I found Alexandre Moors‘ The Yellow Birds and Dee Rees‘ Mudbound to be more about endurance than absorption. They both made me feel trapped and conflicted as I sat there with my overcoat and scarf and cowboy hat scrunched under my seat, grappling with a downish realization that neither were cutting the mustard, much less ringing the bell.

I was obliged to stay, of course, because walking out (i.e., escaping) would be processed as ignoble and dilletantish by the Twitter dogs. And so I sat there in a state of numb submission, popping Tic Tacs and toughing it out, focusing on the fine performances by Mudbound‘s Carey Mulligan, Mary J. Blige and Jason Mitchell (at times almost good enough to redeem the film as a whole) and a pair of honorable turns by Yellow Birds‘ Jennifer Aniston and Toni Collette. 

You know the drill — following along but waiting for something (anything!) truly interesting to happen, and checking your watch at 15-minute intervals.

Alden Ehrenreich as a PTSD-afflicted Iraq War veteran in Alexandre Moors’ The Yellow Birds.

Carey Mulligan in Dee Rees’ Mudbound.

Mudbound, a ’40s period piece about racial relations amid cotton farmers toiling in the hardscrabble South, bears more than a few resemblances to Robert Benton‘s Places In the Heart (’84). Likewise The Yellow Birds, an Iraq War-era drama about a search for the cause of a young American soldier’s mysterious death along with concurrent parental grief, is strongly reminiscent of Paul Haggis‘s In The Valley of Elah (’07).

In both cases the older films are far, far superior — better stories, more skillfully written, more emotionally affecting.

Based on Hillary Jordan‘s 2008 novel, Mudbound (adapted by TV writer-producer Virgil Williams) is about the relations between the white McAllans, owners of a shithole cotton farm (no plumbing or electricity) in the muddy Mississippi delta, and their black tenant-farmer neighbors, the Jacksons, in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

After yesterday’s anti-Trump women’s march in Park City followed by uploading, breakfast and three hours of filing, I caught Alexandre Moors‘ The Yellow Birds (3 pm) and Dee Rees’ Mudbound (6:15 pm) but not Taylor Sheridan‘s Wind River.

I saw the first two because I’d been given tickets by the film’s reps (you need to find them outside the Eccles), but I blew off Wind River because I had no such assurances, and because I’d also came up empty when I requested a ticket from the Sundance Press Office. I could’ve hung around before last night’s 9:30 pm showing and tried to mooch a ticket, but that’s not how I roll. I draw the line at in-person pleading, which in my mind is synoymous with grovelling.

Neither Birds nor Mudbound turned out to be all that good. Mudbound has a humanist heart — it exudes compassion for its hardscrabble characters — and is easily the better of the two. But they’re both slogs. This is sometimes part of the Sundance experience — occasionally you have to sit there and suffer and wait for a film to be over, and then you have to stand there and nod respectfully as people go on and on about how great or moving it was. (I’ll tap out thoughts about both in the next piece.)

The consensus so far is that while Wind River includes Jeremy Renner‘s finest performance yet, it’s decidedly the least of Sheridan’s heartland trilogy, the other two being his scripts for Sicario and Hell or High Water, and so I’m also blowing off this morning’s 9 am Eccles screening. I’ll see it when I see it, the sun will come up tomorrow morning either way, and I won’t be guilt-tripped by guys saying “wait, you’re not seeing Sheridan’s film this morning?” I’m playing my cards the way I want to play them.

I need three or four hours to bang out some column material, and I have three big Eccles films later today — Craig Johnson‘s Wilson (which I’m actually dreading) at 3:15 pm, Luca Guadagnino‘s buzzed-about Call Me By Your Name at 6:15 pm and finally Maya Forbes and Wallace Wolodarksy‘s The Polka King at 9:45 pm.

