• With Halloween dragging the weekend box office down by over thirty percent, High School Musical 3 took the top spot with just $15 million. The Weinstein Company says Zack and Miri Make a Porno came in second with $10.7 million, but rival studios say that projection may be inflated.
• Meanwhile, Europeans really like James Bond.
• MSNBC Films has picked up Witch Hunt. The documentary, which premiered at Toronto and is narrated by Sean Penn, willhave an Oscar qualifying run and then air on TV next year.
• Variety has picked up the “Joaquin Phoenix is quitting movies” story. They’re running an AP item which says the actor, who showed up to Saturday’s Two Lovers premiere at AFI with the phrase “good bye” written on his knuckles, confirmed to reporters that he’s leaving the business to “focus on music,” and promised, “I will emotionally impact you with that, as well.”

• According to Variety, Steven Soderbergh “is plotting a 3-D live-action rock ’n’ roll musical about Cleopatra,” for which he “is courting Catherine Zeta-Jones” for the title role. We’re sure this will never actually happen., because obviously, S.S. is just pulling a fast one on the trades by convincing them that he’s moving on to Cleo immediately after Che. Right? He must have either lost it, or have lost the ability to make a convincing joke… right?
  
• John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt will replace The Soloist as the opening night film at AFI. A better win-win couldn’t have been planned.
• The Academy is parcelling out almost half a million dollars in grants to various film fesitvals, including Sarasota, Seattle, and Ebert Fest.

• After moving the film’s release date from 2008 awards season to spring 2009, Paramount has taken The Soloist out of its opening night slot at AFI. The festival is expected to announce a new opening night film today.
• Taylor Hackford’s Love Ranch, starring his wife Helen Mirren as a brothel owner and financed by ThinkFilm sister Capitol Films, is in search of a distributor. The director is shopping it to studios himself in the hopes of repeating the good fortune he found with Ray. “Directors have to be realistic about this process because people are so frightened right now,” he said.
• The 1963 cult film Hitler’s Brain is being adapted into a “sci-fi musical comedy” for the stage.
• Alec Baldwin will replace Rose McGowan as celebrity co-host of The Essentials, the Saturday night showcase of superclassics on TCM. His episodes will start airing in March.

Standing in front of a packed crowd at the IFC Center last night before the SXSW-presented New York City premiere of his doc Of All The Things, Jody Lambert contemplated his good fortune. “To have Janet Pierson introduce the movie, to be part of Stranger Than Fiction, to have John Pierson send you an email…it’s kind of like Bonertown, USA.”

To say that there were boners all around might be an exaggeration, but Lambert’s goofy, feel-good film definitely pleased the crowd. Jody’s father Dennis Lambert is the songwriter and/or producer of dozens of mainstream pop-rock hits, from “Baby Come Back” (after the screening, Lambert noted that its use in Swiffer commercials has been “very lucrative”) to “Ain’t No Woman” to (my personal favorite) “Do The Freddie.” After spending twenty-plus years writing hits for other artists, eventually Lambert moved down to Boca Raton to start a new life with a new wife and daughter, and a new career as a real estate agent. But “Bags and Things”, the solo album that Lambert released in the early 70s which flopped in the States, is a huge hit in the Phillippines, and Things follows Lambert as he embarks on a tour of that country performing the songs from that album which have apparently become the standard soundtrack for Filipinos in love.

…Read more

I’ve been making plans travel plans for the next couple of months this week, and it looks like in mid-June I’ll be making my first trip to SilverDocs. And look: they’ve just made their first major program announcement:

Spike Lee, the Oscar-nominated director of Do the Right Thing, will be honored at this year’s Silverdocs film festival for his documentary work including When the Levees Broke, on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, organizers said on Wednesday.

Lee will screen excepts from his documentary works and discuss his career on June 19 at the Charles Guggenheim Symposium, which recognizes top documentary filmmakers and is a centerpiece of the June 16-23 festival.

More from Reuters and at the SilverDocs website. I’ll be in town from the 17th-23; will you?

