The sword of Damocles hovering above the Disney work force that N.Y. Times reporter Laura Holson wrote about a while back will strike within two or three weeks, and the percentage of people laid off could be moderate or quite high, depending on who you talk to and how worried they are. A Disney guy told me last night the Mouse House cuts could affect anywhere from 10% to 20% of Disney employees. The slump in DVD sales (i.e., a downturn in growth), the rising cost of making movies (FX houses and big-star salaries) and a rethinking of the types of movies that Disney wants to get involved in are said to be the main reasons for the cuts.

“The barrier to entry in internet media is low — [but] the barrier to success is high,” says Gawker Media’s Nick Denton to N.Y. Times columnist David Carr.
“[Denton] thinks all of the bluster around blogs, fueled in part by AOL’s purchase of weblogs, has brought stupid money off the sidelines,” Carr writes. “He has felt the touch of clammy hands from venture capitalists more times than he would care to count. ‘There is no doubt that there is a bubble right now,’ he says.
“So why not cash out? ‘Because it would be too hard to start over,’ he answers. ‘Sites need to be well-managed and well-designed and even then it is harder and harder to launch one. The world does not need more blogs,” adding that if you count all the pages on MySpace, “there is approximately one reader for every blog out there.”
Note to readers: MCN’s David Poland linked to Carr’s article either last night or earlier this morning, so that means he kind of owns it, and if anyone else links to this article or riffs on it, they’re a kind of poacher, or so Poland believes. They’re taking a dump on land that he’s found and staked out and filed a claim on. HE recognizes that MCN linked to the Carr piece first, and profusely apologizes for offending Poland’s acute sense of territoriality.

Just before the start of Sunday evening’s Little Miss Sunshine showing at the Wadsworth, marking the end of the L.A. Film Festival — 7.2.06, 6:40 pm.

(a) The actual Little Miss Sunshine VW van used during filming, parked in front of the Wadsworth — Sunday, 7.2.06, 6:45 pm; (b) Something between a greeting and a warning; (c) Photographers snapping arrivals prior to Sunday’s Sunshine screening — 7.2.06, 6:42 pm; (d) Islander producer-star Tom Hildreth, publicist Mickey Cottrell, director Ian McCrudden at L.A. Film festival outdoor after-party next to Wadsworth theatre — Sunday, 7.2, 10:35 pm; (f) bad photo of after-party bartenders near the end of their rope — Sunday, 7.2, 11:15 pm; Little Miss Sunshine costar Paul Dano (left), who comes from my high-school home town of Wilton, Connecticut , with his girlfriend (whose name I forgot to write down) and a close pally (ditto) who also hail from Wilton, snapped at Sunday night’s Wadsworth after-party .

AP reporter Dave Germain is reporting that the 2006 box-office picture is better than last year’s because the movies aren’t as sucky. “[The] studios avoided a repeat of their stinker-of-the-week performance of 2005,” he writes, “when seemingly every Friday brought a big new movie that audiences stayed away from [like] the action bombs Stealth and The Island, the comedies The Honeymooners, Rebound and Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, the historical epic Kingdom of Heaven and the remakes House of Wax and The Bad News Bears.” Maybe…but it’s worth repeating the view held in some corners and salons that if the “director’s cut” of Ridley Scott‘s Kingdom of Heaven (i.e., the one currently in DVD stores) opened instead of the truncated version that Fox put into theatres, the Average Joe turn-off factor would have been much lower, if not eliminated altogether.

I didn’t see any of the L.A. Film Festival award-winners, but congrats to Steve Collins‘ Gretchen (winner of the Target Filmmaker Award for Best Narrative Feature), Amy Berg ‘s Deliver Us From Evil (Target’s Best Documentary Feature winner), Robert Cary‘s Ira & Abby (Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature), Jeff Werner and Susan Koch‘s Mario’s Story (Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature), Tomer Heymann‘s Paper Dolls and so on. I’m presuming the whole list of winners will be posted on the festival’s site sooner or later.

“It’s also starting to hit me that Little Miss Sunshine has a real shot at picking up some critics awards and Oscar nominations — Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris for directing, Steve Carell and especially Paul Dano for Best Supporting Actor (the latter’s performance is especially good because two-thirds of it is done non-verbally, and yet he hits it out of the park with every facial muscle inflection and eye-roll), Michael Arndt for Best Screenplay, and so on.” — from today’s Sunshine feature, excerpted out of enthusiasm for Dano’s breakthrough perf.

