For what it’s worth, it’s perfect casting, but there’s still something surprising about the news that Dakota Fanning is taking on the starring role in Floria Sigismondi’s film about ’70s girl group The Runaways. As 15-year-old rocker Cherie Currie, Fanning will continue to bait stories about how quickly she’s growing up, though really the part seems both ironic and appropriate for the former child actress. Currie, who fronted the band wearing a lot of low-cut tops and lingerie on the outside (before Madonna!), may have grown up too fast thanks to her sexualized image and early abuses of drugs and alcohol, but just because Fanning will play the part doesn’t mean she’ll be similarly thrust into adulthood. If anything, her masquerade as Currie will be more effective if audiences recognize that Fanning is still a little girl.

Fanning remains on track to be her generation’s Jodie Foster (who, interestingly enough, costarred with Currie in the movie Foxes), rather than her generation’s Drew Barrymore. And at best this could be her Taxi Driver (at worst, it’s actually her Foxes). Unfortunately, Fanning is a young girl in the age of creepy Internet comments and count-down clocks (not to mention the truly terrible examples of pedophilia to be found on the web), so much of the response to her casting is going to be stuck in predictably thoughtless concerns for her fading innocence and joked anticipation of her innocence lost.

Here are some of the blogged expectations for how the role will impact Fanning’s age and image:

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Joaquin Phoenix’s meltdown/prank on David Letterman Wednesday was certainly eye-opening, but it wasn’t exactly original. There’s a long and storied history of celebrities appearing on Letterman and completely losing their shit. This precedent may lend credibility to the argument that Phoenix’s performance was nothing but an elaborate hoax, perpetrated more for Casey Affleck’s documentary than for the television audience. But this isn’t necessarily always the case. While some of the freak-outs on this list where planned, many of them were genuine meltdowns.

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Getting ready for the Sundance Film Festival can be very exciting. As we await the event’s Thursday opening, we can’t stop wondering what will be the next big thing. Will this year’s hit be the highly-anticipated Michael Cera project Paper Hearts, or will it be something that we as of yet know nothing about?

It’s easy to forget, however, that oftentimes the next big thing is also the next lamest thing. Sundance sensations, those films that are much-buzzed-about, that sell for a lot of money, that go on to be marketed like crazy and ultimately receive Oscar recognition, tend to lend themselves most easily to backlashes. Usually such derision is deserved, as in the case of the following ten films, each of which made a big splash at Sundance despite being bad.
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• The cat is out of the bag for Paper Hearts, a new movie starring Michael Cera about his real-life relationship with actress Charlyne Yi (Knocked Up). The part-doc, part-scripted comedy was apparently hoping to slip into the 2009 Sundance Film Festival completely under the radar in order to keep expectations in check. Now we’re all talking about it, and it’s sure to be one of the hottest tickets in Park City (as long as it’s indeed selected for the fest). Other titles expected to be named next week for the Sundance slate include the Ashton Kutcher starrer Spread, the Nick Hornby-scripted An Education and Antoine Fuqua’s Brooklyn’s Finest.
• Following in his sister’s footsteps, Madonna bro Christopher Ciccone will make his feature directorial debut with a teen thriller titled Twist.
• The Dardenne brothers have accepted the position as heads of Europa Distribution, a two-year-old collective of independent film distributors that acts as a lobby, think-tank and network for the European film industry.
• In other European cinema news, due to the current economy, both the San Sebastian and CineKid film festivals are on the verge of going out of business.
• This should have been the year everyone got a Blu-ray player for Christmas, but despite lowered prices, the current recession will likely still keep consumers from adopting the format.

It hasn’t been terribly uncommon since the late ’60s for musicians to get behind the camera, whether for a straight concert film, a tour documentary or some kind of silly narrative focused on themselves and their bands. Jerry Garcia co-directed The Grateful Dead, Frank Zappa co-directed 200 Motels, The Beatles collectively co-directed The Magical Mystery Tour and separately John, Paul and Ringo has each taken the helm on a film project, some more artsy (John and Yoko’s cinematic collaborations, like Up Your Legs Forever) or less self-focused (Ringo’s Marc Bolan doc, Born to Boogie) than others.

