Karyn Kusama’s Aeon Flux (Paramount, 12.2), the superhero action chick flick with Charlize Theron, is opening without any critic or all-media screenings whatsoever. Quality! No word-of-mouth, no tell-your-friends…just a shitload of ads and a wing and a prayer. And yet Kusama’s last film, Girlfight, showed lots of personality and emotional focus. It was a tight little character-driven film about a female boxer with its attitude completely worked out. And so what happens? Kusama moves up and takes on a big-budget popcorn movie and wham….a flurry of jabs and body blows…right cross, left hook…down for the count.

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It’s King Kong night in Manhattan tonight (Wednesday, 11.30)! Peter Jackson’s three-hour ape flick is showing to junket press at Leow’s Lincoln Plaza (i.e., the one with the big IMAX screen) right about now (7:40 pm NY time). I’m told that members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association are also attending. Working New York press screenings will begin in Manhattan next Monday, as they will in Los Angeles at the Arclight. The very first Los Angeles Kong screening will actually happen Sunday night (12.4) for Academy members, at the Academy theatre on Wilshire and La Peer.

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Here are the Spectrum, Frontier and Midnight selections for the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, as passed along by IndieWIRE. Two Spectrum selections have caught my eye: (1) Stewart Copeland’s Super 8 documentary about the adventures of The Police in the ’80s, “from CBGB’s to Shea Stadium,” and (2) Brent Hamer’s Factotum, the latest indie feature about the honestly grimy, up-and-down adventures of L.A. poet and ribald boozer Charles Bukowski (called Henry Chanski in the film, and very well played by Matt Dillon). I saw Factotum in Cannes last May and it’s a definite recommend. Lily Taylor, Fisher Stevens, Marisa Tomei

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Here it is 11.30.05 with six weeks to go before the start of Sundance ’06, and I still haven’t put myself into a Park City crash pad that I’m happy with. It seems like I do this every year. I need a share with a bed, a desk, a chair and at least a phone line for dial-up. If anyone wants to talk about anything, please get in touch.

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I don’t know if you’ll be able to hear this audio clip with any clarity, but it’s Syriana director-writer Stephen Gaghan telling an oddly humorous story during an interview a couple of nights ago with Variety editor Peter Bart. It’s about a visit Gaghan made to the home of high-level conservative and Iraq War-supporter Richard Perle in early 2003 just before the invasion of Iraq, and what happened when former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu dropped by, and how Perle’s dog (whose name is “Reagan”) related to Netanyahu, and how Netanyahu responded.

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Why is Julia Roberts still “perceived” as the highest-paid actress who pulls down $20 million per film? Back in the days of Notting Hill and Runaway Bride, okay…but now? Isn’t she starting to be over, winding down, etc.? No big movie roles on the horizon, on the mommy track, doing a New York play next March called “Three Days of Rain”, etc.? Roberts’ alleged standing is contained in a special piece by Hollywood Reporter‘s Christy Grosz about the town’s most highly-paid actresses. Nicole Kidman is listed as #2 with a payday in the realm of $16 to $17 million. (Hold up… didn’t I read a few months ago that the triple whammy of Cold Mountain, The Stepford Wives and Bewitched had turned Kidman into a shark jumper?) Reese Witherspoon is said to be...

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It bears repeating that Disney’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (12.9) is one of the only two December releases that are tracking really strongly now, the other being King Kong. I usually bypass those Saturday daytime all-media screenings because family films are bad for my spiritual health, but I don’t think there’s any choice as far as this weekend’s Narnia showing at the Arclight is concerned. Honestly? If I could clap my hands three times and make this film disappear (which would thereby release me from any obligation to see it), I would clap my hands three times. Especially considering Narnia‘s running time of two hours and 15 minutes without credits. (“It’s nowhere near as long as Return of the King,” a friend said this morning…great!) But this is going to be a huge red-state movie, and duty calls.

