Even given the "mountain-air syndrome" and the well-known tendency of Sundance audiences to do emotional back flips over movies they've seen and liked at the festival, the verging-on-tearful standing ovation WHALE RIDER got from a crowd at Park City's Egyptian theatre on Saturday night felt extraordinary to me. Every person in the room was either whoo-whoo-ing or sniffling, or both.

Of course, I was also there in the late '90s when Sundance audiences went dippy over HAPPY, TEXAS and CARE OF THE SPITFIRE GRILL, and they both fizzled with the general public.

Still, considering what I saw and felt last Saturday night, and given that Toronto Film Festival audiences gave WHALE RIDER their Best Film award last September, I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happens here next Saturday, when the Sundance Audience Award is handed out. I'd be surprised if Castle-Hughes doesn't receive some kind of award next weekend also.

WHALE RIDER is that Sundance rarity -- a genuinely first-rate feel-good film (keeping in mind the now-famous Victoria Wisdom declaration that the Sundance Film Festival spelled backwards is depression) that seems assured of great reviews, and as a result will almost certainly kick box-office ass with Average Joe's from coast to coast. I don't know how to write or direct a hit film, but I know one when I see it. Or feel it, I should say.

Slated by Newmarket Films' Bob Berney to open next June -- the conventional wisdom says that a sensitive, tender-hearted art film like this should open either in the spring, the August doldrums or the early fall -- WHALE RIDER will first do business among liberal-minded, review-reading X factor types, but word-of-mouth will eventually filter down to the prole ranks and...well, who knows? It could pull in decent business, or it could be humungous.

If you boil the snow out of it, Caro's script - based on Witi Ihimaera's novel called "The Whale Rider" -- is basically a female empowerment riff conveyed in the terms of a classic spiritual fable.

Pai (Castle-Hughes) is a spiritually-connected soul who aspires to become a Whale Rider, a tribal distinction and position traditionally reserved for males only. She is the grandchild of Koro (Rawiri Paratene), her tribe's dogmatic chief who regards Pai as useless and her aspirations to learn the tribe's male-dominated spiritual disciplines as sacrilegious. The film is basically about how fate comes to Pai's aid in allowing her to prove her mettle with her granddad.

The film's underlying message is that a culture's tradition and protocol must be routinely challenged, or else the culture will eventually die.

But the reason I feel it will prove a big hit is that it says what everyone out there understands and agrees with, which is that everyone's life needs the cohesion and support of a family for things to work out, and that spiritual values keep it all together. It also says that women are under-valued, and that old-guard types like Koro occasionally need to be shaken out of their stupors.

I had a chance to meet Castle-Hughes and Paratene at a pre-screening party at Spur, a restaurant adjacent to the better-known 350 Main Street. I hadn't seen the film at this stage, so there wasn't much to say. Publicist Jeanne Berney thought it might be cute if my 13 year-old son Dylan, who's covering for the Tiburon Ark, were to interview Castle-Hughes, who's nearly his age, but they both felt a little tongue-tied.

WHALE RIDER will be opening in New Zealand on January 30th and in Australia around Easter.

Front Runners

A guy with good taste and who gets around told me on Main Street last night (i.e., Sunday) that Tom McCarthy's THE STATION AGENT is probably the best film of the festival so far. Before seeing it earlier that day at the Library he would have said Wayne Kramer's THE COOLER was the best, he commented, but now he's adjusted his sights. PIECES OF APRIL, he added, is also quite good.

Naturally, I haven't seen any of these.

Set in rural New Jersey, AGENT is basically about a lonely dwarf (or a man "affected by dwarfism," if that's the more p.c. way to put it) who gradually comes out of his self-imposed isolation. Patricia Clarkson and Bobby Canavale costar.

THE COOLER, a Las Vegas-set gambling drama, has been picked up for distribution by Lions Gate. The title refers to a casino employee whose job is to somehow dampen or inhibit players on winning streaks, and thereby save the casino money. It costars William H. Macy and Alec Baldwin.

Produced by Gary Winick's Indigent (the outfit fit that delivered TADPOLE last year), PIECES OF APRIL is a family drama that takes place on Thanksgiving Day and involves several family members, including star Katie Holmes and costars Patricia Clarkson and Derek (ANTWONE FISHER) Luke.