Now it’s a little more common for musicians to become directors of fictional films that aren’t so reflexive. Many don’t even have anything to do with music at all. And many are so awful that it’s safe to say the filmmaker should stick to music making. This week, IFC releases the directorial debut of Madonna (Filth and Wisdom), and Beastie Boy Adam Yauch has a new basketball documentary (Gunnin’ for That #1 Spot) hitting stores, so we’d like to celebrate by looking at some other musicians who turned filmmaker, for better or worse.

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Not to diminish any of her myriad accomplishments (and I will never, ever begrudge her creative partnership with David Fincher), but it seems inarguable that history will remember Madonna most vividly as a cultural vampire: a supernatural creature (who, if not verifiably immortal, then certainly in hard-earned denial about her age), she’s sustained herself by sucking the lifeblood other artists, images, trends, cultural movements. From the punkish red scrawl of the opening credits forward (Is dotted with white Xs), Madonna’s feature directorial debut Filth and Wisdom seems of a piece with her previous work, in that it’s in some way about Madonna herself hiding behind borrowed aesthetics.

Madonna has previously namechecked everyone from Godard to Pasolini as an inspiration, but while Filth and Wisdom has traces of the invention via ignorance seen in those auteurs’ early films, that’s where the comparisons end. The influence of Shane Meadows is definitely felt, both as a love letter to the youthful romance of punk rock in poverty in the pocket of a British city, and in the presence of co-star Vicky McClure, late of three Meadows films including This is England. But Madonna gets the bulk of her borrowed essence from her star, Eugene Hutz, lead of gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello. The clumsy brilliance of Filth and Wisdom is the way it wraps material that’s clearly personal to Madonna in the irresistibly goofy trappings of Hutz’ Joe Strummer-of-the-Eastern Bloc persona and performance style. For fans of Hutz and his band, Filth has the makings of an instant music-movie classic. Fortunately for Madonna, whose major misstep as a filmmaker is the compulsion to divide her own personality traits and obsessions equally among her characters, Hutz is so likeable that he attracts a lot of fans at first sight.

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Whether or not Guy Ritchie is soon to become the most famous male divorcee on the planet, at least he’s keeping busy. The filmmaker will be here at the Con this weekend promoting RocknRolla, his long awaited follow-up to the kabbalah gangster debacle Revolver, and Virgin Comics is here touting Gamekeeper, a Ritchie-created comic book which will, at some point, become a Ritchie-directed film. Though Ritchie apparently approves drawings and storylines for each issue, a Virgin rep told me that the filmmaker was “way more involved” with the recently released Series 2, which introduces a band of mercenaries known as “The Soccer Club.” Panels and buying info can be found here. Above and below: shots from the Virgin display on the show floor, where Ritchie is being promoted alongside Dan Dare and another unlikely comic star, porn star Jenna Jameson.

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Why has the NY Times published two reviews of Richard Brody’s Jean-Luc Godard bio Everything is Cinema––less than two weeks apart, and two months after the book hit store shelves? Are film critics really so lacking in ways to fill their time that the Times has taken pity and allowed them to just publish whatever, and at their leisure?

I know, I know––too far. I retract. It just seems odd that the paper would give space to two pieces of criticism on the same thing, from two critics whose overall take on the thing seems to be not so far away from a shrug. At least the two reviews seem to enter the text from slightly different angles… …Read more

• Robert Downey Jr will go straight from Iron Man victory lap to Guy Ritchie’s brave attempt to overcome his wife’s fatal pull Sherlock Holmes movie. The project is being fasttracked in order to beat that other Sherlock Holmes movie, the one with Will Farrell and Borat, to the screen.
• So much for “final offers”: the day after AFTRA ratified their deal with the studios, news breaks that the AMPTP has offered SAG a $10 million, retroactive-to-July 1 bonus if they agree to ratify the contract by August 15.
• The NY Times is getting a cash infusion by selling the development rights of their stories to Hollywood studios. The most recent story to go on the block (and the 15th in two years) is “This Strange Thing Called Prom,” a June 22 piece about students at a multi-culti Brooklyn high school preparing for the big night. Miramax bought it, but hasn’t yet attached any talent.

