“It’s also starting to hit me that Little Miss Sunshine has a real shot at picking up some critics awards and Oscar nominations — Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris for directing, Steve Carell and especially Paul Dano for Best Supporting Actor (the latter’s performance is especially good because two-thirds of it is done non-verbally, and yet he hits it out of the park with every facial muscle inflection and eye-roll), Michael Arndt for Best Screenplay, and so on.” — from today’s Sunshine feature, excerpted out of enthusiasm for Dano’s breakthrough perf.

Sunshine Is It

Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ Little Miss Sunshine (Fox Searchlight, 7.26) is, at the very least, this year’s Sideways — a non-formulaic character-driven comedy created by people of similar attitude and talent and emotional complexity levels, with laughs are just as rich and uproarious and particular.
There are two big differences: (1) Sunshine is a family comedy — a real family comedy about real people, as opposed to a piece of shite like Cheaper by the Dozen — and not about screwed-up middle-aged guys, and (2) it may make a lot more money than Sideways.

(l. to r.) Gregg Kinnear, Steve Carell, Paul Dano, Toni Collette and Abigail Breslin in Little Miss Sunshine (Fox Searchlight, 7.26)

Or so it would seem to judge by what happened last night, when the L.A. Film Festival ended with a Sunshine screening at the Wadsworth. The place shook like the Eccles theatre did last January before a hopped-up crowd at the start of the Sundance Film Festival. I’m talking guffaws, laughs, horse laughs and one signi- ficant “awww.” Plus heavy cheering and clapping and woo-woo’s as it ended.
The amazing thing for me is that Sunshine goes into some very dark places at times, and yet it has the balls and the spirit to bounce right out of those places and make you laugh five or ten minutes later, like nothing happened.
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Watch both cuts of the trailer — the one on the Sunshine website and the one currently parked on Rotten Tomatoes — and you’ll have some idea of what I’m talking about.
It played just as well last night with me also — no diminishment at all. I can see catching it at least another couple of times and then owning the DVD.
I don’t know how big or how wide, but Sunshine is definitely a hit waiting to happen. It looks to me like a winner with all four quadrants. It may be a bit soft with young males at first, possibly, but that shouldn’t last.

The only people who may not warm to this acidly funny and touching family comedy as much, possibly, are the hideous fastidious mothers out there who delight in transforming their daughters into Jon Benet Ramsey clones so they can win at junior-miss beauty pageants.
After you see Sunshine you’ll know what I’m talking about. These women — the whole junior-miss beauty pagent culture, in fact — should be quietly rounded up and put on Army transport jets and flown to rural China and put to work on farming communes.
It’s also starting to hit me that Sunshine has a real shot at picking up some critics awards and Oscar nominations — Dayton and Faris for directing, Steve Carell and especially Paul Dano for Best Supporting Actor (the latter’s performance is especially good because two-thirds of it is done non-verbally, and yet he hits it out of the park with every facial muscle inflection and eye-roll), Michael Arndt for Best Screenplay, and so on.
I just re-read my morning-after review of Sunshine that ran six months ago, so here it is again (most of it) and screw the quote marks:
Little Miss Sunshine doesn’t exactly re-invent the wheel. It’s just a smart family comedy-slash-road movie, but the last film that got so much good humor out of such dark subject matter was maybe David O. Russell’s Flirting with Disaster, although Sunshine is a bit more of a wholesome, straight-up thing.

This is a film about hostility, feelings of futility, middle-aged career collapse, a troubled marriage, a fiercely alienated son, a dad who’s a bit of an asshole, a sudden family death, a failed suicide…and it’s often very funny and quite warm and so cleverly calculated and well-blended that it doesn’t feel like anyone calculated anything.
Sundance director Geoff Gilmore wrote last January that Little Miss Sunshine possesses a kind of “Capra-esque lunacy.” For me the word Capra (as in Frank) means cornball emotion and cloying stabs at manipulation…and Sunshine feels, to me, more natural (and naturally effective) than any Capra film I’ve ever seen.
And damned if Steve Carell isn’t eight times sadder and gloomier in this thing than he was in the early portions of The 40 Year-Old Virgin, and if he isn’t much funnier and more winning here than he was in that hit film from last summer. It’s his best performance ever, no question.
Virgin director-writer Judd Apatow has been writing comedy for 15 years or so, and when he sees Little Miss Sunshine he’s going to wish he could write something as good as what Michael Arndt has done, and direct a comedy of this type with this kind of naturalistic panache.

