Critic John Anderson has passed along high praise for Lee Daniels‘ Push, which press-screened two or three hours ago. I don’t particularly trust Daniels’ instincts as a filmmaker, but I do trust Anderson’s taste. The next showing is at the Eccles on Tuesday afternoon.

Antoine Fuqua‘s Brooklyn’s Finest, seen this morning, did not light my fire. I can’t imagine any prospective buyer or viewer feeling any genuine enthusiasm for it. It’s a right-down-the-middle, seen-it-sixteen-or-seventeen-times-before urban crime movie — bitter cops, angry cops, street homies, drugs, shootings, desperados, etc.

Lack of subtlety was an issue early on. Two guys sitting in a car late at night, dark street, shooting the shit…and I just knew one of them was going to shoot the other. Not a doubt in my mind. Bam…it happened four minutes later. And I groaned so loudly when it did that a person right in front of me turned around and gave me a dirty look. Right after that he see an older cop (Richard Gere) wakes up from a bad dream, taking a sip of whiskey, putting a pistol in his mouth and pulling the trigger…click. That’s Fuqua’s way of telling us he’s in a bad way.

I wrote the movie off at that click moment. I stayed, however, well beyond that. I’m starting to get the idea that if Richard Gere’s starring in a film, it may well have problems.

Why are people raving about this surveillance-camera footage of the Hudson river splashdown? It comes at the two-minute mark, and it looks like a hand-thrown stone skimming across a lake. Way underwhelming.

A friend insists that Doug Pray‘s Art & Copy, a doc about “advertising’s profound effect on modern culture” and “about the most influential creative forces tapping the zeitgeist of our time,” is brilliant and a must-see. A Variety marketing exec is calling it “one of the greatest things she’s seen in ages,” he says. I’ll be seeing it at tonight’s 8:45 pm press screening.

The synopsis makes it sound like a companion piece to Adam Curtis‘s The Century of the Self, the story of how ads went from selling stuff they people need to stuff they desire. The film quotes Paul Mazer, a Wall Street banker working for Lehman Brothers in the 1930s, as urging an effort to “shift America from a needs to a desires culture…people must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. […] Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”

http://festival.sundance.org/2009/film_events/films/art_copy

“Have you noticed that war is the only chance that a man gets to do something redeeming?,” playwright/screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky wrote some 45 years ago. “That’s why war is so attractive. Brave men die in battle, but in peacetime they’re just normal cowards. Frightened of their wives, trembling before their bosses, terrified at the passing of the years. But war makes them gallant. It makes them self-sacrificing and generous instead of greedy and selfish. War isn’t hell at all. It’s man at his best. The highest morality that he’s capable of ”

These words were spoken as part of a long and windy tea-time speech that James Garner gave in Chayefsky’s The Americanization of Emily (’64) , and wow, did they all came rushing back to me yesterday afternoon as I watched Ross Katz‘s Taking Chance! This is a movie that left a very conflicted taste of my mouth.

It’s a sad, subdued, meditative drama about a middle-aged Marine officer (Kevin Bacon) escorting the body of a young Marine killed in Iraq to his family’s home in Wyoming for burial. It uses emotional and aesthetic restraint to make its points. Katz is no charlatan– he has good chops. But in terms of giving voice to red-state sentiments about the valor of war — and by extension the nobility of the Iraq War effort — Taking Chance shows almost no restraint at all.

I admired it for the respect and sadness it shows for our fallen dead — don’t get me wrong. But at the same time it’s a faintly dishonorable film. Yes, that’s what I said — dishonorable.

Taking Chance moves you with understated eloquence about the profound and lasting sadness of a young man dying in a war (any war) with so many decades of potentially rich life taken from the soldier and his loved ones and his unborn children. But the movie does something else. It sells the honor and glory of combat death in a “sensitive” way that is not only cloying but borders on the hucksterish. Which I feel is a kind of obscenity.

One result of this sell job is that it lends an aura of dignity and nobility to a conflict that was launched upon lies and neocon arrogance and idiocy, and that war simply doesn’t deserve the respectful salute that Taking Chance obliquely extends.

I’m not objecting to this film offering a modest and moving tribute to our fallen dead. I was in fact moved by this. But Ross Katz knows full well that Bush, Cheney, Rummy and Wolfowitz will cream in their pants when they see this thing. Is he proud of this? Because I think Taking Chance is catering, in a roundabout way, to not just the red-state sentiments that have prolonged the Iraq War (and which certainly prolonged the Vietnam War) but the kneejerk neocon thinking that has also kept us in that terrible situation.

The fundamental objection I have to Katz and the film is the underlying spin behind the general honoring of brave young men suffering ghastly death and mutilation under the wind-whipped stars and stripes. Garner’s Emily speech talks about the obscenity of selling the valor of war death — the tributes, statues and Memorial Day parades that praise and worship the act of being killed in combat — because it perpetrates the carnage through decades and generations and centuries.

“We shall never end wars,” Garner says, “as long as we make heroes of our dead and shrines of our battlefields. The fact is that we perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifice. It may be ministers and generals and politicians who blunder us into war, but the least the rest of us can do is to resist honoring the institution.”

