Hollywood Elsewhere departs for the 2015 Sundance Film Festival (1.22 thru 2.1) this coming Wednesday, or a day early. I like to get all set up and settled in before it begins. Here, in any event, is a boilerplate rundown of the films everyone else is talking about. I’ve just average, common too — I’m just like him and the same as you. If there’s something I should add to this list of 25, please advise. I never seem to fit in more than 25 films over my usual eight-day period (I return around noon on Friday, 1.30). I’m posting these films roughly in order of personal interest:

Last Days in the Desert (dir: Rodrigo García — cast: Ewan McGregor) — Yeshua, plumbing the depths of his soul in the Judean desert, runs into a mirror-image Stan. Shot by the legendary Emmanuel Lubezki (Birdman, Gravity, Children of Men).

Mississippi Grind (dir. Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, cast: Ryan Reynolds, Ben Mendelsohn) — Shrewd poker guy and a less-focused drifter gamble their way across the States to a legendary high-stakes game in New Orleans. James Toback told me last March this is a loose reimagining of Robert Altman‘s California Split. Toback performed a cameo in which he belts Mendelsohn. Grind also stars Sienna Miller, Analeigh Tipton and Alfre Woodard.

Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon (dir: Douglas Tirola) — Based on the 2010 Rick Meyerowitz book, charting the entire arc of the National Lampoon. Presumably featuring stories about and recollections of NatLamp all-stars Doug Kenney, Henry Beard, Michael O’Donoghue, Tony Hendra, Sam Gross, Sean Kelly, Anne Beatts, Chris Miller, Gerry Sussman, P.J. O’Rourke, Bruce McCall, Stan Mack, M.K. Brown, Shary Flenniken, et. al.

D-Train (d: Jarrad Paul, Andrew Mogel, cast: Jack Black, James Marsden) — Said to be a “dark” comedy about an ex-geek (Black) attending 20th anniversary high school reunion and hooking up with one of the popular high school hot shots of yore (Marsden). Wild night is fallin’.

A Walk in the Woods (d: Ken Kwapis, cast: Robert Redford, Nick Nolte, Emma Thompson) — All opening-gala films need to be regarded with caution. (No prejudice — just speaking from experience.) Based on travel writer Bill Bryson‘s true-life account, it’s about sturn und drang as three friends hump it along the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail.

True Story (d: Rupert Goold, cast: Jonah Hill, James Franco) — Based on real-life tale about a imprisoned killer (Franco) attempting to steal the identity of a discredited New York Times reporter (Hill). There’s something about this film that feels subdued. Can’t put my finger on it.

Mistress America (d: Noah Baumbach, cast: Greta Gerwig, Lola Kirke). Manhattan relationship shake about a college freshman (Kirke) hanging and galavanting about with her soon-to-be stepsister (Gerwig). Formerly known as “Untitled Public School Film” something or other; been in the can forever.

Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck (d: Brett Morgen) — Authorized doc on late Kurt Cobain from his early days in to his success with Nirvana and the downfall from smack. Featuring Cobain, Courtney Love, Dave Grohl.

Taylor Swift‘s “Shake It Off” is a vapid, puerile pop tune. Not catchy…nothing. Sometimes even songs you detest have little hooks that get you and so you find yourself half-liking them…not this time. The idea of a bald beefy cop singing along to it, much less playing it while driving, is the worst thing to happen to the image of law enforcement since the NYPD work stoppage and before that the Eric Garner incident.

I don’t see what’s so bad about the reaction of Force Majeure director Ruben Ostlund when he learns his film hasn’t been nominated for the Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar. Are you going to tell me you wouldn’t register some kind of vocal disappointment if your film got the hook? Ostlund’s first reaction is to hug his producer, Erik Hemmendorff, and then let go with a kind of resigned and bitter cackle…what’s so bad about that? Okay, he loses it somewhat later on, but I’ll bet every losing contender reacts this way.

On the other hand is there any awards show or annual telecast for which the phrase “anything can happen” is less applicable than the Oscars?

You can dispute or dismiss this, but a guy I was speaking to this morning feels that in liberal Hollywood’s politically correct realm and more precisely in creative filmmaking circles of 2015, older white guys are getting the shit end of the stick in more ways than one. In one sense this is an old lament and yet to some, I’m sure, this probably sounds outrageous. I know that right now some readers are saying “what?” The Oscar nominations just demonstrated to many in this town that the old farts of the Academy don’t get it, and that they didn’t give Selma its due because they felt they did “the black thing” last year with 12 Years A Slave, and you’re saying that 50-and-over white guys are being…what, discriminated against? Your friend actually thinks that?

