Filmmaker magazine’s Jamie Stuart (i.e., the New York blizzard short-film guy) talks with writer/director Tom McCarthy and actor Paul Giamatti to discuss their critically approved Win Win “and the difficulties of dramatizing virtuous people,” the copy says. Here again is my 1.21 review.

With the great Ed Helms in the lead, Miguel Arteta‘s Cedar Rapids (Fox Searchlight, 2.11) may look like another raunchy, wild-ass Hangover-type deal in a midwestern setting. Well, it is somewhat, I guess, but it’s a much better thing than The Hangover because it’s a comedy about values , and it basically cares about people in a way you can really accept and settle in with.

(l. to. r) Whitlock, Reilly, Heche, Helms.

It’s a commercial confection, sure, but it’s about trust and corruption and naivete and mad sex in swimming pools, and about friends doing for each other when the chips are down. It has principles, feelings…a soul.

Phil Johnston‘s script, in short, is about way more than just trying to generate laughter. It and Arteta and producers Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor (i.e., the Sideways guys) are working on a level that The Hangover never dreamt of. Now watch the Eloi go to the plexes next month and say, “Hoo-hah, not bad, pretty funny…but it would have been a little bit better if Helms had lost another tooth.” People never seem to appreciate that it’s a much better, higher-plane thing to blend laughs and feelings and values than to just blow confetti out of your ass.

Helms plays a touchingly but almost ludicrously naive small-town insurance salesman — his values and sexual attitudes are roughly that of a solemn-minded 15 year-old — who’s sent by his boss to a big insurance convention in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His assignment is to secure a kind of good business seal of approval prize that his company has won three years previously, and which enhances its value in the same way that a positive review from Robert Parker makes life great for winemakers.

Things go to hell, of course, when he arrives at the convention hotel and his assumptions and beliefs graudally fall apart. A back-home love affair with an older ex-teacher (Sigourney Weaver) goes down the tubes, and nocturnal shenanigans get him in trouble with the convention’s big cheese (Kurtwood Smith), and then an encounter with corruption further darkens his brow.

But the donkey-ish Helms finds allies in three newfound chums — a loutish party animal type (John C. Reilly), a hot insurance-rep mom looking to kick out the jams when she’s away from her husband and kid (Anne Heche) and a straight-laced workaholic (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) — and together they stumble through and bond together against the hypocrites and the skunks. And Helms — who doesn’t make fun of his character in the slightest — leaves the schoolboy mindset behind to some extent.

If only the third act wrap-up didn’t come together so easily Cedar Rapids might have been even more, but let’s not quibble over milk not even poured. It isn’t a great film but a very good one. And Reilly gives a howlingly funny, ethically grounded performance that — I’m serious — is good and triumphant enough to be called the first Best Supporting Actor-level turn for 2011. The man is a genius at this sort of thing. The second he arrives on-screen you’re going “uh-oh, the man!…here we go.”

Boiled down, Cedar Rapids is a comedy about facing reality and choosing your friends in an ethically clouded world. It’s partly ape humor, and partly warm and reflective. I don’t want to build it up too much — it ain’t art — but it is roughly akin to Billy Wilder‘s The Apartment in that it’s about a youngish insurance company employee (Jack Lemmon played his variation 50 years ago) waking up to things and deciding which side he’s on.

Is it as good as The Apartment? No. It doesn’t dig in as deeply into personal pain or look at the darker aspects of human nature as bluntly. But it’s an honorable ally of that classic 1960 film. And also those Preston Sturges comedies of the early ’40s about clumsy but lovable dolts (Henry Fonda in The Lady Eve, Eddie Bracken in Hail the Conquering Hero) being confronted by ethical shortcomings in whatever realm.

Cedar Rapids is somewhere between a ground-rule double and a triple — the kind of HE-approved commercial comedy that happens all too rarely. I knew it was a big hit ten minutes in.

The whole cast nails it — Helms, Reilly, Whitlock, Heche, Smith, Alia Shawkat, Rob Corddry, Stephen Root, Mike O’Malley, Thomas Lennon, etc. The producers are Payne, Taylor and Jim Burke. Helms executive produced. And it wasn’t even filmed in Iowa! The principal shooting location was Ann Arbor, Michigan. And cheers again to Johnston’s script.

But I dunno, y’know? I’d like to fall by for 15 or 20 minutes, at least. An acoustic set, I’ve been told. It all depends on how it shakes out, I guess. It’s a treadmill and everything is accelerated, on a stop-watch.

I’ve seen these day-in-the-life-of-an-Oscar-contender videos before, and they’re always about anticipation and nerves and personal assistants being “on” and excited and laughing uproariously at their employer’s jokes. This one, focusing on likely Best Supporting Actress nominee Melissa Leo (The Fighter) just before the Golden Globes, seems a little less forced than the others. Leo is a firecracker, a killer, a comet.

