“A playful, elegantly made little horror film, Mama teasingly sustains a game of hide-and-seek as it tantalizes the audience with fleeting apparitions of the title character while maintaining interest in two deeply disturbed little orphan girls,” writes Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy, who filed last night at 11:28 pm.

“Being sold primarily on the name of its godfather, Guillermo del Toro, this Canadian-Spanish co-production from Universal is refreshingly mindful of the less-is-more horror guidelines employed by 1940s master Val Lewton, not to mention Japanese ghost stories, but the PG-13 rating might prove too restrictive for the gory tastes of male core genre fans. Still, less bloodthirsty female teens could make up the difference at the box office, as the film provokes enough tension and gasps to keep susceptible viewers grabbing their armrests or the arms of those next to them.

“In essence, Mama represents a throwback and a modest delight for people who like a good scare but prefer not to be terrorized or grossed out. With fine special effects and a good sense of creating a mood and pacing the jolts, Andy Muschietti shows a reassuringly confident hand for a first-time director, pulling off some fine visual coups through smart camera placement and cutting, and not taking the whole thing so seriously that it becomes overwrought.”

The Park Regency hotel (1710 Prospector Ave., Park City, Utah) has always had weak, spotty, sluggish wifi. It’s 2013 and it still feels like 1997 in this joint. And last night the wifi was moving like a snail in suite #202. So I asked this morning if I could please have a suite that’s closer to the router/modem, and they said sure and gave me the keys to suite #232, where I’m now sitting. And it’s even slower. It’s awful. Pages takes minutes, not seconds, to load. It took so long for my gmail page to load that I went into a dumb-beast trance. There’s nothing worse than bad-wifi headaches. The forehead throbs.

The last time the wifi was this bad was four years ago in Oxford, Mississippi, where the first Hollywood Elsewhere “mood pocket” occured.

I’ve tried to sign up for a mifi service via AT&T but it’ll take days to receive the device in the mail. I can’t do the good old “turn your phone into a mifi device” because in order to do this I’ll have to give up my AT&T international plan, according to two AT&T tech guys I spoke with.

Update: I’ve asked the Park Regency staffers for assistance in a moderate but urgent tone of voice, and they basically stared at me like I’m a circus freak, like I’m crazy and possibly dangerous. Could you please call QWest and ask for a service guy to come out and see what’s wrong? It was like talking to cows. All they do is say “uhm, could you maybe work in the lobby? Because the signal is pretty good here.” (Which it is.) As a last resort I wrote the guy in charge of running this place, Richard Zimmerman of Trading Places, and of course he’s not responding. Why would he?

Instructions for the crazy guy in room #232: Nod, listen, say you’re sorry, keep nice-ing him and wearing him down. He’ll eventually give up. And the staffers are right. They’ve won and I’ve lost. I’m now filing from the lobby. Tail between legs. But somewhat grateful. It works like gangbusters down here! What a contrast!

Update: But it still sucks back in the suite. I brought both of my Macbook Pros plus the iPad 3 on this trip. For whatever reason the Macbook Pro sitting on a table in front of the couch works a little better than the computer sitting on the desk in front of the TV. I guess between the moody couch computer and the lobby sessions I’ll muddle through, but I hate this.

If there’s one awards-quality film that warrants a deep-drill investigation by 60 Minutes, it’s Zero Dark Thirty. Obviously. Hello? With all the sharply differing views about whether the film endorses torture or if Biggy-Boal simply included it because it happened? And yet 60 Minutes executive editor Bill Owens has told The Hollywood Reporter‘s Marisa Guthrie that the show has decided against any such inquiry.

Owens’ reasoning sounds muddled to me. He says “we’d [have to] go out and find our own Jessica Chastain character,” whatever that means. And he’s apparently grappling with some level of disappointment about the fact that ZD30 “is not a documentary.”

And yet 60 Minutes exec producer and CBS News chairman Jeff Fager has told Guthrie — this is unbelievable — that the show will run a follow-up piece on Lincoln, which will be seen as a sequel to the admiring profile of Steven Spielberg’s film that aired in October. The upcoming segment will air on 2.10 or 2.17, or right near the end of Oscar balloting.

