Inspired by Jason Spingarn-Koff‘s Life 2.0, the doc about an alternative fantasy cyber-realm that will show at Sundance 2010, I joined Second Life today and chose my avatar name — Slick Furlough.

I’ve done some reading, heard some things, tossed some stuff around and finalized my essential Sundance 2010 must-see list. It comes to 26 films. Divide this by nine days, add the two or three surprises that always pop up, and then subtract five or six due to conflicting schedules, fatigue and occasional evening parties and I may see 23 or 24 films…but more likely 20.

Tommy Lee Jones, Ben Affleck in John Wells’ Company Men.

If a film shows at a major venue (Library, Egyptian, Eccles, Prospector) during the first three or four days, it’s a hot prospect and at least a pretty good film. (Probably.) If it hasn’t been slated to show within this window, caveat emptor. It’s really that simple, and this is the festival programmers talking, not me. They always frontload the festival with sexy/interesting good stuff so that the buyers can get their business done and leave by Tuesday. Same deal every year

In no particular order…

1. Chris Morris‘ Four Lions. HE comment: British-made swarthy-terrorist comedy. This year’s In The Loop?. First public showing: Saturday, 1.23, 5:30 pm, Egyptian. Good slot!

2. Eric Mendelsohn‘s 3 Backyards. HE comment: Said to be a good script. If Edie Falco is in it, then it must be half-decent. First public showing: Sunday, 1.24, 8 pm, Racquet Club.

3. Joel Schumacher‘s Twelve. HE comment : Upper East Side of Manhattan, high school dropout, drug deals, murder, “chilling chronicle.” First public showing: Friday, 1.29, 6:15 pm, Eccles.

4. John Wells‘ Company Men. HE comment: The definitive Land of Mamet angst-ridden white guy movie of Sundance ’10. Ben Affleck, Chris Cooper, Kevin Costner, Tommy Lee Jones, Maria Bello, Rosemary DeWitt. Produced by Wells, Claire Rudnick Polstein and Paula Weinstein. First public showing: Friday, 1.22, 9:30 pm, Eccles.

5. Rodrigo Garcia‘s Mother & Child. HE comment: High calibre woman’s film that doesn’t play like a “woman’s film.” First 65% to 70% is excellent, at times sublime — the last 30% isn’t as good. First Park City public showing: Monday, 1.25, 8:00 pm, Racquet Club.

6. Amir Bar-Lev‘s The Tillman Story. HE comment: Go to the thing I wrote four days ago. First Park City public showing: Tuesday, 1.26, 8:30 pm, Park City Library. (A Tuesday night showing is a little outside the realm of buyer coolness. Are Sundance programmers hinting at something?)

7. Adam Green‘s Frozen. HE comment: This year’s Open Water, only with snow, height and freezing winds? First Park City public showing: Sunday, 1.24, midnight, Egyptian…forget it! Second showing on Tuesday, 1.26, 11:30 am, Prospector.

8. Michael Winterbottom‘s The Killer Inside Me. HE comment: Same old Jim Thompson femme fatale noir stuff? I’m just asking. But any film costarring Kate Hudson is cursed aforethought. Casey Affleck is too kiddy-faced to play a Robert Mitchumtype. First Park City public showing: Sunday, 1.24, 9:30 pm, Eccles.

3 Backyards

9. Ryan Piers Williams‘ Dry Land. HE comment: Same old back-from-Iraq, PTSD story about a guy looking to weave his way back into society and maybe meet a nice girl, etc.? Maybe not. Ryan O’Nan, America Ferrera, Jason Ritter, Wilmer Valderrama, Melissa Leo. First Park City public showing: Sunday, 1.24, 2:15 pm, Eccles.

10. Floria Sigismondi‘s The Runaways. HE comment: Everybody’s hot to see it and wants to attend the Joan Jett concert, etc., but I smell trouble. Maybe. First Park City public showing: Sunday, 1.24, 6:30 pm, Eccles.

11. Vincenzo Natali‘s Splice. HE comment: I go to Sundance to forget about CG weird-life-form movies, not see more of ’em. Forget it — unless the word is extraordinary. Part of the Park City at Midnight series. In a pig’s eye.

12. Jake Scott‘s Welcome to the Rileys. HE comment: James Gandolfini + Kristen Stewart = sold. First Park City public showing: Saturday, 1.23, 2:15 pm, Racquet Club.

