What happened to those Cloverfield projections in the mid 20s? Smashed on the rocks. Fantasy Moguls Steve Mason is reporting that over the 4-day Martin Luther King holiday weekend J.J. Abrams‘ hand-held monster film “will likely finish in the $39 million to $42 million range. 27 Dresses starring Katherine Heigl appears to be headed for a solid $17 million to $20 million while Mad Money, the first film from Overture, will probably finish with less than $10 million.

Martin McDonagh‘s In Bruges (Focus Features, 2.8) is a much, much better film than the trailer suggests. It’s a classic “surprise” package — looks like nothing but fastballs, is actually about curves, sliders and change-ups. As bright and fully considered as a good play (no surprise) with affecting portions of heart, compassion and symmetry. And laughs — it’s a very funny piece.

I’ve just come from the opening-night screening of this fascinating, above- average intellectual crime romp at Park City’s Eccles Theatre, and I’m waiting for the after-party to start at 10 pm.
The In Bruges trailer isn’t an out-and-out lie, but it ignores what’s really fine and special about the film. Critics and bloggers are supposed to spread the word (and I’m doing that right now) but why didn’t Focus let me see this film last Monday? I wouldn’t have to be sitting in a bar and banging this out right now.
We’re living in a twisted marketing world today. Got a gangster film that works for adult viewers as well as action fans? Keep the critics from seeing before it plays Sundance, and do everything in your power to persuade the adults in the ad campaign that this movie is not for them — sell only to the under-30 adrenaline junkies. Sell it as a hyper, funny, gun-crazy Guy Ritchie or early Quentin Tarantino crime film. Thematic richness be damned. Skillfully written characters, moments of tenderness, oddball humor…fuck all that! Just go for the guns, guys and popcorn.

In Bruges has a good amount of gunplay and blood in the third act, yes, but it’s mainly about tourism, morality, character, good writing, humanity and terrible guilt. It’s about standing up for what you believe (even if it hurts), and also about on-the-fly whimsy and joy and weirdness and pretty girls and pretty views.
Did I mention that it’s funny and sometimes hilarious? I did?
In Bruges also delights because it offers another deeply touching performance by Colin Farrell, playing a young screw-up who develops a conscience and a soul along the way. It’s a revelation for those who may have thought Farrell was on the ropes. He’s found his thing — he magnificent at playing morally tortured losers. This on top of his enormously touching turn as a somewhat similar character in Woody Allen‘s Cassandra’s Dream tells me he’s turned a big corner.
McDonagh, a famed playwright in London and New York circles, has composed a delightfully skewed, carefully balanced watercolor crime movie. And shown at the same time that he knows from visual energy and how to make a scene or shot really come off.

This is the best opening-night Sundance film I’ve ever seen. I know that’s not saying much because the tendency is always to play soft audience pleasers, but In Bruges is a lot more than just “pleasing” or “entertaining.”
Costars Brendan Gleason and Ralph Fiennes are awesome as well — funny, vulnerable, thoughtful. The supporting cast, in fact, is one of the biggest pleasures because every character has angularity, intrigue, particularity. I’ll get into this a bit more tomorrow, but this has been a delightful Sundance start.

This afternoon’s announcement of a “tentative” three-year deal between the Directors Guild and the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers means the heat is really on the Writers Guild negotiators to arrive at some kind of similar agreement with the AMPTP. On strike since 11.5, the WGA apparently hasn’t even had back-channel talks going on with the AMPTP since talks collapsed on 12.7 over producer demands that the guild abandon six of its proposals.
If the WGA guys have any balls at all, they’ll disparage the DGA deal and get out their shovels and dig deeper foxholes and lob fresh grenades. Their manhood and dignity is on the line. Is it better to die standing up than to survive on your knees, or is it better to live standing up rather than die on your knees?
Being a little out of the loop with Sundance, I thought I’d check in on Nikki Finke‘s Deadline Hollywood Daily to see if she has some idea what the writers think about the DGA deal (which, according to Variety, boosts the residuals formula for paid internet downloads by double the current rate and establishing residual rates for ad-supported streaming and use of clips on the Internet) and whether they can live with a similar terms. But Finke is on vacation until 1.22 — great timing!

