Right off the top and without thinking too much, here are some gut-response standouts among the 2008 Sundance Film Festival selections. The dramatic competition, world cinema, world cinema docs and domestic docs were posted at 1 pm today by Variety‘s Todd McCarthy. Premiere selections will be released tomorrow.

Rawson Marshall Thurber, Sienna Miller on the set of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.

As usual, one looks for catchy or provocative subject matter, a proven director, veteran actors…anything that pops through among the Sundance grim-itude. You certainly need to be on the lookout for any film that appears to use chronic downerism as a badge of artistic sincerity or authority. Road movies, marginal lifestyles, bizarre dysfunctional behavior, warring family units, shattered dreams, sex with the wrong people for the wrong reasons, etc. Sundance spelled backwards = funky depression.

Geoff Haley‘s The Last Word, an “irreverent romantic comedy centering on a reclusive writer-for-hire of suicide notes,” sounds like a downer case in point. Winona Ryder, Wes Bentley and Ray Romano costar in this ThinkFilm release…yipes!

Any movie costarring the free-spirited Sam Rockwell needs to be approached with caution, I feel. I’m just saying “watch it”…nothing more. The film in question is Clark Gregg‘s Choke — a “raw mother-son comedy with Rockwell, Anjelica Huston and Kelly Macdonald, based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club).

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, directed and written by Rawson Marshall Thurber (Dodgeball) and starring Jon Foster, Peter Sarsgaard, Sienna Miller, Mena Suvari and Nick Nolte, sounds decent. I say this having read the book by Michael Chabon, which is about sexual exploration (a euphemism for anything gay) and a “tense” father-son relationship. Beware of any director who uses three names as it connotes pretentiousness.

Daniel Barnz‘s Phoebe in Wonderland, an “unusual coming-of-age tale” about a girl (Elle Fanning) who takes her dysfunctional family (some of whom may be played by Felicity Huffman, Patricia Clarkson, Bill Pullman and Campbell Scott) on an unexpected journey…God, another road movie?

A promising contender appears to be Christine Jeffs‘ Sunshine Cleaning, about a biohazard removal and crime-scene cleanup business with Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, Steve Zahn, Alan Arkin, Amy Redford and Clifton Collins Jr.

A sense of uncertainty pervades the synopsis of Jonathan Levine‘s The Wackness — great title! — about a teen drug dealer (Josh Peck) who falls for the daughter of his drug-taking shrink (Ben Kingsley). With Famke Janssen, Olivia Thirlby, Mary Kate Olsen and Method Man.

Among the docs, the social realism standout appears to be Nanette Burstein‘s American Teen, an “irreverent, frank account of four Indiana high school seniors.” It seems general enough in its subject and focus to have possibly lucked into something.

A celebrity portrait doc seemingly guaranteed to deliver a funny, stimulating time is Alex Gibney‘s Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, a “look at the late author’s prime period of 1965-75 via previously unavailable homemovies, audio recordings and unpublished manuscripts.

Ditto Steven Sebring‘s Patti Smith: Dream of Life (please include footage of Smith reciting “Piss Factory”) and Marina Zenovich‘s Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired.

Which doc will win the Al Gore award for best illuminating a dwindling resource/global contamination issue? Will it be Josh Tickell‘s Fields of Fuel, about a man who takes on “big oil, big government and big soy” as he proselytizes for energy alternatives, or Irena Salina‘s Flow: For Love of Water, about “the possibility that Earth’s supply of this essential liquid is dwindling.”

Docs about terrible histories and present-tense roblems in foreign countries include Lisa F. Jackson‘s The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo and Ellen Kuras and Thavisouk Phrasavath‘s Nerakhoon.

The hottest world cinema entry looks to be Jose Padhilla‘s Elite Squad, a Braizlian rime drama that’s been snapped up by the Weinstein Co. — about on a special crime unit’s war against drug dealers in the run-up to the Pope’s visit to Rio. Running a close second is Carlos Moreno‘s Perro Come Perro (Dog Eat Dog), a crime drama about “two hoods who sign their own death warrants when they bungle a job.”

A mildly interesting world doc appears to be Chris Waitt‘s A Complete History of My Sexual Failures, in which the filmmaker “consults the women in his life, past and present, to learn exactly how the opposite sex views him.” In other words, a documentary version of Neil Labute‘s Some Girls witha little Sherman’s March thrown in.

