Oscar Nominee-a-Thon

If you take a look at the box-office grosses for this year's four Academy Award Best Picture nominees, it would seem likely that the average American hasn't seen many of them. But now is your chance to catch up before the envelopes are opened on Sunday, Feb. 22.

On Saturday, Feb. 21, the AMC theater chain is offering a nationwide all-day marathon of the five Oscar nominees (Utah's only location is in Layton). Beginning at 10:30 a.m., the theater will show Milk, The Reader, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Slumdog Millionaireand Frost/Nixon for one $30 ticket. And you'll get a bottomless bucket of popcorn to carry you through the day.

If you want to do even more prepping for the ceremony -- and get perhaps an unbeatable advantage in your personal for-entertainment-purposes-only Oscar pool -- check out the programs of nominated Live Action and Animated shorts beginning this Friday (Feb. 13) at the Tower Theatre. (Scott Renshaw)

Film Review: Twilight

[Teen Vamps] Compared to a lot of other much-loved books, Stephenie Meyer's Twilight seemed like a perfect candidate for cinematic interpretation. After all, there's little about the story that couldn't be improved upon by removing Meyer’s writing.

Simmer down, Edward-ians. I recognize the appeal of the basic premise Meyer created for her literary phenomenon; I give her props for creating both a love story and a complex mythology with uniquely fascinating elements. But actually hiking through the author's mountains of exposition and her clumsy prose? Yikes.

So there’s much to be said for giving that story a platform where the visual side can take over. And that story remains the same: Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), a solitary 16-year-old, moves from Arizona to live with her single father (Billy Burke) in the drizzly small town of Forks, Wash. There she meets Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), a mysteriously dreamy high-school classmate whose initial expressions of disdain towards her mask deeper feelings. See, he’s got a secret to hide, and a side of himself that he fears …

Aw, c’mon, let’s not pretend it’s a “spoiler.” Edward and his “family” are a clan of vampires with a personal moral code that precludes feeding on humans, and the heart of the story is the tension in the romance between Bella and Edward. Will she abandon her humanity to be with him eternally? Can they ever consummate their love? As plot devices go for keeping romantic heroes separated, this one’s a humdinger, and director Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen) and screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg (TV’s Dexter) do a terrific job of translating it to the screen. The scenes between Stewart and Pattinson really sizzle, including a drawn-out prelude to a first kiss that should have audiences shrieking with glee. When the focus is squarely on this forbidden love, Twilight proves surprisingly potent.

Unfortunately, there’s also the part of the story that’s a supernatural thriller. Here, Hardwicke either had a seriously goofy vision for how vampire behavior would actually look, or her special effects team needed to be fired mid-production. The combination of funky super-speed effects and stylized slow-motion do little to convey the graceful movements of natural predators, and the leaping wire-work doesn’t rise to the level of a community theater production of Peter Pan. The producers clearly hired Hardwicke for the human part of the Twilight story, and that’s pretty much all she delivers.

Also, maybe that’s enough. Her casting proves uniformly superb, from the two leads, to Burke as Bella’s laconic police-officer dad, to Anna Kendrick as Bella’s giggly best friend. Hardwicke and Rosenberg grasp both the mundane and operatic elements of Bella’s teenage life, and they convey Meyer’s singular way of exploring temptation and moral choices. Twilight the movie knows what to keep from the books—and what it has the good fortune to be able to discard. (Scott Renshaw)

Zack & Miri: Porntastic!

[Film] Lost in the semi-uproar over Larry Miller's Megaplex Theaters opting to not carry Zack & Miri Make a Porno this weekend: Someone's actually paying attention on the job!

Back in 2006, despite months of industry buzz and pre-notoriety for the cowboys-in-love flick Brokeback Mountain, the Megaplex just let that sucker in and then pulled it ... heh, heh. If you're, say, working in some sector of the film industry, even at a Utah theater chain, shouldn't you be aware of what's going on in the damn film industry at the moment? Just sayin.'

Megaplex Theaters: Punching the clock and looking out for you ... finally. (Bill Frost)

It's the Piano, Man

[Film] It's not often outside of Sundance time that Salt Lake City audiences get a chance to see the star of a movie they've just watched. So should we sniff at the opportunity if the star in question just happens to be an inanimate object?