(l. to r.) Alan Arkin (as the family’s heroin-snorting grandpa), Carrel, Dano, Breslin, Collette, Kinnear

Sunshine is basically about family ties holding strong under ghastly and horrific circumstances.
It’s two days or so in the life of the can’t-catch-a-break Hoover clan — the vaguely dipshitty motivational speaker Richard (Gregg Kinnear), his sorely frustrated wife Sheryl (Toni Collette), Sheryl’s crushed, post-suicidal brother (Carell), a curmud- geonly, drug-taking grandpa (Alan Arkin), the silent, sulking Dwayne (Paul Dano), and 7 year-old cutie-pie Olive (Abigail Breslin).
The action is about going on a car trip from hell to take Olive to a Little Miss Sun- shine beauty pageant in Redondo Beach…and wouldn’t you just know the pageant itself would also be a nightmare? But this family has an improvised cure for that.
It’s not just that this all feels unexpectedly funny, but fresh and unforced. So much so that it’s easy to ignore a couple of scenes that don’t entirely work. It’s not quite as refined or soulful as Alexander Payne’s Sideways, but Sunshine has to be a hit — it can’t not be.

I think I already knew that a truly popular film is a big draw with serious moviegers in theatres and on DVD — in for a penny, in for a pound. A recently-released Neilsen Entertainment survey quoted by N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman refers to “a new core audience of movie devotees who to to the movies most often — 10 times per year or more, which the study calls ‘uber-media consumers’ — are also those who most frequently buy DVDs. In a poll of 2800 moviegoers who bought tickets online, the study found that 83 percent of them also ‘frequently’ or ‘sometimes’ buy the DVD of the movie they saw in the theater.” Very cool, but it’s shocking to me that a polling organization would describe someone who goes out to a movie 10 times a year (the DVD-buying element aside) as an “uber” anything. Ten times a year is nothing. Anyone who’s half-assedly into chasing the culturally dominant or high-intrigue movies is going to hit a theatre at least twice monthly or 24 times a year, bare minimum…and 24 or 25 visits per year means you’re missing about half (sometimes a little less than half) of the very good or excellent films that turn up each year. I see at least three or four newbies each week (that’s factoring in three festival binges per year at Toronto, Sundance and Cannes) plus at least two DVDs of relatively recent films missed in screening rooms a few months back. That’s five per week or 250 films per year. And yet the Neilsen Entertainment pollers regard movie fans who annually see 4% of this total — 10 films — or even those who see 8% of this total — 20 films annually — as “ubers.” I would call these people “dabblers.” I’m pretty sure HE readers are much more ardent than this. Responses?

The people behind Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest have “made everything a little bigger, louder and more expensive. They’ve upped the archness ante, poured on the special effects, and [encouraged] everyone to follow Johnny Depp’s antic lead. The result is an overproduced movie that tries so strenuously hard to be ‘fun’ that it’s a chore to sit through. For all its razzle-dazzle production values, the story itself feels cluttered, hard to follow and hard to care about.” — Newsweek critic David Ansen in the current issue.

The link isn’t up yet, but Matt Drudge is excerpting a Sharon Waxman N.Y. Times story saying that attendance is rising at U.S. plexes after a prolonged draught. “Through the first 25 weeks of the year, domestic box-office revenue — helped by a boost in ticket prices — was up nearly 5 percent, to $4.6 billion, though it still trailed 2004,” the quote reads. “Movie attendance was up about 1.65 percent to 699 million for the first 25 weeks, after a sharp decline the year before. The totals grew last weekend as Warner Brothers’ Superman Returns took in $84 million over a six-day period (i.e., counting Tuesday night).”

David Benioff and David Ayer‘s script for the upcoming Wolverine movie only does a little sidebar origin-story about a twelve year-old Wolverine…fine. All origin stories have the same beats, the same payoffs…and producers in the superhero business have seemed notoriously blind in the past to how sick fans are of seeing another one.