I got shut out of this morning’s 9 am Eccles screening of My Idiot Brother, which I also blew off last night. So I retired to the Yarrow hotel for a nice scrambled-egg breakfast, and then went upstairs to record Oscar Poker #17 with Sasha Stone and Scott Feinberg, topic #1 being the PGA/King’s Speech upset. It’ll be up sometime tonight. And we all agreed to do a special Tuesday morning podcast following announcement of the Oscar nominations.

Just after failing to crash My Idiot Brother showing at the Eccles — Sunday, 1.23, 9:05 am.

Eugene Jarecki‘s Reagan screens at the Library at 2:15 pm, and then comes a 5 pm P & I Holiday Cinemas screening of Gavin Wiesen‘s Homework. And if that doesn’t work out I can hit a 6 pm showing of Andrew Rossi‘s Page One: A Year Inside the N.Y. Times. There’s a Page One dinner starting around 8:30 pm, and then comes the 9:30 pm Eccles showing of Miguel Arteta‘s Cedar Rapids. And then a couple of after-parties.

Every time I see a radically under-dressed 20something guy running around Park City, where the temperature has mostly been in the 20s and early 30s, I get mildly irritated. I’m almost to the point of being pissed off. I’m talking about weather cold enough to theoretically kill you under prolonged circumstances, and young guys completely waving that off by wearing baggy shorts, sneakers without socks and T-shirts with some kind of flannel shirt or, in some instances, just T-shirts.

No generation or culture in the history of the planet earth has ever dressed this stupidly for cold weather. These guys are biological aberrations…freaks.

I know what they’re doing. I mean, I think I get it. They’re embracing a kind of X-treme sports aesthetic and making a kind of statement to themselves and to women who happen by that says, “I’m so hardcore I’ve willed myself into a state in which serious cold doesn’t matter all that much…my lower legs are beet red from the exposure but I’m totally fine, really, because I’m all rugged-ass and hearty and just not into bourgeois protection…I am the weather and the weather is me. Bring it on and let me honestly feel it.”

But of course, they’re being ridiculous all the same. Thousands of years of civilization and people have always bundled up when it’s cold. And then along comes GenY, saying to hell with warmth and any kind of sensible cold-weather attitude.

Drake Doremus‘ Like Crazy, a press screening of which I blew off late yesterday afternoon to attend that cool Elizabeth Olsen dinner, sold to Paramount this morning for a reported $4 million. The price was reportedly driven up by bids from the Weinstein Company and Summit Entertainment, but Paramount ended up with worldwide rights.

My next shot at seeing Like Crazy will be late tomorrow afternoon (i.e., Monday) at the Prospector Square Cinema. I need a ticket, guys, if you can help.

Pic is about two kids riding a mad current of love, eros and separation anxiety. Jacob (Anton Yelchin) and Anna (Felicity Jones) fall head over heels while attending the same Los Angeles university, but are then separated when Anna is forced to return to London over a visa issue, and the long-distance aspect (Skype, sexting?) kicks in. Jones, I’ve been told, is the other big Sundance ’11 discovery, or being talked up as such.

I read yesterday’s Sharon Waxman/Wrap story about Elizabeth Olsen being the big breakout star of Sundance 2011 just as I was heading to a sit-down dinner for Olsen and Martha Marcy May Marlene, her first starring role for which she’s drawn high praise. In fact, I showed the story to Olsen on my iPhone during our chat.

Elizabeth Olsen, star of Martha Marcy May Marlene and Silent House — Saturday, 1.22, 7:45 pm.

The younger sister of the infamous Olsen twins, Elizabeth (and not “Lizzie,” as some are calling her in stories) is obviously bright, sharp, focused. Okay, and fairly beautiful. She’s 22, but her voice conveys the savvy of someone a good ten years older. Olsen is also the star of Chris Kentis and Laura Lau‘s Silent House, the Rope-like horror film that’s also playing at Sundance.

I also spoke with Martha Marcy May Marlene‘s director Sean Durkin, executive producer Ted Hope, and producers Josh Mond and Antonio Campo.

Martha Marcy May Marlene director Sean Durkin.

1.22, 7:47 pm

MMMM producer Antonio Campo (l.), Durkin (c.), producer Josh Mond (r.).

Anne Sewitsky‘s Happy Happy, set in a remote Norweigan village, is about an affair between an unfulfilled wife (Agnes Kittelsen) who works as a middle school teacher, and a married Dane (Henrik Rafaelsen) who, along with his wife, has recently become a neighbor. “Affairs never stay secret for long,” writes Marshall Fine, “but Sewitsky has other layers to reveal about this story that deepen the laughs and, ultimately, also bring a note of melancholy to the comedy.”

