Sylvester Stallone‘s Rocky Balboa, as everyone knows by now, was the #1 film yesterday with earnings of 6.4 million, or $2300 a print. Don’t expect it to stay on top, though, after Night at the Museum opens on Friday. The latest tracking has Museum at 84, 44 and 13, but that’s without kids factored in — it’s looking like the weekend’s biggest earner to me. The Good Shepherd is at 75, 38, 9 — not awful, fair, middling. And We Are Marshall is looking a bit weaker at 69, 32, 6.
Of the two Xmas day openers, Dreamgirls is the stronger at 82, 33 and 6 compared to 45, 24 and 5 for Black Christmas. The likely audience breakdown for Dreamgirls is very much female (35-plus). The fact that it’s opening Monday in 800 mostly urban and/or black-supported theatres obviously indicates DreamWorks knows where the concentrated interest is (so far). If they had a huge across-the-board hit waiting to happen, they’d be opening in 2000 theatres-plus…but they’re not. Do the math.

The Good Shepherd‘s Robert De Niro, Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie talking last week on “The Charlie Rose Show.” (Link stolen from Sasha Stone‘s Oscarwatch.com.)

Mimi Avins‘ L.A. Times piece about Nancy Meyers‘ meticulously designed, lushly furnished, emotionally cozy film sets — like that little gingerbread cottage in Surrey that The Holiday‘s Kate Winslet lives in — overlooks a fairly basic fact, which is this: the instant that any half- aware moviegoer sees one of these sets in one of Meyers’ films, the natural response is, “This is a House and Garden, middle-aged-female-with-money- to-burn bullshit interior-design fantasy.” They make the same point in one Meyers film after another, which is that Meyers prefers her own affluent heroin-habit dream world to any semblance of reality — as most of us (including people with money) know it.

Bad trailers are a dime a dozen. The question is, why isn’t the groundbreaking Little Children trailer on I-Film’s list of the year’s best?

10:32 pm; 10:33 pm; ditto; 10:34 pm.

The James Toback-Anthony Minghella 12.20.06 MOMA Party/ Breaking and Entering Conversation — a series of four photos taken at last night’s post- screening gathering in a beautiful white salon at the Museum of Modern Art, orchestrated by the legendary Peggy Siegal and attended by Minghella (director-writer of the forthcoming Weinstein Co. release), Harvey Weinstein, Toback, Mike Wallace, Stephen Schiff, Lois Ann Cahall, Roger Friedman, Michael Fuchs, George Stevens, Jr., Barbara Kopple, Joann Carelli and numerous others, myself included.

“You don’t choose the films you love — they choose you,” says Arizona Star critic Phil Villarreal. Just like your parents, he means. “If it’s somehow possible that a fictional pop cultural icon can raise a boy, Rocky is my father,” he explains. “Rocky is responsible for instilling the best and worst aspects of my personality — a dogged resolve that tends to segue into a self-destructive stubbornness.
“Sure, my parents technically played their part in bringing me up, providing food, shelter, love and encouragement, but Rocky, with some help from Nintendo’s Mario, showed me the way. I’m exaggerating here, but not as much as you’d think. The Rocky series is truly a part of me, and I was overjoyed that the latest film, Rocky Balboa, maintained the series’ excellence and somehow not only met but surpassed my expectations.”

The results of the first 2006 INDIEWIRE Critics Poll (essentially a continuation of the longstanding Village Voice critics poll, which was disabled by New Media’s firing of film editor Dennis Lin, critic Michael Atkinson and others in early October) have been published. As usual, it’s a thorough tally of what the ultra-studious, vaguely film-nerdish smartypants set feels was the year’s best, and anyone who calls him/herself a serious film fan needs to mull it over.