An excellent new trailer for There Will Be Blood — the best pocked-sized conveyance of what this film is — performances, plot points and all — is viewable from the Paramount Vantage website. But the embedded code is insane — it relaunches every time you refresh HE — and you’re forced to watch trailers for Into The Wild and other PV films over and over. It was torturous so I dumped it and replaced it with this YouTube trailer, which is almost as good.

I sense limited interest in the 25th anniversary screening of E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial at the Academy theatre on Thursday night. Just as Steven Spielberg‘s esteem has begun to diminish, so has the legend of this 1982 film. And I’m saying this as someone who truly worshipped E.T. when it first came out, and who interviewed Henry Thomas and Drew Barrymore for an Us magazine cover story.

It’s certainly one of Spielberg’s finest, but the saturation has been so commercially relentless — the Universal theme-park ride, that awful Neil Diamond song “Heartlight.” the endless parade of DVD re-dips — that it’s pretty much worn out its welcome. Universal’s eagerness to exploit it again and again has become boorish.

It wouldn’t kill me if by some bizarre circumstance I would never be allowed to see E.T. again. I think I could live with that. On top of which it has the usual Spielberg irritants. I’ve always been irritated by that moment when Henry Thomas just drops the pizza takeout on the back lawn. And I’ve always hated the scene in which security guys in space-walk suits invade the house.

Spielberg’s decision to digitally replace the guns in the hands of FBI agents with walkie-talkies wasn’t as bad as George Lucas’s decision to have Greedo shoot first, but it was in the same revisionist ballpark. I’m just done with it. Enough. Tens of thousands feel this way, I suspect.

In a capsule review, Time critic Richard Corliss — usually a fairly adventurous sort and certainly no rigid conservative — has slammed Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood (Paramount Vantage, 12.26), using terms like “daft” and “deranged zone.” No worries — it’s a solvable issue. Corliss has to see it a second time, is all.

After my first Blood screening, I knew it was masterful but I felt traumatized, appalled, thrown off. The second time I saw it for what it was — a diseased but riveting American epic without an ounce of fat or pretense — and the matter of my initial emotional response went by the wayside.

“Ambition can drive a man to greatness or drive him to destruction, or do both,” Corliss begins. “That was the theme of many novels of the early 20th century. One, Upton Sinclair‘s “Oil”, is the inspiration for this inward, wayward epic that spans 30 years of a tycoon’s career. Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis, parading surface charm over a black heart) builds an oil empire on his tenacity, his ruthlessness and his seeming saving grace: a devotion to his son (Dillon Freasier), whom he totes from job to job.

“Anderson’s previous movies (Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch Drunk Love) all teemed with vigorous eccentrics muscling themselves onto the screen. This film is stern, unaccommodating and, finally, daft. It’s of a mind with its antihero, who says, ‘I don’t care to explain myself.’ By the end, when Daniel faces off with a longtime preacher rival (Paul Dano), the movie has retreated into its own deranged zone, to which even sympathetic viewers are forbidden.”

Rudolph Giuliani has a brief but significant mention in Charlie Wilson’s War (Universal, 12.25) . It’s just a quick line in a consultation scene between Rep. Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) and his secretaries over his being investigated for snorting cocaine at a hot-tub party in Las Vegas in ’86. The debauch is depicted at the very beginning of the Mike Nichols film.

(l.) the real Rep. Charlie Wilson; (r.) Rudolph Giuliani

Wilson asks a secretary, “Who’s running the thing? Who’s the prosecutor?” She answers, “Rudolph Giuliani. From the Southern District.” Another assistant asks, “Do you know him?” Wilson says “no.”

The scene is obviously telling us that Giuliani was an opportunist looking to make headlines…which he was. Guliani was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York in ’83, and it was in this position that he first gained national prominence by prosecuting various mafiosos and white-collar criminals including Wall Street’s Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken for insider trading.

Wilson once said of Giuliani’s interest in his recreational Vegas sojourn: “It’s absolutely astounding the lengths to which the Justice Department have gone to try and figure out what I did in a hot tub in Las Vegas. If they had put the same resources into drug trafficking,,,there would be half as much heroin coming into the United States as there is now.”

By taking the best feature of the year trophy at tonight’s 17th annual Gotham Awards ceremonies at Brooklyn’s Steiner Studios, Sean Penn‘s Into The Wild became the first 2007 movie to win anything significant in the year-end awards cycle.

