Traction on the Stop Eddie Murphy movement is starting to happen….maybe. I’ve made it clear from a personal perspective that I’d like to see him denied the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his Dreamgirls work, but there might be more happening than just that. People aren’t exactly lighting torches and preparing to march on Versailles, but…

Two days ago (i.e., the day after Monday’s Murphy-dissing piece in this column), I was interviewed by a N.Y. Post guy who’s writing a story for Sunday’s edition about Murphy’s supposed political weaknesses, the perception that he’s more than a bit of an egoistic asshole, how he’s never made anything other than mainstream big-buck comedies, how he’s never tried to stretch or risk anything in a smaller-budgeted film, plus the ongoing Norbit effect (i.e., that one-sheet image reiterating who Murphy is and challenging the notion that he’s somehow turned a corner with his Dreamgirls performance) upon Academy voters.

Murphy encapsulates everything that is smug, arrogant, closed-off and reac- tionary about today’s Hollywood elite. Denying him the Best Supporting Actor Oscar would be, no exaggeration, an affirmation of positive, open-hearted values. It would amount to the Academy saying en masse, “We will not reward insecure downmarket egotists, no matter how successful their films have been….we’re not necessarily refusing to celebrate movie stars who ride around in big fat SUVs and wear jet-black shades and live behind electrified iron gates, but we chose not to this time.”

As the recent Murphy profile in Entertainment Weekly says, “[Murphy] carries some baggage: a reputation for being prickly and egotistical, rumors of odd idiosyncrasies, a couple of high-profile tabloid scandals.

“Even with the tremendous acclaim for his work in Dreamgirls, some believe he won’t fully stabilize his bumpy career until he overcomes a long-standing image problem. His defenders dispute that idea, saying that with cumulative career box office grosses in the neighborhood of $3 billion, Murphy has a vast reservoir of goodwill in Hollywood and among moviegoers.”

Mark Steven Johnson‘s Ghost Rider (Columbia, 2.16), the Nic Cage/Marvel comics motorcycle action fantasy, is tracking very strongly right now. General awareness is 55, definite interest 40, first choice 13. For a film opening two and a half weeks from now, those are very good numbers. Pic is going to float and then some. Look for a minimum $30 to $35 million opening weekend.
This coming weekend is Super Bowl weekend, which means Sunday is going to be a wipeout and even Saturday may be affected with pre-Super Bowl parties and all. Michael Lehman‘s Because I Said So (Universal, 2.2.07) may do modest business….numbers are mezzo-mezzo to decent…59. 31, 12. Danny and Oxide Pang‘s The Messengers (Columbia, 2.2.07) is at 54, 30 and 9.
Hannibal Rising (MGM/Weinstein Co., 2.9) is at 56, 29 and 5. Modest, nobody’s in it, and it’s MGM. Eddie Murphy’s Norbit (Dreamamount, 2.9) will do decent business…72, 35 and 6. Music and Lyrics (Warner Bros., 2.14) looks like a modest opener — 53, 29, 4. Tyler Perry’s Daddy’s Little Girl (Lionsgate, 2.14) is at 29, 35, 4 — Perry’s fan base will turn out and it should will open fairly well, perhaps very well.
Billy Ray‘s Breach (Universal, 2.16), which I hear is rather good, isn’t tracking all that well so far…29, 24 and 1. Bridge to Terebithia, a kids’ films, is at 55, 27 and 5 — for that kind of picture, these are good numbers. Ghost Rider, as mentioned, is going to be explosive. The Abandoned is at 11, 15 and no first choice at all. The Astronaut Farmer — 34. 20 and 1.
Three 2.23 openings: Black Snake Moan is at 36, 27 and 2. New Line’s Number 23 us tracking at 36, 28 and 2….not much action for a Jim Carrey film. And Reno 9.11 is at 43, 27 and 1.

I’ve asked two or three veterans of the scene, and apparently there’s no precedent for the big Three Amigos press party next week for Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth), Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Babel) and Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men). No precedent, I mean, for three distributors banding together and co-founding and co-staging the same event. I’m guessing that the trio got together and cooked it up, and then went to their respective distributors and said, “Let’s do this.”

The impetus for the wonderful bile in John Cook‘s Sundance-dissing piece in Radar — and a very well-written thing it is — is that Cook (a) didn’t know enough well-connected publicists, and (b) he wound up going to the wrong parties. It’s also apparent (to me anyway) that he didn’t fall in love or at least get laid. I fell in love up there (with Once, I mean), and it made all the difference in the world.

