiness and I think that was about us recreating the childhood that we hadn’t spent together.

http://www.craveonline.com/articles/fil ... rview.html

[Daskedusken]

Very good reads. Thx Thelma

[Thelma]

Very good reads. Thx Thelma

you're welcome

[calypso]

http://commanderbond.net/components/qui ... item=52943

5 questions to Daniel about Defiance

When Daniel Craig took over the role of James Bond, the selection turned heads. A ruggedly handsome, serious-minded 007 -- with light-colored hair? Two big hits later, no one's doubting the pick. Craig has won critical praise for "Casino Royale" and "Quantum of Solace." He also has taken on some choice roles outside the series, such as his character in "Defiance," which opens Friday. He plays Tuvia Bielski, one of three brothers (Liev Schreiber and Jaime Bell play the others) who led a Jewish pocket of resistance in the woods of Belarus during World War II and helped save 1,200 people. It's hinted that Craig's and Schreiber's characters are low-grade smugglers. Craig, a dry, friendly sort, spoke recently about his life as an actor and his work in "Defiance."


QUESTION: Did you know about this part of World War II history?

ANSWER: No, I didn't. I had vague memories of knowing about Jewish resistance, but only that it was wiped out mercilessly. You know, pockets of it. But I didn't know the scale of it. And just in this area alone, there were 20,000, I think, that were resisting. A lot of them were wiped out, but this story has been hidden away for all sorts of reasons. But it's extraordinary that they didn't just survive or scrape out a living. They almost seemed to thrive.

Q: Why hasn't this story been told before?

A: I think the truth of it is, the people involved didn't want to think about that. We don't shy away from that in the film. We suggest that these people, to survive and do what they did, the premise is they were criminals. It's just a label to give them, to say they were used to this kind of life. They were used to reacting to people. They were used to reacting aggressively to people because that's the kind of boys they were. That's probably one of the reasons they survived, but it's also probably one of the reasons that they didn't want to talk about it. ... God forbid that any of us should ever be in that situation, but hopefully that's a question people will ask themselves as they walk out: "What would I do in that situation?"

Q: For the resistance fighters to hide that effectively, the forests must have been incredibly dense.

A: We were filming 100 kilometers from where it actually happened, in the same chain of forests. You walk 20 yards into this place and you're lost. There's no reference whatsoever. ... The place we were filming is like a fairy tale. If you imagine Hansel and Gretel, it's exactly that. You walk into the woods and you expect wolves to come running out of the next clearing.

Q: How big an effect has playing James Bond had on your career?

A: Of course it's had a very positive effect on the way things are. I've got two successful movies on my back as it stands at the moment, very successful movies. It's made things a little easier in many respects, (but) ultimately there's only a finite number of good scripts out there. There's only a finite number of interesting subjects. You have to go looking for it. Something doesn't just stop coming to you. I get more offers but not necessarily offers of good stuff.

Q: A friend who heard about "Defiance" asked if you were a resistance fighter who takes off his shirt.

A: (Laughs.) It's a living.

[Thelma]

Director Zwick defies the typical WWII film


"Frighteningly true": Defiance filmmaker Edward Zwick and star Daniel Craig at the Museum of Tolerance, a Holocaust exhibit in Los Angeles. In the film, Craig plays one of the Bielski brothers, who led Jewish refugees to fight the Nazis.

LOS ANGELES — It all started with little boys playing war.

In the late 1950s, Edward Zwick was a little boy running around his suburban Chicago neighborhood with friends, pretending to fight the Axis powers like the heroic soldiers or flying aces from their favorite World War II movies.

"Gregory Peck seemed to star in all of them —12 O'Clock High, The Guns of Navarone," says Zwick, now 56, who grew up to become the director of Glory, Legends of the Fall, The Last Samurai and Blood Diamond. "But," he adds, "to be a Jewish kid was to hear other stories …"

Those were about the Holocaust, and Zwick was secretly troubled by the all-too-easy question kids often ask, which has a million hard answers: Why didn't they fight back?

"You try to reconcile the difference between the stories you heard about the victimization of people like you, and then these other heroes," he says of the screen fighters he idolized. "It had some kind of pain attached to it, really."

He has finally gotten to tell his own story of tough, fighting Jews, and he did it with the help of 007.

Daniel Craig took the lead role in Zwick's Defiance, which expands nationwide today, as one of four Jewish brothers who lead fellow refugees into the forests of Eastern Europe to wage guerrilla war on the Nazis and their supporters.

With Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace making him an international star, Craig wanted to play an action hero who was based in reality and not just an elaborate fantasy.

"The reality of the story is so much wilder than we could ever really portray," Craig says, sitting with Zwick for an interview at Los Angeles' Museum of Tolerance, a Holocaust history center. "I read and reread the continuing struggle of these people, and it is like a kind of adventure story. They survived, on the run, and the German army was sent in to dig them out, and they escaped."

Hundreds of refugees, old and young, sick and healthy, survived in the woods in makeshift shelters for two years while the elder Bielski brothers — played by Craig, Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell — kept order among the group, raided area farms for food and led strikes on Nazi-aligned authorities.

"They weren't prepared for this. No one was prepared for this, but they were prepared for action," Craig says of the Bielskis. "They were tough guys, in trouble with the law constantly, and they got their own backs. Whenever anybody locally double-crossed them, they took retribution. So once the event happened, they were prepared."

Zwick became aware of the story in 1995 when one of the brothers died of old age and an obituary recounting their struggle ran in The New York Times, which led him to a deeper chronicle of the story in the book Defiance by Nechama Tec.

Years later, persuading Hollywood studios to make the film proved fruitless, but prospects improved after Craig joined the cast, and Zwick was able to pay for the $30 million project by selling international rights in advance.

The little boy from Winnetka, Ill., finally had his Jewish war movie.

It's one that people such as Mitch Braff are happy to see. He runs JewishPartisans.org, which shares the stories of those who resisted, and he says that because Defiance is a David-vs.-Goliath-style action movie starring an A-list actor, it will go a long way toward engaging students.

"We're very excited. As a small, educational non-profit, we never dreamed to reach so many people," Braff says. "Non-Jewish kids say they have more respect for Jews after they see this film, and Jewish kids have a sense of pride and strength that their people were able to fight back."

As Craig and Zwick walk through the corridors of the Museum of Tolerance, flanked on all sides by video displays about American G.I.s who liberated concentration camps and non-Jews who hid refugees or helped them escape, they come to a basement-level display that is a full-scale re-creation of the entrance to one of the camps.

A hush falls over them, and they walk through the rest of the exhibit as if in a holy place. Despite all their work making their own full-scale camps in the forests of Lithuania for the movie, the actor and director acknowledge being humbled by the reality of what they were portraying.

Though many survived under the protection of Craig's character, Tuvia, it came at a cost.

"The basics of life, getting up, washing, eating. If you get that right, you can survive for months. But can you imagine things like cholera got around a camp like that? These are weak people, mostly old people, and young people," Craig says. "You just think, 'How in the hell did they keep that together?' The truth of it was, he ruled it with an iron fist, and the stories about him executing people or getting rid of people are frighteningly true."

For all the historical significance, Zwick acknowledges the story comes back to something very simple, a kind of primal urge of fight or flight — or both.

"The impulse to survive is this undeniable thing," he says, noting similar stories, both real and fantasized. "It's in Robin Hood, it's in the Brothers Grimm. The woods are always a place of transformation in literature. It's where you go, where the lovers go, where the madmen goes to be away from society and be safe or be changed."

Craig says the Bielskis' success may have partly come from playing war as children, just as Craig and Zwick did as boys — though the Bielskis' backyard had been the dense Belorussian forest.

"They knew it like the back of their hand," Craig says. "They had grown up in those forests, and anybody who followed them in would get lost because they could lead them anywhere they wanted. It was a place of security, after all the devastation."

http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/new ... htm?csp=34

[Daskedusken]

Director Zwick defies the typical WWII film

http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/new ... htm?csp=34

I really enjoyed that article, thanks Thelma.

[Thelma]

Director Zwick defies the typical WWII film

http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/new ... htm?csp=34

I really enjoyed that article, thanks Thelma.

You're welcome Aragorn

[Faustine]

Good Point

Benicio deserve the nomination. El argentino is a fantastic movie and he IS Ernesto Guevera

You know why I don´t believe that Daniel is nominated? For the controversy of last year on which 4 principal prizes gave it to Europeans. It is a bilge but that I believe that it is going to weigh.

I think Micky , Frank , and Sean are sure things and Clint . I'm surprised we haven't heard more about Benicio . Dan don't have a chance . He wasn't nominated for a film critics , GG , or SAG award and those are the ones that le4ad up to the Oscars . Just cuz we love him doesn't mean he gets nominated for stuff .

