Yesterday morning at 8 am, fresh off the L train from JFK, I walked into El Brilliante cafe for some breakfast. The food is decent but they’re always playing Latin music — loud, throbby, bassy — at unacceptably loud levels. Who enjoys getting their ears pinned back by barrio music during breakfast? An eggs-and-bacon experience should never be accompanied by anything more than mild chit-chat, soft talk-radio and the rustle of newspapers.

Two weeks after the end of Sundance 2011, NYC-winter-blizzard short-film guy Jamie Stuart emerges with a definitive fragment montage.

According to a 2.14 New Yorker profile called “The Apostate,” director Paul Haggis got a surprise when he forwarded his August 2009 Scientology resignation letter to “more than twenty” Scientologist friends, including Anne Archer, John Travolta and Sky Dayton, the founder of EarthLink. “I felt if I sent it to my friends they’d be as horrified as I was, and they’d ask questions as well,” Haggis says. “That turned out to be largely not the case. They were horrified that I’d send a letter like that.”

We’re all got lively opinions about Kevin Smith these days, particularly over the last year between his anti-Southwest Airlines rant, his decision to go more or less anti-press in the wake of Cop Out, and last month’s Red State auction-that-wasn’t-an-auction at Sundance.

Smith really hasn’t subjected himself to a longish on-camera interview in quite some time, and that, I’m told, is what Horowitz will be doing with him tomorrow. We’re talking about an hour-long streaming interview on MTV.com from 3 to 4 pm. Horowitz is asking for questions to be tweeted to him with the hashtag #askkevin. (Meaning that anyone who wants to ask a question should tweet it with “#askkevin” in the message. That allows MTV staffers to find it more readily. Questions can be tweeted anytime — now, during the show, whenever.)

Miguel Arteta‘s Cedar Rapids (Fox Searchlight, 2.11) is the year’s first above-average, highly engaging, studio-generated comedy. Armed with a funny-clumsy Ed Helms performance and a rollicking one from John C. Reilly, Cedar Rapids is about facing reality and choosing your friends in an ethically clouded world. It’s partly warm and reflective realism, and partly intelligent ape humor.

I’m serious about Reilly’s howlingly funny performance. I wrote last month that “it’s good and triumphant enough to be called the first Best Supporting Actor-level turn for 2011. The man is a genius at this sort of thing. The second he arrives on-screen you’re going ‘uh-oh, here we go.'”

My other Sundance verdict was that Cedar Rapids could have been even more if the third-act was more successful, but that, to me, was only a mild regret because at least it’s operating in the ethical comedy realm that Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges used to excel at.

Marshall Fine has called it “the first worthwhile comedy of 2011 – funny, dirty and full of heart. How can you beat that combination?

“Despite some of the raunchiest dialogue in recent memory, there’s an undeniable sweetness to Cedar Rapids that makes it hard to resist. The fact that it is consistently, inventively funny doesn’t hurt.

“Much of that sweetness – and yes, even innocence – can be credited to Helms’ performance as Tim Lippe, an innocent abroad, or as far abroad as Cedar Rapids is from his hometown of Brown Valley, Wisconsin. Helms is the new master of playing naive guys who aren’t as dumb as they look but also aren’t as smart as they think. He stole The Hangover from Zach Galifianakis and regularly finds comic gold in episodes of The Office.

“He’s not exactly Candide, but there’s a sheltered, optimistic quality to Helms’ [character] that goes beyond the writing to become something identifiable and worthy, as well as quite amusing.”

“The younger generation is just basically film-ignorant. Not just about Bergman, but Antonioni, Truffaut, Kurosawa, Bunuel. Film is not part of their general literacy. They don’t know The Bicycle Thief; they don’t know Grand Illusion. And many, many of them don’t know Citizen Kane. If they do know it, they know it as something they happened to see on television. They don’t have the same general reverence — which I’m not criticizing them for — there’s no reason why they would or should. It’s just a different time. Their icons and heroes lie in a different area.” — Woody Allen speaking to The Hollywood Reporter‘s Gregg Kilday in a 2.4.11 interview about a forthcoming Ingmar Bergman retrospective at the Berlin Film Festival.

“Readers…will notice the conspicuous absence from The Film Snob*s Dictionary, apart from passing references, of such titans of foreign cinema as Federico Fellini (8 1/2), Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal), Akira Kurosawa (The Seven Samurai), and Satyajit Ray (the Apu trilogy). The Film Snob may indeed know a fair amount about these filmmakers, but he generally scoffs at them, deeming them to be mere name-drops for bourgeois losers wishing to seem cultured. Watching a Bergman film is so PBS tote-bag, so Mom-and-Dad-on-a-date-in-college, so baguettes-and-Chardonnay.” — from intro to David Kamp and Lawrence Levi‘s The Film Snob Dictionary (2006).

