A certain columnist today named Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby as the fifteenth best film of 2006… yeegodz! Champagne-toasting a comedy of this calibre (which I suffered through like a cancer patient) and trying to lift it up to pseudo-best of the year status is an old movie-journalist ruse — it makes you look ahead-of- the-curve to bestow serious praise on what others have derided as a crude, run-of-the-mill culture-war comedy.

Then: Ang Lee‘s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon — a very big hit by any standard, let alone for a foreign-language film — opened on 16 screens on 12.8.00, and earned $758.542 after four days. Now: Guillermo del Toro‘s Pan’s Labyrinth opened on 12.29 on 17 screens and has earned $779,427, averaging $44,148 per screen.

The expectation is that Pan’s will have its first million in the coffee can by the end of today, or certainly by sometime tomorrow. Congrats to Picturehouse’s Bob Berney, but what are readers deducing from these figures? The deep-forest fantasy drama opens in…well, it’s already opened in L.A. but Chicago and maybe somewhere else on Friday. It will expand to roughly 100 screens by 1.12.

The Producers Guild of America today improved the Oscar odds of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Babel, which had been seen by some handicappers as somewhat pummelled and rope-a-doping over the last three or four weeks, by naming it as one of the PGA’s five Best Picture nominees.
The other four, no real surprises, are Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed, Bill Condon‘s Dreamgirls, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris‘s Little Miss Sunshine and Stephen Frears‘ The Queen.
The obviously stellar and worthy United 93, Children of Men and Letters From Iwo Jima haven’t necessarily been hurt by being excluded, but let’s face it — they haven’t been helped. For what it’s worth, 11 of the previous 15 PGA winners have won the Best Picture Oscar.
The 3,000 member-strong org will announce the winner on 1.20 (while ev erone’s up at Sundance) at L.A.’s Century Plaza hotel.
Nominated producers are Inarritu, Steve Golin and Jon Kilik for Babel, Graham King for The Departed, Laurence Mark for Dreamgirls, Marc Turtletaub, David T. Friendly, Peter Saraf and Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa for Little Miss Sunshine and Andy Harries, Christine Langan and Tracey Seaward for The Queen.

“What was Little Miss Sunshine if not a brilliant ontological dissection of the perils of sublimation? Every one of the characters is undone by the pressure to conform to the entertainment- celebrity complex ideal, to find a suitable success shape that will justify their existence to the world — everyone but the Alan Arkin character, who chooses hedonism.
“What I love about Little Miss Sunshine are the philosophical questions it raises about how we live, how we should live, how we should be.” — Carina Chocano posting in Slate‘s Movie Club.
“Undone” but not beaten. Paul Dano‘s “Dwayne” character gets past his obsession with being an Air Force jet pilot by the end of the film. And isn’t Steve Carell‘s “Frank” pretty much divested of any success dreams at the get-go, having tried and failed to commit suicide and barely able to lift a half-enthusiastic eyebrow about anything? The nice thing is that he’s in pretty good spiritual shape by the end of the Sunshine journey.

Dani Levy‘s Mein Fuehrer: The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler, which opens in Germany on 1.11, is described in this story by the AP’s Berlin-based Geir Moulson as “treading ground that once would have been off-limits…a German movie that dares to treat Hitler as comedy.”

Levy’s plot “starts in December 1944, with Berlin in ruins and Hitler (Helge Schneider) too depressed to deliver a much-awaited speech to rally his people,” Moulson relates. “His propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth), finds a solution in Adolf Gruenbaum (Ulrich Muhe, star of The Lives of Others), a fictional Jewish actor who coached Hitler at the beginning of his career and is now in a concentration camp.
“‘We need someone who can ignite our Fuehrer’s greatest strength — and that strength is his hatred,’ Goebbels explains.
“Gruenbaum uses the mission to try to kill Hitler, but fails. So he puts him through humiliating exercises, such as crawling about barking like a dog. The farce broadens when Hitler’s barber accidentally shaves off half his mustache; the enraged dictator shouts himself hoarse and Gruenbaum has to lip-sync the big speech, but deviates from the script to make Hitler look even sillier.”
Comedies dealing with war and Holocaust-related subjects — a Hamburg stage musical called Mein Ball, about Hitler trying to save Germany by staging the World Cup, plus Roberto Begnini‘s Life is Beautiful and Mel Brooks‘ “Springtime for Hitler” sequence in The Producers — are mentioned as having paved the way for Levy’s film, but what about the all-but-forgotten Hitler’s Son, the unfunny 1978 comedy staring Bud Cort and Peter Cushing?

