The impetus for the wonderful bile in John Cook‘s Sundance-dissing piece in Radar — and a very well-written thing it is — is that Cook (a) didn’t know enough well-connected publicists, and (b) he wound up going to the wrong parties. It’s also apparent (to me anyway) that he didn’t fall in love or at least get laid. I fell in love up there (with Once, I mean), and it made all the difference in the world.

“The Sundance Film Festival is about independent cinema in much the same way the quadrennial Republican and Democratic national conventions are about democracy,” Cook observes. “Which is to say, the Sundance Film Festival is not about independent cinema. It is about status, and money, and self-regard; it’s an annual industry junket and trade show.
“The 400 or so major screenings, mind you, are not for the benefit of audiences but of fat-pocketed distributors — many of them divisions of the Hollywood studios that Sundance disingenuously poses in opposition to — eagerly searching out the next Sex, Lies and Videotape or Little Miss Sunshine.
“The relative quality of available celebrity notwithstanding, the organizers of Sundance were on a relentless campaign this year to promote the notion that the festival is about art and cinema, and that the attendant clusterfuck of swag lounges and Hummer limos and party girls dressed up like Eskimo hookers are contrary to its principles.
“Much of what happens in Park City is beyond the control of Sundance. But the festival’s arch posturing against commercialization, with Robert Redford inveighing against the swag lounges on Main Street designed to get luxury brands onto the pages of Us Weekly, is too much to take in the face of the omnipresent logos of festival sponsors Volkswagen, Hewlett-Packard, and AOL.
“And the dismissive sniffing about ‘celebrity coverage,’ which Sundance’s chief press handler, Levi Elder, accused me of contemplating when I applied for credentials, becomes petty and egregiously hypocritical when one considers the fact that the fest is programmed deliberately with films featuring stars — Winona Ryder, Heather Graham, Mandy Moore, John Cusack — who are trotted out at screenings to stand on fake, tented-off “red carpets” to be photographed in front of backdrops festooned with those aforementioned corporate logos.
“Better passes translate, roughly, into less waiting. And for the press, the arbitrary, merciless decisions of publicists — 150 credentialed publicists were in attendance — tended to induce a state of what psychological researchers call learned helplessness.
“Waiting outside for admittance to a press conference one afternoon, among a throng of perhaps 30 other journalists, I was rescued, Schindler’s List-style, by a publicist who burst from inside the building, surveyed the crowd (or, to be precise, our badges), and selected three of us who were allowed to come inside.
“I never learned why, but decided from then on that good things would happen to me if I meekly made sure I was always in eyeshot of a publicist. And when they shined upon you, all the bitterness you previously felt about the better-credentialed prima donnas would melt away, and any sense of solidarity with your freezing, milling brothers and sisters in the cold would dissolve into condescension. See you, suckers!

“Little Miss Sunshine is about as quirky as xXx: State of the Union,” writes Radar’s John Cook. “It’s a Sundance genre picture, manufactured with the same empty, production-line cynicism as a Jerry Bruckheimer film, except where studios call for a shower scene with the heroine, Sundance calls for an indie-rock soundtrack. And where studios demand Third Act explosions, Sundance calls for a comically dysfunctional family that somehow rights itself. And where studios demand a happy ending, Sundance demands, well, a happy ending.
“There’s been a Little Miss Sunshine in virtually every Sundance going back for years√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Ǩ¬ùthere’s youthful angst, coming of age, miscommunication, and, usually, a long shot of a sad high-school kid riding a bicycle down a suburban street.
“This year it was Rocket Science, the coming-of-age tale about a high-school kid from a wacky family who overcomes a debilitating stutter and learns something about himself. It’s a perfectly good movie, but it’s exactly what would happen if Brad Grey called CAA and said, “Gin me up a Sundance picture.”
“Last year it was Little Miss Sunshine. The year before, it was Thumbsucker, the coming of age tale about a high school kid from a wacky family who overcomes a debilitating etc., and The Squid and the Whale, the coming-of-age tale about a high school kid from a wacky family who overcomes a debilitating etc. Before that it was Garden State. It goes all the way back to Reality Bites in 1994.
“Some of these are fine films, but they are the products, in their own way, of the same lack of imagination and marketing-driven choices that, according to Redford et. al., are slowly destroying Hollywood.”

