Can't watch this Zodiac "Director's Cut" Blu-ray until I'm back in New Jersey on Sunday -- had to buy it today anyway. I'm convinced that all serious Zodiac heads have been having problems with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button . (I know, being one myself.) It's like the real David Fincher directed Zodiac and a pod replicant -- a Fincher duplicate who's missing something fundamental -- took over and directed Button.

I'm just trying to get as close as I can to that enormous satisfaction I felt when I saw a needle-perfect digital projection...Read More

Ben Brantley's 1.26 pan of the just-opened Hedda Gabler is a corker. The spirit was truly with him when he wrote it. "Ian Rickson, who this season delivered a nigh-perfect Seagull on Broadway, one of the best revivals I have ever, ever seen, is now responsible -- oh, break, break my heart -- for one of the worst revivals I have ever, ever seen. It's not just that everyone is bad in this Hedda -- it's that they're all bad in their own, different ways.

"Could it be that this production has fallen under the spell of Twilight, the hit movie from...Read More

What agent in his/her right mind would put his/her actor client into a lowball Bonnie and Clyde movie -- an effort sure to be either ignored or urinated upon -- under a director whose last effort was a "family" flick starring Lee Majors?

Once costars Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova are no longer conjugal. "Too bad," Jett wrote an hour ago. "Not that I'm surprised. Age difference killed it." Hansard is 38, Irglova is 20. 18 years can seem like a fairly big gap from the vantage point of the younger person. Gaps diminish once you get older, of course. A 30 year woman with a 48 year-old guy is a bit strange, but only a bit. A 40 year-old woman and a 58 year-old guy...who cares?

When I was in my early 20s I used to regard people who were 30-plus as somehow soiled...Read More

I saw Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire for the second time last night at Santa Barbara's Lobero theatre. It didn't improve or diminish. It's still a scruffy, extreme-cinema poverty-tour Dickens fable -- vigorously well done for what it is. My impression of Mumbai hasn't changed -- i.e., that it's populated by some of the nastiest and cruelest people on the planet. And I'm still bothered by Dev Patel's halting, deer-in-the-headlights response to anything and everything that arouses, challenges or threatens his Jamal character.

Boyle Durling...Read More

For me, European TV commercials have always been the Holy Grail. This one's dead perfect, and far more effective than this said-to-be-sexy PETA vegetable ad (rejected for Super Bowl airing) that is obvious, metallic and way too pushy.

Ice Cream from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo

Lee Daniel's Push** won enough respect and rave notices at the Sundance Film Festival to be on everyone's must-see list when it eventually arrives in theatres. Well and good. But I was unaware until today of the other Push (Summit, 2.6.09) -- a seemingly low-rent sci-fi actioner.

The website for this Paul McGuigan-directed programmer tells me it's not likely to be loved or remembered for very long. But I wonder which Push decided on its title first. It's just weird for two of them to punch through (McGuigan's is screening for the press in early February) in the...Read More

Sharon Waxman's The Wrap, a new entertainment website, has been up and running for a few days now. Waxman is a sharp, go-getter reporter and a solid writer, but the site is...well, it's fine. But it needs time to find itself. All websites do. It takes months, usually. Whatever you think a site is going to be when you start out, it always adapts and reconfigures.

Right now it seems a little familiar. Kinda Salon-y. A bit of a stripped-down Daily Beast thing going on. I don't know. I know I could use some more sass...Read More

Defamer's Stu Van Airsdale is spitballing a scenario in which The Curious Case of Benjamin Button goes 0-for-13 on Oscar night. No way. It has to win for the CG face-pasting stuff.

People West Coast bureau chief Elizabeth Leonard has been demoted to senior writer, I've been told. I don't know why they've slapped her down or what the corporate strategy is. I called a couple of staffers; nobody picked up. Leonard has been replaced by senior People staff writer J.D. Heyman, although not 100%. (Some of her bureau chief duties will be handled by other People staffers, apparently.) It's a mess over there. Sooner or later all the Time, Inc. dead-tree publications are going to be remnants of their former selves -- downsized, diminished, scrapped.

Dogs like this have the jaw-power to bite your hand off. But this guy's a real sweetheart. He's lost weight in recent months so he doesn't seem as scary. He's gentle, expressive, emotionally responsive. I'll always be a Golden Retriever man but this guy's all right.

Dog from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo

I feel as if the 2nd Great Depression has finally hit me personally, as Nikki Finke is reporting that Variety columnist and reporter Anne Thompson -- an excellent reporter and commentator, and one of my oldest friends in this racket -- is among the Variety staffers who were laid off today.

Anne will keep her blog, Thompson on Hollywood, and is now talking with Variety about some kind of freelance revenue-sharing deal with them. Or she may tough it out and run her own site and sell her own ads, like myself and David Poland and...Read More

"The Biggest Movie Event of the Year"? I don't want to sound like a sourpuss, but this line doesn't seem to quite get it. Next month's Oscar telecast promises to be both more and less than this. The copy doesn't begin to express the kind of Oscar year this has been. It seems oblivious to the Dark Knight, WALL*E, Kristin Scott Thomas and Gomorrah blow-offs. It ignores all the panicking going on right now. Barack Obama, ethical/cultural transformation and the current economic nightmare are "big" -- what are the Oscars alongside these?

What should this poster...Read More

Breakfast at a mostly vacant French Marketplace. Staffers, two or three patrons, a pair of Los Angeles County highway patrolmen and a grumpy-looking guy staring a hole in his scrambled eggs and fuming at his slower-than-a-turtle AT&T Communications air card -- Monday, 1.26.09, 7:35 am.

Poetry Arts Confidential's Terry McCarty reports that Megan Seling and Brendan Kiley have been hired by L.A. CITYBEAT management to replace the jettisoned Andy Klein. Links to reviews written by these three are offered for comparison.

The Guardian's 1.26 edition includes a report by Julia Finch, Andrew Clark and David Teather that names the 25 bigwigs most responsible for bringing about the grimmest economic episode since the Great Depression. Remember these guys, hang them in effigy, take a poke at them on the street, boil them in oil, etc. It won't solve anything, but it'll feel good.

Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke reported this evening that there may be layoffs "in both the business and editorial sides" of Variety happening this week, perhaps as soon as Monday. One tipster told her the number or rolling heads "might be as high as 30."

If even someone like myself is feeling a wee bit confused about the categorizing of one of Kate Winslet's award-worthy performances, surely the average Academy voter is also. Tonight she won the SAG award for Best Supporting Actress for The Reader, although she's (a) been Oscar-nominated for that same performance in the Best Actress category, (b) recently won a Golden Globe Best Actress / Drama award for her acting in Revolutionary Road and yet (c) also won a Golden Globe Best Supporting Actress trophy for The Reader.

After tonight's honor who is even half-sure which category Winslet's Reader performance belongs in? (There's...Read More

On 2.17 Changeling drinking games will commence nationwide. One swig all around whenever Angelina Jolie says "I want my son back!" Double swigs all around when she says "that's not my son!"

One of the best-written tributes to Revolutonary Road, by none other than San Francisco Chronicle critic Mick LaSalle. It ran three weeks ago, I missed it and I don't care. LaSalle states his case with conviction and simplicity, which are hard to get right in a piece. Together and harmoniously, I mean. (Thanks to HE reader Jeremy Fassler.)

Carl Bialik's 1.23 Wall Street Journal piece about the great and small distortions that always result from the use of stars -- i.e., little asterisks -- to summarize a film critic's opinion moved me not. That's mainly because I've never paid any attention to stars, or at least not in comparison to how I've responded all my life to the Little Man.

I love that the Little Man is very adamant and emotional in his reactions to films, and the fact that he doesn't frown or glare or shake his fist at the stinkers...Read More

Two days ago L.A. Times "Big Picture" columnist Patrick Goldstein wrote a fair assessment of Peter Jones' Inventing L.A.: The Chandlers & Their Times. I saw the doc at Santa Barbara's Lobero theatre last night and agree with most of what he says. But the film ends on a bizarre note of omission that I found almost deranged.

Inventing L.A., which will screen later this year on PBS, is a sharply focused, generally fair-minded and very well-ordered portrait of a family of ultra-conservative robber barons -- the Chandlers -- who used their newspaper, the Los...Read More

The N.Y. Times' Sarah Lyall is reporting about the making of producer Joel Silver and director Guy Ritchie 's Sherlock Holmes (Warner Bros., 11.13), a big-budget effort aimed at the knuckle-dragging popcorn-munchers who don't know from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Basil Rathbone or Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes or Herbert Ross's The Seven Per Cent Solution or any of those other 20th Century, pre-iPhone elements.

