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A good interview/career analysis piece on Brokeback Mountain star Heath Ledger by Time‘s Belinda Luscombe (“Heath Turns It Around”). It reminded me of what I wrote hours after seeing Brokeback in Toronto, which was that between that and Ledger’s then-upcoming Casanova, he has saved his career. The 26 year-old Australian tells Luscombe that he pretty much decided to kill his movie-star persona after A Knight’s Tale, a film which made Ledger feel he was being sold and packaged as a slicked-up commodity. The result of Ledger’s Sean Penn-ish career stratgey since then was that, with the exception of Monster’s Ball, all the films he’s made have been critically slammed or strick out at the box-office, or both (Four Feathers, The Order, The Brothers Grimm, Lords of Dogtown). “Even if [Brokeback Mountain] pulls in crowds only in New York City, South Beach and San Francisco,” Luscombe writes, “it has redeemed Ledger from being a pawn — or even a knight — in the Hollywood chess game.”

So Time‘s Richard Schickel respects Brokeback Mountain for its “its assault on western mythology [and] its discovery of a subversive sexual honesty in an unexpected locale,” but feels it loses steam as it goes along and “finally fails to fully engage our emotions.” Odd how reactions can vary so greatly. For me the ending — the last 20 minutes especially — is the part that ties it all together and finds the primal emotional chord.

The following films are set for the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, which will run from Thursday, 1.19.06 through Sunday, 1.29.06: (1) Steven Shainberg’s Fur, the Diane Arbus biopic with Nicole Kidman and Robert Downey, Jr., from Picturehouse; (2) Brian DePalma’s The Black Dahlia, a period crime thriller with Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johanson, Hilary Swank, Aaron Eckhardt; (3) Joby Harold’s Awake, a Weinstein Company thriller with Hayden Christensen, Sigourney Weaver, Jessica Alban; (4) Fabiane Bielinsky’s The Aura, an Argentine film about a taxidermist involved in criminal intrigue; (5) Terry Zwigoff’s Art School Confidential, a sardonic comedy about a young guy (Max Minghella) who enrolls in art school for curious fame-related reasons, with John Malkovich, Anjelica Huston, Jim Broadbent; (6) 0430, a totally non-verbal Singapore-produced film from director-writer Royston Tan, about a friendship between an 11 year-old boy and a man in his 30s; (7) Todd Yellin’s Brother’s Shadow, a Brooklyn-set drama about a black-sheep type (Scott Cohen) trying to step into the shoes of his deceased older sibling; (8) Neil Armfield’s Candy, a Down Under relationship drama with Heath Ledger, Abbie Cornish and Geoffrey Rush; (9) Nanda Anan’s City of Sand and Stone, an adventure piece about an American woman (Kelli Garner) unravelling some sort of mystery in India, with Justin Theroux and Frank Langella; (10) Fast Track, a Weinstein Co. comedy from director Jesse Peretz, with Jason Bateman, Amanda Peet, Paul Rudd and Mia Farrow; (11) Michael Lehmann’s Flakes, a quirky-behavior comedy with Aaron Stanford and Zooey Deschanel; (12) Nicole Holofcener’s Friends With Money, a relationship drama with Jennifer Aniston, Frances McDormand, Scott Caan; (13) Dito Montiel’s A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, a New York-based drama with Chazz Palmintieri, Rosario Dawon, Robert Downey, Jr., and produced by Downey and Trudie Styler (i.e., Mrs. Sting); (14) Julian Goldberger’s The Hawk is Dying, a Florida-set drama with Paul Giamatti and Michael Pitt; (15) Klimt, about the last years of Austrian artist Gustav Klimt, with John Malkovich, Stephen Dillane and Saphron Burrows; (16) Lee Yoon-Ki’s Love Talk, a Korean-American drama set in Los Angeles; (17) Kevin Smith’s The Passion of the Clerks, with Brian O’Halloran, Jason Mewes, Jeff Anderson and Smith; (18) John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus about several New Yorkers “exploring” each other during a power outage; (19) Bruce Leddy’s Shut Up and Sing, a meditative comedy about an a capella singing group having a reunion; (20) Robert Benigni’s The Tiger and the Snow, about a love-struck Italian poet immersed in the American invasion of Iraq; (21) Carlos Borado’s What God Knows, a Brazilian drama with Diego Luna and Alicia Braga; and (22) Hilary Brougher’s Stephanie Daley, a drama about infanticide with Tilda Swinton and Amber Tamblyn. These 22 films are, of course, just the tip of the iceberg.

