Aside from a relatively short list of stand-out narrative features, for the most part Sundance ’15 has been a festival of great docs, particularly Alex Gibney‘s Going Clear, Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon‘s Best of Enemies and — my personal favorite — Doug Tirola‘s Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead — The Story of the National Lampoon. A generally hilarious history of a great magazine and a period of inspired anarchic subversion, it’s essentially about the birth and shaping of the irreverent mindset that has defined American comedy for the last 40 years, or since the debut of NBC’s Saturday Night Live (’75), National Lampoon’s Animal House (’78) and National Lampoon’s Vacation (’83). But the magazine and its half-demented staffers were the finest and most outrageous expression of this, and Drunk, Stoned is an absolutely vital history lesson for under-35s who’ve never read any National Lampoon issues or sunk into the mythology. I don’t know what the distribution picture is, but I could see this film again right now. It captures the whole saga in one swift, punchy, well-finessed package.

Any film by noted British documentarian Adam Curtis is worth carving out the time to see. I’ve raved over the last decade or so about his two landmark docs, The Century of the Self and particularly The Power of Nightmares. which introduced an idea that the anti-western Islamic terrorists and the neocon hardliners are almost identical in their purist fervor, and are pretty much cut from the same philosophical cloth. Now comes Curtis’s Bitter Lake, which popped in England last weekend and is now viewable on YouTube. The Guardian‘s Sam Wollaston has called it “a story full of violence, bloodshed, and bitter ironies, mainly about how the west, through misunderstanding and oversimplification, repeatedly achieved pretty much the opposite of what it was trying to achieve. America protected Wahhabism through its thirst for Saudi oil, and in doing so helped sow the seeds of radical Islam today. In Afghanistan they built dams to irrigate the Helmand valley, making it perfect to sow actual seeds — opium poppy seeds. The past is strewn with patterns, and warnings, if only anyone had bothered looking and tried to understand.”

Today begins my eighth day in Park City and my seventh day of serious Sundance humping (screenings, filings, running around town). I’ve been averaging four films per day but today I have only two — Alfonso Gomez-Rejon‘s much-buzzed-about Me and Earl and the Dying Girl at the Library at 2:30 pm, and Jared Hess‘s highly anticipated Don Verdean at the Eccles at 6:30 pm. Thursday’s schedule looks underwhelming and to be perfectly honest I’m starting not to care that much. If they would arrange for a special p & i Brooklyn screening I’d be there with bells on, but that’s not in the cards. My “fuck it” mentality always kicks in around the seventh day of any festival. Let’s see what what happens.

DataLab‘s Harry Enten has reported that the ridiculous New York blizzard hysteria of the last two or three days was due to an over-reliance on the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasting. Late Sunday evening less excitable data came out of the SREF, or Short-Range Ensemble Forecast. “Five of the 21 models in the SREF [predicted] less than 10 inches of snow falling,” Enten summarizes. “Nine of the 21 predicted a foot or less. Only eight could have been said to support 18 or more inches of snow in New York City. By Monday afternoon, 11 of the 21 members were on the 10-inches-or-less train. Eight of the 21 still supported big-time snow, but they were a minority.”

Daniel Espinoza‘s Child 44 (Lionsgate, 4.17) is a serial-killer thriller set during the Stalinist chill of 1953 Soviet Russia. Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Noomi Rapace, Charles Dance, Jason Clarke, Vincet Cassell. Filmed in Prague, Ostrova and Kladno in Czech Republic. Based on novel by Tom Rob Smith; screenplay by Richard Price. Boilerplate: “A disgraced member of the military police investigates a series of nasty child murders,” et. al.

During my 20-odd years of attending the Sundance Film Festival I’ve demonstrated an uncanny instinct for missing at least one or two major-buzz films. Two days ago I decided to catch a 6 pm press screening of Stevan Riley‘s Listen To Me Marlon instead of a 6:30 pm showing of John Crowley and Nick Hornby‘s Brooklyn…mistake. It was announced last night that Fox Searchlight has acquired Brooklyn, a period romance starring Saoirse Ronan, Domhnall Gleeson, Emory Cohen, Jim Broadbent and Julie Walters. Pic allegedly does the thing (“Despite its familiar structure it’s a thing of beauty, a delicate, tender period piece about nice people trying to do their best,” said N.Y. Post critic Kyle Smith) and looks like a fall awards-contender. No more screenings between now and Friday morning, which is when I leave. I’ll probably wind up catching it in Telluride/Toronto next September.

Warner Bros.’ decision to secretly screen Andy and Lana Wachowski‘s Jupiter Ascending (opening 2.6) last night at Park City’s Egyptian theatre didn’t turn out all that well. The Egyptian is a small theatre but the crowd was far from capacity, according to Variety and a couple of tweets, and all were forbidden from reviewing until next week. The elf-eared “space opera” is anything but a typical Sundance-type film, and everyone has been presuming all along that it’s some kind of problem movie so why show it here in the first place? A fair number of Sundance-attending press weren’t invited, were turned away at the door or didn’t even know about the screening, to go by several conversations I had last night.

