The 2014 Sundance Film Festival award ceremony begins about three hours hence (6 pm Pacific), and will be viewable on the Sundance website. A friend told me this morning that she sensed an undercurrent of disappointment from my Park City filings. I don’t how where that came from. I saw eight exceptional films (exciting, well shaped, urgent, affecting in one way or another) that definitely got 2014 off to a crackling start. Eight! Most Sundance slates yield five or six keepers, or so it has always seemed.

For a final time and in this order, they are (a) Damien Chazelle‘s Whiplash, (b) Craig Johnson‘s The Skeleton Twins, (c) Steve James‘ Life Itself, (d) Richard Linklater‘s Boyhood, (e) Lynn Shelton‘s Laggies, (f) James D. Cooper‘s Lambert & Stamp, (g) Charlie McDowell‘s The One I Love and (h) Chapman and Maclain Way‘s The Battered Bastards of Baseball.

If there’s an image-quality difference between the 2011 French Gaumount Bluray of Jules Dassin‘s Rififi (a non-English-subtitled version that I bought in Paris in May 2011) and the new subtitle-option Criterion version, which I watched last night, I can’t spot it. A Criterion pally says the latter version has been cleaned up (dirt, scratches)…fine. The grain levels are in no way bothersome. It looks like it was shot on film, and I have no issue with that.

Loaded guys will always be able to relate to other loaded guys. They meet in first class…”hombre!” Any subject, no problem, comfort vibes, selfies. But if you were Zach Braff and your film, Wish I Was Here, hadn’t done all that well with the critics at Sundance (a warm-hearted, family-embracing Emo version of A Serious Man, “a little too much into calculated bromides to be comforting or illuminating…a little too conservative”), would you have done the old buddy-buddy with Mitt Romney? I guess it doesn’t matter that much, but I would have politely kept my distance. If there’s anyone in the world who’s “over,” it’s Romney. I would be afraid of catching that virus.

Last Monday night I saw Chapman and MacLain Way‘s The Battered Bastards of Baseball, and soon after wrote that it could and should be adapted as a feature film. The doc is about a scrappy-ass minor-league Portland baseball team called the Mavericks, which was owned and managed by the late character actor Bing Russell from ’73 to ’77. Actor Kurt Russell, Bing’s son and in his early 20s at the time, served as co-manager and an occasional designated hitter. Russell is an impassioned and entertaining talking head in the doc.

Headline for Kevin Jagernauth’s incorrectly reported story that was posted earlier today.

I was going to tough it out at the Sundance Film Festival until Saturday, but there’s almost no energy here…nothing. Every year it thrives and throbs for six days (Thursday to Tuesday) and then dies on Wednesday. Why did I decide to ignore this and plan to remain until Saturday? Last night I saw James D. Cooper‘s Lambert & Stamp (good doc but not now). Variety ‘s Peter Debruge had urged me to see Steven Knight‘s Locke (Tom Hardy on a cell phone, in a car) but I guess not. My plane leaves at 11-something..later.

Olivier Dahan‘s Grace of Monaco has been announced as the opening night film of the 67th Cannes Film Festival (May 14 thru 25). Okay but honestly? If I was Thierry Fremaux I would have held out for a film that doesn’t seem like damaged goods. The Weinstein Co. release never looked that great, especially with Tim Roth as Prince Rainer. It was going to open, remember, on 11.27.13. Then it was bumped into March 2014. And now this.

Now that The Blaze has made me richer than ever before and I don’t have to jump through ratings hoops to please Roger Ailes, I’d like to be candid about something. I’ve enriched myself enormously over the last several years by exploiting the fears and prejudices of aging rural white idiots, but I’d like to tone it down just a bit and maybe share my warmer, more compassionate side. Because…well, I don’t know exactly but possibly because I have concerns that when I die a pack of growling wolverine gremlins will take me down to hell.

Whose feet? (Only in a movie would a person just stand there as blood splashes across the tile floor, allowing his/her shoes to be stained.) Whose blood? What film?

It took an extra day or two but a friend has sent me a PDF of what appears to be a real-deal Hateful Eight script. It’s dated 12.12.13, has the hand-drawn Quentin chapter pages, the first chapter is called “Last Stage to Red Rock,” it has that inimitable under-educated Quentin writing style, it states that “the whole movie” will be filmed in “breathtaking 70mm CinemaScope,” the word “gloriousness” is used on page #1 and there are other errors, I’m sure. Is this a fake also? I don’t want to step into the same shitpile so I’m not saying just yet. And I’m not offering to send it out either. But I am saying I have a newbie. Update: Okay, so Gawker posted it…fine.

The title alone tells you this film is broader and cruder than the kind of film that Sam Rockwell does best in (like The Way, Way Back or Laggies), but it might be passable crap. Maybe. Directed and written by first-timers Geoff Moore and David Posamentier — bad news because young guys always go crude. Olivia Wilde, Michelle Monaghan, Ben Schwartz, Ken Howard, Ray Liotta and Jane Fonda. Concurrently opening in theaters and won iTunes/VOD on 3.14.

Several film sophistos told me to see Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Ida (Music Box, early 2014) at last September’s Telluride Film Festival. Did I listen? Did I at least catch it at the subsequent Toronto Film Festival? Naah — I waited until Sundance. But it met my expectations, you bet. This is one superbly composed, austere, Robert Bresson– or Carl Dreyer-like art film — set in 1962 and shot in black-and-white with a 1.33 aspect ratio. It’s about nuns, vows, cigarettes, fate, family skeletons, sex and sexy saxophones, Nazis and Jews and the grim atmosphere of Communist Poland. And it’s anchored by two understated knockout performances — one by the quietly mesmerizing, ginger-haired Agata Trzebuchowska as a young almost-nun named Anna, the other by Agata Kulesza as Anna’s aunt — the morose, blunt-spoken, hard-drinking, somewhat promiscuous Wanda.