While most sports movies tend to take themselves very seriously, with triumphant underdogs and platitude-filled speeches in their third acts, some sports just inherently lend themselves to comedy. Bowling is a great example of this, as evidenced by the success of films like the Farrelly brothers’ Kingpin and the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski. Poker is another, though the game itself is so relatively inactive that it’s debatable whether it should even be called a sport, and Zak Penn‘s underrated improvisational comedy The Grand takes full advantage of a poker tournament’s many humorous possibilities.

Similar to the revered work of Christopher Guest and his regular ensemble of actors in films like Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show, Penn assembles a talented ensemble cast and gives them direction on who their characters are, then leaves the dialogue and the development of situations largely up to them. In fact, the poker tournament at the center of the film is a real tournament, and its outcome was undetermined in the script; the winner at the end of the film actually just beat the other actors, regardless of narrative expectations. This approach gives the film extra vitality and excitement, and with so much room to breathe, the cast creates lively, hilarious characters that often riff on and expand their real public personae.

Woody Harrelson stars as “One Eyed” Jack Faro, the owner of The Rabbit’s Foot casino, which he hopes to save by winning an annual tournament called The Grand. Of course, it is the drug-addled, 74-time divorcée Jack’s own bad investments and reckless behavior that has jeopardized his ownership of the casino in the first place, but despite his many vices, Jack is a charming and lovable rogue worth rooting for. His main competition in the tournament includes the Schwartzman twins, Larry (David Cross, who had a good real-life run on Celebrity Poker Showdown) and Lainie (Cheryl Hines); the Rain Man-like genius Harold Melvin (Chris Parnell, best known as 30 Rock‘s incompetent Dr. Leo Spaceman); and oblivious newcomer Andy Andrews (Richard Kind).

As funny and well-developed as all these primary characters are, however, it is the bit parts that really shine in The Grand. Legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog brings a deadpan menace to his character, “The German,” a ruthless cheat who brings a small menagerie of animals with him to the casino’s hotel because, as he says, “To feel alive and to get this energy, it is essential for me to kill something each day.” Dennis Farina is also particularly memorable as LBJ “Deuce” Fairbanks, a Las Vegas veteran nostalgic for a less family-friendly time in the city’s history; as he fondly remembers it, “It was a place where the Jews and the blacks had to enter the casinos through rear entrances. By the way, on this corner right here, I stabbed a bum.” Though barely released in theaters and largely ignored, The Grand is a consistently funny, anarchistic good time for poker fans and novices alike.

Hidden Netflix Gems is a new feature designed to help readers answer that burning question, “What should I watch tonight?” It will be updated every Saturday before the sun goes down.

* 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.

At first glance, [Jeff] Bridges seems a pretty offbeat choice for Rooster Cogburn [in the Coen Brother’s planned remake of 1969’s “True Grit“]. But having just rewatched the John Wayne original last week, I think it might just be casting heaven. Rooster is a killer, but he’s also a fall down drunk, full of sarcastic quips, and surprisingly tender-hearted.

Why not? Bridges is, after all, an actor even if he’s rarely played someone you could call a bad-ass. Below, a comparison –and since the second video is from “The Big Lebowski” you can safely trust that it is NSFW for language, including an ethnic epithet along with a world of painful f-bombs.

Like so many things in life, the meaning of the weekend gross for the Judd Apatow/Adam Sandler “serious comedy,” “Funny People,” is a matter of perspective. On the more cheerful side, we have the trades, which typically enough are accentuating the positive, noting that the somewhat risky project, at least by modern mainstream film standards, was actually #1 at the box office, even if the amount it took the lead by was less than mega-spectacular.

The Hollywood Reporter (actually the AP as carried by THR) thinks that Judd Apatow is living in the best of all possible box office worlds:

Movie audiences have taken a liking to Adam Sandler’s more serious side…[“Funny People”] grabbed the top spot at the weekend boxoffice with a $23.4 million debut.

Variety takes a more measured, but still somewhat upbeat, tone:

Adam Sandler’s “Funny People” has topped a moderate weekend box office with $23.4 million at 3,008 playdates.

Nikki Finke, however, has a different way of seeing things. Here’s her headline:

‘Funny People’ No Laughing Matter; Opens To Lousy $8.6M Fri And Worse $7.4M Sat For Disappointing $23.4M Weekend

La Finke goes on to point out that Universal has been lowering expectations from Sandler’s usual $30-$40 million openers to a more modest $25 million, and fell a bit short of that.

It really does come down to your frame of reference. In my weekend preview post, I mentioned the Sally Field/Tom Hanks starring “Punchline,” which I think is a better point of comparison than any particular Apatow or Adam Sandler film, including 2002’s “Punch-Drunk Love,” simply because of the subject matter, the more-serious-than-you-might-expect approach, and the level of star power. That movie got similarly mixed reviews but was one of 1988’s lowest grossing films, despite the presence of two bankable stars. Two small differences: one had laughs, the other doesn’t, and Sally Field was not ever thought of as a great comedian, “The Flying Nun” notwithstanding.

A side note: when describing the occasional phenomenon of movies with mixed reviews and worse box office eventually emerging as a sort of classic, I forgot last time that the Coen Brothers’ “The Big Lebowski” was another movie that divided and/or confounded critics while generating poor box office on its initial release. It’s worth mentioning as it is probably the biggest “cult hit” of our time responsible for God knows how much in DVD purchases and rentals, not to mention doing its bit for the bowling industry and the consumption of White Russians. You certainly wouldn’t have guessed that at the time, though it did seem odd at the time that the film did so badly when me and the other three people in the theater couldn’t stop laughing the whole way through.

I’m not saying that “Funny People” is a similar case, (maybe ask me after I’ve seen it), but it’s just worth noting that, as long as some people love a movie, the game is never really over. As the story goes, when Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai was asked, sometime in the middle of the 20th century, for his opinion about France’s 1789 revolution, he answered, “It is too soon to say.” Still, if I were Universal I wouldn’t be banking on that $100 million take they were hoping for, not this year.

At the #2 spot for this week, I can report that Harry Potter, apparently benefiting from those suspiciously helpful handwritten notes from the Half-Blood Prince as well as his movie’s expansion into a number of more expensive IMAX/not-really-IMAX 3-D screens, turns out to be holding his own this week. Indeed, he sent the rodents of “G-Force” back to the lab, beating the guinea pigs $17.7 million to somewhere around $17.1, or slightly less, says Box Office Mojo’s table.

The week’s other new releases pretty much sank like a stone. Audiences apparently thought “Aliens in the Attic,” which was not shown to critics, looked about as lousy as I thought it looked, and the film came in at a lackluster fifth place. This is not good for a high concept family film, especially since it actually debuted on slightly more screens than the R-rated “Funny People.”

Similarly, the lack of allure of the “torture porn”-esque “The Collector” might signal that the horror sub-genre, controversial under any name, has become inevitably played out. (You can only make people feel miserable so many times before they begin to resent it.) The feel-bad flick managed a mere $3.625 million. It’s true that it was only on a relatively modest 1,300 screens, but the lackluster $2,736 per screen average is nothing to get out of the iron maiden to celebrate over. Compare it to this week’s box office per-screen winner, the indie comedy romantic sleeper, “(500) Days of Summer,” which managed an outstanding $10,338 average for a total of $2.75 million on a mere 266 screens.