13. Gaspar Noe‘s Enter The Void. HE comment: Mind-bender played at Cannes in a slightly longer unfinished form. First Park City public showing: Friday, 1.22, 8:30 pm, Park City Library.

13. Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman‘s Catfish. HE comment: A doc about social networking and online intrigues? Maybe but most likely later. First Park City public showing: Friday, 1.22, 11:30 am, Park City Library.

14. Jason Spingarn-Koff’s Life 2.0. HE comment: A doc about online fantasy living and online intrigues that’ll be showing directly after Catfish? Are they kidding? Not a chance. Okay, maybe. First Park City public showing: Friday, 1.22, 2:30 pm, Park City Library.

15. Spencer Susher‘s Hesher. HE comment: Creepo. But with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Natalie Portman, Rainn Wilson, Devin Brochu, Piper Laurie and John Carroll Lynch costarring, it has to be worth a shot. First Park City public showing: Fri, 1.22, 3:15 pm, Eccles.

16. Drake Doremus‘ Douchebag. HE comment: No info, no nothin’, great title. First Park City public showing: Friday, 1.22, 8 pm, Racquet Club.

17. Adrian Grenier‘s Teenage Paparazzo. HE comment: I’m getting a slightly icky and insubstantial feeling from this. And yet Grenier’s last doc, which dealt with a search for his absentee father, was quite good. Honestly? If every last teenage paparazzo on the planet earth was to suddenly die, I would not go into grief spasms. First Park City public showing: Friday, 1.22, 5:15 pm, Racquet Club.

Michelle Williams, Ryan Gosling in Blue Valentine

18. Davis Guggenheim‘s WAITING FOR SUPERMAN. HE comment: Nothing except that Guggenheim did well with An Inconvenient Truth so whatever. First Park City public showing: Friday, 1.22, 5:30 pm, Prospector Square.

19. Nicole Holofcener‘s Please Give. HE comment: Another Holofcener film means another film about anxious, ambitious, highly educated upper-middle-classers with issues, blah blah. Give Holofcener credit for trying to operate on a more aspirational realm than Nancy Meyers. First Park City public showing: Friday, 1.22, 6:15 pm, Eccles.

20. Aaron Schneider‘s Get Low. HE comment: Missed it in Toronto, very well spoken of, a definite must-see, an allegedly great Robert Duvall performance. First Park City public showing: Saturday, 1.23, 3:15 pm, Eccles.

21. Jay and Mark Duplass‘s Cyrus (a.k.a. Don’t Fuck My Mom). HE comment: Any Duplass flick gets an advance wave-through. First Park City public showing: Saturday, 1.23, 6:15 pm, Eccles Theatre (2)

22. Phillip Seymour Hoffman‘s Jack Goes Boating. HE comment: Respect must be paid to Philly. First Park City public showing: Saturday, 1.23, 9:15 pm, Eccles.

23. Derek Cianfrance‘s Blue Valentine. HE comment: Relationship drama of some mild interest because of Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, but I’m not holding my breath. I don’t know why I just said that. First Park City public showing: Sunday, 1.24, 3:15 pm, Eccles.

24. Josh Radnor‘s Happythankyoumoreplease. HE comment: “Six New Yorkers negotiating love, friendship and gratitude when they’re too old to be precocious and not yet fully adults.” I smell a mumblecore movie. If so, why don’t the notes just say “mumblecore movie” instead of futzing around? First Park City public showing: Friday,1,22, 12:15 pm 12:15 pm, Eccles.

25. Kevin Tyler Asch‘s Holy Rollers. HE comment: Young Hasidic guy (Jesse Eisenberg) becomes an international ecstasy smuggler. Down with that. First Park City public showing: Monday, 1.25, 3:30 pm, Eccles

26. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman‘s Howl. HE comment: Allen Ginsberg, 1950s obscenity trial, horn-rimmed glasses, the horror of the Eisenhower era, etc. strong>James Franco, David Strathairn, Jon Hamm, Mary-Louise Parker, Jeff Daniels. First Park City public showing: Friday, 1.21, 6:00 pm, Eccles — one of the first essential screenings.

A little more than four years ago Spike Jonze‘s phenomenal “Pardon Our Dust” Gap ad was first shown. In late ’05 I called it one of the most outrageously brilliant TV spots I’d seen in a very long time. It was supposed to be about the coming of a new design for Gap stores, but was obviously about something more. With Edvard Grieg‘s “Peer Gynt Suite” on the soundtrack, it’s about rebellion, revolution…a Fight Club-ish rage against corporate cultural domination.

