Disillusioned, out of control and marginalized young people have always been at the heart of the Sundance Festival with past Jury Prize winners including Welcome to the Dollhouse, Ruby in Paradise and Precious. But in some recent years issues such as poverty, the environment and the red neck menace have often threatened to crowd out the importance of teenage angst.

In their 2010 offerings, however, teenagers seem to have retaken their rightful place on the festival's throne. Among the films to be screened:

Nowhere Boy / United Kingdom (Director: Sam Taylor Wood; Screenwriters: Julia Baird and Matt Greenhalgh)–A teenage John Lennon confronts wrenching family secrets and finds his musical voice in late 1950s Liverpool.

The Runaways / USA (Director and screenwriter: Floria Sigismondi)–In 1970s LA, a tough teenager named Joan Jett connects with an eccentric producer to form an all-girl band that would launch her career and make rock history. Cast: Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning, Scout Taylor-Compton, Michael Shannon, Alia Shawkat, Tatum O'Neal.

Twelve / USA (Director: Joel Schumacher; Screenwriter: Jordan Melamed)–A chronicle of the highs and lows of privileged kids on Manhattan's Upper East Side involving sex, drugs and murder. Cast: Chace Crawford, Emma Roberts, Kiefer Sutherland, 50 Cent, Zoë Kravitz.

Bilal's Stand (Director and screenwriter: Sultan Sharrief)–Bilal, a Muslim high school senior in Detroit juggles his dysfunctional family, their taxi stand, and an ice carving contest in his secret attempt to land a college scholarship. Cast: Julian Gant.

One Too Many Mornings (Director: Michael Mohan; Screenwriters: Anthony Deptula, Michael Mohan, Stephen Hale)–Two damaged young men recover their high school friendship by awkwardly revealing to each other just how messed up they've become. Cast: Anthony Deptula, Stephen Hale, Tina Kapousis.

Enter the Void / France (Director and Screenwriter: Gaspar Noé)–A drug-dealing teen is killed in Japan, after which he reappears as a ghost to watch over his sister. Cast: Nathaniel Brown, Paz de la Huerta, Cyril Roy, Emily Alyn Lind, Jesse Kuhn

Poverty, environmental collapse and the red neck menace all continue to be represented. But in restoring the importance of gawking at teenages as central to the world of independent film, Sundance has taken a brave step forward.

Classic movie star looking, quip-shooting, cause-mongering, caring deeply about the arts, a star who actually writes... Mr. Clooney's status as Hollywood's dream man has survived unscathed through uneven — at best — box office and so-so at best pet projects.

Moviegoers may not be head over in heels in love with him (no film he has made that did not also star Brad Pitt has gone over 50 million since 2000's Perfect Storm) , critics can often take or leave his films, but Clooney still soars like an eagle above the film world, unsullied by setbacks which would have brought low a dozen lesser men of the screen.

And so when Mr. Clooney arrives in Toronto, it is not as a man desperate for a comeback, but as the reining King, bringing along with him two major films with Golden Globe written all over them.

The knight of the cinema arrives direct from the Venice Festival, where the salivating of one TV reporter over George caused Indiewire to explode,

why are the journalists at film festivals so goddamned STUPID? Their questions tend to the dimmer side of sub-normal-barely one step up from "If you could be any kind of tree, what tree would you be?" — and their behaviour is either boorish, or breathtakingly ignorant, or both. Sure enough, at the end of the session, in another monotonous ritual, they rushed the stage to beg for autographs, presumably in the belief that they hadn't yet demeaned themselves or their profession enough.

The Clooney mambo train kicks off in Toronto Saturday night with the premiere of Up In The Air, a film so dripping with understated prestigeyness, you'll want to put on a tux just to watch the trailer. Directed by Jason Reitman — auteur of Oscar's beloved Juno! Based on a novel by celebrated literati Walter Kirn! About a downsizing expert, it deals with contemporary issues! And it comes certified by Telluride where it received "kudo heat" according to Variety.

The second Clooney onslaught comes with The Men Who Stare at Goats. Produced by George, directed by his long-time collaborator Grant Heslov, the film once again takes Clooney into his favorite world of national security — with a wacky twist — telling the story of a secret Defense Department psychic ops unit. The film is already being described as an "Oscar Wildcard."

Poor Jennifer Connelly and Paul Bettany, however, did not sweep into Toronto under a blanket of goodwill, affection and hero worship. After opening the festival with their Charles Darwin biopic Creation they are all but being run out of Canada. Anne Thompson wrote, "This movie bears all the earmarks of a group of people trying not to churn out yet another biopic, desperately searching for drama and conjuring up nothing but flapping boredom."

And Movieline declared of the plot:

their heavy investment in that father-daughter dynamic yields the stuff of exposition, not drama, and Darwin the scientist (and the husband) is reduced to a brooding, whimpering intellectual parody who wouldn't be so out of place in a Woody Allen movie.

Sucks not to be George Clooney around here.

