Cinematical

If you can't make it to Park City, Utah, in January for the Sundance Film Festival, don't worry -- Sundance will come to you! Sort of! If you live in one of eight specific cities! Still, it's a good start, and a pretty nifty idea.

They're calling it Sundance Film Festival U.S.A., and it will work like this. On Jan. 28, while the festival is taking place in Utah, eight filmmakers from the fest will travel to theaters around the country to show their movies to local audiences, followed by the customary Q&A. For the local audiences, it will be a decent approximation of what a real Sundance screening is like, minus the insane crowds and absence of parking. Several of the chosen cities are even in snowy climes, so you won't have to miss out on that aspect of Sundance attendance. If you're lucky, for the full effect, maybe you'll even run into a journalist complaining about the weather.

The selected theaters are: Michigan Theater, Ann Arbor, Mich.; Coolidge Corner Theatre, Brookline, Mass.; BAM, Brooklyn, N.Y.; Music Box Theatre, Chicago; Downtown Independent, Los Angeles; Sundance Cinemas, Madison, Wisc.; Belcourt Theatre, Nashville; and Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, San Francisco. Tickets will be sold through the individual theaters. Each location will get a different film, and we won't know what those films are until after the festival announces its programming in December.

Dispatching filmmakers to appear with their movies live and in person is a cool innovation, and a good way to spread the Sundance vibe beyond the confines of Park City. But it makes me wonder if the next logical step is to simply beam the films via satellite to theaters around the country, the way they do with concerts and special events. As big as Sundance is getting, and as small as Park City is staying, I'm glad to see the festival expanding its reach any way it can.

When the comedy gods close a door, they open a window. Ben Stiller and Robert Downey Jr. said no to co-hosting next year's Academy Awards, and we barely had time to grieve for what might have been before we received this news: Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin have said yes. It's official, as detailed in a press release from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Martin has hosted the Oscars twice before, in 2000 and 2002, and he happens to be my personal favorite host. In fact, he's one of my personal favorite entertainers, period. The man is a straight-up genius, the terrible movies he's made in the last decade notwithstanding. Baldwin was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for The Cooler, so he at least knows his way to the theater, and he's currently enjoying a resurgence in popularity thanks to his top-notch work on TV's 30 Rock.

Martin and Baldwin have worked together several times thanks to their longstanding affiliation with Saturday Night Live. Martin has hosted 15 times -- more than anyone else -- and Baldwin is right behind him at 14. In 2006, Baldwin showed up on a Martin episode, followed a few months later by Martin crashing a Baldwin show, both times with Martin trying to kill Baldwin to prevent him from overtaking his hosting record. (In the Oscar press release, Martin says, "I am happy to co-host the Oscars with my enemy Alec Baldwin.") Martin guested on an episode of 30 Rock, and both actors will appear in It's Complicated this Christmas.

I think both of these men, separately and together, are hilarious, so I'm excited about the Oscars (to be held March 7, 2010). What do you think?

In keeping with the evil spirit of the season, allow me to commit a little blasphemy: I enjoyed the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead more than George Romero's original, which I've always felt was pretty clumsy with its social commentary. The remake has nothing on its mind other than gore, laughs, and thrills, and it delivers them in buckets.

That's why I've chosen it as the Free Flick of the Day at SlashControl. 'Tis the season, you know. Sarah Polley and Ving Rhames star as a couple of the suburbanites holed up in a shopping mall as zombies take over the city. These are the speedy zombies of the 21st century, you'll recall, not the lumbering, cow-like creatures of yesteryear. While I agree with the logical argument that you wouldn't be light on your feet if you'd just crawled out of a grave, fast zombies are a lot scarier. I'm just sayin'.

The film has a wicked sense of humor, too. I love the scene of zombie-hunting set to a cheesy lounge-singer version of "Down with the Sickness," and the way the bored refugees kill time by picking off zombies that look like celebrities. If you've got 100 minutes to kill, why not head over to SlashControl and enjoy some late-October mayhem and carnage?

Watch Dawn of the Dead at SlashControl.

Fans of the comedy troupe Broken Lizard won't have to wait much longer to see the group's latest film, The Slammin' Salmon. Variety reports that Anchor Bay has acquired theatrical rights and will open the film on Dec. 11. No word yet on how wide the release will be, but all of Anchor Bay's previous titles (including Spread and While She Was Out) have been fairly limited.