The documentary Note by Note -- following the year-long process of creating a single Steinway & Sons concert grand piano (this one designated L1037) -- opens today at the Broadway Centre Cinemas. And once viewers have had a chance to watch the artisans put the instrument together, they'll get to see and hear the fruits of their labors, as Daynes Music sponsors special performance/Q&A sessions featuring the one and only L1037 piano itself. Utah Symphony principal keyboardist Jason Hardink and Gina Bachauer competitor Song Choi will be featured at the 7 p.m. performances of Note by Note tonight (June 20) and tomorrow (June 21). Sorry, but the L1037 doesn't do autographs. (Scott Renshaw)

Oscar: I've Got Your Prediction Right *Here*

[Film] This Sunday morning (Feb. 24) at 9:30 a.m., I'll be making my mostly-annual appearance as part of a pre-Oscars panel for Chris Vanocur's On the Record on ABC-4. I'm not sure why Chris keeps inviting me back, considering the way I inevitably turn into a curmudgeon about handicapping this film industry back-slapping party.

Don’t get me wrong--this year more than any other year, the Oscars ceremony served a useful purpose, in that the prospect of a picket line on the Kodak Theatre red carpet probably ended the writers' strike. But as I wrote a couple of years ago, I'm not the biggest fan of the emphasis placed on the Academy Awards. Additionally, I never win Oscar pools, for the same reason that sports writers never win NCAA basketball tournament pools: We know the subject too well, and over-think the bloody thing, so that we never pick the upset that someone else picks because they really liked the dress that Kiera Knightley wore in Atonement.

So I’ll join Chris’ panel because it will give me an opportunity to talk about the movies I love. And because my mother raised me to be a good guest, I'll answer when he asks who I think is going to win. I'm just not going to care too much when I'm wrong, so don't use me as the source in your pool.
Except for Live Action Short Film. Tanghi Argentini's got that one in the bag. Book it. (Scott Renshaw)

Sundance Gone, But Good Documentaries Still in Town

[Post Fest] The sun has officially set on Sundance, but that doesn't mean you won't be able to watch a good documentary or two until next year.

The Salt Lake Film Society is still pumping out relevant and though-provoking films for free right here in town.

Tonight at the Downtown library there will be a screening of the award winning documentary A Walk to Beautiful which follows five Ethiopian women born with physical disfigurements in their struggle for acceptance in their own communities. The screening will be tonight Mon. Jan 28 at the City Library auditorium at 7:oo pm. It will include a discussion with local activists as well as some of the producers of the film.

There will be another feelgood documentary at the city library this Wednesday at 6:30 pm, when the movie Freedom from the Abuse of Power: Torture and Unlawful Imprisonment is shown. This one is a snapshot of our country's recent unpleasantness with secret prisons and extraordinary rendition. University of Utah Professor Tim Chambless will lead a discussion on the legality and ethics of torture in the world, after the movie.

Sure they might not be the kind of movies your looking for if you're in a Weekend at Bernie's kinda mood, but if you are feeling like you want to grapple with some of the most challenging issues of our times then they are well worth checking out, and you don't have to drive to Park City. (Eric S. Peterson)

When Movies (Besides Ones Directed by Joel Schumacher) Make You Hurl

[Film] In non-Sundance-related news...

According to a thrilling nonstory/infotainment piece by CNN, the movie Cloverfield has many people complaining about the motion-sickness caused by the hand-held aspect of the film. In fact, this situation is so dire that one IMDB user had to leave after only 20 minutes (the story actually cites this board-user).

After some journalistic research (ie combing more online discussion boards), I found that this reaction is not uncommon--which is going to affect peoples' decisions on whether to see the movie.

It's a shame too, because people SHOULD see the movie. I'm not going to review it, but it's unlike anything I've seen in a long time--especially in an age where sci-fi movies, novel by nature, have become increasingly familiar. Now, all that innovation is going to be negated by the fact that the movie makes people sick (aka the movie about a vomit monster who comes to vomit town and vomits all over the vomit people who are already inundated with vomit because the vomit pipe line burst*).

Plus, the only people who complain about shaky cam are old.