A publicist asked for a quote about Paddy Considine‘s Tyrannosaur, which I saw late this afternoon. I haven’t written a review, but here’s what I gave her: “The most original adult love story I’ve seen in ages. Easily the biggest shock of the Sundance Film Festival so far. I didn’t see this one coming — it’s a much stronger and more focused film than I expected from a smallish British drama about an older working-class guy with a temper problem. It curiously touches.

Tyrannosaur costars Peter Mullan, Olivia Colman, Eddie Marsan.

Tyrannosaur director-writer Paddy Considine during filming with Olivia Colman.

Tyrannosaur is a drama that deals almost nothing but surprise cards — a tough story of discipline, redemption and wounded love. Cheers to director-writer Considine for making something genuine and extra-unique. He’s not just an actor who’s branched into directing with a special facility for coaxing good performances — he’s a world-class director who knows from shaping, cutting, timing, holding back and making it all come together.”

I didn’t mention the actors — Peter Mullan, Olivia Colman, Eddie Marsan — but their performances simultaneously stand alone and reach in and grab hold. In fact each and every performance (and I mean right down to the dogs) is aces.

The beast of the title is Joseph (Mullan), an alcoholic, widowed, violence-prone rage monster who lives alone in Leeds. He all but melts when he encounters Hannah (Colman), a kind and trusting shop merchant who shows Joseph a little tenderness. Hannah talks the Christian talk but is just as close to alcohol, which she’s turned to as a sanctuary from her ghastly marriage to a homely, ultra-possessive monster of another sort (Marsan) who brings violence and subjugation to Hannah on a constant basis.

Once Mullan and Colman have formed a kind of friendship, the inevitable final conflict with Marsan awaits. One naturally expects (and in facts savors, if truth be told) some sort of howling, knock-down, face-gashing fight between Mullan and Marsan, but…well, I’ll leave it there but it’s more than a bit of a surprise what happens.

I was so taken with Tyrannosaur in the screening’s immediate wake that I shared my reactions with a young freelancer I’d spoken with in the cattle tent. He’d just seen it as well, and basically went “meh.” My mouth almost fell open. “You think what we just saw is just okay?,” I thought but didn’t say. Jeezus Christ. It takes all sorts and sensibilities to make a world.

My mind is blown by The King’s Speech having won the Producers Guild of America Best Picture of 2010 award. What happened to The Social Network? I don’t have an explanation, but I suspect it was due to some kind of involuntary generational reflex or voting spasm. It makes no real aesthetic sense but they did it anyway. Here are a couple of guesses why.

One, the PGA voters skew older and defaulted to the old emotional-tear-ducts-mean-best-picture equation that people like Nicole Sperling have been talking about. Or two, the PGA voters decided to enliven the Best Picture race for perverse reasons — i.e., because they were bored with “The Social Network has it in the bag” scenario, and because they could.

The PGA has definitely shaken things up, that’s for sure. It’s a revolt, is what it is. It’s the old getting onto the young and saying “no…no! Our most highly honored film can’t be about kids talking about computer codes….no! We need that old-time 1993 emotion!” That or it’s some kind of freak vote, like something got into the L.A. water system. All I know is that it’s starting to look like a real horse race again, and that’s fine from an Oscar-covering perspective. But if The King’s Speech wins in the end, it’ll be Shakespeare in Love-defeats-Saving Private Ryan all over again.

I also think it’s safe to assume that EW‘s Dave Karger was popping the champagne tonight. And well he should have. Tonight’s vote was a triumph of Kargerism, which is to say a fulfillment of what Karger and other King’s Speech allies (Poland, Thompson, Howell, etc.) have been saying all along.

Ian Palmer‘s Knuckle is a thoughtful, well-assembled, vaguely sickening doc about four (or is it five?) working-class Irish clans expressing their loathing for each other by staging bare-knuckle mano e mano fist fights over a period of 12 years, or roughly ’97 to ’09. It’s sad and repellent, and yet you’re gripped with anticipation every time a new fight is about to begin. What is that?

There’s no real reason for these medieval-style bouts other than the clansmen being unable or unwilling to transcend this handed-down tradition, which goes back a couple of decades. Or their bestial instincts or economic frustration…whatever. The point is that these beefy, tattooed, very Irish-looking guys are stuck in this grudge-bout cycle like an ox stranded in a mud sinkhole.

Fight Club was a very cool, understandable art film — it was about renouncing passive, corporate-controlled attitudes and lifestyles. Knuckle is just anthropology. There’s nothing to do after seeing it except shake your head and go “I get it, okay, that’s their ritual….but on the other hand, too effin’ bad.”