1. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse: $69 million ($161 million total)

There is no possible way that the opening for Eclipse can be seen as anything other than a huge success. However! Despite laying claim to the widest release ever, Eclipse couldn't top the $200 million five-day gross that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen opened to last summer. And its three-day total pales in comparison to the $142.8 million that New Moon gobbled up in November -- though that should be expected with the release spread out over five days. Those quibbles aside, another $20 million in ticket sales on Monday will allow Eclipse to break the Fourth of July weekend record of $180 million held by Spider-Man 2. It's official: Vampires are the new apple pie.

2. The Last Airbender: $40.6 million ($57 million total)

Maybe being the worst movie of the year isn't such a bad thing. Despite near across the board hatred from critics, The Last Airbender managed $40.6 million over the three-day weekend and will likely top $70 million in receipts come Monday. Granted those numbers aren't herculean, but consider: The three-day opening for The Last Airbender is bigger than the starts for Sex and the City 2, Prince of Persia, The A-Team and Knight and Day. It's also the third best start for director M. Night Shyamalan, behind Signs and The Village. Couple that with an international-friendly product and this isn't the Waterworld-style bloodbath many were expecting. Now let's see how much things tumble in weekend two...

3. Toy Story 3: $30.1 million ($289 million total)

The bad news is that Toy Story 3 dropped almost 50 percent this weekend and fell into third place. The good news? So what! On Monday, the threequel will pass Up to become the second highest grossing film in the history of Pixar and it's less than $50 million away from passing Finding Nemo to top the list. Everyone loves Buzz and Woody... except for those pesky Russians.

4. Grown Ups: $18.5 million ($77 million total)

Typical Adam Sandler. Off 54 percent, Grown Ups will easily cross $100 million and probably top out around $120 -- which would put it in the same ballpark as I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry and 50 First Dates. One major advantage that Grown Ups has for even greater success, however, is the calendar. The next big comedy of the summer -- Steve Carell's Dinner for Schmucks -- doesn't get released until the end of July.

5. Knight and Day: $10.2 million ($45.5 million total)

If you put Knight & Day in the same arena as the similarly themed Duplicity -- remember, with Clive Owen and Julia Roberts? -- then the $45.5 million grossed thus far is more than adequate. But only people working at Twentieth Century Fox are likely to cut this film that much slack. Down 49 percent, Knight & Day will be lucky to cross $80 million domestically. Maybe next time Tom Cruise should try playing a vampire. Again.

Monday: Dateline NBC: Vegas Undercover
Normally, we make a point to shy away from these Dateline NBC specials reports, but, since we’re still on a contact high from watching The Hangover (backlash be damned!), we’ll make an exception here. Chris Hanson, obviously taking a break from outing sexual predators, goes undercover with the Vegas police department to explore the seedy underbelly of Sin City. Expect hookers, pimps, drug dealers and gunrunners. Don’t expect to see Mike Tyson’s tiger. [NBC, 10 p.m.]

Tuesday: HawthoRNe
Nurses are so hot right now! Just a week after the premiere of Nurse Jackie, here comes HawthoRNe, starring Jada Pinkett-Smith as Christina Hawthorne, a tough-as-nails Chief Nursing Officer (hence the capitalized “RN” in the title). We give TNT credit for producing yet another series with a strong female lead (Ms. Pinkett-Smith joins Holly Hunter and Kyra Sedgwick on the network’s roster of ladies), but we’re not quite convinced that this earnest show is going to cut through the clutter. At the very least it might be worth checking out to see Michael Vartan, no doubt fresh out of the Witness Protection Program, in a co-starring role as the hospital’s very own McDreamy. [TNT, 9 p.m.]