*Thanks Lauren (Ryan Bradford)

Sundance: The Extra "R" is for "Really Lame"

[Film Fest] Day Four is when my tolerance for utterly unredeemable crap at Sundance vanishes entirely. I'll start to bail out on the movies with that stench of "I had a DV cam and a burning desire to write a terrible script." Usually I last at least 30 minutes, hoping against hope that sometime around Plot Point #1 (read up on your Syd Field Screenwriting for Dummies, boys and girls), something interesting will happen.

North Starr did not invite me to make it to that magic half-hour mark. I knew I was in trouble when the film opened with a dream sequence, the filmmaking equivalent of “I really don’t know how to start my movie.” It got hilariously worse with a conversation between two African-American gentlemen – one of them an aspiring rapper, apparently, the other his “homey” – which appeared to be constructed out of a hip-hop-themed Mad Libs: “Yo, you packin’ a [street slang for gun]?” Apparently writer-director Matthew Stanton never saw Airplane!’s two jive-talking passengers, because he has re-made that scene as though it were not meant to be funny. After our protagonist flees Houston, having witnessed the murder of his pal, he wanders down a road, sits under a tree, smokes a cigarette and begins writing rap lyrics describing the scene we just endured – all in the course of a single static shot. I was done.

I have now spent more time writing about this movie than I spent watching it. (Scott Renshaw)

Sundance: Flaws of Distraction

[Film Fest] It's early yet. I keep telling myself this: Only three full days down, six more to go. That's plenty of time for a gem to turn up. Don't panic. It's early yet.

For the last several years, I've come to depend on discovering at least one or two films destined for my year-end top 10 list: Napoleon Dynamite in 2004, Kung Fu Hustle and Murderball in 2005, Brick and Half Nelson in 2006, Once and My Kid Could Paint That last year. That’s a lot of pressure to put on the festival, and maybe even a lot to put on myself. What if the one film I can’t quite schedule this year turns out to be “the one?”

While the Documentary Competition has delivered at least a couple of solidly worthy efforts – Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired and Bigger, Stronger, Faster* -- the Dramatic Competition has thus far been characterized by interesting failures and decent films with at least one glaring flaw. In the former category, we have something like Sleep Dealer, a science-fiction allegory with a killer premise: In the near future, the border between Mexico and the United States has been completely shut off, but immigrant labor still performs many tasks remotely by plugging into “nodes” installed in their bodies and becoming the virtual eyes and hands of robot construction workers, nannies, etc. Director/co-screenwriter Alex Rivera has some clever fun with his premise, but the main characters – a rural immigrant to the big city, a writer who sells her memories on a sort of existential eBay, and a Mexican-American guilty about selling out his heritage – aren’t nearly interesting enough. I like my social satire with at least a little more convincing humanity.

On the “glaring flaw” side, we have stuff like The Wackness (too undisciplined), Ballast (too minimalist) and the hilariously named Good Dick. Go ahead, say it once without snickering like an 11-year-old, I dare you. The film itself is about a clerk at an independent video store (Jason Ritter) who becomes obsessed with a customer (Marianna Palka, who also wrote and directed) who always rents porn. The relationship demands a whole hell of a lot of suspension of disbelief, but it’s almost kind of interesting – until the underlying cause of the woman’s intimacy issues is revealed. When Tom Arnold appears in the movie, you can safely assume that it is about to go off the rails. And in this case, not for the usual reason that Tom Arnold sends your movie off the rails. (Scott Renshaw)

Sundance: Ain't That America?

[Film Fest] Notwithstanding my assertion in a City Weekly feature that Sundance was growing ever more international in its thinking, this is still first and foremost an American film festival. How can you tell? Maybe titles like American Son, American Teen, An American Soldier (re-titled The Recruiter since the printing of the film guide).

But it’s not just the titles that are as American as Mom, apple pie and John Mellencamp-scored Chevy commercials. The filmmakers this year seem to be asking what we are all about as a nation during this turbulent time, and they come up with a variety of interesting answers. The documentaries The Recruiter and Secrecy both address controversial current-events topics, but from distinct angles. In Edet Belzberg’s The Recruiter, we meet Houma, La.-based Army recruiter Staff Sgt. Clay Usie, who manages to keep pulling in new potential soldiers even in a time of war. The first half of the film, which follows Usie as he befriends and mentors four teenagers before basic training, provides a fascinating look at a man utterly committed to his mission – to the extent that he makes unsettling overtures to the brother of a recently killed-in-action National Guardsman. Usie’s such a terrific character that the film loses a lot of momentum when it shifts gears to follow those four recruits through their basic training. The footage is eye-opening, but the narrative becomes more about the mechanics of what they do than why they do it.

