During the 2012 Sundance Film Festival I noticed at least two films (Red Lights, Black Rock) in which a protagonist who’s recently been in an ultra-violent altercation walks around in public view with dried blood on his/her face. (I think at least one other Sundance film went in for this.) This is similar to Ryan Gosling walking around during the final 25% of Drive with brownish blood stains on his white scorpion jacket.

This is a bullshit affectation favored by wanna-be-cool directors, and I’m saying right now to Nicholas Winding Refn and all the others that it ends here and now. Nobody in the actual world ever walks around with globs of dried blood on their person. It would be like walking the streets with a big sandwich-board ad that says “HAVE JUST BEEN IN VIOLENT ALTERCATION” and “LOOKING AROUND FOR NEXT PERSON TO HIT OR SHOOT.” It would obviously attract attention, especially from the law, and anyone who’s just beaten up or killed somebody usually wants anything but that. Plus blood is unattractive and sticky, and I think there’s some kind of instinct that we’re all born with to wash it off as soon as possible.

A 1.27 Sundance Film Festival article by N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis proclaimed that “nothing else…came close to stirring up the excitement and sense of discovery generated by Beasts of the Southern Wild…a hauntingly beautiful [film] both visually and in the tenderness it shows toward the characters.”

Dargis has an eagle eye and highly refined taste buds, but there are two things I can usually count on when it comes to her Sundance Film Festival coverage: (1) She’ll never share or suggest what it’s like to live in a film as you’re watching it — how it actually tastes and feels from a non-eltitist, Joe Popcorn journeyman perspective, as I attempted to do in my Beasts review; and (b) her Sundance sum-up pieces will almost always focus on films that I missed for whatever reason or chose to bypass (For Ellen, Celeste and Jesse Forever, Bachelorette) or which I respected but wasn’t especially thrilled by (2 Days in New York).

Dargis acknowledges that Beasts “inspired a minor critical backlash” during the latter part of the festival. That may or may not be Dargis-ese for “people of varied pedigrees dared to express their gut feelings in addition to mulled-over aesthetic responses.”

In a deliberate effort to take ad money out of Hollywood Elsewhere’s pocket, a piece by “agent turned manager turned producer” Gavin Polone about the over-ness of the Oscars appeared in New York magazine on 1.23:

“Any film thought to have a shot at an [Oscar] award has to be released in the late fall or early winter, meaning that almost every film released between January and September is pretty much out of the running. Distributors select the films they think can garner awards and release them during the last quarter of the year all at once, meaning that the holiday season is hugely overserved by prestige projects and all other seasons woefully undersupplied.

“As a result, the Oscars damage the prospects of the very movies they’re designed to promote. If there were no Academy Awards, there would probably be a more even release of quality films throughout the year, making it more likely that additional people would see those films, since most moviegoers don’t schedule their year to make room for increased movie attendance in November and December. Instead, it’s a battle royale for ticket buyers, and too many movies lose out.

“Many in Hollywood would say that the financial reward of Oscars success makes the cost and loss of dignity worthwhile, but the facts indicate otherwise. A detailed statistical analysis of the Oscars’ box-office effect by Boxofficequant.com showed that almost all of the ticket money flowed in after the nomination, not the win. But this is also misleading, since it is difficult to know how a film that was nominated would have performed had it not received a nomination.

“Of course, some people do benefit from the Oscars, aside from publicists, the trade press, the New York and Los Angeles Times (have you ever seen any kind of anti-Oscars article in those publications?), and Los Angeles billboard owners: the individuals who win. Directors, screenwriters, actors, editors, and anyone else with a nomination or a win gets a big bump in pay after being so honored — as much as $5 million, it’s said, for a Best Actor trophy.

“Unfortunately for the payer of this Oscar bonus, there is no correlation between anyone’s winning an award and future box-office success, despite the big deal made about Oscars in marketing campaigns. PopEater‘s Jo Piazza showed that of the top 100 highest-grossing films of 2010, 40 percent of the top twenty featured Oscar winners, while 50 percent of the bottom twenty did. If possessing a statuette was actually worth something, shouldn’t there be some direct correlation between casting an Academy Award winner and higher box office?

“Really, I see no point to any of it, other than the kitschy fun of the spectacle, which, as with the Miss America Pageant, certainly can be entertaining in limited doses. But by the third speech of someone thanking his spouse, agent, manager, psychic, dog walker, and the person who clears his chakras, I am always bored and left wondering why he couldn’t just have a private conversation with the person to whom he wishes to express his gratitude, and then find something more interesting or entertaining to talk about on television.

