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My AT&T air card wifi keeps failing — connects weakly and then dies, connects weakly and then dies. And the wifi at the Park Regency is worthless. The guy at the desk says it can’t keep up with the increased demand from festivalgoers. The situation is so bad I wish I had an extra phone line so I could try dial-up. (Remember dial-up?) I’ve been trying to post a piece about Blue Valentine and two other films I saw yesterday. I guess I’ll hump it over to the Yarrow and work there. This is a kind of hell.

“I knew where the American people were on health care….they wanted somebody to get up and fight for it…I don’t believe in bipartisanship….after the way they ran the country down for the last eight years, what the hell do you want me to work with them on? I told Gibbs he was full of shit..and he gave me the Senator Leahy f-bomb…[I said] do you understand that you’re losing your base?”

MSNBC’s Ed Schultz tells it very well. If only someone like him would stand tall and strong within the Obama inner circle. “It’s my mission to tell it like it is…I’m only trying tio do the movement a favor…It’s money, it’s dirty, it’s wrong…it’s not us, it’s not the American people,…mistakes are made, but tomorrow’s another day…if we don’t have a course correction, who else is going to do it?…We’re with you, but you’ve gotta be with us.”

I got up around 7:30, wrote most of the morning and then saw two Sundance films this afternoon — Jay and Mark Duplass‘s Cyrus, an exceptionally well acted mother-son-boyfriend relationship dramedy, and Adam Green‘s Frozen, the Open Water-on-a-ski-lift movie in which the predators are frigid cold and wolves. I don’t know what’s wrong, but I can’t make myself write about them. The engine won’t turn over. Tomorrow morning, I suppose.

Tonight I’m seeing Derek Cianfrance‘s Blue Valentine and Dan Klores‘ Reggie Miller vs. the New York Knicks.

Vanity Fair.com’s Julian Sanction has assembled a list of indie-film tropes and the Sundance movies that employ them. Car crashes, dead children, prominent cigarette smoking, slovenly beards indicating despair, deadbeats, dead parents, dead pets, etc.

It’s awfully nice to be named as one of the top 50 movie blogs, except that 50 is an awfully large number. I’d rather be on a list of the top 20, say — that would matter a bit more.

Four days ago The Gothamist‘s John Del Signore posted an interview with A Serious Man costar Fred Melamed — i,.e., the bulky balding bearded guy who plays Sy Abelman. I adore Melamed’s performance in this film, but then I love every aspect of this under-loved Coen brothers’ masterpiece.

“It’s funny, people always talk about the ending,” Malamed says. “They say they’re unsatisfied by the ending, they didn’t like it — friends of mine, people I respect. To me, the ending of the movie sends you back into the movie. The endings of some movies ease you out of the movie and back to your normal life. You say, ‘That was an interesting movie, now I’m going to have my dinner or whatever.’ But somehow this movie stays in some part of your brain, at least it did for me, and you really wind up thinking about it a lot.”

In his 1.25 Movieline review of Michael Winterbottom‘s The Killer Inside Me, Seth Abramovitch describes the brutal scene in which Jessica Alba is beaten to a pulp by Casey Affleck‘s Lou.

“After making love [to Alba] and discussing their plans to reconvene a few weeks down the line, Lou pulls on a pair of black gloves, then begins to punch Alba in the face, at full force, repeatedly. The camera does not turn away, and as he takes a good dozen shots at her head, her features begin to distort at each impact with his closed fist. As she lies on the floor, unconscious, unrecognizable and barely breathing, he asks if she can hear him. He tells her he loves her, and that’s he’s sorry. He then [delivers] several more punches.”

The backers of this film are anticipating that Joe Popcorn will want to pay to see this? The deal as I understand it is that if Eli Roth is directing it’s totally deplorable torture porn, but if Michael Winterbottom is directing it’s a Sundance entry and a film that upscale cineastes might want to see.

Remember Cary Grant‘s irritation in Bringing Up Baby when Katharine Hepburn told her mother that his name is “Mr. Bone”? In that light, Winter’s Bone, Debra Granik‘s dramatic competition entry, is arguably the strangest-sounding and most unintriguing title among all the films showing at Sundance 2010. (The other contender for this prize is Restrepo, Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington‘s doc about an Iraq War veteran.)

But MSN’s James Rocchi assures that Granik’s film ranks very high on his list and that I should make every effort. My next and only remaining shot at seeing it will be at the Racquet Club on Tuesday at 8:30 am. Granik’s last film was the memorable Down to the Bone (which included a break-out performance by Vera Farmiga), so she obviously has a thing about that word.

In the wake of last night’s surprise Hurt Locker win at the Producer’s Guild awards, The Wrap‘s Steve Pond has written that he “can easily see a scenario in which Avatar will lose the Best Picture Oscar, probably to The Hurt Locker.” And The Winner Is columnist Scott Feinberg has also assessed the meaning of Sunday’s apparent game-changer.

Aaron Johnson gave a decent performance as John Lennon in Nowhere Boy, but my dislike of that film instilled a collateral animus toward the guy. Perhaps I can get past this with the help of Matthew Vaughn‘s Kick-Ass (Lionsgate, 4.16).

I’ve always felt that the late Jean Simmons peaked with her luminous performances as Julie Maragon in The Big Country (’58), Sister Sharon Falconer in Elmer Gantry (’60) and Varinia in Spartacus (ditto). To some her British accent suggested a prudish nature, but her scenes with Kirk Douglas in Spartacus had a potent erotic current.

Simmons was married to Stewart Granger and director Richard Brooks. She was treated for an alcohol problem in the ’80s, and she apparently smoked for several years. She died on 1.22 at age 80 — she was born on 1.29.29 — from lung cancer. Classy lady, beautiful eyes.