Peter Galison and Robb Moss’ Secrecy doesn’t traffic in Staff Sgt. Usie’s brand of patriotic moral certitude – though it certainly allows some who do to speak their minds. The filmmakers wind their way through a variety of issues related to the Bush administration’s clampdown on the availability of information, touching on both the perils and the advantages of keeping secrets. But the most fascinating element is a through-line involving the 1948 crash of a B-29 bomber, and the subsequent Supreme Court case that became a landmark “state secrets” case. Even as it touches on obvious security vs. democracy questions, it also puts a human face on what happens when an institution doesn’t consider itself accountable to anyone.

And it’s also the human face that elevates one of the festivals best documentaries thus far: Christopher Bell’s Bigger Stronger Faster*. The one-time bodybuilder clearly has the Morgan Spurlock model in mind as he makes himself the star of an investigation of steroids in American society that could have been titled Super-Duper Size Me. Yet while Bell has a showman’s sense for making his subject matter thoroughly entertaining, he takes his story in a surprisingly affecting direction. Focusing on the steroid-fueled lives of his two brothers – one an occasional pro wrestler, the other a bodybuilder and high school football coach – Bell does not instantly and obviously demonize steroids. Instead, he asks what it is about our culture that makes us so willing to do absolutely anything to get an advantage. The answers he finds makes it hard to imagine that any pro sports league policy or Federal law will dissuade a populace constantly reminded that they’re never good enough. U! S! A! U! S! A! (Scott Renshaw)

Sundance: So Much Drama

[Film Fest] In a number of ways, the American Dramatic Competition is the centerpiece of the Sundance Film Festival. It is here that we find the new filmmaking discoveries. It is at these screenings where we see anxious agents, buyers and studio executives hoping to be the first ones to say to Filmmaker X, “We want to be in the [Filmmaker X] business.” This is something people in the movie industry actually have said, apparently. I don’t know how anybody does anything in Hollywood with a straight face.

Many of these Dramatic Competition films are “small” and “intimate,” by which we actually mean “artistically interesting but you can bet nobody will make a dime off of them.” Ballast, from writer-director Lance Hammer, comes from that school of minimalist Americana that prominently features non-professional actors, rural locations and semi-improvised dialogue. The connection between the main characters – Lawrence (Michael J. Smith, Sr.), a 35-year-old man traumatized by the suicide of his twin brother; and Marlee (Tarra Riggs), the working single mother of 12-year-old James – is only gradually revealed, and watching their mutual dependence develop is always at least somewhat engaging. It simply never makes the leap to fully engrossing, a problem that might have been more easily overcome if the muttered dialogue weren’t borderline inaudible half the time. Note to directors: If you’re cutting costs by hiring amateur actors, splurge on a boom mic or two.

Like Ballast, Neil Abramson’s American Son deals with African-American main characters, and the limited opportunities available in a bleak town. In this case, however, the bleak town took on a particular resonance, because it happened to be the bleak town in which I grew up: Bakersfield, California. The main character, Mike (Nick Cannon), has just completed Marines boot camp, and is on Thanksgiving weekend leave in “Bako” before a deployment to Iraq – a fact he has chosen to keep hidden from his family and friends. Abramson and screenwriter Eric Schmid hit a little close to home in their portrayal of Central Valley tedium, which captivated me more than stuff like the tense relationship between Mike and his white best friend. I just know that American Son understands what it’s like to be in a place where it feels like driving around and getting high are the only recreational opportunities. Come to think of it, I guess co-star Tom Sizemore – who was arrested while shooting the movie there – understands that pretty well, too.