Thank fortune the Wolverine guys aren’t contemplating any such notion. I realize that one description by Latino Review‘s El Mayimbe is hardly the last definitive word, but this is encouraging. The Wolverine flick won’t be out until sometime in ’08 due to Hugh Jackman’s crowded schedule, apparently.

A get-well-soon to Roger Ebert after an emergency operation he went through Saturday night (or Sunday morning…it’s not clear) to repair complications from an earlier cancer-related surgery that happened on June 16. The mid-June procedure was about removing a cancerous growth on Ebert’s salivary gland. Newsvine is reporting that a blood vessel burst near the area of the 6.16 surgery on Saturday night around 8 pm, and that Ebert went right into surgery to have this taken care of.

Has anyone seen this Sydney Pollack-directed turn-off-your-cell- phone spot (which he also stars in) that reportedly began playing in Regal and AMC Leows theatres this weekend? I’ve been searching for it online but I guess it’s not viewable this way.

Here’s a piece listing the screen’s great pirate characters …dismissable. A more diverting subject stirred by Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest are two other eye-filling films about ships at sea, both released in the early ’60s, that aren’t available on DVD.
The one I’d like to see the most is Peter Ustinov‘s Billy Budd, a 1962 Allied Artists release that bombed when it came out. I have fond memories of Budd ‘s widescreen black-and-white Scope (2.35 to 1) photography, and think it’s criminal — derelict — that it’s only been transferred on a pan-and-scan VHS basis so far.

Budd lacks the moral complexity of Herman Melville’s novel but I’ve always found it fairly satisfying. It has four or five fascinating performances including those by Terrence Stamp (Budd), Ustinov (a too-likable Captain Veer, but interesting for the specificity and discipline that Ustinov brings to all his performances), Robert Ryan (an especially dark and decadent Claggart) and Melvin Douglas (Dansker).
The other (and I’ve been mentioning this for years) is Lewis Milestone‘s Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), which falls apart at the end but is moderately stirring in an obvious mainstream-Hollywood way for the first two thirds (or is three quarters?), the high points being the rounding-the-horn and mutiny sequences.
The thing that needs to be captured and restored by a good DVD producer is the high-quality photography, since Bounty was shot by dp Robert Surtees in the Ultra Panavision 70 process (which delivered a 2.76 to 1 aspect ratio) and has really never been seen in its full visual splendor since the roadshow engagements that happened during Bounty‘s initial run in late 1962.

Bielinsky’s Spooker

Having finally seen Fabian Bielinsky’s The Aura Saturday night, I understand why IFC Films picked it up and will open it in early September. Quiet, low-key and haunting in the manner of a half-awake dream, it’s a very unusual hybrid by the standards of American films — a heist film mixed with a psychological spooker.
Bielsinky’s screenplay was obviously influenced on some level by Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, which is about a journalist (Jack Nicholson) who abandons his life and identity in order to “become” a recently-deceased arms dealer whom he closely resembles.

The late Fabian Bielinsky (r.), director of The Aura, in a 2000 publicity shot taken to promote Nine Queens

The Aura is about a Buenos Aires taxidermist named Espinoza (Ricardo Darin, star of Bielinsky’s Nine Queens) with an active fantasy life (he dreams of pulling off the perfect bank job) who accidentally kills a complete stranger named Dietrich during a hunting trip in the Patagonian forest.
Instead of simply reporting the shooting to the authorities, Espinoza decides to poke into Dietrich’s life and learns fairly quickly he was involved in a scheme to rob an armored truck — a job due to happen in two or three days’ time. A bit curiously, Espinoza slowly begins to introduce himself to Dietrich’s friends and co-conspira- tors as a confidante whom Dietrich has asked to take his place.
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Suddenly immersed in a world of complex deceptions and lurking hair- trigger violence, Espinoza’s willingness to play this very strange game puts him in big danger, and it gets a little bit creepier with each lie he tells or is forced to cover up. On top of which Espinoza has periodic epileptic fits that send him into blackouts at the worst possible times.
The Aura is superbly acted, shot and scored — a big leap for Bielinski beyond the rote minimalism of his last hit, Nine Queens, which came out six years ago. The quietly creepy music is by Lucio Godoy, the superb color-desaturated photogra- phy is by Checco Varese, and it’s all been cut together in first-rate fashion by Alejandro Carrillo Penovi and Fernando Pardo.