Wednesday: Gordon Ramsay’s F-Word
This is the iPod Shuffle of reality shows. F-Word (which either derives its name from the restaurant on the show, or, from Mr. Ramsay’s favorite expletive) combines the elements of no less than five types of programs (cooking, celebrity interview, adventure, competition and even Japanese game shows), and whips everything together to create a constantly entertaining hodgepodge of forward momentum. Unlike his brash and contemptible persona on Kitchen Confidential, here Mr. Ramsay seems decidedly laid-back by comparison. Oh, don’t worry: He’s still overcaffeinated and cursing like a sailor, but, on F-Word, he’s also wildly charming and pretty darn hilarious. To wit: The fourth season premiere features Mr. Ramsay asking former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell how many “balls” she’s had in her mouth at one time. Meatballs, you dirty bird! Though considering this show is called F-Word, we can understand the confusion. [BBC-America, 9 p.m.]

Thursday: The Happening
The scariest part of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening isn’t that the Earth’s plant life starts killing us pesky humans, but rather that some studio executive actually green-lighted this patently ridiculous enviro-horror film. No one is safe from this bomb, least of all Mark Wahlberg, who preens like a confused child and winds up being out-acted by a tree. True story! Don’t take our word for it, though: You really need to experience The Happening for yourself. [Action Max, 8 p.m.]

Friday: The Doors
On the list of Oliver Stone’s historical polemics, The Doors is but a footnote. Still, despite being a completely standard biopic, the film has great charms, mostly in thanks to its cast. Meg Ryan plays against type as Jim Morrison’s dead sexy and tripped-out true love; as the Lizard King himself, Val Kilmer is absolutely riveting; and Kevin Dillon does Johnny Drama proud as drummer John Densmore. Victory! [HBO, 3 a.m.]

There’s a moment in the boring, brain-dead new M. Night Shyamalan film The Happening when Mark Wahlberg turns to the camera, trying to suppress a grin, and asks, “Can this really be happening?” I ask the same question every week, but it just gets worse.

It’s not a good sign when a director casts Mr. Wahlberg, a ruddy rapper-turned-actor who looks like a choirboy selling crack in the apse, as a science teacher pondering the mystery of why honeybees are disappearing from coast to coast. To be a good scientist, you must have a healthy respect for the laws of nature, he tells his class. I am paraphrasing Professor Wahlberg, of course. Nothing of real significance is worth quoting directly from any film written by M. Night Shyamalan. And you could stuff the entire plot of The Happening into a walnut shell. But thanks to the excellent cinematographer Tak Fujimoto, there are layers of atmosphere worth noting. Two women are sitting on a bench in Central Park when a curious breeze rustles the leaves. One of them reaches for a darning needle and rams it through her jugular vein. Cut to a nearby construction site where the same breeze reaches the hard hats, who leap from a tower scaffold above the city and crash to their deaths below. No, it’s not fallout from the fleshpots of terrorism. According to CNN, that breeze carries airborne, brain-altering chemical toxins that are driving New Yorkers to mass suicide. The infected area is restricted to the Northeast, but it’s spreading. (Nothing seems to be happening in Los Angeles, but how would they know?) When New York is evacuated, Professor Wahlberg and his wife (Zooey Deschanel) are invited to join fellow faculty member John Leguizamo to hide out at his mother’s house in Philadelphia. On the way, the train comes to a grinding halt and the passengers are discharged in the forests of Pennsylvania. From this point on, a movie with so much potential for suspense just plods along, cataloging a chain reaction of violent copycat suicides as people blow their brains out and throw themselves into the lions den at the zoo. Taking refuge in an abandoned farmhouse, they run into a screechy, hysterical old crone (Betty Buckley) who smashes her head through 29 glass windows, but mercifully does not sing anything from Cats. In the end, the plague seems to have reached the Champs Elysées in Paris, threatening a sequel with subtitles.

