Apologies for the Becket obsession, but I've just found an mp3 file made from two of the better Peter O'Toole rants in the film.

"Younger viewers live their lives pushing the envelope, breaking rules and bending rules," Manhattan ad exec Shari Anne Brill tells The Envelope's Scott Collins. "As long as the Oscars are perceived to have a certain rigidity, they're not going to be relatable to young people." Adds [publicist Howard] Bragman: 'The problem with the shows is that they lack any kind of spontaneity or buzz factor.'"

Collin's piece suggests/contends that the show may get higher ratings if Borat's Sacha Baron Cohen is given two or three minutes worth of microphone time. This is because his "ribald acceptance speech at the Golden Globes...was...Read More

Nikki Finke is reporting that last Saturday night, at a swanky dinner party thrown by movie producer Leonard Goldberg in honor of Viacom honcho Sumner Redstone, that Redstone passed along a Dreamgirls post-mortem that had originated with Paramount Pictures chief Brad Grey. Redstone told the gathering that Brad explained that the reason Dreamgirls wasn't nominated for a [Best Picture] Oscar was because "everyone hates David." As in Geffen, the producer of Dreamgirls."

After hearing yesterday of his death, I tried to recall a vivid movie memory pertaining to Sydney Sheldon, the very successful screenwriter, TV producer, Broadway producer and hack romance-novel author. I thought and thought, and the only thing that punched through was a moment from 1977, when I was watching The Other Side of Midnight -- a grotesquely glamorous soap-opera drama about an ambitious hottie (Marie France Pisier) climbing her way to wealth and privelege through a series of relationships with ambitious and/or powerful men -- in a small theatre in Westport, Connecticut.

I'm speaking of the pseudo-legendary ice-bucket scene between...Read More

For anyone heading to the 57th Berlin International Film Festival (February 8 thru 18), here's a programming rundown. One note of concern ; Gregory Nava's Bordertown, the Jennifer Lopez drama about the scores of unsolved Juarez-El Paso female murders, is skedded to be shown. This turkey has been looking for a distributor for eons and finding no love. Lopez movies are almost always mawkish, straining, off-balance. Didn't she say she was looking to quit movies a while back? That awful Bronx accent she accentuates in the trailer for El Cantante is beyond grating -- it rivals Lorraine Bracco's in Medicine Man.

I had only one medium-sized problem with the rough version of Resurrecting the Champ, which director Rod Lurie showed me several weeks before it played at Sundance '07. The problem was Samuel L. Jackson's decision to play the lead character, a homeless guy with a secretive past, with a "whinny" voice -- a raspy-reedy emission that feels like the polar opposite of Jackson's usual sonorous, street-cat tenor-baritone thing.

Jackson in Resurrecting the Champ; Brando in The Godfather

The performance itself is solid and emotionally on-target, but I felt two ways about the whinny --...Read More

In a piece timed to ride the marketing back of Number 23 (New Line, 2.23), the Joel Schumacher creeper about a face-painted wackjob obsessive played by Jim Carrey, industry journalista Kim Masters has written about Carrey's career "crash" in the new Radar, which will hit the stands in about two weeks. Radar's publicist won't show me the article, but it's at least partly about the big-studio plug-pullings of Used Guys and Ripley's Believe It Or Not, both of which Carrey had intended to star in.

"Whatever Little Miss Sunshine is about, it isn't about anything bad," Oscarwatch.com's Sasha Stone wrote yesterday morning, echoing Richard Corliss's just-posted views in Time. "It's all good. It deals with the goodness of humanity underneath it all; it has an idealist's view of people. It is the only one of the five [Best Picture nominees] that does.

"The country needs to vote for Little Miss Sunshine because to do anything else opens the door to the truth. We can't handle the truth, not right now, not when we don't really know what's coming next.

Armond White's N.Y. Press review of Becket is more than a little similar to an appraisal I wrote last year....odd. Easily the most single-minded Manhattan- maverick critic (at times almost peculiarly so), White is an absolute must-read because of his occasional grand-slams -- reviews that pinpoint not only the artistic dimension but the agenda of certain films, like when he called Billy Elliott "a balletomane chickenhawk fantasy."

"Ostensibly the story of King Henry II appointing his confident Thomas a' Becket to be Archbishop of Canterbury and then reneging on his bequest -- a decision that historically split England's religious affiliation --...Read More

Village Voice critic Ed Gonzalez pisses on Becket! Fine, permissible, whatever. The guy has chutzpah.

"Going into the Sundance Film Festival, word was not good," writes Hollywood Reporter critic Kirk Honeycutt. "Coming out of the festival, you realize how little value this 'word' actually possesses. All that acquisition frenzy wasn't because of the high altitude. Sundance audiences' thunderous ovations for every movie are getting to be a joke, but in many cases they were deserved."

And yet Honeycutt seems content to half-breeze through his own festival experience, resigned for the most part to providing cursory descriptions of the films he saw that, with a couple of exceptions, affected him in some kind of thoughtful, jolting, semi-arousing way....Read More

"We are in another of those historical moments, with grim death gargling at you around every corner and people being slaughtered like sheep. Of course, Academy voters could heed the incendiary Zeitgeist and vote for Babel, a film about international chaos, or Letters from Iwo Jima, depicting the last days of a losing war. The Queen shows a head of state stubbornly resisting the popular will, and The Departed is a chic bloodbath.

"Or, surveying this bleak terrain, the Academy membership might turn to the one feel-good movie nominated for Best Picture. Voting for a comedy that celebrates life -- eccentric but...Read More

Heard this happened yesterday, couldn't find the story, gave up: Marcheline Bertrand, 56 year-old former actress, producer (Trudell) and mother of Angelina Jolie, died Saturday of cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Sad, too soon, sorry.

And The Winner Is... blogmeister Scott Feinberg has written a very thoroughly thought-out, fairly persuasive explanation why Little Miss Sunshine is going to win the Best Picture Oscar. I love this little film but I'd personally rather see Babel or The Departed take it. Both are more exciting to watch and think about later.

"This year, producers and actors went for Little Miss Sunshine, directors liked The Departed, and the Globes went with Babel. So the Bagger can confidently say, with all the authority of his one year of experience, that The Win in best picture is up for grabs.

"If Little Miss were to sneak past the best the studios and their specialty divisions had to offer, it would be yet another message that the longshot is sometimes the best shot. Everything that was wrong about this film turned out to be the right. Too many cooks came up with something audiences loved and...Read More

"Can we stop this before you go ahead any further? We can't have this kind of language in this film, to this degree." -- Warner Bros. honcho Alan Horn to Departed producer Graham King, having gotten a very clear idea from early dailies that no brakes were being applied whatsoever on the use of salty street patois ("ya muthah fucked me," etc.). (Quote passed along by King during Sunday's "Movers & Shakers" panel at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.)

"You are not entitled," Bill Condon tells N.Y. Times reporter Laura Holson about winning an Oscar, "an honor he won in 1999 for writing Gods and Monsters and for which his Chicago script was nominated," she writes. Winning the fabled gold statuette "is a gift," he adds. "That sense that you deserve it is wacky."

"We were never going to win [the Best Picture Oscar], even if we were nominated," Condon says, laughing. "The money we would have spent on the campaign, the insane amount of money we saved...people spend like drunken sailors, you know." In Patton, George C. Scott says to...Read More

It may be too late and it may be a futile notion, but it's time for all good people to rise up and band together in order to stop Eddie Murphy from winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. If anyone wants to launch a website to help amplify this feeling and (who knows?) maybe trigger a turnaround of opinion, I'll contribute $100 bucks...seriously. He's the one bad guy in the bunch who, I feel, really doesn't deserve to win. Surely others feel this way?

I've seen that bored-indifferent, man-am-I-rich, leave-me-alone look on Murphy's face too many...Read More

N.Y. Times Oscar blogger David Carr (a.k.a., "the Bagger") linked to a site ("the Shanghaiist") with six or seven Japanese- produced Tommy Lee Jones commercials for Suntory Boss coffee drink.

Sorry, but I 'm not getting whatever it is I'm supposed to get. The juiice isn't seeping in; I'm not feeling the tingle. The spots aren't that clever or witty or "cinematic." They're decent, servicable, not terrible, etc., but all they do is make you wonder how much Jones was paid.

At yesterday's "Movers & Shakers" (i.e., producers) panel at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein asked Little Miss Sunshine producers Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa to comment about the Academy's grossly unfair decision to exclude them from the official group of three who, if LMS wins the Best Picture Oscar, will be allowed to go up onstage and receive a statuette, despite theirBerger and Yerxa being the film's "real" ground-floor producers.

Yerxa gave a soft-pedalled response, saying that the Producers Guild, which approved Yerxa and Berger as one of the LMS producers, and the Academy "are not...Read More

I don't mean to sound like a rabbit-hole cineaste who only processes life in terms of movies and images, but this N.Y. Times photo of Iraqi soldiers dealing with captured gunmen during a sandstorm is like something Vittorio Storaro would have crafted if he was working on a feature about the Iraq conflict. Those burnished orange-sandy hues look like they were rendered with a color filter. Quite beautiful.

Once's Glen Hansard and Marketa Iglova giving an outdoor performance of "Falling Slowly" for HP's Backstage at Sundance 2007.

Filmmakermagazine has put up a Sundance video podcast by the great Jamie Stuart, a guy who delivers so much more than just your typical smart-ass, here's-what-happened diary-type deal that it's not funny. Make no mistake -- Jamie Stuart is the Stanley Kubrick/Alfonso Cuaron/Richard Lester/Sergei Eisenstein of impressionistic short-video film festival pieces.

The marketing geniuses at MPI Home Video don't have it on their site (and why should they? too logical!) but DVD Newsletter's Doug Pratt tells me the Becket DVD will "street" on May 15th. It's currently playing at Manhattan's Film Forum; opening at L.A.'s Nuart on Friday.

