After four days of the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, I’m tempted to call it weak tea. So far there’s been no Call Me By Your Name, no Mudbound, no Big Sick. By my sights the only moderately pleasing narrative films have been Tamara Jenkins‘ lightly comedic Private Life and Jessie Peretz‘s Juliet, Naked. And that’s it.

Update: I saw Lynne Ramsay‘s You Were Never Really Here late Sunday evening, and it’s easily the strongest film — half narrative, half fever-dream — I’ve seen so far in Park City, hands down. It’s bloody and gooey, bothered and nihilistic, but it’s so beautifully shot and unto itself, so self-aware and finely controlled — an arthouse rendering of a Taken-style flick.

Otherwise this festival seems to be largely about “woke”-ness and women’s agenda films — healings, buried pain, social ills, #MeToo awareness, identity politics, etc. Sundance ’18 is like being at a socialist summer camp in the snow.

Headstrong critics have been embracing this or that narrative film and trying to make hay, but generally speaking the ones I’ve seen (or have read or heard about from trusted colleagues) have fallen under the headings of “not bad, awful, meh, fair” or “extremely tough sit”…none have that special propulsion.

You can’t count Mandy, the Nic Cage wackjob thing. Too specialized, cultish, bloody.

Tweeted last night by MCN’s David Poland: “Sundance has never really been a sausage party, as films go. It’s also embraced inclusion for decades. The festival business is changing…full stop. The crazy amounts streaming companies are paying is one thing. But also, high-quality unseen product gets more and more rare.”

So far the only films I’ve felt truly touched and levitated by are three highly intelligent, smoothly assembled but very conventional documentaries — Susan Lacy‘s Jane Fonda in Five Acts, Marina Zenovich‘s Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind and especially Matt Tyrnauer‘s Studio 54.

I’m pretty familiar with the Studio 54 saga (I went there three or four times in ’78 and again in the early ’80s after it reopened under Mark Fleischman), but Tyrnauer’s doc has landed the elusive Ian Schrager, one of the two founding partners of this legendary after-hours club (the other being the late Steve Rubell). This perspective alone is worth the price.

The film itself is a brilliant, levitational recapturing of a quaalude dreamland, a pre-Reagan, pre-AIDS vibe, a culture of nocturnal abandon that bloomed and thumped and carried everyone away but is long past and gone forever. (Naturally.) It’s sadly beautiful in a certain way.

I liked Studio 54 so much I’m thinking of catching it a second time on Friday morning, just before I leave town.

I wish I could say I’ve been aroused or energized by something more daring, but so far the reachy stuff has felt flat or frustrating or slightly disappointing. Tell me I’m wrong.

I didn’t “hate” Debra Granik‘s Leave No Trace, but I bailed around the two-thirds mark. I am therefore not panning Granik’s father-daughter drama altogether. But I really didn’t give a shit about watching a quietly seething asshole dad (Ben Foster, who else?) insisting on living in the damp, chilly woods with his intelligent, coming-into-her-own teenaged daughter (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie).

I saw no charm, no appeal, nothing intriguing in this absurd approach to life and living. It’s one thing to live without TV or smartphones, but eating mushrooms and shitting in the woods without toilet paper?

I’ve never liked Foster much to begin with. Does he do anything besides play intense wackjobs?

Really, what possible good can come from hanging with another naturalist asshole a la Viggo Mortensen‘s dad in Captain Fantastic? Seriously — fuck these pater familias and their oppressive, Thoreau-like parenting theologies. Poor McKenzie is becoming curious about the world and wants to socialize a bit and maybe see what it’s like to have a boyfriend, but her scowling dickhead dad, whose damaged background Granik can barely be bothered to explain, wants none of it.

So after the authorities intercede at the end of Act One and try to prompt Foster to allow his daughter a chance to adapt and socialize and find her way into a structured, work-oriented rural life, Foster’s Will says “c’mon, daughter, we’re going back to the pine cones.” He loves her, but what a hopelessly deranged prick. Of course his daughter will stand up to him and go her own way by the end of Act Three — we knew that going in.

So I was sitting there telling myself “I can write something based on the 65 minutes I’ve seen thus far…I just have to admit that I left before it ended.” And that’s what I’ve done.