What is going on here? The explanation may make you reach for a gun yourself. According to Mr. Shyamalan, it’s simple: an extension of Al Gore’s environmental warning that if we don’t stop destroying our planet, then our planet will get even. For a movie with the potential for so much global-warming electricity, it’s disappointingly low on voltage. How is it possible for one writer-producer-director hyphenate to raise financing for six films, when each one is worse than the one before? His premises are equally predictable and always the same: Unexplained psychic phenomena can happen to perfectly ordinary people. Trouble is, in a Shyamalan flick, an exasperating absence of requisite cinematic creepiness is always guaranteed. They don’t make sense, and they are as empty in the center as a chocolate-covered cherry in which the assembly line left out the maraschino. They’re so kindergarten-level scary that I always figure everything out early. Even The Sixth Sense, his only critical and box office success, was too obvious to rate even one surprise. Minutes after it began, when Bruce Willis entered the party and nobody spoke to or even looked at him, I said, “He’s dead; they don’t see him because he’s a ghost.” Some people are no fun at the movies.

rreed@observer.com

Now, we went into the screening ready to have our pants scared off. From what we’d gathered from previews, the mysterious, nefarious attacking force in The Happening was nature itself – and honestly, at this point, what could be more terrifying than that? We won’t reveal any secrets (except to say that anyone waiting through the third act for a mind-blowing last-minute twist are sure to be disappointed), but will say that we were left with an awful lot of questions that had nothing to do with the movie’s plot. Like, how on earth did this movie get made? There were lines of dialogue that felt so absurdly clunky, so clearly thrown in for expository reasons, that other critics in the screening started laughing. The actual premise of the movie is an interesting one (a new genre: the eco-thriller), but even though the production notes call it a “lightning-paced, heart-pounding paranoid thriller,” even the action-y, supposed suspenseful scenes feel muddled and slow.

And … it didn’t make a whole lot of sense! There are moments scattered throughout this 91 minute film (in theory short, but in actuality loooong) where Mr. Shyamalan nails a particularly creepy and poignant image. But most of the time, instead of showing us (beyond some graphic bits that garnered the much-talked-about R rating) what to be scared of, he – or more specifically his two leads, end up telling us. Which brings us to the tragedy of Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel, who star, and were somehow forced to deliver their lines like bad soap stars gone amuck (at one point, Mr. Wahlberg delivers an un-ironic ‘Oh no!’). Ms. Deschanel, previously lovely and quirky, is twitchy and odd. Her main direction seems to have been to open her eyes wide and tap her fingers a lot. We kept thinking about how excited these two must have been to have landed a big summer movie like this one, and it made us feel … sad.

After the screening, a woman in the restroom asked us if we thought that perhaps Mr. Shyamalan was trying to make an Ed Wood-like old-fashioned disaster movie – that perhaps that was the twist: It was supposed to be this bad! But sadly, we don’t think so. And, in the end, maybe that’s the scariest part of The Happening.

“The [project] that I love is The Happening,” he told The Daily Transom, although he kept mum about the nitty-gritty. “You know how M. Knight is,” he said, “you’re given the coded scripts with your name on it; you can’t get any changes unless you hand in the other changes.” Mr. Leguizamo did assure us, however, that the discreet director is “amazing to work with,” he said, later citing cast-and-crew perks like a group trip to Fiji.

Besides listening to his favorite “hot” new album this season, Alicia Key’s As I Am,” he is also working on writing new material, although he immediately added that he will not challenge the writer’s strike.

Grumbling a little, Mr. Leguizamo went on, “I’m writing for myself, not to sell. I’m not crossing any lines, I’m not a scab or a rat. I don’t want that rat in front of my apartment building!... I’m stuck with all this stuff.”

Lady in the Water is described by Mr. Shyamalan as a “bedtime story” he told to his kids. Do not even think of repeating it to yours unless you plan to turn them into runaways, orphans or worse. No sane person could do justice to the plot, since the plot is as comprehensible as the ukulele of Tiny Tim and the voice of Tom Waits, but it goes something like this: A strange apartment building called the Cove stands in the middle of what looks like a jungle in Tanganyika, but is really Philadelphia.