Broken Lizard's first film, Super Troopers, premiered at Sundance in 2001 and earned a cult following when it hit theaters a year later. But the follow-up efforts, Club Dread and Beerfest, failed to recapture the magic. Slammin' Salmon, which premiered at Slamdance this year and subsequently played at South By Southwest, is a return to form. It's about a boxer-turned-restaurateur who bullies his waitstaff into a contest to see who can sell the most food in one night, all to help him repay a gambling debt; Cinematical's Eugene Novikov said the Broken Lizard guys demonstrate their "singular, goofy, off-the-wall sense of humor, refined and sharpened from their prior efforts."

Eugene wasn't alone, either. The film got several other rave reviews at SXSW, nearly all of them calling it the best Broken Lizard film to date. I was afraid the last two disappointments would doom this one, so I'm glad Anchor Bay stepped up and will let audiences see it. Best of all: now you can enjoy the insane magic that is Michael Clarke Duncan's performance. It truly is a thing of beauty.

Here's a quick look at what's opening in limited release this weekend. If they're not playing where you live, keep an eye out as they make the rounds. And if all else fails, there's always DVD....

Ong Bak 2: The Beginning (pictured) is something of a prequel to Ong Bak, the Thai sensation from a few years ago. Tony Jaa, whose multi-discipline fighting skills are beyond impressive, plays a guy who fights a lot. Cinematical's Todd Gilchrist sums up the way many of us felt when we first caught the film at South By Southwest: The fight scenes are spectacular; unfortunately, the plot that holds them together is incomprehensible and takes itself too seriously. At Rotten Tomatoes, the critics are almost evenly split between yea and nay, with the only question being whether the awesomeness of the fights is enough to compensate for the dullness of the rest of it. Playing on 10 screens in New York, L.A., San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, and Washington D.C.

Antichrist is an art-house horror film from Lars Von Trier, starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a grieving couple to whom some supernatural and terrible things happen. It's been appalling audiences since it premiered at Cannes this spring. The critics all seem to agree that it's repellent, grisly, unsettling, and hard to watch. Where they part company -- about evenly down the middle, so far -- is whether that's good or bad. Playing on one screen each in L.A., New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. It will also be available through some Video On Demand systems starting Oct. 28.

There's an Eric Snider who writes about music and movies for a paper in Florida, and an Eric Snider who developed the Solitaire game that was ubiquitous on computers in the 1990s, and I've occasionally been mistaken for both of them. My lot in life is easy compared to someone named, for example, Harry Potter. London's Daily Mail has an amusing story about one such fellow, an unlucky lad who also happens to have a scar on his forehead (not lightning-shaped, though) and is the same age, 20, as Daniel Radcliffe, who plays the boy wizard in the movies.

Harry Potter was 9 years old when the first Harry Potter book came out, and what began as a silly coincidence became a major annoyance as the series' popularity grew. (As big a deal as Pottermania is in the United States, I understand it's even bigger in the U.K.) He says he has trouble whenever he fills out a job application, and he had to show his girlfriend his passport when he first met her because she didn't believe that was really his name. On the other hand, his girlfriend's name is Philippa, so I'm not sure who's really worse off here.

Oh, and he says: "I've heard all the puns about my wand." (Unrelated fun Harry Potter game: When you read the books, mentally replace every use of the word "wand" with "wang." It never gets old!)

The newspaper says that while fictional Harry Potter got his scar in a battle with Voldemort, the real "Mr Potter ran into a lamppost aged 15." Why it matters that the lamppost was 15 years old, I don't know. How would they even know that??

You may have heard about Bobcat Goldthwait's current film, World's Greatest Dad, possibly from all the raving various people at Cinematical have done about it. It's an outrageously dark comedy -- but that should be no surprise if you've seen any of Bobcat's previous films, including Sleeping Dogs Lie, which I've chosen as AOL/SlashControl's free flick of the day.

Sleeping Dogs Lie premiered under its original title, Stay, at Sundance in 2006, where its perverse subject matter was taboo even by Sundance standards. It's about a young woman who has fallen in love with a guy she hopes to marry, but she's not sure whether she can ever tell him about a certain embarrassing moment in her sexual history. It involves a dog, that's all I'm sayin'. Finally she takes the plunge and tells her boyfriend, and that's when the squirm-inducing comedy really takes off.

