Joseph Gordon Levitt‘s Don Jon’s Addiction, which is likable if overemphatic at times, had its big screening at the Eccles last night. In a sense it’s already old news around Park City. Gotta make way for the new. I arrived late and watched it from the upper balcony, which has happened only once before in my Eccles-attending life. Then I went downstairs and took this when the q & a began. Here’s Todd McCarthy‘s Hollywood Reporter review.

I experienced a bulletproof moment last night. Fairly amazing. I fell on some ice and came crashing down on my right elbow, and nothing happened. I got right up and kept walking. My glasses were destroyed but no aches or scrapes, no bruises, no morning-after stiffness, no Advils…nothing. I could have theoretically busted my arm. A great feeling.

It was vaguely akin to that Pulp Fiction moment when John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson are shot several times by a kid who bursts out of the bathroom and yet none of them are hit — all the bullet holes are in the wall behind them. This led Jackson to want to quit being a hitman and just “walk the earth” like Caine in Kung Fu, “meet all kinds of people, get into adventures.”

The distributors we’re looking to deal with on Phase Two have been slow to pull the trigger, and so today and tomorrow I’m stuck with those loathsome ‘PUT YOUR MOVIE AD HERE” fillers. I’ve always made it a policy to fill the ad space with at least somewhat sexy-looking film ads, and now HE looks like some kind of fire-sale site. My apologies to those who are accustomed to the usual tony environment.

I got up early and slammed it for three and three-quarter hours (writing, packing, changing condos) so I could make this morning’s 10 am p & i screening of James Ponsoldt‘s The Spectacular Now. I arrived at the Holiday Cinemas at 9:45 am and walked into the white tent where N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis and Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy were also waiting for the Ponsoldt. Then we were ushered outside and told we couldn’t attend because it was sold out. Really? Yup, sorry.

I thought that having an Express Pass meant you’ll get in even if you come late. Nope. A Sundance volunteer asked if there were any buyers in our group and some guy in a blue parka said “yeah” and stepped forward and was allowed in. “Why don’t the buyers just have their own screenings?,” Dargis said. Somebody joked about her grumbling. “I’m not grumbling,” Dargis replied. “I’m just…” I missed the rest of it, but if I were she I would’ve said the following: “I’m not grumbling, actually. I’m theorizing about new organizational paradigms and priorities. It’s a process.”

I guess I should have made a point of seeing it last night (8:30 pm) at the Library. That’s where all the cool kids were apparently.

Is Ponsoldt reading this? Or a rep for The Spectacular Now? Let it be known that top-dog correspondents for Hollywood Elsewhere, The New York Times and The Hollywood Reporter were stiffed this morning — left high and dry in a cold parking lot, forced to think on their feet and re-imagine their morning and re-calculate their schedule.

So now it’s 10:27 am and I’m back at the Park Regency. I have an hour to kill before walking to the Eccles for Lynn Shelton‘s Touch Feely.

I’m sorry but this tweet hit me yesterday morning and I couldn’t stop laughing. Not even at my lowest misanthropic nadir would I dismiss/condemn each and every person (janitorial staff included) at an airport. I could write 1000 words about this tweet without blinking an eye. I could write 5000 words. It’s one of those “nihilist essence” utterances.

Last night I saw Joseph Gordon Levitt‘s Don Jon’s Addiction (a decent character-arc piece, the spiritual growth of a Guido, nice ending) at a 6 pm Eccles screening, and then I ran around a bit and returned for a 9:45 pm Eccles screening of Anne Fontaine‘s Two Mothers — a farce, a calamity, one of the worst Sundance films I’ve ever seen or ever will see.

And now it’s 9:10 am with my first screening of the day, James Ponsoldt‘s The Spectacular Now, at the Holiday Village at 10 am. Followed by a 12 noon showing of Lynn Shelton‘s Touchy Feely at the Eccles, and after that a 3 pm screening of Jacob Kornbluth‘s Inequality For All at the Prospector Square. Followed by Michael Winterbottom‘s The Look of Love at 6 pm at the Eccles. Four films per day is my limit. Which allows me barely enough time to bang out little doo-dad riffs, much less reviews.

I’ve been up since 6 am and re-packing because we’re switching condos today. You have to be out at 11 am but the new place won;t be ready until 4 pm….terrific.

“The subject of a teacher-student affair may be tabloid fodder,” the Sundance press notes say about A Teacher, “but writer/director Hannah Fidell resists sensationalism or the temptation to pathologize her protagonist.” I just saw Fidell’s film this afternoon, and boy, was I hoping for a little tabloid sensationalism! Or a touch of pathology. Or a smattering of half-interesting dialogue between the teacher (Lindsay Burdge) and the student (Will Brittain) that might add a little flavor or whatever.