The Last Word is at least nominally more of a comedy than a drama, though how funny you find it may depend a lot on how much less contrived the whole thing seems to you than it did to me. Evan Merck (Wes Bentley) is a struggling writer who (get this!) makes a living writing profound suicide notes for other people. Then while attending the funeral of one of his clients, he meets the guy’s sister Charlotte (Winona Ryder), who immediately (get this!) decides she’s crazy about this anonymous stranger who claims to have been a college friend of her dead, long-estranged brother. Ray Romano provides a surprisingly effective supporting performance as a depressive composer who befriends Evan, and there are some individually spot-on moments (like the puzzled look on loner Evan’s face when he actually hears his phone ring). But so much of the plotting subsequently starts to hinge on ridiculous coincidences, and the performances are too mannered to allow the subject matter’s real sadness to come through. “It’s execution-driven,” Evan improvises when Charlotte discovers a note-in-progress than he claims to be a screenplay with a lame undercover-cop plot. When you’re trying to make a feel-good suicide comedy, that’s true in spades. (Scott Renshaw)

Sundance: It's the Filmmaking, Stupid

[Film Fest] People have a hard time distinguishing a good idea from a good movie.

It's easy for a professional film critic to knock the acumen of laypeople; it's like bashing a tax attorney for not knowing how to perform a hysterectomy. The difference is that average moviegoers think they can perform that metaphorical surgery. They know what they like, and they mistake that affection for a measure of filmmaking quality.

Young@Heart director Stephen Walker has a great subject: A Massachusetts-based choral group made up of senior citizens, whose repertoire consists entirely of punk, rock and blues songs. It’s also a subject that practically directs itself if you let it: You point your camera at a bunch of spunky septua-/octo-/nonagenarians belting out “I Wanna Be Sedated,” and let the “isn’t that cute” factor do all the heavy lifting. Everything the story has to offer – the shift in meaning of certain songs when performed by those facing mortality; the saucy energy of 92-year-old expatriate Brit Eileen Hall – has nothing to do with Walker’s facility with the material. And it’s hard not to look at the whole project as vaguely condescending, since with the exception of returning member Fred Knittle – who delivers a haunting version of Coldplay’s “Fix You” while hooked up to oxygen – no one really can sing a lick. They’re all full of life and fun, and that’s terrific, and there are some sad events, and that might make you cry. And the movie says nothing but that.

Compare that to what Marina Zenovich does with Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. Admittedly, she has the kind of subject that packed an early-morning press screening with movie writers: Revisiting the 1977-78 statutory rape case that sent the celebrated director into exile in France. But she’s done some hardcore reporting, and made stylistic choices that give her every revelation an added punch, whether of drama or (sometimes) comedy. Zenovich turns in not just a fascinating piece of talking-head cinematic journalism, but a real piece of filmmaking. (Scott Renshaw)

Sundance: Black and White

[Film Fest] Because Sundance is what it is, the festival has issues. And I mean that in the sense that the movies are often either overtly or tacitly about something significant. Last year, you couldn’t swing a dead cat in Park City without hitting a movie about Iraq. And then throughout the rest of the year, you could swing several hundred dead cats in any of the theaters where Iraq movies were showing, and not hit a single person. Go figure.

In one of those odd confluences that seems to happen every year, my day at Sundance revolved around issues of black and white. The Black List, a documentary by director Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and erstwhile film critic Elvis Mitchell, is simply a series of interviews with high-profile African-Americans in a variety of fields: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Chris Rock, Colin Powell, Toni Morrison and Slash are among the 20 subjects. Shot a la Errol Morris’ Interrotron – the interviewees face the camera, the questions to which they’re responding never heard – it only grazes the surface of each person in the course of trying to cover a lot of ground.

But it’s positively profound compared to Katrina Browne’s competition documentary Traces of the Trade, in which the filmmaker confronts the revelation that one of her ancestors was one of America’s most prolific slave-traders in 18th-century New England. Taking nine relatives on a tour of Ghana and Cuba, Browne simultaneously takes us all on a journey through breast-beating white liberal guilt, with nary a single stylistic hook or insightful observation. Well, maybe one insightful observation: When a distant cousin comments to Browne that he’s afraid the whole endeavor is becoming “self-indulgent,” you want to hit a buzzer, Groucho-style, and congratulate him for hitting on the secret word.