• In lieu of a more traditional 2007 Top Ten, Variety has taken the conspicuously bloggy tactic of presenting the same information with a negative spin, publishing their picks for the Top Ten Things That Didn’t Happen over the course of the last 12 months. Nice idea in theory maybe, but in practice, it’s sort of an exercise in existential futility. Item #2 is “The WGA would keep working through the end of the year.” Are we sure that didn’t happen more than any of the eight things below it that didn’t happen? If something doesn’t happen in a forest, can Variety hear it? Etc. What a conversation starter!
• Meanwhile, the WGA strike took the top spot on the American Film Institute’s list of things that *did* happen in 2007; its happening was deemed more than Iraq movies or the iPhone. And finally, to make the triumvirate of meaningless distinctions complete, The Hollywood Reporter has declared “Technology” to have been “the biggest Hollywood story in 2007.”
• There Will Be Blood made $67,951 on its first day in release, which is pretty much beyond reproach for a film with a running time of 2.5 hours, opening on just two screens. On a Wednesday.

• Was it star power? Strong reviews? The kind of holiday shopping climate that makes hiding out in a movie theater all weekend seem ideal? Whatever it was, I Am Legend bested all expectations this weekend, to take home $76 million at the domestic box office. That’s the best December opening of all time, stronger than any of the Lord of the Rings films. Meanwhile, from the Adding Insult to Injury File: The Golden Compass continued to disappoint, while Alvin and the Chipmunks scored $45 million in its first weekend.
• On the “specialty” side: Atonement and No Country For Old Men rode their Golden Globe nominations into the overall top ten, landing at spots nine and five, respectively. Expanding to 140-something screens, Juno earned $36,018 per screen–more than any other film, and good for eleventh place overall.
• Awards sludge: the Academy has declared 15 films, including the animated films Beowulf and Ratatouille, eligible for Visual Effects prizes; the American Film Institute put out their annual, totally unremarkable list of the ten best films of the year.
• Is it even news, when Jon Favreau joins the cast of a film already starring Vince Vaughn? Apparently.

• “Thank God for the strike,” says Bob Rehak at Graphic Engine. “There is just too much new content out there, and with the scribes picketing, we now have a chance to recover — to catch up.” Meanwhile,
  Nikki Finke reports that Jason Bateman is just one star who is refusing to promote an upcoming film by crossing picket lines to tape interviews. We think Micheal Bluth would have accidentally driven the stair car through the picket line.
• At Re:Sources, Pamela Cohn conducts a “case study in indie distribution” with Ben Niles, director of the documentary Note By Note: The Making of Steinway L1037, and Jim Browne of Argot Pictures. Browne says that if you really want to book your self-produced film in theaters, you’ll have better luck if it’s a documentary: “Theaters aren’t willing to take a chance on narrative features that have no name actors in them. I see little indies all the time that are really strong, well-made movies, but they don’t have the cash to take out the kind of advertising you would need to drive audiences to the theater, or they don’t have any kind of recognizable talent.”
• Spout Maven Demndiary has posted reviews of Frownland, The Tracey Fragments, Grace is Gone and tons more from the Denver Film Festival.
• At Libertas, Dirty Harry says liberal polemics like Lions For Lambs are failing because blogs like his have pulled back the curtain and engendered mass distrust of the Hollywood system. Of course, they also spread negative buzz sight unseen from the moment the logline appears in Variety, but that’s just part of the process…
• On Day 10 of AFI Fest, Craig Kennedy calls In Search of a Midnight Kiss “the nicest surprise of the festival.”
• In the name of making a “dent on [his] December bills with money that I earned by expressing myself on this website,” Michael Tully is taking a Radioheadian approach to blogging.

• Robert Mitchum’s son Christopher Mitchum and two partners acquired remake rights to High Noon at AFM. The team is on the hunt for a director and a star to make the remake for about $20 million.
• A poster and a synopsis for a sequel to George Romero’s Diary of the Dead were unveiled at AFM, but Romero claims there’s not yet a deal to make the film. “I don’t have an idea yet, but if the idea and the money can meet somewhere in the middle, it’s possible.”
• For Craig Kennedy, Chop Shop is “a nicely rendered slice of life at the fringes of civilization with a near documentary feel and a series of fascinating observances.” Short reviews of Honeydripper, Blind Mountain and 1000 Journals at the same link.
• Scott Foundas had a long profile of Robert Redford, the director of AFI’s opening night selection Lions For Lambs, in last week’s LA Weekly.
• Photo evidence: Michael Jones has snap shots and swag shots at The Circuit; Mark Rabinowitz captures a 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days dinner at The Rabbi Report.

You know about the AFI Bestest Hollywood Movie Times of All Time (Redux). You may have also heard that the Alliance of Women FIlm Journalists has announced plans to release their own counter-list; a few individual, unaffiliated bloggers, have already beaten them to the punch. Meanwhile, film blog bigwigs such as David Poland, Anne Thompson and Jeffrey Wells are furiously compiling lists of possible Oscar contenders, even though Poland admits that they’re way ahead of the studios — maybe the gameplan is to get buzz circulating on personal favorites before the studios lay PR money on what *they* think are their best bets?

