As expected, “Angels & Demons” claimed the top spot on the box-office chart over the weekend with a $48 million opening … but it was a much closer race than I would have figured, with “Star Trek” right on its heels with a second-weekend take of $43 million.

By way of comparison, “The DaVinci Code” enjoyed a $77.1 million opening weekend three years ago, and of course “Star Trek” pulled in nearly that much — $76.5 million — just last week. It looks like a couple million American moviegoers decided to hang back on this one and get a sense of the opening-weekend buzz, or they went to see “Star Trek” instead.

The AP’s regular box-office commentator/cheerleader, Paul Dergarabedian, spun it thusly:

“Sony positioned it well,” said Paul Dergarabedian, box-office analyst for Hollywood.com. “They didn’t try to say, `This is going to be “The Da Vinci Code.”‘ It was actually quite the contrary. They tried to say this was not `Da Vinci Code,’ that it was a different kind of movie.”

Well, “different” in that it’s actually a considerable improvement on the previous film in virtually every way. Of course, if they’d been able to get that message across, you’d think the numbers would have been higher — maybe not “Wolverine” or “Star Trek” higher, since “Angels & Demons” runs two hours and twenty minutes and therefore can’t screen as often as either of those — but something in the neighborhood of $60 million, maybe?

Good for “Star Trek”, though. Can’t think of a more deserving movie. I mean, sure, “Hunger” or “Two Lovers” or even “Adventureland”, but that just wasn’t gonna happen.

The good news: Fox ordered another thirteen episodes of Joss Whedon’s problematic yet frequently awesome “Dollhouse”. Maybe this time they’ll actually air all thirteen of them, instead of saving one for the DVD set.

The weird news: It seems Kevin Smith has announced plans to make a feature-film adaptation of Warren Zevon’s “Hit Somebody! The Hockey Song”, with “Tuesdays with Morrie” author Mitch Albom writing the screenplay.

I am having trouble getting my head around this, because it sounds like the combination of elements would either nullify one another, or react like a helicopter full of antimatter and destroy everything in a five-mile radius.

Still, neither Nicolas Cage nor Werner Herzog is involved, so maybe we’re still on the safe side of the threshold …

Hey, remember when “The DaVinci Code” premiered at Cannes three years ago, and everybody had to make a big deal out of it? There’s no such strategy for “Angels & Demons”, which is just getting a plain old global opening.  But it’s still big enough that everyone else is getting out of its way …

“Angels & Demons“: Ron Howard, Tom Hanks, Brian Grazer and Akiva Goldsman bring us another sprint through art history with Harvard symbologist Robert Landgon. And unlike “The DaVinci Code”, you can actually watch this one without wanting to track them down afterward and punch them in the jeans.

“Fierce Light: When Spirit Meets Action”: Velcrow Ripper’s look at spiritual activism finds the wandering documentarian dropping in on Alice Walker, Desmond Tutu and Daryl Hannah. Susan found it disappointing; Jason had a more qualified reaction.

“Is Anybody There?“: John Crowley, director of “interMission” and “Boy A”, tries his hand at the sort of prefabricated kids-n-oldies melodrama that we’ve all come to loathe on the film-festival circuit, with Michael Caine as an angry, senile magician who teaches a weird kid about life. It’s excruciating, really.

“The Queen & I“: Iranian-born documentarian Nahid Persson Sarvestani tracks down the Shah’s widow expecting to confront an ideological opponent, and finds a fellow exile instead. I’m not entirely sure why this wasn’t in Hot Docs, but it certainly should have been.

Right, back to work … long weekends mean tighter deadlines, you know!

The Cannes film festival kicked off yesterday with the premiere of Pixar’s “Up”, and I was not there to see it. I am not there now, either. Couldn’t make it work. C’est la vie.

Quite a few publications have had to let the festival slide this year; in what I hope will be the last echo of last fall’s economic convulsion, an expensive jaunt to Europe’s glitziest film festival proved a little too rich for their blood. So I’m kicking around Toronto with Liam Lacey from the Globe and Chris Knight from the Post and a few other unfortunates, deeply regretting that we couldn’t have been in the Lumiere yesterday to see what 2,200 people wearing Real 3D glasses look like.

