The American hinterland has spoken again this weekend about American Sniper. It will probably earn another $60 million this weekend on top of last weekend’s super-haul, and that means that Joe and Jane Bubba want Clint Eastwood‘s film to win the Best Picture Oscar. The Producers Guild Awards are unfolding as we speak, and they’re expected to give their Daryl F. Zanuck award to Boyhood…right? Just saying. Different realms.

Yesterday I caught four films over an 11-hour period, and I’ve got another three-and-a-half on the schedule today — a half-hour’s worth of Stevan Riley‘s Listen to Me, Marlon (2:30 pm, Prospector), Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck‘s Mississippi Grind (3:30 pm, Eccles), Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig‘s Mistress America (6:30 pm, Eccles) and then, possibly, most of Craig Zobel‘s Z For Zachariah (8:30 pm, Library). And if I want to be a serious madman I’ll catch an 11:30 pm screening of Patrick Brice‘s The Overnight at the Prospector.

On top of which I’m moving this morning from the somewhat larger suite #121 at the Park Regency to the somewhat smaller #124, which should take about an hour. A tight clock. Oh, to wander through the Sundance Film Festival solely on whims and instinct with no need to file…stop dreaming.

For me the smartest, most engaging and fully realized film I saw yesterday was Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon‘s Best of Enemies, a wise and propulsive capturing of a kind of clash-of-the-titans TV debates between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal during the 1968 Democratic and Republican conventions.

But running a close second was Andrew Mogel and Jarrad Paul‘s The D Train, by far the darkest and nerviest laugher I’ve seen in ages. It begins as a not-too-funny situation comedy about a neurotic, high-strung suburban family man (Jack Black) who goes to great fraudulent lengths to travel to Los Angeles to lure a former high-school classmate who’s now a more-or-less-failed Hollywood actor (James Marsden) to a 20th anniversary high-school reunion.

What I didn’t expect to see was a detour into Brokeback Mountain territory by way of a Lars von Trier film. But at the same time, as I mentioned during the post-screening q & a, The D Train follows the classic structure known as “the Three Ds” — desire, deception and discovery.

“A hysterical screwball fantasia that openly steals from Lubitsch, Hawks, Capra and Sturges, and wants to be caught with its fingers in the till. The result is a highly-sexed Jenga-pile of silliness, to which Bogdanovich can’t resist adding block after teetering block.” — from Robbie Collin‘s Telegraph review of Peter Bogdanovich‘s She’s Funny That Way, filed at the 2014 Venice Film Festival.

I might want to wedge in a Sunday afternoon Library screening of Ariel Kleiman‘s Partisan, an allegedly “sinister” melodrama about an enigmatic drifter (Vincent Cassel) who “becomes an unlikely mentor to a young boy” who’s starting to think for himself and see past some of the bullshit. Kleiman directs from a script he co-wrote with Sarah Cyngler. Winners and losers surface at every Sundance Film Festival. No predicting — you just have to roll with the punches. But at least up here you’re dealing with new material and live situations and the coolest people on the planet as opposed to calculating fickle Oscar odds and dealing with the January doldrums back in L.A.

I was intending to see Ken Kwapis‘ A Walk in the Woods this morning, but I hesitated when I realized it will have only one public screening in Park City and no press & industry screenings at all (limited availability always indicates trouble) and particularly after costar Robert Redford said during yesterday’s opening press conference that showing the film during the festival “wasn’t my idea but John Cooper‘s.” Would Redford have said that if he had any serious affection for the film?

So instead I’ll be catching an 11:45 am Library screening of Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon‘s Best of Enemies, a doc about the notorious television debates between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal during the 1968 Democratic and Republican conventions. This will be followed by a 2:30 pm screening of Josh Mond‘s James White (also at the Library). This will be quickly followed by a 5:30 pm MARC screening of Rupert Goold‘s True Story, the Jonah Hill-James Franco fact-based psychodrama. The final film of the day will be Andrew Mogel and Jarrad Paul‘s The D Train, about a Zelig-like guy (Jack Black) enduring the agonies of a 20th anniversary high-school reunion.

For whatever perverse reason Sundance programmers will occasionally select a mostly dreadful, all-but-unendurable film to play in the Premieres section. The common consensus is that Bryan Buckley‘s The Bronze is one of these films. I can’t speak from authority because I left around the 15-minute mark, but I could smell trouble even before it began.

Standing before the Eccles crowd and delivering his opening remarks, Buckley, 51, was affecting a look of a ski-slope party animal with a bright red parka and long blonde hair worn in a shaggy Iggy Pop or Chris Hemsworth-in-Rush style, and right away I was muttering, “No good can come of this….not from this guy.”

I was right. Written by Melissa Rauch (The Big Bang Theory) and her husband Winston, pic is about Hope (Rauch), a former Olympic gymnast who won a bronze medal in ’04 and is still coasting on that modest memory, ten years on, as she resides with her dad (Gary Cole) — the very embodiment of a self-entitled, delusional loser. Buckley had told the crowd they would be detesting Hope almost immediately, so the name of the game was “how hateful is this bitch going to be?”

I decided within minutes — seconds, really — that my life would not be significantly diminished if I never found out. The easy-lay types were laughing but half-heartedly. An aura of uncertainty and then discomfort began to permeate the room. I grabbed the cowboy hat and bolted. I emerged from the Eccles a free man, elated and renewed and striding purposefully down Kearns Boulevard as I sucked in the frigid night air.

Prior to the start of last night’s screening of The Bronze. If you look closely you’ll spot a guy with a very worried expression sitting right in the middle, in the first row of the second section.