In last night’s SNL sketch, Aziz Asari‘s offense was saying he was okay with La La Land but that it kinda drags in the middle. I conveyed a similar reaction when I saw it last September, but I added that the opening and ending numbers (especially the latter) more than overcame any qualms. I’ve since mentioned that if you catch it a second or better yet a third time, all of that “drags in the middle” stuff kind of melts away. Plus I’ve never heard of any La La Land fascists barking at ambivalent types. So all in all I didn’t find this the least bit funny.

I was walking down Park Avenue this morning after the march. I briefly stopped at the bus station across from the Park City Library to consider the schedules. I was standing in a kind of detoured parking area that wasn’t in a car lane but not on the sidewalk — a small ridge of slushy snow was between me and the shelter. Two older women were standing there, and one offered a maternal warning. She: “You’re on the wrong side.” Me: “Whadddaya mean?” She: “You could get hit by a car.” Me: “Naah, I’m okay.” She: “Just be careful.” Me: “If a bus comes along I’ll just leap out of the way, like the proverbial brown fox jumping over the log…really.  I’m fast.  Lightning reflexes.”

The mock-tawdry headline of yesterday’s review of Margaret Betts‘ Novitiate read “Hot Lesbo Nun Action Toward The End.” That’s because the strongest, grabbiest scene in the whole film is a shadowy erotic thing between a couple of nuns-in-training. I asked around and everyone agreed that was the big stand-out moment — trust me.

But wait, hold on….there’s a Brooklyn perspective on this vein of hothouse cinema that demands consideration. Ebert.com and N.Y. Times contributor Glenn Kenny doesn’t like the term “lesbo” — he not only thinks it’s juvenile (which of course it is) but feels it’s important to strongly discourage its use even by those adopting a mock-ironic tone.

Kenny also feels that anyone who isn’t an elite foo-foo walking around with a feather quill sticking out of his or her anal cavity shouldn’t mention Robert Bresson, whom I referenced in my review because most of the costars in Novitiate are model-pretty in the vein of Bresson’s own casting tendencies. So he tried to give me a little bitch-slapping today, and I bitch-slapped his ass right back.

I’ve never had so much fun at a protest march in my life. Or maybe it’s been so long since I joined one of these events that I don’t fully recall how good it feels to be part of a throng of joyous howling humanists. But I got there late — 9:15 am — due to the bus from the Park City Marriott to downtown Park City taking almost 50 minutes, and so I only joined the march 15 or so minutes before it ended. Cold gusty winds, heavyish flurries, snowdrifts, slush, stalled traffic…love it!

There was a hilarious moment when everyone started waving and cheering when they noticed a video drone flying overhead, at which point Toronto Star critic Peter Howell, whom I was marching next to, remarked that the drone could have been Donald Trump‘s. Or Vladimir Putin‘s, I was thinking.

My favorite sighting was a young 30ish mom leaning over to explain to her toddler son what the march was all about, and the boy just gazing at all the bodies and taking in the energy and the spirit of it, his face full of wonder.

“We Americans have a new leader: Vladimir Putin,” Real Time‘s Bill Maher quipped last night. “But also this guy Trump who took some sort of oath today. The Trump supporters are saying this is a reckoning. As in, I reckon we’re all fucked. All the pundits were saying [his inaugural address], which was joyless and ugly and divisive, was going to be classy and uplifting and unifying. At what point are people going to realize there is no normal president inside the Trump fat suit? That’s it. That’s who it is.”

No filing until sometime in the mid afternoon. It’s 7:20 am — off to Park Marriott for press tickets, which will cost about an hour, then  grab a downtown Park City bus for the anti-Trump march down Main Street, which begins around 9 am.  Three films later today, the first being a YA adaptation called Before I Fall — dread and foreboding.  Thinking of shining it.

Yesterday’s big knockout (and a likely indie-sized hit) was The Big Sick, a diverting, highly original romantic saga — you never really know where it’s going, and that’s just how I like it. (Okay — the finale is fairly conventional but that’s all.) Dry, droll, low-key humor for smarties & hipsters.