Let’s back up and look at this again. 60 Minutes, a class act among news analysis shows with the ability to provide a huge p.r. advantage to any film looking for awards acclaim, is giving two (click) two (click) two blowjob pieces to Lincoln while turning its back on what is easily the most controversial Oscar-season film of the year — a story which could obviously be illuminated by a few probing interviews with the right people.

Methinks something stinks in Denmark. Favoritism, powerful alliances, kowtowing to the Spielberg aura…something. Eyebrows were raised a few days ago when Spielberg persuaded Bill Clinton to speak highly of Lincoln at the Golden Globes, and now a second Lincoln profile on 60 Minutes within a three-month period? What’s going on here?

60 Minutes has a sterling reputation for independence and backbone (except for the Geoffrey Wigand episode depicted in The Insider), but their coverage of Lincoln is perplexing. Because if they weren’t an honorable news show and if brown paper bags filled with cash were being delivered to Owens by special couriers in black limos, they’d be covering this film exactly the way they are now.

Last night I saw Andres Muschietti and Guillermo del Toro‘s masterful, sublimely crafted Mama at a Universal screening room. Totally over the moon, man. Levitational. I’m not a horror aficionado so I guess I’m off on my own orbit. But I know it when a director knows what he/she is doing, and Mama — is Scott Feinberg listening? — is the most engaging and exquisitely creepy horror film I’ve seen in ages.

Well, not “ages.” Five and a half years, to be precise. That’s when I saw Juan Antonio Bayona‘s The Orphanage, which Gillermo also produced. The Orphanage wasn’t aimed at genre fans either, and it played roughly the same “what’s around the corner?,” “what did we just see?,” “what’s that sound?” game. Aimed at somewhat-more-intelligent audiences, playing a less-is-more game. Mama is a bit more graphic and intense than The Orphanage, okay, but it’s definitely my idea of restrained. Certainly by today’s standards.

Does Mama contain familiar elements? Yeah. It’s a ghost story about a ferocious female banshee. Could some of these elements be called cliches? Yeah, I guess. And it doesn’t matter in the slightest when you’ve got a pair of exceptionally talented fellows behind the curtain. As I tried to tell Hoffman last night, it’s the singer not the song. Guys like Hoffman don’t want to know about appreciating standard stuff that feels fresh and alive and tingly. They just want what they want because they want it.

Mama is extra special because it’s about more than just fright zings. It’s also a grow-into-motherhood story for Jessica Chastain‘s Annabel, a gothy bass player with inky black fingernails who starts out with indifferent feelings about caring for Victoria (Megan Charpentier) and Lilly (Isabelle Nelisse), who’ve been found feral in a forest cabin after surviving on their own for five years.

Victoria and Lilly are the nieces of Annabel’s boyfriend Lucas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), a fellow musician whose dead brother, a scumbag financial trader of some kind, was their dad. The opening sequence, occurring about five years ago and showing what this wretched father did to his girls, is dynamic, super-powerful stuff.

Annabel is strictly hands-off in the beginning, as noted, but she edges into motherhood with a series of small halting steps, and by the end she’s fighting tooth and nail with the other “mother,” an extremely possessive figure who wants only to hold and nurture the girls into eternity. Victoria isn’t as much in Mama’s sway as Lilly, but both are on her team at the beginning and…no more exposition.

Mama is a light-touch horror pic. A concoction that sneaks in with hints and teasing cuts and, okay, an occasional shock cut or shock-music prompt, but mainly little cinematic games that turn you on if you’re hip or knowledgable enough. If you’re not hip enough you’ll just sit there like a popcorn-munching wildebeest and going “okay, okay but…c’mon, dude, where’s the really crazy shit? Where are the blood-soaked carpets?”

Is Mama an adult horror film in the vein of Robert Wise‘s The Haunting? Maybe that’s the wrong analogy as horror-film language has evolved so far beyond the tropes of 1961, but at times, yeah, it is. It goes for suggestion rather than shocks whenever possible. Is it a horror film for everyone who mostly hated Cabin In The Woods? Maybe. But if that film rang your geek bell and made you go “whoo-hoo!,” I don’t know what to say to you. I sure as hell don’t want to fucking know you. If I see you coming I’ll cross to the other side of the street.