Only $29 (marked down from $34) with a pledge to ship within 2 to 3 days. This and more at the online NBC Universal store.

I’ve never been able to work myself up over media-ownership-changing-hands stories. The sale of the Huffington Post to AOL for $315 million (about $300 million in cash) is great news for founder Arianna Huffington and partner Ken Lerner, who started the news reporting-and-analysis site in ’05. A huge profit for them and a major content acquisition for AOL CEO Tim Armstrong — terrific. I’m not sure what there is to say beyond what I already have.

MSN’s James Rocchi has tweeted that the purchase is ‘idiotic and shameful” and that Huffington is “a horrible, no-talent sharecropper who’s built a shabby empire out of ego.” MCN’ David Poland has tweeted that “news organizations of size cannot be supported wholly by web advertising. Why do so many want to believe the fantasy [that they can]?”

J. J. Abrams‘ Super 8 Super Bowl trailer.

“After being deemed unfit for military service, Steve Rogers — a skinny dweeb — volunteers for a top secret research project that turns him into Captain America, a superhero dedicated to defending America’s ideals.” Same old superhero crap trotted out for the 49th time.

29 months ago I explained a common reason why certain films are nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. It’s “because of the resonance and universality of their themes. And the themes that always seem to register more than others are contained in personal journey movies about growth, redemption and transformation.” Or because they make the old 3D formula — desire, deception, discovery — seem true and real in a newish way.

What, then, are this year’s Best Picture Oscar contenders saying in a thematic, this-is-our-life-and-this-is-who-we-are sort of way? Here, right or wrong, are my summaries:

127 Hours is basically saying that no man is an island, that arrogance always leads to a fall, but if you meet a traumatic threat head-on and somehow survive you’ll be much stronger for it, and that you’ll feel a wonderful tidal surge of “isn’t life grand?” when you realize you’ve escaped death. Basic slogan: Anyone who thinks he/she is Superman will find out sooner or later that he/she is not.

Black Swan is saying that being wound too tight and overly competitive and agitated about your creative competitors…actually, it’s not saying that. It’s saying that if a director keeps things close and real and Roman Polanski-like and tones down the CG and cranks up the Tchaikovsky and lays on the lezzy sex, he’ll have a hell of a good film on his hands. Basic slogan: It’s hard to go wrong with Darren Aronfosky at the helm.

The Fighter is saying that family is not always the end-all and be-all. It says that almost every family has a damaging parent. It also has a brother or sister who are hugely delusional and/or damaged and draining the spirit of those family members who are trying to live focused, balanced and productive lives. And yet at the end of the day, family members do watch out for each other. Basic slogan: Life is rough and hard and messy, so you need people you can trust.

Inception is saying that Christopher Nolan has a wow-level imagination and the support of a corporate-connected studio to make those imaginings come true. Basic slogan: The real drama in anyone’s life is buried in their subconscious.

The Kids Are All Right is saying that lesbians are just like anyone else, and that marriage can be a bitch and a marathon and is no piece of cake. Basic slogan: We’re all regular folks under the skin.

The King’s Speech is saying that degrees and pedigrees don’t matter all that much, and that bright, resourceful Average Joes sometimes know a thing or two that can really help high-born fellows who have everything. Basic slogan: Smarts, perception and wisdom sometimes come in unlikely packages.

The Social Network is saying that nobody nices their way into the big-time, that gold does things to men’s souls, and that (a) genius and (b) loyalty, friendship and decency are two different games that don’t necessarily overlap. People with big brains live in their own realm and are sometimes less trustworthy than people with medium or smaller-sized brains. Such is the way of exceptionalism. Basic slogan: Watch your back, jack.

Toy Story 3 is saying that it’s hard when your usefulness has run its course, and thank God for about-to-be-college students who remember what it was like to be a kid. Basic slogan: Cherish and hold onto the heart and the imagination that you knew in your childhood.

True Grit is saying that being tough and smart and feisty doesn’t mean you wont lose your arm or wind up living a life without a lover or a husband, but if you get bitten by a snake it’s good to have a pot-bellied old dog like Ruben Cogburn looking out for you. Basic slogan: the Coen brothers are the best — they always know what they’re doing.

Alfred Hitchcock‘s Foreign Correspondent (1940) was one of 1940’s ten Best Picture nominees. Hitchcock’s Rebecca won the Oscar, John Ford‘s The Grapes of Wrath should have won, but in my book Correspondent is almost equal to Wrath. And it’s much better than All This, and Heaven Too, The Great Dictator, Kitty Foyle, The Letter, The Long Voyage Home, Our Town and The Philadelphia Story.

The plane-crash sequence shows that you don’t need state-of-the-art visual effects, much less 21st Century CGI, to make an action sequence work. It’s all about what to show, and when and how to show it