MSN Goes to the Movies: Dogs Have Their Day at the Golden Globes

BY JEREMY WALKER

BURNING GOLDEN GLOBE QUESTIONS – Did the show’s producers purposefully seat a freaked-out Sally “Happy-Go-Lucky” Hawkins in Alaska so as to siphon her approach to the podium through a gauntlet of Hollywood royalty? When she finally arrived, she arrived, her Best Actress/Comedy or Musical win seeming more like a coronation …Whose idea was it to ask Tom Brokaw to introduce the clip for Best Picture nominee “Frost/Nixon”? Was David Frost unavailable?...How much will ultra-cool Bruce Springsteen’s win for “The Wrestler” contribute to the overall narrative driving Mickey Rourke’s now very real Best Actor campaign?...Do Globes for screenplay, score, director, picture mean a “Slumdog” sweep at the Oscars? I don’t think it was by accident that we kept hearing about what the victories would mean back in Mumbai, which could use some good old fashioned Hollywood love. The Oscars are, after all, a global event.

SUNDANCUS INTERRUPTUS – The latest edition of the film festival Robert Redford founded 25 years ago begins this week, a Darwinian orgy of the newest independent cinema that asks the industry and the journalists that cover it to press “pause” on obsessing over the best of 2008 and to focus for 10 days on the newest of 2009. Enterprising distributors will try to root out the handful of titles able to demonstrate commercial potential against the bulk of the program that, frankly, won’t. Oscar-winner (for Redford’s 1980 masterpiece “Ordinary People”) and Malibu native Timothy Hutton appears in three Sundance ’09 films, while another localneighbor, Pierce Brosnan, will be in Park City to support “The Greatest,” which he stars in and also produced.

Based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis, “The Informers” is a new film fortunate to enjoy a world premiere at Sundance with a domestic distribution deal already in place. Senator Films, whose new president of distribution, Mark Urman, is a festival veteran, will open the movie in New York and LA theatres on April 10. As he did in 2000 with the intrinsically controversial “American Psycho,” Urman is essentially treating the Sundance premiere of “The Informers” as the movie’s first press screening. The stakes are high: as it is easy for any film to fail very publicly in Park City.

If you consider the three big-screen adaptations of novels by Ellis, “Less Than Zero” (more a grab-bag of missed opportunities than a movie), “American Psycho” (essential contemporary American independent cinema) and “The Rules of Attraction” (great soundtrack, weirdly sexy, low-profile cast, troubled, Oscar-winning director), and then look at “The Informers,” you’ll notice the opening credit sequence of the most recent film is the only one that actually bears Ellis’ name as a screenwriter, a credit he shares with Nicholas Jarecki. As with many great Hollywood stories, “The Informers” is set partially in Malibu, so we’ll keep a particularly close eye on it. Could “The Informers” prove to be the important period film that has so far eluded West Coast Generation X? We’ll all know a lot more next week.

In the meantime, if you haven’t seen “American Psycho,” you must, in this order, hit the Netflix, send the kids to grandma’s, power up the plasma, pour yourself a “fine Chardonnay” and watch Christian Bale let ’er rip.

PET PROJECT – Ellen Kuras is the only person to have won the Best Cinematographer prize at Sundance three times. For the last 23 years, between working on other directors’ films, she made her own, which premiered to great acclaim at Sundance last year and is just opening now at Laemmle’s Music Hall in order to capitalize on a likely Oscar nomination for Best Documentary. Lovingly, heartbreakingly made with subject and co-director Thavisouk Phrasavath, “The Betrayal (Nerakhoon) is an unforgettable look at one Laotian family’s survival of personal and political abandonment as they move from their war-torn native country to Brooklyn. Like Golden Globe winner “Waltz With Bashir,” “The Betrayal” is a bright, hard reminder of how war can utterly erase individual identity unless its victims are willing to engage in a wholly new fight to preserve it. It’s also a reminder that besides hosting a great festival, the Sundance Institute also nurtures important films and filmmakers like “The Betrayal” and Kuras, support that is today more vital than ever.