An entirely different kind of black and white anchors the fascinating Frontier category entry Fear(s) of the Dark. This French-produced omnibus project brings together a handful of talented graphic artists for a series of animated shorts, all focused around horror or the supernatural, and all in shades of black, white and gray. As you’d expect of such a project, the entries are hit and miss, but two of them are stellar: Charles Burns’ chronicle of a nerd with unique girlfriend troubles, and Richard McGuire’s brilliant, dialogue-free story of a man seeking refuge from a blizzard in a haunted house. Creepy and stylistically vibrant, they’re the kind of filmmaking you want to see at a festival like this. And no “issues” are required. (Scott Renshaw)

Sundance Day 2: Numb Faces, Dead Languages

[Film Fest] Park City is a stupid place for a world-class film festival.

Allow me to clarify that: Park City is a beautiful place. But it is at high altitude. It is January. It is approximately 8 degrees. It is snowing. The road conditions suck. And there will be thousands more people than the city was designed to support crowding those roads.

But here we all are, hoping that the quality of the films and the cinephile camaraderie make it all worthwhile. For a journalist, that could mean a dodgy first day, as the press screenings for the competition films generally don’t precede the first public screening. We get a shot at less buzzed-about entries, like the Spectrum category documentary The Linguists. It follows social scientists David Harrison and Gregory Anderson as they attempt to document the world’s dying languages: the native Siberian tongue Chulym; Native American Indian languages with speakers remaining in the single digits. At just 64 minutes, it doesn’t quite have enough time to develop its main characters, but their enthusiasm for their mission – including discovering a counting system improbably based on 20 and 12 simultaneously – helps carry the narrative.

And after all, isn’t the new and improbable what we’re all here plowing through the snow to discover? (Scott Renshaw)

Daffy for Dutcher

[Media] With the release of Falling, the SLC press is tripping over itself to pimp "father of Mormon Cinema" Richard Dutcher. He's everywhere this week, but City Weekly had him back in October. As for the reviews of Falling, they go like this:

"It's dark!"

"It's really dark!"

"It's really fetchin' dark!"

"Daaark!"

A dark peek at Falling:



(Bill Frost)

Not Showing at Sundance

[Voting] Utah's Bruce Funk is a movie star. The former Emery County clerk whose questioning of voting machines led to his ouster from office is profiled in a new movie, Uncounted, put out by those who want to convince you that elections are being stolen.

The folksy, soft spoken Funk was featured in City Weekly articles after he tussled with Emery County and state election officials over electronic voting machines in 2006 (Ghost in the Machine, and Election Defection). In Uncounted, he is profiled as one of several “heroes” the film tells us have stood up against dark forces trying to deny Americans their right to vote.

Uncounted is showing in a few California theaters this month. It will also be shown at the Durango Film Festival in Colorado. Director David Earnhardt, a documentary filmmaker, is also hawking DVD copies on a Website, UncountedTheMovie.com.

The film’s premise isn’t new among voting conspiracy buffs: the presidential election in 2004 and congressional elections in 2006 were stolen, and more fraud “looms as an unbridled threat to the outcome of the 2008 election.”

It's hard to watch the film and not become a little convinced there is indeed a conspiracy. Uncounted has all the plot lines—including a segment about a man who invented the world’s greatest voting machine … only to die in a mysterious accident before his democracy-saving company could get off the ground.

Uncounted also includes the story of a computer expert who told a congressional committee that he was paid by a prominent George W. Bush supporter to create voting machine software that could switch votes from one candidate to another.

But the film’s most convincing segments aren’t those devoted to the alleged terrors of computerized voting. Rather, the film works best when it rehashes the well worn stories of voters—mostly poor or minority—who appear to have been systematically denied a vote during elections of 2004 and 2006.

There are the stories of would-be voters turned away at the polls through what seem like obvious attempts at voter suppression (like having just one polling place in poor parts of town or telling people to vote in the wrong neighborhood). There is the famous 2004 Ohio exit polling showing victory for Al Gore.

Some anti-voting machine buffs had trouble sticking to their conspiracy theory after the 2006 mid-term elections, which were won by Democrats. (The Democrats shouldn’t have won if the Bushies had fixed the elections through friends in the voting machine companies.)

Uncounted’s answer to the dilemma: Democrats would have won the 2006 elections by much wider margins had the fix not been in. The film examines polling data and examples of vote counting irregularities to support the idea.

Utah’s Funk serves as a bookend to the story. To recap: Funk was the man in charge of elections in Emery County when new electronic voting machines were delivered. Funk noticed the machines giving weird readouts and called in computer experts to check it out.

