Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer‘s Meet the Spartans, which no one with a semblance of taste wants to see much less write about, earned $18.7 million at 2605 theatres this weekend. Running a close second was Sylvester Stallone‘s Rambo, which most critics have dismissed but some HE readers have said good things about, with $18.2 million on 2751 screens. I plan to actually pay to see it sometime later today.

Joel and Ethan Coen won the the DGA’s best feature award for No Country for Old Men at last night’s ceremony in Century City. Obviously this means what it means as far the Oscar situation is concerned. Here, courtesy of The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil, is an mp3 of Martin Scorsese announcing the award and of Joel and Ethan accepting (and giving special thanks to NCFOM producer Scott Rudin).

Ethan Coen, Martin Scorsese, Joel Coen

The winner of ’08 Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury prize in the drama category, decided last night, is Courtney Hunt‘s Frozen River — one of many Sundance ’08 films I didn’t get to see. Presumably it will open theatrically down the road. It’s been described as “a somber and suspenseful film about two desperate women who smuggle illegals into the United States,” etc.

Ben Kingsley, Josh Peck in The Wackness

Not to throw water on a proud moment, but it is axiomatic that the winners of the Sundance Grand Jury prize don’t “matter.” The jurors always seem to vote for the values of their effete and ingrown independent-film culture (and are motivated by this and that political factor within this sphere). Getting a thumbs-up from this cut-off crew always seems to bestow a stamp that says “worthy but marginal.”
Conversely, the winner of the Sundance Audience Award usually does suggest that it may be an exceptional or even transcendent film with a potential of reaching into the culture, which is why I’m taken aback that Jonathan Levine‘s The Wackness won this award last night.
I’m not saying that this well-made under-30 relationship film is dimissable, but it just doesn’t have that schwing. At best it’s an in-and-outer — mostly out. Set in ’94, The Wackness is an urban buddy saga (older therapist, teenaged pot dealer) with a funereal visual palette (i.e., covered in dark, gray-green murk) and a vaguely off-putting, constantly medicating male lead (Josh Peck) with a haircut that I came to really and truly hate by the 30-minute mark.
The only unmitigated plus about this film is Ben Kingsley‘s nicely skewed performance as the pot-smoking therapist. But, as I wrote during Sundance, “when you add in Peck’s weirdnesses and all those cigarettes and doobies that everyone keeps sucking into their lungs and before you know it you’re thinking about hitting a health club just to flush the experience out of your system.”
Here are the other Sundance ’08 winners.

Strange as this sounds, TMZ is reporting that “sources intimately connected with the Heath Ledger investigation” are saying “it’s possible the actor died of natural causes due to alleged findings that the toxic drug levels in Ledger’s system was “low enough that it may not have caused his death.” TMZ’s sources are saying that Ledger’s heart simply “stopped…it could have been a heart attack but it’s not certain, at least not yet.” The report acknowledges the bizarreness of a non-obese 28-year-old dying of natural causes, but says “it happens.”

The Obama victory is South Carolina is a “rout,” according to the AP — 58% Obama, 28% Clinton, 13% Edwards (who needs to quit, quit, quit tomorrow morning…it’s over, man!). And “roughly 6 in 10 South Carolina Democratic primary voters said Bill Clinton‘s campaigning was important in how they ultimately decided to vote.” For a brief moment, a cool breeze.

The main image on the official Warner Bros. Dark Knight website (after you click past the initial bat-shadow thing). (Thanks to HollywoodChIcago‘s Adam Fendelman.)

A true Democracy cannot function and is in fact doomed without the participation of an alert, educated and impassioned electorate. Every malignant turn that has happened in the political primary process over the last few months is due to the absence of this, and it is why we are basically fucked as far as the chances of really turning things around.

As long as the majority of voters out there are living in their lazy sloth-bubbles — those stubborn, intellectually insulated comfort-zone attitudes that tens of millions subsist on like fast food — the neg-heads and the fear-exploiters and the dividers will always color the mood and run the show. It’s sad and it’s sickening. Drive me off a cliff.

When that Heath Ledger Joker-trauma quote began making the rounds last Tuesday — the late actor confiding that playing “a psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy” in Chris Nolan‘s The Dark Knight caused him to sleep only “an average of two hours a night” — it seemed lurid to even suggest that his acting in the forthcoming Warner Bros. film had obliquely contributed to his apparent sleeping-pill death. But Jack Nicholson‘s comment about Ledger’s death in London three days ago — “Well, I warned him” — means that this allusion/association isn’t going to go away.

Heath Ledger, Jack Nicholson in respective Joker guises

Meanwhile, as long as we’re listening to celeb/performer opinions about Ledger’s passing, Pauly Shore has called the Olsen twins “evil.”