All I know is that Mama is made for guys like myself. Guys who hate, hate, hate horror-geek slop. It’s not in the least bit gross or revolting, and it’s seriously, fundamentally scary. It trusts in your being able to recognize and revel in elegant filmmaking. It’s mainly about build-up and whispers and hints and intimations. It gets explicit toward the end, and this, truth be told, is the part I enjoyed the least…but it still delivers a first-rate finale because (and this is a big consideration) it doesn’t give the audience everything it wants. I’ll just leave it at that.

At the very least Mama is one hell of a calling card for first-time-director Muschietti as it feels like it was directed by a middle-aged pro. That’s a nod to Del Toro as he developed Mama, finessed it, worked on every aspect (it was shot in Toronto around the time of principal photography of Pacific Rim), “produced” and perhaps held Muschietti’s hand the way Howard Hawks held Christian Nyby‘s during the making of The Thing. Except Muschietti is no Nyby. He’s clearly “on the map” now, and will be around for a long time. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought up Nyby to begin with. It’s just that Mama feels so smooth and commanding and sure of itself.

There’s a classic bit in Mama that belongs in the annals of high horror. The film is worth seeing for this alone. It involves an older sister stealing her younger sister’s blanket, and then a static hallway shot showing the two of them wrestling for control of the blanket in their bedroom but with only the younger sister visible. And then we see something unexpected. I laughed out loud. I mostly hate the geek realm, but for that moment I was in geek fucking heaven.

Yesterday Thought Catalog‘s Brian Donovan posted an unusually perceptive, nicely phrased appreciation of Silver Linings Playbook, although it’s mainly a reiteration of what everyone (including Sasha Stone) has been saying from the get-go, which is that the film is almost entirely about Jennifer Lawrence‘s spunk.

Haters can say whatever they want but any hate-for-hate’s-sake Captain Ahab posts will be immediately killed…just saying. Here’s an excerpt:

“What makes it all work, what turns Silver Linings into the kind of movie you see once and immediately want to see again, is that despite being about sadness, the movie is never actually sad. Actually, it’s hilarious. It took me three viewings to figure out how they did it, and I think this is the secret: all the characters care. They’re passionate, mostly about achieving happiness, and so they try, despite every limitation and stroke of bad luck, to change. They usually fail, but they always try.

“So really, it’s not a film about mental illness, but a movie about people who want to get better. And who of us can not identify with that?

“You know that feeling when you’re standing at the bar, desperately wanting to talk to the guy or girl next to you, but are unable to force yourself to do it? Or staring at your gym clothes knowing that you’d ultimately be happier if you worked out, but your mind just won’t let it happen? That’s the world that this movie explores, in a simplistic sense. Obviously being bipolar is a lot more complicated and serious than being lazy, but for those who haven’t been around mental illness, that’s one way to understand it. No matter how badly you want your mind to cooperate, to do something that you know is for the best, sometimes it just won’t allow it.

“Every scene between Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence crackles with that conflict. They’re drawn to each other, it’s clear. They have too much in common, are too able to help each other not to fit, but Cooper just can’t let it be. You can see, over and over again, his mind standing in the way. Too obsessed with his pointless past to let a happy future in. The character’s motto is ‘Excelsior.’ Rise above. Improve. Excel. But he can’t ever pull it off. No matter how badly he wants to avoid a fight at a football game, he ends up with a fist in someone’s face. He clearly loves his Dad, but won’t let himself get close to him. And Lawrence, who’s so obviously his salvation, he dismisses as long as he possibly can.

“And when the movie takes off, the scene where it becomes irresistible, is when Lawrence says ‘Fuck this, I’m taking over, I’m fixing everything right now.’

“Without giving too much away, I’ll say this. There comes a moment two-thirds of the way through the film when all is lost. Cooper’s father, Robert DeNiro, is on the verge of a gambling catastrophe, Cooper seems to finally grasp that his marriage is over, and then Lawrence gives them all a way out. She has an argument with DeNiro’s character, and she owns it. An actor almost 50 years older than her, with two Oscars and a slew more nominations, who’s also, you know, Robert Fucking DeNiro, and I swear to God she acts him under the table.