L.A. Times reporter Claudia Eller has a first-rate piece about the years and years it took to bring Rent (Columbia, 11.23) to the screen, but why has almost every article I’ve read about this Chris Columbus film contain an allusion to a possibly cloudy box-office future? It’s not the deepest or most complex thing you’ll ever see — Rent is Rent — but Columbus has done it proud. “In its vibrant, open-hearted, selling-the-hell-out-of-each-and-every- song-and-dance-number way, Rent is a knockout,” I wrote earlier this month, “and an ass-whooper and damn near glorious at times. I didn’t just like it…I felt dazzled, amped, alpha-vibed… people were applauding after almost every song, and the film really does give you a ‘whoa… this is special’ feeling.” Today’s tracking figures show 77% general awareness, 31% definite awareness and 7% first choice. A friend who supplied these numbers says the people at Revolution and Columbia “know there’s no heat on it…it’s just not ‘there’ and it’s not going to improve with age.” This is what’s known as a classic Hollywood disconnect. The movie gets what a very popular stage musical was all about and it plays like gangbusters (to me and the crowd I saw it with anyway), and so naturally…of course!…audiences aren’t going to support it all that much.

Let the word go forth from this time and place that the the new King Kong DVD (Warner Home Video, 11.22) has a wonderfuly detailed multi-chapter “making of” documentary, but (and I’m very sorry to report this) the film itself doesn’t look that fantastic. Maybe a little bit better than versions shown on VHS and laser disc, but there’s no great visual-leap factor. The film is marked by the same dirt and grain and speckles its had since playing on “Million Dolar Movie” in the 1950s. WHV should have John Lowry-ed this thing — i.e., removed a portion of the grain (i.e., not a Lowry Sunset Boulevard treatment but the kind of treatment that was given to Casablanca ) and cleaned it up on a frame-by- frame basis. But some Warner Home Video fuddy-duddy said “nope…leave it as it is, dirt and grain intact…it’s more pure that way.” One very cool thing: Max Steiner’s Kong overture that precedes the start of the film.

If anyone wants to talk about anything during tomorrow’s debut airing of Elsewhere Live, send an e-mail with your phone number any time between tonight and when the show starts at 7 pm Sunday…and tell me what you want to discuss. If you really want to get my attention, send an AOL Instant Message — my AOL user name is gzornplatt2.

I was right about Walk the Line exceeding expectations. (One of the film’s p.r. reps was urging me to go with a safe projection of $15 million or so.) Jim Mangold’s Johhny Cash biopic did about $7.7 million yesterday, so figure about triple that for the weekend. And I hear the cards have been very good-to-excellent all along. The ace-in-the-hole is that it’s doing especially well among red-state rurals. In short, a very good showing over a weekend totally swampled by Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire ($39 million yesterday — i.e., Friday — and a total of about $120 million by Sunday night).

A smart, strongly worded piece by the Hollywood Reporter‘s Anne Thompson about how the big-studio marketing departments only know how to sell fat tentpole movies these days, and why they should let their indie “dependent” divisions make and market the smaller-budgeted, character-driven quality level stuff. Probably true, but Thompson comes to her conclusion because of the failure of six character-driven films releases by the majors: 20th Century Fox’s In Her Shoes and Stay, North Country and Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang from Warner Bros. and Paramount’s Elizabethtown and The Weather Man. The truth is that only one out of the six — In Her Shoes — was half-screwed by bad marketing (i.e., a trailer that made it look too chick-flicky). The other five totally shot themselves in the foot. Stay because it wasn’t much good. The Weather Man by being one of the worst soul-suffocating downers in movie history. Elizabethtown because it wasn’t good enough. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang because it was too glib by half and basically about its own cleverness. And North Country because a court case about sexual harassment is fodder for a 1985 TV movie.

The Hollywood Foreign Press has voted to move Hustle & Flow into the Drama category. This means Hustle star Terrence Howard will have to be nominated for Best Actor, and not Best Actor in a Musical, and if he gets nominated (which of course he should be…he’s monumental in that role) he’ll be going up against Heath Ledger, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Ralph Fiennes…and one of those three will almost certainly win. So even though it’s idiotic (to put it mildly) to call Hustle & Flow a musical, the HFPA should have stuck to their loony-tunes classification because now the most Howard can look forward to is a Best Actor nomination. Bottom line: the HFPA has basically fucked him.

One thing is clear about the box-office come early December: Disney’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (openign 12.9) will be through the roof.

None of the Thanksgving movies — Rent, The Ice Harvest, Syriana, Yours Mine and Ours, 39 Pounds of Love — are tracking that well. Rent is soft. Jett, my 17 year-old son, says he and a couple of his friends are into seeing Syriana but the first tracking postings came out today and that it awareness and interest levels aren’t much right now.

Walk the Line (20th Century Fox, 11.18), the Johnny Cash biopic with Joaquin Pheonix and Reese Witherspoon, may do better this weekend than tracking figures are projecting, which is somewhere around $15 million. Surveys of moviegoers tends to focus on the big cities and miss out on the views of folks from the boonies…red-state pickup-truck country…which is where a lot of Cash’s fans live. Figure something closer to $20 million, give or take. The big champ, of course, will be the Harry Potter film, but nobody cares about that..ignore it.