With four injury/mishaps so far (including last night’s), Spider-Man: Fall Into The Pit has turned into the biggest B’way disaster of all time. Can’t catch a break, can’t turn a profit…eye-filling but fucked. The upside is that it’s become a kind of NASCAR attraction. People are going to see the prepared show, but now there’s the added factor of “will some new calamity happen?”

About 14 months ago I ran a Best of Decade list using the years 2000 to 2009 (although ’09 had another couple of months to go at the time). Here’s another shot at the decade but this time defining it as 2001 to ’10. I’m not saying these films were the “best,” but they do possess, in my mind, the strongest positive after-flow effect. Right now, looking back, this is what the decade feels like to me. And it could change a bit down the road.

I decided this time to also throw in some legendary first-decade stinkers but I didn’t try hard enough to please have at it. Let’s just say in a blanket sense that all Pirates of the Caribbean movies blew chunks — at least we can get that straight. And I’m sure I’ve gotten date or two wrong, and left out many fine and deserving films….sorry.

I’m already sorry I compiled this list because it took too damn long to sort and think through. I’ve decided for now on 80 films as the best of the decade. That’s about right, proportionally-speaking.

Best of 2001: In the Bedroom, Ghost World, Monster’s Ball, Sexy Beast, A Beautiful Mind, The Royal Tenenbaums, Y tu mama tambien (7). Among Worst of 2001: The Majestic, K-PAX, Serendipity, Saving Silverman,

Best of 2002: The Pianist, The Quiet American, Talk To Her, The 25th Hour, Adaptation, City of God, 8 Mile, Bloody Sunday, Bowling for Columbine, The Pianist, Whale Rider, Road to Perdition (12). Worst of 2002: Eddie Murphy‘s I Spy, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, Rollerball, Bad Company, Bubba Ho-Tep, Snow Dogs, The Sweetest Thing.

Best of 2003: American Splendor, Matchstick Men, Open Range, Reversal of Fortune, Touching the Void, Mystic River (6). Worst of 2003: Love Actually, Cheaper by the Dozen, Cold Mountain, Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions.

Best of 2004: Sideways, The Incredibles, Collateral, The Motorcycle Diaries, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Sea Inside, The Corporation, Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession, I Heart Huckabees (9). Worst of 2004: Finding Neverland, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason.

Best of 2005: Brokeback Mountain, Grizzly Man, Capote, The Wedding Crashers, A History of Violence (5). Worst of 2005: Two For The Money, Aeon Flux, Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo.

Best of 2006: Children of Men, United 93, The Lives of Others, The Departed, Pan’s Labyrinth, Hustle and Flow, Babel, Notes on a Scandal (8). Worst of 2006: Snakes on the Plane, Running With Scissors, RV.

Best of 2007: Zodiac, No Country for Old Men, Control, Michael Clayton, Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, Four Months, Three Weeks & 2 Days, There Will Be Blood, Things We Lost in the Fire, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, The Orphanage (10). Worst of 2007: Balls of Fury, Norbit, Good Luck Chuck, Lions For Lambs, Elizabeth: The Golden Age.

Best of 2008: Che, Man on Wire, The Visitor, WALL*E, Doubt, Three Monkeys, Slumdog Millionaire (7). Worst of 2008: The Hottie & The Nottie, Sex and the City, My Blueberry Nights.

Best of 2009: The Hurt Locker, An Education, Avatar, A Serious Man, Sin Nombre, Up In The Air (6). Worst of 2009: I Love you, Beth Cooper, Love Happens, All About Steve…who cares?

Best of 2010: The Social Network, Black Swan, The Fighter, The King’s Speech, Inception, Let Me In, Blue Valentine, Toy Story 3, 127 Hours, Biutiful (10). Worst of 2010: The Bounty Hunter, Marmaduke, Killers, Flipped, When In Rome, Grown Ups. Most Misunderstood, Under-Valued Comedy of 2010: Hot Tub Time Machine.

23 Gold Derby pundits are now declaring that The Social Network is ahead in the race for Best Picture over The King’s Speech, and that one of the Networkers — this is fairly significant, I think — is former (and very recent) King’s Speech supporter Pete Hammond.

Twelve pundits are now supporting The Social Network while only nine now foresee The King’s Speech pulling ahead in the end.

This really needs to be repeated. Pete Hammond of Deadline.com has abandoned Best Picture support of The King’s Speech! Pete Hammond of Deadline.com has abandoned Best Picture support The King’s Speech! How big of an omen is this? Is it just a matter of time before Dave Karger bails, and then Anne Thompson, etc.? You tell me, but I’m sensing a underground tumble in the Gurus of Gold alignment.

