We're not especially up on just what is cool among third-graders these days. But those who are — or at least who have kids who are — extol the Judy Moody children's book series and its popularity among the schoolkids. Which we suppose makes it good news for said kids, and parents, that an independent movie based on the character is coming to theaters.

Nascent distribution label Relativity Media announced today that it had acquired rights to "Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer" and will put it in theaters this summer. The film, which is currently in production, is a new set of adventures based on Megan McDonald's precocious third-grade title character. (There are about 10 previously published books, as well as a handful of spinoffs involving Stink, Judy's brother.) According to a Relativity release, the film "chronicles Judy Moody's adventures, in which she sets out to have the most thrilling summer of her life with the help of her little brother Stink and fun-loving Aunt Opal." 

We, however, prefer the patois-heavy product description on Amazon: "Roar! It’s not bad enough that Mom and Dad are heading to California, leaving Judy and Stink with Aunt Awful (er, Opal), but now Judy’s two best friends are going Splitsville, too. Just when it looks like her summer is going to be BOR-ing - eureka! - Judy comes up with the most thrill-a-delic plan ever." McDonald herself wrote the screenplay, taking her characters in new directions; Heather Graham stars as Opal. (Aussie newcomer Jordana Beatty plays the young heroine.)

Maybe most eye-catching: The film is being produced by the team that brought us "Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire."

Movies based on young-girl properties ("American Girl," "Ramona and Beezus") have a checkered history on the big screen. But if you're bringing out a new movie, a hugely popular book series isn't a bad place to start.

— Steven Zeitchik

twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

Photo:A Peter Reynolds illustration for 'Judy Moody.' Credit: Candlewick Press.

"Son of No One," the Channing Tatum-Al Pacino crime drama that played the Sundance Film Festival, will be coming to theaters. Anchor Bay, the small distributor that released "City Island' last year, has acquired the movie.

Dito Montiel's movie centers on a New York City police officer (Tatum) tormented by a secret that threatens to catch up to him. As the walls close in, he finds himself on the run from his boss (Ray Liotta), and wonders if he can even trust his godfather, who's also the police commissioner (Pacino).

The movie, which co-stars Katie Holmes, played to a warm reception to a full house of approximately 1,200 film-goers at the Eccles Theatre in Park City, Utah, on Friday night. The movie had become a hot topic at the festival after a report that a number of people had left a media and industry screening early.

--Steven Zeitchik
twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

Photo: Channing Tatum at the Sundance Film Festival. Credit: Lucas Jackson / Reuters

Jane Fonda is more than a little excited about her upcoming film, "Peace, Love & Misunderstanding," directed by Bruce Beresford and starring Catherine Keener and Sundance "It" girl Elizabeth Olsen. 

Keener “plays my daughter and that excites and pleases me more than you can know because I think she is both truly talented and original but also fascinating,” Fonda wrote on her blog  (janefonda.com) during filming in July. She also uploaded photos, such as her dog Tulea wandering the set and shots of Olsen with her onscreen love interest, "Gossip Girl’s" Chace Crawford. Hey, it's her first Hollywood movie since 2007's "Georgia Rule," so we forgive her enthusiasm.

Actually, Fonda seems to approach all her projects -- movies, a new play, a fresh batch of fitness videos, the blog -- with that same characteristic gusto. At 73, the actress/activist/fitness guru is clearly still hungry -- a critical trait that she learned from Katharine Hepburn, she told 24 Frames.

“On the set of 'Golden Pond' … Hepburn told us a story about seeing Laurette Taylor play the first 'Glass Menagerie.'  And she said it was beyond imagination how transcendent it was. When [Taylor] did it 15 years later, Katharine said the magic was gone. She’d lost her hunger. It sunk into me, I never forgot that. So I say to myself ‘stay hungry, man.’”

  Her most imminent project, the play “33 Variations,” opens Feb. 9 at the Ahmanson Theatre; Fonda stars as an aging Beethoven scholar struggling with the disease ALS. The role earned her a Tony nomination when she performed it on Broadway in 2009. In reprising her role for the L.A. stage, Fonda could easily have dialed in her critically acclaimed performance. But she heeded Hepburn's advice and dug deeper into the material. 