We're basically talking about a digitized Indiana Holmes and the Temple of Doom times ten with brilliant powers of deduction and totally hot washboard abs....Read More

At yesterday's screenwriter's panel at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, moderator Anne Thompson asked Dustin Lance Black (Milk), Tom McCarthy (The Visitor), Robert Knott (The Appaloosa) and Andrew Stanton (Wall*E) about their writing process -- when they write best, how they write best, etc.

Grand Jury Prize, U.S. Dramatic and Audience Award, Dramatic:: Push: Based on a novel by Sapphire, d: Lee Daniels. HE comment: Didn't choose to see it during Sundance because I didn't care for Daniels' Shadowboxer ('05). I'll see it down the road, but I'm from Missouri. Mordbid obesity is not an affliction in the sense of being hit by a disease or having a tree fall on you. It's a choice.

Grand Jury Prize, U.S. Documentary: We Live In Public, d: Ondi Timoner. Provocative and probably prophetic doc about how online obsession can (and did, in the case of internet pioneer Josh...Read More

Taken following this afternoon's screenwriter's panel at Santa Barbara's Lobero Theatre. Moderated by Variety's Anne Thompson, the guests were Dustin Lance Black (Milk), Tom McCarthy (The Visitor), Robert Knott (The Appaloosa) and Andrew Stanton (Wall*E).

Dustin Lance Black

Tom McCarthy

I have commentary to share plus a video clip to show, but I have to get to another event. I might put them up later tonight; more likely early tomorrow.

In today's report about the apparent death of the Seth Rogen Green Hornet project, Hitfix's Drew McWeeny declines to answer or even ask "why," even on a speculative basis.

All he says, boiled down, is that The Green Hornet "has gone onto life-support at Sony" and that there's "a good chance the studio's going to kick the plug out any moment now."

I don't know diddly squat but I can speculate on a reason. The screenplay of The Green Hornet, written by the unequivocally smart-ass, comedically inclined Rogen and Evan Goldberg, never found the right balance between the demands...Read More

"Underworld...vampires, Bill Nighy, naah. Hotel for Dogs...great title, kids movie, naah. Already seen The Wrestler, good downer flick, hope Mickey wins. Mall Cop is a slob comedy...nope. Didn't I read somewhere that Dustin Hoffman gives his best performance in Harvey since...I don't know, a really long time? S'matter? You just wanna eat something? Sure? Fine."

I have a solution for the obviously flawed Academy Awards' nomination process. We all know the line about what an honor it is to be nominated by your peers, but we also know that the motives and taste buds of a certain sector of the Academy -- i.e., the sentimentalists, the cheap-seaters, the over-the-hill gang -- have resulted in various embarassments.

The geezer-homophobia bloc that took down Brokeback Mountain is the most infamous example. Two current manifestations are the Best Actor nominating of Brad Pitt for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and the Best Actress nomination-snubbing of Happy-Go-Lucky's Sally Hawkins.

One...Read More

HE reader Richard Huffman finds it very odd, as I do, that the Academy denied Happy-Go-Lucky's Sally Hawkins a Best Actress nomination. You'd think someone who won a Best Actress trophy last month from the Los Angeles and New York film critics as well as a Best Comedy/Muscial actress Golden Globe award would have at least warranted a nomination, for heaven's sake. But no -- not even that.

What happened?

"I've only scanned the awards of the last eight years, but every single winner of Best Actress in a Drama, or in a Musical/Comedy at the Golden Globes has been guaranteed an...Read More

"He was just a very smooth, cool, laidback dancer. He was just like a normal person," Victoria Lucas, 14, told People's Sandra Sobieraj Westfall and Stephen M. Silverman three or four days ago. "I said to him, 'Let's start the Bump,' and he was like, 'Well, okay!' It was the only dance move I knew that was good for TV. We both had the basic movement going on and it just sort of fell into place. He's just an all-American good dancer. I hope I find a boy like that!"

I completely agree about Ted Chung's A Thousand Words, a five-minute dialogue-free short that was posted on Vimeo four days ago. It's an elegant, concise and very affecting portrait of big-city loneliness and little instant connections that go "ping" and are gone seconds later. The emotions are halting, delicate, true. Beautiful piano score.

A Thousand Words from Ted Chung on Vimeo.

The HE reader who sent it along (i.e., "Paisley Merriweather") is calling it an "absolutely phenomenal" short "that blows...Read More

Yesterday Variety's Todd McCarthy posted a wrap-up piece called "Sundance synchs with the times -- Education, Push emblematic of Obama age."

Bill Benenson and Gene Rosow's Dirt! The Movie is a straightforward tutorial movie that reminds us of the importance of keeping in touch with basic organic elements, and explains in numerous ways how it's a profound mistake to live a 100% synthetic lifestyle, which applies to everyone who doesn't work outdoors or isn't dirt poor. It's not all that clever or penetrating, frankly, but Dirt! is focusing on a critical quality-of-life issue that we need to pay attention to. As in urgently, muy importante, do-or-die, etc.

I'm referring to the fact that tens of millions of...Read More

Last-chance Sundance screenings and the distraction of the Dowd-Anderson fisticuffs caused me to miss this Bagger video two days ago. N.Y. Times Oscar blogger and Sundance guy David Carr tries snowboarding with Woody Harrelson and falls four times. Backwards. Landing on packed snow.

N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis today posted a Sundance '09 summation piece, in which she hugs Unmade Beds, Big Fan, Big River Man, In the Loop, Crude, Cold Souls and Lulu and Jimi.

And yet she makes no mention at all of Lone Scherfig's An Education . And I saw Manohla in line for this one! She obviously isn't required to agree with me that it was far and away the best film of the festival, but to ignore it is... what's the right word? Curious? Obstinate? Bewildering? Not mentioning a film that everyone has either praised or...Read More

In an online chat earlier today between Washington Post columnist and film critic Ann Hornaday, a Virginia guy named "ArtMovieLover" voiced strong support for the hiring of the potentially pugilistic and hot-tempered John Anderson as a full-time Post critic.

Washington Post critic/columnist Ann Hornaday; two-fisted film critic John Anderson; Jeff "the Dude" Dowd.

"Now that your sometime colleague John Anderson has gone so far as to punch out Jeff 'the Dude' Dowd at Sundance over his endless advocacy for a documentary that Anderson didn't care for, can the Post...Read More

Caroline Kennedy was pretty awful with her shyness and sagging shoulders and "you knows" and whatnot. But New York's just-appointed U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand isn't that great either. She has a kind of yappy suburban-soccer-mom voice, she speaks in banal bromides, she's short and she looks like the wife of a rural Austrian baker. I don't feel any charisma, and I sense nothing in the way of intellectual force or serious Bella Abzug-styled backbone. And she's clearly proud of her 100 rating from the NRA.

Moderately funny, but goes on too long. Good newscaster and politican "gets." Good naked Jack Black. But the music is fucking awful. And...wait, was that Joseph Gordon Levitt?

For several months I've been suppressing a thought about MSNBC's Chuck Todd out of a fear of sounding banal and superficial, but -- I think Andy Warhol would back me up here -- the only thing lamer than saying something shallow is being afraid to sound shallow. So here goes. It's real, it's happening, and it can't be ignored any longer.

Todd is only 36 years old, and his hairline is in serious trouble. As a TV reporter and the chief White House correspondent for NBC and MSNBC, Todd really doesn't want to be a baldie...Read More

The financial woes that KO'ed Rod Lurie's Nothing But The Truth last month were briefly forgotten when this incontestably fine film, which I called "Lurie's best, hands down" in my 8.18.08 review, was honored last night as the opening attraction at the 2009 Santa Barbara Film Festival.

Nothing But The Truth costar Noah Wyle, director-writer Rod Lurie at last night's after-party in downtown Santa Barbara.

The Bob Yari Chapter 11 tragedy, announced on 12.13.08, turned Nothing But The Truth into an instant dead horse -- no bookings, no ads, no nothin'.

I praised...Read More

Outside Santa Barbara's State Street hotel -- 1.23.09, 7:05 am.

Wetness from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo.

Who wasn't shocked at yesterday's announcement about Stephen Daldry's The Reader being one of the Best Picture Oscar nominees? The Envelope 's Pete Hammond, for one.

In the wake of last week's BAFTA announcement in which The Reader received several key noms including best picture, Hammond wrote that "this is the movie that has cropped up again and again in conversations I've had with academy members, not The Dark Knight.