Liz Garbus‘ What Happened, Miss Simone? is a sad, absorbing, expertly assembled doc about the legendary Nina Simone (1933-2003), one of the greatest genius-level jazz-soul singers of the 20th Century as well as a classically trained pianist extraordinaire. Garbus is obviously a huge Simone fan, and she makes her case for — draws you into — this flawed, impassioned artist with skill and flair. Pic opened the 2015 Sundance Film Festival on Thursday night at the Eccles.

So Garbus’ film has the expertise and the feeling and the spirit. No one who sees it will leave feeling under-nourished. But I also found What Happened, Miss Simone? irksome because of several biographical facts that Garbus inexplicably leaves out. (Her birth year, the cause of her death, her first marriage, a shooting incident, etc.) I also found Simone herself a bit of a hurdle. Her lack of respect and reverence for her extraordinary singing gifts as well as a general indifference to the basics of maintaining a healthy career is perplexing and even alienating. Maybe it’s me but it’s hard to warm up to, much less feel a kinship with, haughty aloofness, a hair-trigger temperament and self-destructive behavior.

But oh, those pipes, that phrasing, that style…that magnificent, touched-by-God aura.

I just happened upon this beautiful photo this morning on Twitter. I had an emotional reaction that’s stayed with me all day. I had to a chance to watch a digitally remastered Apocalypse Now inside the beautiful Werner Herzog Cinema at last September’s Telluride Film Festival, but I went to see Wild instead because that was the hotter film at the moment. I’m really sorry I did that.

“My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It’s what it was really like. It was crazy. We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.” — Francis Ford Coppola speaking at a press conference during the 1979 Cannes Film Festival.

The 2015 Sundance Film Festival opening-day press conference was the exercise it’s always been — an attempt to define what the climate is and what’s changing, and an attempt by journalist to goad Robert Redford into giving them a tasty quote or two. The aging Sundance Kid was asked virtually all of the questions and obliged with his usual honesty. Festival director John Cooper and executive director Keri Putnam added their two cents from time to time. It was an okay discussion and frank as far as it went, but the answers at these conferences are always influenced by diplomatic sidestepping or at least a tendency to sand off the edges. Incidentally: I was struck by a bland, vaguely grotesque mini-mall across the street from the Egyptian theatre, where the conference took place. Bit by little bit Park City, which had a vaguely historic aura 20 years ago, is losing those remnants of the old mining town that it used to have. A kind of cultural blight is spreading. Shallow entrepreneurs catering to the rich and the tasteless are coming in and rebuilding it to fit their bullshit sensibilities.

(l. to .r) Salt Lake Tribune‘s Sean Means (moderator), Sundance Film Festival director John Cooper, exec director Keri Putnam, founder and costar Captain America costar Robert Redford during this afternoon’s press conference.

The ugliest addition to Main Street in many years — big and sprawling and exuding not a hint of personality or charm — a form of nouveau riche arrogance by way of architectural blight.

The Riverhorse Cafe used to be a pleasant gray — now it’s been repainted a dark gray with a touch of forest green. It almost feels funereal. No accounting for taste.

In a 1.22 Daily Beast article, Michael Musto chats with a (presumably New York-based) Academy voter, and he…sorry, she has a lot of refreshingly candid views to share. One of them is that Alejandro G. Inarritu is not a day at the beach to work with…big deal. Occasional creative tempest will manifest — it goes with the movie business, which has never been a bowl of cherries. Sometimes making a special film takes more effort, and then more on top of that.

Musto: What do you think will emerge triumphant, Boyhood or Birdman?

Oscar Lady: In my book, Birdman. I don’t get Boyhood as a movie. I don’t understand how it was nominated for screenplay. That was one of the weakest things about it, in my opinion.

Musto: [What about] Supporting Actress?

Oscar Lady: With Keira Knightley [in The Imitation Game], you can throw that one away. Like, “Why? Really?”

Musto: The wife of the gay guy!

On top of my previously posted Sundance Hot 25, I’m adding four newbies. Will I manage to catch them all? Well, I can sure give it hell. Addition #1: Adam Salky‘s I Smile Back, about a libertine mom (Sarah Silverman) whose bacchanalian ways threaten to detonate her life. Addition #2: Stevan Riley‘s Listen To Me Marlon, a doc portrait of the late Marlon Brando constructed with previously unreleased audio and visual materials. Addition #3: Leslie Headland‘s Sleeping with Other People, a sex-addict romance with Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie…I can smell the broadness but I’ll give it a shot. Addition #4: 4. Josh Mond‘s James White, in which Christopher Abbott (hunky guy on Girls, beefy truck hijacker in A Most Violent Year) plays “a hedonistic, raw-nerved son of a woman (Cynthia Nixon) who’s dying of cancer,” etc.

Christopher Abbott in Josh Mond’s James White.

David Koepp‘s Mortdecai is looking like a contender for the Worst of 2015 roster, to go by early reviews. The arch, ultra-mannered Johnny Depp farce has an 11% Rotten Tomatoes rating as we speak. But I had a great time with Robbie Collin‘s Telegraph review. Excerpt #1: “It’s hard to think of a way in which the experience of watching the new Johnny Depp film could be any worse, unless you returned home afterwards to discover that Depp himself had popped round while you were out and set fire to your house. Excerpt #2: “What’s fascinating about the film, other than its early and near-impregnable status as the worst of 2015, are its superficial but nagging similarities to Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, a project to which Depp was once attached. Both films center on fey but sexually rapacious men who belong to bygone eras, and both involve a missing art treasure. Perhaps in a parallel universe, Ralph Fiennes missed a train by a fraction of a second, and Depp is now the star of a tragicomic Academy Award nominated masterpiece, while Fiennes gropes co-stars half his age and jokes about statutory rape.”