Sunshine Is It

Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ Little Miss Sunshine (Fox Searchlight, 7.26) is, at the very least, this year’s Sideways — a non-formulaic character-driven comedy created by people of similar attitude and talent and emotional complexity levels, with laughs are just as rich and uproarious and particular.
There are two big differences: (1) Sunshine is a family comedy — a real family comedy about real people, as opposed to a piece of shite like Cheaper by the Dozen — and not about screwed-up middle-aged guys, and (2) it may make a lot more money than Sideways.

(l. to r.) Gregg Kinnear, Steve Carell, Paul Dano, Toni Collette and Abigail Breslin in Little Miss Sunshine (Fox Searchlight, 7.26)

Or so it would seem to judge by what happened last night, when the L.A. Film Festival ended with a Sunshine screening at the Wadsworth. The place shook like the Eccles theatre did last January before a hopped-up crowd at the start of the Sundance Film Festival. I’m talking guffaws, laughs, horse laughs and one signi- ficant “awww.” Plus heavy cheering and clapping and woo-woo’s as it ended.
The amazing thing for me is that Sunshine goes into some very dark places at times, and yet it has the balls and the spirit to bounce right out of those places and make you laugh five or ten minutes later, like nothing happened.
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?>
Watch both cuts of the trailer — the one on the Sunshine website and the one currently parked on Rotten Tomatoes — and you’ll have some idea of what I’m talking about.
It played just as well last night with me also — no diminishment at all. I can see catching it at least another couple of times and then owning the DVD.
I don’t know how big or how wide, but Sunshine is definitely a hit waiting to happen. It looks to me like a winner with all four quadrants. It may be a bit soft with young males at first, possibly, but that shouldn’t last.

The only people who may not warm to this acidly funny and touching family comedy as much, possibly, are the hideous fastidious mothers out there who delight in transforming their daughters into Jon Benet Ramsey clones so they can win at junior-miss beauty pageants.
After you see Sunshine you’ll know what I’m talking about. These women — the whole junior-miss beauty pagent culture, in fact — should be quietly rounded up and put on Army transport jets and flown to rural China and put to work on farming communes.
It’s also starting to hit me that Sunshine has a real shot at picking up some critics awards and Oscar nominations — Dayton and Faris for directing, Steve Carell and especially Paul Dano for Best Supporting Actor (the latter’s performance is especially good because two-thirds of it is done non-verbally, and yet he hits it out of the park with every facial muscle inflection and eye-roll), Michael Arndt for Best Screenplay, and so on.
I just re-read my morning-after review of Sunshine that ran six months ago, so here it is again (most of it) and screw the quote marks:
Little Miss Sunshine doesn’t exactly re-invent the wheel. It’s just a smart family comedy-slash-road movie, but the last film that got so much good humor out of such dark subject matter was maybe David O. Russell’s Flirting with Disaster, although Sunshine is a bit more of a wholesome, straight-up thing.

This is a film about hostility, feelings of futility, middle-aged career collapse, a troubled marriage, a fiercely alienated son, a dad who’s a bit of an asshole, a sudden family death, a failed suicide…and it’s often very funny and quite warm and so cleverly calculated and well-blended that it doesn’t feel like anyone calculated anything.
Sundance director Geoff Gilmore wrote last January that Little Miss Sunshine possesses a kind of “Capra-esque lunacy.” For me the word Capra (as in Frank) means cornball emotion and cloying stabs at manipulation…and Sunshine feels, to me, more natural (and naturally effective) than any Capra film I’ve ever seen.
And damned if Steve Carell isn’t eight times sadder and gloomier in this thing than he was in the early portions of The 40 Year-Old Virgin, and if he isn’t much funnier and more winning here than he was in that hit film from last summer. It’s his best performance ever, no question.
Virgin director-writer Judd Apatow has been writing comedy for 15 years or so, and when he sees Little Miss Sunshine he’s going to wish he could write something as good as what Michael Arndt has done, and direct a comedy of this type with this kind of naturalistic panache.