Some people are hot about Matthew Ryan Hodge's THE UNITED STATES OF LELAND, which Paramount Classics has picked up. It's a drama about a couple of dysfunctional families dealing with a major trauma drama, in the vein of THE ICE STORM, THE SAFETY OF OBJECTS and ORDINARY PEOPLE. Yeah, I've seen it. Ryan Gosling is mesmerizing as a gentle-mannered teenager who's killed a young boy in order to save him from all the sadness he's sure to encounter in life.

It's not an uninteresting film, partly because of the way Don Cheadle's healer/therapist character (a stock figure in films of this sort) turns out to be not much of either, but for the most part THE UNITED STATES OF LELAND is a little too taken with its own delicate sensibilities.

I'm told that CAPTURING THE FRIEDMAN'S is also definitely worth catching.

The latest tally of pickups is as follows: Fox Searchight has bought THIRTEEN, Lions Gate has THE COOLER, and Paramount Classics has nabbed THE UNITED STATES OF LELAND and THE SINGING DETECTIVE.

Fidel's Spin

I saw Oliver Stone's COMANDANTE in Los Angeles a week or so ago, and liked it. An interview piece with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, it's about how this shrewd and robust 75 year-old sees himself and his country's political history over the last 40-plus years. It showed last weekend at the Eccles and the Prospector Square cinemas, and will turn up on HBO in May.

It's not a revelatory piece of political truth-telling (far from it, probably), or a political grilling in any way, shape or form. Stone got his interview with Castro because of his rebel iconoclast credentials and because Castro, no fool, knew Stone would offer sympathy in the final cut. And sure enough, it's a softball piece. Stone converses with Castro like a left-wing Larry King, asking some sharp questions and verbally fencing with the old coot but clearly not trying to nail him, or expose any dark or damning material.

But COMANDANTE is, after a fashion, an honest film. Another one of Stone's explorations into darkly charismatic father figures (in the wake of NIXON and WALL STREET'S Gordon Gekko), the film is essentially a portrait of how an old man deals with (or doesn't deal with) with what he's done with his life. It's about denial, life force, moxie, festering intrigues, rationalizations, history, passion, machismo, tenacity and sad memories.

During a q & a session at the Eccles last Saturday, Stone said that "why" was what motivated the film and that "evasions are in the eye of the beholder." Asked if he expected a lot of negative reaction to the film among Cuban Americans, Stone said he "would hope that the Cubans who see the film will see [Castro] in a new light, but I fear many of them will react not emotionally but ideologically.

Clearly enamored of Castro and the anti-corporate culture of Cuba, Stone described his subject as "a movie star...he's shockingly trim at 75 and full of charisma...he carries this whole movie from start to finish, and that's saying something." And yet...

Middle Eastern Mystery

Oliver Stone ducked me all weekend, and I'm not paranoid and I don't have a persecution complex. Why the dodge? I have a theory or two, but it might have something to do with his documentary about Yasser Arafat, PERSONA NON GRATA, which he shot right in late March of '02, right after doing the Castro interview.

I inquired about the Arafat doc in a conversation with HBO publicist Leslie Martinelli last week. She said she knew nothing about it whatsoever, which I took to mean she didn't want to muddy the reception to COMANDANTE by even remotely linking it to what is obviously a controversial hot-potato documentary that will probably not win Stone many friends among establishment Hollywood Jews, when and if it ever gets seen. I would love to see it, personally. It sounds like a hum-dinger

The Arafat documentary has been assembled in some coherent form and, according to a fairly reliable source I spoke to last weekend, takes as much of a softball political approach towards Arafat as COMANDANTE does towards Castro. Actually, the source confides, "It's not really a documentary about Arafat any more...it's now a documentary on terrorism." Still, given Stone's support of, or at least sympathy for, the Palestinian side of the Middle East conflict, it's probably a safe bet it'll be at least obliquely compassionate towards Arafat and critical to some extent of Israeli actions.

I would have much rather seen the Arafat doc at Sundance instead of the Castro thing. It would've obviously made for exciting copy. Think of the incendiary lead paragraphs that might have been: "As U.S forces prepare for war with Iraq, an American director has come to Sundance with at least a half-sympathetic portrait of a man with obvious links to terrorist factions and whose sympathies are not in synch with Israeli or U.S. interests," one might have read.