Alas, no.

We all know what lazy minimalism is. Especially when concerned with self-destructive, anti-social types. The director-screenwriter will (a) use only the faintest brushtrokes and (b) supply no hard info about who her characters are or what they’re running from or what they need…nothing. You have to sit there and just watch them do things that are stupid and wildly self-destructive and incomprehensible and then…you know, piece it together as best you can. Bad Lieutenant did this. Many indie films have done this. And it’s enervating and faintly boring.

Except A Teacher isn’t completely boring because Fidell is a fairly disciplined director. She knows how to drill in tight and strip away the extraneous and make it seem as if you’re watching something that might, you know, go somewhere. And Burdge and Brittain are, I admit, fairly intriguing in their radically underwritten roles. They know how to behave.

You know going in that the affair is going to blow up sooner or later. We’ve all read about real-life dalliances of this sort. The teacher is eventually found out, arrested and so on. So the question: what is it about Burdge’s Diana, a teacher at a high school in a semi-affluent Texas town, that will add to the basic drill? What will we learn about her that will turn our assumptions around or at least gussy them up? What will happen that will make this familiar tale seem stranger or darker or funnier than we might expect?

Answer: nothing. Fidell just shows us interesting natural atmosphere and good acting chops and behavior in and of itself, and then baby, you’re on your own.

The first thing we learn about Diana is that she’s fucking Eric (Brittain), a smooth, good-looking, rich-kid senior. They meet whenever and however, and all they do is fuck. They don’t talk, they don’t share, they don’t watch movies, they don’t cook meals, they don’t take walks…it’s all about the salami. And then we learn that she can’t stand her mother and refuses to talk with her, and that she has a strained relationship with her blase brother…blankness, blankness.

About three-fifths of the way through she freaks when she and Eric are fucking at his father’s ranch and a foreman shows up. Out of the blue she feels concerned about the affair being discovered and losing her job. And then she starts feeling repulsed by herself and vents this by rejecting Eric, and then she wants him again and he doesn’t want her and it all goes to hell.

Diana, in short, is a car wreck waiting to happen. Unstable, wired, crazy, not very bright, emotionally blocked, fucked up….and I’m watching a story about her because why again? Because I’m at the Sundance Film Festival and I had an open slot between 3 pm and 5 pm?

I’m catching a 3 pm p & i screening of Hannah Fidell‘s A Teacher at the Holiday Village, and if that doesn’t work out I’ll slip into the 3:30 pm screening of Jeff Nichols Mud at 3:30 pm in the same plex. Next comes the 6:30 pm Eccles screening of Joseph Gordon-Levitt‘s Don Jon’s Addiction, followed by a 9:30 pm screening of Ann Fontaine‘s Two Mothers in the same venue.

A pic of All About Eve costar Marlyn Monroe before attending the 1951 Oscars, which honored films released in 1950. Hosted by Fred Astaire, the show happened at the RKO Pantages theatre on March 29, 1951. Joseph L. Mankiewicz‘s All About Eve was nominated for 14 Oscars and won six. Billy Wilder‘s Sunset Boulevard was nominated for 11 Oscars but won only three — Best Screenplay, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration (Black-and-White) and Best Musical Score (Franz Waxman).

Nick Ryan‘s The Summit is an absorbing but highly complex doc about the death of 11 climbers on the notorious K2 in August 2008. Located on the border of Pakistan and China and the world’s second-highest peak (just below Mt. Everest), K2 is a killer — 25% of all the climbers who have ascended it have died. If nothing else, The Summit makes you feel very good that you’re in a warm movie theatre and not freezing or falling to your death amid ice, snow and avalanches at 26,000 feet.

A week after the tragedy Freddie Wilkinson ran a fairly thorough Huffington Post account of what happened. He wrote another piece in December 2008 that looked at the tragedy in greater detail. It’s a story with a lot of angles, a lot “if only this hadn’t happened” factors.

In a way that’s kind of the problem with The Summit — too much detail, too many POVs, too many climbers, too many “on the other hand” considerations. And too many widows or relatives of same suggesting this and that.

I admire Ryan for not jumping to easy or facile conclusions, of course, but on the other hand you’re looking for a clear through-line and not too many flashbacks or asides and a clean, graspable sense of who messed up and whose deaths were avoidable and whose weren’t. Read Wilkinson’s articles if you want a concise account.

