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• Your Christmas weekend time suck is here, in the form of indieWIRE’s massive 2007 Critics Poll. There Will Be Blood takes top honors, but as usual, the real fun lies in investigating the individual ballots and spotting the idiosyncrasies. Behold Andrew Bujalski’s single vote for Best Supporting Actor! Marvel at the critic who gave almost equal love to Ken Jacobs and Blades of Glory! But before you do, decide whether you’re thrilled or infuriated to see Southland Tales land ten full places ahead of Atonement (I’m the former. I think.)
• Speaking of There Will Be Blood, critics poll participant Filmbrain has posted some “sketches, fragments, and other half-baked ideas” about what he declares is “easily the best film of the year.” His key contention: it’s a love letter to Stanley Kubrick.
• Tomorrow is Burbanked’s second blogoversy, and he’s celebrating with a ten day party.
• Finally, here’s another time suck, if you need a break from all that critic pollery: Marisa Tomei joins Natalie Portman in the ranks of unwitting screencap porn stars. NSFW, via The WoW Report.

Andrew O’Hehir’s annual survey of the year in indie film is up at Salon today. Consider it a companion to yesterday’s discussion of the best “undistributed” films of 2007. The big theme: the increasing dominance of studio indie arms (like Fox Searchight and Focus Features, which exist primarily because their parent companies want to win awards without actually having to take their attention away from their bread and butter tentpoles) is forcing “true” indies like Magnolia and IFC (which is still part of a huge corporation, but manages to operate under a curation strategy that’s more like MoMA than Miramax) to take risks, both in what they release and how they attempt to deliver it to an audience. Oh??????and beware of iPods!

Ah, futurism. O’Herhir gives the impression that if the indie industry can’t figure out how to get anyone to see the legitimately good films that they have been distributing, their solution will be to basically scrap all that and start making content for the devices that they’re pretty sure kids are paying attention to instead (again with the kids!) Killer Films’ Christine Vachon acknowledges that iPods, “the YouTube universe and the whole notion of making things for cellphones” are forcing producers like herself to “shift with the times.”?? Microcinema’s Joel Bachar takes it a step further: our devices have ruined our ability to respond to traditional content. “There’s this social-networking mentality; they’re Twittering, they’re blogging,” he says. “There’s more commitment to, you know, the experiential moment, and not much commitment to longer moments.”

Interesting. I’m going to go back to Twittering about the three 3-hour films that are sure to make my 2007 Top Ten while you ponder it.

At the Kansas City Star, Robert W. Butler brings up an issue that I’ve been thinking about a lot: with music minimized in the massive TV campaign behind Sweeney Todd (see a totally music-free spot above), aren’t they worried that that millions of Jack Sparrow fans will swarm the theaters, only march out angrily when the star breaks into song? According to Butler, we’d be naive to expect anything else:

Today???s kids are crazy about Johnny Depp and horror, and the Warner marketing folk have played to those strengths, emphasizing that in the R-rated Sweeney Todd Depp plays a bleakly amusing killer, a nut job with a straight razor. At the same time the ads de-emphasize the film???s musical origins…Lest I come off as terribly cynical about this, let me state right now that I approve of the Warner ad campaign. That???s because I think Sweeney Todd is a brilliant accomplishment that deserves to be seen by as many people as possible. And if you???ve got to con the kiddies into buying a ticket, that???s fine with me.

“Con the kiddies,” huh? Without even broaching the topic of a studio blatantly trying to sell an R-rated film to the under 17s (not to mention Butler’s presumption of knowledge about “today’s kids”), the real dishonesty here goes beyond the fact that the distributors are not being totally forthcoming about the fact that 90 percent of this story is told in song. The real lie: Sweeney Todd is not just a musical. It’s very literally your parents’ musical.
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