The Screengrab

The 2008 Sundance Film Festival, the thirtieth annual mass screening on the slopes, opens on January 18, which means that we are fast approaching a yearly ritual near and dear to the hearts of all serious filmlovers — the annual blossoming of critical think pieces arguing that Sundance has "sold out," that "the magic is gone", and that there's no such thing as independent film anymore, if there ever was. (It's like the annual debate over the San Diego Comic-Con, except that there are people who care. I think.)

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You really have to hand it to Oliver Stone; whatever you might think of the quality of his movies, he sure does know how to rile people. He virtually invented Vietnam revisionism with Platoon, pissing off all the people who wanted to buy into the Rambo vision of a mighty America sold out by craven politicians; he irritated pretty much everybody with JFK and was practically elevated to Satanhood with Natural Born Killers; he drove conservatives batty with his sympathetic portrayal of Fidel Castro in Comandante; and his World Trade Center irked people of every political stripe. After returning to Vietnam for Pinkville (a dramatic retelling of the My Lai massacre), his next rumored project will be a documentary biography, in the Comandante mode, of the hugely controversial Iranian president Ahmadinejad. It’s a move likely to enrage conservatives in the U.S., but right-wingers in Iran are already furious — they’ve hated Stone since he directed Alexander, a film about the Macedonian emperor who is reviled by Persians as a hated conquerer. As the Guardian reports, conservative newspapers in Tehran are already going buggy at the idea of their beloved leader being immortalized on film by a man who already directed The Doors, a film about "one of America's perverted and half-mad singers; someone who urinated on the head of his fans during his concerts and enjoyed doing so." (The article also provides a helpful side-by-side comparison of the careers of Ahmadindejad and Jim Morrison.) — Leonard Pierce

We're going to be up to our noses in year-end lists soon, and you can either run and hide or go into training. By asking five critics to each name a high point, a low point, and a "surprise" from the past year, the Guardian has neatly offered what amounts to a quick, anticipatory cracking of the knuckles before everyone heads over to the main track. It's nice to see some love for the beautiful Ian Curtis biopic Control and, for some of us, reassuring to see some doubts surface about the greatness of The Lives of Others, the German film that may just have been the first wildly overrated big release of the year. Other opinions that, whether you or I agree with them or not, seem to be on the faster track to becoming conventional wisdom: No Country for Old Men is the movie of the Coens' career, if not of the year, Wes Anderson needs a new act, Quentin Tarantino needs to refuel, and if you need someone to play a pained figure of American integrity of a certain age, you ought to ask Tommy Lee Jones first. Lovably perverse contrarian opinion of the year: Mel Gibson isn't just an anti-Semitic fruitcake, he's also a hell of a director! (Uh, if you say so. Under the right circumstances, I'd still pay to see him act.) — Phil Nugent

The productions of perhaps the two most anticipated comic book adaptations of all time — Watchmen and The Dark Knight — have both kicked into high gear, and there’s plenty of geeky content to go around before the movies actually end up in the can.  (Try not to think too hard about the fact that Dark Knight draws only its title, and nothing else, from Frank Miller’s stunning Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, or that Watchmen is being directed by a guy who turned another, far lesser Frank Miller book into a homoerotic big-screen video game.) In the Guardian, film blogger Sean Dodson provides a handy rundown of the astonishingly large number of Dark Knight teaser websites that have sprung up in the last few weeks (including ones for the Gotham Police Department, the local newspaper and a creepily amusing recruitment site for the Joker’s henchmen). Meanwhile, Zack Snyder himself provides some photos from the back lot of Watchmen, which contain lots of goodies for longtime fans of the comic (lots of characters, locations, companies, and other cultural references to the book are present in the background of the shots), although the set designer doesn’t seem to realize that Grain Belt beer has never been a big seller in New York.
— Leonard Pierce