“You blow [the old interpretation of the role] away -- gone,” she says. “You’re asking for trouble if you think about awards, and you’re asking for trouble if you try to repeat what you did. In my character, there’s a lot left to discover. Staying hungry is the key.”

Where does that intrinsic desire to “not be mediocre” come from, exactly? Fonda isn’t sure. But when pressed, she credits her father, Henry Fonda.

“My father was meticulous as an actor and a painter. My mother died too soon, so I don’t know. I think a lot of it came from my father, but … I don’t know.”

The two-time Academy Award winner and feminist icon (she prefers “role model”) says she’s never had an individual role model herself. But she’s been inspired by countless actors. “Right now, Annette Bening, Natalie Portman, Meryl Streep, Michelle Williams, Edie Falco. Their talent just blows me over,” she says. “I’m turned on by talent.”

If Fonda had to pick a single mentor, however, it would have to be Hepburn. “The most I’ve ever learned from any single woman was Katharine Hepburn. But I wouldn’t call her a role model because I don’t feel a particular kinship with her in the way she did her life or her philosophy. But I learned a lot from her.”

--Deborah Vankin

Twitter.com/@debvankin

Photo, top: Actress Jane Fonda arrives at the 32nd Annual Carousel of Hope Ball in Beverly Hills on Oct. 23, 2010. Credit: Dan Steinberg / Associated Press

Photo, bottom: Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda in the 1981 film "On Golden Pond.” Credit: Reuters

James Cameron may be throwing his "Avatar" sequels into a higher gear, writing and prepping movies so they'll be ready for release by 2014 and 2015. But over the coming months he'll also kick-start a busy side career as a mentor and producer.

Before he starts working in earnest on "Avatar," Cameron will be steering a trio of other films.

They include Guillermo del Toro's adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's Arctic thriller "At the Mountains of Madness," a reboot of medical action-adventure "Fantastic Voyage" and a live-action 3-D film centered on Cirque de Soleil that will deploy some of the 3-D technology he used to shoot "Avatar."

The Del Toro film is on track to start shooting in June, and "Fantastic Voyage" will proceed shortly after that. But neither, he said, should impinge on his "Avatar" schedule. "Those both ['Mountains' and 'Voyage'] should be largely through the pipeline before I have to take the phone off the hook and get singularly focused on the two 'Avatar' films," Cameron said in an interview with 24 Frames.

The first product of Cameron's new spate of producing efforts can be seen Friday with the opening of "Sanctum," a 3-D underwater thriller set in Australia; for more on his unusual decision to get involved with that movie -- which includes a desire to demonstrate that 3-D can be just as effective in intimate stories as in big-canvas ones -- please see our recent print story.

As for "Madness," Cameron downplays his input on the genre film. "Guillermo doesn’t need a lot of help," Cameron said. "He’s a pretty self-contained, visionary guy, does his own writing, works with a team of designers. He’s certainly not going to need me to come to the set."

So why did he jump in? "It was working with [Del Toro] and Universal to try to figure out the best, most efficient way to shoot the film and act as a shuttle diplomat more than anything to keep the momentum going on the project."

But don't expect the producing activity to continue when this little streak ends.

All of this behind-the-scenes activity is uncharacteristic for a man who prefers to immerse himself in his own films, and when his latest three projects are done, he'll be stepping back from his patron role.

“The recent decision I made is, I don’t really want to produce movies [that I don't direct] anymore,” Cameron said. “It makes sense to do these films to prove a point, but that’s not something I see myself doing 10 years from now.”

-- Rebecca Keegan

 twitter.com/@thatrebecca

 Photo: James Cameron at the "Sanctum" premiere. Credit: Fred Prouser / Reuters

EXCLUSIVE: Film fans eager to see "My Idiot Brother," Jesse Peretz's Sundance hit starring Paul Rudd that will be in theaters later this year, could soon get another dose of seriocomedy from the filmmaker.