The super of this U-shaped, five-story, 57-unit junkyard is a creep with Tourette’s syndrome named Cleveland Heep, played by Paul Giamatti, who ticks and stutters his way through a battery of mannerisms in a nerdy performance that is more annoying and affected than usual, which is saying a lot. Mr. Heep is always finding flotsam in the drain, and there is something wrong with the swimming pool. The water is slimy and at the bottom there’s a secret world inhabited by a weird woman the color of kindergarten paste called a “narf.” The narf, named Story and played by director Ron Howard’s daughter, Bryce Dallas Howard, climbs out of the water naked and sleeps on Mr. Heep’s sofa. She’s a spirit who is trying to get back to the mythological Blue World at the bottom of the ocean on the wings of a giant eagle called the Great Eatlon, but she’s in danger of being clawed to death by vicious green carnivores called “scrunts” who look like warthogs covered with sea grass. The scrunts have poison claws; three scratches and you die. The only things that can save a narf are the “Tartutics,” who live in the trees of Philadelphia and look like Margaret Hamilton’s flying monkeys from Oz.

All of this may be going on right now, says Mr. Shyamalan, in your own backyard. He needs a room with a view, with bars on the windows and no sharp objects.

Meanwhile, the super summons the tenants in the Cove to act as human vessels and protect Story from the hairy scrunts until the Great Eatlon arrives and flies her back to the world she came from. This ecosystem includes Freddy Rodríguez as a lopsided weight lifter who only works on one side of his body; Mary Beth Hurt as an old woman who collects animals; Bill Irwin as a stoop-shouldered recluse who hides in his television set; Jeffrey Wright as part of a father-son combo that does crossword puzzles; Cindy Cheung as a Korean college girl whose mother knows the bedtime story about the lady in the water but only reveals one clue at a time to spread the movie to a length of just under two hours of tedium; and Bob Balaban as a movie critic who has seen so many horror films he can predict the endings (just as every movie critic I know can predict the ending of every movie by M. Night Shyamalan).

The tenants take on the roles of the ancient characters in the Blue World and act as symbolists who can read clouds, and guilds who can solve the problems of the universe with their hands, communicating the clues to the spirit world on cell phones. Mr. Shyamalan plays the most boring one of all and, to his credit, gives himself the dullest dialogue. Alas, the solution to all the ancient puzzles of the spirit world is reserved for the crossword-puzzle child, who finds the answers to the plagues against mankind on a box of Cheerios!

Before Big Bird flies in like a 747, Story escapes the carnivorous scrunts, who eat the cynical movie critic instead. Therein lies another of Mr. Shyamalan’s secret fantasies—inspired, for obvious reasons, by his reviews. I was sorry to see the critic end up like one of the tourists in Jurassic Park, because he speaks the only line in the movie that makes one lick of sense: “There is no originality left in the world. That’s a sad fact I’ve learned to live with.”

I like whimsy, fantasy and artistic license as much as the next guy trying to get in touch with his inner 6-year-old child, but to succeed, even a fairy tale must be believable. This movie is more about arrogance than anything else. A whole book has just been published about Mr. Shyamalan’s reckless budget, myopic vision and refusal to throw in the towel, after at least six Walt Disney executives flew to Philadelphia to meet with him before admitting they didn’t understand the script. Only the accountants will ever know if they were prophets or fools, but in my opinion, when Disney turns you down on the basis of incoherence, you know it’s time for a reality check. Who knew there were that many smart producers at Disney?

Lusty Ladies

With so many movies about sex and gloom crowding marquees, Heading South is one of the more controversial. Some people are fascinated by French director Laurent Cantet’s exploration of money and class differences between sophisticated white female tourists in the crime-ridden political turmoil of Haiti in the 1970’s and the black native boy toys they sexually exploit to satisfy their lust. Others consider the film overrated and tedious. One thing is clear: Charlotte Rampling gives another prize-worthy performance as Ellen, an alluring, unmarried, 55-year-old French literature professor at Wellesley who has spent the last six summers vacationing at a seaside Haitian hotel where dirt-poor men congregate, looking for women to lavish them with money and gifts in exchange for physical pleasure.

