By Steven Zeitchik

Good sports movies are a dime a dozen, but good sports-fan movies you can count pretty much on one foam finger.

We're talking not comeback stories or sports biopics or  underdog triumph-of-the-spiriters or coaches-who-care tearfests. We're talking about movies that look at the people who root for all of the aforementioned — movies about the colorful, the seamy, the identifiable, the all-too-human people or groups who make it all possible, who pay money and support and cheer for the possibility of vindication, but, more often, for the probability of disappointment.

There's  the 90's indie stalwart "Buffalo '66," the Vincent Gallo-Christina Ricci quirkfest (notable, among other things, for an Anjelica Houston turn as an obsessive and provincial Buffalo Bills fan), which both accurately showed and disrespectfully mocked the importance of a pro sports team to a slumping midsized city

There's a movie that an up-and-coming indie production company is developing about the fans of the University of Alabama Crimson Tide, based on Warren St. John's book about same.

And Sundance this past year yielded Robert Siegel's "Big Fan," a sly and rich, if at a few moments smug, portrait of an outerborough New York Giants fan with little ambition beyond calling in a nightly talk radio program (and a movie that, in yet one more headscratching indie development, remains without a distributor).

And that's pretty much it.

So we're encouraged by the news  Monday that Barry Levinson is joining the already illustrious group of feature helmers who will be directing an hourlong doc for ESPN's  30 for 30 program.

Levinson is taking on — what else? — a story close to the hearts of Baltimoreans, in this case the middle-of-the-night exodus of Ron Irsay's Baltimore Colts back in 1984. It was a heartwrenching moment for the city — if there's one thing more humiliating than having your team flee in the middle of the night, it's having them flee to Indianapolis.

It was also a move that seemed to take place in another era These days, your Twitter account wouldn't have stood a chance — a gaggle of bloggers and TMZ would have been all over the story before the first bus reached the Beltway..

What's encouraging about Levinson's conception of the project is that it's hardly a simple investigation into the economics and mindset of a losing team but instead will delve into more juicy and complex social issues. As an ESPN release states, the pic will show "how a fan base copes with losing the team that it loves,"

Of course it all worked out well for those who live in the city that reads — the Colts left, but the Ravens sprang up a decade later and won a Super Bowl not longer after that. We don't suppose the director of "Avalon" may go for the happy ending?

Is there any doubt that the NC-17 rating which "Bruno" has been given  on its first go-round with the MPAA  won't be used as a marketing tool by Universal? Not since Harvey Weinstein put out, well, any Michael Moore movie has a pre-release controversy been so milkable by a studio. It's _Bruno_. Fans want to come in thinking they'll be be shocked.We'd have been more surprised if it went in to the house that Glickman maintains and came out with only an R.

By Steven Zeitchik

We've had some specific theories about the big earners of this young year. "Paul Blart: Mall Cop" worked because, for all its silliness, it felt relatable to the many ticket-buyers who see movies (and were no doubt seeing that movie) in a mall. "Taken" popped because people aren't used to propulsive thrillers in the winter, and because it played on a universal fear parents have about their children (not the kidnapped by agents in Europe part, just the general notion).

"Monsters vs Aliens," the third score in the movie biz's hat trick, has its own reasons for its blowout success of $58 million this weekend (and it is a blowout — the number marks the third-highest first-quarter opening ever, behind "Ice Age: The Meltdown" and "300").

For one thing, it's the first real animated kids movie of the year, a boon to parents starved for the things ("Coraline," which still did an impressive $73 million, feels a lot more adult). It's also had a brilliant marketing campaign that, with a sharp ad and gimmick, got attention raised and parents on board as far back as the Super Bowl.

It had an insanely wide opening of 4100 screenings.

And it has genre elements that's bringing in teen and even older viewers who wouldn't be caught dead at your typical cute-animal-in-trouble animated pic.

But it's also impossible to deny that the 3D aspect was a factor in mobilizing moviegoers. Animated properties — at least non-sequel ones — historically don't get people rushing out opening weekend this time of year.

A couple of years ago, Fox's "Robots" garnered nearly $130 million in domestic box office, but only after a respectable-but-not-overwhelming $34 million opening. That picture has sci-fi elements, appeals to a slightly older audience and also opened in March, which makes it a good control experiment to "Aliens" — and which means that 3D has more than a little something to do with "Aliens" nearly doubling the "Robots" box office. No matter how you slice it, "Aliens" is the most definitive proof yet that 3D movies not only work, it's their 3D-ness that make them work.

Of course, direct comparisons between "Aliens" and past 3D pics aren't really apt, since the technology is getting better by the month, the screens are getting more prevalent and the content increasingly looks like high-end studio product instead of just a concert video using 3D to masquerade as a real feature. But as a tea leaf for future releases, it's pretty strong.