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Steven Spielberg’s Munich (Universal, 12.23) will run about 2 hours and 40 minutes with credits, according to Universal and DreamWorks sources. (Terrence Malick’s The New World, which opens on 12.25, runs about the same.) Spielberg’s spokesperson says he’ll be vacationing starting around 12.20 or so and isn’t planning on doing any dog-and-pony-show appearances in Los Angeles to promote Munich, but the word for some time has been that “we’re letting the film speak for itself”). Spielberg does have a history, however, of enjoying Time or Newsweek cover stories to promote his important films (which he got from Time for Saving Private Ryan). The word is that one of these two rags (Time, most likely) will have a Munich cover on the stands next Monday…unless some big news event pushes it off.

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A certain industry observer was working last week on another story about Oscar bloggers, and then along came Patrick Goldstein’s thing yesterday in the L.A. Times so who knows? Maybe this other piece might get changed around over said journo’s concerns about not being first or following Goldstein or whatever.

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“Studio publicists say they cater to [Oscar] bloggers because their top executives react hysterically to every little slight they see on the web,” writes “Big Picture” columnist Patrick Goldstein in his current L.A. Times posting. I can testify about the reverse end of this. I’ve just been disinvited to two events I’ve RSVP’d to — in one instance because I’ve run negative postings about a certain big-studio feature, and in another instance because I used some initiative to get myself into an Academy-members screening of an upcoming film. I think it can be said without any particular prejudice that some people really love sloshing around in their emotional bathwater, even when it doesn’t serve their strategic interests.

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There’s concern out there…concern bordering on distress…about what moves L.A. Times‘ Calendar Entertainment editor Betsy Sharkey and senior editor Lennie Maguire are planning to make in order to cover independent films after Kevin Thomas, who’s been reviewing indie releases for the Times for eons, leaves the paper at the end of the year. Sharkey and Maguire didn’t pick up, but the understanding is that the Times won’t be hiring a “new Kevin” and will have to depend on a Dave Kehr-like pinch-hitter (or perhaps a freelancer) to review the releases from Magnolia, IFC, Strand, Cowboy, et. al. Sounds like a fairly simple solution, but I wonder who the contenders are? How about staying with Kevin on a freelance basis? It seems inconceivable that the Times would ignore certain lower-profile indie releases..that they would decide to selectively review most of the smaller films but not all of them…but that’s what some people in the indie-publicist realm are worried about. Daily Calendar editor Alice Short and Deputy Daily Calendar Editor Lee Margulies declined comment.

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Attaboy’s to the principal IFP Spirit Awward nominees, i.e., those with three nominations or more. The big winner was Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale with six — Baumbach for Best Director and Best Screenplay, Jeff Daniels for Best Male Lead, Laura Linney for Best Female Lead, and Jesse Eisenberg (one of the more intriguing young actors out there as well as a very cool, sharp and thoughtful dude to shoot the shit with) for Best Supporting Male performance. Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, Bennett Miller’s Capote, George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck and Tommy Lee Jones’ The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada got four each. Congrats to Team Capote‘s Dan Futterman for his Best Screenplay nomination. And a hearty “good going” to Paul Haggis, Bobby Moresco, Mark R. Harris, Don Cheadle, et., al. over Crash‘s being nominated for Best First Feature.

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The IFP Spirit Award gang has nominated Robin Wright Penn’s brief but pulverizing turn in Rodrigo Garcia’s Nine Lives for a Best Supporting Actress award…all right! Maybe the Academy and the Gurus of Gold prognoticators will listen up and consider this. I went apeshit over her performance in a 10.19 piece.

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I don’t want to make too much of this, but it comes as a jolt that the IFP Sprit Awards nominating committee has given a pat on the back to Hans Petter Moland’s The Beautiful Country by nominating Sabina Murray’s script for a Best First Screenplay award. (Veteran screenwriter Larry Gross also worked on it, no?) Country was so roundly ignored by the media and public alike (or so it seemed) that I’m feeling a bit shocked. I fell hook, line and sinker for The Beautiful Country way back on 4.20.05…not that it mattered.

