Todd Solondz‘s Weiner-Dog, a morose and depressive slog about a dachsund passing from owner to owner and bearing the sins of mankind, screened at the Eccles tonight. It’s about futility, fuck it, banality, depression, ennui, emptiness, death, Down Syndrome and cancer. It’s definitely not about “what if?” Solondz reportedly told an interviewer today that he intended a blend of Au Hasard Balthasar and Benji. I’ve always hated Solondz and his dweeby, depressive attitude and particularly his attachment to depressive losers. I began hating this film early on, and it was agony sitting through to the end (which I was determined to do no matter what). Animal lovers…I was about to post a warning but they can fend for themselves. As Weiner-Dog began a woman sitting behind me was making that “awwuhhah” sound as the camera regarded the lovable dachshund, and I was muttering to myself or more precisely to God “please don’t make me listen to this woman make ‘awwuhhah’ sounds all through this thing.” Well, she stopped. (On this note Solondz was my ally.) At the very end an older woman sitting next to me was moaning “Why did he do that? Why did he do that?”

Hollywood Elsewhere and The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg have been suggesting for quite a while that one way to reduce the Academy deadwood factor would be to weight the ballots of those who are working currently or have worked within the last 10 years vs. those who haven’t worked for the last 10 or 20 years and are more or less coasting.

In response to the current OscarsSoWhite narrative, which indirectly suggests that old Academy farts aren’t voting for African-American actors and filmmakers as much as they could or perhaps should, the following letter was sent today to Academy members at 12:26 pm from Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs:

“Dear [Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences] Member,

“I realize the last few days have been tough for all of us, with so many voices in the mix.

“Last night, the Board of Governors made a series of courageous steps.

“Beginning later this year, each new member’s voting status will last ten years, and will be renewed if that new member has been active in motion pictures during that decade. In addition, members will receive lifetime voting rights after three ten-year terms; or if they have won or been nominated for an Academy Award. We will apply these same standards retroactively to current members.

“In other words, if a current member has not been active in the last 10 years they can still qualify by meeting the other criteria. Those who do not qualify for active status will be moved to emeritus status. Emeritus members do not pay dues but enjoy all the privileges of membership, except voting.

Charlotte Rampling is a woman of cast-iron balls. Instead of going along with the OscarsSoWhite narrative like every other liberal scared rabbit in Hollywood, she said in a 1.22 Europe 1 interview that “perhaps the black actors did not deserve to make the final list” — which is more or less what I said in that Rory Carroll Guardian piece that popped last Wednesday.

Rampling went further by saying that complaints about the lack of diversity among this year’s Oscar nominees are “racist to whites.” She added: “Why classify people? These days everyone is more or less accepted. Do we have to take from this that there should be lots of minorities everywhere?”

You know what the reaction is going to be? Not that Rampling had the balls to speak her own mind, but that she’s hurt her chances of winning the Best Actress Oscar for her performance in 45 Years.

Repeating from Carroll/Guardian piece: “Jeffrey Wells, a veteran Los Angeles-based film blogger, said others shared his view that the NWA biopic Straight Outta Compton and Michael B. Jordan’s’ performance in Creed, for instance, were not Oscar-worthy but that few would say so publicly.

Tribute documentaries about famous folk tend to be fairly similar, especially if the subjects are still living. They mainly say that the celebrity is a pretty darn wonderful person — modest but brilliant, witty, accomplished as all get out, fascinating, rich, extremely compassionate, loves his/her life, good with kids, pets dogs. Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing‘s Norman Lear: Just Another Version Of You, which will air as a PBS American Masters special later this year, pretty much sticks to this formula.

I could call it a cut or two above the usual, certainly from a technical standpoint, but Lear, the 93 year-old creator-writer-producer of such legendary ’70s TV series All In the Family, Maude, Sanford and Son, One Day at a Time and The Jeffersons, is never presented as anything but the most happy and wonderful fella. Which he may well be for the most part, but c’mon — everyone has known hurt, failure, shame, regrets. Everyone has aspects of their nature they wish they could iron out or refine. Everyone experiences nightmare flashes from time to time. Including the very wealthiest.

The doc gets into Lear’s feelings about his father but not all that deeply. Grady and Ewing never elicit a single semi-critical remark about Lear from the famous talking heads (Rob Reiner, George Clooney, et, al.). It was obvious during the post-screening q & a that Lear can be a snappy dictatorial type who knows how to crack a whip, but there wasn’t a hint of this in the doc.

I was bothered by several omissions that I learned about later when I visited Lear’s Wikipedia page.

Chris Kelly‘s Other People, the first narrative drama screened at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, struck me as deftly written and persuasively well-acted but fraught with self-pity and a little too glum. Wading through and meditating upon cancer death will have that affect. But it’s delicate and restrained and absorbing as far as it goes. And occasionally amusing. But…I don’t know what else to say. I felt a certain respect more than affection.

Jesse Plemons, Molly Shannon in Chris Kelly’s Other People.

Some in the Eccles audience were reportedly choking up; not this horse. After the show I spoke to two or three guys (i.e., writers) who were partly critical; one was outright dismissive. I later saw on Twitter that others (but not all) were putting it down.