Twenty-one Gold Derby pundits are predicting The Social Network‘s David Fincher to snag the Best Director Oscar. An even greater majority is pushing King’s Speech star Colin Firth for Best Actor, and Black Swan‘s Natalie Portman to edge out Annette Bening for Best Actress. The Fighter‘s Christian Bale is favored for Best Supporting Actor, of course, and Melissa Leo for Best Supporting Actress, etc.

Don’t tell me it wouldn’t feel good to somehow make the Iranian authorities suffer for having today sentenced director Jafar Panahi to six years in jail. They’ve also told him to forget about making films for 20 years. They’re pigs, of course, but I wonder why Panahi didn’t just lam it when he had the chance and move to Paris? Home is where creativity takes you.

Jailed Iranian director Jafar Panahi after winning Berlin’s Silver Bear award in 2006.

Panahi has no choice, of course, but to sneak out of Iran and make films elsewhere once he gets out of jail. Unless, of course, he wants to be a good little citizen and do what the mullahs have told him to do. He’s a 50 year-old filmmaker. He can’t wait until he’s 70 to make another film. Absurd.

A 12.21 Guardian story by Saeed Kamali Dehghan says that Panahi, “an outspoken supporter of Iran’s opposition green movement, was convicted of gathering, colluding and propaganda against the regime, his attorney Farideh Gheyrat told the Iranian state news agency ISNA.

“‘He is therefore sentenced to six years in prison and also he is banned for 20 years from making any films, writing any scripts, travelling abroad and also giving any interviews to the media including foreign and domestic news organizations,” she said. Gheyrat said she would appeal against the conviction.

“Panahi won the Camera d’Or award at the Cannes film festival in 1995 for his debut feature, The White Balloon, and took the Golden Lion prize at Venice for his 2000 drama, The Circle. His other films include Crimson Gold and Offside. He is highly regarded around the world but his films are banned at home.”

Here is Panahi’s Facebook page.

The Chicago Film Critics Association has gone with The Social Network for Best Picture, Best Director (David Fincher) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Aaron Sorkin). Colin Firth for Best Actor, Natalie Portman for Best Actress, Christian Bale for Best Supporting Actor….zzzzzzz. Hold on…True Grit‘s Hailee Steinfeld for Best Supporting Actress instead of Melissa Leo or Amy Adams? Okay.

I wasn’t that all that keen on attending tonight’s all-media screening of Rob Letterman‘s Gulliver’s Travels (20th Century Fox, 12.25). I’ve been getting a weird vibe from the ads, like something’s wrong or off-balance. Maybe I’m Jack Black-ed out. And then I read this 12.20 “Vulture” story about anemic tracking and went, “Oh…well, that fits then.” Still trying to reach boxoffice.com‘s Phil Contrino to see if his sources and indicators are saying the same thing. “If people don’t wanna see something, you can’t stop ’em.” — Samuel Goldwyn.

Last Friday Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone bravely became the latest significant voice to question the mule-ish insistence by several Gurus of Gold that The King’s Speech is the odds-on favorite to win the Best Picture Oscar. And she did so by pointing to an apparent change in Academy thinking that began to manifest in 2006 — a change that those feet-stuck-in-cement Gurus seem reluctant to acknowledge.

“If I could name one of the biggest changes I’ve seen since 1999, when I first started covering the race annually,” she begins, “it would be this: after Brokeback Mountain lost to Crash, there was a shift in how the Academy chose its best picture. It became less about what they ‘liked’ and more about what they thought was the ‘best.’

“Since then, their choices have been about great filmmaking — directors working at the top of their game, with an assured hand, in complete command of their story. Their choices seem to continually baffle awards watchers, or, specifically, the Gurus of Gold – a group assembled to be the experts in how the Academy votes. But they seem to be always questioning the Academy’s ability to know a great film when they see one, choosing instead to view them as an infantilized group that can’t handle ambiguity of plot, complexity of story, and mostly, a deliberate lack of a feelgood component. They haven’t seemed to notice because every year there is continued doubt that this movie or that movie can win.

“Judging by the last several years, one would have to be asleep at the wheel to not notice how the Academy has changed, how its choices have become more thoughtful, how much more important critically acclaimed films have become,” Stone concludes. “It is not just about the emotional payoff anymore. I’m not saying it isn’t going to shift back. It very well might do that this year. But there is no recent precedent to suggest, as David Poland did the other day, that ‘no way can The Social Network win Best Picture.’

