“In many respects, Sundance is always the same. Movies you expect to be good, disappoint; the films you shy away from because they sound bad on paper turn out to be wonderful. Half the time you feel as of you’re in the wrong theater. That said, I thought the mood this year was high. Positive, not poisonous like last year. People seemed upbeat, invigorated, inspired.” — Best quote in Eric Kohn and Sharon Waxman‘s 1.31 Sundance 2010 sum-up piece.

I’ve just been invited to a February 8th press day for Adam Kane‘s Formosa Betrayed, a drama about an attempt by a 20-something real-estate shark to lease the legendary but ailing Formosa Cafe for the covert purpose of turning it into a Burger King franchise. It’s kind of a Mike Judge-type dramedy about the extermination of pre-1950s architectural traditions in Los Angeles…something like that.

Formosa Betrayed actually tells the story of an FBI Agent (James Van Der Beek) investigating of the murder of a Taiwanese-American professor on U.S. soil. With the help of an FBI colleague (John Heard) and a Chicago police detective (Leslie Hope ), Van der Beek discovers…well, whatever. But Taiwan footage is definitely part of the visual package.

During my first day at Sundance I tapped out a piece for Fandango called “Confessions of an Oscar Blogger.” It’s q & a thing between myself and a Park City priest. Here’s an excerpt:

Priest: “Do you believe in God?”

Me: “The question is, does God believe in me? I do believe that at their best movies allow for a kind of God discussion — a profound communion with all dreams and faiths and spiritual longings. And that the winning of an Oscar amounts to a kind of sanctifying of the dreams and longings that a given movie contains.”

Priest: “What is it you wish to confess? You said you’ve sinned.”

Me: “I’ve been guilty of the sin of pride, Father. I’m proud of some of the stuff that I’ve written; movies that I’ve helped push into the Oscar realm to some degree, movies or actors I’ve helped to demean or degrade to some extent.”

Priest: “But God teaches us to show only love and tender mercies, my son.”

Me: “Well, I couldn’t do that when they nominated Eddie Muphy for Dreamgirls.”

In all modesty, that “kind of sanctifying” paragraph many be the cleanest and most concise explanation of the meaning of Oscar awards that I’ve ever written.

I stole the “does God believe in me?” line, of course, from Stanley Kubrick‘s Lolita (it’s spoken by James Mason‘s Humbert Humbert) , or perhaps from the original Vladimir Nabokov novel. I wouldn’t know, never having read it.

What a luxuriously hellish, repetitively empty, medieval-prison-cell existence Sam Raimi must be enduring now. Let’s see…I’ve made millions and could make many millions more by continuing to make super-hero movies that aren’t Spider-Man. Iconic guy, lonely lone-wolf attitude, distinctive outfit, derring-do, savior mentality, etc. Hey, what about The Shadow?

This would be the same old CG megaplex crap and a manifestation of the same old agent-pleasing, kid’s-college-fund affluent quicksand. If Raimi does this his soul will slip through his fingers like water and seep through the cobblestones. He needs to man up and direct another film in the vein of A Simple Plan — his finest ever — and never make a super-hero movie ever again.

And never cast Bruce Campbell in anything ever again. Why should regular-Joe moviegoers be asked to contribute to the keep-Sam Raimi‘s- friends-from-the-old-days-in-financial-clover fund? This is clubby sentimental indulgence of the lowest order.

Mike from Milwaukee, the famous Phantom Menace reviewer with the really weird deep-dorky voice, nails various Avatar shortcomings but misses the transporting aspects. I think he wanted another shot of attention and figured an Avatar trashing would do better than a praising — simple as that.

With reader assistance I’ve located a slow-loading online trailer for Julio Medem‘s Room in Rome, which CHUD’s Devin Faraci wrote about on 1.19. The quality of Medem’s Sex and Lucia indicates that Room in Rome will have a mitigating touch of class. IFC will open it domestically later this year.

Almost anytime an American film shoots in Rome, they get it wrong by doing everything they can to gloss and tidy it up. Medem apparently shot most of Room in Rome in Madrid except for a few exteriors. Thinking about Rome put me in a mood to run one of my own pics, shot in June of ’07.

The “wall of Romulus” is one of three ancient walls surrounding Rome. This may be it, or it could be one of the Servian walls builit in the ninth century.

A 1.28 Hollywood Reporter story about an HBO project called Emergency Sex caught my eye because it reminded me of (a) the 9.11 “terror fucking” syndrome that was observed in Manhattan, and (b) the heated romantic triangle in Iraq involving CBS News correspondent Lara Logan that was reported about during the summer of 2008.

Emergency Sex will star Maria Bello, is being written by Slumdog Millionaire writer Simon Beaufoy, and will be executive produced by Bello, Beaufoy and Russell Crowe.