“Something strange happened the other day. All these different people — friends, co-workers, relatives, people on a liberal e-mail list I read — kept saying the same thing: They’ve suddenly developed a disdain for Bill and Hillary Clinton. Maybe this is just a coincidence, but I think we’ve reached an irrevocable turning point in liberal opinion of the Clintons.
“The sentiment seems to be concentrated among Barack Obama supporters. Going into the campaign, most of us liked Hillary Clinton just fine, but the fact that tens of millions of Americans are seized with irrational loathing for her suggested that she might not be a good Democratic nominee. But now that loathing seems a lot less irrational. We’re not frothing Clinton haters like…well, name pretty much any conservative. We just really wish they’d go away.” — Jonathan Chait, a contributing editor to L.A. Times‘ “Opinion” and a senior editor at the New Republic, in a 1.26 article.
I used to hate Hillary but love or least greatly enjoy Bill. Now that they’ve (apparently) succeeded in downgrading the Democratic presidential primary race into a race referendum, in thoroughly putrifying this race compared to what it all felt like 23 days ago, I really and truly despise both of them. If I could find it in my head or my heart to vote for McCain or Romney in the general election, I would do just to spite Clinton (presuming she wins the nomination, which seems likely given the leads she has over Obamain California and NewYork due to the wide support she has among traditional older Democrats and particularly older women). But I can’t vote for McCain (not with his Iraq War suppport) or Romney, and this choice makes me miserable.
Everyone is going to spin Obama’s almost certain South Carolina victory today as a racially-driven and nothing more. The Clintons and their disgusting surrogates have colored this race over the last three weeks, and damn them to hell for doing this.
Here’s a portion of a Peggy Noonan piece that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on 1.25: “Bill Clinton, with his trembly, red-faced rage, makes John McCain look young. His divisive and destructive daily comportment — this is a former president of the United States — is a civic embarrassment. It is also an education, and there is something heartening in this.
“There are many serious and thoughtful liberals and Democrats who support Barack Obama and John Edwards, and who are seeing Mr. Clinton in a new way and saying so. Here is William Greider in The Nation, the venerable left-liberal magazine. The Clintons are ‘high minded’ on the surface but ‘smarmily duplicitous underneath, meanwhile jabbing hard at the groin area. They are a slippery pair and come as a package. The nation is at fair risk of getting them back in the White House for four years.’
“That, again, is from one of the premier liberal journals in the United States. It is exactly what conservatives have been saying for a decade. This may mark a certain coming together of the thoughtful on both sides. The Clintons, uniters at last.”

If you know Ted Kotcheff‘s First Blood (’82) and you fancy yourself as any kind of amateur Sylvester Stallone imitator (i.e., the kind that performs at parties in front of their friends), you know that the key line to use in your act is “they drew first blood, not me.”

Now, I’m pretty good with this line. (I’m also not bad with my imitation of Stallone reading the Edgar Allen Poe line, “Once upon a midnight dreary..:) The thing to remember in any Stallone imitation is that your upper lip barely works. Half of it is mostly paralyzed. And so you have to say, “Ney drew fuss blud…nah-me.”
No “t” consonant in the word “not.” And you don’t say the word “me” — it has to be a combination of a road-runner “meep” (but without the “p”) and a guttural, low-register throat-clearing sound. I’m not trying to be smart-assy about Stallone (whom I respect) or the movie — I worship First Blood. I’m just saying I’m almost as good with my First Blood bit as Kevin Spacey is doing Christopher Walken.

The Philadephia Inquirer has endorsed Barack Obama for President of the U.S.; the N.Y. Times editorial chieftains — traitors! home-town capitulators! part of the problem! — have endorsed Hillary Clinton. Consider their opposing rationales:
“In some respects, Clinton is much better prepared than was her husband, Bill, when he, as Arkansas governor, was elected president in 1992,” reads the Inquirer editorial. “The senator from New York could be a strong leader, comparable to Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, but with a compassion for children’s issues that could glue the nation’s focus on its most precious asset.
“But in an election where change is the operative word, would the former first lady represent that? After two Bush presidencies, many Americans don’t see change in a Clinton dynasty. Hillary’s high negatives in polls may have more to do with her husband’s behavior as president than anything she has done since. But those negatives suggest she could be a catalyst for division when the nation longs for unity.
Given that, Barack Obama is the best Democrat to lead this nation past the nasty, partisan, Washington-as-usual politics that have blocked consensus on Iraq; politics that never blinked at the greedy, subprime mortgage schemes that could spawn a recession; politics that have greatly diminished our country’s stature in the world.
“Obama inspires people to action. And while inspiration alone isn’t enough to get a job done, it’s a necessary ingredient to begin the hard work.”
The final graph of the 1.25 Times editorial states that “the potential upside of a great Obama presidency is enticing, but this country faces huge problems, and will no doubt be facing more that we can’t foresee. The next president needs to start immediately on challenges that will require concrete solutions, resolve, and the ability to make government work. Mrs. Clinton is more qualified, right now, to be president.”
The same words could just as easily been stated by a tut-tutting editorial board during the 1960 election: “The potential upside of a great John Kennedy presidency is enticing, but this country faces huge problems, and will no doubt be facing more that we can’t foresee. The next president needs to start immediately on challenges that will require concrete solutions, resolve, and the ability to make government work. Richard Nixon is more qualified, right now, to be president.”
And you know something? They would have been “right” to say so — Nixon possessed greater experience in dealing with affairs of state than Kennedy — and yet faulty in their allegiance, and missing out on the inevitable rightness of the necessary cultural turnover than a Kennedy win would signify and promise.

The hard-luck Christian Brando, the 49 year-old son of the late Marlon Brando, “died this morning at 1:47 a.m. at the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles,” according to the N.Y. Post. The poor guy — never caught a groove or a break, cursed by the neuroses of his parents (his mother was the high-strung, irrrationally-behaved Anna Kashfi), an erratic upbringing and a murder on his conscience.

CB: “Hey, dad.” MB: “Christian! You’re here! Give me a hug. Wait…what year is it? There are no clocks or calendars in heaven.” CB: “2008…January. I’ll be missing the South Carolina primary, not to mention the Democratic candidates’ debate on Wednesday in Los Angeles.” MB: “My boy, what happened? You were only 49. I’m so sorry. Life is so short as it is. Forgive me, Christian. I love you. You were such a beautiful boy.”
Does the triumvirate of Brad Renfro, Heath Ledger and Christian Brando — three Hollywood kids who died by their own hand — amount to a standard “rule of three” (i.e., the tendency of the famous to die in groups of three within days of each other), or did they pass away too many days apart?