I more than half-liked Jesse Peretz‘s Juliet, Naked after catching it yesterday afternoon, and I loved the ending to death. But for reasons best not explained or not fully understood, I couldn’t bring myself to write about it, and I mean not even a tweet. It didn’t really arouse or provoke me except in the matter of Ethan Hawke‘s pudgebod graybeard appearance and atrociously ill-chosen wardrobe (a blind man visits Goodwill).

Seeing Susan Lacy’s Jane Fonda in Five Acts at 9 am, and then Matt Tyrnauer’s Studio 54 at 11:30 am, and Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace at 3 pm. The finale will either be Rupert Everett‘s Oscar Wilde film, The Happy Prince, at 9 pm, or Lynne Ramsay‘s You Were Never Really Here at 8:30 pm, which I already have a ticket for.

Guillermo del Toro‘s Creature From The Love Lagoon (a.k.a. Gill Man, a.k.a. Aqua Man, a.k.a.The Shape of Water) has won the PGA’s Daryl F. Zanuck award for Outstanding Motion Picture of 2017. So the apparent descent of Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri proceeds as the heat lessens…right? What else does this mean?

The Handmaid’s Tale won Producers Guild Award for Best Drama Series. Brett Morgen‘s Jane, the Jane Goodall documentary that screened at the Hollywood Bowl last summer (i.e., the event at which I spilled red shrimp sauced all over my jeans), has won the Producers Guild Award for top movie doc. The PGA’s Danny Thomas Award for episodic comedy went to Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel And Last Week Tonight with John Oliver won the PGA’s live entertainment and talk prize.

Barry Levinson and Al Pacino‘s Paterno (HBO, March/April) deals with the whole horrid Penn State child sex scandal that came to light in 2011, and mainly involved pedophile Jerry Sandusky and legendary Penn State football coach Joe Paterno. Who plays Sandusky? Who remembers how great Amir Bar Lev‘s Happy Valley was?

A friend who used to work with young kids shared the following yesterday: “I once worked at an elementary school as a kindergarten aid for a year, and then as an aid to third graders. And I know this: Children lie. They lie more often than they tell the truth and half of the time they don’t know the difference. They want to please adults, and they’ll hold onto the lie if they think it will please an adult and not get them into trouble.

“The reason I never bought Dylan Farrow‘s story is that kids don’t have that kind of consistency in stories they tell UNLESS they are lying. Most of the time if you ask them the details will shift and they’ll embellish the story — the only way they don’t change their stories is if they’ve been told exactly what to say. Memories are easily implanted, not just in children but adults. And no one seems to want to talk about this part of it.”

Prior to this afternoon’s (3:30 pm) screening of Paul Dano‘s Wildlife:

Paul Dano‘s Wildlife is a sluggish but otherwise strongly directed middle-class horror film — cold, creepy, perverse. I didn’t hate it because of Dano’s visual discipline (handsome compositions, a restrained shooting style, extra-scrupulous 1960 period design) and because of Carey Mulligan‘s fascinating performance as a youngish cheating mom in a small Montana town. But it’s a funereal gloom movie, and it makes you feel like you’re sinking into a cold swamp.

On top of which I was appalled — astonished — by the cruel, self-destructive behavior of this sad 34 year-old woman, whose name is Jeanette, and particularly by her decision to invite her 14 year-old son Joe (Ed Oxenbould) to almost participate in some extra-marital humping with a rich, small-town fat guy (Bill Camp) while her irresponsible husband Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal) is off fighting a forest fire with local volunteers.

Yes, the screenplay (by Dano and Zoey Kazan) is an adaptation of a 1990 Richard Ford novel so blame Ford, right? But who dreams up stuff like this? And what kind of mother has ever injected this kind of sexually odious poison into her son’s life?

Infidels hide their affairs, particularly from their kids. But Jeanette more or less whispers in her son’s ear, “I dunno but I kinda like this balding Uriah Heep…he’s rich and definitely not your father, and so I’m feeling flirty and thinking about…well, I’ve said enough.” And the kid just stares at her like she’s some kind of conniving ghoul from a Vincent Price flick. Later she says she’s miserable and almost ready to kill herself, but that doesn’t negate the earlier thing.

So Wildlife is partly admirable, yes, but mostly an endurance test. The feeling of watching it is something like “all right, this is grim and getting grimmer but I can handle it…I certainly love Mulligan and Gyllenhaal’s acting but Oxenbould…the kid is torture. He doesn’t look like Carey or Jake, of course — familial resemblance almost never happens in movies — but he wears the exact same expression in every scene in the film…a look of intimidation, anxiety, quiet horror, shock, dread…every damn scene.”

