“Any great modern film which is successful is so because of a misunderstanding.” — from an interview with Jean Luc Godard, Cahiers du Cinema 171, October 1965, from Godard on Godard, translated and edited by Tom Milne, and used as a preface in a Glenn Kenny piece about the ending of No Country for Old Men.

“At the end of the day, your ideas in a book have less impact than if you had summed them up in two paragraphs on the most widely read blog at the most-read time of the day, so why do you spend two years on it?” — Emily Gould, the recently-resigned Gawker editor, talking to New York‘s Vanessa Grigoriadis for a 10.14.07 profile of the then-Gawker crew called “Everybody Sucks.” A wise and well written piece…worth 15 minutes of your time.

There was supposed to be an embargo on Sweeney Todd reactions until Monday, but then Envelope guy Tom O’Neil posted last night and then N.Y. Times Oscar columnist David Carr (a.k.a. “the Bagger”), let go. So I called my Paramount guy this morning and begged for a release from bondage, and he said okay.

Then David Poland posted this morning, mentioning also the embargo and being careful to point out that the film “plays a lot better on multiple viewings.” (Mutliple viewings because, you know, Poland is so important and well-connected.) The only guy who’s unmoved so far is Red Carpet District‘s Kris Tapley.

I went to last night’s screening of Sweeney Todd (Dreamamount, 11.21) with a guarded attitude. Here we go, another flush of the downward Burton swirl, get ready for it. The man has been in a kind of losing-it mode since Planet of the Apes and he’s had his day…live with it. And then it began, and less than two minutes in I knew it was exceptional and perhaps more than that.

Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter

Ten minutes later I was feeling something growing within me. Surprise turned to admiration turned to amazement. I felt filled up, delighted. I couldn’t believe it…a Tim Burton film that reverses the decline! Call me a changed man. Call Burton a changed man. Sweeney Todd is his best film since…Beetlejuice?

I have to leave for LAX and a flight to Boston in less than an hour, but I have to get at least some of this down.

All my life I’ve loved — worshipped — what Stephen Sondheim‘s music can do for the human heart. Blend this with a tragic, grand guignol metaphor about how we’re all caught up with some issue of the past — needing on some level to pay the world back for the hurt and the woundings. Add to this Burton’s exquisite visual panache and precision, the drop-dead beautiful, near monochromatic color, the ravishing production design and…pardon me for sounding like a pushover, but this movie pushes over.

At times it melted me like a candle. I was lifted, moved. I was never not aroused. Every frame is a painting.

Johnny Depp is fantastic as the Demon Barber of Fleet Street — he has to be a Best Actor candidate as of this moment. It grieves me to admit this, but bully-boy David Poland predicted that Depp’s Todd would be a major contender early last year. Helena Bonham Carter can’t sing very well but she’s great anyway. Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, Jamie Campbell Bower (a major new arrival), Jayne Wisener, Sascha Baron Cohen…everyone fills the bill.

The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil has been calling this one for weeks and weeks, and if Sweeney Todd hadn’t been this good he would have egg yolk all over his face this morning. But he listened to the voices and somehow just…knew. Sweeney Todd is a locked Best Picture contender at this stage. It’s too beautifully made, too full of feeling, too exquisitely performed to shunt aside. But it won’t win because of the blood.

I was lifted, touched, moved, melted…and also showered and sprayed. And I’m sorry for this. If only Burton had held back and focused harder on the metaphor of a man consumed by bitterness, determined to pay back those who ruined his life…if he’d only elected to turn away and not indulge his B-movie director’s fetish for the gushing red vino, as if from a garden hose or a fire hydrant. The film is its own tragedy, in a way. So near and yet so far.

Jamie Campbell Bower, Johnny Depp

Something very deep-down kicks in when a human being is killed or mutilated or both. It’s horrible and ghastly, and the spirit naturally recoils unless — and this is a very big “unless” — the style and the context turn it around and redefine it in some way.

Al I know for sure is that I was mesmerized. I loved the duets, the look of it, the control, the poise, the ache, the tragedy. This is a major, major film. Way up there. Better, impact-wise than the B’way stage version I saw a couple of years ago with Patti Lupone. The finest big-time movie musical since the under-appreciated Evita, which I feel is Alan Parker‘s best film ever.

So into the top-five slot it goes and let the back-and-forth begin. It almost certainly won’t win the Best Picture Oscar because Burton, intractable mule that he is, allows a gore fetish to override the emotion and the metaphor and the beauty. Okay, perhaps not “override” but he gives too much exposure and power to the plasma. But this is still a masterful work. Heart-stopping, heart-lifting. I came close to tears several times, and I don’t like admitting this stuff because people use it against you later on.

A fresh slate of Sundance ’08 titles were announced again today — premieres, spectrum, etc. The pop-through titles are Martin McDonagh‘s In Bruges (opening nighter), Bernard Shakey‘s CSNY Deja Vu (closing-nighter), Brett Simon‘s Assassination of a High School President, Michel Gondry‘s Be Kind Rewind, Steven Schachter‘s The Deal, Rupert Wyatt‘s The Escapist, Sean McGinty‘s The Great Buck Howard, Mark Pellington‘s Henry Poole Is Here, Sharon Maguire‘s Incendiary, Tom Kalin‘s Savage Grace, Bill Maher‘s Sleepwalking, Noam Murro‘s Smart People, Alan Ball‘s Towelhead and Barry Levinson‘s What Just Happened?.