Benicio wasn't nominated either and he's the one who deserves it the most...The role of his life.

Don´t forget something: Benicio play a icon of Cuban Revolution. I can´t imagine a award for this in the States.

I´m from Argentina and know deeply all about Che Guevara and Benicio create a perfect Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, the man after the myth

[advicky]

International Film Music Critics Announce 2008 Nominees

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE FOR A DRAMA FILM

* The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, music by James Horner
* Che, music by Alberto Iglesias
* The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, music by Alexandre Desplat
* Defiance, music by James Newton Howard
* Milk, music by Danny Elfman

http://www.ropeofsilicon.com/article/in ... 8-nominees

[Daskedusken]

Fingers crossed

[advicky]

Moral ambiguity underlies film of Bielski partisans
New film's cast and director wrestled with ethics of fighting evil in portaying the Bielski brothers

The brothers Tuvia, Zus and Asael Bielski saved some 1,200 of their fellow Jews during World War II by helping them to elude and fight the Nazis for several years in the deep woods of their Belarusian homeland.

That's more people than Oskar Schindler saved. Yet the man celebrated by the Oscar-winning movie Schindler's List is considerably better known than the Bielskis, whose heroism finally gets big-screen attention in Defiance, the new Ed Zwick movie.

The Bielskis never liked talking about the war. They stayed mum even after surviving brothers Tuvia and Zus (Asael died during the war) moved to America in peacetime to find jobs, wives and long, quiet lives.

They weren't alone in their reticence, says actor Liev Schreiber, who plays the fiery middle brother, Zus, in the film (Daniel Craig plays elder brother Tuvia and Jamie Bell plays younger brother Asael).

People who actually endured the Holocaust are often unable to adequately express their thoughts, Schreiber said. They instead choose not to say anything.

"In researching the Holocaust for work I've done in the past and for my own film (Everything Is Illuminated), I found very few people willing to talk to me," he said at a recent West Hollywood press junket promoting Defiance.

"They just didn't want to talk about it, and they wanted to know why I wanted to talk about it. They were suspicious of me. Being an actor in a film was not a good enough reason to talk about it."

There were additional complications in getting to the truth about the Bielskis, Schreiber said, even though much of the story had been revealed in Defiance: The Bielski Partisans, the 1993 book by Nechama Tec that the film is based upon.

There is no doubt the Bielskis were heroes, but their struggle against the Nazis followed no standard rules of engagement. These were tough rural men, desperately fighting to save themselves and their compatriots from a brutal and genocidal foe. They did some things they were later ashamed to speak about.

Said Schreiber: "I get in trouble for talking about this, but there's a streak of violence in the acts they did. It's really horrible. American GIs had a term called a `Bielski Enema,' which is where you take a potato masher grenade and put it in a rectum of a German officer and watch the person explode from the inside out.

"Another thing they did with people who collaborated (with the Nazis) is they would decapitate them. They would put their heads with signs in the town square: `This Is What Happens To Collaborators.'

"These are documented facts about the Bielskis. When I looked at that, I thought, `These guys saw some things and did some things they don't care to remember. They don't care for anyone else to discuss it.' You could have a dialectic about how heroic they were, but eventually you're going to come back to this thing."

Schreiber doesn't judge the Bielskis. "I was really interested in the moral ambiguity of what they've done and to me that's what makes them heroic. It's not the other stuff. It's the vulnerabilities, the cracks in the armour, I think, that equipped them to do what they did."

Schreiber's co-star Craig, who knows a thing or two about moral ambiguity with his "licence to kill" as the latest James Bond, said he was attracted to the story of Defiance precisely because the Bielskis weren't saints.

"That's what fascinated me about this, really. It's obvious if anyone watches the film, if anyone reads the book, if you sort of understand the storyline, that these people did bad things," Craig said.

"They did very, very bad things and you always have to look at the net result, which is that 1,200 people walked out of this situation and survived. But keeping that many people together and under control, there were power struggles and major shifts in power ...

"The question is: `What would you do in a situation like this? How would you defend yourself?' You'd like to think that you'd protect your family, that you'd protect the people around you. But what would you be prepared to do to actually make that succeed, to protect yourself and your family?"

It's important to look at the Bielskis in the context of their times, said Bell, the film's third lead actor, who, as younger brother Asael, has to grow up in a hurry.