In my case, the decision was made back when things were at their darkest; if I’d known where things would stand now, I think I could have pulled the whole thing together, but you know what they say about hindsight. I fully expect to be back there next year, though. And I’ll be following the 2009 festival through the reporting of my online friends, with particular interest in Mike D’Angelo’s dispatches for the Onion AV Club.

If I have to pull a positive out of this, well … at least I got to catch the season finale of “Lost” in real time. It took me almost three weeks to see last year’s wrapup, and the spoiler avoidance was a bitch. I can’t imagine it would have been any easier this year — harder, probably, given that the AP was posting major plot twists as news within minutes of the end credits last night — so I’m glad I was able to see it without any accidental revelations.

And yes, I know that if I get my wish and go back to the festival next year, I’ll face the same problem with the presumably mind-blowing series finale. But such are the sacrifices one must make for Cannes, non?

Yeah, I know. Life’s rough.

Actual headline on the AP wire this morning:

Woman finds ‘Twilight’ sequel script in trash

To wit:

Casey Ray found two scripts, one for the vampire sequel “New Moon” and one for a different movie titled “Memoirs.” She decided to return them to the studio making the films. In return, she was invited to attend the movies’ premieres, her lawyer said.

Ray recently was waiting for her fiance to finish work when she spotted two scripts in a trash container. She was outside a hotel where actors were staying during a St. Louis shoot for the upcoming George Clooney movie, “Up in the Air.”

It’s not clear how the scripts wound up in the bin.

The Clooney movie includes actress Anna Kendrick, who is also in the “Twilight” vampire movie. A spokeswoman for Kendrick, Lisa Perkins, said the actress wouldn’t have left scripts lying around.

Oh, and this bit is great, too:

When Ray found the scripts, she considered leaking them to a national tabloid but decided against it, said her lawyer, Al Watkins.

“My client didn’t really want to get paid,” he said, but she was interested in hanging onto the scripts as collector’s items.

Watkins helped her return them to Los Angeles-based Summit Entertainment LLC, the studio making the movies. He said the studio invited Ray to premieres for the two films, and will certify the scripts as authentic after the movies are released.

So, let’s see. We have someone who “spotted two scripts in a trash container” and then “considered leaking them to a national tabloid but decided against it, said her lawyer,” who then “helped her return them” to Summit. By calling the phone number on the front page of the scripts, one would assume.

I love the bit about how, despite a moment of weakness, Ray nobly chose not to sell the scripts — sorry, “leak” them — to the tabloids. Perhaps the fact that no tabloid, respectable or otherwise, would offer a dime for the “New Moon” screenplay had something to do with her deep reserves of decency.

The script for “Iron Man 2”? Oh, they’d totally pay for that. But an adaptation of an existing best-seller, the plot of which is hardly a secret? Yeah, not so much. I wonder whether her lawyer talked her out of it, or whether the tab in question shamed her into returning the scripts to Summit. The AP story certainly feels like it was written with a soupcon of contempt, don’t you think?

With a solid $76.5 million opening weekend, J.J. Abrams’ “Star Trek” is poised to be the “Iron Man” of 2009: A solid critical and commercial hit with major franchise potential. Of course, “Star Trek” already was a franchise, but … well, you know, the whole reboot thing means we’re starting from zero again.

I’m perversely hoping they’ll dispose of the “II” and “III” sequel designations and start using titles that are just slightly to the left of the episodes from which they’ll inevitably be adapted. “The City on the Precipice of Forever”, “Equivalence of Terror”, “Spock’s Cerebellum”, “Thpace Theed” … the possibilities are endless!

And then they can eventually make “The Vengeance of Khan”, which was what “Star Trek II” was supposed to be called in the first place.

See? The particulars might be a little different, but everything eventually ends up exactly where it’s supposed to be.

This was bound to happen eventually: In honor of Mother’s Day, my latest Sympatico/MSN movie gallery offers a look at some fairly extreme examples of motherhood.

I mean, anyone can pick you up and kiss your boo-boo better. It takes someone very special to do it while surrounded by ravenous xenomorphs, is all I’m saying.