Here’s an audio clip of Sundance movie star Al Gore ripping into George Bush on Martin Luther King day over constitutional abuses.

Three Brokeback Mountain items: (a) despite George Bush‘s recent assertion that he hasn’t seen Ang Lee’s film, producer James Schamus said recently that the White House has requested a print and that one was sent over; (b) a guy named Pepe Ruiloba has written and told me after seeing Brokeback Mountain [he] was surprised to discover that the male prostitute that Jack Twist picks up across the boarder is none other than the film’s Mexican cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, and yet the IMDB doesn’t list Prieto…who knows the truth of this?, and (c) a recent new story said that Brokeback Mountain will be banned from theatres in China in Mongolia.

Steven Soderbergh‘s Che recently filmed some exterior scenes on Mahattan’s Uper East Side, with Benicio del Toro playing the title role. Here’s a photo supplied by Latino Review. I’m assuming this photo is genuine, but you never know.

It’s worth saying again: Lajos Koltai’s Fateless is the first near-great film of 2006. The exquisite widescreen framing, desaturated color and exquisite editing make it, to my eyes, the most visually immaculate Holocaust death-camp drama ever made (am I saying this right?) as well as one of the most realistic seeming and subtly-rendered in terms of story. Based on Imre Kertesz’s mostly true-life account, it’s about a young Jewish boy from Budapest who ends up in a concentration camp during World War II and just barely survives. It lacks the story tension and rooting factor of Polanski’s The Pianist, but situations of hunger, despair and the ashy aura of near-death have never been rendered with such remarkable pictorial finesse. Here’s a phone interview I did with Koltai a week and a half ago.

An excellent Tony Scott-authored New York Times piece about Sundance ’06…observing the usual razzmatazz, nostalgia pangs, contradictions, side amusements, etc.

Here’s an okay Al Gore/Inconvenient Truth piece by the Washington Post‘s William Booth.

“I have seen one of the wisest films I can remember about love and human intimacy,” Roger Ebert wrote a couple of days ago about Jeff Lipsky’s Flannel Pajamas…which I just saw this afternoon. “It is a film of integrity and truth, acted fearlessly, written and directed with quiet, implacable skill. [And] I will not forget it.” Nor will I. Pajamas is a very smart and probing film about an adult relationship that eventually goes bad. But after a while (after about 90 minutes, give or take) I started to really, really hate it, and I finally couldn’t stand another minute and left. What I really mean is, I couldn’t tolerate the character played by Julianne Nicholson, who plays one of the draggiest pain-in-the-ass bad girlfriend/death-wife characters ever created for the screen. She is the sort of woman-with-very-bad- baggage who frowns like it’s going out of style and always has a bug up her ass about something and has no sense of humor and has a very cold mother and who brings everything and everyone down with her pissy moods. Nicholson is so convincing that I don’t want to ever see her again. Seriously — if she is in a film I will think seriously about not going to it. I don’t mean to say I didn’t respect Flannel Pajamas. It’s up to something real and different and chilly and complex, but I had to leave and I’m glad I did. Justin Kirk‘s lead character is no day at the beach either. She wants a dog and he says no? What’s his problem? Ebert said in the same piece that the film “is so truthful and observant, so subtle and knowing about human nature, that it may be too much for most audiences. Moviegoers demand a little something in the way of formula, if only for reassurance, or as a road sign.” No — the problem is that the two main characters become more and more of a migraine headache, and it finally gets so bad you want Nicholson to get killed in a car crash so the film can take a different turn.

Goran Dukic’s Wristcutters: A Love Story is playing noon on Friday (1.27) at the Eccles, so now I don’t have an excuse to miss it. That’s too bad. I don’t want to see any movie of any kind about post-mortal purgatory, or about anyone cutting their wrists… fuck that shit and send it to hell. And the lead guy Patrick Fugit (who was completely perfect in Almost Famous) has been rubbing me the wrong way in his last couple of films. Everyone’s been telling me to see it though, so I guess I’m stuck. “I’m saying that Wristcutters is the best film in the festival…it is a very specialized play,” David Poland wrote sometime last night. “It is not quite as weird as Napoleon Dynamite [and] it’s a little like last year’s Everything Is Illuminated, though it promises less and delivers more.” Again I’m telling myself, “Always be wary when Poland likes something.” But this line got me: “Dukic doesn’t put a spotlight on his most interesting choices. He allows the audience to find them all for themselves. And that is how you end up with a true cult film. It leaves a funny sensation. I can feel in the pit of my stomach how strong it will play with young audiences, in great part because it doesn’t have the easy marketing hooks that some of the other films have had. It respects its audience, even as it pushes the envelope.” Fuck me…I’ll be there tomorrow.

This just happened, just now…right across from me. A guy sitting on the couch in the lobby of the Yarrow hotel said to a critic friend who just wandered over: “Hey, how was I for India?” The critic answered, “B for boring.” Bad news for the filmmaker, right? Maybe, but you need to take into account a certain tendency that critics and journalists have when speaking to each other in groups, which is to always be clever.

I sat right outside the Yarrow press screening room when Right At Your Door was being shown late Wednesday afternoon…obviously wanting to see it but also needing to freshen the column material and put up new photos. Duty prevailed. Door, a futuristic thriller about terrorist destruction hitting Los Angeles, has been acquired by Lionsgate, and at least six others have been bought also. Little Miss Sunshine has been acquired by Fox Searchlight, Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep by Warner Independent, The Night Listener by Miramax (I haven’t seen a less commercial- seeming film at this festival), Wordplay by IFC Films, Factotum by Picturehouse…no, Picturehouse’s deal fell through and then IFC picked it up…and Momentum Pictures has acquired Jody Hill’s The Foot Fist Way, which I declined to see a day or two ago because I won’t do f***ing midnight screenings that keep me up until 2:30 or 3 am.

A dead-certain acquisition to come: the quietly moving and intriguingly measured Stephanie Daley, which I saw early Wednesday afternoon at the Eccles. My hat is sincerely tipped to director Hilary Brougher, and especially for eliciting such superb performances from Tilda Swinton and especially Amber Tamblyn, who is now on the Big Map because of this film. (It’s too bad after giving such a finely textured dig-deep performance in Daley that she’s agreed to star in the lowballing Grudge 2). Other Sundance pickups in the wings include Bobcat Goldwaithe’s Stay (which is nominally about the ramifications of a woman having given a blowjob to a dog), Slamdance’s Sasquatch Dumpling Gang (which I had a chance to see yesterday at 3 pm but Sundance is all about tough choices and I had to make one), Half Nelson (some- thing’s approaching in the distance…it’s…oh, God!…it’s the immaculate sensitivity and tasteful inclinations of Ryan Gosling!), and the widely admired Wristcutters: A Love Story.

The lawyers representing Kirby Dick and This Film Is Not Yet Rated have been making a curious call since the film first press-screened two days ago (i.e., Tuesday). As noted in Wednesday’s article about the film, it reveals the names and backgrounds of the MPAA’s previously anonymous film raters and appeals board members. But the lawyers and the good publicists at Falco Ink, obviously conerned about a possible MPAA blowback, are declining to provide these names for print purposes. The press notes, which they wrote three or four weeks ago, don’t provide the names, and an informal attempt to get this information sent to me hasn’t panned out. It’s not that big a deal and not the end of the world, but it seems fair to ask that the names be provided by the film’s reps to anyone interested in exploring the issues raised in the film from another angle. The cat’s out of the bag, right? I tried scribbling down the names at the Eccles theatre Wednesday night as they flashed on the screen, but it was too dark and I could barely see the note pad.