wired

Two days ago I copied and pasted every p.r. message about films, events, promotions and panel discussions at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival and put it on a mini-hard drive and printed it out at Sir Speedy. It’s on thick paper but even with that it’s thicker and heavier than any script I have — it’s like a Russian novel. And 20 or 30 new Sundance e-mails have come in since. Every year I’ve written some kind of sum-up and I always miss out on this or that hot-button film…screw it. I’m just going to go to this film and that film and play it as it comes. I’ll have time to see maybe 25 films, if that…and I’m assuming I’ll miss out on something truly exceptional. But you can’t let it get you down.

This is about 10 days old but it only just appeared on my screen: a MacLeans piece by author George Jonas about (a) the writing of “Vengeance”, his 1984 book about Mossad’s revenge campaign upon the supporters and perpetrators of the 1972 Munich massacre, and (b) how, in his opinion, Steven Spielberg got it all wrong. The title is “The Spielberg Massacre: My book was all about avenging evil. Then the King of Hollywood got hold of it.” The piece is well-written, seems grounded in reality…worth reading.

“Friend of the court” Jeff Dowd (a.k.a. “the Dude”) is imploring those visiting Park City, Utah, over the next eight to ten days to please pay proper attention and respect to Patricia Foulkrod’s The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends, which is screening in the independent film doc competition section. It’s basically a piece about post-traumatic stress and emotional recovery problems that U.S. soldiers have been coping with after returning from the Iraq War. Kind of the same story as the one presented in The Best Years of Our Lives, only different…right?

3,148 features were considered for Sundance 2006, according to Kenneth Turan’s annual start-of-the-festival piece in the L.A. Times. up from last year’s 2,613, as well as more than 4,300 shorts. Plus the fact that “indie-style films such as Brokeback Mountain, Capote and Good Night, and Good Luck are dominating the awards season as never before,” he notes. “This roaring success, however, has also brought unwanted attention and aggressive commercialization to the independent world. Through no fault of its own, Sundance has become Mardi Gras North, a celebrity magnet and party destination for people with zero interest in watching films, independent or otherwise.”

“STUDIO EXECS PREFER ‘BROKEBACK’ OVER ‘MUNICH’ — SPIELBERG SAID DISPLEASED,” a Drudge Report headline said earlier today. I’m not saying this allegation is gospel but who at Universal wouldn’t be feeling more enthusiastic about Brokeback Mountain than Munich at this stage? An emotionally moving critical fave now sitting at the top of a Showbiz Data box-office chart vs. a politically despised, okay-but-no-cigar Spielberg movie that’s doing blah business and which nobody but nobody thinks has a chance of nabbing any Oscar nominations of note, much less the awards.

USA Today‘s Scott Bowles is floating the idea that Walk the Line is surging after winning three Golden Globes last night and may even be nipping at Brokeback Mountain‘s heels. Why not? Anything to make it seem like a horse race. (The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil is playing a similar tune, saying that Crash or Good Night can still beat Brokeback at the Oscars.) The best part of the Bowles piece is the observation that Globe acceptance speeches are Academy audition tapes.

One of the few complaints about Good Night, and Good Luck is that Edward R. Murrow (played by David Strathairn) is portrayed in ways that are insufficiently fleshed-out. He’s too virtuous, too noble…too much of a paragon of journalistic integrity. In my first riff on the film in early October, I said that co-screen- writers George Clooney and Grant Heslov should “have added more shading to Murrow. He’s just a rock-ribbed man of virtue here. He needs some ticks and peculiarities. Men of consequence are usually driven by more than what they believe in and are willing to fight for. If he had a thing for butter pecan ice cream, let’s say. Or if he lost it every time he heard Abbott and Costello’s ‘Who’s on First’ routine…something.” Well, I watched a Murrow documentary on DVD over the weekend called “This Reporter” (off New Video Group’s “Edward R. Murrow Collection”), and Murrow’s former colleagues talk about an aspect of Murrow’s character that the movie utterly ignores. Murrow was a danger junkie…a guy who liked driving fast, taking risks, going on bombing missions during World War II and generally tempting fate. A former CBS News colleague named Edward Bliss, Jr. says that Murrow “liked to gamble…he gambled with his life in the way he smoked… he gambled in the way he drove around London in his little roadster…he gambled by going up in aircraft during the war.” This suggests that Murrow went up against Sen. Joseph McCarthy at least in part because he was into the thrill and danger of taking on an important public figure who might possibly hurt or even crush him. So he wasn’t just this noble crusader — he was a guy who stood for the right things, but also got a charge out of putting himself in harm’s way and seeing what he could get away with. Right away this makes Murrow much more human and ten times more interesting than the guy he appears to be in Good Night, and Good Luck. I think that Clooney and Heslov wrote a strong script, but they could have bumped it up a notch or two if they’d figured a way to work this in.

Things changed on Saturday and it it began to look as if Glory Road might squeak past Hoodwinked for the #1 slot…but it’s a very tight competition with The Chronicles of Narnia also in the race. And that’s all I know…I’m going off to meet up with Larry Clark in Santa Monica and then do some bike-riding.

Sean P. Means and (I guess) some others at the Salt Lake Tribune have assembled loads of material in this section on Sundance ’06.

I haven’t done any serious Sundance digging, but there’s one film I’ve consistently heard is awfully good, and I’m not saying this because it was written by Michael Arndt, a guy I happened to swap apartments with last summer. It’s called Little Miss Sunshine, it’s a “heart” movie about a dysfunctional family, and it costars Greg Kinnear, Steve Carell, Toni Collette, Alan Arkin, Abigail Breslin (the little girl who said “there’s a monster outside my window…can I have a glass of water?” in Signs) and Paul Dano. It’s a Premier selection, and the best of these are usually slotted on Friday, Saturday or Sunday nights. Sunshine‘s first showing is on Friday at 6 pm — absolute prime time.

Here’s to the fearless Don Murphy, a laser-brained, seriously tough-nut producer I’ve known since about ’94 (when he was producing Natural-Born Killers with his then-partner Jane Hamsher)…a guy who won’t take ‘no’…a guy who once tore into me because I had the absolute temerity to ring up Vincent Gallo and later Ed Sanders because I was interested in the progress of a possible Murphy-produced Charles Manson movie…a guy who once said to me, “You…are…my…bitch!” They’re just words and they hit the floor like drops of water off a duck’s ass. Murphy is one of the coolest hard-core hombres in town, and he comes off pretty well in this profile by Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson.

I should have posted this Friday (1.13), but it’s weird reading the piece by the Wall Street Journal‘s Jon Weinbach about the “other” Munich movie called Sword of Gideon — a 1986 HBO cable movie — that’s about the same thing (i.e., an Israeli assassin’s sense of gathering guilt over helping to kill several conspirators who helped perpetrate the 1972 Munich Olympic games massacre) and more-or-less based on the same 1984 book “Vengeance,” by Canadian author George Jonas. Weinbach makes this sound like a big revelation, to wit: “Now here’s something else to add to the discussion: It turns out there was a cable-TV movie made 20 years ago about…,” blah, blah. And it seems kinda weird from this corner because I brought this up front- and-center in a column piece that ran on 3.9.05.