"What I do know is that Sundance has become a very big machine in which it has become increasingly difficult for modestly scaled films without stars, without powerful brokers and backing and manufactured buzz to attract attention," writes N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis in a 1.29 piece.

Especially, I would add, when front-line newspapers like the N.Y. Times overlook -- i.e., fail to pay attention to -- certain modestly scaled but high-quality films that don't have stars, powerful backing & manufactured buzz...like John Carney's Once.

Manohla may not have deliberately bypassed Once -- perhaps she simply never got around...Read More

Observed during Saturday's backstage-at-the- Lobero luncheon that followed the Directors' Panel: a reapprochement between formerly feuding collaborators Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Guillermo Arriaga. Inarritu went up to the sitting Arriaga and gave him a hug; Arriaga reciprocated with a couple of comradely slaps on the back. Then they left the room together and stood alone out on the brick patio, shooting the shit for nearly ten minutes, no evident tensions whatsover. I thought to myself, "This would make a historic photo...the duelling amigos back together again"...but a voice told me to stay away.

It's over...Little Miss Sunshine is going to win the Best Picture Oscar. The SAG Awards made this quite clear -- done deal, finito, no further discussion. The Departed never punched through (except for the fait accompli of Martin Scorsese winning the Best Director Oscar), Babel had some headwind out of the Golden Globes but no longer (or am I wrong? ...I'm willing to consider a Babel win...just tell me how it happens)), and The Queen and Letters From Iwo Jima were never really in the game.

What a boring cavalcade of tedium the SAG Awards were tonight. No shockers, no mild surprises, the same people won who've won before...the same old heroin. The Best Ensemble Cast award went to Little Miss Sunshine...terrific, bolstering chances that LMS might actually take the Best Picture Oscar. The oppressiveness of Helen Mirren winning yet again for Best Actress makes her the Mao Zhedong of the '06 Oscar race. Forest Whitaker, who won Best Actor for The Last King of Scotland, is Zhou Enlai (or Chou En-lai, if you prefer). Jennifer Hudson for Best Supporting Actress...I guess the Dreamgirls fall-off hasn't hurt her. Eddie...Read More

The Envelope's Tom O'Neil is reporting that O'Toole won't be at tonight's SAG Awards, but says that Miramax publicist Andrew Goldstein (did Tom mean to write Andrew Bernstein?) has confided that O'Toole "will attend the Oscar nominees lunch on February 5" and then stick around "for a few days" before retreating back to London. He'll come back for the Oscar show some two and a half weeks later.

A whole N.Y. Times piece about Grindhouse -- two high-style wankoff movies made in the spirit of '70s exploitation flicks, one directed by Robert Rodriguez, the other by Quentin Tarantino -- and not a single mention of the film's most fascinating element, which is how heatedly and lasciviously Rodriguez will photograph actress Rose McGowan in his segment, called "Planet Terror."

Rodriguez, a very clever and likable guy who, being a kind of lapsed Catholic, appears to regard women as either Madonnas or floozies, tends to make his actresses look hot and saucy in his...Read More

In person, Leonardo DiCaprio is "polite, charming, makes jokes, engages eye contact. And manages in an almost Rock Hudson-like way to give almost no hint whatsoever of his actual personality," writes the Guardian's Carole Cadwalladr. I know what she means -- Leo's definitely a bit of a hider when he talks to the press -- but "in an almost Rock Hudson-like way"?

Romantic comedies "seem to have fallen out of step with modern life," writes N.Y. Daily News guy Joe Neumaier, the result being that "moviegoers are experiencing a kind of cinematic bed death when it comes to meet-cute flicks and affairs to remember."

He mentions recent or soon-to-open examples like Catch and Release (a dud), Music and Lyrics, Daddy's Little Girls and Starter for 10 (which I instantly dismissed after catching it at the Toronto Film Festival), but emphasizes that "audiences and romantic comedies are going through a bad patch, and it'll take more than a pint of Haagen-Dazs and a crying...Read More

"From its first screenings here at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, the micro-budget Irish film Once, rejected by many a festival en route to Park City, has generated word-of-mouth bordering on euphoria," Chicago Tribune critic Michael Phillips writes in today's (Sunday) edition.

"It's a marvelous film, described by writer-director John Carney as "a musical, maybe." It may well be the best music film of any stripe since Stop Making Sense a generation ago, and yes, that includes Chicago and Dreamgirls.

"Shot in under three weeks for less than $150,000, funded entirely by the Irish national film board, Carney's so-called 'video album'...Read More

Sundance juror awards are untrustworthy in that every year there's always one or two "huh?" calls. This is partly due to a long-established tendency of Sundance jurors to select recipients for inside-the-beltway political reasons, and partly due to the film festival aesthetic that tends to honor films that are nourishing (in the same way that boiled squash is nourishing) but not necessarily riveting or transcendent.

This isn't to say the 2007 Sundance Film Festival Award Winners are neces- sarily suspect; only that the Grand Jury awards rarely deliver ground-truth appraisals like the Audience Awards do.

Two fascinating panel discussions happened today at the Santa Barbara Film Festival. I recorded both with my Olympus WS-300M, which I put right smack dab on the stage, five feet in front of the panelists...and it didn't quite work. The voices sound echo-y and a bit faint. There's a lot of good stuff in both discussions, but you'd do well to listen with headphones. They both last over an hour.

Babel screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga and Night Buffalo co-producer Jimena Rodriguez in a backstage salon at Santa Barbara's Lobero Theatre -- Saturday, 1.27.07, 1:25 pm -- prior to...

The SAG Awards will air on TNT and TBS Sunday evening. My eyelids, trust me, are at half-mast as I type these projections/assessments:

Forest Whitaker -- whose performance as Idi Amin Dada was hugely enjoyable in a frightening sort of way, although I never felt it went past (i.e., deeper than) that level of engagement -- will almost certainly win the Best Actor award.

Helen Mirren is oppressively locked as the winner of the Best Actress trophy, although I really and truly feel that Penelope Cruz gives a much stronger, earthier, fuller performance in...Read More

The Once word-of-mouth seems to have taken hold and distributors are finally looking to buy it. One distrib chief has confided a sincere hope that his/her company will acquire it sometime later this week, "although there are 5 other distributors circling," he/she confided this morning.

Epic Movie will be #1 this weekend with a projected $17,368,000 by Sunday night. It wasn't press-screened, is said to be a piece of shit and will almost certainly be over and out the door by next week or the week after. Joe Carnahan's Smokin' Aces (which I don't give a damn about seeing) will manage a decent $14,129,000 on 2200 screens, roughly $6300 a print. Night at the Museum will be #3 with $8,601,000 for a total cume of $215,900,000. (The American public likes what it likes.)

Catch and Release will end up in fourth place with $7,737,000 -- 1600 theatres, 4700...Read More

"What made me finally relax is that during one of the moments we were showing clips, [Helen Mirren] reached out for my hand and squeezed it and said I was doing a good job. Can you believe that?! At the end of the tribute, right before Bill Macy was to come out, the lights dimmed. She once again reached for my hand and squeezed it. 'This was lovely,' she said. 'Once in a lifetiime, thank you.' I looked up, and she had tears in her eyes." -- Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling, writing on his festival blog about last...Read More

There is no Helen Mirren vs. Judi Dench suspense factor in the Best Actress Oscar race, so this Notes on a Queen mashup doesn't really coagulate.

I'd forgotten what a moving speech Adrien Brody gave four years ago when he won the Best Actor Oscar for The Pianist. His final thought (which he has to "shush" the orchestra to finish) about the citizens, whether they worship God or Allah, who were then just starting to be wounded and killed in Iraq is especially poignant now, for obvious reasons.

Joerg Wagner's Motodrom, one of the coolest (because of its avant-garde simplicity and lack of pretension) shorts I saw at Sundance '07. Many other excellent shorts are downloadable on the Sundance site, but I couldn't find one I saw that played just before Once, about a young guy and a girl flirting on the Paris metro by underlining words in books they're holding on their laps. Does anyone have a link to this?

I went to the opening-night Factory Girl party for the Santa Barbara Film Festival last night, but I couldn't get into the groove today. I blew off the Sacha Baron Cohen discussion at the Lobero early this afternoon, and then I couldn't bring myself to attend the Helen Mirren tribute this evening at the Arlington. I don't know why, but maybe I'm just feeling Cohen-ed and Mirren-ed out. (A lot of us are, no?) I promise to do better tomorrow. Apologies to Roger Durling and the gang -- just an "off" day. (Or something.)

A dull photo because...

There is something profoundly wrong with the mentality behind the Sundance aquisition frenzy. No, not Paramount Vantage paying $7 million for Son of Rambow (i.e., Billy Elliott if directed by Tim Burton). Not Adrienne Shelly's Waitress selling to Fox Searchlight for $4 million, despite it being a somewhat hammy, too-obvious thing. And not Harvey Weinstein buying Grace is Gone, a steady, honest film about loss and denial that may find fans among the rural reds. All of these are solid deals that make sense.

What's mind-blowing is the fact is that none of them deliver as much of an exquisite, true-hearted high as...Read More

An Envelope podcast chat (recorded Thursday afternoon) between myself and Tom O'Neil about Sundance '07 -- Once, Black Snake Moan, Grace is Gone, The Savages, etc. Plus L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turan talking about same -- Once, Grace Is Gone -- plus Hounddog, Away From Her, In The Shadow of the Moon, et. al.