“Seth Sonstein and Nicola Spechko, owners of Southeast Portland’s irascible and essential Clinton Street Theater, have done something the likes of which I’ve never remotely heard of,” reports Oregonian critic Shawn Levy. “They’ve bought a drive-in movie theater in Oceanside, California, and they’re moving all of the hardware — lock, stock, barrel, snack bar, screens, little speakers on poles, and so forth — up here to Oregon.

“They plan to use one of the four projectors they’ve acquired to replace the aged gear in their theater. But they’re also hoping they can get a chunk of land somewhere nearby to use the rest of the equipment to open a new drive-in of their own — one, presumably, which will show the Clinton Street’s patented blend of grindhouse, experimental, cult, and shoestring-independent fare.
“Right now, according to this definitive seeming site, Oregon has only four functioning drive-ins: the nearest to Portland is the 99W in Newberg, along with open-top theaters in La Grande, Milton-Freewater and Dallas. So it’s not like the market is flooded, exactly. And Bruce Lee, anime and “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” under the stars of a Willamette Valley summer night? Oh, I can dig it; can’t you?”

Apologies for the Becket obsession, but I’ve just found an mp3 file made from two of the better Peter O’Toole rants in the film.

“Younger viewers live their lives pushing the envelope, breaking rules and bending rules,” Manhattan ad exec Shari Anne Brill tells The Envelope‘s Scott Collins. “As long as the Oscars are perceived to have a certain rigidity, they’re not going to be relatable to young people.” Adds [publicist Howard] Bragman: ‘The problem with the shows is that they lack any kind of spontaneity or buzz factor.'”
Collin’s piece suggests/contends that the show may get higher ratings if Borat‘s Sacha Baron Cohen is given two or three minutes worth of microphone time. This is because his “ribald acceptance speech at the Golden Globes…was perhaps the only buzz-worthy moment in a night otherwise deemed fairly dull. And though he may not have been single-handedly responsible, ratings climbed too: The telecast delivered a total of 20 million viewers, up 6% compared with the previous year, according to Nielsen Media Research.”
Of course, the only way Cohen would have any real impact would be if he was hosting the show, which he’s not — Ellen DeGeneres is. I’ve said this a couple of times over the past year, and here goes again: if the Oscar show producers want their stately presentation to have spontaneity or buzz factor or simple hilarity, get Sarah Silverman to host it. She killed at the IFP Spirit Awards last year, and her comic sensibility is right in the under-40 groove — provocative, nervy, deadpan/put-on.

Nikki Finke is reporting that last Saturday night, at a swanky dinner party thrown by movie producer Leonard Goldberg in honor of Viacom honcho Sumner Redstone, that Redstone passed along a Dreamgirls post-mortem that had originated with Paramount Pictures chief Brad Grey. Redstone told the gathering that Brad explained that the reason Dreamgirls wasn’t nominated for a [Best Picture] Oscar was because “everyone hates David.” As in Geffen, the producer of Dreamgirls.”

After hearing yesterday of his death, I tried to recall a vivid movie memory pertaining to Sydney Sheldon, the very successful screenwriter, TV producer, Broadway producer and hack romance-novel author. I thought and thought, and the only thing that punched through was a moment from 1977, when I was watching The Other Side of Midnight — a somewhat grotesque soap-opera about an ambitious hottie (Marie France Pisier) climbing her way to wealth and privelege through a series of relationships with powerful men — in a small theatre in Westport, Connecticut.