And it really does come together emotionally during the last 25% or 30%. I loved the  ISIS and 9/11 terrorist jokes. The only big problem is remembering how to spell and pronounce Kumail Nanjiani, the Pakistani comedian who co-stars and co-wrote.  Best performance ever by Zoe Kazan.

Off to the march…

A 1.20 Wrap story by Matt Pressberg about Megan Ellison‘s Annapurna Pictures launching a distribution arm contains a bit of a shocker, at least from my perspective. Kathryn Bigelow’s untitled drama about the 1967 Detroit riots, Pressberg reports, will be released by Annapurna on August 4th — the 50th anniversary of the riots. Which is well and good as far as acknowledging history goes, but an August release usually means no Oscar action, or none anticipated by the filmmakers and/or the distributor. I was naturally expecting Bigelow’s film, which was written and co-produced by Hurt Locker/Zero Dark Thirty collaborators  Mark Boal, to be in the Oscar conversation. Maybe it still will be, but an 8.4 release doesn’t encourage belief in that possibility.

I love this scene from Tony Gilroy‘s Michael Clayton…love it. Possibly the best piece of acting that Dennis O’Hare‘s ever delivered, and I love that look on George Clooney‘s face after the wine-glass-smash…cool, measured, not even faintly acknowledging what’s just happened.

“Hot lesbo nun action” is a tawdry headline, but it’s definitely an accurate description of portions of Margaret Betts‘ Novitiate, which screened at Park City’s Eccles theatre earlier today. I’m not saying Noivitiate is mostly or even partly an erotic thing (the real hot-nun Sundance flick is Jeff Baena‘s The Little Hours), but a certain scene during the final third…yowsah!

Novitiate is basically about various repressions (mostly spiritual) visited on a group of young women who’ve committed to be nuns-in-training, or novitiates. It’s mostly set in 1964, which is when various Vatican-led reforms, known as the Second Vatican Council or Vatican II, were being implemented.

But don’t trust the The Sundance program notes, to wit: “This coming-of-age story is about a young girl’s first love. In this case, her first love is God.” The key term in this previous sentence isn’t “God” but “first love.”

Right off the top you’re going “hmmm, possibly an austere Robert Bresson-like film about the denials, devotions and disciplines of the life of a young would-be nun.”

The young protagonist is Cathleen (Margaret Qualley, 22 year-old daughter of Andie McDowell), and over the course of this 123-minute film “her faith is challenged by the harsh, often inhumane realities of being a nun,” etc. But sure enough, the old repressed-libido thing eventually kicks in and when it does, the axiom about “the stronger the constraints, the hotter the eroticism” comes to mind. I was sitting there watching a film about a nunnery, but the concept of “wood”…sorry.

I mentioned Bresson because Novitiate contains slight echoes of his passions and obsessions. He was not just a cinematic minimalist but a religious man of a conservative bent. He knew from austerity, spirituality and holding it in (i.e., Diary of a Country Priest). Except Bresson always cast his films with extremely good-looking, model-pretty actors and actresses. Sex never happened in his films, but it was certainly intimated in the features of his youthful players.

Here’s the thing — almost all the young women playing nuns in Novitiate are serious hotties. Qualley, Diana Agron, Liana Liberato, Morgan Saylor (White Girl), Maddie Hasson, Eline Powell — they’re all knockouts, and when was the last time you ran into even a half-hot nun or seen a picture of one?

Answer: Almost never. Retired actress Dolores Hart, who was quite attractive when young, is the only nun I’ve heard or read about who stands out in this regard. The actress who played a novitiate in Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Ida — Agata Trzebuchowska — was beautiful, of course, but that was a movie.

Novitiate is a reasonably well done thing, a little eccentric, a little Sundance-y but not half bad. The strongest supporting performances are from Melissa Leo as Reverend Mother (basically doing the same kind of thing that Meryl Streep did in Doubt, only with a heavier hand), Julianne Nicholson as Qualley’s skeptical, non-religious mom, and Denis O’Hare as an Archbishop pressuring Leo into adopting Vatican II’s more liberal “suggestions” about how to run things.