Relatively few will pay to see this in theatres but it’s really not half bad, especially in terms of the acting. I never pulled back or disconnected; I always felt engaged. There’s already a consensus that Molly Shannon, who plays a spirited suburban mom dying of leiomyosarcoma, will be Best Actress-nominated for a Spirit or a Gotham Award. And that the low-key, somewhat pudgy, ginger-haired Jesse Plemons scores also as her son, a gay showbiz writer grappling with more than just the immediate tragedy at hand.

Kelly’s loosely autobiographical film is about Plemons, a 29 year-old showbiz writer who returns home to drab Sacramento to hang with his cancer-stricken mom (Shannon) as she withers away under the care of Plemons’ under-written homophobic dad (Bradley Whitford) while his two younger sisters (Maude Apatow, Madisen Beaty) watch and fret.

The insular Sundance grind distracts from the day-to-day so you miss stuff that everyone else absorbed hours ago, but this an expertly conceived and assembled political ad. There’s a certain poignancy in the fact that Bernie Sanders and Paul Simon are the same age.

The wifi is mostly awful at the Park Regency. Okay, sometimes it’s tolerable but mostly the signal is so weak you have to work in the main lobby, and even from the lobby it stinks. (It crapped out twice when I was filing there yesterday morning.) But the password-free wifi inside the nearby Park City Marriott (a two-minute walk from the Regency) is totally fine so the hell with it — here’s where I work from here on. Warm and friendly with a bus stop right outside the hotel. The only bothersome aspect is the occasional yappity-yap-yapping of the hotel guests and visitors. You’d think they’d want to dial it down like, you know, the members of an old world’s gentleman’s club in London. Note: Video captured today (Friday, 1.22) at 6:25 am.

A N.Y. Daily News story by Joe Dziemianowicz and Don Kaplan reports that Manhattan’s legendary Ziegeld theatre, which opened in 1969, is toast and will close in “a few weeks.” Fisher Brothers, the landlord, has informed lease-holder Cablevision that “they have a new tenant for the location and, therefore, we will be exiting our lease in the coming weeks to accommodate the new tenant,” Cablevision officials said in a statement. The theater is expected to re-open in the fall of ’17 as the Ziegfeld Ballroom — a high-end space for corporate events.

Eight months ago The Hollywood Reporter‘s Mattthew Belloni and Pamela McLintock reported that the Ziegfeld — the glorious cinematic temple with the greatest sub-woofer bass speakers I’ve ever heard, where I had my socks blown off while watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Apocalypse Now in ’77 and ’79, respectively — was on the verge of closing because Cablevision, which operates the legendary theatre, was sick of the way the Ziegfeld had been losing money hand over fist. (Around $1 million per year.)

Last night I experienced three mildly unpleasant encounters in Park City. Okay, maybe not “unpleasant” but the kind of brushes with human behavior that make you roll your eyes and count to ten. We’re living in times that “try men’s souls,” and I was reminded of this last night, you bet. 

The first happened in the delicatessen department at Fresh Farms. There were three women working the counter, two 20somethings and a smallish woman in her late 60s or early 70s. I asked the older woman if I should take a number, and she said “we don’t do numbers here” — okay. She was busy slicing chicken meat for somebody. She was packing it up when a guy about 30 (definitely an out-of-towner) came over and asked to see it. “Are the slices extra thin?” he asked, inspecting with disapproval. “I said extra thin slices…I want to almost be able to see through them.” The woman rolled her eyes as she reached for more chicken. I felt sorry for her. “Ma’am…could I buy those chicken slices? Would that help?” She seemed relieved. I didn’t want the chicken but that guy was such a dick and he’d made her life more difficult.

The second encounter happened as I was walking up Park City’s Main Street. Three guys in their late 50s or early ’60s (skiiers, I guessed, or maybe distribution sales guys) were walking in front of me at a really slow pace, and of course they had the sidewalk blocked with their pudge-bods. Walking up Main Street is a cardiovascular challenge and I always do it with a certain vigor — I’m sorry but walking like a retiree with arthritis is not an option. So as I approached the three sea lions I said “excuse me?…sorry.” They glanced back and allowed me to pass, but not without comment. Their reaction was basically “sure thing but what’s your hurry?…have you ever heard of enjoying yourself and smelling the night air and not always racing when you walk?” My silent response: “Yeah, I’ve heard of it and I even walk slowly on my own from time to time, but never on Main Street uphill and especially when three guys are doing the mall meander in front of me.”

Hollywood Elsewhere arrived at the Park City Regency last evening around 6 pm. I shuttled right down to Fresh Farms (formerly Albertson’s) for groceries, went back to the pad to unload, and then hitched a lift to Main Street for dinner with HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko and David Scott Smith. After which the trouble started. Well, not “trouble” but certainly the first disappointment of the 2016 Sundance Film Festival.

Before Tuesday night’s screening of Hail Caesar! Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn told me about a little kickoff gathering on Woodside, which I naturally assumed was happening last night (i.e., Wednesday) as the festival’s first screenings — Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing‘s Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You and Chris Kelly‘s Other People — will happen at 5:30 and 9 pm, respectively.

On top of which Wednesday night is the only “free” social night for serious Sundance go-getters, many if not most of whom arrive on Wednesday so they can unpack, get groceries, get a good night’s sleep and hit the ground running on Thursday morning, which is what I’m doing as we speak.