I noticed last night that some people don’t have the elocution skills to say Howl properly. You have to really use your mouth and your tongue and get that “owl” sound going. You have to say “ow!” as in “damn, that hurts!” and then throw in a strong rolling “l.” Two or three people I spoke to prior to last night’s Eccles screening were calling it “Hal,” as in HAL 9000 computer. One of them was a publicist. I leaned forward and went “come again?” and he said, “You know…Hal? The movie you’re about to go see?”

Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Freidman‘s Howl, which premiered tonight at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, isn’t half bad. Why did I just say that? It’s better than that — it’s an indie, artsy, half-animated dream-cream movie that’s basically an instructional primer for the uninitiated about what a wonderfully seminal and influential poem Allen Ginsberg‘s Howl was and is.

It’s brisk, condensed, in some ways florid, engaging, intellectually alert and stimulating. You know what this thing is? It’s a gay Richard Linklater movie, only deeper and more trippy. It’s an half-animated exploration thing that contains scenes of actors reading and “being,” but in no way is this a movie that plays like a movie. It’s something else, and that’s a good thing for me.

Howl is a “small” film, but it’s rather wonderful and joyful in the particulars.

Howl is not a narrative feature — it’s a near-documentary that says “stop what you’re doing and consider what a cool poem Howl was…in fact, let us take you through the whole thing and show and tell you how cool and illuminating it is.” It uses Waltz With Bashir-like animation to illuminate what Howl was in Ginsberg’s head when he wrote it, and what the poem’s more sensitive readers might have seen in their heads when they first read it.

James Franco “plays” Ginsberg quite fully, particularly and well — he gets the slurring speech patterns and pours a mean cup of tea as he’s explaining a point to a journalist — but Franco, good as he is, is subordinate to (or should I say in harmony with?) the basic ambition of the film, which is to inform, instruct, awaken, turn on.

For me, Ian McKellen‘s “Acting Shakespeare” was a somewhat similar experience. An accomplished British actor explaining and double-defining the joy and transcendent pleasure of performing, feeling and really knowing deep down what Shakespeare’s poetry really means, and has meant to him all his life.

I’ve read Howl one a half times, but only now do I feel I really know it.

I did nothing this afternoon except grab a free lunch at Frontier, the daring-indie-cinema space on Main Street. And then walk across the street to the Egyptian for the annual festival-launch press conference, this time (and for the first time) with John Cooper paired with festival founder Robert Redford. And then I walked down to Java Cow to write and upload. There I met a fetching blonde who smiled and started the conversation and bought me a coffee — delightful. The Java Cow wifi wasn’t fast enough to handle my YouTube uploads, but I took it like a man.

Sundance Film Festival director John Cooper, founder Robert Redford — Thursday, 1.21, 2:15 pm.

Bilal’s Stand director-writer Sultan Sharrief, who gave me a short lift today from the Yarrow to downtown. Sundance programmer Shari Frillot says his film, filled with heart and authenticity, hails a new voice American independent cinema.” in

Veteran indie publicist Linda Brown (center); colleagues/employees Elizabeth Glenn (l.), Nicole Menconi (r.) during today’s press luncheon at Frontier on Main Street.

Pepperminta director Pipilotti Rist during Frontier press luncheon.

Lobby of Park City Marriott, taken from new “press lounge” balcony, which is basically a narrow space with some tables and chairs and eats without much of an opportunity to “lounge.” That’s Variety critic Todd McCarthy with the baseball cap; standing to McCarthy’s right is critic Harlan Jacobson.

Howl co-directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman have announced their next feature — a drama about the late oral-sex queen and subsequent feminist and antiporn activist Linda Lovelace, based on a script by W. Merritt Johnson.

Lovelace is “a story with great dramatic and psychological dimensions,” said Friedman. “It’s also set against a backdrop of shifting sexual mores, which should be a lot of fun to dig into.”

Producers Laura Rister at Untitled Entertainment, Jim Young at Animus Films and Heidi Jo Markel at Eclectic Pictures are in “active negotiations” with Nu Image to finance the project. Johnson will executive produce.

“I have five or six feature films pushing me. You see, it sounds as if I have a career and I’m planning a lot. But no, the films come like a home invasion, like burglars in the middle of the night. All of a sudden they are there, and you have to deal with them.” — director Werner Herzog speaking to DGA Quarterly‘s Jeffrey Ressner in a fascinating, nicely edited q & a.

The snowflakes are very fine. The overall blanketing effect is kinda blizzardy. It’s quite beautiful. I adore the aura of heavy snow. Taken from front stoop of Park City’s Park Regency — Thursday, 1.21, 7:50 am.