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It’s evident why David Poland would be miffed at Patrick Goldstein’s just-up column about Oscar bloggers (“Making Oscars a mule race”), but I’m not going to squawk about Goldstein calling me “the Lewis Black of Oscar bloggers.” Plus he compounded whatever impact my anti-Memoirs of a Geisha views may have on the local populace by imprinting my words on wads of actual lumber-mill paper, which, for some people over the age of 45 or so, carries a certain legitmacy that cyber copy lacks. I have to say that I agree with Poland in his dispute with Goldstein over which acronym applies in the matter of a deminishing media enterprise. Goldstein describes himself and the L.A. Times as representatives of MSM...

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IndieWIRE has put up the complete list of competition titles for Sundance ’06 — Dramatic, World Cinema Dramatic, Feature Documentaries and World Cinema Docs. (Hey, three films from that discredited Film Finders list are included! Dito Montiel’s A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, Julian Goldberger’s Hawk Is Dying and Hilary Bourgher’s Stephanie Daley.) Spectrum, Park City at Midnight, and Frontier lineups will be announced Wednesday, 11.30 at 1:00 a.m. eastern (Tuesday, 11.29 at 10pm). The Premiere’s section lineup will be announced on Thursday, 12.1 at 1:00 a.m. eastern (Wednesday, 11.30 at 10 pm). The short film lineup will be released on Monday, 12.5.

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Excellent news on the Best Actress nomination front for The Upside of Anger‘s Joan Allen, whom I went to town for last weekend in a lead Elsewhere feature. Allen is now in sixth place on MCN’s “Gurus of Gold” Best Actress nominee list, right behind non-actress Keira Knightley, who’s been bizarrely favored for some reason because of her looks and coy charm deployment in Pride and Prejudice. Knightley lovers should ask themselves how much better that film would have been with Rachel McAdams, a real actress, playing Knightley’s character. I admit Allen is far behind with only 24 points to Knightley’s 75, and only Thelma Adams and Peter Howell have put her on their lists besides me. All I know is, the top four nominees (Witherspoon, Dench, Huffman, Theron) are untrashable and deserve to be there. But it’s time to...

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Laura Holson’s N.Y. Times story about the value of Steven Spielberg these days (“So, What’s The Spielberg Magic Worth?”) as Universal prepares to buy his creative services via their purchase of DreamWorks can’t be easily answered. What’s the value of a guy whose name automatically spells “quality thrill ride” as far as the general public is concerned? Big value, I’d say. What’s the value of a guy who was at his creative peak from 1974 to 1982, and then briefly bounced back with Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List and then again with Saving Private Ryan and Minority Report? And who may re-surge again (for all I know it may happen with Munich), but who has basically been banging out this and that “commercial” film for years without any apparent interest in becoming...

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Check out this slide show of Mike Russell’s “history of Aeon Flux” strip that ran in the Boston Globe last Sunday. There are infer- ences about the general worthiness of the Charlize Theron-Karyn Kusama movie that Paramount is releasing on 12.2, although there’s an explanation at the end of the Globe slide show that “all snark aside, the author has absolutely no idea how the live-action movie turned out.” (He doesn’t? Kids from Tibet and Afghanistan with their ears to the rails have an “idea” about this.) There will also be a one-page, slightly expanded “CulturePulp cut” of this comic available tonight at midnight on Russell’s CulturePulp.com site.

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Forget that whole Sundance Film Festival ’06 thing I posted in this section a few days ago, and in the main column last Saturday. I’ve now been persuaded that a good portion of the titles I mentioned won’t be at the festival, and that some weren’t even submitted (!). Five or six days ago a friend from the festival circuit sent me a document put together by Film Finders called “Tipped for Sundance,” and it had those 22 films listed. I went for it because (a) the Film Finders people are known to be fairly well connected on a business affairs level, (b) the document was passed along only a few days before the official announcements (the trades will be running the stories this week), (c) the document “looked” superficially reliable — it had production info history, sales contact info and phone numbers for each film — and (d) the combined reputations of Film Finders and the guy who sent me the document convinced me the information was probably jake. And for the most part, it wasn’t.

