I can roll with austere minimalism as well as the next guy, and I certainly respect what Rodrigo Garcia and Emmanuel Lubezki are up to in Last Days of the Desert, which is basically about the 40 meditative days that Yeshua of Nazareth (Ewan McGregor) spent in the desert before embarking upon his calling as the Ultimate Lamb of God. Except it’s a little too spare — there’s not much feeling or drama in this thing, which is mostly about performances, photography and an impressive sense of stillness. The focus is not so much about Yeshua’s spiritual battle with a mirror-image Satan (also played by McGregor) as it is his decision to hang with a family of desert dwellers (Ciaran Hinds, Tye Sheridan, Ayelet Zurer) and help them build a small stone abode atop a mountain peak. That in itself felt like a problem. We all understand fasting in the wasteland to attain spiritual purity, but why would a family — anyone — live in that Godforsaken inferno? No soil, no water to speak of, no grass for the goats…a situation without a thread of logic or believability. I was also bothered by the footwear. In each and every Bible flick ever made guys have worn standard-issue sandals — a thick hunk of foot-shaped leather with a couple of straps. But McGregor and Hinds wear a kind of burlap slip-on — call it a desert hiking loafer. If you go to the Nordstrom site a close facsimile is available — Tom’s classic metallic burlap slip-on. I’m not being snarky. Any creative decision that diverts your attention form the main order of business is a mistake. Garcia and his wardrobe designer should have gone with boilerplate King of Kings sandals.

Yesterday In Contention‘s Kris Tapley assessed the out-of-the-blue Birdman surge and the apparently strong likelihood that Alejandro G. Innaritu‘s film has the Best Picture Oscar in the bag. It’s an astute piece but some assertions/observations need addressing.

Assertion #1: “No one was really expecting this of Birdman, and boom, there it is.” True — I had been urging people to vote for Birdman all along but I wasn’t expecting a PGA or SAG win. I had more or less wilted and accepted the Boyhood-is-all-but-inevitable theology…and then lo and behold!

Assertion #2: “I’ve always sensed some softness in the Boyhood steamroller.” Indeed — it’s been soft all along. I sensed that softness as I watched and absorbed Boyhood at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, but tea-leaf readers kept insisting it had the Best Picture goods, and after a while most of us started to think, “Hmmm, yeah, maybe it does…okay, fine.”

All hail Grantland‘s Wesley Morris for looking askance at the bizarre euphoria that has greeted Rick Famuyiwa‘s Dope, and for standing on my side of the debate. “You can see Famuyiwa going for a certain class of skuzzy Los Angeles odyssey, like the ones of Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson,” Morris observes. “[But] this is more like Doug Liman‘s Go, which was like Kwik-E-Mart Tarantino. But Dope isn’t made with even the sustained wit of Go. It has its moments, all of which involve the attempt to humorously unpack racial baggage. There just aren’t nearly enough.

And yet Dope “has been the most hotly auctioned film of the festival,” Morris notes. “I don’t know whether Open Road and Sony Pictures, who’ve acquired Dope, went for it because it feels, to them, authentically black or because the blackness is familiar to the world’s marketplaces.” Or because Famuyiqwa is supplying the kind of “black shit [that] white people like.”

In a 1.27 q & a with Variety‘s Brent Lang, the Going Clear guys — director Alex Gibney, whose doc about the malignancy of Scientology is arguably the finest and most riveting film to play at Sundance ’15, and author Lawrence Wright, whose book is the basis of Gibney’s film — call on Tom Cruise and John Travolta to wake up, man up and speak out against Scientology’s abusive practices.

Gibney: “By now there is a well-documented record of abuses in the Church of Scientology, yet Cruise and Travolta have never spoken out about them. By not speaking out, it’s a kind of an endorsement and I think that’s why we’re right and properly critical.”

Wright: “They’re selling a product and the product they’re selling is oppressing some of the people inside the church, especially the clergy, which is called the Sea Org, and Cruise has spent countless hours out on the Sea Org base where — on that same base where he has a special chateau — there [are] these double-wide trailers called the hole, which is a kind of re-education camp where people have been incarcerated for years. Sleeping on the floor on bedrolls with ants crawling around, abused physically, made to lick the floor or the toilet with their tongue. It’s just unbelievable degradation.

Some superhero movies (like the two Captain America flicks) are just good films, but the superhero megaplex virus is fed by a widespread sense of diminishment, impotence and insignificance, felt most acutely by under-35s who are either just starting to realize or have recently realized how un-heroic and unexceptional their lives are likely to be. On the other hand Miles “don’t be a pervert, man” Teller is one of the paycheck fantastics.

I naturally expected Alex Gibney’s Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief to rip Scientology, founder L. Ron Hubbard, current Scientology honcho David Miscavige, John Travolta and particularly Tom Cruise big-time, but the hard, well-ordered substance of the film knocked me back regardless. The case against Scientology and Miscavige in particular has been on the table for years, but Going Clear still packs a mean punch.

If you’ve done any reading about Scientology over the years Gibney’s film is not exactly a torrent of fresh information, but for those who are relatively uninformed the doc, which will air on HBO, is a seriously brutal indictment. It’s clear and tight and comprehensive as hell about Hubbard’s history, and is quite convincing with three ex-Scientology notables, including Marty Rathbun, formerly the church’s second-highest ranking official before leaving in 2004, spilling the beans big-time.

