Category: media

“A year after David Geffen, Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg sold the studio for $1.6 billion to Viacom’s Paramount Pictures, simmering tensions, backbiting and internal power plays between the co-founders and the new owner suggest a case of sellers’ remorse.”

Sundance shows that thee are indie star actors. But “a glass ceiling still separates the indie and Hollywood spheres. And they may not even be cozily entrenched, given the constant pressure to get A-list names in indies and the corresponding trend toward stunt-casting. Further complicating matters, an ever growing number of Hollywood A-listers regard Sundance as a kind of boutique spa where they can order up an image makeover.”

Nope, it wasn’t Dreamgirls, which picked up the most nominations except for the Big One That Matters. “Even as some of ‘Dreamgirls’ hopes were fading, a trio of new stars emerged: the ‘three amigos’ – Mexican filmmakers and buddies Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Babel), Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men) and Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth).What about those three pals from Mexico?”

“Clear signs that the sitcom is rebounding from its early-2000s slump are beginning to surface. Before this year, as onetime hits such as ‘Frasier,’ ‘Friends,’ and ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’ were saying their too-long goodbyes, the sitcom genre was viewed as a tired format with a musty TV Land vibe. But while there are fewer sitcoms on TV now, each of them seems to be working harder to stay alive.”

“This year, the festival presented 125 features (from 3,287 submissions) for an estimated audience of 52,000, including some 1,000 accredited journalists from around the world and 900 registered film industry types. Although this year’s edition, which ended yesterday, was widely perceived as a critical disappointment, good and great work is still shown at Sundance, even if these days it’s often the festival itself that makes bigger news than the films.”

“With a determinedly global outlook, the 2007 Sundance Film Festival awarded Padre Nuestro, Christopher Zalla’s drama of Mexican nationals making their treacherous way in New York City, the grand jury prize for dramatic feature. The documentary jury awarded its prize to Manda Bala, chronicling political violence in Brazil. Announced at Saturday’s closing ceremony, the Park City, Utah, festival audience award for best dramatic feature went to Grace Is Gone, starring John Cusack as the widower of a soldier killed in Iraq.”

The Sundance Festival hands out its awards this weekend, and Geoff Pevere has a few of his own to add to the mix. How about “Most Overhyped” for the Dakota Fanning rape movie? Or the “Mouthy Git Award” for a documentary featuring the late frontman of punk band The Clash? Or the “Make Him Squirm Award” for Teeth, a fanciful romp about a teenage girl who has a full set of chompers located somewhere south of the usual location.

A job at the Sundance Festival is considered quite the plum appointment for film students, even if that job mainly involves standing around outside in single-digit weather and making exactly no money. The waiting list for such thankless volunteer gigs is shockingly long, especially considering the major restrictions on self-promotion: “no talking to celebrities, no asking for autographs, no pitching their own film projects. Violators who are found out will not be accepted back.”

All mentions of God are bleeped out of a version of Oscar-nominated movie The Queen distributed to Delta and some other airlines.

“Reality television, which was originally created as a thumb-nosing alternative for the young (“The Real World”), has been co-opted by the baby boomers, who never miss a chance to assert their hegemony on popular culture. It’s not so much that they watch the shows, though many do. It’s that reality television aims for younger viewers, 18 to 34, while subliminally underscoring and cementing their fealty to the relaxed-fit generation.”