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Last July 15th I ran a column piece about a very tangy and well-respected redneck race-car movie called The Last American Hero (1973), which was directed and co-written by Lamont Johnson. Hero didn’t do much business and kind of sank beneath the waves after its initial release, and it hadn’t been seen on laser disc or DVD since, and I was pushing for Fox Home Video to think about releasing a DVD now. Hero was loosely based on Tom Wolfe’s legendary 1965 Esquire article about one-time moonshine smuggler and stock-car racer Junior Johnson. Wolfe’s piece was called “The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!” The movie is about a guy named Junior Jackson (Jeff Bridges) who’s more or less content to smuggle illegal hooch until...

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“Well, ya really don’t know much about nobody until ya lend ‘em money or punch ‘em hard.” This is just a mock Rocky Balboa line from that Robert Welkos L.A. Times piece about Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky 6 that ran a week or so ago…but it’s true. You kinda don’t know a person until you lend them money or punch ‘em hard. I would add that the way a person reacts in any kind of heavy-duty, act-now-or-die situation can be revealing. Was it Norman Mailer who wrote that a man never truly knows who his wife is until he meets her in court?

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Newsweek‘s Devin Gordon has seen and written about Peter Jackson’s King Kong (Universal, 12.14), and right off the top he uses the same “I” word I’ve been using to describe Jackson for the last four years. (What columnist would use such a term, after all, if he/she wasn’t unfairly biased against Jackson?) “Some critics will complain that the film’s length is an act of Oscar-drunk hubris,” Gordon allows, “but while Kong may be indulgent, it’s not pretentious. And it’s certainly never dull. Jackson has honored his favorite film in the best possible way: by recapturing its heart-pounding, escapist glee.” Keep in mind that any journalist-critic would be inclined to show politeness (if not outright gratitude) to Jackson for his goodwill gesture of letting the journo-critic get a world-exclusive...

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The New World producer Sarah Green is blowing dubious smoke in a piece by New York Times writer Steve Chagollan about Terrence Malick’s latest film, which New Line is opening on 12.25. “First and foremost we’ve created a love story,” Green declares. “We’re definitely not doing a historical piece. We try to set it properly; we try to give that background and that feeling, but we focus on the love story.” It’s too early to riff about The New World — which is in many ways rapturous and magnificent, by the way — but Green is being truthful only in a partial sense, and in an overall looking- at-the-entire-movie sense her statement is a flat-out crock.

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The timestamp of each WIRED item is now a Permalink, which means each and every item can be summoned as a separate link, and each HE column has been Permalinked also.

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This piece by L.A. Times reporter John Horn about how and why Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha (Columbia, 12.9) was spoken in English is almost…I was going to say “hilarious” but I think “staggering” is a better term. Especially this paragraph: “American moviegoers aren’t terribly keen on subtitles, but in truth that wasn’t the sole reason that Marshall filmed only the opening segment with Japanese dialogue. Had the actors performed the entire movie in the language, the director says, ‘I never would have known what they were saying.’” My God, the sheer, take-it-or-leave-it bluntness of that statement! If that isn’t a compelling reason to film a Japan-based movie in English, I don’t know what would be.

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Defamer‘s Mark Lisanti may be lackadaisical, disorganized or pussy-whipped (he backed out of attending Charles Fleming’s USC class on internet journalism last Monday because his girlfriend told him they had previously-committed-to “plans”), but he’s also got that Los Angeles magazine profile in the current issue, and now he’s got a mention about the piece in the New York Post‘s “Page Six” column. He’s quoted in the Los Angeles article as saying, “People should not care about Lindsay Lohan or Tara Reid, but this is what the cultural tennis ball machine is firing at us. This is what I have to swing at.” Correction: There are lots of different tennis balls coming our way and bouncing all over the fucking place. Lisanti is swinging only at the balls that fit...

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Walk the Line (20th Century Fox) has really caught on. A $28 million haul is being projected for the five-day Thanksgiving holiday, plus a three day projected total is $20 million, a very good hold and very slight drop from the opening weekend total of $22 million. The word-of-mouth is obviously a factor, meaning that the only thing Fox screwed up on was not sneaking it a week before opening. If they’d done that they might’ve had an opening frame of $30 million or so.

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