This TMZ video of Nicole Kidman's auto crash on the set of The Invasion, which appeared on the Drudge Report yesterday morning, shows Kidman grimacing for a very brief second, but then walking away from the banged up vehicle a few seconds later in a relaxed, we-be-cool way. I like that quality in a woman. This was a definite image-enhancer. (Apologies for putting in the wrong link yesterday -- "Leo jeered by Spanish press" -- which, by the way, is pretty funny, the apparent lesson being that it's rude to keep press people waiting.)

Today is Paul Newman's 82nd birthday, which reminds me that a respected big-name critic is hard at work on an ambitious Newman biography (he's been operating under-the-radar for the last several months). Let's hope everything's jake when the book finally comes out, which may be next year. Meanwhile, Turner Classic Movies is airing a kline-up of Newman films this week -- Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Hud, The Hustler, The Rack and The Prize. The latter two aren't available on DVD.

This is bad, very bad, for the image of George Clooney. Good Night and Good Luck, Darfur and Pamela Anderson don't mix. I'm hoping it's not true; in fact, I'm going into arbitrary denial right now and presuming it isn't. One should always either fuck "up" or fuck laterally, but never, ever beneath your station.

The Academy's Producers Branch Executive Committee gave Little Miss Sunshine producers Ron Yerxa and Albert Berger the royal shaft this morning by excluding them from the final roster of producers eligible to receive a Best Picture Oscar, if and when Sunshine wins.

The irony is that Yerxa and Berger were (a) the first producers to read and then attempt to find funding for Michael Arndt's Sunshine screenplay (they came on board only three or four weeks after 9.11.01), and (b) the ones who brought in co-directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris -- undoubtedly the chief creative contributors to Sunshine's success -- due...Read More

Leaving Salt Lake City this morning for Los Angeles, then driving right up to Santa Barbara for Roger Durling's hot-shit film festival, which kicks off tonight with a screening of Factory Girl. No more posts until day's end, at best.

After much waiting, the Los Angeles memorial gathering for the late Robert Altman has been scheduled. It will happen on Sunday, 3.4.07, at the main Directors Guild theatre, at 2 pm. The New York version will happen about two weeks earlier, on Tuesday, 2.20.07.

"And then the Best Picture category was announced: Babel, The Departed, Little Miss Sunshine, he Queen and Letters From Iwo Jima. Wait...are they nominating six [films] this year? The hundreds of reporters in the [Academy] auditorium were leaning heads together, making sure that they did not hear the name Dreamgirls.
They did not." -- from David Carr's Oscar nomination piece in the N.Y. Times.

"David Geffen's Dreamgirls was snubbed because Hollywood is jealous of him. So what that the Motown musical led with eight Oscar nominations (three of them for Best Song)? That tally may be a promotional wet dream, but trust me, DreamWorks and Paramount, who've been pimping this pic since those disgusting $25 movie tickets during the first 10 days of its theatrical run, are having dry-hump nightmares.

"Shut out for Best Picture. Shut out for Best Director. Shut out for Best Actor/Actress. Among the big nominations, it made do with only Best Supporting Actor and Actress. There was too much hype and it...Read More

Park City is dead, the festival is dead...it's over, emptied, drained. Figuratively speaking, of course. I'm outta here tomor- row and totally fine with that. I've been calling Paramount Vantage publicists to get tickets to the Black Snake Moan screening at 6 pm this evening, and they're not calling me back. I'm half inclined to shine it, but L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas is sitting next to me and sayng I have to give it a try, "it's your job," etc. I'm seeing Once a second time this evening at 8:30 pm, and that's all she wrote.

I too sat through yesterday afternoon's press screening of Hounddog, and I agree with everyone else that it's nothing. Nothing to see, nothing to release, nothing to rent, nothing to get shocked or stirred about...just another neo-Faulknerian Southern gothic wallow with a tasteful, non-inflammatory Dakota Fanning rape scene. I'll say this: Fanning is a very skilled, super-readable scene inhabitor. That may have been obvious to others previously, but this is the first film she's had to "carry" as the star. Here's an excellent rip-job review by Screengrab's Mike D'Angelo, and another negative review by N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick.

I'm starting to agree -- Sundance '07 is definitely one of the worst in memory. I've seen about 16 or 17 films so far, and genuinely liked/admired five -- Once, Grace is Gone, Interview, The Savages and Broken English. I missed yesterday afternoon's press screening of Son of Rambow (described in Variety as "Billy Elliott directed by Tim Burton") but now that it's been picked up for $8 million by Paramount Vantage it'll obviously be viewable down the road. I haven't written about any of the crappos and mezzo-mezzos -- I'm trying to stick to the ones I've given a B-plus grade...Read More

"If you fail the first time, try, try, try, try, try, try, try again." -- Peter O'Toole's reaction to being Best Actor nominated for Venus.

How did Harvey Weinstein land that distribution deal for Grace is Gone last weekend? A producer at Monday's Picturehouse party told me that Harvey was so determined to lock things down, he drove over to the condo of the Grace producers at 4 ayem and knocked on the door -- bam! bam! bam! I don't know precisely which Grace producers were in the condo (it could have been John Cusack, Grace Loh, Daniela Taplin Lundberg, Ed Hart and/or Paul Bernstein), but the Weinstein home invasion sent them into a five-alarm mode.

Like terrified rabbits, they all scurried into a bathroom and locked...Read More

John Stockwell's Turistas (Fox Atomic), which shot in mid '05 for a cost of $10 million, has earned $7,015,358 so far, according to the IMDB, after seven weeks of play. Understandably, Lionsgate UK has retitled it Paradise Lost for its U.K. and Ireland opening on 4.13.07. What's happened to Stockwell? He was a GenX Curtis Hanson after making crazybeautiful and Blue Crush, a first-rate, emotionally honest surfing movie, but he's allowed himself to slide into a pseudo-Lionsgate horror B-movie groove, making flicks about half-dressed kids dodging bad guys and killers in sunny climes (Into the Blue, Turistas). I don't know the backstory, but...Read More

"I've been in this business a long time, and Adrienne Shelly's Waitress could have come to the festival, gotten a standing ovation and remained unsold. And to sell to Searchlight! She hit the jackpot! I tried to explain how great this was to her mother, Elaine, but even while I was talking we both started crying. But [producer] Michael Roiff and I are sure that Adrienne can still hear the laughter somehow and is happy.

"As someone said at her memorial service, Adrienne's life may have been cut short, but she sure left her mark." --...Read More

"I think it's wonderful. I think it is not only an outstanding film, but it has created a genuine cultural shift in how people think about what I believe to be one of the most important issues of our times.'' -- Sen. Barack Obama commenting on An Inconvenient Truth being nominated for the Best Feature Documentary Oscar.

"What basis is there for everyone seeing Dreamgirls as the biggest Best Picture snub? Dreamgirls never won a critics award, nor was it the top film on all that many, if any, top 10 lists. The only reason to consider it a snub is because its assumed front-runner status was banged into our heads all year long. The real snub, in my mind, went to United 93 and Children of Men." -- A reader named "kbowen." (Wells to kbowen: Agreed.)

The Hollywood Reporter team -- Anne Thompson, Gregg Goldstein, Nicole Sperling -- has been wailing with the various Sundance acquisition stories that have broken within the past 36 hours or so. Goldstein claimed at last night's Cinetic party that they've whipped Variety's ass on most (or many) of these reportings/announcements. I have no reason to doubt this until somebody argues otherwise. It's all been appearing on Thompson's Riskybiz Blog....scroll down and read it all. Truthfully? I'm starting to disengage from Sundance a bit. I've been humping it for six days straight, 18 or 19 hours a day. 36 hours to go, then...Read More

"Hounddog is an indigestible gumbo of Southern Gothic ingredients seasoned with snake oil, Biblical hash, and thoroughly unpalatable spice," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy.

"[Director] Deborah Kampmeier's second feature became notorious even before its premiere as the 'Dakota Fanning rape movie.' The problem, however, is not that pivotal scene, which is as tastefully handled as it could be under the circumstances, but the fact that, after a reasonably atmospheric, if uneventful, first hour, the picture subsequently runs right off the rails.

"Aside from Fanning and the controversy, the film has nothing going for it commercially;...Read More

"Some will suggest that [Dreamgirls' loss] is a race thing, that an all-black cast has a hard time with the Academy, " writes N.Y. Times Oscar guy David Carr (a.k.a., "the Bagger"), "but check out the diversity among the actor nominations and ignore that excuse.

"What happened then? Mainly, Clint Eastwood, deep into his career, innovated midstream and came up with a Japanese take on the Battle of Iwo Jima. It's the kind of artistic and entrepreneurial performance that merits recognition and the Academy gave it.

"Dreamgirls also got skunked when it came to best director, perhaps because the voters had...Read More

"I think Sunshine is absolutely the front- runner. And the fact its directors didn't get nominated is irrelevant. The best picture and best director categories are so ridiculous anyway. How can something be the best picture and not be the best directed? And the reverse.

"So yeah, give props to Sunshine. I saw it for the second time on a plane back from Panama City, and it's really wonderful, funny, heartwarming, well performed, whatever. And the folks on the plane just loved it. You could tell the ones who weren't watching were wondering what was going on when, on numerous occasions, half...Read More

"When was the last time a film led in total nominations and got shut out of Best Picture, Director and Writing, as Dreamgirls was this morning?," asks Hollywood Wiretap's Pete Hammond. "The answer, going back to the Academy's beginnings 79 years ago is...never (at least as far as we can tell).

"'We did everything we could (to get the Best Picture nomination),' a truly dejected DreamWorks consultant lamented after the announcement.

"Of course those three, count `em, three Best Song nominations ballooned the total Dreamgirls noms, making composer Henry Krieger the most nominated person of the year, garnering by far the biggest...Read More

The 22nd Santa Barbara Film Festival (1.25 to 2.4) will have 32 of this morning's announced Oscar nominees in attendance -- Helen Mirren, Will Smith, Forest Whitaker, Sacha Baron Cohen, Jackie Earle Haley, Djimon Honsou, Jennifer Hudson, Queen screenwriter Peter Morgan, Babel director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, Little Children helmer Todd Field, Little Miss Sunshine screenwriter Michael Arndt, etc. The list goes on...you get the idea.