"That decidedly unscientific survey has again proven to be right," Hammond said yesterday. "My 'group' has in previous years pointed clearly to upset victories for My Cousin Vinnie's Marisa...Read More

Art accompanying Oscar nomination piece posted earlier today by The Film Experience's Nathaniel R.

Based on the BBC mini-series of the same title, State of Play (Universal, 4.17) is "about a team of investigative reporters work alongside a police detective to try to solve the murder of a Washington congressman's mistress." Russell Crowe, Rachel McAdams, Ben Affleck and Helen Mirren costar. Screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan and Tony Gilroy; directed by Kevin Macdonald.

Posted 10 days ago by Joe Nicolosi. You could make a whole series of idiot synopsis summaries about dozens of classic films.

Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.

In a 1.23 Alliance of Women Film Journalist piece called "Oscar-Worthy Women's Work, 2009 Edition," Eleanor Ringel uses the terms "achingly desolate" and "beautifully bleak" to describe...Revolutionary Road? Okay, fine, but when I first read these four words as a pull quote I naturally assumed Ringel was talking about Kristin Scott Thomas's performance in I Loved You So Long.

Which, by the way, Ringel doesn't mention at all in the piece. Everyone else in the '08 sorority -- Melissa Leo, La Streep, Viola Davis, Sally Hawkins, Anne Hathaway, Marisa Tomei, etc. -- makes the cut, but not Thomas, who arguably delivered...Read More

Ian Softley's Inkheart opens tomorrow. Yeegodz and little fishes.

Last week L.A.Times sports writer Lance Pugmire happened to run into Mickey Rourke during a visit to the Wild Card Gym. Rourke talked to Pugmire about the boxing world and the people in it. As Debbie Goffa writes, "It is a telling interview, just under four minutes long, and shows where Rourke's heart really is -- boxing."

IFC Films has made a wise decision in acquiring U.S. rights to Armando Iannucci 's hilarious In The Loop, which I wrote about on 1.13. Pic will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this evening. It costars Peter Capaldi, James Gandolfini, Tom Hollander, Gina McKee, Mimi Kennedy, David Rasche, Chris Addison, Anna Chlumsky and Steve Coogan. The deal was negotiated by Arianna Bocco and Betsy Rodgers for IFC Films with Cassian Elwes of William Morris Independent and Ben Roberts of Protagonist Pictures on behalf of BBC Films, Aramid Capital and UK Film Council.

Arriving in downtown Santa Barbara sometime around 3 pm.

State Street from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo.

15 minutes south of Santa Barbara from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo.

In this corner, the three most warmly received Oscar nominations are those for Richard Jenkins in The Visitor for Best Actor, Melissa Leo's for Best Actress for her Frozen River turn, and an excellent Best Supporting Actor nomination going to Michael Shannon -- Michael Shannon, ladies and gentlemen! -- for his truth-telling nutter in Revolutionary Road.

I really wasn't figuring on Happy-Go-Lucky's Sally Hawkins not getting nominated for Best Actress. '08 really was her year, and she was honored up and down by many other awards-giving groups.

And the Academy blew off bestowing a gold-watch Best Actor nomination for Clint...Read More

No Best Picture nomination for The Dark Knight or WALL*E, but 13 nominations for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button? Okay, fine, what's done is done...but in this respect the Oscar nominations are feeling a bit tepid to me.

Whoa, wait a minute, whoa...Brad Pitt has been nominated for Best Actor for playing a passive sponge man with two and a half expressions? This is a performance abour makeup and CG. Button is very worthy film in some respects, but this is comic relief. This is ridiculous. Nobody in the movie-savvy world has even flirted with medium-level (much less high)...Read More

The New York Post reported a little while ago that Caroline Kennedy has folded her bid to seek appointment to the New York Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton.

To go by an e-mailed statement received a couple of hours ago, I think I understand the gist of Jeff "the Dude" Dowd's objection to the negative feelings about Dirt! The Movie expressed by John "knuckle sandwich" Anderson .

Dowd is basically saying that in the case of documentaries exploring the ruination of the planet and what can be done about this, film critics should get with the new spirit of the nation under Barack Obama and double-track their reviews.

In short, don't just say if the film is well-made or not, but also give credit where due if the...Read More

Because I did the right thing and focused on seeing two films I needed to see -- The Greatest, which played at the Library at 11:30 this morning, and Humpday, which I saw and quite loved at a Racquet Club screening that began at 2:15 pm -- I missed the noon dustup between John "knuckle sandwich" Anderson and Jeff "the Dude" Dowd.

The dining table in the Yarrow hotel's restaurant where Variety critic John Anderson was allegedly sitting before standing up and face-punching Jeff "the Dude" Dowd earlier today.

As I'm seeing Shrink at 6:15...Read More

For the first time since arriving in Park City last Thursday I got lazy and slept until 7:30 am. So now I'm behind the clock and unable, for now, to post reactions to Dirt! The Movie and Don't Let Me Drown. I have to hike down to the Library where I'll be trying hard to bum a ticket to The Greatest (need to catch Carey Mulligan's other stand-out performance), and then it's right over to the Racquet Club and Humpday.

I hate standing around and asking publicists for tickets to anything. All my journalist pals have that super-cool red pass that...Read More

With the cat out of the bag after last night's screening of The Girlfriend Experience , Some Came Running's Glenn Kenny has written about his cameo role as a sleazy website manager. And he confirms that yes, he "did write that nasty voice-over 'review'" himself, and that "all of the dialogue of the film was in fact improvised."

Reactions to Kenny's cameo as well as the film have been generally favorable thus far. The best line has come from Cinematical's James Rocchi (actually quoting someone else), to wit: that The Girlfriend Experience is "a period piece from October 2008."

Here are...Read More

"I've seen many presidents come and go, but I've never watched a tableau like the one Tuesday, when four million eyes turned heavenward, following the path of George Bush's helicopter out of town. Everyone, it seemed, was waving goodbye, with one or two hands, a wave that moved westward down the Mall toward the Lincoln Memorial, and keeping their eyes fixed unwaveringly on that green bird.

"They wanted to make absolutely, positively certain that W. was gone. It was like a physical burden being lifted, like a sigh went up of 'Thank God. Has Cheney's wheelchair left...Read More

Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience -- a not-half-bad indie-scaled pic about the life of an upscale Manhattan prostitute -- had a sneak preview at Park City's Eccles early this evening. Apart from the usual Soderberghian textures and intrigues, it should be immediately noted that Some Came Running's Glenn Kenny plays a sleazy erotic website guy who exploits the main hooker character ( Sasha Grey). He has the funniest lines in the film and, if I'm not mistaken, wrote the smart-ass erotic review that we hear in voiceover.

Steven Soderbergh during q & a at the Eccles...

"Coming into Sundance, we had a feeling the coming-of-age dramedy An Education would probably be pretty good," Defamer's Stu Van Airsdale wrote yesterday afternoon. "But as 282 lucky ticketholders at Sunday's premiere soon discovered, 'good' isn't the half of it.

"An Education all but blew the marquee off the Egyptian Theater, where over 100 latecomers were turned away onto a swarming Main Street before director Lone Scherfig nervously announced not even she had yet seen her film outside the lab. She had nothing to worry about:

"Led by 23-year-old Carey Mulligan in a breakthrough that makes Ellen Page's Juno turn look...Read More

Variety's Anne Thompson is reporting that Sony Pictures Classics has paid $3 million for Western Hemisphere rights for Lone Scherfig's An Education "after a heated bidding war.

"The deal closed Monday night. Fox Searchlight tried to grab the film with an early preemptive bid, but the offer was deemed too low by sellers CAA, Endeavor and Endgame Entertainment, which financed the $12 million '60s romance with BBC Films.

"Fox Searchlight came back into the negotiation on a second round but was unable to close; also bidding were The Weinstein Co., Focus Features, Lionsgate...Read More

Herewith Peter Sciretta's 15-word review of The Informers on /film: "Spoiled Rich kids. Drugs. Sex. Amber Heard naked. Aids. Infidelity. Kidnapping. Unconnected. Boring. Uninteresting. Horrible."

Nicolas Winding Refn's Bronson, which I just stumbled out of, is, I must say, audaciously directed. A stark, blunt prison drama (with two brief episodes outside the slammer) that's more of a performance-art piece than anything else, it's about an incorrigible, mentally thick, ultra-violent career criminal who lives to strike blows and inflict pain and bang his shaved head against the proverbial wall.

Tom Hardy as Bronson

And there's never any doubt throughout it that Refn is incapable of compromising on any front. This is in-your-face filmmaking, all right. Nor is there any doubt that Tom...Read More

The Chief Justice Roberts-President Barack Obama oath of office flubadub transcript.