“It’s amazing. She pulls the family (and the movie) together in two minutes, and sets us up for an outstanding third act. It’s like she’s speaking to all the craziness in the room, everyone’s collective insanity, and saying ‘No, we are all going to do better.’ And miraculously, somehow, they all do. It’s great writing, of course. But without out a dynamo like Lawrence you’d never buy it. I’m glad they got her, because it leads to a finale so good I can stop smiling just thinking about it.”

What is it about Chis Nolan‘s Batman movies that have (a) prompted me and everyone else to sing praises for all three, jumping up and down, and yet (b) have all dropped off the screen or failed to register when it comes to awards tallies?

I would have run the new trailer for Freddy Camalier‘s Muscle Shoals, the Sundance ’13 doc about the storied Alabama recording studio, but the embed code provided by Rolling Stone doesn’t offer pixel dimensions so it comes out all mesed up. [See idiot result after jump.] Sincerre thanks to the tech geniuses at Rolling Stone for their professional assistance.

Nagisa Oshima, the great Japanese purveyor-explorer of obsessive eroticism and dead serious ram-rutting, has died of pneumonia at age 80. His landmark film is/was In The Realm of the Senses (’76), which dove into the churning rapids of of fierce, desperate, no-holds-barred, lose-your-mind-and-irritate-the-neighbors sex and purer-than-pure, slit-my-throat love, was shot with unsimulated sex scenes, and was pretty much the erotic date movie of the ’70s, above Last Tango in Paris even.

And then there was Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (’83), a WWII prison-camp movie about a Japanese officer (Ryuichi Sakamoto) falling madly in love with Major Jack Celliers (David Bowie), a British POW. And Empire of Passion (’78), a kind of Realm of the Senses sequel (from a marketing standpoint, I mean) which I saw once. I recall it being a kind of Postman Always Rings Twice but with the ghost of the murdered husband messing things up for the lovers.

Oshima made 20 films from 1959 to ’70 — quite an output. Between ’70 and ’83 he made five. After Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence he made two — Max, Mon Amour and Taboo — and that was all she wrote. Respect the man. From the early ’70s to the early ’80s he held mountains in the palm of his hands.

Ned Zeman‘s Vanity Fair piece about the making of The Blues Brothers (“Soul Men“) reminds that there actually used to be a thing called a “cocaine movie” — a film that exuded a certain hyperness, a tone of manic extremity. Or a belief, at least, in the legend of same. But how many cocaine movies were there outside of The Blues Brothers and Martin Scorsese‘s New York, New York? I’m asking.

The best depiction of a manic cocaine state is in that running-around-with-bloodshot-eyes sequence in the third act of Goodfellas, but that was made straight.

“What was it about The Blues Brothers that obliterated and suffocated?,” I wrote last May. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe the fact that it was an unfunny, over-emphatic, overproduced super-whale that was made on cocaine (or so the legend went)?

“I asked Blues Brothers director John Landis about this wildly inflated, pushing-too-hard aspect when I interviewed him in ’82 for an American Werewolf in London piece. It was over breakfast at an Upper East Side hotel (Landis was hungrily wolfing down a plate of scrambled eggs and home fries). At one point I said that the ‘enormity’ of The Blues Brothers seemed ‘somewhat incongruous with the humble origins of the Chicago Blues.’

“That hit a nerve. ‘It wasn’t supposed to be a documentary about the humble origins of the Chicago Blues!’ Landis replied. But the essence of the Chicago blues wasn’t about flamboyant energy and huge lavish musical numbers and car chases and mad slapstick, I said. And your movie seemed to take that Paul Butterfield current and amplify it beyond all measure or reason.

“Okay, I didn’t literally say all this to Landis but that was the basic implication. (I wasn’t impolitic enough to call it ‘a cocaine movie’ but that’s what it damn sure felt like.) As Landis argued with me the Universal publicist sitting at the table started making ‘no, no’ faces, indicating I should tone it down.

“In any case I mostly hated The Blues Brothers from the get-go, and here it is 32 years later and I still hate it. And now Press Play‘s Aaron Aradillas has written an essay about it called “Cruel Summer.” — from “Chicago Blues + Nose Candy,” 5.14.12.