* Even as A-listers are wrapping up George Clooney‘s Haiti telethon, the Sundance Film Festival is now underway in earnest and under new management, although boss Bob abides, naturally. Anne Thompson has a report from the front. Yesterday, she reported on the notable acquisition of the super-fest, director David Guggenheim’s “Waiting for Superman” — which is not about to whole “when will the next Superman movie come out?” thing or even superheroes at all. Sorry.

More Sundance news to come next week, no doubt. Watch this space.

* Movie City News has compiled the results of 225 Top 10 lists and come out with a top 30 of its own. At the top, “The Hurt Locker” far ahead of nearest competitors, “Up in the Air” and “Inglourious Basterds.” At the bottom of the “best of” lists, Lars von Trier’s horror drama “Antichrist,” the most controversial film in a career filled with controversy.

* Speaking of films at the bottom, the Wrap brings us Forbes’ annoyingly hard-to-read list of the biggest fiscal flops of the last five years in more easily digestible form. Topping the list is the recent adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men” which went from Oscar hopeful to complete dud in nothing flat when it came out. There are two films I personally like on this list, “Grindhouse” and “Walk Hard.” Anybody else out there have a favorite on the flop list? In any case, I wonder about the accuracy of the list as it doesn’t include DVD figures.

* The relatively new mini-major, Overture Films, is “hitting the pause button.”

* The L.A. Times brings the five directors likely to be battling it out for the Oscar this year together. Some sniping occurs.

* With the addition of Mike Fleming to the Deadline|Hollywood team (he’ll eventually be hosting Deadline|New York), things have been on fire over at Nikki Finke’s place. First, Fleiming has a bit on Ron Howard’ s shrewd longtime cohort, Brian Grazer, getting involved in something called “Transmedia storytelling.” (I’d call it a fancy expression for licensing across media, but that sounds kind of jargony, too.)

He also reported yesterday on the casting of actor Jason Mamoa as the new Conan — that’s the barbarian, not the departing Tonight Show host. People can complain about lack of originality all that way, but making an actually good Conan movie for a change would be originality enough for me. I’ve never watched “Stargate Atlantis,” but here’s hoping Mamoa finds a better mid-life career choice than screwing up one of the world’s largest economies.

* If Roman Polanski wants to find out how long his prison sentence is going to be, he’ll have to come back to L.A. to find out.

* Martin Scorsese did come to L.A.’s County Museum of Art to discuss, what else, film preservation and the art of movies. Go Marty.

* Adrian Curry of the Auteurs brings us some cool new movies posters commissioned by the Alamo Drafthouse from artist Tyler Stout for such cult greats as “Robocop” and “The Big Lebowski.” Cool stuff. Anyone know if he’s any relation to William Stout?

* My Spider sense tells me this story is far, far from rock solid at this point, but my inner evil person forces me to mention that Will Harris’s very most favoretest young actress is rumored — and it’s barely even that — to be in the running for the part of Mary Jane in the upcoming “Spiderman” reboot. For more on l’ affaire Hayden Panettiere, check out the end of this piece.

* Peter Saarsgard of the very good “An Education” is a highly intriguing actor who I’ve been following for some time, especially since catching his work in the underrated “The Dying Gaul” at Sundance a few years back. No matter what kind of character he’s playing, he seems to have a real gift for moral ambiguity. If he’s cast as a villain, we think he must have a good side, and if he’s cast as someone more upright, we wonder if there isn’t something underhanded going on. Anyhow, Borys Kit reports that it looks like he might be playing the villain side of the street in the Green Lantern movie. Could be good.

* The longest named director in show business is back on “The Tourist,” a remake of a French thriller to star Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie.  Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck is the very talented and personable multilingual director behind “The Lives of Others.”

* Simon Brew has some more on the upcoming “Spiderman” reboot announced yesterday. His list of possible new Spideys has two interesting entries that I can’t quite agree with. Daniel Radcliffe actually makes some sense, but we’ll have to see how his American accent is, though I’d personally advise the soon-to-be ex-Harry Potter to avoid overly franchisey roles for a while. Michael Cera would be interesting but, I fear, disastrous. He’d have to get muscular and we know what happens to funny young actors when they become too obviously physically fit. Just ask Anthony Michael Hall.

The trick with Peter Parker is that the actor has to be believable both as a vulnerable demi-nerd, and as the sinewy superhero. Tobey Maguire was actually a really outstanding choice.

* As for superhero casting at the other end of the age scale, it can now be revealed that some time ago the Hughes Brothers were contemplating making a film of  The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller’s epoch-making 1985 comic book (in my view, a “graphic novel” is just a long comic book with an inferiority complex).

To star as the comic’s near-geriatric Batman/Bruce Wayne they were thinking of “somebody like Clint Eastwood.” Actually, at the time, he was about the only star for the role. Mel Gibson is getting close to having the right age/physicality for the role in maybe another five-ten years. He’s already got the worldview to play a Miller hero, I suspect. (H/t JoBlo).

* The L.A. Film Critics have spoken: the best movie of the aughts was “Mulholland Drive.” Could there be a bias in the film’s favor if you’ve actually driven the windy hillside road with the awesome nighttime views?

* Can we start calling them Galifianakis & Rudd now that they’re apparently starring in two movies together in a row? The script of their next film is by comic Demetri Martin and will be directed by Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton of “Little Miss Sunshine.” Should be interesting.

* This cool little web toy shows you the most popular Netflix rentals of 2009 by zip-code in various large urban areas. It seems that people use Netflix largely to catch up Oscar films they don’t feel like seeing in the theater, e.g., “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” (Sorry, Dave, but I don’t think think I would have made it to the end of that one I’d been watching it at home.)

* This makes me feel a little bit better about the guy currently scheduled to make the newest attempt at “Dune.” Not to compare Pierre Morel to Peter Jackson, necessarily, but having a fan do a project like this makes sense to me. You want someone with real passion.

* Last night, I wrote a bit about the passing of the great French writer-director Erich Rohmer at age 89. I didn’t mention an infamous quote from director Arthur Penn and writer Alan Sharp’s 1975 “Night Moves” in which a private eye played by Gene Hackman humorously compares watching a Rohmer film to an inherently boring act. Jim Emerson will explain it for you. He also mentions a Twitter meme. See if you can find my oh-so brilliant contribution.

* Sitting around watching TV kills! Instead, see a movie while standing up and fidgeting a lot.

* Quentin Tarantino tells a story I’d never heard before about the making of 1992’s “Reservoir Dogs” and the legendarily nutso actor Lawrence Tierney, who embodied crime boss Joe Cabot so well in the film. Though I count myself as something of a Tierney fan, it’s not hard to believe that Tierney, who died in 2002, needed firing. Nor do I have a hard time buying the story in his Wikipedia entry explaining why he only only appeared once as Elaine Benes’ intimidating author father on “Seinfeld.” I personally witnessed Tierney’s oddness more than once.

The most memorable example came before a screening of his “Born to Kill”, a 1947 thriller he’d starred in. In a more or less friendly mode, he accosted me and a friend. He was affable enough but what he said didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Not long after, it seemed to me that he managed to intimidate the film’s famously mild-mannered director, Robert Wise, from the audience while interrupting a post-screening Q&A. But then it turns out that, according to film noir expert Eddie Muller writing back in 1999, I didn’t know the half of it. Let’s just say that it turns out there are worse forms of filmgoer misbehavior than taking cell phone calls. Much worse.