Gregor Jordan's The Informers, based on Brett Easton Ellis 's 1994 book of the same name, is about as rancid and repellent as a movie of this sort gets. Set in 1983 Los Angeles, it makes you feel immensely sorry for the actors but mostly for yourself because you're stuck watching it. I just came out of it; everyone I've spoken to about it (i.e, those who saw it with me at the Yarrow) looks pained and deflated -- like they've got the flu.

I know that I will never ever watch another sleazy, poison-virus flick about a bunch of empty, drugged-up...Read More

Barack Hussein Obama is now the President of the United States, and we're all listening to the speech. But I was shocked, I have to say, that Chief Justice John Roberts managed to screw up the wording in the oath of office. The second stanza is supposed to go, "To faithfully execute the office of President of the United States," and not "to execute the office of President of the United States faithfully," as Roberts put it.

1.20.09, 10:01 am (Park City time)

A critic friend just told me I'm not missing very much by not being at this morning's Eccles showing of Adventureland. But a producer friend who saw it last night said he "loved it...a more realistic version of 500 Days of Summer, which is much more stylized."

N.Y. Times columnist/reporter David Carr (right profile, notepad), producer Albert Berger (Little Miss Sunshine).

Inside Spur Bar & Grill --1.20.09, 11:07 am

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Here's a Twitter text post from last night: "Remember not to forget [that Steven] Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience sneak-screens tomorrow at Eccles Theatre at 6:15!" Well, maybe. But when I asked Soderbergh about the Girlfriend Experience rumor yesterday morning he said, "Where'd you hear that?" From everyone, I said. It's just a rumor but it's been passed all around. "Really?" he said. So what is going to happen on Tuesday? I asked. "All I've heard is showing some clips and my doing some talking," he said.

Armando Iannucci's In The Loop played like gangbusters during yesterday's press screening at the Yarrow. Here's a link to my 1.13.09 rave and chat with Iannucci.

A portion of the Sundance critic and entertainment journo community will attend the Obama Inaugural breakfast viewing party that starts at 8 am. The invite said 8:30 but some of us leaned on publicist Mickey Cottrell to at least open the doors by 8. The gathering is partly in honor of Bill Benenson and Gene Rosow's Dirt!, a thoughtful, quietly stirring tutorial doc that I saw last night. Today, in any event, is the day. Here's to a great speech and the turning of the page.

The gist of IFC's breakfast news conference this morning was to announce the availability of day-and-date video on demand and festival premieres. There was also an announcement of a partnership with South by Southwest. Steven Soderbergh attended, partly to talk about Che going into video-on-demand and partly to discuss the basic viewing landscape out there. Here's part of what he said.

I received an email yesterday (or was it Saturday?) saying that Taking Chance director Ross Katz wanted to sit down and dispute my 40% positive, 60% negative review of his film and explain how I'd misunderstood it. I wrote back to say "cool, let's do it, I'm game." I respect any filmmaker who stands up and argues back. But that was the end of it from his end.

"You should really check out Don't Let Me Drown at Sundance," a guy just wrote me. "It's by far the best movie here," he said. How does he know that, and what dies "best" mean? I've heard good recommends from two others, but not along the lines of it being the mother of all 2009 Sundance flicks. I'm catching the press and industry screening at 6 pm -- an hour from now.

MySpace Celebrity and Katalyst present The Presidential Pledge

You can't do the kind of column I usually do (seven or eight stories daily, if not more) and see three films daily plus attend a social function at day's end and get five or six hours in the sack -- it just doesn't work. One or the other has to suffer. And these eighteen-hour days wear you down after four or five days. Not so much physically as emotionally, psychologically.

It's right around this time during Sundance -- middle of the fifth day, three nights and two days to go -- that the sum total of all the films you've missed and...Read More

A guy just wrote me about this 500 Days of Summer trailer and asked what I thought of the finished film. I've had two chances to see it, I told him, but I've wound up doing other things because of my Joseph Gordon-Levitt problem, which is fairly severe. I don't want to get hung up on this, but his internally mannered acting style bugs the hell out of me. It began with Brick and intensified with The Lookout. For me, I mean.

I spoke briefly to An Education's Carey Mulligan -- the big breakout star of Sundance '09 -- yesterday at a post-screening party that was held at Park City's Village at the Yard. Mulligan is easy to talk with and sharp as a tack, which is always the case with the super-talented. She's just starting to happen with the press due to the wow eception to Lone Scherfig's film here at Sundance, but the talent community has been on to her for a while now.

An Education's Carey Mulligan, CAA agent Chris Andrews.

Besides her supporting role The...Read More

A lot of people said "Gump!" when Benjamin Button was first screened. This video is for those astute minds who initially waved the comparison off.

The tone of Glenn Ficarra and John Requa's I Love You Phillip Morris is hard to describe. It's a kind of dark comedy (i.e., there are bits that are intended to draw laughter), but since it's a tale of obsessive gay loony love there's really not that much to "laugh" at. But there's conviction in it -- the emotions are as real as it gets -- and the performances by Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor as the lovers are intense and out-there and fully grounded. Nobody's putting anyone on, I mean.

The tone is somewhere...Read More

Lone Scherfig's An Education, a coming-of-age period drama set in 1961 London, is the absolute shit -- the best film of the Sundance Film Festival, a finely tuned and deeply engaging film by regular popcorn-watching standards, an award-calibre drama that will definitely be in contention at the end of the year, and a movie that has launched a genuine movie star in an old-fashioned and yet very new-fashioned sense -- 23 year-old Carey Mulligan.

An Education star Carey Mulligan during post-screening q & a at the Egyptian -- 1.18.09, 5:05 pm.

I know that special old-soul-mixed-with-youthful-effervescence...Read More

Doug Pray's Art & Copy turned out to be a little thin. It's basically a chapter-by-chapter history of the most legendary ad campaigns of the last 45 or 50 years, each chapter with a corresponding flattery profile of the advertising exec (or execs) who dreamt each one up.

But there's no arching theme to it, no undercurrent, no inquiring line of thought. Pray doesn't begin to think about the odious implications of modern advertising (as Adam Curtis did in The Century of the Self). Nor does he think to draw parallels between certain legendary ad copy lines and the contours...Read More

I'm about to see Duncan Jones' Moon at the Yarrow. Then comes Lone Scherfig's An Education at 3 pm at the Egyptian, and then 500 Days of Summer, a Fox Searchlight film, at 7:15 pm. I don't know how to do all this and get in the writing time. I don't know how to do the writing and see the right films. I do know that items like this are boring to read. I'll try and post sometime between 5 and 7 pm today.

If you're trying to see a film at the Yarrow hotel press-and-industry theatre, you have to go into this tent and wait. Okay, you can always rebel and refuse (as I did last night) but most people submit. It's not some terrible indignity, but it does feel like a stockyard pen inside.

Ben Affleck is the exec producer of Eric Daniel Metzgar's Reporter, a deeply stirring and yet dispiriting doc about Pulitzer Prize-winning N.Y. Times reporter Nicholas Kristof. It was curious, I thought, that interviews with Kristof and Metzgar were offered yesterday but not one with Affleck. He's the headliner, right? Whatever.

The doc, which I saw late yesterday afternoon, focuses on two very threatening and frustrating situations -- the gradual eclipsing of traditional print journalism institutions like the Times, which supports the kind of vital,...Read More

Critic John Anderson has passed along high praise for Lee Daniels' Push, which press-screened two or three hours ago. I don't particularly trust Daniels' instincts as a filmmaker, but I do trust Anderson's taste. The next showing is at the Eccles on Tuesday afternoon.

Antoine Fuqua's Brooklyn's Finest, seen this morning, did not light my fire. I can't imagine any prospective buyer or viewer feeling any genuine enthusiasm for it. It's a right-down-the-middle, seen-it-sixteen-or-seventeen-times-before urban crime movie -- bitter cops, angry cops, street homies, drugs, shootings, desperados, etc.

Lack of subtlety was an issue early on. Two guys sitting in a car late at night, dark street, shooting the shit...and I just knew one of them was going to shoot the other. Not a doubt in my mind. Bam...it happened four minutes later. And I groaned so loudly when it did that a person right...Read More

Why are people raving about this surveillance-camera footage of the Hudson river splashdown? It comes at the two-minute mark, and it looks like a hand-thrown stone skimming across a lake. Way underwhelming.