“The Sundance Film Festival is about independent cinema in much the same way the quadrennial Republican and Democratic national conventions are about democracy,” Cook observes. “Which is to say, the Sundance Film Festival is not about independent cinema. It is about status, and money, and self-regard; it’s an annual industry junket and trade show.
“The 400 or so major screenings, mind you, are not for the benefit of audiences but of fat-pocketed distributors — many of them divisions of the Hollywood studios that Sundance disingenuously poses in opposition to — eagerly searching out the next Sex, Lies and Videotape or Little Miss Sunshine.
“The relative quality of available celebrity notwithstanding, the organizers of Sundance were on a relentless campaign this year to promote the notion that the festival is about art and cinema, and that the attendant clusterfuck of swag lounges and Hummer limos and party girls dressed up like Eskimo hookers are contrary to its principles.
“Much of what happens in Park City is beyond the control of Sundance. But the festival’s arch posturing against commercialization, with Robert Redford inveighing against the swag lounges on Main Street designed to get luxury brands onto the pages of Us Weekly, is too much to take in the face of the omnipresent logos of festival sponsors Volkswagen, Hewlett-Packard, and AOL.
“And the dismissive sniffing about ‘celebrity coverage,’ which Sundance’s chief press handler, Levi Elder, accused me of contemplating when I applied for credentials, becomes petty and egregiously hypocritical when one considers the fact that the fest is programmed deliberately with films featuring stars — Winona Ryder, Heather Graham, Mandy Moore, John Cusack — who are trotted out at screenings to stand on fake, tented-off “red carpets” to be photographed in front of backdrops festooned with those aforementioned corporate logos.
“Better passes translate, roughly, into less waiting. And for the press, the arbitrary, merciless decisions of publicists — 150 credentialed publicists were in attendance — tended to induce a state of what psychological researchers call learned helplessness.
“Waiting outside for admittance to a press conference one afternoon, among a throng of perhaps 30 other journalists, I was rescued, Schindler’s List-style, by a publicist who burst from inside the building, surveyed the crowd (or, to be precise, our badges), and selected three of us who were allowed to come inside.
“I never learned why, but decided from then on that good things would happen to me if I meekly made sure I was always in eyeshot of a publicist. And when they shined upon you, all the bitterness you previously felt about the better-credentialed prima donnas would melt away, and any sense of solidarity with your freezing, milling brothers and sisters in the cold would dissolve into condescension. See you, suckers!

“Little Miss Sunshine is about as quirky as xXx: State of the Union,” writes Radar’s John Cook. “It’s a Sundance genre picture, manufactured with the same empty, production-line cynicism as a Jerry Bruckheimer film, except where studios call for a shower scene with the heroine, Sundance calls for an indie-rock soundtrack. And where studios demand Third Act explosions, Sundance calls for a comically dysfunctional family that somehow rights itself. And where studios demand a happy ending, Sundance demands, well, a happy ending.
“There’s been a Little Miss Sunshine in virtually every Sundance going back for years√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Ǩ¬ùthere’s youthful angst, coming of age, miscommunication, and, usually, a long shot of a sad high-school kid riding a bicycle down a suburban street.
“This year it was Rocket Science, the coming-of-age tale about a high-school kid from a wacky family who overcomes a debilitating stutter and learns something about himself. It’s a perfectly good movie, but it’s exactly what would happen if Brad Grey called CAA and said, “Gin me up a Sundance picture.”
“Last year it was Little Miss Sunshine. The year before, it was Thumbsucker, the coming of age tale about a high school kid from a wacky family who overcomes a debilitating etc., and The Squid and the Whale, the coming-of-age tale about a high school kid from a wacky family who overcomes a debilitating etc. Before that it was Garden State. It goes all the way back to Reality Bites in 1994.
“Some of these are fine films, but they are the products, in their own way, of the same lack of imagination and marketing-driven choices that, according to Redford et. al., are slowly destroying Hollywood.”

“Seth Sonstein and Nicola Spechko, owners of Southeast Portland’s irascible and essential Clinton Street Theater, have done something the likes of which I’ve never remotely heard of,” reports Oregonian critic Shawn Levy. “They’ve bought a drive-in movie theater in Oceanside, California, and they’re moving all of the hardware — lock, stock, barrel, snack bar, screens, little speakers on poles, and so forth — up here to Oregon.

“They plan to use one of the four projectors they’ve acquired to replace the aged gear in their theater. But they’re also hoping they can get a chunk of land somewhere nearby to use the rest of the equipment to open a new drive-in of their own — one, presumably, which will show the Clinton Street’s patented blend of grindhouse, experimental, cult, and shoestring-independent fare.
“Right now, according to this definitive seeming site, Oregon has only four functioning drive-ins: the nearest to Portland is the 99W in Newberg, along with open-top theaters in La Grande, Milton-Freewater and Dallas. So it’s not like the market is flooded, exactly. And Bruce Lee, anime and “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” under the stars of a Willamette Valley summer night? Oh, I can dig it; can’t you?”