To say this group has supremely refined taste buds is putting it mildly. Their Best Documentary list alone shows this without a doubt — I mean this sincerely. Every film listed in this category is a winner, from James Longley‘s Iraq in Fragments to Eugene Jarecki‘s Why We Fight. Copy it, print it out, paste it to your refrigerator door.
The Best Film honor went to Cristi Puiu‘s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, and the next nine preferences were as follows: L’Enfant, The Departed, Inland Empire, Army of Shadows, Three Times, Old Joy, United 93, Children of Men and Half Nelson.
In the Best Performance category (they don’t separate the sexes), I’d thoroughly expected Half Nelson‘s Ryan Gosling to win — any Gosling performance is catnip to these guys — but The Queen‘s Helen Mirren beat him out by 46 points. (Is there any critics group anywhere in the world that hasn’t decided that Mirren gave the year’s best performance? This is monotonous.)
The Departed‘s Mark Wahlberg won their Best Supporting Performance award! Well deserved.
The Departed‘s Martin Scorsese received the most votes (or points) for Best Director, followed by Inland Empire‘s David Lynch, Lazerescu‘s Christi Puiu, Children of Men‘s Alfonso Cuaron and L’Enfant‘s Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne.
Voting on the indieWIRE Critics Poll was conducted online during the first half of December. As Lin noted in an email to critics just after Thanksgiving, a national survey of this scope and scale, by calling attention to the year’s best — and, in many cases, most overlooked — films, provides a meaningful counterpoint to much of the year-end hoopla.

I don’t know how I missed this two-day-old Dreamgirls rave from New Yorker critic David Denby: “The sigh you will hear across the country in the next few weeks is the sound of a gratified audience: a great movie musical has been made at last. Dreamgirls is a singing, not a dancing, musical, [and] we can tell from the easy fluency of the movie that [its] basic urge is to merge and join things, not to separate them. Again and again, director Bill Condon lets a declaration of love, an argument, a music-business event flow directly into the next moment, and then into the next, in an exhilarating organic structure with liquid joints.”

Whoops…now the Director’s Guild of America has reportedly decided against permitting distribs to send screeners to individual DGA members, per a “breaking news” announcement on Movie City News. This sounds so priggish, so locoweed. Everyone all over town with any kind of industry connection has screeners sent to them (Oscarwatch’s Sasha Stone says that “the check-out guy at my local Von’s is getting screeners and Rob Reiner isn’t?”) so what’s the DGA’s problem, aside from being flaky and indecisive? I guess we’ll find out soon enough.
The noteworthy things in Poland’s earlier Hot Blog riff on the earlier reported DGA screener policy — i.e., saying it was okay to send them out — were (a) the dissing of L.A. Times reporter Robert Welkos for having buried the “earth-shaking” news about the changed policy about nine paragraphs down (i.e., on the jump page) in his 12.13.06 Envelope-posted story — last Wednesday! — about how industry rank-and-filers see Oscar contenders, and (b) getting in a dig at the Times‘ Oscar-savvy website by writing that “since The Envelope has not become a closely read publication in the industry, most didn’t even see [the story].”

“Oh, what a year for newspapers! They’re dying! They’re keeling. They’re ghosts! They’re dinosaurs! They’re mice! Eeeek! And that’s just from the publishers. This is the first business in the history of capitalism where the owners are trying to terrify themselves out of business. Newspapers. Ohhh…the kids don’t read ’em. Ohhh…the Internet. Ohhh…shit. So in a year of panic in the newspaper business, the crisis of the press came to this: The most inspiring media hero this year was the guy who quit.” — from a New York Observer “Media Mensch” profile of Dean Baquet, the former L.A. Times editor who resigned “under pressure” six weeks ago for refusing to make staff cuts.

L.A. Times columnist John Horn is reporting that “the Dallas-Ft. Worth Film Critics Assn., a group of online, print and broadcast journalists that isn’t even on most people’s radar, seems to [pick Oscar winners] most often. Like the DGA, the group missed only Crash over the last five years, picking Brokeback Mountain instead. Every other time, its top film also went on to grab the Oscar.”
But of course, the Dallas-Ft. Worth team handed United 93 its Best Picture prize a few days ago, and we all know the name of that tune as far as Academy members who’ve refused to see it are concerned. Horn doesn’t mention this for some reason. His piece is mainly about how the Golden Globe winners aren’t reliable indicators.