A friend insists that Doug Pray's Art & Copy, a doc about "advertising's profound effect on modern culture" and "about the most influential creative forces tapping the zeitgeist of our time," is brilliant and a must-see. A Variety marketing exec is calling it "one of the greatest things she's seen in ages," he says. I'll be seeing it at tonight's 8:45 pm press screening.

The synopsis makes it sound like a companion piece to Adam Curtis's The Century of the Self, the story of how ads went from selling stuff they people need to stuff they desire. The film quotes...Read More

"Have you noticed that war is the only chance that a man gets to do something redeeming?," playwright/screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky wrote some 45 years ago. "That's why war is so attractive. Brave men die in battle, but in peacetime they're just normal cowards. Frightened of their wives, trembling before their bosses, terrified at the passing of the years. But war makes them gallant. It makes them self-sacrificing and generous instead of greedy and selfish. War isn't hell at all. It's man at his best. The highest morality that he's capable of "

These words were spoken as...Read More

The wi-fi situation is getting so bad that I'm thinking...well, not about packing it in, but if you can't post stuff without going through all kinds of trial and error, desperate contortions and calling AT&T tech support every other time, who needs it? It's awful.

Damn the AT&T people to hell for taking my AT&T air card money every month and then failing to create and maintain a system that works in extremely high-stress areas like Park City -- i.e., tens of thousands of users crammed into a relatively small area and using the "air" 24/7. Thanks to the festival for providing...Read More

I lasted ten minutes with Lymelife earlier this afternoon. I was talking to MCN's Kim Voynar about her damaged left foot, the lights came down, the movie played a bit and I was starting to think about escaping less than five minutes later. I knew I had to five minutes after that. I know from ten-minute bailouts. I don't make a habit of them -- maybe five or six times in my life -- but I now if films aren't going to work for me very quickly.

We all know what it's like to feel intrigued and curious and be...Read More

"I didn't see you at the [today's] Moon screening," a distribution guy wrote me just now. "If you weren't, you missed the first breakout hit of the festival.

"It's a sensational piece of indie sci-fi with cult potential. Brilliantly conceived. A superb performance by Sam Rockwell -- award-worthy in fact.

"The only problem is that there's a big twist about 45 minutes in that would be criminal to reveal. I hope respectful critics like yourself won't spoil it! Definitely one to make sure you see.

"I believe Sony Classics has the rights for the US, England and Australia, although I don't know...Read More

It can very get awfully tiring...depressing, really, to watch groups of credentialed, shaggy-haired, snow-booted Sundance journalists and filmmakers who are sitting near you in the lounge smiling and gleefully laughing with each other, one joke after another, chit-chat, chuckle-chuck, hah-hah, grins and mirth...no end to it, constantly, hour after hour. It's cool for the first hour or so, but after the two-hour mark I could just scream.

A little part of me -- okay, one that I don't admire and probably shouldn't acknowledge -- wants to go up to one of these groups, bend over and say in a very quiet voice, "I'm...Read More

I moved this morning from the shitty condo with the cold-air seeping through the living room window and no wifi and the total-agony mattress from Jakarta to a really sublime two-floor condo on Upper Norfolk (i.e., about 150 feet above Main Street) with great wifi, a comfy bed, a flat-screen TV, a nice kitchen, two full bathrooms, and a snow-covered outdoor porch with a great view.

Twi-story condo on Upper Norfolk -- Friday, 1.16, 10:25 am.

After moving my stuff to the new pad I took a cheap cab (only $5 bills -- driver gave me a break)...Read More

Anyway who wants a free ticket to the 6 pm public screening of The Missing Person, get in touch. I decided to catch the 5:15 pm showing of Taking Chance at the Racquet Club instead. Oh, and tomorrow night's 9 pm screening of When You're Strange -- I'm not going to that one either. I'm sitting in a 2nd floor lounge/lobby in the Park City Marriott adjacent to the press office until 4:30 pm, or just write.

Press office comp ducatsthat I requested in writing yesterday. The people running the press ticket hand-outs have been fairly efficient...

Adam Elliot's Mary and Max, which opened the Sundance Film Festival tonight with separate but simultaneous screenings for press and the public, is a very high-end claymation drama in every respect -- adult yet sweet, tender but not twee, beautifully written, honest about handicaps and melancholia but full of warmth and caring and a general mood of oddball quirk. Older kids will roll with it (I hope) but it's not aimed at the conventional family trade, which tends to prefer upbeat formula stuff with far-less-weird characters and euphoric endings.

Mary and Max ends sadly but movingly...Read More

Variety's Michael Fleming and Dave McNary are reporting that Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox "have settled their battle over Watchmen with WB getting some face-saving points, but Fox getting the equivalent of a movie star's gross participation.

"Warner Bros. gets the right to open its superhero pic on March 6th as planned, and the WB logo will be the only one on the film, sources said.

"Fox, on the other hand, will emerge with an upfront cash payment that sources pegged between $5 million and $10 million, covering reimbursement of $1.4 million the studio invested in development fees, and also millions...Read More

The National Fisheries Institute has issued a video challenge to Jeremy Piven over statements he made this morning to Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America.

I caught Tom DiCillo's When You're Strange, a 90-minute doc about Jim Morrison and The Doors, inside a viewing booth at the Park City Marriott early this afternoon. I also saw Ondi Timoner's We Live in Public, a doc about '90s internet pioneer Josh Harris. A study and a history of internet obsession, Timoner's film is easily the more thoughtful and provocative of the two. But DeCillo's is more engaging because Morrison is still a fascinating wild man, and at the same time a little more average-human than he seemed in the Stone pic.

The...Read More

To be in an airborne jet, hit a flock of geese, crash land in the Hudson River, not sink, climb out on the wing, get your pants and feet wet, get picked up by a boat, get dropped off somewhere in Manhattan's West 40s, visit an emergency room for a check-up and then be driven downtown to the Tribeca Bar & Grill for a plate of seared salmon and a couple glasses of perfect Pinot Grigio. Talk about feeling tremendously alive!

As Winston Churchill once said, "There...

Jeremy Piven spoke to Good Morning America's Diane Sawyer this morning to try to put the mercury-poisoning/Speed-The-Plow thing to bed once and for all. Never!

Variety's Robert Koehler has called Jonathan Parker 's (Untitled) "one of the rare American indie films to land a world premiere at a fest prior to Sundance [that nonetheless] bears all the hallmarks of a prestige Sundance movie, from a hip cast including Adam Goldberg, Marley Shelton and Eion Bailey to a brilliant score by leading new music composer and Pulitzer winner David Lang.

"Parker jabs and pokes at the New York contemporary art world with some satirical success. Teasing today's new realms in painting, conceptual art and music is almost too easy, and the impressive aspect of Parker's latest is an evident...Read More

"I have to believe that if Slumdog Millionaire wins Best Picture, it will further cement the awards as an elitist back-patting ceremony which is rapidly distancing itself from the general moviegoing public as it is, " writes HE reader Evan Boucher.

"There are three different types of people seeing movies these days. The A students of cinema like yourself -- journalists, buffs and your grad students living in the village who see mainstream, indie, shorts, foreign,cult...everything. On the other end are the F students, the ones lining up for things like Saw V and Wanted, thinking the latter is the...Read More

Following her double-win at the Golden Globes last Sunday (Best Actress for Rev Road plus Best Supporting Actress for The Reader), Kate Winslet being double-nominated by BAFTA yesterday has me worried. We wouldn't want to see this happen with the Oscar nominations or in the final voting. It's too much. It feels hoggish.

I understand Kate's people pushing her in both categories in order to build a storm of acclamation and critical mass, but I really think it's time to nip this one in the bud. She'll probably win the Best Actress trophy for Rev Road -- highly deserved -- but that's...Read More

Ricardo Montalban passed yesterday at age 88 -- sorry. Then again, having lived a exciting high-style life for 88 years is hardly a tragedy. When you hear his name you think (a) Fantasy Island, (b) his muscular pecs in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (very impressive for a guy who was 61 years old) and (c) Esther Wiliams costar. But my strongest memory is the way he said the words "rich Corinthian leather" in those Chrysler Cordoba commercials. (His Wikipedia bio says that the adjective was "soft," not "rich.")

I loved Montalban's Ahab-ish dying...Read More

The pancreatic cancer that has been weakening poor Steve Jobs is apparently back and aggressive as hell. I'm very sorry. May his remaining days be creative, spiritual and full of love. It does seem weird, however, that so many people are convinced that when Jobs dies, Apple will start to die as well. There are no young bucks out there with the instincts and abilities to keep that company grooving along like it should? C'mon.

