For reasons no one fully understands, the forthcoming Hannah Montana concert movie is being called (ready?) Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour. The 3D Disney release comes out on 2.1.08, and Fandango’s Harry Medved has passed along the following:
(a) It currently accounts for 91% of all ticket sales on Fandango, (b) Although plenty of tickets are still available for midweek shows, over 1,000 showtimes are already sold out, (c) It’s the best-selling concert movie in Fandango’s seven-year history; (d) Exhibitors are regularly adding additional show times at their theaters, including Thursday midnight shows and Friday morning shows (as early as 8:00 a.m.).

Slashfilm’s Peter Sciretta has posted two shots of Sean Penn in bearded, early ’70s guise as the late, deeply mythologized San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk in Gus Van Sant‘s currently-rolling Milk. It appears as if Penn is trying to merge with Milk by wearing a prosthetic schnozz. His own nose has never been patrician or baloney-slice thin, but it does seem larger and more bulbous in the black-and-white Milk photo.

Sean Penn in Gus Van Sant’s Milk; Harvey Milk

I dropped by Santa Barbara’s Marjorie Luke theatre yesterday afternoon to see four short films, but mainly to take a look at Josh Brolin‘s X, which he directed, wrote and self-produced. A 15-minute piece about a heavily-tattooed criminal dad (Vincent Riverside) and his hard-bitten, Bonnie Parker-like daughter (Eden Brolin) sharing a violent fate in the desert, X is a first-rate effort — well-shot, nicely paced, engagingly acted. 3 days of shooting, 96 set-ups. It convinces you that Brolin will probably be directing a feature within two or three years.

(l. to r.) X costars Vincent Riverside, Eden Brolin, director-producer-writer Josh Brolin; two guys who directed an alluring short called Elevator People, and a director of another short film — ready to insert name and title with assistance.

That said, X‘s like-father, like-daughter theme is depressing. Riverside’s character is a low-rent loser who has not only ruined his own life but, it seems, his daughter’s. The short has a certain scuzzy integrity, yes, but I wouldn’t want to see X expanded into a feature. It’s too bleak, the characters too doomed. It left me with nothing except a belief that Brolin can handle himself behind a camera. He’s a funny guy. Something tells me he’d be good with a sardonic comedy of some sort.

Gentlemen of the jury, there are many kinds of silence. Consider first the silence of a man who is dead. Let us suppose we go into the room where he is laid out, and we listen. What do we hear? Nothing — this is silence pure and simple. But let us take another case, a case put before us this very day.

Having decided to drop out of the Democratic primary race, John Edwards declined during his New Orleans speech to endorse either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. He offered, in a manner of speaking, silence, but as Cromwell in A Man For All Seasons pointed out, “Silence can, according to the circumstances, speak.”
What does Edwards’ silence betoken? He knows Clinton is polling well ahead of Obama in the big states and that his endorsing Obama might help to even things out. By saying nothing, he is, in effect, standing with Hillary — the sanctimonious lawyer-smoothie with the southern drawl and the $400 haircut, playing it safe and showing his true colors. The dominant theme, as always, being “let’s see what we can get out of this.” Card-shuffler, back-room dealer.

The Sean Young-Julian Schnabel DGA video from last Saturday night. You can barely hear Young saying “get on with it!”…just barely. It’s underwhelming. The irony is that Schnabel did take too long to get rolling. His on-stage behavior seems a tad affected, running his hands through his hair, pausing eternally. Not that this excuses Young’s behavior.

Amused last night by Julie Chen‘s account of the bombed-and-belligerent Sean Young telling Julian Schnabel to “get on with it!” at last weekend’s DGA Awards, David Letterman half-seriously stated (quote approximate) a hope that “this is the start of a new award-show trend — heckling winners.”

There are no rivers of Juno-hate. Stu Van Airsdale‘s rant aside, there never has been. There is only a sense of Juno proportion, which is where I’ve been coming from all along. Take shots but don’t throw grenades because it’s a good film about perk and snark and emotional conviction. It’s smart, appealing, likable. Just not Oscar-winning. And that’s not a putdown. Fox Searchlight is delighted with how it’s performed and been received. It’s all to the good. Count the money.
Update: Van Airsdale just wrote to say he’s being “misrepresent[ed]” as a Juno hater. “Read my rant again,” he writes. “We’re saying the same thing. I like the movie fine, I just want to keep its box-office and feel-good creds separate from its Oscar creds. If one is synonymous with the other, then maybe the bigger issue is not *what* the Academy recognizes as its ‘Best Picture’, but rather how it defines such. For people who care about the institution and its history — let alone the industry that banks on its imprimatur — it’s not an irrelevant matter.”

I missed this Bagger announcement last night: “Falling Slowly,” the Once song, is back in the running as a legitimate Best Song contender, having been pronounced eligible and put back on the ballot by the Academy’s music branch executive committee.

Terrific, guys…but why, given the well-known, not-hidden facts about Glenn Hansard having written the song for the film and he and Marketa Irglova recording it only subsequently on two other albums, was there a challenge in the first place?
The deal all along (or so I’ve understood) has been that since Once failed to gather the Best Picture talk it certainly deserved all along, the Best Song Oscar is being seen as not just a fitting tribute for the song (and Glenn-Mar’s touching performing of it), but as a repository of all feelings of respect and affection for the film itself.

Variety critic Robert Koehler and I were having a beer at Joe’s Cafe this evening when a Barcelona-based journalist friend and a significant other dropped by to say hello. I asked the guy if he knew what the Spanish- language title of Woody Allen‘s latest film is. (The English-language title is one of the all-time worst from a significant American filmmaker — Vicky Cristina Barcelona.) His girlfriend/wife said it was Somewhere in Barcelona, or, roughly translated, En algun lugar de Barcelona.

If you’re talking spiritual analogies, Barack Obama is a little more Bobby than Jack Kennedy. In 1968, Of course. And if you really run with that analogy, as a critic friend explained this afternoon, you have to accept that Hillary Clinton is Richard Nixon.

Producer Jonathan Dana‘s “dumb money” assessment of the three-tiered indie-glut scene, passed along to Variety‘s Anne Thompson, is worth a read-through.