Peretz is making headway on a new family drama called "What's This S%^@ Called Love?" Peretz, who wrote the script and has been talking to financiers, said that Catherine Keener and John Malkovich are attached to star in the movie -- the first time, if financing and scheduling work out, that the actors would appear on-screen together since "Being John Malkovich," the 1999 surrealist hit that turbocharged both their careers. (Representatives for the actors could not immediately be reached for comment.)

The new movie, which is being produced by Tim Perell ("Last Chance Harvey," "The Rebound") is set in Cambridge, Mass., during the 1980s, a place and period in which Peretz, the son of well-known journalist Marty Peretz, came of age.

It centers on a teenage boy who's contemplating coming out. But in a twist, his ultra-progressive family actually wants to celebrate the boy's newfound sexuality, while all the boy wants is to be left alone. (Keener and Malkovich would play the parents; Keener has played the open-minded parent of precocious children before, perhaps most famously in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin.")

"My Idiot Brother," a story of a dimwitted man and his doting sisters, became a breakout at Sundance, snapped up by The Weinstein Co. for more than $6 million. Peretz doesn't make movies very often -- it had been five years since his previous effort, the Amanda Peet-Jason Bateman dramatic comedy "The Ex," came out.

When asked if "What's This S%^@ Called Love?" was a little like the coming-of-age story in "The Squid and the Whale," Noah Baumbach's paragon of upper-middle-class family dysfunction, Peretz didn't disagree. "It's kind of like that," he said. "But maybe a little more positive."

-- Steven Zeitchik

twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

 Photo: Catherine Keener and John Malkovich in "Being John Malkovich." Credit: USA Films

Oprah Winfrey’s new cable network, OWN, has acquired “Crime After Crime,” a documentary that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last week and takes aim at Los Angeles County Dist. Atty.  Steve Cooley for his handling of a controversial murder case.

Director Yoav Potash said in an interview Monday that the deal includes an Oscar-qualifying theatrical run in Los Angeles and New York before its airing on television. The deal for the film was valued in the low six figures, according to a person involved in the negotiations.

“Throughout most of my time making this film, which was 5 1/2 years, people kept saying Oprah has to see this,” Potash said by phone. “It involves an important social issue that affects women but doesn’t get the attention it deserves, and it’s a film about an African American protagonist who holds her head up high despite being brutalized and being denied justice.” 

The film chronicles the story of Deborah Peagler, who pleaded guilty in 1983 to first-degree murder and was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. She said she agreed to the plea  to avoid a death sentence for her involvement in the killing of her estranged boyfriend. (Read more about the case, and last week's screening, here.)

At the time, the fact that she was severely battered by her boyfriend was not considered, but California became the first state in the country to pass a law in 2002 that allows cases to be reopened if the defendant can show that domestic violence was a factor that led to the killing.

Cooley became a key foil to the efforts of Peagler and her pro bono attorneys to gain her release under the law, and the documentary follows their topsy-turvy battle to its unsettling completion.

At screenings of the movie in Park City, Utah, many viewers hissed when Cooley appeared on screen, but his spokeswoman released a statement saying that the office was steadfast in its belief that Peagler was treated appropriately.

"Deborah Peagler intentionally orchestrated the murder-for-hire of her estranged boyfriend. She lured him to the spot where he was killed. She witnessed the murder and drove the killers away," Sandi Gibbons said. "She profited by receiving money from the victim's insurance."

--Garrett Therolf

Photo: Deborah Peagler, pictured behind the security glass at Central California Women's Facility prison. Credit: Yoav Potash

The reaction in the fan universe to the news that Henry Cavill is the new Superman has been surprisingly muted given that the actor has little track record -- and the one he does have involves a royals soap-opera on pay cable.

But with the casting of "The Tudors" costar as the new Man of Steel, it's impossible not to notice the trend of Brits in capes. As my colleague Geoff Boucher notes, British citizens will fill all three slots in the holy trinity of superheroes for the first time in history now that Cavill will play Superman. (Welsh native Christian Bale is reprising his role as Batman in "The Dark Knight Rises," and British-American Andrew Garfield is the new Spider-Man.)