Inspired by the book “Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures: A True Story From Hell on Earth,” by Kenneth Cain, Heidi Postlewait and Andrew Thomson, the project “revolves around the larger-than-life exploits of expatriate nongovernment-organization workers who find their sanity tested in the face of atrocities, loneliness and primal desires,” the story says.

The book chronicles the real-life experiences of Cain, Postlewait and Thomson, who met in Cambodia during the 1990s as members of a UN peacekeeping mission.

Eighteen months ago I wrote that Logan’s story “would make for a good filmed drama. The considerate way to go about it would be to use the facts (romantic Baghdad triangle, emotions at a fever pitch, divorce proceeding, bullets whizzing past lovers’ heads, IEDs exploding) but with made-up names and perhaps a slightly fictionalized story line just to blur things up.

In early July ’08 Washington Post columnist Howard Kurtz wrote that “while some may accuse [Logan] of tawdry conduct, what happened to her is an all-too-familiar tale of someone consumed by a career and needing a partner who understands the peculiar pressures involved.”

Those pressures being reporting from an intense war zone where violence, bodies and bomb blasts are part of the daily drill. As I put it a few days before, “There’s always something strangely erotic in the air when there’s a lot of random death and danger floating about…the more ghastly or threatening the surroundings, the more likely it is that like-minded professionals of a certain age are going to get down in the heat of the moment.”

Scott Feinberg‘s final Oscar nomination forecast include the following the Best Picture picks: The Hurt Locker, Avatar, Up in the Air, Inglourious Basterds, Precious, An Education, Up, Invictus, District 9, The Blind Side. He omits A Serious Man because, being a real-world handicapper, he obviously believes that most Academy voters will omit it also.

No rag on Scott but that’s just (a) sick, (b) derelict and (c) decrepit. To nominate Invictus, a decent but second-tier Clint Eastwood film primarily because it honors Nelson Mandela by way of a steady and soothing Morgan Freeman performance, and at the same time not nominate one of the finest-ever Coen brothers’ films — a pitch-black comedy with a riveting exactitude of tone, cultural satire and misanthropic worldview — is outrageous. Putrid. Shame on anyone who would think and nominate along these lines.

March 23rd will be a banner day for Blu-ray aficionados with Paramount Home Video’s long-awaited African Queen restoral/remastering and Criterion’s Days of Heaven, already devastating on standard DVD, making their debuts in this format. And then a week later (3.30) comes the Collateral Blu-ray.

Three years after its debut at the 2007 Cinequest Film Festival, Michael Moriarty and Brian Keown‘s Hitler Meets Christ will be available on DVD on 3.23.

Pic is “a discussion between two mentally ill vagabonds who only believe themselves to be Der Fuhrer and the Savior, set against Vancouver’s wine country on East Hastings Street,” said one summary.

In his capsule review, Metroactive’s Richard Von Busack wrote the following: “Like Nixon, Hitler is a part that is good for any actor, and Moriarty does it proud, even with just the hint of the famous mustache visible above the grizzled beard. His Hitler is scatological and taunting.

“But he doesn’t seriously miss his lost empire. What he seeks, instead, is death and oblivion — a nothingness he can only achieve by repenting, as if surrendering to God’s son. Dismissing this ultimate act of egocide, Hitler tells Jesus, ‘You’re crazier than Rudolph Hess.’ The intriguing idea never transcends the level of a squabble.”

Why would a lanky Abe Lincoln-sized guy want a Tinkerbell-sized girlfriend, regardless of how hot she might seem? Why would any confident, self-respecting guy want to have sex with a woman small enough to be eight or nine years old? I can understand Hobbit-like women wanting a Richard Kiel-sized boyfriend for protection or whatever, but such couplings do seem a bit perverse from the guy’s perspective.

(l.) When in Rome‘s Josh Duhamel, Kristin Bell; (r.) Twilight‘s Rob Pattinson, Kristen Stewart,

I’m not saying that men in such relationships are necessarily having wicked fantasies, but it’s only natural to hook up with someone who’s in the same approximate realm (physically, emotionally, attractiveness-wise) so why do Gort-sized guys hook up with little bitty pixies with Tiny Kingdom feet and hands and little peep-peep voices?

I was just considering the odd disparity between When in Rome‘s Kristen Bell, who could easily pass for a fifth grader if she weren’t biologically mature in other ways, and Josh Duhamel, who’s so much taller than Bell he seems almost Navi-sized.

Or the romance between Twilight‘s Rob Pattinson, who’s a good 6’2″ or 6’3″, and the elfin Kristen Stewart. It hit me as I looked at her on the Eccles stage in Park City that she’s not just short but tiny in a growth-stunted way. She physically got to age nine or so and then just stopped.