“Fortunately, the public seems finally to be losing interest. The Oscar broadcast has evidenced a pretty steady decline in audience share since the mid-seventies. Last year, obviously feeling the need to bring in a younger viewership, the Academy hired James Franco and Anne Hathaway as hosts. The plan didn’t work; there was a 12 percent drop in the 18-to-49 demographic and a 9 percent decrease in overall viewers. Clearly, this is because the audience feels alienated from the choices of nominations and winners, not how they are presented. As with any cultural institution, when the interest and support of the young are lost, it is just a question of when, not if, that institution becomes fully irrelevant. I can’t wait.”

I reviewed Matt Ross‘s 28 Hotel Rooms on 1.22. The trailer went up hours ago.

What do you mean people should take the comments I recently passed along about Darren Aronofsky‘s Noah “with a grain of salt”? Are you thinking Matty Libatique isn’t a straight shooter or someone to be trusted? Because he’s only a dp and isn’t the heavy-hitter authority that Aronofsky is? Or are you thinking…what, that I was drunk when I spoke to him? (I wasn’t.) He said what he said and I said what I said during the last Oscar Poker.

I hadn’t read good things about Katie Asleton‘s Black Rock, a kind of chick mumblecore Deliverance thriller, so I didn’t expect much when I finally sat down to see it yesterday at the Egyptian. But I was still appalled at how lame it is. Asleton and husband Mark Duplass, who wrote the script and exec produced, need to stay the hell away from the action-thriller genre henceforth, or at least up their game. Because Black Rock — surprisingly, stunningly — verges on the incompetent.

Black Rock costars at Sundance Film festival premiere (l. to r.):
Jay Paulson, Lake Bell, Katie Asleton, Kate Bosworth, Will Bouvier, Anslem Richardson.

The film has three basic problems. One, the event that triggers violence between three camping girlfriends (Aselton, Kate Bosworth, Lake Bell) and three dishonorably discharged soldiers (Jay Paulson, Will Bouvier, Anslem Richardson ) isn’t believable. Two, the women frequently act like morons before and after the violence occurs. And three, even as they’re in danger of being shot or knifed or beaten to death they still place a high premium on settling their emotional conflicts and can’t shut the fuck up as they’re crawling around in the mud and the brush.

Preparation suggestion for all feminist female directors thinking about making a thriller of this sort: Watch Ted Kotcheff‘s First Blood three or four times. It might teach you that when your life is in danger in the boonies you need to (a) Rambo up, (b) be quiet like an animal and (c) save the emotional sharing for when you get back to safety.

Asleton, Bosworth and Bell are camping on a remote island off the coast of Maine when they run into the three above-described assholes. The remote location and lack of any legal recourse if things turn weird would naturally lead any sane woman to play it very, very carefully if confronted by three guys with rifles. But not Katie! She not only decides to flirt with the best looking of the three (i.e., Bouvier) but entice him into the woods for sex. And then the booze suddenly catches up with her and she does a 180 and says “whoops, sorry…changed my mind.” Brilliant! Bouvier decides to force himself upon her and Asleton resists and squirms and freaks and finally stops him by thunking him in the head with a large rock. His spirit leaves his body and rises into the night sky above.

The break from reality happens when Paulson, the most rabid and unstable of the three, decides to waste the three women as revenge for Asleton killing their buddy. Duplass and Asleton are trying to sell the idea that this guy is so whacked and such a woman-hater that he’s ready to become a murderer and a lifelong fugitive from justice in order to affirm the bonds of buddyhood. I could maybe accept these two creeps deciding to sexually assault the three women for revenge, but not kill them. That’s too much. The women explain that it wasn’t deliberate and that Asleton was just trying to defend herself, and that doesn’t matter to Paulson. His willingness to jump into the pit of death and madness happens way too easily, and it’s especially bothersome that he and Richardson act like they don’t know much about soldiering (i.e., shooting, tracking, hand-to-hand combat) when things turn nasty.

The last 15 or so minutes are especially awful. There’s a skill and an art to delivering good do-or-die combat sequences. And there had to be a way for these three women to handle themselves in such a way that wouldn’t invite disbelief and derision. People sitting in front of me at the Egyptian were smirking and chortling. I kept silent but was truly amazed.

I’m leaving Park City today and arriving late this evening at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, which kicked off last night. The opener was Lawrence Kasdan‘s Darling Companion (Sony Classics, 4.20), a lost dog movie which is very, very slight. Variety‘s Lael Lowenstein said it “won’t be long before this one turns up at the Netflix pound.”