Still, there's a caveat for the Katzenbergians out there. With 3D movies increasing, box office as a whole is going to trend up, not necessarily because more people want to see them but because theaters can charge as much as $15 for a ticket instead of $10, driving up dollar totals even when attendance is flat or goes down.

That could be good for the industry. But like other inflation-driven growth, it doesn't necessarily mean the movie business as a whole is getting healthier. For that we'll need help from something technology can't solve: the movies themselves.

By Steven Zeitchik

We know David O. Russell is most heralded for "Flirting with Disaster" and "Three Kings." And they're plenty good. But for our money his best work is his first work, "Spanking the Monkey," that at once creepy and human look at a recent college grad forced to move back in with his mother. The right mood, the right tone, the right music, and just the right touch of incest.

The rebel on the backlot has a few things on his plate with similar promise — his upcoming, financially-hexed "Nailed"  and the barroom brawler, "The Grackle," which looks funny despite Matthew McConaughey potentially starring.

But he's returning back to the beginning, in a way, with a new pic he's attached to for The Weinstein Company. It's a project called "The Silver Linings Handbook," and it's an offbeat dramedy about a man who also is forced to move back in with his mother (this time because he has just been released from an institution) and attempts to piece together a new life.

Any romance here is not of the parental variety — it's with a creepy possible friend who stalks him — but there are enough tonal similarities that we're hoping it takes the director, and the audience, back to those glorious mid-90's days, before quirk was Quirk and when, well, a spanking was a spanking.

By Steven Zeitchik

There have been so many rumors and murmurs about “Where the Wild Things Are,” Spike Jonze’s adaptation, via a Dave Eggers script, of the Maurice Sendak classic, that the very fact that there’s now tangible footage itself seems like an achievement.

The October release, after all, was put in turnaround by Universal, suffered a one-year delay in release date at new home Warners and, depending on how many of those rumors you believe, was possibly on the receiving end of reshoot-minded execs who didn’t like Jonze’s first cut.

But Wednesday saw the release of a trailer (check it out below), and while the CG monsters, Gothic backdrops and scared/wondrous children in animal costumes hardly represent a triumph of the form — or even a particularly good come-on for the film — it confirms that the film is here, it’s real and it’s confident in its sense of self, no matter how justified (or unjustified) that confidence may be.

Plus the filmmakers may need to be cut some slack. Whatever issues Jonze ran into trying to transfer this book to the screen speaks to the fundamental challenge any director would have had– this is a book whose very theme is the possibilities of imagination (it’s only ten sentences long) and no matter how much Jonze-ian surrealness, Expressionist doodads or Arcade Fire hooks you lay in, a movie pretty much by definition is going to spell out what the imagination would otherwise fill in.

We’re kind of rooting for the picture, because it’s a marriage of subject and director that just feels right and because it’s been sent back to its room so many times — like protagonist Max, come to think of it — that it’s hard to root against it. And Jonze has a way of snatching defeat from the jaws of naysaying, so we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

We’ll see how many others do the same. There is a market question here — will this be a movie for children that happens to encompass hipster elements (in which case there are questions over whether kids, or parents, will go for the more provocative-looking monsters, though it’s worth remembering that forty-five years ago the book’s drawings stirred similar concerns) or a movie for hipsters that just happens to derive from a children’s book (in which case the roughly $75 million the project allegedly cost would make it the most expensive hipster movie ever made).

Judging by the trailer — and the presence of a certain aforementioned Canadian band — we suspect the market will lie more with the latter. We just hope there are enough ticket-buying hipsters to go around.

By Steven Zeitchik

Robert DeNiro had the joke of the Oscars when he wondered how, given his stellar performance as Harvey Milk, Sean Penn had managed to get all those straight parts over the years.

We suspect he won't be winning any Oscars for his new role, but after Penn gets done playing Larry from the Three Stooges, it's possible we'll be wondering how he ever got all those non-slapstick parts all these years. Or at least so MGM hopes. Penn's casting as one of the Stooges is either an inspired choice or a head-scratching one, and it will provide endless fodder for Stooge purists as to whether he'll enhance the movie with his acting chops or undercut it with his seriousness (not to mention provide endless jokes for the Bill O'Reilly's of the world that Penn was already a Stooge, nyuk-nyuk).

As for the other roles, Benicio del Toro, who is being talked about for the part of Moe, seems only slightly less bold than Penn,  while Jim Carrey makes about as much sense for the part of Curly as any actor can make. Still, the cumulative effect is Harvey Milk, Che and Ace Ventura. The comedy is on even before a single slap or poke in the eye.

By Steven Zeitchik

If you thought Rob Pattinson looked brooding and serious in "Twilight," you ain't seen nothing yet.