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s decision to put Charlie Wilson’s War, The Savages, Margot at the Wedding, Juno, The Darjeeling Limited, Waitress and Lars and the Real Girl into the comedy/musical category for the Golden Globes Awards is, of course, a bizarre call. Because the HFPA is committed to filling an annual slot of comedy/musical contenders, they seize upon any dramedy they can find and call it a comedy.

The general definition of a dramedy is a drama leavened with humor that is either (a) dry, (b) cryptic, (c) deadpan or (d) acid but almost never out-and-out “funny.” Juno is probably the most hah-hah-ish, although it’s very much a mainstream dramedy. Charlie Wilson’s War is a dramedy with some genuine laughs courtesy of Philip Seymour Hoffman‘s performance. The Savages isn’t even a dramedy — it’s a fairly morose drama about a dying dad and his two semi-miserable middle- aged children embroidered with, okay, some darkly witty dialogue. Lars and the Real Girl is about an absurd situation, but is not a dramedy by any standard I’m aware of. The humor in The Darjeeling Limited is so dry and deadpan it barely qualifies — I enjoyed the tone but I didn’t even chortle. Waitress, I suppose, can be called a kind of dramedy.

Late to the table on Michael Cieply‘s 11.28 N.Y. Times piece about Disney and Pixar wanting to push Ratatouille for Best Picture rather than the “less prestigious,” ghetto-ized Best Animated Feature Oscar. Answer: the Best Animated Feature Oscar is a very high honor and should be regarded as such. Only the very best animated films are considered so what’s the problem? The friends of Ratatouille should leave well enough alone and stay on their side of the fence.

The first Sweeney Todd L.A. media screenings are happening today — one at 4 pm, another at 7 pm — but there will be no reactions like the ones posted after last Monday’s Charlie Wilson’s War showing. The trade review date is 12.17 — Paramount is otherwise saying no reviews “until time of release.” Tongiht’s second high–voltage event is a post-screening q & a with Zodiac director David Fincher at the Arclight. Variety‘s Todd McCarthy will deliver the questions following a showing of the Zodiac Director’s Cut.

I need to take a little credit for pushing an idea with Entertainment Weekly when I freelanced with them (’91 to ’96) that they totally ignored, but are now finally going with — a Hollywood “Smart List” that champions “the savants and the wunderkinds whose ideas are driving the film industry forward,” according to EW copy.

In ’93 or ’94 (it may even have been ’95), I sent at least a couple of faxed memos urging my then-editors (Cable Neuhaus, Maggie Murphy, Jim Seymour) to blow off the idea of putting out an annual Hollywood Power 100 list and go instead with an MVP issue — Most Valuable Players. The idea was to honor the people in the film industry who’d made the best movies, written the best scripts, introduced some valuable idea or innovation…anyone who’d moved the Hollywood legend along by doing something excellent or daring or in some way novel.

I was told at the time that Seymour (who at the time had a home on Wilton’s Belden Hill Road, only a short walk from where I lived during my Wilton High School years) was the “stopper.” He was heavily married to the Power issue and wouldn’t budge. In any case, the influence of newly arrived West Coast editor Sean Smith has resulted in EW finally going with a variation on my MVP idea…12 or 13 years later.

That said, EW‘s decision to put Judd Apatow at the top of the list is a good one. But what could have persuaded them to put Steven Spielberg — a man whose directorial innovations and pseudo-hip influence peaked 25 years ago — in the #2 slot, and James Cameron — making a 3D CG movie now, but a guy who’s basically been out of the game for 10 years — in the #3 position?

And Will Smith — a guy who’s done absolutely nothing in terms of moving the game along and stands for nothing whatsover except the fulfillment of a certain movie-star aura that leads to selling tickets and making big money — is in the fifth position? We all understand obesiance-before-power displays, but I thought the idea was supposed to be about something else.

Manhattan hotshot journo Lewis Beale is the latest smart guy to allow his personal feelings to get in the way of acknowledging the malignant greatness of There Will Be Blood. In his not-yet-posted Film Journal review he admits it’s “a major work from an extremely talented director that’s been “meticulously made and contains some astonishing set pieces,” and another one of Daniel Day-Lewis‘s “astonishing, burrowing-into-the-role performances.” But it “centers on a pretty reprehensible human being whose actions become less sympathetic, and more bizarre, as the story unfolds.” Beale calls it “a flawed, at times distasteful piece that will turn off as many viewers as it turns on. Is it art? Undoubtedly. Commercial? Probably not.”

Michael Fleming‘s Variety story about Jake Gyllenhaal agreeing to play famed quarterback Joe Namath put me to sleep when I read it two days ago. The fact that Namath was “the first football player to find rock-star status” means zip in terms of a strong story ingredient. I remember Namath and the reports about his big-star swagger — fame, girls, money, endorsements. But nothing happened in his life that would make for strong drama.

The most exciting thing that happened in Namath’s life was beating the Colts in the ’69 Super Bowl. But a win has to be more than just a win. It has to mean something above and beyond.

It is slightly more interesting, frankly, to read about the alleged mile-high incident between Gyllenhaal and Reese Witherspoon on their way back from Europe two or three weeks ago. They spent a reported 11 minutes in the first-class bathroom. I would rather see a short film about this than a feature about Broadway Joe any day.

There’s going a huge hair problem with the Namath film, by the way. For a film set in the ’60s and ’70s, Gyllenhaal will be obliged to wear something similar to an Anton Chigurh haircut. Think about that for a second.