Meanwhile, Aussie Chris Hemsworth is playing Thor (a character, of course, rooted in another country's mythology) in a new Marvel movie. Even Green Lantern comes from Canada.

Before the comment flames begin ... yes, in many ways this doesn't really matter. These actors will lose their accents long before they leap off their first building. And while Superman is ostensibly a character who seeks "truth, justice and the American way," the phrase from the comic (if it's used in the movie at all) is just a euphemism meant to suggest goodness. These days it could just as easily be the British way.

Still, the casting of foreigners is notable. For one thing, it reflects where filmmakers are headed with these characters. Nearly all of these superheroes are darker and more tortured, and the current generation of Brits is seen, rightly or wrongly, as more comfortable at that end of the acting spectrum than many of their American counterparts.

Maybe more important, the choice speaks to a desire to cast relative unknowns in the roles. Except for Bale, none of the Aussies or Brits was known to a broad U.S. audience when they landed their superhero parts. The ability to get an actor at a reasonable paycheck -- the superhero, after all, makes the actor as much as the other way around -- can't be far from the minds of producers. And creatively, an unknown is a blank slate that can grow with a franchise instead of overshadowing it.

In fact, while some of us get very worked up about just who will play these superheroes, the actors who have inhabited these parts most successfully -- Christopher Reeve, Tobey Maguire -- have been low-key, even fey presences. Actors well-known for their charm -- a George Clooney, for instance -- actually make less-memorable superheroes.

When Brandon Routh was cast as Superman six years ago, he worried that he'd be confused a little too much with Reeve. It wasn't an idle concern: Routh looked and acted enough like the late Reeve to draw the comparison, but he inevitably got the short end of the stick. The goal these days seems to lie in the other direction: Bring in someone who looks and acts nothing like those who came before.

-- Steven Zeitchik

twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

Photo: Henry Cavill (center) in '"The Tudors." Credit: Jonathan Hession / Showtime

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As the last publicists, filmmakers and reporters made their way out of Park City, Utah, on Sunday and turned the land back over to its rightful owners (snowboarders and ski bums), we decided to take a look back at the 11 days just passed at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. Six storylines had risen to the top. (Well, a few others did too, but six has a nice ring to it.) Here they are, in no particular order:

The cultists. This may well be remembered as the year cults and their leaders became a Sundance fixture. Two highly buzzed-about, if very different, films put a cult front-and-center: Sean Durkin's flashback-happy "Martha Marcy May Marlene" cast Elizabeth Olsen as a woman who seeks to escape the psychological clutches of a charismatic but murderous leader, while Zal Batmanglij's "Lost"-like "Sound of My Voice," about a cult figure (Brit Marling) who may or may not be from the future, provided some of the most well-received storytelling of the festival.  Both movies will  have a cultural impact beyond Park City -- "MMMM" will get a major release from Fox Searchlight, and the second could well end up as a television pilot and subsequent series, according to the movie's representatives.

Rebirthing. It may not be the most talked-about current-events documentary to come out of the festival (that honor probably belongs to Morgan Spurlock's "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold"). But when the festival fades into history, time could well show that the 9/11 movie "Rebirth" -- which will be a part of the national 9/11 museum and will likely get theatrical and television distribution too -- as the Sundance product with the longest reach. First-time filmmaker Jim Whitaker spent nearly a decade dealing with the messy emotional business of people who lived through, and with, the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. His movie looks to be a factor for even longer than that.

Tickle Me Emo. At Sundance 2010, "Blue Valentine" took the pining and emotional shoe-gazing pretty deep; this year's "Like Crazy" takes its story of lovers divided by an ocean a level deeper. Whether or not Drake Doremus' drama becomes a hit when it's released by Paramount this year, it already seems bound to usher in a new round of sensitivity in independent-film circles. And much like "An Education" did for Carey Mulligan at the festival two years ago, "Like Crazy," which won two major prizes from the jury, heralds the arrival of a young British actress (in this case, the vulnerable, young Felicity Jones).

