Rarely has movie love been handled with both the dreamy indulgence and the cynicism that James Grey pulls off in Two Lovers. It’s a pity that the film, which premiered nine months ago at Cannes and is now rolling out on VOD and in theaters via Magnolia, has been pegged in time as the allegedly final film of star Joaquin Phoenix. In this meditation on class passing and infinite adolescence, set mainly in Brighton Beach with a few giddy sojourns to Manhattan, Grey creates a mood pocket, as it were, that’s distinctly out of time. Working off a series of contrasts that’s very true to its New York setting, Two Lovers is implicitly concerned with the way romantic relationships give us an opportunity to slide back and forth across class lines; if that motion temporarily offers the potential for an erasal of personal history, our ultimate stations in life can’t be escaped.

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To loosely paraphrase Journey: the Sundance movie deals never end, they go on and on and on and on. As Magnolia announces (via indieWIRE) that they’ve picked up Sundance Narrative Competition title Arlen Faber (starring Jeff Daniels, Lauren Graham and Olivia Thirlby) the biggest deal of the festival is getting infinitely more complicated. We’ve added Faber to our Sundance 2009 deal chart, and have also ammended the purchase price of Humpday. We’ll hold off on ammending the Push entry to reflect Harvey Weinstein’s claims, at least for now.

Fox Searchlight, the distributor that tends to get the most bang for its Sundance buck, has picked up worldwide rights to Max Mayer’s romantic film Adam with intent for a 2009 theatrical release. Other big deals of the past 24 hours include Sony Classics’ acquisition of North American rights to the blaxploitation tribute Black Dynamite and Magnolia’s pickup of worldwide rights to Lynn Shelton’s comedy Humpday, which will get a VOD release a month prior to its debut in theaters this summer.

Check out our Sundance Deals chart for the full scoop on these three deals and the rest of the acquisitions as of this morning.

Here’s our running tally of each of the distribution deals announced just before, throughout the course of, and just after the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. We will update this post whenever new information comes in, so bookmark it and keep checking back for the newest latest.

We’ve known for months that absolutely nothing was wrong with Valkyrie, and now we’re just a few days away from watching this tiny independent feature storm the box office, redeem United Artists as a production entity and make Tom Cruise a respectable household name again.

Of course, there is the slight problem: he’s portraying Nazi Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, who may have disagreed with the party politics, but still rocked the swastika and straight salute.  How exactly did Cruise, one of the great symbols of the “Blockbuster Film” and American culture, wind up so perfectly suited as a crippled, over-zealous Nazi embroiled in conspiracy? We’ve excavated evidence from his filmography to track the transformation.

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According to WIRED and other sources, Mark Cuban, founder of 2929 Entertainment (which includes the eponymous production company, Magnolia Pictures, HDNet and Landmark Theaters), has been charged with insider training. FORBES has the filing, which contends that in 2004, Cuban became privy to the knowledge that Mamma.com, in which he owned 600,000 shares, was set to offer public shares at a cut price. Despite agreeing to keep the information confidential, the filing charges, Cuban sold his shares, and thereby “avoided losses in excess of $750,000.”

For those of us who are SEC illiterate, Sillicon Alley Insider offers a detailed timeline of exactly what the Commission is alleging Cuban did. They conclude that “if the SEC’s reporting of the facts is true and complete, it certainly appears that Mark traded while in possession of material non-public information.”

We’ll be refreshing Cuban’s blog all afternoon and wil let you know if he posts a comment.

UPDATE! That was quick. Cuban now has a statement, signed by his lawyer, on his blog. It reads in part: “This matter, which has been pending before the Commission for nearly two years, has no merit and is a product of gross abuse of prosecutorial discretion…Mr. Cuban stated, ‘I am disappointed that the Commission chose to bring this case based upon its Enforcement staff’s win-at-any-cost ambitions. The staff’s process was result-oriented, facts be damned. The government’s claims are false and they will be proven to be so.’”

I have a confession to make: I am really not up to date on the newest latest trends in contemporary porn. When I used to work in a video store, the culture of AVN and Vivid Video was impossible to ignore, but I guess I’ve gone respectable. So when I saw Chris’ post earlier today about the casting of Sasha Grey in Steven Soderbergh’s prostitute drama The Girlfriend Experience, I wondered if the part about Grey being a fan of “Godard, Bertolucci and Breillat” was a joke.

But then I discovered Grey’s Wikipedia profile, which offers evidence that the 20 year-old (recently the youngest actress to be named AVN’s Female Performer of the Year) has actually made attempts to position herself as The Porn Star Who Likes Art Films. Some choice excerpts:

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With the first weekend of the 2008 Toronto International Fim Festival now in the dustbin of history, here are a few notes from the ground:

• Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler premiered here last night, fresh off its Golden Bear win in Venice, and nary a negative word has so far been heard. In the interest of time management, I’m going to wait until NYFF to catch it, but a reliable source told me after the screening that the film “is fucking awesome.” Apparently Fox Searchlight agrees––this morning they locked a deal to domestically distribute the film and finance a major Oscar push for star Mickey Rourke.
• A film at the polar opposite end of the buzz spectrum is Spike Lee’s The Miracle at St. Anna, which even admirers of Spike’s provacations are calling a waste of time. Our own Kevin Kelly was at the film’s junket, which he says devolved into “The Elect Barack Obama Show” when neither journalists nor the filmmaker could keep the conversation focused on the movie. Kevin will have a report from the junket coming soon.
• Somewhere in between in terms of audience reaction: Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married. It’s my favorite film in Toronto this far, and a small contingent of journalists are also all about it. Still, some are (bafflingly, to my mind) pejoratively comparing it to Margot at the Wedding (the titles share a word, so apparently such comparisons are fair game), and rumor has it that the NYFF selection comittee unanimously rejected it for inclusion.
• Magnolia hasn’t officially announced it yet, but everyone is saying that they’ve settled on a deal to distribute Che. The NY Post says Mark Cuban’s distribution arm is “already booking theaters.”