It’s basically about an older, well-to-do Denver couple (Kevin Kline, Diane Keaton) getting in touch with their issues through a relationship with a mixed collie they’ve adopted after Keaton and her daughter (Elisabeth Moss) find him huddling on the side of a road. The dog is soon being attended to by a friendly vet (Jay Ali), enjoying a nice hot bath, and given the name of Freeway.

During a Rocky Mountain vacation Kline, an emotionally curt surgeon who’s constantly phoning and texting, lets Freeway slip the leash…gone. Keaton, emotionally invested in her relationship with Freeway in lieu of a dry and distant one with Kline, is hugely pissed and is soon leading a major log-cabin campaign to find the dog. Helping out are Kline’s sister (Dianne Wiest), her easygoing boyfriend (Richard Jenkins), Penny’s doctor son (Mark Duplass) and a sexy exotic European (Ayelet Zurer) who has gypsy-like, extra-sensory insight into Freeway’s whereabouts. And a local sheriff (Sam Shepard) is aware of the hunt and peripherally involved.

I thought maybe Kasdan might be up to something clever here. Perhaps using the lost-dog plot as a way into a kind of Big Chill flick about four or five old farts hanging around a Rocky Mountain cabin and evaluating their lives and times…something like that. But for the most part, Darling Companion is just about finding the dog. Okay, Kline comes around to admitting that he’s too aloof and work-oriented, but this is hardly the stuff of keen audience engagement.

A septugenarian Big Chill would make sense as Kasdan isn’t concerned in the least with Freeway’s whereabouts or adventures. All we do is hang out with the oldsters and Duplass and Zurer and blah blah, and then the story comes to a nice wholesome conclusion.

At one point Kline and Jenkins encounter a kind of Unabomber guy living in a rundown cabin in the woods, and there’s an implication that Freeway might have been kidnapped and/or is being held by this dog of a human being, but this possibility is quickly discarded.

Why does Freeway run away from Kline in the first place? Dogs don’t just run away from their masters. Are we to suppose that Freeway is just as put off by Kline’s selfish cell-phone existence and can’t wait to escape his company? That’s a stretch.

Darling Companion made me feel really old on top of everything else. I’ve known Kline, Keaton, Weist and Shepard since the late ’70s and early ’80s, and they’re all looking and especially acting like people in their late 60s and early 70s with their aching joints and arms falling out of their sockets and their gray hair and Shepard’s teeth looking small and gnarly with his pot belly hanging out…Jesus! Shepard was a smooth romantic figure in the ’80s.

If you’re going to be an older working actor, you have to look younger than you are. That’s the rule. If you’re 75, you have to look 60 or 65 after you’ve just had a facial and been worked on by a skilled hair colorist (i.e., a little gray around the edges). If you’re 60 or 65, you have to look like a 50 or 55 year-old physical trainer. No limping, no paunch, in good shape, no complaining about aching joints. Because I’m telling you it’s really depressing to watch Kline and Keaton stumbling along a mountain trail like refugees from a retirement community.

And yet the film’s best scene happens on that same mountain trail when Kline’s right arm becomes dislocated and Keaton has to help him pop it back in.

My basic reaction as I left the screening room was “why is Kasdan degrading his once-proud brand with a feathery little project like this? A movie about finding a fucking dog in the Rocky Mountains? That‘s what the once-great Kasdan is up to?”

Kasdan’s last truly tasty film, Mumford, came out 12 and a half years ago. I will never stop respecting or believing in his craft and vision, but over the last decade he’s generally been regarded by the media mob as M.I.A. or “on hold” or past it. As soon as I heard about Darling Companion I began wondering if it’s a potential rebound or a place-holder or what. Because my suspicions were, no offense, skeptical. And now I know — it’s a place-holder. It’s actually kind of a mild embarassment.

I don’t mean to speak dismissively of one of the strongest and most distinctive director-screenwriters of the ’80s and ’90s. Body Heat, The Big Chill, Silverado, The Accidental Tourist, Grand Canyon, Wyatt Earp, Mumford — that’s a hell of a 20-year run. But writer-directors have only so much psychic essence, and the prevailing view is that after they’ve shot their wad (as most wads are lamentably finite), that’s it.

For whatever reason Kasdan tells us that the mountain-search portion of the film is happening in Telluride, Colorado, as we’re shown an establishing shot of Telluride’s main street. But it was shot in and around Park City’s Wasatch Mountains. I’m betting that part of the pitch to the Darling actors was “you get a nice five or six-week vacation in the Rockies as part of the deal.”