With Dreamgirls out of the running, which of the five nominated Best Picture films is the front-runner at this stage? Opinions, please. I suspect that Little Miss Sunshine is going to get dissed the most between now and ballot-closing day, even though the odds of winning don't seem all that great because Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris weren't jointly nominated for Best Director. LMS could win , of course. As a a big-name producer told me after last weekend's PGA win, "Sunshine is the only [likely] Best Picture nominee without negatives -- it's a very good film and everybody likes it."

"It's obviously possible for a movie to get nominated for Best Picture without its lead actors getting their own nominations. But is it possible for a film to be a Best Picture contender when its lead performances were widely panned, even by people who otherwise liked the movie? I'm referring, of course, to Beyonce Knowles, Jamie Foxx and Dreamgirls.

"Let's face it -- as much as everyone seemed to like Eddie Murphy and Jennifer Hudson, and as much as you could legitimately call this an ensemble picture, Jamie Foxx and Beyonce Knowles were the ostensible leads. The...Read More

Once again, Warner Bros. deserves double credit as far as Leonardo DiCaprio is concerned -- a plus for getting him a Best Actor nomination in Blood Diamond (!), a not-very-good film, and a minus for not putting him up for Best Actor in The Departed, which would have been the right and proper move because the guy is flat-out great in the "mole" role. Congrats also to Mark Wahlberg for his Best Supporting Actor nomination.

"Many in our office are still getting over the fact that Dreamgirls was snubbed. I say, tough luck!" -- New York-based advertising executive in just-received e-mail.

The morning's flimsiest call has to be the Best Adapted Screenplay nomination for the Borat gang -- Sacha Baron Cohen & Anthony Hines & Peter Baynham & Dan Mazer. Adapted from "Da Ali G Show" because of very similar elements, concept, attitudes, etc.

You can get the whole Oscar nomination rundown anywhere at this point, but my two favorites are Variety and Oscar Watch. I just wish that the esteemed Sasha Stone would boldface her categories.

No Best Foreign Language Film nomination for Pedro Almodovar's Volver? And I was shocked, frankly, that Susanne Bier's After the Wedding, her weakest film ever, was nominated in this category. Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth and Florian von Henckel Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others were nominated....good calls. Less enthusiasm in this corner for Days of Glory and Water, but fine.

Another significant surprise (and a feather in the cap of not only Universal Oscar strategist Tony Angellotti but every impassioned, hard-pushing advocate of United 93 in the industry and press circles): Paul Greengrass, the director of United 93 -- a movie that many Academy members reportedly refused to even see, has been nominated for Best Director. A significant victory, no question. Whoda thunk it?

We'll never know the precise vote tallies, but this indicates that the vote to nominate United 93 for Best Picture was (probably) fairly sizable. A very surprising thing, and a hint that the Academy's "deadwood" faction (geezers, reactionaries,...Read More

Dreamgirls, the musical that many, many people (David Poland included) said over and over would win the Oscar for Best Picture, hasn't even been nominated for Best Picture....double, no, triple-strength shocker!...an omission that will live in the annals of Oscar nomination history.

Eight Dreamgirls noms, but not for Best Picture

The gloom clouds hanging over the Dreamgirls camp right now are extremely dark and Cecil B. DeMille-y. For what it's worth, my sincere condolences to Bill Condon, Larry Mark, Terry Press, Nancy Kirkpatrick, David Geffen and the gang. I never hated Dreamgirls or campaigned for its...Read More

The Salt Lake City NBC channel cut off the live feed from the Academy right in the middle of the announcement of Best Adapted Screenplay nominees (I know...why am I watching television at all?), but the first early surprise (prior to the impact grenade of Dreamgirls' non-inclusion among the Best Picture nominees) was Little Miss Sunshine's Abigail Breslin getting nominated for Best Supporting Actress. That's an indicator of general industry sentiment about this Fox Searchlight film, and a further suggestion that Sunshine might really win the Best Picture race.

John Carney's Once, which I finally saw last night at 10:40 pm or thereabouts, is the Sundance heart & soul movie everyone's talking about. And you don't need to be an NYU film scholar to understand why. A kickaround, no-star Irish musical love story, Once has an ether-like spirit that anyone who's truly been in love will recognize in a flash.

Once costars Marketa Irglova (l.), Glen Hansard (r.)

It's about a pair of Dublin-based musicians -- a scruffy, red-bearded troubadour (folk-rocker Glen Hansard, best known for his Irish group The Frames) and a young Czech immigrant...Read More

Hollywood Elsewhere has been out of business all day long due to an incorrectly installed DBD module, which affected my ability to go into Movable Type. The problem started at 8:15 this morning; the subsequent 11 or so hours were absolute hell. The problem was finally solved ten minutes ago by a genius named Chris Tillet. I'm asking that everyone observe a moment of grateful silence for the 2% or 3% of tech support people out there who actually know a thing or two and use their nimble noggins.

"A friend who visited Atlanta this past weekend tells me that Little Children was one of the options at her hotel for in-room pay-per-viewing. So I can't help thinking: No matter how many Oscar nominations the movie may receive on Tuesday, has New Line already written off the movie's prospects as a theatrical release?" -- recent entry on Joe Leydon's Moving Picture Blog.

In major denial: "I refuse to believe that Little Miss Sunshine, a movie the world loves but I loathed, is going to get a Best Picture nod." -- Salt Lake Tribune's Sean P. Means, in a piece about Tuesday's Oscar nominations.

An above-average, all-star Oscar roundtable -- Helen Mirren, Penelope Cruz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Forest Whitaker -- by Newsweek's Sean Smith and David Ansen, including streaming video clips. From the 1.29.07 issue.

The Reeler's Stu VanAirsdale on (deep breath...no, two deep breaths) Amir Bar-Lev's My Kid Could Paint That, "already the subject of buying speculation after last week's TV deal with A&E Indie Films and one of the more eagerly anticipated competition titles among festivalgoers. The anticipation paid off: Bar-Lev's film is a meta-mix of doc ethics, art politics and family drama, a brilliantly paced mystery tale of a Binghamton, N.Y., four year-old whose abstract paintings develop a lucrative following before its authorship is drawn into question by an increasingly skeptical media...including Bar-Lev himself."

"Chicago 10 deliberately eschews context and perspective, the better to simply plunge the viewer into the maelstrom, as if these fires raged last week rather than four decades ago. [Brett] Morgen's message, however, while implicit, couldn't be much clearer. In lieu of a "comprehensive," "dispassionate," "balanced" portrait of the most explosive instance of American dissidence of the past half-century (at least), he gives us something much more valuable: a call to arms.

"Yes, the movie is blatantly stacked in favor of its hero-agitators, but it's also impossible to watch Chicago 10 without becoming acutely aware of the vacuum at the center of...Read More

The Envelope's Tom O'Neil attempts an explanation for Little Miss Sunshine's PGA Best Picture win.

I've been through not-so-hot Sundance Film Festivals before, and even the bad ones had their occasional pleasures and surprises. It's a little bit early to be asking if "this is the worst Sundance ever?" and then saying "yes, maybe"...like David Poland did yesterday. "We're two days into the festival and the buyers are ready to go home," he wrote. Let them go home already! There'll be more room at industry screenings if they leave, right? Am I disappointed I haven't seen something deeper, stronger, funnier, punchier? Yeah, I am, but there are five days to go, for Chrissake. Give it a rest.

I despise romantic comedies as a rule, but Zoe Cassevetes' Broken English is an exception, perhaps because it doesn't try to be "funny" as much as sardonic and bitterly truthful about what a slog it is out there for no-longer-young women who are "looking for love," or at least for a relationship that allows for the possibility of something nourishing and genuine.

For what it is and as far as it goes, English is very bright and absorbing, and it contains the most affecting and vulnerable performance of Parker Posey's 38-year life. She may seem to...Read More

James C. Strouse's Grace is Gone, which I saw last night at 10 pm, is the best film I've seen so far at Sundance '07. It's a plain and pared down thing, emotionally subtle but very specific and often moving, familiar and understated with a Midwestern voice of its own -- a family film about a very American, very here-and-now tragedy.

It definitely stands a chance of being remembered at year's end, certainly for John Cusack's deeply touching performance (a major step forward given his career-long inhabiting of hip sardonic wise guys) and possibly in the Best...Read More

Shocker! The Producers Guild -- not exactly a recent harbinger of Best Picture Oscar wins, but a significant indicator of industry sentiment -- has given Little Miss Sunshine its Best Picture award. I didn't see it coming, I thought they'd give it to The Departed.... amazing! Obviously the Dreamgirls Golden Globes momentum has been stopped in its tracks, Babel is back to maybe-but-who-knows? status, and it's a wide-open race for the Best Picture Oscar. There is no joy in Mudville (and you know where & what that is) this evening. Dreamgirls could still take it; so could Babel or The Departed. Nobody knows...but...Read More

Mike Russell has another comic-strip interview up -- this one with Guillermo del Toro explaining the fascist symbolism of his Pan's Labyrinth monsters, a.k.a., "Fascist Monsters of Filmland."

"Sasha, you're right about it being a long night. I'm already heading down to the Century Plaza. We're going to start drinking in our hotel room at about 4 before heading down to the cocktail hour at 6. The group I'm with is all about The Departed but we're realizing Dreamgirls is a very big possibility. In the last two hours I spoke with two other PGA members who said they voted for Sunshine. I'm baffled as to how this thing is going to turn out tonight." -- industry guy discussing tonight's Producer's Guild Awards on Oscarwatch.com.