Actually, there was something funny about that film — the copy line on the one-sheet: “Vee haff vays of making you laugh.”

“Because President Bush declared Tuesday a national day of mourning [because of ex-President Gerald Ford‘s passing], the United States Postal Service did not deliver mail. No big deal right? Except that yesterday was the deadline for ballots to be returned to the Producer’s Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild for their respective film awards. And those Oscar screeners that were coming out at the end of the year spent a day somewhere deep in the bowels of the postal system.” — N.Y. Times guy David Carr (a.k.a., “the Bagger”) on the fretting and running around that happened as a result.

Both the Kansas City Film Critics Circle (KCFCC…sounds like Kentucky Fried Chicken) and the Austin Film Critics have named United 93 as their Best Film of the Year. Will the Academy cowards who’ve refused to see this film heed this latest hosannah, or are they digging their heels all the more with each new award it receives? Can the delicate finessings of Universal Oscar consultant Tony Angelotti achieve the impossible and persuade them to at least watch it?

Risky Biz blog’s Anne Thompson has chided David Denby‘s recently posted New Yorker piece about Hollywood’s digital future by calling it a dutiful “term paper” that seems “terribly familar” and “very obvious…and as always, Denby’s sorry to let the old ways go.”
I enjoyed Denby’s piece because it’s honest and thorough and well written — he talked to many of the Left Coast people he needed to speak to and then tried to put it all together in his head, and then he came back to Manhattan and wrote it from his heart. It’s a smart, absorbing read. I don’t get the bashing. From Poland, yes (naturally)…but not from Anne.
And while digital technology is improving new and old films markedly (i.e., first-rate digital projection in theatres is, to my eyes, definitely preferable to film projection), some of the “old ways” of showing and experiencing movies were really spectac- ular. There’s an extra-oomph showmanship quality that’s missing from all but the best theatres (like Hollywood’s Arclight) today.
Those ornate, super-sized movie palaces, for example….finito. I’ve only seen pictures (okay, I was inside Radio City Music Hall once) but I feel like I’ve missed out on something really grandiose and spirit-filling.
I’ve seen 30-frame Todd-AO exactly once in my life (when a restored 30-frame version of Oklahoma! was shown in ’84 or thereabouts), and I’ve never forgotten it. The fluidity of motion and considerable lessening of pan blur in that ancient 70mm process, which hasn’t been freshly exhibited since 1956 or thereabouts, was truly awesome.
Something in me also regrets that Showscan, the 60 frame-per-second process that peaked iin the ’80s and early ’90s, was never used to make a feature film. I’m a little bit sorry also that the old three-projector Cinerama process, dual-projector 3-D projection, Ultra- and Super-Panavision 70, Camera 65, Dimension 150, Aromarama and all the nervy, forward-thinking processes of the ’50s and early ’60s are gone as well.

Hollywood Interrupted‘s Mark Ebner is claiming that People magazine “recently buried” a rare investigative piece featuring shocking interviews with three women claiming that Bill Cosby “earned their trust, then sexually assaulted them,” but because the story was hidden in all the fluff that drives celebrity magazine sales, Cosby-as-serial sexual-abuser is still essentially a non-story.”
The ever-dogged Ebner, who dug into Cosby’s history while working for the Bonnie Fuller tabs, goes on to make his case that Cosby has been drugging and in some cases having his way with women for a fairly long time. I usually stay far away from stories of this kind, but I happen to be personally acquainted with a woman who told me (and eventually Ebner, whom I introduced her to) that she had an unwanted (i.e. forced) sexual encounter with Cosby in ’69. And I believe her.
The interesting thing here is how and why People bailed on this story, if in fact this happened. (I’ve inquired with a friend in People‘s West Coast office; maybe I’ll hear something back.) Cosby doesn’t even turn up when you do a search on their site.
Prior to Ebner’s story the strongest Cosby impression I’ve had over the last few years has been Jack Black‘s put-down of a sweater John Cusack wears in the first 20 minutes of High Fidelity: “It’s a Cosby sweater…a Cosby sweater!”

