President Obama is magical. How else to explain how he found time in his busy pre-inauguration weekend to attend the Sundance Film Festival? He saw some films, attended some parties, pitched a high-concept movie idea and even met Steven Soderbergh, who admits he didn’t vote for the guy but wishes him luck. Filmmakers Jesse Epstein and Natalie Difford, of Chicken & Egg Pictures, managed to document our new commander-in-chief in Park City just before he was due in Washington for the swearing-in ceremony.

Okay, the real Barack Obama wasn’t there. Instead, the video short features an Obama action figure, one of the many popular products available last week in the great merchandization of Obama (one of these figures sits in my apartment, too, so I’m not judging). But the toy does at least represent the spirit of Obama, which was certainly present at Sundance throughout. That final moment is not staged; many festivalgoers abandoned screening rooms to see the inauguration. And no coverage of the fest was complete without reference to the concurrence of events.

Maybe one day the real Obama will find time to attend the festival. Sundance vet Al Gore can bring him.

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It’s already been called the most important civil rights film of the decade, but only time will tell if Milk has any real impact on the gay marriage issue or any other related civil rights matter. Obviously the film, which is set thirty years in the past, can be appropriated by the campaign to overturn Proposition 8, but if that campaign is successful, it will be difficult to prove with certainty Milk contributed to the end result.

The Birth of a Nation may have inspired a reformation of the Ku Klux Klan and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner may have opened some minds to wider acceptance of interracial marriage (which had just recently been legalized). However, as Time magazine reported earlier this year, it’s quite rare for cinema to really change the world. A movie like Philadelphia easily gets moviegoers thinking about AIDS and discrimination, for instance, and Sicko exposes some of the supposed benefits of universal health care, yet most of these kinds of message films preach primarily to the choir.

But at least five films have made an actual difference, either on a local or national level. Will Milk join the small group of movies detailed below?
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Matt Drudge is linking to an Irish Times report on a documentary called Not Evil Just Wrong, which Irish filmmakers Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer claim “is the film Al Gore and Hollywood don’t want you to see.” The film purports to reveal “how extreme environmentalism is damaging the lives of ordinary people,” and the filmmakers have set up a PayPal account in the hopes of raising money for distribution. As the copy reads on their website, they’re “asking ordinary Americans to be part of cinematic history by making sure a documentary that finally tells the truth about their lives is shown across the nation.”

The trailer, embedded above, suggests that the Not Evil is typical reactionary propaganda, full of ominous music, quickly edited collapses in logic (such as when one man’s concern over the potential closing of an unidentified factory is followed up by an expert warning that “100s of millions of people would die”), and provocative but unfounded statements like, “They want to go back to the Dark Ages and the Black Plague!” But you know … that’s fine. Everyone should be allowed to make over-the-top, aggressively partisan cinema if it that makes them and their friends feel better about what they believe, right?

But it’s the PayPal campaign rankles, if only because of the extreme amount of cash involved. …Read more

Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind may have failed to make much of an impact at the box office, but as Liz Shannon Miller reports at NewTeeVee, it did touch off a serious wave of low-budget remake making on the web. Of the three “Sweded” mini-masterpieces she considers, by favorite is the above take on An Inconvenient Truth. Watch it, and join the fight to keep polar bears from taking our jobs. Related: this plus The Pleasure of Being Robbed makes two recent works to employ use of a fake polar bear. I just have to find one more fake polar bear in popular culture, and I can pitch a trend piece to the New York Times!

The Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago has canceled two screenings of Senator Obama Goes to Africa, a documentary by Bob Hercules & Keith Walker about the presidential candidate’s “emotional homecoming to Kisumu, Kenya - his father’s former home.” Even though the film is already available on DVD, with interest in the Illinois senator higher than ever (despite or because of his marginal loss to Hillary Clinton last night, “Obama” is today’s Top 3 search term on Technorati, and “Barack Obama” is #2 on Yahoo), you can be sure the Film Center wasn’t going to have trouble selling tickets. So what’s the problem?

According to this Chicagoist story, as a non-profit the Film Center couldn’t risk “creat[ing] a perceived aura of support for any political candidate.” More than that, screening a pro-Obama film during an election could actually “jeopardize [the center's] not for profit status.”

Would the better solution be to run films representing each of the candidates? I mean, sure, maybe you wait until later in the season, when the race is down to just a couple of frontrunners in each party. But it shouldn’t be hard finding material.

