The usual we’re-Sundance-and-we’re-proud-of- what-we-stand for themes were sounded by Robert Redford and festival program director Geoff Gilmore at the opening-day Sundance Film Festival press conference, which ended about 90 minutes ago. I don’t know if anyone was knocked flat by theser statements, but it was good to hear the Sundance fundamentals restated in a clear and concise fashion.

(l. to r.) Sundance program director Geoff Gilmore, Robert Redford, Chicago 10 director Brett Morgen at the close of this afternoon’s 2007 Sundance Film Festival press conference at the Egyptian theatre — Thursday, 1.18.07, 3:20 pm

We’re about movies and not parties or ambush marketing, Redford said. We’re living in a very exciting, expansive and inclusive time, they both said. And I recall one of them saying that the line between narrative features and documentaries is blurring, and that’s good, and the more this happens the better for everyone. (I agree.)
I recorded the whole thing, but I’ll tell you right now that Redford spoke a little too softly and wasn’t adequately miked, so don’t expect much from the first five or six minutes. In fact, the whole recording is on the insufficient side. The clearest thing of all is me asking Redford and Gilmore a question; I was sitting right next to the Olympus recorder so duhhhh.
Chicago 10 director Brett Morgen joined them about halfway through the conference to talk about the genesis of his film, why he thinks a revisiting of the Chicago ’68 riots is relevant today, or at least why it should be, and to what extent his film is “political” (scary word, that) and why he decided that the first thing to get right was to make the film entertaining.

I was writing at a table in a sports bar last night, and there was a group of five sitting nearby — four guys and a lady — who couldn’t stop laughing uproariously. Every time they burst out laughing it felt like someone had exploded an aural fart grenade….”hah-hah-hah-hahhhh!” After a while I got out my watch and started timing their frequency — no lie, the boisterous noise happened about once every 75 or 80 seconds.

Everybody explodes in laughter from time to time — it’s wonderful when this happens. But people who do it repeatedly and oppressively in a crowded room are, no offense, animals. They’re the equivalent of a guy who sits down at a communal breakfast table (which I’m sitting at right now at the Star hotel) and loudly slurps down a bowl of Raisin Bran.

“Many inside and out of the Academy feel Little Miss Sunshine is virtually a lock for a Best Picture nomination come Tuesday,” writes Hollywood Wiretap‘s Pete Hammond. The odds, in other words, are “looking very good right now for LMS to fill the ‘small’ movie slot in Oscar’s top five. [And] people are wondering if there isn’t a sea change in the Academy; a new way of thinking and the possibility that this Little picture, which was the first serious contender out of the gate last summer and the first to send DVD screeners, could just be the last one standing around 9 pm or so on February 25th. In the kind of currently wide-open Oscar landscape we have, this scenario seems as plausible as any.”

Nikki Finke nails Brad Grey for being a credit hog maneuverer at the Golden Globes. To approximately quote Jack Nicholson’s character in The Departed, “Nobody gives you anything — you have to take it.”

An Associated Press story on CNN.com this morning says “it’s rare for the Sundance Film Festival to start with a documentary..and [yet] organizers say this year’s opening night film, Chicago 10, represents just the sort of bold gambit the United States’ top independent-cinema venue likes to see in its movies.” Well, okay…but Brett Morgen‘s film, to go by the various descriptions, isn’t the kind of thing Sundance programmers usually pick for the opening-night attraction. Not to my recollection, at least.

Sundance programmers have always chosen to begin the festival with a film with a thoughtful but moderate pulse — every major film festival (Cannes, Toronto) tends to do this. Totally par for the course. This makes me concerned, of course, that Morgen’s film may be thoughtfully moderate…let’s hope not.
Chicago 10 “is a film that I think at one level is really basically about risk-taking, about people who want to change the world, so in that sense, it’s inspiring,” Sundance director Geoffrey Gilmore told AP. “It speaks to what goes into the struggle for social change, which is not unlike what goes into the personal vision of independent film.”