(l. to r.) Alan Arkin (as the family’s heroin-snorting grandpa), Carrel, Dano, Breslin, Collette, Kinnear

Sunshine is basically about family ties holding strong under ghastly and horrific circumstances.
It’s two days or so in the life of the can’t-catch-a-break Hoover clan — the vaguely dipshitty motivational speaker Richard (Gregg Kinnear), his sorely frustrated wife Sheryl (Toni Collette), Sheryl’s crushed, post-suicidal brother (Carell), a curmud- geonly, drug-taking grandpa (Alan Arkin), the silent, sulking Dwayne (Paul Dano), and 7 year-old cutie-pie Olive (Abigail Breslin).
The action is about going on a car trip from hell to take Olive to a Little Miss Sun- shine beauty pageant in Redondo Beach…and wouldn’t you just know the pageant itself would also be a nightmare? But this family has an improvised cure for that.
It’s not just that this all feels unexpectedly funny, but fresh and unforced. So much so that it’s easy to ignore a couple of scenes that don’t entirely work. It’s not quite as refined or soulful as Alexander Payne’s Sideways, but Sunshine has to be a hit — it can’t not be.

I think I already knew that a truly popular film is a big draw with serious moviegers in theatres and on DVD — in for a penny, in for a pound. A recently-released Neilsen Entertainment survey quoted by N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman refers to “a new core audience of movie devotees who to to the movies most often — 10 times per year or more, which the study calls ‘uber-media consumers’ — are also those who most frequently buy DVDs. In a poll of 2800 moviegoers who bought tickets online, the study found that 83 percent of them also ‘frequently’ or ‘sometimes’ buy the DVD of the movie they saw in the theater.” Very cool, but it’s shocking to me that a polling organization would describe someone who goes out to a movie 10 times a year (the DVD-buying element aside) as an “uber” anything. Ten times a year is nothing. Anyone who’s half-assedly into chasing the culturally dominant or high-intrigue movies is going to hit a theatre at least twice monthly or 24 times a year, bare minimum…and 24 or 25 visits per year means you’re missing about half (sometimes a little less than half) of the very good or excellent films that turn up each year. I see at least three or four newbies each week (that’s factoring in three festival binges per year at Toronto, Sundance and Cannes) plus at least two DVDs of relatively recent films missed in screening rooms a few months back. That’s five per week or 250 films per year. And yet the Neilsen Entertainment pollers regard movie fans who annually see 4% of this total — 10 films — or even those who see 8% of this total — 20 films annually — as “ubers.” I would call these people “dabblers.” I’m pretty sure HE readers are much more ardent than this. Responses?

The people behind Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest have “made everything a little bigger, louder and more expensive. They’ve upped the archness ante, poured on the special effects, and [encouraged] everyone to follow Johnny Depp’s antic lead. The result is an overproduced movie that tries so strenuously hard to be ‘fun’ that it’s a chore to sit through. For all its razzle-dazzle production values, the story itself feels cluttered, hard to follow and hard to care about.” — Newsweek critic David Ansen in the current issue.

The link isn’t up yet, but Matt Drudge is excerpting a Sharon Waxman N.Y. Times story saying that attendance is rising at U.S. plexes after a prolonged draught. “Through the first 25 weeks of the year, domestic box-office revenue — helped by a boost in ticket prices — was up nearly 5 percent, to $4.6 billion, though it still trailed 2004,” the quote reads. “Movie attendance was up about 1.65 percent to 699 million for the first 25 weeks, after a sharp decline the year before. The totals grew last weekend as Warner Brothers’ Superman Returns took in $84 million over a six-day period (i.e., counting Tuesday night).”

David Benioff and David Ayer‘s script for the upcoming Wolverine movie only does a little sidebar origin-story about a twelve year-old Wolverine…fine. All origin stories have the same beats, the same payoffs…and producers in the superhero business have seemed notoriously blind in the past to how sick fans are of seeing another one.

Thank fortune the Wolverine guys aren’t contemplating any such notion. I realize that one description by Latino Review‘s El Mayimbe is hardly the last definitive word, but this is encouraging. The Wolverine flick won’t be out until sometime in ’08 due to Hugh Jackman’s crowded schedule, apparently.

A get-well-soon to Roger Ebert after an emergency operation he went through Saturday night (or Sunday morning…it’s not clear) to repair complications from an earlier cancer-related surgery that happened on June 16. The mid-June procedure was about removing a cancerous growth on Ebert’s salivary gland. Newsvine is reporting that a blood vessel burst near the area of the 6.16 surgery on Saturday night around 8 pm, and that Ebert went right into surgery to have this taken care of.