“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. These forecasts can be astonishingly accurate — or way off. Palen has found that the tracking for Lionsgate’s hits routinely underestimates their audience: people who are slightly outside the mainstream. At the studio, they call these party crashers ‘the freak factor.’

“NRG predicted that Tyler Perry‘s first film for Lionsgate, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, would open at four to six million dollars, and it opened at $21.9 million. Tracking studies are conducted among people who’ve seen at least six movies in the past year, but Perry’s films have proved to be wildly popular with churchgoing African-American women. Other hidden pockets of interest made The Passion of the Christ and Sex and the City even bigger hits.

“Kevin Goetz, president of the worldwide motion-picture group at the research firm OTX, says that his company, knowing it can’t track all of Perry’s audience, simply inflates the ‘unknown variable’ segment of its predictive model by twenty to twenty-five per cent for his films. Often, then, the algorithm of box-office estimation, which is itself the algorithm of marketing efficacy, is actually the algorithm of the informed hunch.” — from Tad Friend‘s 1.19 New Yorker profile of Lionsgate’s Tim Palen, called “The Cobra.”

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 Sarah Kunstler‘s William Kunstler: Disturbing The Universe. Josiane Balasko‘s Cliente. Tom DeCillo‘s When You’re Strange. Marie Noelle and Peter Sehr‘s The Anarchist’s Wife. Lone Scherfig‘s An Education. Oliver Hirschbiegel‘s Five Minutes of Heaven. Glenn Ficarra and John Requa‘s I Love You Phillip Morris. Davis Guggenheim‘s It Might Get Loud. Noah Buschel‘s The Missing Person. Shana Feste‘s The Greatest.

I’ll see Mary and Max, the opening-night film, but only because there’s nothing else to do. Max, the character voiced by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, is said to be morbidly obese, so right away I don’t want to go there. Even if he’s made of clay. Obesity is the King Kong of metaphors in terms of the current American malaise, and particularly the economic meltdown that is now threatening our security and stability.

Today is my last in North Bergen/Manhattan until January 30th or thereabouts. Flying to Park City and the Sundance Film Festival tomorrow morning, and then doing the Santa Barbara Film Festival from 1.22 to 1.30.

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 style [that weds] the sensational hedonism characteristic of Danielle Steel [with] the spiritual malaise of Douglas Coupland.”

The only downside is that Sundance programmers have given The Informers a bum’s-rush slot — Thursday night, 1.22 and Friday morning, 1.23, or two days after all the big buyers and journalists tend to bail out. But the Informers Sundance screening and after-party is going to be quite the madmen/party animal/poets’ corner event. Every person involved is an eccentric X factor danger-risker of some sort.

Everyone benefits for the time being — Jordan, the producers (Bret Easton Ellis, Vanessa Coifman, Brian Young, Jere Hausfater, Nicholas Jarecki), the screenwriters (Ellis, Jarecki) and the hot-shot cast — Billy Bob Thornton, Kim Basinger, Mickey Rourke, Winona Ryder, Jon Foster and Amber Heard. As well as Chris Isaak, Lou Taylor Pucci, Rhys Ifans and the late Brad Renfro .

The four stand-out quotes in the piece: (1) “You’ve got to be worried when I’m the sanest person on the set,” reportedly said by Thornton to Jordan early on; (2) “If you want to take a shot at it, it’s a full target,” said by Sundance Film Festival honcho Geoff Gilmore; (c) “I know it will be polarizing, it isn’t for everyone,” said by Senator Entertainment’s Marco Weber, and (d) “It’s a guilty pleasure — I think Amber Heard wears a dress once in the entire movie,” spoken by Mark Urman, Senator’s president of distribution.

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 journalists had to shlep over to festival headquarters at the Park City Marriott and request public screening ducats a day in advance. In writing yet. And then shlep back there the next morning to see if any had been made available. Thus forcing some of us (i.e., those who can’t spare the time to go through the ticket-request ritual) to become subservient beggars, cajolers, grovellers and suck-ups in the Eccles lobby. What a pleasant ritual to look forward to!

I can see most everything via press screenings at the Yarrow, but you know how it is — you try to see films whenever and however, depending on your always-tight schedule. On top of which it’s cooler to see Premiere selections at the Eccles — there’s a feeling of crackling excitement during some of those screenings that you just can’t get sitting with a bunch of critics.

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 know, possibly” due to two factors.

One, a form of semi-infectious enthusiasm coming from the “friends and colleagues” of Spoutblog’s Karina Longworth, who recently wrote that it’s “definitely the domestic narrative competition feature that’s come up most in conversation.”

And two, my having been invited this morning to a Humpday party and a press day, which…I don’t know, conveys a certain confidence and a suspicion that the film, directed and written by Lynn Shelton, might not be a huge problem. Staking a claim to respectability with a party can sometimes mean something. In the same way that it made sense, conversely, that Thinkfilm’s Mark Urman decided against throwing a party for Zoo, the horse-fucking movie that played at Sundance ’07.

I still say “trust no one” and “caveat emptor” when it comes to any kind of smallish Sundance movie looking for attention by pushing any kind of sexual-behavior envelope. Because, as we all know, any kind of “whoa, haven’t seen that before!” buzz tends to turn heads. And the ability to turn heads means next to nothing. Okay, it means something.

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 that the insistence by prosecutors and the court that Polanski must appear in person to seek dismissal “is a joke, a cruel joke being played on me.”

A hearing is set for 1.21.09 on Polanski’s motion for dismissal. But prosecutors have said he must appear in person — an act which would risk his arrest. “If Polanski cannot stand before the court to make this request, I, as the victim, can and I, as the victim do,” Geimer said in the declaration, which was signed at her home in Kilauea, Hawaii.

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 pair of boots, by contrast, is the last thing he sees, as he dies on the floor of a Bolivian hut; they belong to the officer who has come to check that Che, caught and shot, has finally given up his troublesome ghost. The visual echo is a fitting one, since, whatever the private impulses that fired this work, there is no doubting Soderbergh’s desire to shoot at ground level — not to linger on the loftiness of political ideals but, instead, to get down amid the dirt, sweat, and despair of putting them into practice.” — from Anthony Lane‘s New Yorker review, dated 1.19.09.

“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 good script, but sometimes the most chaotic mess turns into a marvelous souffle.

“All we really know is that we know a good movie when we see one, whether the Dow’s scraping bottom or running with the bulls.”

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.