The Society of Online Awards Prognosticators (SOAP) winners have been announced, and as I am a member, it's very gratifying to bestow the Best Picture award on Children of Men, and the Best Director award on its creator, Alfonso Cuaron. I would take the time to paste in and format the other winners, but I should have left and begun my Saturday Sundance expedition two hours ago. If the winners were listed on someone's site, I would naturally link to them/it.

The Hollywood Reporter team -- Nicole Sperling, Gregg Goldstein, Anne Thompson -- reported last night that Dan Klores' documentary Crazy Love will probably be distributed by Magnolia Pictures.

"Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton jumped into the 2008 presidential race yesterday," per N.Y. Times reporters Patrick Healy and Jeff Zeleny, "immediately squaring off against Senator Barack Obama and the rest of the Democratic field in what is effectively the party's first primary, the competition for campaign donations.

'I'm in,' Mrs. Clinton said in an e-mail message to supporters early yesterday. 'And I'm in to win.'" No, not correct. The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan's opinion of Clinton aside, she's a smart egg and a fairly savvy operator, but she's a polarizing figure, she's carrying all kinds of '90s baggage, the Bubbas...Read More

L.A. Weekly's Scott Foundas has written partly about the trials of indie filmmaker Gary Walkow, whose late '80s Grand Jury prize-winner The Trouble With Dick has been more or less remade as Crashing, Walkow's "fourth independent feature and the first-ever sequel to a Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner," Foundas notes.

Crashing director Gary Walkow; Park City's main street around 1991

"Now, exactly 20 years after his first Park City premiere, Walkow is readying himself for another. Only when the curtain goes up on Crashing, it will be at Slamdance, the 13-year-old alterna-festival that offered...Read More

Our choices now in entertainment are "staggering," Magnolia Pictures president Eamonn Bowles tells N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis, adding that "something needs to be extremely compelling to get people motivated to leave the house."

"The cosmopolitanism of international filmmaking is matched by the parochialism of American film culture." -- N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott so concludes in a rambling, searching-with-a-flashlight piece about how foreign films are receiving ever-smaller, ever-weaker receptions in this country.

"Sundance movies have devolved into a genre [and are ] getting as predictable as Hollywood's," writes Time's Richard Corliss. "The style is spare and naturalistic. The theme is relationships, beginning in angst and ending in reconciliation. The focus is often on a dysfunctional family (there are no functional ones in indie movies) that strives to reconnect. Within this genre are a few subspecies: the family breakup film (The Squid and the Whale), the finding-your-family-at- school movie (Half Nelson, Brick), the gay drama (Mysterious Skin). Way too frequently, the family goes on a trip. Given the typical Sundance pace, which is leisurely to...Read More

The box-office is looking fairly lousy this weekend, and the two big Golden Globe winners -- Dreamgirls and Babel -- aren't getting that much of a bump from their respective wins last Monday. Night at the Museum, #1 again with the super-sophisticates, will end up with around $11,849,000 and a rough cume of $204 million by tomorrow night. Stomp the Yard, off 47%, will earn about $11,352,000. Dreamgirls will earn $7,826,000 this weekend, up about 6% but they added close to 300 runs this weekend so it's actually close to flat.

The Hitcher, #4 on the list, is doing about $4600...Read More

Yesterday was half-consumed by hellish vagabonding; the rental-share I had fell apart and I had to scramble to find a close-to-the-action crash pad with good wifi. Despite this, I've managed so far to see Brett Morgen's Chicago 10, Tamara Jenkins' The Savages, Mike Cahill's The King of California and Jorge Hernandez Aldana's The Night Buffalo.

None really did it for me in an emotional world-rocking sense, although Jenkins' film is by far the best written and acted. It's a wise/sad/funny downhead drama about a 40ish brother and sister (Philip Seymour Hoffman, Laura Linney) trying to care...Read More

The release date of Lucky You, the most unloved and unwanted Curtis Hanson gambling movie in U.S. history, has been bumped again -- this time to May 4th, Hopefully it'll snag all the people who aren't into seeing Spider-Man 3. (Two other films opening that day are Sarah Polley's Away From Her and that nicely-pitched anthology flick Paris, Je t'aime.)

By my count, Lucky You, which costars Eric Bana, Drew Barry- more and Robert Duvall, was supposed to come out 9.8.06, then 10.27.06 and then 3.16.07. I can't understand how a film by Hanson (In Her Shoes, L.A. Confidential) with...Read More

Stephen Rodrick's Los Angeles magazine piece about Oscar bloggers ("The Blog Whisperers") hit the stands yesterday, the main focus being on myself and MCN's David Poland. I suppose Rodrick or his editor Kit Rachlis thought the Poland vs. Wells bitchfest was the tangiest aspect to run with, but...

The piece is okay but a bit myopic in the sense that no attention is paid to The Envelope's Tom O'Neil and Hollywood Wiretap's Pete Hammond. Poland and I are heavily in the game, of course, but these two guys mainline it. If I'm a "lapsed Catholic" or even...Read More

N.Y. Times guy David Carr considers the very sad Sundance legacy of the late Adrienne Shelly, whose last directed film, Waitress, will have its premiere at the festival fairly soon. "Because Shelly had such a clear idea of what she wanted and was not shy about making it happen," he writes, "her absence [at Sundance] as the film makes the rounds is all the more acute."

Adrienne Shelly,Cheryl Hines and Keri Russell in Waitress

When did those Sundance-is-losing-its-soul pieces first start to happen? The mid '90s? A bit later? When did the Sundance-has-been-totally- corrupted-vulgarized-and-putrified stories start happening? Around 2000 or '01? Question is, as far as Sundance tear-down articles go, where does this John Anderson 1.19 Guardian piece fit in?

The usual we're-Sundance-and-we're-proud-of- what-we-stand for themes were sounded by Robert Redford and festival program director Geoff Gilmore at the opening-day Sundance Film Festival press conference, which ended about 90 minutes ago. I don't know if anyone was knocked flat by theser statements, but it was good to hear the Sundance fundamentals restated in a clear and concise fashion.

(l. to r.) Sundance program director Geoff Gilmore, Robert Redford, Chicago 10 director Brett Morgen at the close of this afternoon's 2007 Sundance Film Festival press conference at the Egyptian theatre -- Thursday, 1.18.07, 3:20 pm

We're about movies...Read More

I was writing at a table in a sports bar last night, and there was a group of five sitting nearby -- four guys and a lady -- who couldn't stop laughing uproariously. Every time they burst out laughing it felt like someone had exploded an aural fart grenade...."hah-hah-hah-hahhhh!" After a while I got out my watch and started timing their frequency -- no lie, the boisterous noise happened about once every 75 or 80 seconds.

Everybody explodes in laughter from time to time -- it's wonderful when this happens. But people who do it repeatedly and oppressively in a crowded room...Read More

"Many inside and out of the Academy feel Little Miss Sunshine is virtually a lock for a Best Picture nomination come Tuesday," writes Hollywood Wiretap's Pete Hammond. The odds, in other words, are "looking very good right now for LMS to fill the 'small' movie slot in Oscar's top five. [And] people are wondering if there isn't a sea change in the Academy; a new way of thinking and the possibility that this Little picture, which was the first serious contender out of the gate last summer and the first to send DVD screeners, could just be the last one standing around...Read More

Nikki Finke nails Brad Grey for being a credit hog maneuverer at the Golden Globes. To approximately quote Jack Nicholson's character in The Departed, "Nobody gives you anything -- you have to take it."

An Associated Press story on CNN.com this morning says "it's rare for the Sundance Film Festival to start with a documentary..and [yet] organizers say this year's opening night film, Chicago 10, represents just the sort of bold gambit the United States' top independent-cinema venue likes to see in its movies." Well, okay...but Brett Morgen's film, to go by the various descriptions, isn't the kind of thing Sundance programmers usually pick for the opening-night attraction. Not to my recollection, at least.

Sundance programmers have always chosen to begin the festival with a film with a thoughtful...Read More

I happened to come upon a thumbnail this morning of the infamous 12.12.05 Time cover that started all the trouble for Steven Spielberg's Munich -- a cover that basically said, "Old media has come down from Mt. Sinai and lo, here is the film of the year, a film of our time...a masterful, heart-palpitating Oscar-worthy drama by a legendary filmmaker who has spoken to Time and Time only."

With one fell swoop...

With Sundance '07 already being labelled as "ehh" by some of the buyers, it's good to recall a crusty old Park City truism: in doubt or despair, go to the docs, go to World Cinema, go to Slamdance and buttonhole Variety's Robert Koehler.

The death of Art Buchwald, the hotshot political columnist who peaked in the '60s and'70s, was announced yesterday by his son. Buchwald's humor was never, as I recall, terribly savage or incendiary -- he worked and played within the established boundaries -- but in his better moments he displayed a delicious wit.

Rich guys who can't wait for the June '07 debut of the iPhone may have already heard that South Korea's LG Electronics Co. is launching a Prada phone, a $780 mobile device that offers a buttonless touch-screen interface that's a lot like the iPhone's -- and which will be in stores in Europe next month.

The Globe and Mail's Liam Lacey today reiterated the envelope-pushing theme of this year's Sundance Film Festival -- "If you want to get people worked up, you can't beat the combination of incendiary politics and twisted sex." Lacey lists seven examples. Quick, without looking...how many can you recite off the top of your head? (There've been a couple of Sundance stories already posted in this vein.)

Heather Graham in Adrift

The films are (a) Brett Morgen's Chicago 10, "about one of the more inflammatory trials in American history, the 1968 conspiracy trial of the Chicago Seven, [using]...Read More

Financial Times writer David Bowen wrote today that Sen. Barack Obama's announcement of an exploratory committee about his likely U.S. presidential candidacy via his own website "shows that the web can be wonderful, but only if it works hand in hand with the steam-driven world, so don't go writing off newspapers and television just yet."