The geeks who Funk brought to town were from Black Box Voting, a group of prominent electronic voting critics, and Black Box splashed their visit to rural Utah all over the Internet. It was the first time a government elections official had allowed Black Box to hack into an official voting machine and Black Box claimed it had exposed vulnerabilities in the Utah boxes. (Utah state election officials, who purchased the machines for counties, denied the claims.)

Soon after the episode, executives of the voting machine company were in town and meeting privately with Emery County commissioners and state election officials. At the end of the meetings, Funk was out on his ear. There is still debate about whether or not Funk voluntarily resigned.

In the year since the Funk fiasco, several counties across the country have scrapped voting machines—some even returning to paper ballots—citing security flaws like those Black Box claimed to have found in the Emory County machines.

To the folks who made Uncounted, the Funk saga is evidence of nefarious private corporations taking over our democracy. One of the film’s final scenes is Funk, presumably at his ranch, tending animals and looking out into the sunset. (Ted McDonough)

The Trolley Report

[Film] Your art house options have officially been reduced: Regency Theatres' Lyndon Golin confirmed today that effective immediately, the Trolley Square theater has shuttered two of its four screens, and the theater will close entirely effective the end of January. Not even regular sold-out showings of Juno were able to save the struggling theater from a rough overall year for independent film at the box office. That leaves the Salt Lake Film Society's Broadway Centre and Tower Theatre as the remaining downtown locations for non-Hollywood fare. (Scott Renshaw)

Juno What to Do

[Gimme] Free movies! They're what makes the life of a movie critic seem almost too beautiful for words. But are we the only ones who can enjoy this privilege? Nay!


Regular City Weekly readers know to check our pages for free passes to preview screenings, but the studios do occasionally bypass the middleman. Fox Searchlight is among the indie-film distributors that occasionally goes direct to the public, as they are doing with their terrific new comedy Juno. Just head here and scroll down to the screening Wednesday, Dec. 19 at the Megaplex Gateway (the one on Dec. 13 at Trolley Square is already a sell out). Hurry, supplies are limited! (Scott Renshaw)

Contest: Double Franchisee

[Three-peat] Next week marks the DVD release of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, a film that -- whatever its other qualities -- placed Orlando Bloom in select company. Having appeared as Legolas in three Lord of the Rings films and Will Turner in three Pirates of the Caribbean films, Bloom becomes one of only a handful of performers to play the same character in at least three films in two different film series. Harrison Ford -- Han Solo and Indiana Jones -- is an easy one. But how many others could you come up with?

Readers are invited to send in the longest possible list of actors who have appeared as the same character in at least three theatrically-released films in two different film series, no later than Monday, Dec. 3. The winner receives a copy of the Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End DVD. Voice roles count; direct-to-video doesn't. And a bonus point for anyone who includes a woman in his or her list. So far, the best I've been able to find are women with one trilogy and one two-fer.

Email to scottr@slweekly.com with subject line "Double Franchise Contest", and be sure to include your daytime phone number and mailing address. (Scott Renshaw)

What's Up, Docs?

[Film] Every year, people ask me to predict the Academy Awards. And every year I resist, because I want nothing to do with furthering the legitimacy of this gold-statuette-dispensing gaggle of clown-shoes.

The latest example of the Motion Picture Academy's mind-boggling lack of artistic vision comes with this week's announcement of the 15 "short-listed" finalists for the Documentary Feature category. Since you may know little about the specific titles listed, let me offer some helpful Harper's Index-style statistics:

* Percent of finalists that are in some way about America's Middle East adventure: 26.6%
* Percentage of finalists that are in some way about war: 53.3%
* Percentage of finalists that are about a clearly and obviously "important issue" like slave labor, Chinese democracy, health care, abortion, etc.: 100%

So forget a shot for the year's most interesting and stylistically innovative documentaries: Manda Bala (Send a Bullet), Manufactured Landscapes, The King of Kong, My Kid Could Paint That, Protagonist. Always desperately concerned about putting on its serious face, the Academy ignores anything that doesn't come with Cliff's Notes thesis statements. Remember: These are the awards given by an industry to itself. Trust them accordingly. (Scott Renshaw)