It’s still one of the most radical TV spots ever — a subversive thing that Stanley Kubrick might have cooked up. The idea that a major corporation funded this in order to sell “product” is mind-blowing. What TV ads over the last four years have double-tracked quite as brilliantly?

Jerzy Skolimowski‘s Deep End (’71) is a highly absorbing, smoothly composed British noir about a withdrawn kid and his obsessive feelings for a co-worker. It’s more than a bit creepy, unsettling, perverted. But coolly stylish. It’s being restored by Bavaria Media for re-release as a DVD. It’s crudely viewable right now on YouTube.

Skolimowski clearly had a thing for Jane Asher, the fetching red-haired actress who’d become famous in the mid ’60s for being Paul McCartney‘s girlfriend. Her character, a duplicitous swimming-pool attendant, has an affair with an older guy, etc.

The Skolimowski flick I’d really like to see given a full restoration and a high-def digital remastering on Criterion is Moonlighting (’82), the Polish-laborers-restoring-a-London-townhouse allegory with Jeremy Irons. It was said in the ’80s that there are two kinds of people — those who hear Moonlighting and think Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepard, and those who think Skolimowksi, Irons and Polish communism.

Movieline‘s Stu VanAirsdale is asking why Carey Mulligan hasn’t caught on as a formidable Best Actress finalist. I could feel this bizarre turn taking shape but I didn’t want to face it. I finally did on 1.13 in a lament/argument piece. Mulligan will still be nominated, of course, but the race is now between Meryl Streep and Sandra Bullock — we may as well face facts.

Carey Mulligan

But why? How did her handlers “utterly fail to build any public image or brand for their awards hopeful?,” as VanAirsdale puts it. It couldn’t have been easy to let the advantage slip away, given Mulligan’s headwind out of Sundance ’09, but somehow it happened. It seems fair to say that Sony Pictures Classics didn’t exactly quarterback the campaign like Eli Manning. Tom Bernard and Michael Barker are known to be equitable and hands-offish when it comes to acting-awards campaigns. It therefore never seemed likely that they would have orchestrated some kind of balls-out Mulligan push. That’s not how they play it.

“Any number of unknowable internal factors contributed to this,” VanAirsdale says, “from peaking too early to Mulligan’s personal reluctance to play the game (especially after she started dating Shia LaBeouf) to Sony Pictures’ Classics’ institutional thriftiness to simply taking an awards nod for granted and planning to regroup in February — after the Oscar nominations are announced — for a legitimate campaign.”

And to think it was only three months ago when I told Scott Feinberg the following:

“Meryl Streep gives an expert performance as Julia Child in Julie & Julia. She always gives expert performances. She always gets everything right. But this time around she isn’t half as spirited or soulful as Carey Mulligan in An Education. Seriously, not by half. Streep is doing a bit. She’s the master of this kind of acting. But Mulligan is turning on the current, acting her butt off and pouring her heart out. She’s fresh and alive and expert as well. She’s got the moves and the chops.

“The industry worships Streep but I know more than a few people who are sorta kinda sick of her being so good all the time. Always the grand dame, always being nominated, etc. As she deserves to be — don’t get me wrong. But the bottom line reality is that her performance in Nora Ephron‘s decently made film is nowhere near as good as Mulligan’s in Lone Scherfig‘s superb one. That’s a fact.”

As Steve McQueen‘s Jake Holman cried out in the finale of The Sand Pebbles, “What the hell happened?”

I don’t know what I was thinking. I wanted to be in Salt Lake City by the early afternoon, but the reality of getting three or four hours sleep at most and having to wake up with the stars still out has only just hit me. Tomorrow is the last day for all the stuff you always have to do before leaving. I’ll be wearing a niftier black cowboy hat than the one I wore last year. The flight will be miserable, of course, and I can only guess what the airline will be charging me for baggage.

Apple’s iPad/iTablet will be announced on January 27th, but won’t be purchasable until March…is that right? Won’t their presentation seem a little anticlimactic, given all the informational hubbub so far?

An HE reader “used to sell a lot of Apple computers,” he claims, “so I know how their supply chain and marketing strategies have worked because they haven’t changed. I have no inside knowlege whatsoever, and have just been putting together the rumors like any other outsider.” But from all the sites and the consistencies and inconsistencies, here are his predictions:

1. What it is:

“A 10.1 inch multitouch screen that will act like the iPhone screen.