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• American Gangster managed “the highest opening for an R-rated crime drama in history” this weekend, earning $46.3 million to Bee Movie’s $39.1 million at the box office. The animated film opened on almost 25 percent more screens than Ridley Scott’s love letter to a 70s drug kingpin. Meanwhile, Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead added 40 screens and saw its weekend take rise 440 percent. Julien Temple’s doc Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten scored the highest per-screen average of the weekend, with $10,193 on each of its two screens.
• David O. Russell will direct a “risque political satire” called Nailed, which he’ll co-write with Kristin “Daughter of Al” Gore. Jessica Biel and Jake Gyllenhaal have already been cast, but the Hollywood Reporter story gives the impression that the script has yet to be written. Which might be a problem, because…
• Last minute talks were unable to head off a strike. Movie studios are not so worried … yet. Enough preparation was done pre-strike to ensure a more or less full release schedule for 2008; the immediate problem, is that with late night shows expected to shut down until there’s a new WGA contract, stars and filmmakers will have to find a new venue for cheap promotion.
• The American Film Market “has gotten off to its slowest start in recent memory.” The biggest deal of the event so far: Sony agreed to fully finance and handle most distribution for Peter Jackson’s District 9.

• Advancing the dangerous notion that an Oscar is the first step to the Nobel Prize, Variety asks An Inconvenient Truth director Davis Guggenheim and producer Laurie David to confirm that “the film played a part” in Al Gore’s Nobel lauding. Meanwhile, the Guardian reveals that the film’s recent battle for educational clearance in Britain was engineered by “a Scottish quarrying magnate who established a controversial lobbying group to attack environmentalists’ claims about global warming.”
• According to Pamela McClintock, Across the Universe has managed “by the far the best showing among specialty releases so far this fall” by drawing repeat visits from teenage girls. Meanwhile, the under-marketed expansion of The Assassination of Jesse James was, as could only be expected, a failure, grossing less than $400,000 on 163 screens.
• Taylor Hackford will direct his wife, Helen Mirren, in Love Ranch, about “a couple who opened the first legal brothel in Nevada and the violence that resulted when their relationship was tested by infidelity.”

• Hollywood’s sexiest Lefties, George Clooney and Leonardo DiCaprio, may be teaming up to bring the, um, tragedy of Howard Dean’s presidential campaign to the screen. Clooney would direct and DiCaprio would star in Farragut North, based on a play written by one of Dean’s former aides, about “an inspiring, though unorthodox, presidential candidate [whose] career is done in by more seasoned politicos who thrive on poisonous partisan politics, dirty tricks and back-stabbing.”
• In other liberal disappointments, a British judge ruled yesterday that Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth contains “nine scientific errors”, and can only be used as a teaching tool in classrooms if accompanied by “fresh guidance notes to balance Mr Gore’s ‘one-sided’ views.”
• Troma’s Lloyd Kaufman is hardly sleeping on his new job as chairman of the Independent Film and Television Alliance. In the three weeks since his election, according to Variety’s DaveMcNary, he’s already made a trip to DC to lobby on behalf of IFTA and push his three-part plan: “continuing IFTA’s campaign against media consolidation; focusing on new technologies, such as protection of copyright and keeping Internet access on a level playing field (’net neutrality’); and stepping up international outreach.” He’s been so busy that he apparently hasn’t had time for a new headshot–the Variety story features a pic of Kaufman on the set of Poultrygeist.

Just when I thought I had a grasp of what kind of movies are sure to get a sequel or two, and which ones won’t, all my assumptions are being turned upside down. Spider Man? Sure. Pirates? Of course. But a sequel to An Inconvenient Truth? And one for Hal Hartly’s Henry Fool (which, incidentally is one of my favorite films)? Go figure.

Yes, it appears to be true. We’re going to be treated to a sequel of an informative (if slightly slow) documentary about global warming, and another for a high quality film with very little action and rather unpleasant characters. For An Inconvenient Truth Part 2 (I know, it gets your heart beating faster, doesn’t it?), director Davis Guggenheim is scheduled to meet with Paramount next week, so it’s too soon for details. (Will the original film’s star, Al Gore, agree to a sequel? The suspense…)

For the Henry Fool sequel, Hartly made Fay Grim, which picks up seven years later and focuses on the Parker Posey character by the same name. Somehow, Hartly manages to take a movie based entirely in a Queens neighborhood, and move its sequel to Paris, where the CIA also plays a role. Not your typical sequel (but I can’t wait to see it–check out the trailer at Spout).

So do these new developments tell us anything about the future of the sequel? Probably not. Some of the best documentary sequels (although most people don’t call them that) have been around for a while–director Michael Apted’s Up Series (28 Up, 35 Up, etc.), which he began filming in 1963. (Apted began chronicling the lives of 14 seven year olds that year, following up with “sequels” every seven years after.) It’s a brilliant series, but it hasn’t shifted the way most studios think about doing sequels. Neither did Smoke or its sequel (of sorts) Blue in the Face, another example of an atypical movie sequel set. No, it seems the decision to make your average sequel is generally all about what made a lot of money the first time around and might have enough buzz surrounding it to sustain another go. Wouldn’t it be great if the decision to create a sequel was based on the story, and whether it was worthy of another go?