Carly Mayberry‘s 1.3.07 Hollywood Reporter piece about the Warner Bros./AOL digital restoration process called Ultra-Resolution — which has been nominated for a Scientific and Technical Academy Award — describes it reverently but incompletely.

frame capture from 1999 Wizard of Oz restoration (l.) vs. 2002 Ultra-Resolution restoration (r.) [source: DVD Beaver]

I’ve been a devout worshipper of this process since seeing the results on the super-duper restored four-disc Gone With The Wind DVD (released in ’04), plus ones for The Wizard of Oz (released in October ’05), Singin’ in the Rain (’02) and The Searchers (released last June). The colors on these DVDs are heart-stop- pingly crisp and vibrant and luminous — they’re so pretty you could eat them.
Mayberry says Technicolor films like GWTW, Singin’ In the Rain and Oz — which over time have suffered (here comes the litany) slight blurrings, “color fringing”, “color breathing,” misregistration, detail lost during multiple generations of dupli- cation as well as shrinkage, stretching and other damage — have been realigned and made to look much sharper with by Ultra-Resolution, with the added bounty of much more vibrant colors.

But she doesn’t explain that what’s been realigned are the three color strips — cyan, yellow and magenta — that combine with a b&w negative to render the final images in the old Technicolor process. (The Searchers, which was filmed in a single-strip color process, was restored by realigning the separation masters.)
Nor does Mayberry explain that Ultra-Resolution makes these old films look sharper and cleaner than they ever looked to the people who made them back in the late 1930s (and, in Singin’ in the Rain‘s case, early ’50s). That’s because the late 1930s (and early ’50s) technology that aligned the three strips was less exacting than this relatively new digital process, which was created for AOL by Keren and Sharon Perlmutter.
Nor does she mention that some of the Ultra-Resolution imagery is so precise that viewers can see things that they’re not supposed to see, like the wires lifting up the Wizard of Oz flying monkeys. (I say keep the clarity and digitally erase the wires — simple and very common. Same solution for the far-too-vivid wires holding up the Martian space ships in War of the Worlds.)
Nor does she mention that Lowry Digital, which was bought a year and a half ago by DTS (Digital Theatre Systems), and Cinesite, the Los Angeles branch of which was shut down two and half or three years ago by Kodak, have developed very similar processes on their own, and applied them to various films.

More support for the notion that Jude Law isn’t a star, supplied by the fair-minded but candid Anne Thompson. She calls it “The Jude Law Curse”; I said a few days ago it’s more a matter of the wrong roles at the wrong time. Law needs to stop playing hounds, play against his looks and inhabit some kind of coldly perverse villain. The best thing he ever did was the limping photographer-assassin in Road to Perdition; the second best was the freak-out scene in I Heart Huckabees. He has a taste for the weird.

“The movies are a habit, and a big part of us just wants them to be like they were before. Surprise me, we ask, show me something new — but let me recognize it. [The movies are] a business, and if the public likes a personality, you tell the stories that make the personality look good. A mythology develops, a whole set of legends — we call it the star system and the code of genres.
“Of course, the movies are changing. Many of the old rules are crumbling. And there are artists ready to test us in new ways. But as soon as the new ways work, they become institutionalized.
“No one thought The Godfather would do well. It became the most successful film made in 1972. So they let Coppola make The Godfather, Part II. It did far less well, but it’s a better film because in doing part one Coppola had learned new ways of doing a story, and the uneasy possibility that at the end a villain could be left in charge. That was new for a moment. Now everyone does it.” –from David Thomson‘s “The Comfort of Deja Vu,” in the 1.1.07 Guardian.