Indiewire’s Eugene Hernandez and Peter Knegt have reported on all the managed generosity. Michael Moore‘s Sicko won the best documentary feature award, Juno‘s Ellen Page won the breakthrough actor award and Craig Zobel was named best breakthrough director for Great World of Sound. The casts of Talk To Me and Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead tied for the best ensemble cast award.

There aren’t very many Republican actors in Hollywood, granted, but they’re out there. And it seems reasonable to assume that at least some of them would be supporting Fred Thompson‘s bid for the Republican Presidential nomination. The guy has acted in “40 film and TV projects, after all, and appeared with thousands of other performers during his years in Hollywood going back to the mid-1980s until a recent turn as Ulysses S. Grant in HBO’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” as Politico‘s Jeffrey Ressner reports. And yet “only one recent contributor to Thompson’s presidential campaign, with a donation of $350, put down ‘actor’ in the ‘profession’ category.” So local conservatives prefer Rudy Giuliani or (choke) Mitt Romney?

Yesterday’s announcement about Warner Bros. production president Jeff Robinov being handed the reins of the newly formed Warner Bros. Pictures Group as of January ’07 means he’ll be running all worldwide marketing and distribution while continuing to oversee production for all studio releases. WB president and COO Alan Horn will continue to have “final greenlight authority” but will have less overall power and no dominion over marketing, which leaves domestic marketing president Dawn Taubin, a longtime ally/protege of Horn’s, in a vulnerable spot or at least a somewhat weakened position.

There are hints that the Broadway stagehands strike might not go on too much longer. A guy with some knowledge of the Broadway theatre world told me earlier today that a resolution doesn’t seem too far off. And N.Y. Times reporter Campbell Robertson wrote today that “in a sign that this stoppage might have been more of a break than a breakdown, the League of American Theaters and Producers announced that it was canceling performances only through Wednesday’s matinees” — i.e., tomorrow’s. “Two weekends ago, when the talks fell apart, the league canceled all of Thanksgiving week,” Robertson notes. The two plays to see (if I were doing my usual NYC holiday visitation, which I’m not) would be Aaron Sorkin‘s The Farnsworth Invention and Tom Stoppard‘s Rock ‘n’ Roll.

Tariq Khan‘s 11.26 Envelope piece about the ten worst Oscar losers is based upon behavior actually witnessed by TV viewers, as opposed to what’s been reported about this or that loser throwing a hissy fit. Sore-losing legend Eddie Murphy doesn’t rate, therefore, because the cameras didn’t see him leaving the Kodak theatre in a huff last year after losing to Alan Arkin in the Best Supporting Actor category.

This despite the L.A. Times‘ Joel Stein having run a 2.27.07 first-person observation piece about Murphy’s limo driver being told to pick up Murphy just after Arkin’s triumph.

Bill Murray‘s shocked and dismayed reaction after losing the Best Actor trophy to Sean Penn in ’03 wasn’t seen by the cameras either, and yet Murray ahs the #2 slot on Khan’s list. I distinctly remember not having a clue why Oscar host Billy Crystal was consoling Murray from the podium that night and begging him not to leave because the cameras showed next to nothing. Khan says Murray looked “devastated” — maybe I need to see the tape again but that’s not my recollection at all.

A day-late “welcome back!” to N.Y. Times Oscar columnist David Carr, a.k.a. “the Bagger.”

Carr has run a “comment of the day” from Kate who complains that little if anything in the way of late fall prestige movies have hit her local plex so far. HE’s reponse: Kate, the key to 21st Century moviegoing is to give up on the old lofty pedigree/ warm-emotional-bath feelings that award-level films have given you in the past. Forget about movies soothing your soul. You’re not going find deer and rabbits in the North Pole, and the state of things right now is probably about something other than what you’re looking to find right now.

David Lean is dead, Francis Coppola is in creative remission, James L. Brooks is apparently spent (or taking his time with the next thing, whatever that may be), Tom Hanks has became “Tom Hanks”…the empire is collapsing, we’re in the End of Days and you have to get your movie nutrition according to the terms and ingredients of the New Order.

On top of which there are many who feel that ’07 is one of the best movie years in a long time…since ’99 perhaps. Zodiac (have you seen it?) is a masterpiece. Control is close to that. No Country for Old Men is a landmark film. Have you seen Once? (I’m betting you haven’t.) Sidney Lumet‘s Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead is a Greek tragedy for the ages. Things We Lost in the Fire, The Assassin- ation of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Atonement, I’m Not There, In The Valley of Elah, Ratatouille…all stirring, all exceptional.