"We have no idea of the circumstances back then. We can't really comprehend what it must have been like, and to survive you had to do some pretty brutal things, whether it's murdering your neighbour for food, or murdering another guy for some medicine so that people can stay alive.

"The conditions were incredibly brutal. And I think that's why Tuvia Bielski did not want this story to be told, purely because it was too hard for him to explain why he had to do certain things. He's a hero because he saved lives, and that's why the story should be told. I think that Ed (Zwick, the director) wanted to blend the fact that they did have to do some pretty brutal things, but there were also acts of heroism."

Zwick (Glory, Blood Diamond) did want to do just that. Like his actors, he saw the Bielskis as diamonds in the rough – flawed, but still magnificent.

In doing his own research for the film, Zwick spoke to other Holocaust survivors. "We met many guys who had done these extraordinary things," Zwick said.

"It was described to me once. A man said it was as if he was looking at things through a window, and that he had opened that window, gone through it to do what he did, and stepped back out and shut that window."

http://www.thestar.com/Entertainment/article/571740

[advicky]

Finally, Edward Zwick’s Defiance (Paramount Vantage), the PTA champ for the past two weekends, has expanded to 1,789 playdates, and it has scored a nice upside surprise. With a cast that includes Daniel Craig (Quantum of Solace), Live Schriber (The Manchurian Candidate) and Jamie Bell (Billy Elliot), the film has failed to generate much love from awards voters, but it is selling tickets. Defiance seized $2.9M on its first day of wide release, and it seems headed for a possible $12.47M by Monday night.

EXCLUSIVE STEVE MASON EARLY FRIDAY ESTIMATES
1. NEW - Paul Blart: Mall Cop (Sony) - $9.5M, $3,022 PTA, $9.5M cume
2. NEW – Notorious (Fox Searchlight) - $9M, $5,495 PTA, $9M cume
3. NEW - My Bloody Valentine 3-D (Lionsgate) - $7.5M, $2,960 PTA, $7.5M cume
4. Gran Torino (Warner Bros) - $6.5M, $2,187, $57.49M cume
5. NEW – Hotel For Dogs (Dreamworks/Paramount) - $4.7M, $1,437 PTA, $4.7M cume
6. Bride Wars (Fox) - $3.55M, $1,100 PTA, $29.37M cume
7. Defiance (Paramount Vantage) - $2.9M, $1,621 PTA, $3.24M cume
8. Marley & Me (Fox) - $2.3M, $779 PTA, $128.7M cume
9. The Unborn (Rogue) - $2.2M, $933 PTA, $25.43M cume
10. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Paramount) - $1.7M, $765 PTA, $98.72M cume
11. Bedtime Stories (Disney) - $1.65M, $630 PTA, $100.55M cume
12. Slumdog Millionaire (Fox Searchlight) - $1.3M, $2,234 PTA, $38.13M cume

EXCLUSIVE STEVE MASON EARLY 4-DAY ESTIMATES
1. NEW - Paul Blart: Mall Cop (Sony) - $36M, $11,450 PTA, $36M cume
2. NEW – Notorious (Fox Searchlight) - $29M, $17,705 PTA, $29M cume
3. Gran Torino (Warner Bros) - $26.65M, $8,967, $77.64M cume
4. NEW – Hotel For Dogs (Dreamworks/Paramount) - $26.32M, $8,046 PTA, $26.32M cume
5. NEW - My Bloody Valentine 3-D (Lionsgate) - $22.5M, $8,879 PTA, $22.5M cume
6. Bride Wars (Fox) - $14.91, $4,619 PTA, $40.73M cume
7. Defiance (Paramount Vantage) - $12.47M, $6,970 PTA, $12.81M cume
8. Marley & Me (Fox) - $10.58M, $3,584 PTA, $136.98M cume
9. Bedtime Stories (Disney) - $9.3M, $3,551 PTA, $108.2M cume
10. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Paramount) - $7.5M, $3,347 PTA, $104.52M cume
11. The Unborn (Rogue) - $7.92M, $3,357 PTA, $31.15M cume
12. Slumdog Millionaire (Fox Searchlight) - $5.59M, $9,605 PTA, $42.42M cume

http://www.slashfilm.com/2009/01/17/box ... kend-ever/

[Germangirl]

Wonderful news - lets hope it continues like this...its a good film and deserves recognition.

[calypso]

i cannot make that in my mind

7th? only $12 by Monday? that low? or is good?

i see films open and by mondya they have $30 plus?