Hip or Hype?

Maybe you can't be too rich or too thin, but you can sometimes be too hip — as Trainspotting's director Danny Boyle, screenwriter John Hodge, producer Andrew Macdonald, and lead Ewan McGregor discovered with their new film, A Life Less Ordinary, which opened with a belly flop. The offbeat romantic comedy barely cracked the top 10 with a $2 million haul. (Since Alicia Silverstone's Excess Baggage also bombed, collecting a total gross of $14 million, perhaps it's time for a moratorium on rich-girl-kidnapping comedies.) Elsewhere on the hip front, I Know What You Did Last Summer continued to hook viewers, and New Line's Boogie Nights had another encouraging expansion. Despite an innovative choose-your-baby's-DNA print-ad campaign, the sci-fi suspense film Gattaca, starring Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, yielded just $4.3 million, which wasn't enough to bump the previous weekend's top four box office leaders from their slots.