I felt nothing but contempt for the Spanish soldiers in El Cid who cried like children when word got out...Read More

Of all time. Or at least in my experience on this planet. It's amazing to me that there are people in third-world countries who are actually paid money to design and manufacture these back-breaking coil-spring mattresses. They must know, surely, that the possibility of people feeling comfortable enough to actually fall asleep on them is very slight. I've slept better on hard-metal cots in city jails.

You have to be a sadist to make one of these things; you certainly have to be a masochist to willingly sleep on one. I gave up after four, four and...Read More

As sorry as I am about the passing of Patrick McGoohan, I wasn't that taken with his internals on-screen. I loved, of course, the magnificent snap, crack and timbre of his voice -- what an instrument! -- blended with that purring Irish-English accent. But McGoohan always -- almost always -- played creepy obsessives with cold eyes and cold souls, and I can't say I ever liked him all that much.

I respected him, naturally, for his chops, for that undercurrent of whatever, for that well pedigreed quality. He was a first-rate actor.

I loved the...Read More

If you don't know anything about the semi-infamous Star Hotel/cowboy hat/ residual-scent episode, read about it here and then continue. I walked into the Park City police station about 10:15 pm this evening and asked if they had my cowboy hat. It took them a while to find it, but find it they did. Good guys! I now look like the Durango Dude. I am here in Park City -- stoked, outfitted, ready to rock, getting my press pass tomorrow morning, etc. Life is good again.

Saddest, most neglected cowboy hat in the world on...

Andy Klein, one of the wisest and most smoothly readable film critics in the known universe, has been whacked. LACitybeat, which he's been reviewing for since '03 or thereabouts, has cut him loose. Jesus, it's the damn bubonic plague out there! L.A. Observed says he'll continue with KPCC's FilmWeek segment and "Off-Ramp." Andy, if you're reading this...we'll talk soon. Hang tough, stand tall, wait for the next turn.

Got into LAX around 12:15ish. Paid $50 to leave on a Southwest Salt Lake City flight that will leave two hours earlier than the flight I'd previously booked, but which'll arrive in SLC only an hour earlier -- around 6 pm -- because it stops in Pheonix. Live with it. It's mid January and the current L.A. temperature is 83 degrees. But it's 32 degrees in Park City. As it should be.

Waiting for Southwest #463 to Salt Lake City.

"A scheduled Tuesday court conference between Fox and Warner Bros. attorneys has been canceled," the Hollywood Reporter's Borys Kit wrote late last night, "fueling talk that a settlement in the contentious Watchmen case is imminent.

"Fox sued Warners last February, saying the Burbank-based studio infringed on its rights to make the comic book adaptation. In December, when federal judge Gary A. Feess ruled that Fox has distribution rights to the film, Warners faced the prospect of having the film's March 6th release blocked.

"Settlement talks between the two sides became serious over the weekend and continued to heat up yesterday.

"A settlement...Read More

One Sundance film I should have included on my final shortlist is Nicolas Winding Refn's Bronson. Journalist Bilge Ebiri yesterday spoke of "a bunch of New York journos" having seen an early screening of the bio-prison pic and gone "ape-shit."

And for what it's worth, a fellow with a certain professional interest in Bronson has written the following: "It's a directorial wow from Refn and it has a Best Actor Oscar-worthy performance by Tom Hardy. I'm not kidding about Hardy's work. It's a total 'who is that?' performance...Read More

A senior foreign-language Academy committee guy who wanted everything he said of interest to be non-attributable called last night to say two things about yesterday's Gomorrah snub. One, he doesn't feel that blowing off Gomorrah this year is as much of a scandal as last year's 4 Months snub because 12 months ago the foreign-language fuddy-duds also ignored Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light and Fatih Akin's Edge of Heaven, among others. And two, voices in the foreign branch's executive elite committee just didn't think Gomorrah "delivered in the way it could or should have," he said. "It's not a matter of it not...Read More

Envelope/Feinberg Files columnist Scott Feinberg spoke last night to IFC Entertainment president Jonathan Sehring, whose company is distributing Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah -- the widely-hailed, much-honored Italian crime film that was snubbed yesterday by the Academy's foreign-language committee by being kept off the "short list" -- a preliminary list of foreign-language faves from which the final five nominees are decided upon.

"I know I speak for the entire country of Italy and a lot of people in the critical community when I say that it just doesn't make sense and there's something wrong with the foreign language committee as a whole," Sehring Read More

Outta here at 6:45 am, LAX plane at 8:30 am, landing at 12 noon. Either 90 minutes or four hours of layover, depending how it goes. But however you slice it Wednesday, 1.14, is likely to be a low-activity day in terms of postings, photos and prose poems. But it'll all work out in the long run if you have some of that Allie Fox "four o'clock in the morning courage" stored inside...which I do.

Jack Torrance's seminal masterwork is an actual hold-it-in-your-hands book, published by Gengotti Editore on 12.18.08. Sells for $9.99 plus shipping and handling.

The filmsinfocus.com guys have run a series of New Year's Resolutions from a variety of filmmakers, but the funniest one was written by Pride and Glory's Gavin O'Connor. I don't have any New Year's Resolutions myself because I don't believe in anything being renewed on January 1st. I don't believe in numerology of any kind. I don't believe in magic, in Jesus, in yoga, in kings, in Elvis, in Zimmerman, in David Poland, in New York "Vulture," in Defamer, in Beatles...I just believe in me. HE and me. And HE advertisers. And the redemptive power of movies. And that's reality.

The Academy's Foreign Language Committee has done it again! Last year they failed to include the brilliant 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days on the short list, and this year they've blown off Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah, which has been honored left and right by critics' groups and last month won the European Film Award for Best Film of 2008. Committee chief Mark Johnson...what happened, bro? This b.s. wasn't supposed to repeat itself, and yet here we are. Another embarassment!

I have to leave for an appointment and can't get into this but here are the films that the foreign-language committee...Read More

"I read your morning-after Golden Globes piece," a publicist friend wrote earlier today. (He was referring to "Winslet's Double Win.") "Answer me this: how is Kate Winslet a Best Supporting Actress contender for The Reader when Nicole Kidman was a Best Actress winner for The Hours?"

I didn't expect very much from Armando Iannucci's In The Loop, a Sundance '09 movie that I caught here last week. The notes made this low-budget British political comedy sound too ambitious and convoluted and cross-burdened. Except it's not. It's easily one of the funniest comedies about governmental inanity and media mis-speak I've ever seen. It also felt to me like one of the fastest laughers of this type since Billy Wilder's One, Two,Three.

In The Loop director-writer Armando Iannucci

And it has some absolutely wonderful insult humor. I'm talking one beautiful saber thrust and...Read More

"The bottom line is that the old model -- let's go to Sundance and cross our fingers that someone is going to buy it -- is ridiculous," says veteran publicist Cynthia Schwartz, whose firm 42West is repping 15 films at this year's Sundance Film Festival and also consults on several DIY releases during the year. "Filmmakers have to take control. If they get a distributor, terrific. But if they don't, they have to have a Plan B. And for the first time at Sundance, I feel like people are getting that." -- from Anthony Kaufman's 1.13.09 Indiewire piece, "Not Picked Up in...Read More

"The reviews of Oliver Stone's W. were generally pretty good, which always helps 'prestige' films, but Lionsgate's hopes really rose when NRG's tracking for W. jumped after the film's premiere. Marketers pay particular attention to how many people volunteer knowledge of their film -- if the numbers are low a few weeks out, they will tweak the campaign--and W.'s 'unaided awareness' had risen from two per cent that Monday to a healthy eight per cent on Thursday.

"The three main research companies use their tracking data to predict the opening weekend's gross, and their predictions for W. were in the eight-to-nine-million-dollar range....Read More

For the fourth straight year, the Oscar-nominated short films in the live-action and animated categories will play in U.S. theatres. This year's crop, which will ultimately be seen in about 60 theatres nationwide, will open on 2.6.09, or roughly 16 days before the 81st Academy Awards telecast on 2.22.09.

Shorts International and Magnolia Pictures are the entities behind the release. A press release says that the short films "have charted a dramatic 223% increase in attendance at U.S. theatres since the [program's] launch in 2006. Together with the theatrical run, the nominated short films will also be released on iTunes on 2.17.

"Tom Bernard of Sony Pictures Classics once equated the Sundance Film Festival proceedings to 'making drug deals in the snow.'" -- from an off-to-Sundance, see-you-there jotting by N.Y. Times Oscar-race columnist David Carr, a.k.a. "the Bagger."

