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.”

Nobody’s here. That I recognize. Empty streets, idle merchants, half-filled restaurants…the last quiet that Park City will know for 10 or 11 days. It all cranks up starting tomorrow. I shared a $34 dollar airport shuttle into town with Hollywood Reporter guy Gregg Goldstein — that’s the single most noteworthy thing that’s happened over the last eight or nine hours. It’s now about 3 or 4 degrees outside. Ice crystals in my nostrils. A big storm is coming on Sunday, the shuttle driver said.

Egyptian theatre, upper Main Street, Park City

Wasatch mountains, a few minutes away from landing at Salt Lake City airport — Wednesday, 1.16.08, 4:55 pm

Lower Main Street — 1.16.08, 9:25 pm

The Oscar statuette in this just-released poster looks like he’s made from liquid metal, the stuff that the T-1000 was composed of in James Cameron‘s T2: Judgment Day. In other words, subject to melting or shattering and (given the reported contingency plan to televise an “alternate” Oscar show if the strike isn’t settled) given to shape-shifting. Of all the years to use this visual metaphor…wow. As if the Oscar fathers decided to deliberately convey the ongoing anxiety. (Thanks to Awards Daily for posting the art.)

As the uproar over the exclusion of Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days from the foreign-language “short list” continues to smolder, a thought comes to mind. Instead of ignoring the oversight and stressing the awards and lavish praise that this film has gathered since last May, what if IFC Films, the film’s distributor, were to make the Academy committee’s diss the focus of a new campaign?
What if IFC Films sought out the hundreds of “name”-level industry people who are mortified at what happened and asked them to sign their names to a petition that would run in consumer press and online ads, pleading with the public to see the film regardless and that doing so would be about more than just “buying a ticket” and “seeing a film”?
Or forget the public — what about a trade ad in Variety in which the film’s admirers say en masse that they’re disgusted by the Academy committee’s decision, and this incident makes clear that changes in the selection process are desperately needed?
People who care about these matters should stand up and respond as a community. You can’t just shrug and be cynical. You have to say “this can’t happen again…for the good of the industry and its reputation, we have to do something.”

Due to Sundance packing, air travel and general frenzy, the usual postings will be on hold starting now and continuing until sometime this evening.

The BAFTA nominations mean nothing in terms of Atonement Oscar odds. Joe Wright‘s film is still dead as far as its Best Pictures prospects are concerned. The British simply stood up for a hometown film, is all. Made in England, produced by Brits, based on book by British author, British actors, about England during World War II…hats in the air and 14 nominations! That said, it still is and will continue to be an exceptional, high-grade film. That no one really loves.
Update due to talkbackers claiming the film is loved by many, etc.: Of course it’s liked, loved and selling tickets. Which is why I used “really” to define the kind of love that counts, matters, means something in terms of awards. People admire Atonement as far as it goes, but this hasn’t been enough in terms of trophies on the mantlepiece.

“This is a lesson all the failed Iraq films of ’07 have learned — allegory works much better than brutal fact.” For whatever reason, this comment from HE reader “Howling Man” has parted the curtains and explained the failure of the Iraq War flicks in a way that, for the first time, doesn’t piss me off. I’ve been fuming for months about people’s refusal to see In The Valley of Elah and the others (poor Stop Loss — doomed before it even gets out of the gate) and I imagine I’ll continue to have this reaction regardless, but now I have a place to put it.

As predicted, Cloverfield‘s definite interest and first-choice tracking levels have gone up, and the expected weekend gross is now somewhere north of $20 million. It could nudge its way into the mid 20s…who knows? The general first-choice percentage is 17 and the first-choice rating among young males is in the 30s. The older male definite interest is in the 20s while female definite interest is around 5 or 6. Strictly being seen as a guy movie…although it’s much more interesting than what that label connotes.