Yes, that’s the viewpoint. For the last 90 years, I mean. With the exception of the usual heavy-hitters and pantheon types, older directors and especially writers have always been treated this way — over, past their prime, spent. Older creative guys do tend to lose the spark — let’s be frank. Look at Blackhat, for God’s sake. But there’s something else going on now, and it’s almost on the level of that famous “aha!” that Tom Wolfe stumbled upon when he began roughing out “The Painted Word” and realized that modern art had become “completely literary” and that it only existed only to illustrate the text (or more specifically this or that conceptual theory).

What’s going on today in Hollywood is starting to become somewhat similar, for in the award-season realm it’s not just the film but who has made it — the combination of the two is what travels. Because (and I’m not saying this is an absolute law but it’s becoming more and more of an occurence) if the film is right but the filmmaker is wrong, you might be nudged out of the game. Or you might not even be considered in the first place. Or even get the film made.

French cineaste Pierre Rissient is famous for having said “it isn’t enough to like a good film…you have to like it for the right reasons.” In the same vein it isn’t enough to like or support a would-be Best Picture contender — you also have to like the right filmmaker, which means this or that filmmaker has to have earned your allegiance for the right reasons.

Variety‘s Brent Lang is reporting that Clint Eastwood‘s American Sniper will have earned an astonishing $90.2 million by late tonight, and that it’ll most likely pull down $105 million by tomorrow night, or by the conclusion of the four-day Martin Luther King weekend. “The movie has become a cultural phenomenon,” said WB distribution topper Dan Fellman. “It tore apart the record book and not by a little. By an enormous amount.” On the other hand a Twitter guy named veryfewguys said, “Of course it’s crushing the box office…it’s The Hurt Locker dumbed down for the Call of Duty/Halo nation.”

This morning the know-it-all bloggy bloggies kicked around the notion of American Sniper suddenly being the new big gorilla in the Best Picture race, especially after it crosses $200 million. “So I just had a crazy thought,” one said. “Considering that Argo won Best Picture without Ben Affleck winning a Best Director nom…”

“Feels to me like all bets are off,” said Voice #2. “Not predicting Sniper but the combination of the box-office and Clint’s age and the really soggy Best Picture slate in terms of studio fare…it feels like a threat to me. Don’t think SAG matters much. Though we always say that and it always does!”

Voice #3: “Boyhood, Budapest and Birdman will still win a lot.”

Voice #1: “Budapest will take production design, makeup, maybe cinematography…right? Birdman takes original screenplay at the very least. Keaton, Best Actor.”

Voice #4: “Sniper takes both sound categories (I think it will easily), editing, screenplay maybe (blecch). Boyhood takes director for sure, supporting actress…what else though? Whiplash could take screenplay, supporting actor Imitation Game takes…?”

Voice #1: “I’m just saying it looks like Sniper could take the most Oscars in the end …Linklater should take the DGA but if Clint takes it…”

With Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland‘s Still Alice having opened yesterday, here’s a portion of my 11.28 review. Actually, I’m rewriting portions as I go along. Well, half and half. I began by saying that Still Alice is a morose but affecting Lifetime movie about a brilliant college professor (Julianne Moore) who, at age 50, begins to succumb to the awful progressive malice of Alzheimer’s diseasem, or actually early onset Alzheimer’s. Which an HE reader has since dubbed Alice-heimer’s. Sorry.

Moore plays her melancholy part with delicacy and the depth of feeling that only great actresses seem to fully harness — she’s convincing and then some and deserves the Best Actress Oscar that she’s been all but asssured of winning for…what, four and a half months now?

But for me, Still Alice is a hellish thing to sit through. It’s a dirge about a kind of death sentence or more precisely a spiritual suffocation, mitigated to some extent by the fact that the condemned (i.e., Moore) is attractive and wealthy and married to a nice man (Alec Baldwin) and surrounded by bright, sensitive family members who care a great deal and can do absolutely nothing to help.