Nobody's saying anything about the Arafat doc because it's apparently in some kind of limbo, or at least has been taken off the discussion table, hence, I suspect, my not getting a chance to ask Oliver about it last weekend.

Stone was hired to do the Castro and Arafat docs by Vincent Maraval's The Wild Bunch, a Paris -based company affiliated with Le Studio Canal Plus. He took the gig, I'm told, mainly because he needed the scratch. (He's also directed a commercial, I'm told.) COMANDANTE was offered to HBO as a straight acquisition after completion. HBO didn't acquire the Arafat doc, for obvious reasons.

The political situation in Hollywood is doubly sensitive with Stone currently involved in some tricky financial preparations for his upcoming ALEXANDER THE GREAT, which is supposed to go into production in Morocco in June with Colin Farrell in the lead role. Stone agitating the Jewish community with his Arafat documentary might not have any effect on the financial or pre-production challenges he and his financier, Intermedia, are facing, but it's hard to see how the Arafat documentary could help matters. Warner Bros. has signed on as the film's domestic distributor.

I'm basing my assumption that Stone was dodging me on three things that happened -- or didn't happen, rather -- last weekend.

One, I happened to be standing at the base of a staircase at the Salt Lake City airport on Friday afternoon when he arrived from Los Angeles, and he walked right by without so much as a nod. (We know each other pretty well, trust me.) Two, I was told by his Sundance publicist that he'd try to put me on the phone with Oliver for five minutes or so, but the call never came. And three, I was cleared to attend a post-screening cocktail party with Oliver on Saturday afternoon at the Wahso Grill, but when I arrived I was told by the same publicist he didn't think I was coming (bullshit), and that in any case he couldn't let me in.

It's weird. I've always been an Oliver fan, for the most part, and I have a good history with him. I quoted him accurately when I reported about a controversial panel discussion he took part in during the September '01 New York Film Festival, and I was told after this ran that he had read it and thought it was fine. I've known him since the early '90s and I know a lot of people who've worked for him. We've run into each other at this and that party or award ceremony. I once wrote a piece about Oliver's JFK assassination theories for ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY that he didn't like, but that wasn't me -- the article was strongly rewritten by EW editors.

I thought the avoidance might have been due to a piece last Friday about a pseudo roman a clef drama written and directed by his former assistant, Azita Zendel, about her tumultuous history with the guy. I was later told he never read the article and was unaware of Azita's film, which is called CONTROLLED CHAOS, but you never know.

Oliver might have also bristled at a moderately friendly to at least neutral piece I wrote in this column about a critical book about him that was written by Eric Hamburg, a former associate of Stone's who produced NIXON. But my best guess is the Arafat thing. I guess I'll learn more about the situation when I return home next week.

Clarifying

In case anyone who read Friday's column and saw that photo of my Sundance press badge with the words "Reel.com" on the front got any bizarre ideas, I have no lingering allegiance for that website, for which I wrote this column for three years. It was just a mistake by the Sundance people who make up the badges. I went back to their offices on Sunday and got myself a Movie Poop Shoot badge, and now all is harmonious.

Sum of All Screenings

Actually, I can't deliver a sum of everything I've seen because I can't write any more now that I have to drive Dylan to the airport. I'll have to get to it Wednesday, but I've seen QUATTRO NOZA (mostly positive, some reservations), THE UNITED STATES OF LELAND (discussed elsewhere in column), A DECADE UNDER THE INFLUENCE (smart and agreeable, but not extraordinary), and PARTY MONSTER (not as bad as I was told it would be).

I've also seen THE SINGING DETECTIVE (nicely done in many respects but I didn't enjoy the watching, and it hasn't a commercial prayer), CONFIDENCE (a run-of-the-mill caper film from James Foley that's pretty much a wash for everyone involved), THE EDUCATION OF GORE VIDAL (superb in a mild-mannered sort of way), and Thomas Vinterberg's IT'S ALL ABOUT LOVE, a socially grounded futuristic horror-fantasy that I didn't find very appealing, despite the obvious care and talent that went into the writing and directing.

Revolt

The projectionist at the Prospector Square Cinemas screwed up the reel sequence during a Saturday afternoon showing of Susanne Bier's OPEN HEARTS, a well-regarded Dogme drama about marriage and infidelity. The audience saw reel #4 before reel #3, and there were probably more than a few who suspected right away that something was wrong.