All is not lost, Joe Wright! Venerated critic David Thomson is standing by you, stating that the [Best Director] Oscar will go to Atonement in a 1.16 Guardian piece. He calls it, however, “a film that reeks of class and moral uplift and which matches the terrible state of our culture in one way only: its spuriousness.
“I am certain that Wright will be nominated for directing Atonement, and just about as sure that in fifty years he will be written off,” he declares. “The key to the direction of Atonement is its Dunkirk shot — immense, detailed, a long tracking shot which finally includes all you ever knew or thought about Dunkirk, but which feels like a shopping list where all the items are ticked off. It’s industrial assembly not direction. And it could easily win!
“Moreover, in all these predictions I am guessing what will be nominated and what will win, not what should win according to justice. Why? There is no justice. In fifty years, God willing, There Will Be Blood will stand out as a classic and Julian Schabel‘s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly will look like the transitional work in Schnabel’s career. But not very many people have seen either film, and Best Director tends to go to a reasonable success.
“For myself, I don’t see how David Cronenberg can be excluded for Eastern Promises, and I take it for granted that the Coen Brothers will be recognized for No Country for Old Men. Both films are very violent, yet directors somehow are allowed to be violent.
“Both films have a lot to say about the place of violence in our culture. They seem like genre movies — tales of lurid crime — but they are also questions about what decency can do now. And I like directors who ask awkward questions.”

In a 1.15 Huffington Post-ing, MSNBC movie columnist Eric Lundegaard laments that Best Picture Oscar nominees have become, box-office-wise, a smaller niche market than horror films or urban comedies. Which underscores, he says, that we have no “national cinema,” which is to say quality-level but highly popular movies that “we’re all aware of and can enjoy and reference.”
Because — shocking disclosure! — we’ve become two moviegoing nations sharing a common land mass. The good movies are supported (most of the time) by the educated quality-seekers, film geeks and the elites, and the “popular” movies are sometimes enjoyed by same (thank goodness) but are mainly carried on the shoulders of the mostly tasteless rubes.
Lundegaard offers a decade-by-decade listing of no. 1 annual box office hits that were also nominated for Best Picture. There were 7 in the 1950s, or 7 out of 50 Best Picture nominees. There were 8 in the 1960s, and 9 in the ’70s. And then along came the blockbuster phenomenon (i.e., high-concept movies aimed at the lowest common denominator in order to get the biggest opening weekend), the infantilization of movies (the Spielberg-Lucas effect from Star Wars and Jaws) and the resultant expiring of Hollywood’s golden age, which lasted from the late ’60s until sometime in the late ’70s or early ’80s.
There were only 3 Best Picture nominees that were also #1 box-office champs in the 1980s. There were also only 3 in the 1990s, and there’s been only one since the turn of the century.
“From 1950 to 1979, in other words, the most popular film of the year was almost always nominated for Best Picture,” Lundegaard writes. “In the three decades since? The reverse. Since 1983, it’s only happened five times: Rain Man in 1988, Forrest Gump in 1994, Titanic in 1997, Saving Private Ryan in 1998 and Lord of the Rings: Return of the King in 2003.
“What isn’t so familiar is how bad it’s gotten in this decade,” Lundegaard states. “Let’s widen the parameters. How rare is it when at least one of the best picture nominees isn’t among the year’s top 10 box office hits? Since 1944, it’s happened only five times: 1947, 1984…and the last three years in a row: 2004, 2005, 2006. What was once a rarity has now become routine.”
Well, of course, naturally…come on. This is the Age We Live In — a time of great divide between those smart and rousing and finely woven films that truly matter and will be enjoyed by people of quality 20 or 50 or 100 years from now, and the big-studio downmarket dumb-ass movies that are aimed at the culturally and educationally challenged. We are Gorilla Nation with tiny little slices of chimp and orangutan culture in the cities…and Lundegaard is only just waking up to this?

You have to hike through 15 paragraphs in David Halbfinger‘s 1.17 N.Y. Times profile of producer Michael London and his production company, Groundswell Prods., before you arrive at paragraph #16 and the reason why the piece is running at the start of Sundance ’08 — i.e., because London has three films showing here.

London set up Groundswell in 2006 with $55 million from two sets of investors, the article states. He “started small with three movies, each costing less than $10 million. In a coup, all three are being shown at Sundance.” And in a follow-up coup, the N.Y. Times is giving London and his slate a grand promotional boost. And here I am tagging along.
London’s topliner is The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, a drama looking for a distributor that’s based upon the Michael Chabon novel, and starring Sienna Miller. (Remember her “shitsburgh” remark, which she said during filming? I’ve always loved her for that. A very Tallulah Bankhead thing to say, and bravo.) Peter Sarsgaard and Nick Nolte are the costars. The director is Rawson Marshall Thurber.
The other two are The Visitor with Richard Jenkins (the FBI agent who ate a chicken spiked with LSD in Flirting With Disaster), and Noam Murro√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s Smart People, a comedy “not too unlike The Family Stone, says Halbfinger. Sarah Jessica Parker, Dennis Quaid, Thomas Haden Church and Ellen Page costar.