The Aura star Ricardo Darin, director Fabian Bielinsky during shooting in early ’05 in Argentina’s Paragonian forest.

Nothing was going to keep me from seeing The Aura at its final L.A. Film Festival showing. I’d been keen to see it all along, but Bielinsky’s death last Thursday in Sao Paolo upset me and made me resolve to go no matter what, if for nothing else than as a tribute to a director I respected and a guy I didn’t know very well at all, but who was always friendly and gracious to me when we communicated.
Before the film began an actress named Hebe Tabachnik, who is serving as the L.A. Film Festival’s Shorts Programmer and Latin American programming consultant, told the audience about Bielinsky’s sudden death.
Trying for a dignified tone while fighting back tears, Tabachnik described Bielin- sky’s career as an assistant director on several films in the late ’80s and ’90s before getting his big break in getting the chance to direct Nine Queens.
I asked Tabachnik after the screening if she knew what had happened to cause his death. 47 year-old men generally don’t just keel over and die without warning. She said she had no information, although it can probably be said that Bielinsky either had a heart condition that he genetically inherited, or he simply didn’t know his body or chose to ignore the warning signs or whatever.

Bielinsky’s Variety obituary said he “reportedly had had hypertension for some time.”
He was in Sao Paolo casting for an advertising project when a heart attack killed him.
The Aura received six Condors de Plata on Monday, 6.26, at the 54th Argentine Association of Film Journalists Awards ceremony in Buenos Aires. The thriller won for best film, director, original screenplay, sound, cinematography and lead actor (Darin).

In the late ’90s director Jonathan Kaufer (Bad Manners) used to invite pallies and media allies to occasional DVD parties, at which everyone would decide which cool DVD to watch (films by Bresson or Antonioni or Wilder never seemed to make the cut) while sipping good wine and eating delicious Chinese take-out food.
The parties happened at a big McMansion on Summit Drive in the gated Beverly Park community which Kaufer was sharing with then-wife Pia Zadora and their children, and in going to these parties I got to know their swanky neighborhood a bit. It’s very soothing to bask in the aura of great wealth, but Beverly Park feels a little bit like something built for Disney World in Orlando — “Ostentatious- Rich-People-Who-Don’t-Quite-Get-It Land.” Flamboyant and luxurious and well- tended, but with a declasse faux quality everywhere you turned.

All to say this N.Y. Times Sharon Waxman piece about the residents of Beverly Park struck me as hilarious. The funniest part describes how some residents decided to get in the face of their neighbors Jeanette and Robert Bisno (who live next door to Pheonix Pictures honcho Mike Medavoy and his wife Irena) for essentially degrading the neighborhood with their appalling lack of taste (“Vegas”- style gates, a dinosaur topiary viewable from the street, “an eight-foot abstract sculpture in their front courtyard of what some interpret to be a woman on her back with her legs in the air“).
I was attacked last year when I wrote that aesthetic choices made by people whose last names end in vowels could rarely be trusted, but sometimes the proof is in the pudding. You can’t instill good taste in people. Taste is a result of a thousand distastes, and either you’ve been around and seen the world and developed a sense of some refinement and a respect for venerated aesthetic traditions…or you haven’t.
Zadora and Kaufer’s home, by the way, was built on land where Pickfair, the celebrated Spanish-style home of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, once stood. Zadora and her former husband Meshulam Riklis bought Pickfair in 1988 and destroyed it soon after to make way for their McManse.

I had a very funny Tom Arnold moment six or seven years ago when I was approaching Jonathan Kaufer‘s home for one of those DVD parties, and it convinced me for life that Arnold has a cool attitude. Kaufer would give his guests the number code to get them through the front gate, and yet a group of three or four people — Arnold among them — was standing that night in front of the gate when I arrived. They had the wrong code or something. It was very dark and all I could see were vague shapes. I said in a joking flippant way as I approached, “Hey, how come everyone’s just standing around?” And Arnold said, “Because we’re assholes?”