From Variety‘s Ramin Setoodeh: “Despite the hype of a secret Jupiter Ascending screening, clusters of seats inside the 300-person venue remained empty, and a handful of patrons walked out” — bailed! — “of the two-hour-plus space epic starring Mila Kunis as a princess and Channing Tatum as an intergalactic soldier tasked with rescuing her.

“The Wachowskis’ flair was fully on display, with sequences reminiscent of The Matrix or Star Wars. But when the film ended, the usually gracious Sundance audience didn’t clap at the closing credits.

“‘I hated it,’ said one of the festival’s volunteers, who asked not to be identified for fear of irking Sundance. ‘It’s just ridiculous.’

I can roll with austere minimalism as well as the next guy, and I certainly respect what Rodrigo Garcia and Emmanuel Lubezki are up to in Last Days of the Desert, which is basically about the 40 meditative days that Yeshua of Nazareth (Ewan McGregor) spent in the desert before embarking upon his calling as the Ultimate Lamb of God. Except it’s a little too spare — there’s not much feeling or drama in this thing, which is mostly about performances, photography and an impressive sense of stillness. The focus is not so much about Yeshua’s spiritual battle with a mirror-image Satan (also played by McGregor) as it is his decision to hang with a family of desert dwellers (Ciaran Hinds, Tye Sheridan, Ayelet Zurer) and help them build a small stone abode atop a mountain peak. That in itself felt like a problem. We all understand fasting in the wasteland to attain spiritual purity, but why would a family — anyone — live in that Godforsaken inferno? No soil, no water to speak of, no grass for the goats…a situation without a thread of logic or believability. I was also bothered by the footwear. In each and every Bible flick ever made guys have worn standard-issue sandals — a thick hunk of foot-shaped leather with a couple of straps. But McGregor and Hinds wear a kind of burlap slip-on — call it a desert hiking loafer. If you go to the Nordstrom site a close facsimile is available — Tom’s classic metallic burlap slip-on. I’m not being snarky. Any creative decision that diverts your attention form the main order of business is a mistake. Garcia and his wardrobe designer should have gone with boilerplate King of Kings sandals.

Yesterday In Contention‘s Kris Tapley assessed the out-of-the-blue Birdman surge and the apparently strong likelihood that Alejandro G. Innaritu‘s film has the Best Picture Oscar in the bag. It’s an astute piece but some assertions/observations need addressing.

Assertion #1: “No one was really expecting this of Birdman, and boom, there it is.” True — I had been urging people to vote for Birdman all along but I wasn’t expecting a PGA or SAG win. I had more or less wilted and accepted the Boyhood-is-all-but-inevitable theology…and then lo and behold!

Assertion #2: “I’ve always sensed some softness in the Boyhood steamroller.” Indeed — it’s been soft all along. I sensed that softness as I watched and absorbed Boyhood at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, but tea-leaf readers kept insisting it had the Best Picture goods, and after a while most of us started to think, “Hmmm, yeah, maybe it does…okay, fine.”

All hail Grantland‘s Wesley Morris for looking askance at the bizarre euphoria that has greeted Rick Famuyiwa‘s Dope, and for standing on my side of the debate. “You can see Famuyiwa going for a certain class of skuzzy Los Angeles odyssey, like the ones of Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson,” Morris observes. “[But] this is more like Doug Liman‘s Go, which was like Kwik-E-Mart Tarantino. But Dope isn’t made with even the sustained wit of Go. It has its moments, all of which involve the attempt to humorously unpack racial baggage. There just aren’t nearly enough.

And yet Dope “has been the most hotly auctioned film of the festival,” Morris notes. “I don’t know whether Open Road and Sony Pictures, who’ve acquired Dope, went for it because it feels, to them, authentically black or because the blackness is familiar to the world’s marketplaces.” Or because Famuyiqwa is supplying the kind of “black shit [that] white people like.”

In a 1.27 q & a with Variety‘s Brent Lang, the Going Clear guys — director Alex Gibney, whose doc about the malignancy of Scientology is arguably the finest and most riveting film to play at Sundance ’15, and author Lawrence Wright, whose book is the basis of Gibney’s film — call on Tom Cruise and John Travolta to wake up, man up and speak out against Scientology’s abusive practices.

Gibney: “By now there is a well-documented record of abuses in the Church of Scientology, yet Cruise and Travolta have never spoken out about them. By not speaking out, it’s a kind of an endorsement and I think that’s why we’re right and properly critical.”

Wright: “They’re selling a product and the product they’re selling is oppressing some of the people inside the church, especially the clergy, which is called the Sea Org, and Cruise has spent countless hours out on the Sea Org base where — on that same base where he has a special chateau — there [are] these double-wide trailers called the hole, which is a kind of re-education camp where people have been incarcerated for years. Sleeping on the floor on bedrolls with ants crawling around, abused physically, made to lick the floor or the toilet with their tongue. It’s just unbelievable degradation.

Some superhero movies (like the two Captain America flicks) are just good films, but the superhero megaplex virus is fed by a widespread sense of diminishment, impotence and insignificance, felt most acutely by under-35s who are either just starting to realize or have recently realized how un-heroic and unexceptional their lives are likely to be. On the other hand Miles “don’t be a pervert, man” Teller is one of the paycheck fantastics.