The wi-fi situation is getting so bad that I’m thinking…well, not about packing it in, but if you can’t post stuff without going through all kinds of trial and error, desperate contortions and calling AT&T tech support every other time, who needs it? It’s awful.

Damn the AT&T people to hell for taking my AT&T air card money every month and then failing to create and maintain a system that works in extremely high-stress areas like Park City — i.e., tens of thousands of users crammed into a relatively small area and using the “air” 24/7. Thanks to the festival for providing free wifi at the Park City Marriott, but the gesture is kind of defeated when the wifi isn’t strong enough to handle the demand.

Even the AT&T internet service has been crapping out on iPhones — you’ll see the bars but can’t get mail or web pages. It’s infuriating. I can’t keep up my usual level of HE posting with the above-described deficiencies fighting me tooth and nail every time I log on.

Update: I had to visit a Staples store this morning in Kimball Junction (i.e., north of Park City about 8 or 10 miles), and am now sitting at a nearby McDonalds — and the wifi is great here. All hail the Golden Arches guys and the life-shortening food they sell.

I lasted ten minutes with Lymelife earlier this afternoon. I was talking to MCN’s Kim Voynar about her damaged left foot, the lights came down, the movie played a bit and I was starting to think about escaping less than five minutes later. I knew I had to five minutes after that. I know from ten-minute bailouts. I don’t make a habit of them — maybe five or six times in my life — but I now if films aren’t going to work for me very quickly.

We all know what it’s like to feel intrigued and curious and be unsure what a film is doing or where it’s going during the first 10 or 20 minutes. This wasn’t like that. The energy was wrong, the vibe was off, the fatigue factor had manifested within minutes and it just wasn’t happening.

This was “I’m not going to sit through a leafy suburban movie with Keiran Culkin playing Alec Baldwin‘s son.” This was “I’m not going to watch the weathered-looking, saggy-faced Timothy Hutton — it takes decades of partying to get a face like his — play an emotionally repressed weirdo for the next 90 plus minutes.” This was the “oh, no, I’ve been here before, I know what’s going to happen” indie Sundance blahs/blues.

I might get stuck with it on a plane some day and watch it all through. But maybe not. I just know/knew I couldn’t sit there and get into a movie starring Keiran Culkin, especially one with him wearing a truly dorky looking light-blue mixed with dark-blue winter jacket.

“I didn’t see you at the [today’s] Moon screening,” a distribution guy wrote me just now. “If you weren’t, you missed the first breakout hit of the festival.

“It’s a sensational piece of indie sci-fi with cult potential. Brilliantly conceived. A superb performance by Sam Rockwell — award-worthy in fact.

“The only problem is that there’s a big twist about 45 minutes in that would be criminal to reveal. I hope respectful critics like yourself won’t spoil it! Definitely one to make sure you see.

“I believe Sony Classics has the rights for the US, England and Australia, although I don’t know if

that’s public knowledge yet. If it isn’t you didn’t get it from me.”

It can very get awfully tiring…depressing, really, to watch groups of credentialed, shaggy-haired, snow-booted Sundance journalists and filmmakers who are sitting near you in the lounge smiling and gleefully laughing with each other, one joke after another, chit-chat, chuckle-chuck, hah-hah, grins and mirth…no end to it, constantly, hour after hour. It’s cool for the first hour or so, but after the two-hour mark I could just scream.

A little part of me — okay, one that I don’t admire and probably shouldn’t acknowledge — wants to go up to one of these groups, bend over and say in a very quiet voice, “I’m sorry, guys, it’s obviously none of my business…but did you know that the stuff you say in conversation doesn’t always have to be funny? I mean, you don’t have to laugh uproariously all the time? You can just sit there and chill down and be heavy-cat Zen types. You could even be silent for a bit and read about the jet that splashed into the Hudson yesterday. Oh, I’m sorry — not funny enough, right?

“I’m mentioning this, no offense, because your constant smiling and chuckling and laughing are driving me up the wall.”

I moved this morning from the shitty condo with the cold-air seeping through the living room window and no wifi and the total-agony mattress from Jakarta to a really sublime two-floor condo on Upper Norfolk (i.e., about 150 feet above Main Street) with great wifi, a comfy bed, a flat-screen TV, a nice kitchen, two full bathrooms, and a snow-covered outdoor porch with a great view.

Twi-story condo on Upper Norfolk — Friday, 1.16, 10:25 am.

After moving my stuff to the new pad I took a cheap cab (only $5 bills — driver gave me a break) to the Yarrow hotel — the only place in town with decent free wifi — for a little work, and then walked across the frigid, snow-blown parking lo to the Holiday Cinemas to line up for the press screening of John Dower‘s Thriller in Manilla, a very decent doc about the long rivalry and bitter feud between Muhammud Ali and Joe Frazier that climaxed in their legendary1975 heavyweight championship bout in the Philiopines. (More on this later.)

But all this morning and some of the afternoon have been taken up by AT&T wi-fi air card issues. I had to download a new AT&T Communication Manager and load new drivers, etc. Then I had to call the AT& T tech guys again when something called “error 680” came up. Then I went over to the Park City Marriott to do some more writing only to discover that the free wi-fi is overloaded by too many people trying to use, the result being that the service stops after 10 minutes of use (or less). And the AT&T air card still isn’t working. It’s been hell, nothing but hell.