This year, two of the sex tourists compete for the sexual attentions of the same 18-year-old Adonis, whose flashy new clothes endanger his life with the murderous thug regime of the diabolical Haitian dictator, “Baby Doc” Duvalier. Four monologues are addressed to the camera by the hard-boiled Ellen, who has made peace with her decision to pay for sex in middle age; Brenda (Karen Young), a naïve, Valium-popping Southerner from Savannah with a hidden mean-spirited and masochistic streak; Sue (Louise Portal), a level-headed French-Canadian who is earthy and joyous and determined to make sex fun at any expense; and Albert (Lys Ambroise), the courtly headwaiter who loathes Americans and speaks harsh truths straight from the heart about the poison they spread like butter on a croissant. Legba (Ménothy Cesar, miscast and anything but an Adonis) is the sensual object of the women’s competitive acts of revenge and betrayal—a boy who is out to better himself in the poverty of Haiti, bouncing from bed to bed, one step ahead of the dreaded, machete-carrying Ton Ton Macoutes.

The women’s world holds a mirror to the cold economic calculations of the resort’s amoral gigolos, trading tips and gossip on their days off. But director Cantet has no interest in stigmatizing either the women or their black conquests. His focus is on rethinking the political economy of sex, society and prostitution in a global market where every emotion has a trade value. The film is too slow for my taste, but for perfectly formed characters and authentic human conflict, Heading South is beautifully written, carefully photographed and eventually devastating.

Lady in the Water is described by Mr. Shyamalan as a “bedtime story” he told to his kids. Do not even think of repeating it to yours unless you plan to turn them into runaways, orphans or worse. No sane person could do justice to the plot, since the plot is as comprehensible as the ukulele of Tiny Tim and the voice of Tom Waits, but it goes something like this: A strange apartment building called the Cove stands in the middle of what looks like a jungle in Tanganyika, but is really Philadelphia.

The super of this U-shaped, five-story, 57-unit junkyard is a creep with Tourette’s syndrome named Cleveland Heep, played by Paul Giamatti, who ticks and stutters his way through a battery of mannerisms in a nerdy performance that is more annoying and affected than usual, which is saying a lot. Mr. Heep is always finding flotsam in the drain, and there is something wrong with the swimming pool. The water is slimy and at the bottom there’s a secret world inhabited by a weird woman the color of kindergarten paste called a “narf.” The narf, named Story and played by director Ron Howard’s daughter, Bryce Dallas Howard, climbs out of the water naked and sleeps on Mr. Heep’s sofa. She’s a spirit who is trying to get back to the mythological Blue World at the bottom of the ocean on the wings of a giant eagle called the Great Eatlon, but she’s in danger of being clawed to death by vicious green carnivores called “scrunts” who look like warthogs covered with sea grass. The scrunts have poison claws; three scratches and you die. The only things that can save a narf are the “Tartutics,” who live in the trees of Philadelphia and look like Margaret Hamilton’s flying monkeys from Oz.

All of this may be going on right now, says Mr. Shyamalan, in your own backyard. He needs a room with a view, with bars on the windows and no sharp objects.

Meanwhile, the super summons the tenants in the Cove to act as human vessels and protect Story from the hairy scrunts until the Great Eatlon arrives and flies her back to the world she came from. This ecosystem includes Freddy Rodríguez as a lopsided weight lifter who only works on one side of his body; Mary Beth Hurt as an old woman who collects animals; Bill Irwin as a stoop-shouldered recluse who hides in his television set; Jeffrey Wright as part of a father-son combo that does crossword puzzles; Cindy Cheung as a Korean college girl whose mother knows the bedtime story about the lady in the water but only reveals one clue at a time to spread the movie to a length of just under two hours of tedium; and Bob Balaban as a movie critic who has seen so many horror films he can predict the endings (just as every movie critic I know can predict the ending of every movie by M. Night Shyamalan).