I’m speaking of the pseudo-legendary ice-bucket scene between Pisier and Raf Vallone, playing an Aristotle Onassis-like tycoon, and a moment when a naked Pisier, riding Vallone like an equestrian, grabs a handful of ice cubes from a nearby bucket and, at the moment of orgasm, mashes the ice into Vallone’s privates. The camera doesn’t show this — we are shown only an insert shot of Pisier’s hand scooping up the ice, and then we hear Vallone moan like a large animal who’s just been speared.

No offense to Sheldon’s memory, but that, for me, in my moviegoing life, is the most memorable thing that Sheldon produced, and for all I know the scene wasn’t even in the book — it may have been an invention by Herman Raucher, the screenwriter who adapted Sheldon’s book, or director Charles Jarrott.

For anyone heading to the 57th Berlin International Film Festival (February 8 thru 18), here’s a programming rundown. One note of concern ; Gregory Nava‘s Bordertown, the Jennifer Lopez drama about the scores of unsolved Juarez-El Paso female murders, is skedded to be shown. This turkey has been looking for a distributor for eons and finding no love. Lopez movies are almost always mawkish, straining, off-balance. Didn’t she say she was looking to quit movies a while back? That awful Bronx accent she accentuates in the trailer for El Cantante is beyond grating — it rivals Lorraine Bracco‘s in Medicine Man.

I had only one medium-sized problem with the rough version of Resurrecting the Champ, which director Rod Lurie showed me several weeks before it played at Sundance ’07. The problem was Samuel L. Jackson‘s decision to play the lead character, a homeless guy with a secretive past, with a “whinny” voice — a raspy-reedy emission that feels like the polar opposite of Jackson’s usual sonorous, street-cat tenor-baritone thing.

Jackson in Resurrecting the Champ; Brando in The Godfather

The performance itself is solid and emotionally on-target, but I felt two ways about the whinny — it reminded me of Marlon Brando‘s voice after he gets shot in The Godfather (“We didn’t have enough time, Michael….not enough time”) and it felt a little too actorish, by which I sorta kinda mean indulgent. Like Kevin Costner‘s mid-Atlantic accent in Robin Hood, it seems to get in the way more than anything else. Forces of nature like Jackson should never do voices or accents — movie stars should always be the same guy.
Jackson’s performance has been totally captivating for some. The Hollywood Reporter‘s Duane Byrge called it “knock-out ” and “terrific,” so take my opinion with a grain. (For whatever reason, Variety didn’t review it during Sundance.)
I wrote several weeks prior to Sundance that I’d seen a rough version of Champ. The version that was shown in Park City was, I’m told, 10 or 15 minutes shorter. I’m still not going to spill anything, but the script — written by Lurie, Allison Burnett, Michael Bortman and Chris Gerolmo — has a fascinating second-act turn. The nominal plot is about a youngish, not-quite-established sports reporter (Josh Hartnett) lucking into a big story when he discovers that a frail homeless guy (Jackson) is actually a former heavyweight boxing champion previously thought to be dead. But the title doesn’t mean what you might think.
Alan Alda and Peter Coyote give the best supporting performances. The most unwelcome (for me, in the longer cut) was Kathryn Morris‘s performance as Hartnett’s wife. Not because she’s unskilled or unappealing (far from it) but because she chose to wear a pissed-off, nagging-wife, guilt-trip expression during the bulk of her screen time. I delicately suggested to Lurie that he do something about this in the final edit — it’s the same expression my ex-wife used to have when our marriage was falling apart, and as much of an asshole as this might make me sound, it felt irritating as shit to absorb this on a scene-after-scene basis.

In a piece timed to ride the marketing back of Number 23 (New Line, 2.23), the Joel Schumacher creeper about a face-painted wackjob obsessive played by Jim Carrey, industry journalista Kim Masters has written about Carrey’s career “crash” in the new Radar, which will hit the stands in about two weeks. Radar‘s publicist won’t show me the article, but it’s at least partly about the big-studio plug-pullings of Used Guys and Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, both of which Carrey had intended to star in.