Does Bowen's view -- obviously an old-media way of looking of things, but not without a pinch of real-world validity -- apply in any way, shape or form to entertainment news stories?

"I know the Obama site exists only because I read it about in...Read More

On the L.A.-to-Salt Lake City plane today, a critic passed along a starting-to-sound-familiar observation, which is that Sundance '07 is looking more and more like an off year. A friend of the critic has seen 20 of the films being shown here and so far he's saying "naaah"....flat, so-so, nothing to write home about material...a couple of almost-but-not-quite- as-good-as-Half Nelson flicks, and apparently nothing even close to a Little Miss Sunshine-type breakout waiting to happen. "Apparently," I say.

On top of which I talked to a guy who said he'd seen and didn't care for Tommy O'Haver's An American Crime...just that kind...Read More

I couldn't be bothered yesterday to mention the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Best Foreign Language Film award short list. Couldn't get to it today either. But of the nine films chosen (Days of Glory, Water, After the Wedding, Avenue Montaigne, The Lives of Others, Pan's Labyrinth, Black Book, Volver and Vitus), the final five have to include The Lives of Others, Pan's Labyrinth and Volver, right? That leaves room for two other finalists. They'll be announced on 1.23.07 along with everything and everyone else.

The Sundance plane leaves at 3:40 pm and I, uhm....haven't finished packing. No more filing until tonight sometime. Up, up and away. (Presumably.)

ThinkFilm honcho Mark Urman resented last night's post about Zoo and wrote the following: "Zoo, if you really want to know, is extremely artsy, totally un-sensationalistic, and 100% 'specialty.' Alas -- writers insist upon calling it 'the horse-fucking movie' and talking about it in tabloid terms, and flinging it at a broad-based audience that is not equipped to meet it on its own terms."

I wrote back straight away and said "the only touchstone I have in the naked male-stimulated-by-horse genre of drama is Equus. Does Zoo touch upon any of the themes and/or musings in...Read More

Find Me Guilty producer-co-screenwriter T.J Mancini is doggedly sticking with attempts to explain to anyone who'll listen that the Yari Film Releasing Group (i.e., Bob Yari's outfit) screwed up badly on the distribution and marketing of this esteemed moral fable/courtrom drama, which is one of Sidney Lumet's very best films and easily one of the best of '06.

It's old news and water under the bridge, but Mancini sent me a Find Me Guilty road-to-implosion timeline this morning, with commentary. He points out that Find Me Guilty was the first major film released by the new...Read More

A hilarious YouTube satire clip from a "Fox & Friends" discussion on Fox News, the subject being how patriotic movies that don't tear down America make more money than communist/socialist/ homosexual movies. What's funny is the wedged-in editorial commentary. Cheers to the great Dougie Zero for composing it.

Dreamgirls, a movie musical based on the '60s and early '70s career tribulations of the Supremes and Diana Ross (as well as Berry Gordy, Flo Ballard, etc.) has been playing fairly broadly since Christmas, and yet Ross, who went on Late Night with David Letterman Tuesday night with an absolutely massive '70s 'fro, says she (a) hasn't had time to see it, (b) has "heard a lot about it," (c) plans "to see it with my lawyers" and (d) "I would like to do is to be able to see it."

Those are lies, no?...Read More

"I just arrived in Park City tonight. Beware, it is bitter cold. Not snowing though." -- a publicist friend who wrote me at 2:30 ayem this morning.

China's movie censor has decided not to approve The Departed for domestic release in China "due to the film's brief mention of a Chinese plan to buy military equipment," according to Reuters. "There is no chance The Departed will be shown in mainland cinemas because the U.S. side declined to change a plot line describing how Beijing wanted to buy advanced military computer hardware,'' a Chinese government source told Reuters. "That part of the plot is definitely unnecessary. The [Chinese] regulators just cannot understand why the movie wanted to involve China. They can talk about Iran or Iraq or whatever, but there's no...Read More

Behold the poster for ThinkFilm 's Zoo, Robinson Devor's "horse-fucking movie" that will show at the Sundance Film Festival. One look and right away you're reminded of Peter Shaffer''s Equus. Where do I get the feeling that Zoo isn't quite as pregnant with ideas and metaphor? (Maybe it is.) When I think of a horse schtupping some guy and death resulting from ruptured tissue...gimme a break. Feels on some level like the new cinematic "Piss Christ."

I'm leaving for the 2007 Sundance Film Festival tomorrow afternoon, and I plan on working it for seven full days -- Thursday, 1.18 through the evening of Wednesday, 1.25. The usual three to four films per day, which may work out closer to three than four...figure 24, 25 films in all. I've just reviewed the party rundown supplied by an agency friend, and there are 77 parties happening over those seven days. If you attend any more than two or three per day max you'll be baked in no time, so you need to keep it closer to one or two and...Read More

Senator Barack Obama took his first solid step into the Democratic presidential race today by opening "an exploratory committee to raise money and begin building a campaign designed to change our politics," the N.Y. Times reported today. Obama said he would make a formal declaration February 10th in Illinois. I can't wait for the bubbas to start showing their colors when he does.

"But I did love producer Lloyd Levin's United 93 story: apparently the team of editors desperately trying to cut United 93's documentary-like coverage into some kind of shape in just 14 weeks of post-production tried to persuade [director Paul] Greengrass to give them more time. Everyone, in fact, told him to take it. [But Greengrass] insisted that they make the movie in the time they had, and that it would be better for the movie not to overthink it." -- Risky Bizblog's Anne Thompson.

"In the end, the movie awards were dominated by Paramount -- a studio flack even emailed me 'All Paramount Grand Prix' (and to a lesser extent Fox and Disney's Miramax). But it's the rule rather than the exception for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association to be susceptible to studio campaigning (all that attention, all that money, all those perks and freebies, showered on only 85 people who can barely call themselves legitimate journalists). Still, the HFPA wanted to spread around the awards to as many Big Names as possible to glam up the show and NBC's ratings." -- Nikki Finke, Deadline...

I've been writing Miramax pallies about some long-awaited Peter O'Toole face-time when he finally arrives in Los Angeles, following his smashing success on the New York talk-show circuit. (And getting no reply.) The Envelope's Tom O'Neil has been interested in same, but he reported early this morning that a Miramax rep has told Gold Derby, "Unfortunately, O'Toole flew back to London [last] Saturday. He was exhausted after his crazy press schedule in New York and didn't have it in him to come here. If we get the Oscar nom, he will come." Good heavens...he was supposed to fly to L.A. and settle...Read More

Here's the Film Forum page for Becket's one-week booking (1.26 through 2.1), and the MPI/Slowhand Cinema site for the restored film itself. It's really too bad that there won't be an opportunity to see Becket (it hits L.A.'s Nuart in early February) in bigger, swankier theatres than those afforded by Landmark Cinemas or the Film Forum -- it's a cerebral "big" movie and really should be seen at the Arclight or at some other spacious, tip-top venue.

One other comment: the "Production Notes" on the Becket site [which was deactivated/shut down yesterday by MPI...Read More

After every major awards show, year after year, the same thought is on everyone's mind: "Good for this or that film (or this or that creative player) for winning -- the voters have spoken. But my God, the final decisions in some respects were so clueless, so behind-the-curve, so old-farty, so off-on-their-own-island."

I know that Children of Men, United 93, Paul Greengrass, The Lives of Others, Volver and Penelope Cruz (to name but a few) are probably going to get the shaft on Oscar nomination day (1.23), and that's okay -- not the end of the world. It's just that they could...Read More

The Golden Globes awards confirmed two things: (a) there will be no sweeping victory by anyone or anything come Oscar night, and (b) the Globes are getting a bit staid and tidy -- almost Oscarish in their decorum. Once upon an ass-time the Globes were regarded as a kind of alcoholic, loosey-goosey fuck-all thing, but there was almost no snap or rudeness or exhilaration in any of it. No real verve, raunch...no extraordinary pocket-drop eloquence... the pulse refused to race or even swerve. The winners, the speeches and the patter were almost all mid-tempo; ditto the parties.

...

A respectful nod to Hollywood Wiretap's Pete Hammond for making nearly all the right Golden Globe calls last Thursday, including a Babel win in the Best Motion Picture, Drama category, which surprised me: "A somewhat shaky and timid consensus for the Globes seems to call for a Babel Drama win and Dreamgirls Comedy or Musical win," he wrote, "with Martin Scorsese taking Director and Helen Mirren, Meryl Streep, Sacha Baron Cohen and Jennifer Hudson certain to win acting awards." He also called the Forest Whitaker and Clint Eastwood/Letters From Iwo Jima wins.

A Scott Bowles/USA Today theory by way of Entertainment Weekly's Dave Karger -- Academy voters may be starting to get sick of the big winners thus far -- doesn't seem to actually apply except in the case of Forest Whitaker, last night's Golden Globe Best Actor champ. The notion that IVenus contender Peter O'Toole's late surge could theoretically unseat him is given some weight. But Helen Mirren and Martin Scorsese (if you don't know their categories by now...) are about as locked as they could possibly be.

Babel wins the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture, Drama!! Shocker! First shocker of the night! Didn't see this coming, frankly. Was this just me? I don't think so. This will provide, hopefuly, a big shot in the arm for ticket sales. Hooray for the team, hooray for Alejandro.

Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Motion Picture, Drama goes to Forest Whitaker in The Last King of Scotland. Whitaker goes "wow" two or three times. Says he's "really happy to be included in the company of Will Smith and Leonardo DiCaprio," thanks to his children, God, his ancestors, Fox Searchlight, Peter Rice, Nancy Utley, Kevin Williamson, etc.