“He seems to be reverting back to the days when the critics really didn’t matter so much because they were so far out of whack from the Oscars it wasn’t worth counting them. I myself used to write ‘Academy voters are not critics.’ But that paradigm has shifted. As Oscar watchers we must adapt and evolve to the way the Academy itself is changing, otherwise we are our own worst problem, not that they weren’t already.

“Those I heard saying The Departed, No Country For Old Men and The Hurt Locker couldn’t win were Oscar watchers, for the most part, experts who are supposed to be good at reading the Academy. But here we are, heading into another year where a film is doing extremely well with the critics, has a director who will likely be the frontrunner for the DGA — a film that is critically acclaimed by Film Comment, Roger Ebert, Kenneth Turan, the Boston Film Critics, the Chicago film critics, the LA film critics, the NY film critics — and still [many of the Gurus] are saying it can’t win Best Picture.”

On 12.20, Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, one of the Guru hold-outs, wrote the following: “To those who say that The Social Network ‘S huge success with critics presages an Academy Award Best Picture win, let me remind that critics are not Academy members. All this success is helping the movie, no question, but it doesn’t change the fact that The King’s Speech remains a soft lob down the middle for Academy members. They love this movie. So don’t count it out just yet.”

I spent two hours this morning doing Sundance 2011 research. I read synopses and followed web threads about the various premieres, dramatic competitors, docs (premieres and competition), int’l features, Park City at Midnight, etc. I’ll wind up going, of course, to the same 20 or 25 hot films that everyone else will be clamoring to get into, etc. But right now? Honestly? Three films stand out: (a) Jason Eisener‘s Hobo With A Shotgun, (b) Andrew Rossi‘s Page One: A Year Inside The N.Y. Times, and (c) Eugene Jarecki‘s Reagan.

I will settle for nothing less than a severe anal ripping from Jarecki, by the way. I want to see The Gipper strung up for being the guy who unleashed the unregulated forces that ultimately led to the financial collapse of 2008.

I’m pleased to have scored condo rentals in the same Park City complex I stayed in last year, the Park Regency. A condo share, I mean, with a fellow journalist and a publicist pally, and for a fee that I consider fair and reasonable.

Cheers to Amir Bar Lev‘s The Tillman Story for snagging the Florida Film Critics Circle’s Best Documentary award. (The San Francisco Film Critics Circle felt the same way.) Otherwise the Floridians succumbed to the same Social Network juggernaut (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay) that has swept the nation like Alexander the Great. Plus The King’s Speech‘s Colin Firth for Best Actor, Black Swan‘s Natalie Portman for Best Actress plus the Fighter twins — Christian Bale for Best Supporting Actor, Melissa Leo for Best Supporting Actress.

“The rap on Sofia Coppola‘s Somewhere is actually true,” writes Marshall Fine. “This is a film in which very little happens and very little is said. [It is] the second seriously Antonioni-esque film of this year (The American was the other) and one that is bound to divide viewers dramatically.

“Coppola’s minimalism has bothered me in the past; both The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette seemed like films in which the look, the feel and the music were more important than the characters or the story. But with Lost in Translation and now with Somewhere, she finds a way to turn that minimalism into a gift, a style that forces you to put yourself in the mind of the character, whose reaction to what he’s involved with has little to do with what he shows to the world.

“There’s a found-art quality to Somewhere, a sense that Coppola has snuck up on the best moments in the film and captured them with a camera. But it’s really a beautifully constructed venture, filled with revelations that go off in your brain like little time bombs.

“If you can swing with Coppola, if you watch the film with an understanding that it’s as much about what you don’t see as what you do, if you recognize that these are the moments that usually happen off-camera but which reveal more than what is usually shown — well, you’re in for a rich and haunting treat.”

The new Salt Unrated Edition Bluray (out tomorrow) actually contains three versions of Phillip Noyce‘s spy thriller — the original theatrical cut (95 minutes and 54 seconds), an extended version (96 minutes, 56 seconds) and a director’s cut (99 minutes and 48 seconds). The longer cuts are said to be worth the purchase price in themselves.

The extended version is the original cut before Noyce went back to shoot a new ending (Jolie leaping out of chopper, splashing to the Potomac, running into the woods, etc.) and the action scene in the middle of the film in which Salt kills her Russian mentor and his cohorts on a barge. The director’s cut is Noyce’s extended unrated version of the material that made it into the theatrical release.

The theatrical version with the re-shot ending was preferred by the studio because it left the door open for a sequel.