Still Alice is a movie that says “okay, your brain is going to start dying now…okay, the symptoms are getting a little worse now…is the horror of this predicament affecting everyone? Getting worse, still worse…my God, this disease really sucks! And Julianne Moore can’t do anything about it. And neither can you, the viewer. Because we, the filmmakers, have decided that the most sensitive and affecting thing to do is for everyone — Moore, the costars, the audience, Jeffrey Wells sitting on his living room couch — to just ride it out to the end…sadly, gently, compassionately.”

Without giving too much attention to Fear Clinic (Anchor Bay, 1.30) I’d like to mention my efforts as a freelance public relations guy for New Line Cinema in ’85 and ’86, and particularly my promotion of Jack Sholder‘s A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, and even more particularly the semi-phenomenon know as “Freddiemania,” which originated with spottings of movie fans dressed as Freddy Krueger a la Rocky Horror for midnight showings of Wes Craven‘s A Nightmare on Elm Street (’84). There weren’t that many Freddy freaks to be found, to be perfectly honest, but it was an interesting and amusing enough story to persuade Entertainment Tonight and the N.Y. Times and other big outlets to run pieces on it and to speak with Sholder (who later directed The Hidden, one of the finest New Line films ever made) as well as Freddy himself, Robert Englund, with whom I became friendly and hung out with a bit. (Producer Mike DeLuca was a 20 year-old New Line assistant at the time.) One of my big Freddy promotional stunts was persuading Englund to march in New York’s Village Halloween Parade on 10.31.85 from Houston Street up to 14th or 23rd or something like that.

Nine days ago I mentioned that while I respect the learned dweeb mentality of Variety reviewer Guy Lodge, I don’t trust him that much. Not after his praising of Abbas Kiarostami‘s suffocating, mildly infuriating Certified Copy, and certainly not after giving a total pass to Paddington without at least mentioning that the story is ridiculous and wafer-thin. You also have to consider the native loyalty factor in any England-residing critic’s review of a British-made film, and particularly one directed and written by a youngish Brit — in this instance Alex Garland. All to say that Lodge has now reviewed Ex Machina. Read it carefully.

The cover of the latest issue of The New Yorker depicts the late Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Michael Brown and NYPD Officer Wenjian Liu marching together, arm in arm — united against hate, bigotry and particularly violence, as they all met their doom from…actually, it’s not that simple. Two of them died at the hands of armed assassins — haters who fired coldly, deliberately. The other three died in racially-charged altercations that could and should have been avoided if tempers on both sides had been cooler — not quite as cut-and-dried. I just wonder how Dr. King would feel about being depicted as morally and spiritually allied with and in a sense occupying the same historical station as Brown, who was no sweetheart. A roughly similar image would be a New Yorker cover depicting a group of famed World War II figures marching side by side — George S. Patton, Omar Bradley, Douglas MacArthur, James Doolittle, Ernie Pyle and Eddie Slovik.

Conservative people of faith are going to see American Sniper this weekend. America gets off the couch, climbs into the SUV, drives down to the multiplex, buys tickets, turns off cell phone, etc. And goes, “Hmmm, yeah…that was okay. The battle scenes at least.” Variety‘s Maane Khatchatourian is reporting that Clint Eastwood’s not-bad-but-far-from-great Iraq War drama might actually earn $68 million by Sunday night and $80 million by Monday night, having grossed a startling $30.5 million yesterday — “the biggest single-day take in January.” Plus Eastwood’s biggest hit ever? Its a conservative man’s look at war, duty and country…and that’s where a lot of Amurrican hinterlanders are at. As I wrote the other day, if a movie respects hinterland culture or theology, flyover-state types will line up regardless of how good it is. If nothing else, American Sniper does that thing. The Fox News crowd (i.e., white-haired steak-eaters and their wives) has, I’m assuming, come out in force.

“A nice candid shot of one of the actors who worked with Bradley Cooper in American Sniper,” as tweeted last night by Mark Harris.

I’ve been assuming all along that Sam Taylor-Johnson‘s Fifty Shades of Grey (Universal, 2.13) is probably going to be a difficult sit, possibly even a painful one. It would be derelict, of course, to ignore a film expected to be this huge. But part of me wants to duck it in the same way I routinely duck Asian action cinema. What’s the point? On top of which I was disappointed when I saw that Dakota Johnson, who was up to something cool in that scene with Justin Timberlake in David Fincher‘s The Social Network, had dyed her hair a kind of mousey brown. I didn’t much care for Taylor-Johnson’s Nowhere Boy but I respect producer Michael DeLuca and screenwriter Kelly Marcel so let’s see.