“It will have one button like the iPhone.

“It will have a video/still camera that’ll probably be 5 megapixels that will do video chat.

“It will be Wifi enabled.

“It will have 3g capability that you will have to pay a monthly charge for through the Itunes store.

“It won’t make calls (that would eat into iPhone market)

“It will run an operating system similar to the iPhone operating system, just expanded with options for filesaving like a Mac does.

“It will not run Snow Leopard or any other laptop/desktop Mac OS (which would eat into the laptop market).

“It will have the same iPod connector.

“It will have every major magazine or newspaper distributed as an application.

“There will be a new Ebook section on the Itunes site if they don’t go out and add an IBook site just to cater to the book business.

“It will have an aluminum backing similar to the current iPhone.

“It won’t have a battery you can replace (this is so that it will eventually DIE and you will have to replace it, like every iPod and iPhone).

“It will have the most gorgeous HD capable display you will see on anything out there.

There will most likely be three versions: Entry Level $599/ 32gb hdd, $699/64gb hdd, and a $899 with additional features and a larger HDD.

“The additional features will most likely be a mobile version of IWORK, Apple’s office suite that is the only thing they haven’t beaten Gates with.

“IWORK will be available as an application, but Microsoft Word will not obviously.

It will have a memory card reader slot, but no CD’s obviously.”

2. What it means for Apple::

“Apple has marketed itself as the primary consumer computing company. If there was a gap in their product offering, this is it.

“It makes them the first and last legitimate destination to purchase any book, magazine, newspaper — the key element being textbooks.

“Apple did it with music. They’re gaining momentum (slowly) with TV and film. But whatever momentum the TV and film had will be pedestrian to the explosion of consumption of print media through the iPad. Print media is already limited based on the form of the user interface. It will be cheaper and easier to consume, and the user experience will be better.

“This is a by-product, but Apple cares a lot about the environment. How much can they play up the fact that they are saving forests by enabling digital versions so people don’t have to print or recycle paper?

“The odds of them screwing up are astronomical. All they really have to do is get an iPhone and a Macbook Pro to have sex and you will have the most portable and most enjoyable content delivery system in the world.

3. What it means for us as a society:

“It gives a heart transplant to journalism as an industry and public service. People need reporting, and when the print media no longer has to pay for pulp and printing presses (which they are currently doing in addition to their current digital formats) they will have more money to compete for reporters who will improve the overall finished product. We all know about the death of newspapers from David Simon and The Wire.

“Whatever was holding back the idea of telecommuting isn’t anymore.

Any media you want will be available by a subscription service. NBC on demand? $5 per month. NYTimes? $5 per month. Whatever else you can think of.

“Just like the iPod became your entire CD collection, you will be able to carry around your entire DVD collection on a viewable form that exceeds or rivals your current viewing situation. If you have a top end 50” HDTV with a Blu-ray player that you watch in surround sound from 10 feet away, it will look the same on 10.1, deliver similar if not equal sound and resolution from 2.5 feet away.

“If it does and these things, and if it performs them in a simple, clean, straightforward way, there is no way that this doesn’t make Apple the one to beat in every major and minor media platform. I think future versions may include some form of Docking system that eventually replaces your cable box and blu-ray player. I don’t think they want a part of the console gaming industry now, but they already have the mobile gaming industry on its toes, but if they want the consoles they can take that too.

“The iPod is 10 years old. Ten years ago, people had CD collections and mobile CD players that were huge. When was the last time you saw one of those things? Ten years from now, its entirely possible that people will look at newspapers, magazines, textbooks, cd’s, dvd’s, cable boxes, stereos, paper notebooks, printed photographs, landline telephones (gone with the advent of the video chat and skype apps). And it will be entirely possible that Apple, while not owning exclusivity in any anti-trust capacity, will effectively own all of those industries. Every school kid could be required to have one in lieu of issuing textbooks.

“Since 1984, Apple has targeted two markets, education and personal consumers. They ignored business computing. What does this do to Microsoft, who is on the verge of another so-so version of Windows, a huge investment in an inferior tablet, and losing marketshare in their business based software? What happens if Apple wants to make a move into that world? With cost effective user-friendly workstations that work with everything you already have and improves it going forward? Whats stopping them?”

The Envelope‘s Pete Hammond spoke last night to Avatar‘s James Cameron at the Fox after-party at Craft. His first question, naturally, was about Cameron’s surprise Golden Globe win over Kathryn Bigelow in the Best Director category.