• Hancock is expected to make around $100 million this weekend, simply because Will Smith + July 4th = boatloads of money, regardless of negative buzz.
• SAG still doesn’t have a contract, but nobody seems to be particularly concerned. According to Variety, “There’s a ubiquitous sense among studio and network execs, talent reps and multihyphenates that SAG does not have the bedrock of support among its members to call for a work stoppage.” Meanwhile, Tom Hanks is supporting a ratification of the AFTRA deal, which would almost certainly nix any possibility of a SAG strike, whilst Jack Nicholson wants his compatriots to hold out for a better deal.
• Sacha Baron Cohen will play Sherlock Holmes opposite Will Ferrell’s Watson in an as-yet untitled comedy based on the detective stories. But they’ll have stiff competition from a competing Sherlock film being developed by the week’s most famous male maybe-divorcee, Guy Ritchie…right? [crickets]

• Benten Film’s latest release, the award-winning The Free Will (otherwise known as “that 3-hour German rape movie”), is available today. I’ll be posting a longish piece on the film when I get back to New York next week, but in the meantime, check out comments from Cinematical, The ScreenGrab, and Hammer to Nail.
• Fleshbot notes that the editor of Showgirls/director of last year’s Dane Cook/Jessica Alba bomb Good Luck Chuck is also a published photographer of art porn. The Approval Matrix may need to be redrawn to reflect such achievements in middlebrow sleaze.
• Speaking of dubious filmmakers: is Madonna turning into Mae West? Michael Musto is all for it, as long as we all agree to “pass a law that in 30 years she must start covering shit up.”
• New Magnet release Shrooms leads Craig Keller at Cinemasparagus to ask an immortal question: “If, in a film, a character has to have his penis bitten off within the first 35 minutes, wouldn’t it be more interesting to let him live until the story’s end?”

Oh, the drama! Whilst a gossip blog of questionable repute allegedly has airtight evidence that maverick filmmaker Madonna has hired Paul MacCartney’s divorce attorney to sever her ties to Guy Ritchie, at the same time rumors are spreading that the soon-to-be 50 pop star is reteaming with director Alex Keshishian to make a follow-up to his 1991 tour doc Truth or Dare (known overseas as In Bed With Madonna).

I don’t know whether or not the two stories are related, and it’s probably best if we assume that both just aren’t true, but for the sake of argument: please, please, let Madonna make a (probably doomed, but noble!) attempt to recapture her floridly, gloriously shallow Truth or Dare era glory days by once again leaving a movie-making husband and forcing a no-name filmmaker to shape her everyday life into mall-grade Fellini!

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• Dreamworks is coming back, baby! All Steven Spielberg needs is a new distribution partner…and one billion dollars in outside financing…and an early exit from his Paramount contract…and an assurance that Jeffrey Katzenberg will take his side if there’s a battle over the Dreamworks name…
• Sony Animation is producing an Alvin and the Chipmunks-inspired live action/CGI Smurfs feature. Insert tasteless joke about random partying starlet turning blue as research for a role …. here.
• Madonna has canceled a screening of her Malawi doc I Am Because We Are at the Glastonbury music festival, because she’s afraid that not enough people are going to show up.
• Hugh Grant and Ziyi Zhang are in talks to star in Lost For Words, a romantic comedy directed by Suzanne Bier. The plot will cleverly circumvent the problem of Ziyi being unable to speak English.

Christina Crawford––adopted daughter of Joan Crawford, and author of Mommie Dearest, the woe-is-me memoir on which the Faye Dunaway camp classic was based––has always had a bizarre/brilliant way of promoting herself. This week, the woman who is only famous for having been adopted by a celebrity is promoting a 30th anniversary edition of her memoir about being adopted by a celebrity by saying that celebrities shouldn’t adopt. From The Guardian:

“I have tremendous concerns about celebrity adoptions by people like Madonna and Angelina Jolie,” she said in an exclusive interview to mark the publication of a 30th anniversary edition of her memoir. “From the adoptee’s point of view, it is vitally important to know who they are, where they came from, or it can have profound medical and psychological effects.”

Crawford alleges that her mother, who was one of the biggest film stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age, adopted her four children for publicity purposes…When asked if today’s celebrities are driven by the same motivation, she replied: “What do you think? Why are they so keen on getting the maximum newspaper and magazine coverage?”

Of course, taking advantage of one’s relationship to a celebrity to attract media attention, and then using that opportunity to rail against how celebrities shouldn’t do things to attract media attention, is completely different. And none of this has anything to do with that new book about Joan Crawford, recently excerpted in Vanity Fair, which basically contends that Mommie Dearest was pure fiction manufactured by Christina in a desperate ploy for attention. Why can’t you give her the respect that she’s entitled to?!?!