The show is nearly at three hours and is obviously going to last longer than that. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is next, presenting the Best Motion Picture, Drama award to The Departed...right?

Comment about the show: "There used to be a drinkier atmosphere....theres...Read More

Phillip Seymour Hoffman presenting the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture, Drama, and the award goes to Helen Mirren in The Queen.

The Golden Globe for Best TV Series, Drama goes to Grey's Anatomy.

The Golden Globe for Best Comedy/Musical of the year goes to Dreamgirls....not much of a shocker. The film has a new lease on life...sort of. I mean, it may get a bump at the box-office, which it kind of needs. I still say the Oscar thing is pretty much settled as far as Dreamgirls not getting the Best Picture Oscar. There have been no big surprises tonight...nothing ballsy except for the mention of testicles by Tom Hanks and Sacha Baron Cohen.

Borat's Sacha Baron Cohen wins for Best Comedy/Musical Performance by an Actor! He tells an extended joke about costar Kenneth Davitian, the naked wrestling fat guy. Cohen riffs on "the anus and testicles of my costar...when I saw your two wrinkled Golden Globes on my chin, I thought to myself, I'd better win a bloody award for this." Also: "Thank you to every American who has not sued me so far...thank you."

Steven Spielberg presenting the Golden Globe for Best Director of a Motion Picture, and it's gotta be Marty...right? Martin Scorsese wins! Comments: "Thank you, Hollywood Foreign Press....I'm gonna talk a little bit faster than I normally do. (He thanks all the producers, the agent/manager reps, William Monahan, Thelma Schoonmaker...the original film....Leo, Jack, Mark Wahlberg, Marty Sheen, Alec Baldwin.) "I wanted to make an old Warner Bros. movie like Angels with Dirty Faces -- we wound up making Devils with Dirty Faces."

Tom Hanks presenting the Cecil B. DeMille award (i.e., life achievement) to Warren Beatty. Hanks is fine, but why didn't Nicholson present this award? "What balls this man has! What balls has Warren Beatty!" (Will the network bleep out "balls") Hanks adds, sensing the vibe, "By balls, I mean artistic vision." The flim clips, of course...Bonnie and Clyde, Splendor in the Grass, Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait, Reds, Bugsy, Dick Tracy, Bulworth. Hanks asks the ladies in the room who've succumbed to Warren's charms to raise their hands. (Moderately funny.) We all want to exude his class, charisma and balls.

Beatty takes the...Read More

The Golden Globe for Best Actress in a TV Series, and the winner is Ugly Betty's America Ferrera. She's happily weeping, of course...thanking everyone, etc. Doing a Halle Berry. Fine.

Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore presenting (wait...Grant explains that Pince was stuck in traffic earlier) the Golden Globe for Best Original Score, and the award-winner is Alexandre Desplat for The Painted Veil.

Djimon Honsou and Sharon Stone announcing the Golden Globe for Best Foreign-Language Film, and the winner is Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima. Fine...if I were king I would have handed it to The Lives of Others but fine -- Letters is a very good film. Significant Eastwood remark: "This does amazing things for my confidence."

Jamie Foxx takes the stage to present the...forget it. He's just there to introduce the Dreamgirls reel.. "A film that has audiences cheering all across the country...in only 800 theatres," Foxx says. "Do the math, do the math." Not true! It expanded last weekend to nearly 2000 theatres.

Golden Globe for Best TV Series Comedy, and the winner is Ugly Betty.

Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy TV Series, and the winner is Alec Baldwin for 30 Rock. Noteworthy remark: "Thanks to the Hollywood Foreign Press for remembering me in the autumn of my career." Also: "I'd like to than the greatest producer in the history of broadcast television....Marci Klein." (He means Calvin's daughter.)

Golden Globe for Best Screenplay...will it be for The Departed or Babel? And the winner is Peter Morgan for The Queen.

Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Miniseries or TV Movie: Bill Nighy (!!!)....the great Bill Nighy, who is awesome in The Vertical Hour, inGideon's Daughter. Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Miniseries or TV Movie: Helen Mirren wins for Elizabeth I...Christ, she's going to win two tonight.

Rachel Weisz presenting Golden Glboe for Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture....will it be Murphy? And the Golden Globe goes to Eddie Murphy in Dreamgirls. An omen? Does this mean that Dreamgirls win the Best Musical or Comedy Golden Globe award? Even if it does...hah! Stand-out remark: "Thank you, David Geffen, for convincing me to work for free."

Salma Hayek strides out on stage to present the Golden Globe for Best Series or TV Movie, and the trophy goes to HBO's Elizabeth I. ( I called it Elizabeth the First earlier....I was wrong.)

Joaquin Pheonix presenting the award to Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy....and the award goes to Meryl Streep. Surprised? Not me. "Oh, my God...thank you everybody. I'm really thrilled. I think I've worked with everybody in the room. (Somebody groans or murmurs something.) Oh, shut up....it's not that long. Congratulations to nominees in all categories for Best Actress....this has been such a fun year to watch movies because of you gals. I just want to thank David Frankel and Aline Brosh McKenna for a really sharp script, and thanks to Elizabeth Gabler [and the other producers] and Tommy Rothman who signs the...Read More

The Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature Film (presented by Steve Carell) goes to Cars...Cars!?...Cars!

The Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress in a Series, Mini-Series or TV Movie: Emily Blunt, Gideon's Daughter (also played the sick, runny-nosed secretary in The Devil Wears Prada). The Golden Globe for Best Actor in a TV Series or Drama: Hugh Laurie, House. Laurie's first remark: "I am speechless....I am absolutely with a speech." The rest of the improv is fairly fast, glib, moderately amusing...fun guy. "I would like to thank Robert Sean Leonard -- I can't remember why."

Best Supporting Actor in a Series, Miniseries or TV movie...very to that. And the Golden Globe goes to Jeremy Irons for Elizabeth the First, the HBO movie. "This is a nightmare," Iron begins. "I can't remember your names. Why is it that the jobs that are the most fun are the ones that get you awards? This film showed in England -- they ignored it. It showed here and you people didn't ignore it. It's wonderful to have this. Thank you very much!" And Kyra Sedgwick just won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a TV Series/Drama, for her acting on the...Read More

Justin Timberlake just handed out the Best Song award -- to "Song of The Heart" from Happy Feet. Nobody showed up to accept it. Timberlake said, "I guess Prince isn't here so I'd like to thank the HFPA for this great honor," or words to that effect. Commercial break as I write this....

Jennifer Hudson just won the Best Supporting Actress award at the Globes. (George Clooney announced it -- no surprise in his voice when he said her name.) Her remarks: "Thank you so much, I have always dreamed but never, ever this big...thank you to the Hollywood Foreign Press for such an amazing honor. You do no know how much this does fro my confidence...because of this, it makes me feel like I'm a part of a community...it makes me feel like an actress....my thanks to Bill Condon, and I thank God for such an experience....[thanks to] Larry Mark, David Geffen. Thank you to...Read More

Hollywood Elsewhere is spiffed up, in position and watching a live West Coast feed of the Golden Globe awards in a secure location. I'm going to start blah-blahing and post-posting as soon as it starts. If you're in the Pacific time zone, the winners will be posted here first, or fairly early....

1.15.07, 4:05 pm; 4:06 pm; 4:07 pm

In his boilerplate Golden Globes lead-up piece, AP reporter David Germain says "there [is] no clear front-runner for the best-drama prize, whose nominees Include The Departed, the Robert Kennedy-in-absentia tale Bobby, the suburban comic drama Little Children and the British-royalty story The Queen." Saying there's "no clear front-runner" is a dodge, unless I'm way off the mark. It's The Departed, son...The Departed.

AP photo by Jeff Christensen

"Moving through a room [like the one at the Chateau Marmont, where the big pre-Globes HBO party happened last Saturday] is either the best thing you've ever done or a claustropho- bic's ultimate nightmare. You exchange brief glances with strangers; their hungry eyes bounce around the room looking for famous places to land. If you're a nobody, those eyes bounce off of you without even a smile. It's a social dance that silently decides hierarchy." -- from Sasha Stone's Oscarwatch.com piece about Saturday night shenanigans, which only confirms my observation that there are very few people in this town who are less...Read More

HE Golden Globe predictions: Best Drama -- The Departed; Best Musical or Comedy -- Dreamgirls will probably eke out a win -- I have a feeling that Little Miss Sunshine and Borat aren't strong enough to take it away; Best Director -- Martin Scorsese; Best Actress, Drama -- Helen Mirren; Best Actor, Drama -- Forest Whitaker (although I'd rather see Leonardo DiCaprio take it); Best Actress, Comedy/Musical -- Meryl Streep; Best Actor, Comedy/Musical: Sacha Baron Cohen; Best Supporting Actor: Eddie Murphy (although it really ought to be Alan Arkin...really); Best Supporting Actress -- Jennifer Hudson (locked); Best Screenplay -- Babel; Best Animated Feature...Read More

It doesn't matter if Dreamgirls wins the Golden Globe award for Best Musical or Comedy, which may happen. The Dreamgirls downturn, which is blitzkrieging right now, began about a week and a half to two weeks ago, and I suspect that the HFPA voters weren't as attuned to this turn in the wind when they cast their ballots as they (probably) are right now.

What I'm saying is (and I take no pleasure from writing this, being an admirer of various portions of Bill Condon's musical, for what that may be worth), Dreamgirls is going to lose the Best Picture Oscar no...Read More

"That's what I've been tellin' ya....there ain't no freakin' french fries"...Jack Nicholson as the voice of Jack in the Box. (Thanks to "the Bagger" for the link.)