Bier told me she "went completely wild" when the mistake was discovered, but the audience dug in their heels when the film was stopped. After the lights came up a Sundance organizer got on a mike and announced that the film would be shown in its proper reel order at a later date, due to it being unspooled off a huge platter, but the crowd refused to leave.

OPEN HEARTS producer Vibeke Windelov saw the disturbance and stood in front of the crowd and asked if they'd like to stay and see it anyway, even with reel #3 following reel #4, and they all said yes.

"And everyone stayed for the q & a," publicist Jeanne Berney told me later that afternoon.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

I can't tell you what a comfort it is to be up here and dealing with richer and more intriguing creative matters than Sunday night's Golden Globe awards.

That said, CHICAGO's Renee Zellweger's winning the Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy award was almost a self-directed insult, since her performance in that film wasn't even close to extraordinary. Ditto Richard Gere's win in the male category -- he worked hard and learned to tap-dance and delivered a fun performance, but it wasn't nearly award-level and the Hollywood Foreign Press members know this in their eccentric heart of hearts.

Applause and congratulations to Jack Nicholson and his candor for (a) admitting he took a Valium before driving down to the ceremonies, and (b) saying after he won the Best Actor in a Drama award for his ABOUT SCHMIDT performance, "I don't know whether to be happy or ashamed, because I thought we made a comedy."

Slapped!

As I listened to Al Pacino, director Dan Algrant and screenwriter Jon Robin Baitz talk about PEOPLE I KNOW at a press conference inside the Yarrow Hotel last Saturday morning, the boys from Park City Towing were hoisting my little red Alamo rental car onto a large flatbed truck and taking it out to their muddy depot yard about three miles outside of town.

I got towed because the hard-cases who run Albertson's, the supermarket, don't want festival-goers who have business at the Yarrow, which is right next to their store, parking in their lot. There are rows and rows of cars in the Albertson's lot. The Yarrow has a permit for its patrons to park in only one row, which is right next to the hotel. I was parked in the next row over.

I understand why Albertson's feels they need to tow people -- they're just trying to protect their business -- but I had to fork $175 to get my car back, and that's nearly all of my meager Sundance spending money. I'm now subsisting on oranges, yogurt, cheese, taco chips and whatever free meals I can sponge off publicists and production companies.

As I was driving by the Yarrow last night around 6 pm I saw two Park City Tow trucks taking away three SUV's. One of them being belonged to publicist Michael Dalling, who's here repping THE SINGING DETECTIVE and SONG FOR A RAGGY BOY.

I've been told, by the way, that there may be as many of 30,000 extra bodies here in Park City than there were last year. Traffic is constantly backed up on Park Avenue and near the festival headquarters, and just about all traveling takes longer than it used to. There are also a lot of mongrel types here -- thousands of them. Last night some guy got into a fight at Burgie's (he hit a pregnant woman to boot, I was told) and was subsequently beaten up by the bouncers and hauled off to a hospital on his way to jail by the Park City police.

Snoring

"Oh, I feel your pain. For the snorer, buy some Breathe-Right strips -- they made a big difference with my husband's snoring problem. Of course, he's a mild snorer, but at any rate they won't hurt. For yourself, get some Mack's Wax earplugs, a.k.a., murder prevention aides -- they work much better than the foam kind, even though the decibel rating is lower. Can you tell I've spent too much of the past ten years investigating this?" -- Kristi Coulter

"A pillow over the face of the guy snoring in your condo should do the trick. Think Big Chief gently quieting Randall P. McMurphy at the end of CUCKOO'S NEST. Trust me -- there really is no other way." -- Josh Mooney

"Short of a mercy killing to put your roommate out of your misery, a couple of foam earplugs and single malt should help. That combination saved me from taking extreme measures against my brother in Prague a couple of years ago." -- Karl Dworak

"Many years ago I was doing that European backpack tour with a couple of buddies, one of whom snored like all hell. We were always trapped in hostels and B&B's with him. The other guy and I took it for a few nights but quickly lost all humor. We then found a solution. We beat the shit out of him. Every night when he started up we would just go over a wail on him. I started falling asleep with a shoe handy so I could whip it at him when the need arose. Within a few nights he stopped snoring altogether. His body just learned not to do it.-- Joe Greenia, Chicago.

Wells to Grenia: You wailed on your friend with a shoe? I'd have thought slaps and body punches would suffice.