The moussed-one is currently in talks to star in a movie called "Memoirs" for "Twilight" studio Summit. The picture deals with a young romantic relationship, but no campy vampire sequences here –these are relationships touched by tragedy (two, in fact, according to the logline). Jenny Lumet — she of light comedic romp "Rachel Getting Married" — is doing a rewrite on the script. It even has a serious _name._ This is a no-nonsense turn for Pattinson.

It's no surprise, after the runaway success and cacophonous squeals that came with "Twilight" that Summit would want to be in the Rob Pattinson business. The actor, now with Endeavor, overcame early blog-world skepticism to generate tons of fan enthusiasm and media in his role as the goodhearted, if opaque, teen vampire.

But what Pattinson-mania doesn't address is his post-"Twlight" drawing power — a time that is coming sooner than you'd think, given that three of the four potential movies in the franchise will have come out by next summer. Sure, tons of teenage girls went to see him in "Twlight," but they went to see him in an  adaptation of a book they've adored and re-read. Will they flock to him when he's not an unattainable, chaste member of the undead?

He'll have his work cut out for him, at least in a couple projects he's already shot. Viewers can see Pattinson in May in Regent Releasing's (they of foreign-language fare like "Departures") arthouse title "Little Ashes, in which Pattinson plays Salvador Dali, that ol' hunky pinup.  And those who don't want to wait even that long can hit the fest circuit now, where a small indie called "How To Be" is currently making the rounds. The pic is a dramedy about a man with an existential crisis who calls upon a self-help guru. It won an honorable mention at Slamdance, to give you an idea.

You see, Pattinson, for all his media celebrity, is caught in that weird netherworld where he's on the cusp of major stardom but still has movies that came out of a less heady time in his career. That transitional period could be embarrassing for young actors (see under: Anne Hathaway in "Havoc") or it could just be surreal (literally; see under: Pattinson as a Spanish surrealist).

The bigger question is what happens to Pattinson after this wave, with the choices he makes now – does his career go commercial or critical, pinup or Oscar? And does he become a box-office draw in his own right?

By Steven Zeitchik

Hannibal Lecter as Big Papa?

Anthony Hopkins is loosely attached to "Hemingway & Fuentes," an indie project about the iconic writer that will be written and directed by Andy Garcia.

Garcia, who also will produce via his CineSon Entertainment banner, is co-penning the script with Hilary Hemingway, a screenwriter and author and the niece of Ernest Hemingway. The movie will revolve around the relationship between Hemingway and his longtime fishing-boat captain Gregorio Fuentes.

Annette Bening also could come aboard the project, Garcia said, in the role of Hemingway's wife and widow Mary Welsh.

Instead of functioning as a biopic, "Hemingway & Fuentes" will take the form of a historical drama, centering on the final, troubled chapter in Hemingway's dramatic life.

The writer spent roughly the last decade of his life in the fishing towns of Cojimar, Cuba, and Ketchum, Idaho, a period for which the author is artistically best known for penning "The Old Man and the Sea," the novella about a Cuban fisherman that won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1953.

Garcia said he hopes to explore the psyche of Hemingway, the dynamic with Fuentes and the relationship both had with fishing. "I'm a Hemingway nut and also an avid fisherman, and the reality of the relationship between Hemingway and his captain is compelling to me," he said.  Garcia, who said the project is in its nascent stages, aims to star as Fuentes.

The captain, who died in 2002 at 104, led a colorful life himself. Born in the Canary Islands, he migrated to Cuba when he was 10; some say he was the model for "Old Man and the Sea" protagonist Santiago, though others have disputed those reports.

Hopkins has of course played famous writers before, most notably starring as C.S. Lewis in Richard Attenborough's 1993 biopic "Shadowlands."

While Garcia aims to inject in "Hemingway" as much realism as possible, he acknowledged that it would be tricky to film in Cuba given the state of Cuban-U.S. relations. Garcia directed and starred in 2005's "The Lost City," a story of a Havana nightclub owner caught in the 1959 Cuban revolution, but he shot the pic in the Dominican Republic.

The Paradigm-repped Garcia next appears in "City Island," a family dramedy he produced about a prison guard who discovers that an inmate is his illegitimate child. Raymond De Felitta wrote and directed that film, which will premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival next month. Garcia stars wth Julianna Margulies, Alan Arkin and Garcia's daughter, Dominik Garcia-Lorido.

"The beauty of the movie is it straddles the fence, with one leg in the emotional reality of what people are going through and the other in the humor of the situations," Garcia said.

Hemingway is undergoing something of a renaissance in Hollywood. Tommy Lee Jones is directing, writing and starring in "Islands in the Stream," based on Hemingway's novel about painter Thomas Hudson, and last year John Irvin directed the U.K. indie "Garden of Eden," based on the author's novel about a writer's travels across Europe after World War I. It's Big Papa time on the big screen.