A 1.15.07 N.Y. Times piece by Katherine Seelye and Richard Siklos quotes Time, Inc. executives saying that "while Time Inc. remains profitable, with margins of about 18 percent, it is witnessing a downturn in print advertising revenue and increasingly fierce competition from the internet ." One result, expected to happen later this week, is that "more than 150 people" are going to lose their jobs, including a big chunk of editorial staffers, as party of of a general cost-cutting move.

A friend who works at Time Inc., is going through "torture" waiting to find out if he's going to be one of...Read More

The Golden Globe Awards will air tonight on NBC starting at 8 pm and run about three hours. I'm hoping to be in a favored position somewhere in the Beverly Hilton complex (I think) and posting as it all happens in actuality, which is to say starting at 5 pm Pacific, If my plan fails I'll just be chasing after the winners on a category-by-category basis like everyone else (Oscarwatch.com's Sasha Stone is pretty fast on her feet in this regard), but without the particular observational eyeball stuff.

I'll definitely be going to four...Read More

"Independent bloggers can laugh all they want about the imperious posture of the mainstream media, but I and others at the N.Y.Times have never been more in touch with readers' every robustly communicated whim than we are today. Not only do I hear what people are saying, but I also care.

"Sometimes I wonder whether I care to the point that I neglect other things, like, oh, my job. Tweaking the blog is seductive in a way that a print deadline never is. By the time I am done posting entries, moderating comments and making links, my, has the time flown. I probably...Read More

Fox411's Roger Friedman wrote yesterday that The Departed director Martin Scorsese "got a big surprise Friday night and scored an upset victory at the Critics' Choice Awards in Santa Monica...it was Scorsese's best showing ever at an awards show and a legitimate one at that. He joked to the crowd: 'It's the first [film] I tried to make that has a plot.'"

But of course, Scorsese winning a Best Director trophy from critics groups has been a foregone conclusion for many, many weeks. How can one call it an upset when this happens?

Friedman also says "this big win for The...Read More

Last night on SNL, Jake Gyllenhaal briefly made two legends soar in the same instant -- the gay Dreamgirls thing (can't decide if this was an Oscar-campaign assist or a futher tear-down) plus the old Brokeback Mountain gay-cowboy mystique. Hilarious-perfect. In one fell swoop he won instant forgiveness for Jarhead and upped the anticipation levels for Zodiac (Paramount, 3.7)

Park City/Sundance Film Festival weather projection for Thursday, 1.18 through Saturday, 1.20: Partly cloudy. Highs in the upper 20s. Lows zero to 5 above.

I can't think of any journalist who's been a more impassioned Dreamgirls fan that The Envelope's Tom O'Neil, so it's significant that he wrote yesterday, "Surrender, Dreamgirls fans -- The Departed is now officially ahead for the Best Picture Oscar. When the top Critics' Choice Award went to The Departed on Friday night, it was the last bit of evidence I needed to change my prediction."

O'Neil's conclusion was fortified "a day earlier when I heard a third academy member over two days tell me that they planned to vote for The Departed. The only other film they even considered was Little...Read More

Some kind of A to Z rundown of 2007 movies, the precise rhyme and slant of which I don't quite get. Most of the films are listed alphabetically, but not all. Maybe there is no rhyme or slant.

"How do you light a man on fire, blow seven others to bits, choreograph a gun battle with 20 shooters, discharge 400 special-effects squibs, shatter a panoramic hotel window, separate an FBI agent's torso from his waist, then show a neo-Nazi to his seat -- which happens to be a chain saw -- all in mere minutes?" So reads Sheigh Crabtree's opening graph in her 1.14.07 L.A. Times piece about Joe Carnahan's choreography of a big final sequence in Smokin' Aces (Universal, 1.26). Show a Nazi to his seat which happens to be a chainsaw....?

Directed by Francis Lawrence (Constantine) and co-written and co-produced by Akiva Goldsman, I Am Legend (Warner Bros., 12.14.07) "is testimony to the unexpected durability of Richard Matheson's 1953 novel," writes Lewis Beale in the N.Y. Times.

"It's a taut, realistic chiller about a post-apocalyptic world in which germ warfare creates a biological plague that turns humans into bloodsuckers.

"The idea was born, says Matheson, now 80 and living in the Los Angeles area, 'when I was a teenager and saw Bela Lugosi in Dracula. I thought if the world was full of...Read More

Alec Baldwin's directorial debut The Devil and Daniel Webster, which I did some reporting on in late October, will finally be released after five years of collecting dust....but not theatrically. "Page Six" says it'll show up on Starz on Demand with a new title (Shortcut to Happiness), and, like I wrote several weeks ago, with Alan Smithee (or some such pseudonym) credited as director. The drama stars Baldwin, Jennifer Love Hewitt and Anthony Hopkins.

Yesterday afternoon Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke reported that Martin Campbell's Casino Royale passed $540 million Friday night and officially passed Die Another Day globally as the biggest-grossing Bond flick ever. It's gathered $161.2 million in the U.S,. thus far, but "the really big bucks have been coming from international theaters where the spy pic stayed #1 for weeks and weeks in 50-plus countries. The estimate is for Casino Royale to end up with as much as $575 million in theatrical worldwide revenue.

It's 3:14 am and I've just finished reading the Wikipedia document about the late Gertrude Baniszewski, a.k.a. "the Torture Mother" -- a hugely disturbed Indiana woman who instigated and organized the prolonged torture, mutilation and eventual murder of Sylvia Likens, a teenage girl she had taken into her home, in the early 1960s.

Ellen Page, Catherine Keener in An American Crime

I read this history because of Pat Broeske's 1.14.07 N.Y. Times piece about a movie about Baniszewski's beyond-ghastly deed -- Tommy O'Haver's An American Crime, with Catherine Keener portraying Baniszewski.

O'Haver's film...Read More

I...uhm...half-apologize for saying earlier today that David Poland is a member of the Dreamgirls "team." Poland answers to no one but his own voice, apparently, and he has no particular ties to Dream- girls that results in his being a "member of the team." (I'm vomiting on my rug as I say this.)

Poland obviously supports the idea of Dreamgirls winning the Best Picture Oscar, of course, but he's not in the pocket of or unduly allied with anyone on the DreamWorks/Dreamgirls posse. I thought that was thud-obvious, but a certain party wants this pointed out anyway.

This said, let me make...Read More

Another finger-to-the wind Dreamgirls observation, this one from Newsweek's Miki Turner.

"Today is the first truly bad day for Dreamgirls in terms of the movie's box office and the awards race," a certain party admitted earlier today. "To expand by 1000 or so screens and still be off from last Friday is not a great thing...one could argue that it dropped a lot less than the other holdovers. Still, it can not be said that this is a banner day for the film.

"As I have written for a while now, the box-office life of Dreamgirls is a big part of what will or will not make it win Best Picture. (And...Read More

Finally!...a YouTube clip of Peter O'Toole's visit to "Late Night with David Letterman" earlier this week, plus his somewhat less musical visit to "The Daily Show" and his chat with Jon Stewart. Best Stewart moments are (a) O'Toole's pronounciation of the name "Katherine Houghton Hepburn" and (b) the notion of a 5 pm glass of white wine and a cigarette.

Columbia Pictures and Michael Mann are in a race against Warner Bros. and Johnny Depp to make a film about Alexander "Sasha" Litvinenko, the ex-KGB agent who was fatally poisoned by high-ups in the Russian government.

Alexander Litvinenko

Michael Fleming's 1.12.07 Variety story says that Mann's pic will be "an espionage thriller, exploring the collision between deep-rooted Russian power structure enforced by the KGB and its successor, the FSB, and the new wave of wild west capitalism that came on the heels of glasnost. And the way in which Litvinenko got caught between those two colossal forces."

The stupid Broadcast Film Critics site doesn't even have last night's winners posted, much less photos. (They've still got last year's winners posted...shmucks.) Plus last night's show won't even be aired on E! until 1.20.07, which is derelict by the immediate cyber standards of early 2007.

I had a chance to grab a dinner last night in Venice with Fox news guy Bill McCuddy, and it was a full-out pleasure to kick back and ignore the BFCA Critics Choice Awards shebaggle going on at the Santa Monica Civic, about a mile north of Hal's. Is the BFCA breathing the same pollen as the Hollywood Foreign Press? Or the Oscars, even? (Consider this Oscarwatch.com comparison.) Do they even have the same kind of lungs?

If either is the case, or simply if the wind continues to blow in the direction it...Read More

Did anyone see Stomp the Yard (Screen Gems) yesterday? It's the #1 film of this 4-day weekend (i.e., Martin Luther King Day on Monday) with a projected $25,727,000. Night at the Museum will be #2 with $20,120,000 projected by Monday night. The steady-earning Pursuiit of Happyness -- no Oscar love, Will Smith's Best Actor hopes never got of the ground -- is #3 with $11,249,000.

The "hmmm" statistic concerns the 4th-ranked Dreamgirls. Dreamamount more than doubled their screens this weekend -- they were at 800-something last weekend, and are now at 1907 screens -- and got very little gain from it. In fact,...Read More

The Envelope's Steve Pond has written an Oscar timeline piece -- not exactly pulse-quickening, but good to read and save.

New York's Logan Hill on kinky Sundance sex movies -- Craig Brewer's Black Snake Moan (an allegedly well-made "problem movie" about Samuel L. Jackson curing Christina Ricci of nymphomania), The Ten (a spoof of the Ten Commandments...has the aura of lame-assitude), Deborah Kampmeier's Hounddog (a.k.a,, the "Dakota Fanning rape project"), Robinson Devor's Zoo, "which is generally being referred to as 'the horse-fucking movie,'" and Teeth, a "horror movie that follows the leader of the abstinence movement at a small-town Christian high school...when she's raped, she discovers that she has a Carrie-like power for revenge: a real vagina dentata."