The story of the 2008 tragedy demands specificity and exactitude, and Ryan’s film (which is partly re-enacted) certainly provides that. But in the name of thoroughness and looking at all the angles, it declines to judge or point fingers. Ryan decides to not say in clear, talking-to-a-dumb-guy fashion if this or that climber was guilty of carelessness or negligence. He just says, “This happened, and a lot of factors came into play. Either way I’m not going to give you, the viewer, the satisfaction of being able to say ‘this guy screwed up’ or ‘this guy should have known better.’ You can figure that out yourself on your way home, if you want. Or you can do some in-depth reading about it.”

I understand the spiritual payoff in successfully climbing a mountain as brutal and vicious as K2, but if you make a go of it and things don’t go your way, too bad. You bought it, pal. You knew the risks. So it’s hard to shed tears or feel much for those whose deaths are explained in The Summit. They were good fellows and skilled climbers but they weren’t geniuses and sometimes God takes you out. They took a bet that they’d be among the 75% who would make it and they lost. Tough tits.

Imagine a doc about 10 guys with poor eyesight who decide to try and cross an unlighted six-lane freeway at 10 pm while drunk and wearing black. I would fail to see the tragedy if two or three of them get hit by cars. I would in fact fail to be even somewhat moved. Hey, guys? I’m really sorry about your getting hit by passing autos but I guess you knew the odds of getting hit were pretty high, right? You chose to wear black, you chose a section of the freeway that had no lighting, you chose to get drunk…what do you want from me?

I don’t want to give The Summit a blanket put-down. It’s very carefully made. Loads of hard work went into it. It didn’t piss me off or irritate…well, okay I guess it did irritate me to some extent. But it’s a first-rate attempt at digging into detail and being fair-minded and determined to follow leads. And it’s quite the eye-filling epic. Cheers and salutations to Ryan, screenwriter Mark Monroe, cinematographers Robbie Ryan and Stephen O’Reilly, and exec producers John Battsek, Pat Falvey, Darrell Kavanagh and John McDonnell.

Morgan Neville‘s Twenty Feet From Stardom, which I saw last night at a 10 pm Yarrow press screening, is a snappy, joyful, deeply emotional doc about the career agonies and ecstasies of soul-angel backup singers Merry Clayton, Darlene Love, Lisa Fischer and Judith Hill (among others). The journo-buyer audience, usually reserved, applauded when it ended. It appears we have the first breakout of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival on our hands.

These ladies have belted out every backup “ooh, yayuh-yaaaay!” and “ooh-wah” and “babaaay!” you’ve ever heard. They’re all as rippin’ and soulful as any Aretha Franklin or Mariah Carey or whomever, but none has ever built a strong solo career. This is the melancholy that runs through Twenty Feet From Stardom, but Neville has crafted a killer tribute and brought back the spotlight.

Twenty Feet takes you back to every Motown and Phil Spector tune that ever mattered, to this and that Joe Cocker song, to David Bowie‘s “Young Americans” (“Aahhhhllll night!”) and especially to Clayton’s legendary solo on the Rolling Stones “Gimme Shelter”…knockout stuff! The talking heads include Bruce Springsteen, Bette Midler and Mick Jagger.

Yesterday afternoon at the Park City Marriot publicist Nancy Willen suggested that I might want to catch this, and I went “aahhh, I don’t know…backup singers? Doesn’t sound like my cup of tea.” An unfailingly polite and dutiful professional, Willen decided not to push it and moved on to some other films she’s repping…cool. But if you’ve got a winner, you should make it clear and push a little harder. Just because I said “aahh, I don’t think this is going to be much”…what do I know? It was just an instinct. Willen should have grabbed me by the lapels and said, “Look, Jeff, I like you but your instincts are wrong this time. Trust me. You really want to see this one.”

Luckily I ran into IFC Films’ Ryan Werner at the MARC and he talked me into it, and wow….loved it! A live-wire “yeahhh!”, an audience film, a winner.

Wells to Willen: Are Merry Clayton and Darlene Love and the others in town? Can I get a sitdown and/or a photo op? Is there a soundtrack CD?

I was thinking about the death of “Dear Abby” (a.k.a., Pauline Phillips) during the opening press conference for the 2013 Sundance Film Festival (which featured founder Robert Redford, festival director John Cooper, and exec director Keri Putnam). And it hit me that I should probably take up the mantle and write the world’s gnarliest, snippiest, most contrarian, most peculiar and possibly the most illuminating personal advice column as a sideline. It could open up all kinds of doors.

(l. to r) 2013 Sundance Film Festival press conference moderator Sean Means, Robert Redford, Keri Putnam, John Cooper.