“I am still stunned,” Cameron answered. “I was sure [Kathryn] was gonna win. I thought because it was the foreign press, they might appreciate our movie a little more, so best picture was a possibility, but not director.”

As for Avatar being $200 million shy of breaking Titanic‘s worldwide box-office record, Cameron said he “always knew one day someone would do it. And I knew I had to prepare myself to accept that fact. I just never knew it would be me, so yeah, I’m fine with it happening now!”

“I had to laugh after I saw Creation at the Toronto Film Festival last fall,” writes Marshall Fine, “because I’d read speculation in the press that the reason it was having trouble finding an American distributor was its controversial content.

Paul Bettany as Charles Darwin in Creation.

“As if this weak-tea, droopy-drawers drama had a scintilla of anything that might be mistaken for controversy squirreled somewhere within its overlong running time. Perhaps I dozed through that part.

“What most people were too polite to say was that Creation (1.22.10) is a colossal snooze, a drama allegedly about a hot-button topic — Darwin’s theory of evolution — that buries its most interesting material beneath a mountain of sudsy and dreary psychodrama that’s not all that dramatic.”

An announcement about April Criterion releases says that Sidney Lumet‘s The Fugitive Kind (1960), an under-appreciated adaptation of Tennessee Williams‘ Orpheus Descending starring Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani, will be among them. We’re talking a double-disc special edition with a high-definition digital transfer plus extras, including a documentary about the making of the film and an essay by David Thomson.

Brando’s Valentine Xaiver, a guitar-strumming drifter in a snakeskin jacket, was his second and last performance as a youngish moody type in a frankly sexual drama. (Val could’ve been the older, alienated-hipster brother of Stanley Kowalski — one who never wrote or kept in touch.) Brando returned to this kind of character in Last Tango in Paris, of course, but as a middle-aged man on a kind of spiritual downswirl.

Joanne Woodward costarred as a heavily mascara’ed wackjob. Victor Jory plays one of Williams’ standard-issue Southern sickos — a symbol of decrepitude and intolerance.

The Criterion email calls The Fugitive Kind a 1959 film. The IMDB says it opened on December 1, 1959 but Bosley Crowther‘s N.Y. Times review is dated April 15, 1960. It premiered in Los Angeles and sat around for four months before opening in New York?

“At the center of his drama, which grimly and relentlessly takes place in the sweaty and noxious climate of a backwash Louisiana town, there are two brave and enterprising people whose inevitably frustrating fate assumes, from the vibrance of their natures, the shape of tragedy,” Crowther wrote. “And because Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani play these two people brilliantly, The Fugitive Kind has a distinction and a sensitivity that are rare today in films.

“Credit, too, Sidney Lumet, who has directed this piercing account of loneliness and disappointment in a crass and tyrannical world. His plainly perceptive understanding of the deep-running skills of the two stars, his daring with faces in close-up and his out-right audacity in pacing his film at a morbid tempo that lets time drag and passions slowly shape are responsible for much of the insistence and the mesmeric quality that emerge.”

HE reader Bobby Rivers has pointed out that during last night’s Martin Scorsese montage before he accepted his Golden Globe life achievement award there was no clip from New York, New York, even though the band played the film’s Kander & Ebb title tune as Scorsese walked to the stage.

Liza Minelli, Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York.

The reason, of course, is that very few people feel much affection for New York, New York. I’ve never really liked it myself. (It has one electric scene — i.e., when Robert De Niro is physically thrown out of a club that Liza Minelli is performing in, and he kicks out several light bulbs adorning the entrance way as he’s manhandled out by the manager and a bouncer). But I know I’ve always liked Pauline Kael‘s line about New York, New York (one of the most infamous cocaine movies of all time) being “an honest failure.”

What other films can be described this way? Is dishonesty a reason why most films fail? Do audience sense some kind of lying going on and therefore reject them out of hand? Honest Failures is just one way of putting it. Respectable Failures, Honorable Failures, Commendable Failures…movie history books are full of them.

I’m not defining Honest Failures as films which have steadily risen in esteem in the years since their initial release (like Charles Laughton‘s Night of the Hunter, say), but as admirable, well-made films that are still a little under-regarded, and in some instances have almost been forgotten.

But what is this? I’m going to be blamed for linking to this so go ahead and trash me, but I honestly gasped when I laid eyes.