The tenants take on the roles of the ancient characters in the Blue World and act as symbolists who can read clouds, and guilds who can solve the problems of the universe with their hands, communicating the clues to the spirit world on cell phones. Mr. Shyamalan plays the most boring one of all and, to his credit, gives himself the dullest dialogue. Alas, the solution to all the ancient puzzles of the spirit world is reserved for the crossword-puzzle child, who finds the answers to the plagues against mankind on a box of Cheerios!

Before Big Bird flies in like a 747, Story escapes the carnivorous scrunts, who eat the cynical movie critic instead. Therein lies another of Mr. Shyamalan’s secret fantasies—inspired, for obvious reasons, by his reviews. I was sorry to see the critic end up like one of the tourists in Jurassic Park, because he speaks the only line in the movie that makes one lick of sense: “There is no originality left in the world. That’s a sad fact I’ve learned to live with.”

I like whimsy, fantasy and artistic license as much as the next guy trying to get in touch with his inner 6-year-old child, but to succeed, even a fairy tale must be believable. This movie is more about arrogance than anything else. A whole book has just been published about Mr. Shyamalan’s reckless budget, myopic vision and refusal to throw in the towel, after at least six Walt Disney executives flew to Philadelphia to meet with him before admitting they didn’t understand the script. Only the accountants will ever know if they were prophets or fools, but in my opinion, when Disney turns you down on the basis of incoherence, you know it’s time for a reality check. Who knew there were that many smart producers at Disney?

Lusty Ladies

With so many movies about sex and gloom crowding marquees, Heading South is one of the more controversial. Some people are fascinated by French director Laurent Cantet’s exploration of money and class differences between sophisticated white female tourists in the crime-ridden political turmoil of Haiti in the 1970’s and the black native boy toys they sexually exploit to satisfy their lust. Others consider the film overrated and tedious. One thing is clear: Charlotte Rampling gives another prize-worthy performance as Ellen, an alluring, unmarried, 55-year-old French literature professor at Wellesley who has spent the last six summers vacationing at a seaside Haitian hotel where dirt-poor men congregate, looking for women to lavish them with money and gifts in exchange for physical pleasure.

This year, two of the sex tourists compete for the sexual attentions of the same 18-year-old Adonis, whose flashy new clothes endanger his life with the murderous thug regime of the diabolical Haitian dictator, “Baby Doc” Duvalier. Four monologues are addressed to the camera by the hard-boiled Ellen, who has made peace with her decision to pay for sex in middle age; Brenda (Karen Young), a naïve, Valium-popping Southerner from Savannah with a hidden mean-spirited and masochistic streak; Sue (Louise Portal), a level-headed French-Canadian who is earthy and joyous and determined to make sex fun at any expense; and Albert (Lys Ambroise), the courtly headwaiter who loathes Americans and speaks harsh truths straight from the heart about the poison they spread like butter on a croissant. Legba (Ménothy Cesar, miscast and anything but an Adonis) is the sensual object of the women’s competitive acts of revenge and betrayal—a boy who is out to better himself in the poverty of Haiti, bouncing from bed to bed, one step ahead of the dreaded, machete-carrying Ton Ton Macoutes.

The women’s world holds a mirror to the cold economic calculations of the resort’s amoral gigolos, trading tips and gossip on their days off. But director Cantet has no interest in stigmatizing either the women or their black conquests. His focus is on rethinking the political economy of sex, society and prostitution in a global market where every emotion has a trade value. The film is too slow for my taste, but for perfectly formed characters and authentic human conflict, Heading South is beautifully written, carefully photographed and eventually devastating.