The jury at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival has given its grand jury U.S. dramatic prize to Drake Doremus' "Like Crazy," a story of a long-distance romance starring Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones.

The prize, the festival's highest honor, was the second for the film this evening; the jury previously handed a special prize to Jones.

It also awarded the grand jury U.S. documentary prize to Peter D. Richardson's "How to Die in Oregon," a story of the first state to legalize physician-assisted suicide.

In accepting the dramatic prize, Doremus said that "this movie is about love, and love never dying and being with you for the rest of your life." Then he thanked his agent. "Oh, and Paramount Pictures -- thanks for buying the movie." (The studio  acquired rights to the film a week ago and will release it later this year.)

Matt Groening presented the grand jury documentary prize and thanked the festival for inviting him to participate despite a "Simpsons" episode that once mocked the festival for the presence of "Parker Posey" and "Parka poseurs."

The audience at the festival gave its top U.S. dramatic prize to Maryam Keshavarz's "Circumstance," a Farsi-language look at a pair of teenage lesbians in contemporary Iran, and its top U.S. documentary prize to Cindy Meehl's "Buck," the story of a real-life horse whisperer.

Four films won a pair of jury prizes: in addition to "Like Crazy," Paddy Considine's "Tyrannosaur," Mike Cahill's "Another Earth" and Danfung Dennis' doc "Hell and Back Again" each were given two prizes.

For more details, see our sister blog, Awards Tracker.

-- Steven Zeitchik and Mark Olsen in Park City, Utah

 twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

Photo: Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones in 'Like Crazy.' Credit: Sundance Film Festival

The money and wine that flowed at the parties over the last week up and down Main Street in the resort mountain town of Park City, Utah, may not have suggested a particular kind of hardship. But Sundance has a way of depicting tribulations on its screens that belies the revelry of the festival itself.

This year, with the recession more than two years old, many of the movies, conceived when the recession was just starting, incorporated economic and other difficulties into their fabric. The struggle to make it in today's America was an on-screen trend related to -- or perhaps even the antecedent for -- the Sundance Film Festival's other common theme -- that of characters looking for spiritual salvation.

The struggle was not apparent in a Michael Moore-Barbara Ehrenreich power-to-the-people sort of fashion, though one documentary, "The Flaw," stopped to take a look at ordinary citizens affected by the subprime mortgage crisis. It  did, however, permeate the movies in more subtle ways.

In Tom McCarthy's "Win Win," a character played by Paul Giamatti cuts corners because his family-law practice has come upon hard times. Andrew Maclean's Alaskan Inuit thriller "On the Ice" showed the desperation of characters in a  remote, economically blighted part of the country (and then throws in some more reasons for desperation). In festival breakout "Martha Marcy May Marlene," Elizabeth Olsen's wanderer argues materialism and capitalism with her yuppie brother-in-law (Hugh Dancy).

In "Take Shelter," Michael Shannon's family man spends much of the movie readying himself for a coming storm that may be as much symbolic as meteorological. Danfun Dennis' documentary "Hell and Back Again" shows a sergeant struggling to adapt to everyday North Carolina life after he is wounded in Afghanistan.

J.C. Chandor's  "Margin Call" takes on the subject of modern-day crisis with an absence of metaphor: it shows how executives up and down the ladder of an investment brokerage are thrown for a financial and spiritual loop when the Wall Street unraveling begins.

Meanwhile, no one seems to be struggling financially (just emotionally) in "I Melt With You," the Rob Lowe-Jeremy Piven drama about a weeklong retreat of male bonding gone horribly wrong. But modern forces close in on them anyway:  Lowe's doctor becomes a pill-supplying quack to make extra cash, while Piven's banker has stolen from his clients to give his family an upper-class life and is, as the movie begins, bracing himself for a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation.

Even genre films got in on the act: Brit Marling, the Sundance It Girl who co-wrote and starred in two movies here, explored a young woman with no prospects in the science-fiction-tinged "Another Earth" -- her best chance at redemption is represented by, literally, a trip to another planet.