Rawson Thurber, Sienna Miller during shooting of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

I don’t want to be the scolding guy, but there’s an error in David Carr‘s 1.17 start-of-Sundance piece in the N.Y. Times. In paragraph #13 he writes that “last year [at Sundance] Once was bought for a song — about $150,000 — and went on to earn $10 million and counting for Fox Searchlight.” As I heard it over and over, Once was made for about $150,000 U.S. and sold for somewhere between $500,000 and $600,000. I got the production budget figure from director John Carney (“a little over 100,000 euros” is how he put it) and exec producer David Collins.

Barry Levinson and Art Linson‘s What Just Happened?, a Hollywood dramedy based on what Linson’s same-titled book that tells what he went through when he produced The Edge (i.e., the “bear movie” with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin), is hunting for a distributor in Park City. It screens at the Eccles on Saturday, 1.19, at 6:15 pm, and at Prospector Square on Sunday at 8:30 am. A guy who gets around believes “it will be the biggest festival sale by far, unless it totally sucks and/or is just too expensive.”

A simulation of a Cannes Film Festival premiere, filmed at Cal State Northridge during What Just Happened? shoot.

In his annual Sundance-is-about-to-begin article, L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turan said yesterday that Christine Jeff‘s Sunshine Cleaning, which will have its first festival screening tomorrow (i.e., Friday) night at the Racquet Club, features “a vibrant performance by Amy Adams that not even the work she’s done in Enchanted and Junebug prepares you for.”

Amy Adams in Sunshine Cleaning

In other words, he’s seen it. And in other words, one gathers, Adams is playing another open-hearted emotional innocent facing each day with a plucky smile, determined to see and respond to only the good in people, and just charming the pants off everyone with her middle-American radiance and belief in half-full glasses of water. If her Sunshine Cleaning character is different than this, great. But Turan has put the fear of God in.
You know what I mean. Adams delivers the kind of schtick — a barrage of inner glow, positivism, hopefulness — that would cause the Cloverfield monster to turn tail and run away screaming. It sure as hell gives me the willies, I can tell you.
I don’t like women who always seem to be taking “happiness pills” any more than I like people who are glum all the time. I’ve seen this kind of personality emanate in real life from girly-girls and conservative-minded country-music music performers and red-state Christian wives and girlfriends, and it creeps me out. I want to grab them and say, “Do you ever have an emotion that isn’t ‘happy’ or ‘positive’? What are you so fucking afraid of?”
But most people have found Adams’ spirited-ness appealing, and since playing a wholly positive-minded pregnant wife in Junebug producers, as I hear it, have been offering her similar parts to based on a confidence that she will deliver that schtick in spades. All to say that I’m approaching Sunshine Cleaning, as I’m sure many others are, with a certain apprehension. If my fears prove unfounded, terrific, but you know how this goes.
From the Sundance program: “Expertly conceived and executed by New Zealand native Christine Jeffs, Sunshine Cleaning is fueled by the enormous appeal of Amy Adams and Emily Blunt as two sisters who, in their effort to escape the malaise and general shabbiness of their day-to-day existence, undertake a very specialized business: cleaning up the blood and body parts at various crime scenes and suicide sites.”
How can you not be relentlessly upbeat and buoyant when you’re cleaning up bloody crime scenes all day long? If you don’t the miserable after-vibe of murder and mayhem could infect your soul, and you can’t let this happen. See where this is going?
Sunshine Cleaning will also play early Sunday afternoon at the Eccles, and will have a press screening late Monday morning at the Holiday Village.

Echoing my belief that the threatening thing you can’t see is ten times scarier than one you can, Variety‘s Todd McCarthy says the following in his Cloverfield review: “At long last, a lingering full-on shot of the monster is served up, and it’s not a friendly sight. All the same, a strong argument could be made for not showing the creature at all. The film’s initial hints at offering a new kind of horror eventually devolve into something essentially familiar, provoking idle thoughts that, in the vein of the ’50s sci-fier Forbidden Planet, it could have been more effective with an invisible but quite tangible threat.”