I've assembled a slight rethink of prime Sundance Film Festival features. The total is now up to 19. I might have time to see five or six more but that's it. I know how this works. You never get to see as many films as you'd like. Not when you're filing eight to ten stories daily, you won't. If I'm missing something major, please inform.

R.J. Cutler's The September Issue. Carlos Cuaron's Rudy and Cursi. Lynn Shelton's Humpday. (Maybe.) Antoine Fuqua's Brooklyn's Finest. Gregg Mottola's Adventureland. Ross Katz's Taking Chance. Sophie Barthes' Cold Souls. Jonas Pate's Shrink. Armando Ianucci's In The Loop.Emily and...Read More

Michael Cieply's 1.13 N.Y. Times piece on Gregor Jordan's The Informers, based on Brett Easton Ellis's 1994 short-story collection about sex, drugs and depravity in 1983 Los Angeles, is a Sundance attention coup. Here, it says, is the definitive scurvy-pervy Naked Lunch/Alphadog/Less Than Zero-revisited flick of early '09. Join us! Hey, got a smoke? I can't find my fucking lighter. Wanna do an eightball in the parking lot?

Or, to go by a Publisher's Weekly review, here is a cinematic revisiting of Ellis's "one-dimensional satirical...Read More

It used to be so nice and easy to see movies at Park City's Eccles theatre during past Sundance Film Festivals. A volunteer would hand out 50 tickets to press, so all you had to do was show up a half-hour before and things would usually work out. The Eccles was a fairly easy groove in those days -- the one place in Park City where you knew you'd probably get into a public screening without much hassle.

But last year (or was it the year before?) the Sundance press office junked the 50-ticket-handout deal in favor of a tiresome system in which...Read More

My initial inclination regarding Humpday, a Sundance Dramatic Compettion movie about two 30something buddies who decide to fuck each other on camera as a kind of amateur-porn Zack and Miri art project, was to shine it. Any and all movies involving the spreading of male butt cheeks generally gets a pass from me. (And I don't want to hear any homophobic dings about this. Saying "later" to the watching of gay boning in Park City isn't quite the same thing as putting it down or condemning it, God forbid.)

But now I'm thinking "maybe, I don't...Read More

Respect, compassion and admiration for 45 year-old Samantha Geiner, the unwilling and way-underage recipient of Roman Polanski's predatory lust 31 years ago, for standing up and telling the Los Angeles County district attorney's office where to go yesterday. Back off, enough already, stop your prosecutorial bullshit and bring this protracted case to an end.

Geimer filed a legal declaration asking that the charge against Polanski be dismissed in the interest of saving her from further trauma as the case is publicized anew, and claimed she's being victimized again by prosecutors' focus on lurid details of what happened to her. She also said...Read More

Steven Soderbergh's Che "begins with a pair of boots. More than four hours later, that is pretty much how it ends, too. The first boots belong to Che Guevara (Benicio Del Toro), who is wearing them, together with his trademark combat fatigues, while being interviewed in Havana, in 1964. He wears the same outfit later that year, in New York, as a way of indicating, to the United Nations and to any bien-pensants who can gaze at him without drooling, that even in this city of chatter he remains an undaunted man of action.

"The second...Read More

"I won't be surprised if studios start telling themselves that when money's tight, it's time to greenlight some feel-good stories," L.A. Times/"Big Picture" columnist Patrick Goldstein wrote earlier today. "But trying to second-guess moviegoer tastes is like trying to time the stock market.

"Both the movies and the market are driven by irrational forces beyond anyone's control. Everyone knows that moviegoers want good movies but no one has ever been able to figure out how to patent that secret formula. It's too tricky a recipe: A great book can make a bad movie and a bad filmmaker can ruin a...Read More

Five reasons why Indiewire's Anthony Kaufman isn't making the trek to Sundance this year. Thin mountain air, stress, too many bus rides, not enough cash, etc.

Richard Shepard's I Knew It Was You is a longish short (40 minutes) about the late great John Cazale. He was a brave, talented, funny-looking character actor with a big forehead who didn't last very long. His masterwork was creating the legendary Fredo -- a pathetic but touching figure -- in the first two Godfather films. He also played the psychotic, fruit-loopy Sal in Dog Day Afternoon, a guy named Stan in The Conversation, and another guy named Stan in The Deer Hunter.

And that was it. Five films. A career cut short due...Read More

I was looking for a YouTube embed of Jeremy Piven addressing the sushi situation from the Golden Globes red carpet. Couldn't find it. But I found this hilarious (if old) Young Turks clip from 3.29.07, about Piven and his entourage visiting Nobu Matsuhisa. Cenk Uygur is a truly gifted raconteur.

Sundance Film Festival director Geoff Gilmore has written a state-of-things piece for the new Indiewire called "Evolution vs. Revolution." Here's a taste with commentary interspersed:

Gilmore: "Audiences are changing. The over-30 audience is the target for much of the independent arena." Wells: Because a significant portion of the over-30s (more like the over-50s) have a habit and a history of reading reviews in magazines and newspapers. Most of the under-30s glance at the scores on Rotten Tomatoes. Maybe. The majority just watch trailers online or in theatres, and that's it.

Gilmore: "Whereas the new generation...Read More

There was a big dress rehearsal in Washington, D.C. yesterday for the various inauguration events and festivities. Army Sgt. Derrick Brooks stood in for President-elect Barack Obama and Navy Yeoman 1st Class LaSean McCray stood in for Michelle Obama. But honestly? The photo below gave me pause.

After 30 Rock's Tina Fey used her Golden Globes acceptance speech to bash neg-head posters on TheEnvelope.com's message board, The Envelope's Tom O'Neil offered an apology. But why apologize for snarky mean things said by talk-backers? It's part of the digital rough-and-tumble out there. Apologize for your own words and deeds and that's all.

In a weird roundabout way the Golden Globes seem to have a bit more integrity this morning due to last night's double-awarding of Kate Winslet -- a Best Supporting Actress award for her performance in The Reader and a Best Actress trophy for her work in Revolutionary Road. But in another way the HFPA looks like the same old shop of whores.

We all believe that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association -- the ultimate organization for obsequious celebrity suck-upping -- "cooks" their nominations so as to ensure as many big names as possible showing up for the...Read More

Who buys the idea of 32 year-old Ryan Reynolds pairing off with 44 year-old Sandra Bullock (who, no offense, is starting to look her age somewhat) in The Proposition (Touchstone, 6.12.09)?

On one level it seems almost exciting -- at the very least intriguing -- that societal standards are such that an older attractive actress can get away today with the same thing that older male actors have been getting away with for decades, i.e., romantic pairings with women 10, 20 and even 30 years younger....Read More

You have to do more than just sell tickets to be considered a serious heavy-hitting movie star. Every so often (i.e., every three or four years) you have to be in a really good film. And I mean a really good one -- not a line-drive single or ground-rule double but a serious triple or a homer. By this standard, or even in strictly monetary terms, how can 32 year-old Ryan Reynolds be considered a star of any kind?

He's a talented performer, obviously charming and good looking. He seems to be trying to do quality...Read More

Call it fortune-telling, instinct or luck, but Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling was obviously on target several weeks ago when he booked Golden Globe winners Mickey Rourke and Sally Hawkins, double-winner Kate Winslet and Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle for tribute appearances. The fest runs from Thursday, 1.22 to Sunday, 2.1.

Retreating to the relative warmth of Santa Barbara after 9 days of Sundance -- sub-freezing temps, snow, winds and all manner of dampness -- is a very pleasant thing, I can tell you.

Naturally, or at least not unexpectedly, Slumdog Millionaire has won the Golden Globe for Best Dramatic Feature (or whatever the exact award wording is).

The Wrestler's Mickey Rourke has beaten Milk's Sean Penn with a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Drama....big one! And a bit of a surprise. A beaming and moustachioed Darren Aronofsky sitting at the table. Rourke says the word "balls" twice. Goes on a bit, orchestra cuts him off, go for it.

Kate Winslet's double Golden Globe win -- Best Actress for Revolutionary Road and Best Supporting Actress for The Reader -- is probably a first. (Isn't it?)...Read More

"We're getting out of the early adopter phase and into the mass-market phase. It's been two and half years since we first introduced a Blu-ray player. 2009 is the year we expect to continue significant growth of the format. This will be our big growth year." -- Blu-ray Disc Association president Andy Parsons.

In other words, cheaper players and...cheaper Bluray discs? Well?

I read somewhere last April that Gerald McMorrow's Franklyn was a possible Cannes '08 entry, but nope. Then I was thought it might turn up at last September's Toronto Film Festival...sorry. Then I thought it might appear at Sundance '09....no-go. And now it's opening in the UK next month with no U.S. release date in sight. Face it -- there must be something wrong with it.

