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Jeff Wells notes that Juno, which came in at the third spot at the box office over the weekend, is now besting both I Am Legend and the National Treasure sequel to sell more tickets than any other film during the week. At the rate it’s going, it looks certain to cross the $100 million mark by the end of awards season. To put it mildly, this strikes Wells as something of a surprise:

That’s a mindblower. I never would have called that in a million years. This is just a sweet and sharp little film. I wasn’t levitating after I first saw it in Toronto. I knew that I liked it because it was well-written and well-acted. I still know that. But for me, this makes two head-scratchers in a single night.

Really, Jeff? A teen sex comedy hipped up enough to attract 20-somethings, feminized just enough to attract tween girls, but not so girly that it turns off the Apatow crowd. Advertised EVERYWHERE. Plus, it’s probably the most crowd-pleasing movie to have played a festival in 2007. And you’re surprised that it’s making a lot of money? Seriously?

You would have had to have been stupid to have seen Juno with an audience at Telluride or Toronto and NOT imagined it performing at least as well as Superbad. Jeff Wells is not stupid. Is actively selling the fiction that this is a “surprise”/”crossover” hit a condition of accepting Juno skyscrapers on your site?

I swear to god, I want to stop talking about this, but they keep pulling me back in …

Under discussion:

Sicko  (2007)

The Business of Being Born  (2007)

Darfur Now  (2007)

I’m so over filmmakers who put or involve themselves in their documentaries. Thanks to Michael Moore, who wasn’t the first to use first-person narrative in non-fiction filmmaking but who was certainly the one who brought it into the spotlight, so many documentarians want to be in their movies, be the subject of their movies or at least narrate their movies in a very personality-injected way. It’s like the whole Woody Allen, casting oneself as the star kind of directing, which influenced so many indie filmmakers, only it’s much worse. This isn’t to say that all documentary must be objective, and I continue to be a huge fan of McElwee and Broomfield (who apparently has changed his style of late) despite the fact that newbies like Jonathan Caouette and Zana Briski have been ruining subjective documentary filmmaking in recent years. Instead it’s to say that one shouldn’t pretend to be making a movie about a cause, when really one is making a movie about oneself, or one’s cause.

Case in point, this trailer for Abby Epstein’s The Business of Being Born, which attempts to make the documentary out to be like a footnote to Moore’s Sicko. It doesn’t really show how the film involves executive producer Ricki Lake on screen, nor does it let us know that Epstein, too, is a character. I’ll admit that I haven’t yet seen The Business of Being Born and so can not comment on just how much footage there is of Lake, who apparently gives birth in the film, or Epstein, who fortuitously became pregnant in the middle of making the film, but any amount is too much, in my opinion. I made exceptions for Don Cheadle, who executive produced Darfur Now, in which he also appears, because the film is partially about how celebrity is unfortunately the best route in which to carry a cause (and a film), but in Lake’s case it merely seems like a case of blatant self-interest. Anyway, the film opens today in New York City. And no, I’m not running out the door to see it, so it may be awhile before I find out if that self-interest works or doesn’t.

From a McClatchy story from yesterday afternoon, long before Hillary Clinton’s “unexpected” win in the New Hampshire primary:

Ken Burns, the documentary filmmaker, a New Hampshire resident who’s endorsed Obama, said in an interview the day before the primary…that, if elected, Obama had the potential to be a Lincoln or a Franklin D. Roosevelt.

“He is the embodiment of our wish for ourselves, his ability to transcend the same-old same-old,” Burns said. “He’s a wonderful messenger who carries a complicated message to the rest of us of what we want to be . . . of a whole legacy of promise.”

I’m still trying to work out what it actually means for a messenger to carry me a message of who I want to be, but I do know that Burns has a thing about “transcendent presidents”??????that’s the phrase used to describe Lincoln in the official synopsis of The Civil War.