· Marvel Studios joins Lionsgate in signing an interim deal with the WGA, a move that should get a handful of uncredited superhero-movie specialists back to punching up scripts for Magneto and Deathlok scripts immediately. [THR]
· Disney will re-release Pixar's Toy Story and Toy Story 2 in 3-D in late 2009 and early 2010, hoping kids will scream until their parents take them to see the vastly improved version where Buzz Lightyear flies out of the screen every three minutes. [Variety]

· Sundance's high-profile "Premieres" titles have been revealed, including Jack Black/Mos Def/Michel Gondry project Be Kind Rewind and Alan Ball's directorial debut, Towelhead. [Variety]
· Running out of new episodes of its scripted series, NBC is cramming three extra hours of reality shows onto its early 2008 schedule, with American Gladiators, The Biggest Loser and 1 vs. 100 filling timeslot holes caused by the strike. "We're kicking off the New Year with a craptastic, writer-free bang!" crows NBC's head of alternative programming. [Variety]
· Cameron Diaz's Christmas wish is granted as Shrek the Halls puts up "socko" (translation: huge) Nielsens Wednesday night, ensuring that future generations of children will be spending the holidays with their favorite Santa-ogre. [Variety]

The movie — so odious that many people have simply walked out during the screenings — shows actor Aaron Eckhart having sex with a 13-year-old girl played by a now 19-year-old actress, Summer Bishil. The actress only turned 19 recently, however, which means that she was just on the cusp of 18 when she made the movie last year. [...]

Eckhart, best known for roles in "Erin Brockovich" and "Thank You for Smoking" inexplicably agreed to this part. His character initially takes the girl's virginity by fondling her, in a very graphic scene that leaves nothing to the imagination.

Later, he sodomizes her. In between, his pedophilia is played in such a way that the first and only thought is that we're watching kiddie porn.

If Ball — who regularly toyed with conventions in his TV show and in "American Beauty" — thought all this would somehow illuminate the tragedy of child abuse, he was wrong. Too much is shown and too many lines are crossed for "Nothing Is Private" ever to be released by a major studio or distribution company to theatres. If nothing else, the endless "ick" factor involving nearly every character is a permanent obstacle.

We're going to resist the temptation to attempt to poke out our mind's eye with a meat thermometer based on Friedman's critical appraisal alone; after all, this is a film by an actual, Oscar-winning screenwriter who has certainly learned something about the delicate handling of potentially controversial sexual material from his experience of having his American Beauty script translated into an acclaimed motion picture. We're sure whatever early versions of the scenes that precipitated these reported walk-outs can easily be made more aesthetically palatable by the addition of a calming rain of rose petals or a well-timed cutaway to a peacefully floating plastic bag, changes that could defuse further controversy before its next festival screening.

• Kiddie Porn Movie Rocks Toronto as 'Feel-Awful' Film of the Year [Fox 411]

• Oh Hells Yes [LAWEEKLY.COM]

Thanks to the collapsing dollar, mandatory first-class travel (if not $150,000 private jet trips) for both movie stars and their countless handlers and friends, and Cannes' onerous minimum-night hotel rules, the price tag for a Cannes unveiling can be staggering, often four times (or more) the tab for an equally lavish Hollywood premiere. A suite at the popular Majestic Hotel costs about $2,500 a night, while a big room at the swank Carlton can run up to $3,000. The tiniest room at the ultra-luxurious Hotel du Cap is more than $1,000 a night, with suites logarithmically higher.

["Marky" Mark] Wahlberg, the costar of this year's Cannes entry "We Own the Night," asked that he and his five-member entourage stay at the Du Cap. But the film's producers, 2929 Entertainment, said it was only willing to pay for Wahlberg and a few assistants, not his entire retinue. Wahlberg has now told 2929 he won't be attending the festival. The production company declined to comment, and Wahlberg's talent agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Wahlberg (whom we hardly need to remind you is the inspiration for Entourage, so he has a rep to maintain) certainly won't feel any better about 2929's refusal to meet his freeloader-indulging demands when good pal George Clooney, at Cannes for the spectacular international debut of Ocean's 13, phones him each night of the festival to brag about how deep-pocketed Warner Bros. not only put up his second masseuse (lumbar region and manual releases only) in a Du Cap suite, they even offered to build a perfect replica of his L.A. home on the roof of the hotel so that his stay in France would be as comfortable as possible.

• In a Cannes prix fix [LAT]

And in an as-yet-untitled Southern gothic directed by Deborah Kampmeier ("Virgin"), Dakota Fanning plays a precocious girl in 1950's Alabama who sings and dances like Elvis Presley. But the film includes a scene in which the 12-year-old Miss Fanning's character is raped.

Indeed, it sounds a little harsh when the inevitably controversial moment is presented as the one where "12-year-old Miss Fanning's character is raped," but we're sure that when festival-goers congregate on a ice-slicked sidewalk outside its Park City screening, still reeling from the complicated work of art they just witnessed, they'll eventually all agree that the scene in question was shot in the most tasteful, non-exploitative, and Oscar-nomination-guaranteeing manner possible.

• Coming to Sundance: New Crop of Engaged Indie Films [NY Times]
• Previously: Dakota Fanning's Team Takes Her Career To Higher Level Of Exploitation [Defamer]

"I didn't take it to heart," Dunst says in an interview in the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly. "How would we feel about the French doing a movie about George Washington with French actors?"

Thanks to this relatively advanced coping technique, Dunst was spared a potentially self-esteem-damaging moment of reflection in which she may have questioned her choices for the execution of a difficult role. Instead, she was able to block out the French-inflected shower of boos by calming herself with the quiet, repeated recitation of her ego-shielding mantra, "The Frogs just hate American actors." Eventually, the hisses subsided, and she was once again left to enjoy her time among the overly possessive, xenophoic festival attendees.

• Dunst Understands Boos for Her Character [AP]