Which reminds me -- where's Beeban Kidron's Hippie Hippie Shake?

My parents made the mistake of moving into an assisted living facility called East Hill Woods a few years ago. My father was fond of calling this compound, located in dull-as-dishwater Southbury, Connecticut, "death row." It's a clean, quiet and very friendly concentration camp for the aged -- tidy and comfortable and absolutely horrible for the human spirit. (Mine, anyway.) I would rather collapse and die on a New York street in the dead of winter than live in one of those hell-holes.

The Watermark at East Hill Woods

Things took a turn for the worse...Read More

Last night my son Jett and two of his roommates were discussing wall-poster decorations in their just-moved-into flophouse -- a seedy second-floor apartment with five bedrooms, a kitchen and a bathroom that's only a couple of blocks from the Syracuse University campus. Jett wanted to put up a poster featuring James Dean and Bob Dylan, and one of the roommates -- a very bright 20 year-old who's (a) gay, (b) African-American and (c) a Republican -- said no way. The point is that the guy had never heard of Dean or Dylan. I'm putting it as plainly as I can. The guy had...Read More

Earlier today The Envelope's Tom O'Neil posted a list of who will present what award at tonight's Golden Globes ceremony. I know one thing -- the presentation of the Cecil B. DeMille Award to Steven Spielberg is bathroom-break, make-a-meatloaf-sandwich, throw-the-wet-clothes-into-the-dryer time for me. All hail the director of Tintin!

What exactly has Spielberg done lately to deserve another brass kowtow besides having agreed to show up tonight? If Spielberg wasn't a billionaire big-shot who's hired a great number of people in this town and whose films have made gazillions over the past 33 years, would he be receiving this award tonight? I...Read More

If a troubled heterosexual relationship drama had come out this year with scenes as good as this, it would absolutely be among the five Best Picture nominees with a damn good shot to win. The older Carnal Knowledge gets, the better it gets.

The Golden Globes will air at 8 pm tonight on both coasts. For the first time in a long time I won't be schnorring around the after-parties. Even if I was there in L.A. I don't know that I'd be feeling all that amped about it. It's just the Globes. Need to try a little push-back against the cynicism.

"If you're looking for an item on a slow night, I thought you'd enjoy realizing that Roger Ebert and Lou Lumenick are consistently the two main critics quoted in the ads for Slumdog Millionaire. Both gave it four stars and raved it as being one of the best films of 2008.

"So what?

"Well, you'll recall that their viewing of the movie was interrupted at TIFF when Lumenick whacked Ebert with his binder because Ebert objected to Lumenick blocking his view at a press screening. But obviously the dust-up didn't interfere with the appreciation of the movie. All's well that ends well."...Read More

"Upon leaving a stuffy Beverly Hills party thrown by a socialite, Groucho Marx said to her, 'I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it." -- from "A Better Sort of Insult," a 1.9.09 N.Y. Times piece by Dick Cavett.

"I'd love to hear your take on Silent Light, the new Carlos Reygadas film. Or his other work, for that matter. I just saw it at the Film Forum, and am still trying to decide what I thought of it. A few people in the theatre were falling asleep, and as I left a few were looking at the blown-up Manohla Dargis N.Y. Times review, giving each other bewildered looks while words like 'terrible', 'pretentious' and whatnot slipped out.

"I don't agree with them, but I still haven't quite made up my mind about it. Reygadas is definitely into meditative as...Read More

Looking out of a half-opened doorway in a Chinese takeout place in East Syracuse -- 1.10.09, 7:05 pm

Blizzard from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo.

The question is whether or not rabid Christian righties will be dumb enough to make a stink about the already notorious "black model called Jesus who wears a loincloth and a crown of thorns" in Sacha Baron Cohen's forthcoming Bruno movie, a.k.a., Bruno: Delicious Journeys Through America For The Purpose Of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable In The Presence Of A Gay Foreigner In A Mesh T-Shirt.

At Thursday night's BFCA awards Angelina Jolie reportedly said "she'll be in front of the camera early this year [but] didn't say what projects she may be working on." She also told a reporter that she "may" work for a few months. My understanding is that she will start working in March -- no ifs, ands or buts.

The film she'll be starring in is no secret. It's called Salt, a CIA thriller formerly known as Edwin A. Salt, which Tom Cruise planned to make earlier this year before he changed his mind. The part was given a sex-change to accomodate Jolie's...Read More

Mass Pike heading west, east of Stockbridge -- Saturday, 1.10.09, 11:35 am.

Berkshires from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo

I've now been invited to least one Sundance Film Festival Barack Obama inauguration breakfast-and-bagels high-def viewing party, being held at a place on Park City's Main Street. I won't identify the folks throwing the event, but it's about publicizing a pro-earth documentary called Dirt! The Movie -- i.e., not about the Courteney Cox Fox TV series.

Big Hollywood's Steve Mason is reporting that contrary to yesterday's expectations, Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino has cleaned the Bride Wars clock. The deeply loathed Kate Hudson-Anne Hathaway comedy made about $7.5 million yesterday for a projected $21 million by Sunday night, but Torino will beat that total by $9 million.

The wide-breaking Eastwood flick tallied $10 million yesterday and could hit $30 million by Sunday night, which would be an opening-weekend Eastwood high. (The second biggest is the $18,9 million earned by Space Cowboys followed by $15.2 million for In The Line of Fire.) Add...Read More

Nicole Kidman has admitted to extreme discomfort while watching Australia during the Sydney premiere screening in November. Quotes have either been heard by or passed along to the Daily Mail's Richard Shears that she "squirmed" in her seat, that she "can't look at this movie and be proud of what I've done," that she turned to husband Keith Urban and asked "am I any good in this movie?" and decided that it's "just impossible for me to connect to it emotionally at all.'

I was too lazy and unfocused to reply to The Envelope/Gold Derby's Tom O'Neil with my Golden Globe predictions, but others got around to it. Here are calls from Thelma Adams (Us Weekly), Scott Bowles (USA Today), Peter Howell (Toronto Star), Dave Karger (Entertainment Weekly), Marshall Fine (Star Magazine, Hollywood and Fine), Kris Tapley (InContention.com), Brad Brevet (Rope of Silicon), Scott Feinberg (Feinberg Files, The Envelope), Peter Travers (Rolling Stone), Pete Hammond (Notes on a Season, The Envelope), Edward Douglas (Comingsoon.net) and O'Neil.

A female publicist friend complained earlier today about my having referred to Avi Lerner, Boaz Davidson and Danny Dumbort, producers of the upcoming Sylvester Stallone film The Expendables , as "the Bad News Jews of the 21st Century." It just came trippingly off the tongue, but I suppose it sounded a bit raw. So I wrote her back to explain and fill things in.

Back in the '80s, I said, the term "Bad News Jews" was a commonly used slur aimed at Cannon Films honchos Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, who more or less pioneered the Israeli rug-merchant approach to making...Read More

The L.A. Weekly's esteemed and highly perceptive film critic Ella Taylor was whacked earlier today, Goodfellas-style. I'm truly sorry, Ella. Brutal world, condolences, chin up.

It's been said that as '50s melodramas go Mad Men is richer and more layered than Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road. Now Variety 's Todd McCarthy has gone one better in his latest "Deep Focus" column, arguing that Richard Quine 's Strangers When We Meet ('60) is also a fuller, more believable portrait of '50s suburban angst than Mendes' film. Speaking as an ardent Revolutionary Road fan, I found McCarthy's words persuasive.

The first six minutes of Bryan Singer's Valkyrie are now live on Apple.

Sony Pictures Classics has announced the acquisition of North American rights to writer-director James Toback's Tyson, winner of the Un Certain Regard's Knockout Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and due to have its North American preem at the Sundance Film Festival. I saw Tyson last April in Los Angeles. It's a much sadder and more touching portrait of Tyson that you might expect.

MTV.com has the trailer for The Missing Person, the Sundance Film Festival attraction with Michael Shannon and Amy Ryan.

The difference between these French Connection frame captures, the top from Fox Home Video's standard DVD released in '05 and the bottom from FHV's forthcoming Bluray disc, is obvious. The desaturated Bluray image looks sickly and anemic; the '05 DVD looks smoother, warmer, less noisy. Read yesterday's post about the complaints DVD fans are voicing about William Friedkin's decision to create a "pastel"-looking Bluray version, which he reportedly admits does not represent the way the film looked originally.

DVD Beaver frame capture of standard French Connection DVD.