Independent movies have explored difficult times in previous years."The Company Men," which played at Sundance last year, looked at the effects of the recession on upper-middle management. The 2009 festival-circuit  hit "Wendy & Lucy" showed a drifter whose lost dog may have represented a larger absence of hope. But this year's Sundance may be the first large-scale gathering of English-language cinema in which hardship isn't just the subject of an occasional movie but a veritable through-line.

"Things seem so strange, especially in the wake of the economic collapse and the confusion over 'if consumption isn't everything, how do you construct a meaningful life?'" said Marling, who also brought the episodic drama "Sound of My Voice," a cult-centric story that explores spiritual desolation and salvation of its own kind, to the festival. "Both of my films  are really investigating our faith in being alive: who are we, what are we doing and why should we keep going?" The filmmakers here have one answer to those questions: to make and see movies about just that.

-- Steven Zeitchik in Park City, Utah

twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

Photo: Alex Shaffer, left, and Paul Giamatti in "Win Win."

Credit: Sundance Film Festival

Even before it screened for the public Friday night, Dito Montiel's crime drama "Son of No One" already had generated a lot of headlines in the bubble of the Sundance Film Festival.

The movie became a hot topic after a story appeared in The Hollywood Reporter earlier in the week saying  that a number of filmgoers had left a media and industry screening early. That prompted a sales agent for the film to tweet against the story (which prompted a followup item in The Hollywood Reporter).

But despite the walkout talk from earlier in the week, the movie, which co-stars Katie Holmes, played to a warm reception at a full house of approximately 1,200 filmgoers at the Eccles Theatre on Friday night.

Montiel's movie centers on a New York City police officer (Channing Tatum) tormented by a secret that threatens to catch up to him. As the walls close in, he finds himself on the run even from his boss (Ray Liotta) and wonders if he can even trust his godfather, who's also the police commissioner (Al Pacino).

At a news  conference earlier Friday, the freewheeling Montiel, who was previously here with "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints," addressed the walkout story, saying it "drove him nuts" but then added, "Whatever ... the movie's great."

A handful of audience members did seem aware of the earlier publicity. "I heard Katie [Holmes] wasn't coming because of all the bad press," one moviegoer said to another. "She hasn't been in anything good since 'Pieces of April.'"

Holmes did, in fact, show up at the last minute -- and for the first time all week, nearly the entire Eccles auditorium stood up to gawk and snap photographs of a celebrity. She later took the stage with Montiel and the rest of the cast, who spent most of the question-and-answer session praising the filmmaker.

On the red carpet before the screening, Tatum -- true to actor form -- said he'd not read any of the press surrounding the movie.

"I don’t ever read those things. People have asked me some interesting questions today," he said with a smiled. When asked what he meant by that, he replied, with a wink, "I don't know, you asked me." (Check out the video with Tatum below.)

From the stage, the actor self-deprecatingly noted that he only had about "15 words or lines in this entire movie." "[Montiel] convinced me the less I did, the better I'd be," he quipped.

-- Steven Zeitchik and Amy Kaufman

Twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

Twitter.com/AmyKinLA

Photo:  Ray Liotta, left, Channing Tatum and Dito Montiel at the Sundance Film Festival. Credit: Danny Moloshok / Associated Press

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With his 1995 film "Hoop Dreams," documentary filmmaker Steve James helped turn nonfiction filmmaking into something that also appealed to popular audiences.

With his latest film, "The Interrupters," which had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, James takes a look at a group of community activists in Chicago who attempt to intervene in conflicts and stop violence before it happens.

The film follows three of the violence "interrupters," who work with an organization called CeaseFire, over the course of one year. A number of mediations are caught on tape, in situations ranging from a brutal street fight to a group of teenagers haggling over $5.

But the real work of the interrupters often begins when they have backed people away from violence and they become involved in the lives of the people they encounter. Capturing both hope and heartache, the film is a far cry from the sensationalized accounts one might see, say, on a reality television show.