But Dano knows how to visually compose and hold to a certain austere style, and Mulligan is always peak-level, no matter the role.

I dropped by the Grey Goose lounge yesterday afternoon to speak with HE’s own Jonah Hill. His performance as a quietly gay trust-fund kid who mentors alcoholics in Gus Van Sant‘s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot (Amazon, 5.11) is, for me, a knockout — emotionally open and “real”, not a single amount of digressive humor, straight cards.

Hill said he wasn’t sure what “quietly gay” means but yeah, whatever — a growth thing, a workout, a dig-in.

I hadn’t seen Van Sant’s film when we spoke, but a journalist friend had called it (as noted yesterday) “a really good 12-step movie,” which I agree with, having seen it late last night. Jonah said it’s more than just a 12-step procedural (and he’s half-right) but the film is entirely about the how late cartoonist John Callahan (touchingly rendered by Joaquin Pheonix) overcame his alcohol addiction and eventually found a way to forgive, including his absent mother and even the guy (Jack Black‘s “Dexter”) whose drunk driving caused Callahan to become a quadraplegic.

Snapped upstairs at Park City’s Grey Goose lounge — Friday, 1.19, around 4:15 pm.

There’s a third-act scene in which Jonah delivers one of those “this is who I really am and I’m actually not so great” monologues. It’s easily the most emotionally ballsy or vulnerable thing he’s ever done.

I’m sure that for every person out there who will feel as I do after seeing the film there will be ten others who will complain about Hill not doing funny material any more, or not enough of it. I mentioned the “new Calvinist climate” (which I didn’t try to get Hill to talk about), and said that the Hill performances I’ve loved the most (Wolf of Wall Street, Superbad, War Dogs, Get Him To The Greek) are rooted in an obsessive-indulgent lifestyle mindset that suddenly seems antithetical to the current mood, and that I hope he never loses touch with that current.

Hill is currently editing Mid 90s, his semi-autobiographical directing debut, and that he hopes to have it ready to screen at Telluride, or seven and a half months hence. He’s no longer on board with Uncut Gems, a Benny and Josh Safdie film that presumably has something to do with larceny. His departure was mostly about scheduling issues. The script for the Richard Jewell movie is currently undergoing rewrites at the direction of helmer Ezra Edelman, who “wants to make it his own thing,” Hill explained.

Here’s our brief discussion. The recorder was right next to Jonah, and yet for some reason it sounds like he’s sitting five feet away.

There’s a small food shop adjacent to the main lobby of the Park City Marriott. I picked up a granola yogurt cup this morning (8:25 am) after snagging a ticket to a Sunday night Sundance showing of Lynne Ramsay‘s You Were Never Really Here. But before the sale the checkout girl wanted to make sure I knew the score.

Checkout Girl (pointing to yogurt cup): Uhm, this is seven dollars.
HE (mild, droll): Yeah, you’re pricey, you charge a lot, sure.
Checkout Girl: So is that okay?
HE: Yeah…what do you mean?
Checkout Girl: Is that okay?
HE (slightly confused): Well, no but (a smile) I’ll pay it!
Checkout Girl: I’m sorry. I don’t set the prices.
HE: Sure you do. You’re the mastermind. You’re the Ernst Stavro Blofeld of yogurt pricing.

The checkout girl (a throughly decent person) didn’t get it at all. I shouldn’t have used such an obscure reference. Too early in the morning. Why couldn’t I have let well enough alone and just muttered “no worries”? I’ll tell you why. Because she not only warned me about the high price, and because she asked me for a reaction. I tried to keep things light, but I messed it up with an obscure reference to a couple of late ’60s Bond films.

On last night’s Real Time with Bill Maher, Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff said that a woman whom Trump is currently boning is identified towards the end of the book. “Somebody he’s fucking now?,” Maher asked. “It is,” Wolff answered. But he didn’t identify because he didn’t “have the ultimate proof — I didn’t have the blue dress.” If I had to guess, I would say Hope Hicks…right? Wolff said the woman’s identity is indicated by “reading between the lines” in a section near the end of the book. “Now that I’ve told you,” Wolff said, “when you hit that paragraph you’re going to say ‘Bingo.’ “