Day: January 16, 2013

All forms of exercise are wonderful, spirit-lifting, perfect. But of all the ways to exercise and get the blood pumping and harden the bod, skiing seems the most…I don’t know, the most complacent? The most middle-class? Certainly the most indulgent and regimented. Every time I see a couple of skiers clomping down the hallway of the Park Regency or hauling their huge gear sacks into a Park City shuttle, I always look at their white faces and every time I see looks of boredom and blankness.

Skiiers might have a lot hidden underneath their gear, but they’re not interesting people. Not on the surface, at least. I’ve been watching them for too many years. I know. They seem lacking in snap and intrigue. A few Park City bar owners and resturateurs love the ski crowd and look askance at journo types like myself because we don’t spend enough. I give them the eff-you attitude right back. I almost dislike skiiers as much as golfers with their hideously-patterned golf shirts and checkered pants and shit.

Plus I vaguely despise those padded ski suits skiers all wear, especially the orange ones. I mean, I’m here trying to figure out a film festival, working hard in my jeans and deerskin cowboy boots and looking for salvation and acting cool, and then two or three pink-faced skiiers get on the bus…oh, God, here they are. Deadbeats. They sit down, fatigued and winded and not talking with each other. All zombied out. They remind me of people who go to Cancun and Las Vegas and Atlantic City for vacations.

The only time I’ve identified with a skiier is when I’ve watched the Criterion DVD of Michael Ritchie‘s Downhill Racer. Otherwise forget it. Forget the whole ski culture.

The Gold Derby status-quo conservatives are sticking with sleepy Lincoln for Best Picture, but TheWrap‘s Steve Pond, Deadline‘s Pete Hammond, Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil and Coming Soon‘s Ed Douglas are now forecasting an Argo win. Me? After forecasting Lincoln for ages, I’m starting to think that Silver Linings Playbook has a shot. The just-up Twitter Oscars Index convinced me it just might happen…maybe.

“A playful, elegantly made little horror film, Mama teasingly sustains a game of hide-and-seek as it tantalizes the audience with fleeting apparitions of the title character while maintaining interest in two deeply disturbed little orphan girls,” writes Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy, who filed last night at 11:28 pm.

“Being sold primarily on the name of its godfather, Guillermo del Toro, this Canadian-Spanish co-production from Universal is refreshingly mindful of the less-is-more horror guidelines employed by 1940s master Val Lewton, not to mention Japanese ghost stories, but the PG-13 rating might prove too restrictive for the gory tastes of male core genre fans. Still, less bloodthirsty female teens could make up the difference at the box office, as the film provokes enough tension and gasps to keep susceptible viewers grabbing their armrests or the arms of those next to them.

“In essence, Mama represents a throwback and a modest delight for people who like a good scare but prefer not to be terrorized or grossed out. With fine special effects and a good sense of creating a mood and pacing the jolts, Andy Muschietti shows a reassuringly confident hand for a first-time director, pulling off some fine visual coups through smart camera placement and cutting, and not taking the whole thing so seriously that it becomes overwrought.”

The Park Regency hotel (1710 Prospector Ave., Park City, Utah) has always had weak, spotty, sluggish wifi. It’s 2013 and it still feels like 1997 in this joint. And last night the wifi was moving like a snail in suite #202. So I asked this morning if I could please have a suite that’s closer to the router/modem, and they said sure and gave me the keys to suite #232, where I’m now sitting. And it’s even slower. It’s awful. Pages takes minutes, not seconds, to load. It took so long for my gmail page to load that I went into a dumb-beast trance. There’s nothing worse than bad-wifi headaches. The forehead throbs.

The last time the wifi was this bad was four years ago in Oxford, Mississippi, where the first Hollywood Elsewhere “mood pocket” occured.

I’ve tried to sign up for a mifi service via AT&T but it’ll take days to receive the device in the mail. I can’t do the good old “turn your phone into a mifi device” because in order to do this I’ll have to give up my AT&T international plan, according to two AT&T tech guys I spoke with.

Update: I’ve asked the Park Regency staffers for assistance in a moderate but urgent tone of voice, and they basically stared at me like I’m a circus freak, like I’m crazy and possibly dangerous. Could you please call QWest and ask for a service guy to come out and see what’s wrong? It was like talking to cows. All they do is say “uhm, could you maybe work in the lobby? Because the signal is pretty good here.” (Which it is.) As a last resort I wrote the guy in charge of running this place, Richard Zimmerman of Trading Places, and of course he’s not responding. Why would he?

Instructions for the crazy guy in room #232: Nod, listen, say you’re sorry, keep nice-ing him and wearing him down. He’ll eventually give up. And the staffers are right. They’ve won and I’ve lost. I’m now filing from the lobby. Tail between legs. But somewhat grateful. It works like gangbusters down here! What a contrast!

Update: But it still sucks back in the suite. I brought both of my Macbook Pros plus the iPad 3 on this trip. For whatever reason the Macbook Pro sitting on a table in front of the couch works a little better than the computer sitting on the desk in front of the TV. I guess between the moody couch computer and the lobby sessions I’ll muddle through, but I hate this.

If there’s one awards-quality film that warrants a deep-drill investigation by 60 Minutes, it’s Zero Dark Thirty. Obviously. Hello? With all the sharply differing views about whether the film endorses torture or if Biggy-Boal simply included it because it happened? And yet 60 Minutes executive editor Bill Owens has told The Hollywood Reporter‘s Marisa Guthrie that the show has decided against any such inquiry.

Owens’ reasoning sounds muddled to me. He says “we’d [have to] go out and find our own Jessica Chastain character,” whatever that means. And he’s apparently grappling with some level of disappointment about the fact that ZD30 “is not a documentary.”

And yet 60 Minutes exec producer and CBS News chairman Jeff Fager has told Guthrie — this is unbelievable — that the show will run a follow-up piece on Lincoln, which will be seen as a sequel to the admiring profile of Steven Spielberg’s film that aired in October. The upcoming segment will air on 2.10 or 2.17, or right near the end of Oscar balloting.

Let’s back up and look at this again. 60 Minutes, a class act among news analysis shows with the ability to provide a huge p.r. advantage to any film looking for awards acclaim, is giving two (click) two (click) two blowjob pieces to Lincoln while turning its back on what is easily the most controversial Oscar-season film of the year — a story which could obviously be illuminated by a few probing interviews with the right people.

Methinks something stinks in Denmark. Favoritism, powerful alliances, kowtowing to the Spielberg aura…something. Eyebrows were raised a few days ago when Spielberg persuaded Bill Clinton to speak highly of Lincoln at the Golden Globes, and now a second Lincoln profile on 60 Minutes within a three-month period? What’s going on here?

60 Minutes has a sterling reputation for independence and backbone (except for the Geoffrey Wigand episode depicted in The Insider), but their coverage of Lincoln is perplexing. Because if they weren’t an honorable news show and if brown paper bags filled with cash were being delivered to Owens by special couriers in black limos, they’d be covering this film exactly the way they are now.