Most critics didn't love it, but for the second week in a row, viewers streamed in anyway. Still playing at just two theaters, Joshua Seftel's comedy-drama War, Inc. (First Look), starring John Cusack, averaged $12,100 per screen to continue its reign at the top of the indie weekend box office chart, according to estimates compiled by Box Office Mojo. That gives it a two-week total of $78,700.

Among new specialty releases, Leonard Klady at Movie City News reports that Tom Kalin's drama Savage Grace (IFC Films) made $11,150 per screen at the two theaters in New York where it opened. Julianne Moore stars in a suffocating period piece about a twisted mother/son relationship. You can read more about it in the reviews by Nick Schager and Kim Voynar.

Jody Hill's comedy The Foot Fist Way (Paramount Vantage) opened in four theaters and earned $8,550 per engagement, according to Mr. Klady. Patrick Walsh offered up a mostly positive review on this "character study about a character you'd never want to meet," a children's Tae Kwon Do instructor who goes off the rails when his wife cheats on him.

Jeffrey M. Anderson described Giuseppe Tornatore's The Unknown Woman (Outsider Films) as "a restless, panicked, devastating emotional roller coaster, meticulously planned and executed like a razor." The film follows the travails of a woman who leaves the Ukraine to look for work in Italy. It made $6,000 at one theater in Manhattan.

The Foot Fist Way premiered at Sundance in 2006. I got my hands on a copy about a year ago, and wondered why it never got a big cross-country release. I knew it was a hit among big-time comedy folk (your Stillers, your Apatows, your Oswalts), and I started to figure that maybe they just wanted to keep it to themselves. But with a big push from Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, Foot Fist has found its way into theaters. Shot independently over nineteen days for little money in North Carolina, the film is a character study about a character you'd never want to meet -- Fred Simmons.

Danny McBride plays Simmons, an unbalanced children's Tae Kwon Do instructor who goes completely off the rails when his wife (the very funny Mary Jane Bostic) cheats on him. Fred is obsessed with karate master and low-budget film star Chuck "The Truck" Wallace (Ben Best), and tries to focus his energies on bringing his hero to the school. That's about it for a plot, much of the film consists of quasi-connected short scenes and moments that feel quite a bit like sketches. A genuinely hilarious scene early on involving an elderly woman, for example, is a self-contained jewel (I actually choked on soda watching it), and would be an internet sensation if this film had never existed.

The juxtaposition of a deranged man and young children is a comedy staple going back (at least) to W.C. Fields, but since this is an indie flick, things go darker than you might expect. Simmons is not a likable man, not at all really, and McBride's resistance to give him a big heart makes him feel a lot more authentic than a lot of the "heroes" in major studio comedies today. Sometimes a dick is just a dick.

Imagine not having to input your birth date and other information in order to watch a red band trailer. Oh yeah, that's already a reality thanks to YouTube. But you know what I mean. Legally, currently, we've had to prove our ages to see restricted trailers for such movies as Pineapple Express, Semi-Pro, Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, The Foot Fist Way (this comedy's whole website is age-restricted), Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Alien vs. Predator: Requiem and, most recently, Tropic Thunder. We've even seen red band trailers for PG-13-rated movies like Beowulf, which doesn't make any sense at all. Well, now we can see them on the big screen again. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Regal Entertainment Group cinemas (includes: Regal, United Artists, Edwards) has decided to bring red band trailers back to theaters.

Regal, the nation's largest cinema operator, made the announcement last week at ShoWest (yet the news hit the trades too late for my summary) and will begin looking at red band ads this week to see which film gets to be the inaugural title (the chain has already been quietly experimenting with a few at its Art Theaters). Obviously the trailers will only be shown before movies rated R or NC-17 or which are unrated. And most of them will likely continue to be for Judd Apatow movies. The move by Regal should put some new life into the marketing of certain movies -- Semi-Pro might have done better had its red band trailer been shown in theaters -- and will possibly influence other cinema chains to follow suit.