In his 12.17 review, Den of Geek‘s Mark Pickavance opines that the director’s cut “has significantly more balls in delivering a less-than-perfect ending. The extended cut is also interesting, because in it the death of one character, Daniel Olbrychski‘s Orlov, happens at an entirely different point, which alters things quite dramatically, and results in a totally different ending.” And that taken together, these two new versions “fix a number of plot holes that the theatrical release suffers [from].

“One question everyone I asked about the theatrical cut is why Evelyn Salt runs at the end. Well, if you watch the director’s cut you find out why, and also possibly why Orlov’s plan actually works, although it’s not the plan as presented in the theatrical version.”

Come again?

“What appears to have happened is that the studio liked the movie, but the [extended] cut doesn’t really allow for a sequel, so it got altered to make that possible,” Pikavance writes. “I won’t spoil what ultimately happens, but [in] the extended cut the death of Orlov happens at an entirely different point, which alters things quite dramatically, and results in a totally different ending.

“If you liked this movie then you’ll want to see both of those cuts, because even if the running time differences are in the region of four minutes, those are minutes that put some much needed edge on what is essentially a by-the-numbers spy thriller.”

This YouTube video (recorded by an American guy) from Japan explains some of the differences between the cuts. The extended cut is “way more interesting,” he says, than the theatrical version.

An Amazon reader’s assessment, passed along by a person close to the film and therefore presumably accurate, agrees that the director’s cut “makes the most sense plot-wise, and includes some better character development.”

Differences between the theatrical vs. director’s cut:

(1) Evelyn Salt’s opening interrogation scene in North Korea is longer and more brutal. The soldiers force a tube down her throat and subject her to more intense questioning, followed by several kicks to the abdomen.

(2) Extended scene of Orlov training little kids who will be future sleeper agents. As the kids finish a race through the woods, Orlov asks which kid was first, and which was last, whipping the last kid with a riding crop.

(3) Abduction of Michael (Salt’s husband) by Orlov’s thugs is shown.

(4) Additional scene where Michael tells Salt about a new species of spider that he has discovered.

(5) Childhood scene between Salt and [somebody] at Orlov’s training camp.

(6) Salt’s husband is not shot in the director’s cut; rather, he is slowly drowned and Salt is forced to watch. Michael’s death is much more harrowing in the director’s cut.

(7) Salt kills Orlov with a broken bottle, and the stabbing is shown in more detail, rather than off-screen.

(8) Salt’s rampage through Orlov’s freighter headquarters is more graphic.

(9) Gunfights depict more bullet holes and blood, but nothing overly gory.

(10) Liev Schreiber‘s Winter kills the president in the director’s cut, whereas in the theatrical cut, Winter only knocks him unconscious. Some have noted that the theatrical cut never made much sense, because the President would easily be able to identify Winter as the traitor.

(11) At the end of the movie, there is a voiceover that subtly suggests that the vice president is actually one of Orlov’s sleeper agents, setting the stage up for a sequel. This voiceover is not present in the extended cut.

Differences between the extended cut vs. director’s cut:

(1) The changes listed above in the director’s cut are also done in the Extended Cut, with the exception of the differences below.

2) The President is only knocked unconscious in the theatrical cut (and killed in the director’s cut). In the extended cut, Winter attempts to make his way towards the unconscious President, who is being wheeled away on a stretcher, in order to kill him.

3) The biggest difference in the extended cut is that Salt doesn’t kill Orlov until the end of the movie. So the entire sequence in the theatrical and director’s cuts where Salt annihilates Orlov’s thugs on the barge is missing.

At the end of the extended cut, she is being interrogated by Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor), where she fakes suicide and is taken to a hospital. She subsequently escapes from the hospital, finds Orlov (back in Russia somewhere), and kills him.

Last Friday I wrote that the existence of those 17 minutes of cut footage from 2001: A Space Odyssey, sitting in a vault in Hutchinson, Kansas, has been known to Warner Bros. for the last 42 years, and is therefore no discovery, and that re-integrating the footage into the standard 139 minute cut that’s everyone’s familiar with would probably be a bad idea.

This morning a statement from Warner Bros. arrived: “The additional footage from 2001: A Space Odyssey has always existed in the Warner vaults. When [director Stanley] Kubrick trimmed the 17 minutes from 2001 after the NY premiere, he made it clear the shortened version was his final edit. The film is as he wanted it to be presented and preserved and Warner Home Video has no plans to expand or revise Mr. Kubrick’s vision.”

Okay, fine…but what about including the unseen footage being included on an extras menu on a subsequent Bluray down the line? Where would be the harm?