Not surprisingly, Goldthwait had a hard time finding a distributor for the movie. The best it ever got was a two-week run on six screens, grossing $15,745 in the U.S., but another $622,000 internationally. (Apparently this sort of thing plays better in foreign countries. Make of that what you will.) It's obviously not for everyone, but if you like bawdy, clever, shocking comedy, it's worth watching. It will almost certainly make you feel better about whatever shameful secrets you have in your own past.

Watch Sleeping Dogs Lie at SlashControl.

A dizzying array of elements are involved in creating a movie poster -- everything from contractual requirements dictating the size of the stars' names to psychological studies on which colors and fonts produce which emotions in viewers. But Ron Henriques at Latino Review suggests there might be more to it. In a very amusing article -- or an infuriating one, depending on how seriously you take it -- he shows multiple examples of what he considers racist "rules" in the way minorities are shown in posters.

For example, Henriques says it's only OK for a minority (he's mostly talking about African Americans) to brandish a gun in a movie poster if they're cops, secret agents, or FBI. What's more, he says, the posters tend to make it clear that the person is in law enforcement, either through costume elements or in the text on the poster, lest observers think he's a criminal. (White people, he implies, are allowed to hold guns on posters without being identified as cops.) "Perhaps this will change in time if the powers that be will get over their fears that minorities brandishing weapons on a simple movie poster is going to make their kids go postal," Henriques writes, making it hard to tell whether he's exaggerating for the sake of humor or whether he really believes that that's what movie marketers believe.

Another of his observations: Minorities brandishing weapons often have their faces partially obscured from the poster. He shows American Gangster, Smokin' Aces, and Matrix Reloaded as examples; in each case, the black actors' faces are cut off just above the nose. But in fairness, so are the white actors' faces.

When it comes to making movies, few things are more subjective than horror. There's nothing that scares everyone, and even if your movie is about something that most people find frightening, that's no guarantee you'll depict it in a way that earns goosebumps. Meanwhile, plenty of good filmmakers have produced terror with things that audiences wouldn't have thought would scare them. (Before Psycho, was anyone ever afraid of showers?) So it's a crapshoot, basically.

Still, some horror films have had villains that they must have known -- or should have known -- wouldn't be scary, no matter how skilled the execution. (And the lousy execution of some of these didn't help.) The Child's Play films got intentionally goofy later in the series, but in the beginning Chucky the murderous doll was actually supposed to be scary, despite being 18 inches tall and weighing only a few pounds. Then there was the title character of Leprechaun, also diminutive and silly, AND he didn't even speak with an Irish accent! If I'm going to watch a movie about a leprechaun, that leprechaun had damn well better sound Irish. I'm just sayin'.

Or remember Darkness Falls, where the supernatural villain was the tooth fairy? Or the evil genie in the Wishmaster films, putting ironic, malevolent twists on people's wishes? Or Julian Sands' time-traveling he-witch in Warlock? The killer snowman in Jack Frost? What's your vote for the silliest horror villain? One of these, or someone else? Let us know in the comments.

Last week it was widely reported that after providing a successful rewrite of the Spider-Man 4 script, Gary Ross had been approached by Columbia Pictures to rewrite the screenplay for the spin-off film, Venom, and to direct it himself. This was noteworthy for a variety of reasons, not least of which was the fact that Ross' writing-and-directing résumé, which includes Pleasantville and Seabiscuit, wouldn't suggest he was the guy for a comic-based summer blockbuster about an alien symbiote that turns people evil.

But now The Playlist says that, according to an unnamed but well-placed source, whatever Ross is doing with Venom will have to wait -- first he's going to direct a Matt Helm movie. The source says it's supposed to go into production next summer, which would push the shooting of Venom into 2011 at the earliest.

Matt Helm, a badass spy character created by Donald Hamilton, appeared in 27 novels between 1960 and 1993. Dean Martin played Helm in four movies in the 1960s, but they were campy rather than hard-edged. There was a short-lived TV series in 1975, too. As recently as this summer, Steven Spielberg was considering making a new Helm film, before deciding to make Harvey instead.