I’ve been choking for the last 24 hours or so. Having seen six Sundance films over the last day and a half and ten since Saturday morning, I haven’t been able to write much about them. Earlier today I was telling myself to just write whatever comes to mind. The less I have to write about, the easier it is. I can take a slim thread of a feeling or a notion I’ve had in the shower and turn this into four or five graphs, easy. But movies are substantive topics — each one demands some kind of thorough, full-on exploration. And that’s hard when you’re seeing four per day. The only approach that works is to pick one or two aspects of a film that bother me. Once I’ve covered that I can usually add a sum-up response or boilerplate appraisal of some kind. I love Sundance but there’s a part of me that would almost rather be in New York City right now. I love walking around in snowboots as everything grinds to halt. A blizzard in Manhattan and not a snowflake falling here. It’s getting warmer, in fact.

You can tell right off the bat that Sam Rockwell will be doing his usual low-key sardonic routine in Jared Hess‘s Don Verdean, a Lionsgate release that pops at Park City’s Eccles theatre on Wednesday, 1.28 at 6:30 pm. The fact that Rockwell plays “a biblical archaeologist propositioned by a church that wants to finance his digs in exchange for creating a museum of sacred relics” tells you that sanctimonious righty Christians are going to take it in the neck. Amy Ryan, Leslie Bibb, Will Forte and the absolutely demonic Danny McBride costar. Hess (Napoleon Dynamite) directed and co-wrote somebody from his family with the first name of “Jerusha.”

Sundance critics appear to be as delighted with Rick Famuyiwa‘s Dope as the Open Road and Sony execs who’ve paid $7 million for the rights plus a $15 million p & a commitment. It’ll almost certainly be a hit — a just reward for being a snappy (i.e., jizz-whizzy), cartoonish, wild-ass Inglewood ‘hood action farce about friendship, guns, ’90s sounds, romance, sellin’ somebody else’s cocaine, gangstas, bullets flyin’, gettin’ into college (hey, maybe Harvard) and foxy, model-esque girls flashin’ that come-fuck-me look at hapless geeks with “who me?” gee-whiz expressions (in this instance Shameik Moore), and one of those hotties, drugged way the fuck up, stumbling across a busy street and then pissing outdoors in the shrubbery of a faux-Starbucks and the incident getting covered big-time by local TV news. Of course!

Dope pallies (l. to r.) Tony Revolori, Kiersey Clemons, Shameik Moore.

In other words, for all its keep-it-comin’ energy Dope is smartly assembled exploitation crap. Okay, not fair — it’s too superficially engaging to be called “crap” but it’s definitely insubstantial — a fleet, Tarantino-like hodgepodge of fantasy bullshit in the vein of a New Line Cinema release from the ’90s (i.e., House Party), and adapted to the general sensibility of 2015. In other words it’s fun as far as it goes but definitely not that great. Everything that happens fits a carefully calculated Hollywood street sensibility and is right the fuck on the nose; nothing is soft or subtle or indirect. Plus it’s too long by 15 or 20 minutes. At the 90-minute mark I was saying to myself, “Wait, wait…this thing should be wrapping up by now but it isn’t…it feels like it’s still building and developing points rather than starting to pay off.”

Instead of the usual routine of writing in the morning and then starting screenings around noon, this morning I’m catching a 9 am showing of Rodrigo Garcia‘s Last Days in the Desert (which Variety‘s Justin Chang has called “a quietly captivating and remarkably beautiful account of Jesus’ time in the wilderness before the beginning of his ministry”) and then Rick Famuyiwa‘s much-buzzed-about Dope at 11:30 at the Prospector. And then, starring around 2 pm, three hours of writing before catching Stevan Riley‘s Listen To Me Marlon at 6 pm at the Holiday Cinemas, and then Joe Swanberg‘s Digging for Fire at 9:45 pm at the Eccles. I got up at 5:30 am to get a jump on filing, but seeing four films per day (which is what I’ve been averaging) means there’s never enough time to write much of anything. Maybe I’ll cut it back to three-per-day starting tomorrow (i.e., Tuesday, 1.27). I return to Los Angeles on Friday, 1.30, around noon, so between now and then I’ll be seeing about 13 films, counting today’s four.

With Birdman having just won SAG’s Best Ensemble award on top of snagging the PGA Zanuck trophy last night, it’s looking even more likely that it’ll take the Best Picture Oscar. Right, Sasha Stone, Scott Feinberg, Pete Hammond, Tom O’Neil and Steve Pond? It may not, of course, but if Boyhood wins instead (as an L.A.-based, Sundance-reporting journalist is still insisting will happen), it’ll be a huge shocker. And by the way, The Theory of Everything‘s Eddie Redmayne winning SAG’s Best Actor award means over-and-out for Michael Keaton?

Distracted this morning by Birdman euphoria and other matters, I now have 17 minutes to tap out something about Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig‘s Mistress America, a whipsmart, acrid, His Girl Friday-like comedy which I was entirely delighted with. Comedy is hard but making a fast, rat-a-tat-tat comedy is, I’m guessing, all the harder, especially when you’ve managed to fortify it with serious character shadings and a touch of pathos. I was also pleased and gratified by Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden‘s Mississippi Grind, which has an assured, nicely textured, low-key ’70s quality, and is easily the best film that Ryan Reynolds (whose performance as a good-natured knockabout is completely centered and confident) has ever starred in. I was fairly charmed and definitely amused by Patrick Brice‘s The Overnight, which I caught last night at 11:30 pm. It’s a congenial sex-kink comedy about an innocent 30something couple being gently and lovingly manipulated into sexual receptivity to a mellow predatory couple looking for a little action. It really works all around, but I have to leave for Drunk, Stoned, Brilliant, Dead…later.