I certainly don’t begrudge the AFI a chance to promote themselves (and as Self-Styled Siren puts it, “if even a few people put Sunrise on the Netflix queue then the AFI exercise was not in vain.”) I also admire the passion and dedication it takes for anyone to sit down and rank a list of 100 anything.
But grand-scale list-making is so inherently subjective, it more often than not ends up being uselessly narcissistic. A supposed catalyst for discussion ends up spawning a flurry of responses, each one playing as though the respondent barely registered the original entry before the launching their self-serving counterattack.

It’s just all so … macro. So, in an effort to bestow on movie list-making something resembling a practical function, I’m launching a new SpoutBlog feature: The Micro 5. The idea will be to create a lot of five-item lists, on film-related topics that go beyond blanket declarations of “good” or “bad”, in order to spawn a real dialogue — kind of like what goes on at the Spout group Top 5, with lists like the Top 5 Overhead Shots, or The House Next Door’s occasional 5 For the Day feature — but potentially even more hyper-specific. For each list, in the interest of welcoming actual debate/discussion, I’ll tag five film bloggers who I’m directly inviting to produce lists of their own–but feel free to make your own list, even if you’re not tagged, and leave the link in the comments.

Check back tomorrow morning for the first installment: Five Improbable Werner Herzog Anecdotes.

This week, the American Film Institute announced a number of changes to their list of The 100 Greatest Films Ever Made Anywhere in the World (But Mostly In Hollywood) Of All Time (But Mostly Since The Dawn Of Sound). Of course, it’s a hot topic with us film bloggers. Here’s a tour through just a few of the many responses.

Ever the polemicist, The Reeler weighs in briefly just to make sure anyone who finds any kind fun (or even masochistic pleasure/frustration) in this sort of thing ends up feeling like a total moron:

I know this is supposed to be rooted in the spirit of discussion, so here we are. Let’s discuss how reading this list is like letting your grandpa yawn in your face — the grandpa on your stepmother’s side, the one you see once a year at some booze-fueled holiday and who pretends to “get it” while foisting his little arbitrary chestnuts of counsel and tradition on you. Except instead of an annual visit, you get one per decade, all joint aches, halitosis and constipation…

Although, in what would seem to be a break from tradition for our friend Mr. VanAirsdale, he eventually allows that a list of “the 100 best forgotten films” might be permissable.

Pretty much everyone else focuses on the actual movies Roger Ebert comes out of recovery to declare Fargo’s omission “unthinkable.” He continues, on a more wistful note: “New films become old films so fast. Raging Bull came out 27 years ago. It’s older than Casablanca (No. 3) was when I became a film critic.”

At NewCritics, M.A. Peel takes a close look at changes to the top ten. Raging Bull’s twenty slot jump to #4, Peel says, “makes sense.” Chuck Tyron laments that The Conversation, His Girl Friday, 25th Hour, Dark City, and Groundhog Day were snubbed, and he’d “substitute Robert Altman\’s Short Cuts for Nashville.”

Jeffrey Wells tries to have it both ways, first dismissing AFI for “whorishly shopping its once- distinguished brand on the tube for years with best-this and best-that presentations, and none of their efforts at self-promotion signifies a damn thing (except for their own diminishment)” … and then blurbing a few of “the 23 films that have vanished since the last time AFI published this list, in 1998. Example: of An American in Paris, which fell from #68 into oblivion, Wells says, “[W]ith each passing year, the obviously gifted Gene Kelly has seemed more and more un-genuine and absolutely desperate in his need to be loved.” Perhaps by way of compensation, AFI shuffled Singing in the Rain up from #10 to #5.

Ed Copeland qualifies the exercise as “silly” before admitting he finds the revised list to be “a vast improvement over the first version.” He’s got both lists on his site.

Most everyone notes a lack of diversity, although I don’t know how shocking it is that an industry run overwhelmingly by white men would declare that 99 of the 100 best films ever were directed by white men (Do the Right Thing came in at #96). In related news, the Aliance of Women Film Journalists has announced that they’ll produce their own list. I’m sure The Reeler will be pleased.

Above: Alonzo Mosley’s list-making spoof, 100 Movies, 100 Quotes, 100 Numbers