• Paula Wagner, Tom Cruise’s long-time producing partner, is leaving her post at the top of United Artists. Though Wagner will hold on to a share of UA––which has barely made use of their $500 million credit line, due to some friction with parent studio MGM over which movies to greenlight––apparently “it’s possible that the studio will once again go into hibernation and that the UA coin will go to MGM.”
• Totally coincidentally, the release date on UA’s next big production, the bad buzz-plagued Tom Cruise-in-an-eye patch vehicle Valkyrie, has been moved to Dec. 26 from Feb. 13, allegedly to capitalize on holiday audiences.
• In news that has to do with Cruise but is totally unrelated to Paula Wagner, he might star in The Tourist, a remake of a 2005 French film called Anthony Zimmer, with an adaptation by Julian Fellowes.
• Magnolia is funneling a few of genre-arm Magnet’s recent acquisitions into a theatrical release label called the Six Shooter Film Series. The Series will start with the Tribeca-lauded Swedish vampire flick Let the Right One In, and will also showcase Sundance picks Special and Timecrimes.

I believe this Hollywood Reporter story on the struggles faced by several American Cannes premieres to find a stateside distributor is the first notice that 2929 Entertainment has decided to give James Gray’s Two Lovers to Magnolia to distribute.

The film famously drew mixed reactions in Cannes; I gave it a thumbs up with some reservations, whilst the very idea of waiting in line for it drove Lisa Schwarzbaum to expletives. Lovers has a lower profile than What Just Happened?, another film which 2929 recently decided to let their sister company distribute when buyers didn’t materialize. Both bleak and stylized, the romantic melodrama might even be a tougher sell to audiences than a satire about old men who work in the film industry. We’ll see––Magnolia’s planning a limited release in early 2009.

Our friend Kevin Kelly was at that Mark Cuban panel at the TCA featured in the vague WIRED post mentioned earlier, and he sent along some further context––and quotes!

Apparently, the panel’s essential purpose was to promote Humboldt County, a SXSW vet and now a Magnolia release which will debut on VOD three weeks before hitting theaters in September. Also on the panel was Humboldt co-star Peter Bogdanovich, and talk about an odd pairing. On the one hand, you’ve got mogul Cuban making his cocky techno-evangelist pitch about how business travelers held captive in hotels are dying to charge their corporate cards $12 for the chance to see films like Flawless and Finding Amanda.

Then there’s old Pete, still an active theatrical patron himself (“Sex in the City was amazing because it was all women. I was the only guy in the theater, and the women loved it, and I loved that the women loved it”), but conscious that it’s an experience that’s diminishing for a reason (in part because trailers are “unbelievably violent, fast, crazy, noisy garbage.”) And he acknowledges that even if, for him,  nothing’s going “to replace the experience of seeing a movie on the big screen with an audience,” alternate philosophies of distribution “seems to be working in terms of getting people to see the films.”

I wish I had been there. Excerpts from Kevin’s transcription of the even follow after the jump.

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• It’s been all-but-confirmed for awhile, but thisVariety story nails it: Magnolia will self-distribute What Just Happened?, Barry Levinson’s Hollywood satire which the studio produced through 2929 Entertainment but were hoping to unload at either Sundance or Cannes. “There were offers,” Eamonn Bowles told Anne Thompson, “But we can make more money doing it ourselves.” They’re planning a platform to medium-wide release for October.
• Brazillian novelist Paulo Coelho is a MySpace addict! But at least the one-hour-a-day user has found a way to funnel his obsession into something productive: he’s planning to “‘curate’ a Web-generated film based on The Witch of Portobello from MySpace video and music submissions.”
• Warner Brothers says Speed Racer wasn’t *that* much of a disaster after all––toy sales have apparently been “comparable to the last Batman.”

• Not content to let IFC walk off the Croisette as the big buying ballers of Cannes 2008, Sony Pictures Classics set a number of deals in the last days of the fest, including distribution pacts for the Israeli animated doc Waltz With Bashir, Lorna’s Silence by the Dardenne brothers, and James Toback’s Tyson.
• Meanwhile, the people at Magnolia have all but resigned themselves to distributing What Just Happened?, the Barry Levinson Cannes closer which they produced through 2929 Entertainment, but have been attempting to unload on another distributor since Sundance.
• Ewan McGregor will play Gore Vidal’s dad/Amelia Earhart’s lover in Amelia, a biopic set to star Hillary Swank as the famous missing aviatrix.
• Blah blah blah Indiana Jones, blah blah blah $311 million worldwide.

• Confirmation came yesterday afternoon that the films long expected to open and close the Cannes Film Festival, Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness and Barry Levinson’s What Just Happened?, will in fact do so, despite recent rumors that the latter film had been nixed due to its post-Sundance loser taint.
• Magnolia has purchased Wayne Wang’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, which premiered last fall at the Toronto Film Festival.
• At Tribeca, IFC has selected the “Spanish-language psychological thriller” Fermat’s Room for its Festival Direct video-on-demand only program.