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I’ve never gone to South by Southwest because it always seemed too pain-in-the-assy in various ways. My far-off impression has always been that it’s a slightly hipper and more discriminating cousin of ComicCon, which is to say slightly more tolerable than that San Diego gathering but more fanboyish that I would normally find comfortable. But now that Summit’s release date for Jodie Foster and Mel Gibson‘s The Beaver has been bumped back to May 6th, I feel that I need to attend SXSW in order to catch it on March 16th in Austin.

Yes, I’ve decided to spend at least $600 or $700 bills that I could otherwise keep in my savings account so I can (a) see The Beaver a few weeks earlier and (b) see how it plays with the under-35 Austin beer-and-taco crowd.

Yes, I can also catch up with (a) the super-special Ain’t It Cool News 15th Anniversary screening of whatever, (b) Takashi Mike‘s 13 Assassins (which I couldn’t be bothered to see in Cannes last May because I despise fetishistic Asian chopsocky, (c) Rodman Flender‘s Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop, (d) Greg Mottola‘s Paul (which I’m probably going to hate), (e) Duncan Jones‘ Source Code (which is probably going to make me sigh and groan a lot), and (f) James Gunn‘s SUPER (which I’m probably going to hate). Plus it’ll probably be fun socially. And I can wear my cowboy hat again.

Nearly a month ago I mentioned an inability to play my Broadcast News Bluray because of a Bluray firmware update I need to install. Right after that I asked Sony to send me a firmware software disc, and they said they’d do so right away but it didn’t arrive until after I left for Sundance/Santa Barbara. So I installed it last night (easy, no big deal) and now I can watch my Broadcast News plus two other Blurays that wouldn’t play due to lack of proper firmware.

The downside is that right now it doesn’t feel as vital and exciting to savor Broadcast News as it did, say, three or four weeks ago. It’s an excellent film and I’m glad I own it, but the fresh-Bluray-coolness moment has passed. Now the cool Bluray to have and to watch is Sweet Smell of Success, which Criterion will street on 2.22.

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, Boxoffice.com‘s Phil Contrino and I discussed the state of things this morning — the post-depression, no-more-bargaining, post-anger “acceptance” of the forthcoming Oscar wins by The King’s Speech (“a very good B-plus movie”), a little Cedar Rapids riffing, choosing the likely Oscar winners on a category-by-category basis, how The Social Network is a kind of comfort-blanket film, etc. The iTunes link is above; here’s a non-iTunes link.

After recording Oscar Poker #20 this morning with Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and boxoffice.com’s Phil Contrino, I ran up to the Hotel Andaz (Fifth Avenue and 41st Street) for a Cedar Rapids press conference with star-producer Ed Helms, director Miguel Arteta, and costars Anne Heche and Isiah Whitlock, Jr.

The Cedar Rapids gang at this afternoon’s press conference (l to. r.): Anne Heche, Ed Helms, Isiah Whitlock, Jr. and director Miguel Arteta.

I asked two questions: (1) Did Helms or Arteta or screenwriter Phil Johnston ever literally say to themselves “let’s try to go in a Billy Wilder and/or Preston Sturges direction here” (which I feel they absolutely did, given the proof on the screen) or are just guys like myself bringing up this analogy? And (2) are they in any way concerned that the Sundance stamp on the film’s one-sheet might persuade Eloi popcorn types that Cedar Rapids isn’t low and common enough in a Hangover sense — i.e., that it might be too hip for the room in an indie-movie sense?

In the view of some I spoke to during Sundance Cedar Rapids isn’t indie-dweebie enough — it’s a very mainstreamy-type comedy — but some people, I’m guessing, are spooked by the name “Sundance.”

41st Street exterior of the Andaz hotel.

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]?”