I happened to come upon a thumbnail this morning of the infamous 12.12.05 Time cover that started all the trouble for Steven Spielberg‘s Munich — a cover that basically said, “Old media has come down from Mt. Sinai and lo, here is the film of the year, a film of our time…a masterful, heart-palpitating Oscar-worthy drama by a legendary filmmaker who has spoken to Time and Time only.”

With one fell swoop…

With Sundance ’07 already being labelled as “ehh” by some of the buyers, it’s good to recall a crusty old Park City truism: in doubt or despair, go to the docs, go to World Cinema, go to Slamdance and buttonhole Variety‘s Robert Koehler.

The death of Art Buchwald, the hotshot political columnist who peaked in the ’60s and’70s, was announced yesterday by his son. Buchwald’s humor was never, as I recall, terribly savage or incendiary — he worked and played within the established boundaries — but in his better moments he displayed a delicious wit.

Rich guys who can’t wait for the June ’07 debut of the iPhone may have already heard that South Korea’s LG Electronics Co. is launching a Prada phone, a $780 mobile device that offers a buttonless touch-screen interface that’s a lot like the iPhone’s — and which will be in stores in Europe next month.

The Globe and Mail‘s Liam Lacey today reiterated the envelope-pushing theme of this year’s Sundance Film Festival — “If you want to get people worked up, you can’t beat the combination of incendiary politics and twisted sex.” Lacey lists seven examples. Quick, without looking…how many can you recite off the top of your head? (There’ve been a couple of Sundance stories already posted in this vein.)

Heather Graham in Adrift

The films are (a) Brett Morgen‘s Chicago 10, “about one of the more inflammatory trials in American history, the 1968 conspiracy trial of the Chicago Seven, [using] music, animation, contemporary actors and archival footage”; (b) Hounddog (a.k.a., untitled Dakota Fanning Rape Project) features the 12-year-old Fanning “as a girl in the 1950s who’s obsessed with the music of Elvis Presley, [and who is] violently raped and appears, at different times, either naked or in underpants.”
Plus Robinson Devor‘s already-immortal Zoo, the “horse-fucking” (or more accurately, “fucking-horse”) doc about a 45-year-old Seattle guy “who made videotapes of himself being anally penetrated by a stallion and died in 2005 after an internal injury”; Adrift In Manhattan, with Heather Graham playing “an unhappy New York optometrist who participates in what Variety describes as ‘an eye-popping sex scene'”; the not-so-hot (according to one critic) An American Crime, a reality-based tale about a deranged woman (Catherine Keener) involved in the hideous torture of an Indiana teenager (Ellen Page); and Teeth, is about a sexually assaulted Christian girl who discovers she has choppers in her vaginal cavity.
“Compared with these,” says Lacey, “the merely obsessive stalker documentary Crazy Love, about a married New York lawyer who has been obsessed with another woman for 50 years, sounds almost romantic.”

Financial Times writer David Bowen wrote today that Sen. Barack Obama‘s announcement of an exploratory committee about his likely U.S. presidential candidacy via his own website “shows that the web can be wonderful, but only if it works hand in hand with the steam-driven world, so don’t go writing off newspapers and television just yet.”
Does Bowen’s view — obviously an old-media way of looking of things, but not without a pinch of real-world validity — apply in any way, shape or form to entertainment news stories?
“I know the Obama site exists only because I read it about in the papers,” Bowen goes on. “All the reports noted that Obama made the announcement on [it]. If they had not, what would have happened? No one (well, few people) would have thought to look for it. It would have remained just one among millions of websites that can be found if you are looking for it, but you would be as unlikely to stumble across as you would to prick your finger on that needle in a haystack.
“This may seem blindingly obvious, but it is a good example of an important point that is perhaps being forgotten. The web is a secondary medium. Obama√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s site may be a pleasing way of getting his message across…but only if people find it via a primary medium.
“What do I mean by primary medium? Simply, one that people will turn to themselves, or be exposed to without effort √ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Ǩ≈ì a high visibility medium, you might call it. Newspaper articles or advertisements, television reports or commercials, radio ditto, hoardings by the side of the road. Indeed the billboard on a busy road probably wins the visibility prize: it is difficult not to see.”