Tribute documentaries about famous folk tend to be fairly similar, especially if the subjects are still living. They mainly say that the celebrity is a pretty darn wonderful person — modest but brilliant, witty, accomplished as all get out, fascinating, rich, extremely compassionate, loves his/her life, good with kids, pets dogs. Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing‘s Norman Lear: Just Another Version Of You, which will air as a PBS American Masters special later this year, pretty much sticks to this formula.

I could call it a cut or two above the usual, certainly from a technical standpoint, but Lear, the 93 year-old creator-writer-producer of such legendary ’70s TV series All In the Family, Maude, Sanford and Son, One Day at a Time and The Jeffersons, is never presented as anything but the most happy and wonderful fella. Which he may well be for the most part, but c’mon — everyone has known hurt, failure, shame, regrets. Everyone has aspects of their nature they wish they could iron out or refine. Everyone experiences nightmare flashes from time to time. Including the very wealthiest.

The doc gets into Lear’s feelings about his father but not all that deeply. Grady and Ewing never elicit a single semi-critical remark about Lear from the famous talking heads (Rob Reiner, George Clooney, et, al.). It was obvious during the post-screening q & a that Lear can be a snappy dictatorial type who knows how to crack a whip, but there wasn’t a hint of this in the doc.

I was bothered by several omissions that I learned about later when I visited Lear’s Wikipedia page.

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Chris Kelly‘s Other People, the first narrative drama screened at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, struck me as deftly written and persuasively well-acted but fraught with self-pity and a little too glum. Wading through and meditating upon cancer death will have that affect. But it’s delicate and restrained and absorbing as far as it goes. And occasionally amusing. But…I don’t know what else to say. I felt a certain respect more than affection.

Jesse Plemons, Molly Shannon in Chris Kelly’s Other People.

Some in the Eccles audience were reportedly choking up; not this horse. After the show I spoke to two or three guys (i.e., writers) who were partly critical; one was outright dismissive. I later saw on Twitter that others (but not all) were putting it down.

Relatively few will pay to see this in theatres but it’s really not half bad, especially in terms of the acting. I never pulled back or disconnected; I always felt engaged. There’s already a consensus that Molly Shannon, who plays a spirited suburban mom dying of leiomyosarcoma, will be Best Actress-nominated for a Spirit or a Gotham Award. And that the low-key, somewhat pudgy, ginger-haired Jesse Plemons scores also as her son, a gay showbiz writer grappling with more than just the immediate tragedy at hand.

Kelly’s loosely autobiographical film is about Plemons, a 29 year-old showbiz writer who returns home to drab Sacramento to hang with his cancer-stricken mom (Shannon) as she withers away under the care of Plemons’ under-written homophobic dad (Bradley Whitford) while his two younger sisters (Maude Apatow, Madisen Beaty) watch and fret.

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The insular Sundance grind distracts from the day-to-day so you miss stuff that everyone else absorbed hours ago, but this an expertly conceived and assembled political ad. There’s a certain poignancy in the fact that Bernie Sanders and Paul Simon are the same age.

The wifi is mostly awful at the Park Regency. Okay, sometimes it’s tolerable but mostly the signal is so weak you have to work in the main lobby, and even from the lobby it stinks. (It crapped out twice when I was filing there yesterday morning.) But the password-free wifi inside the nearby Park City Marriott (a two-minute walk from the Regency) is totally fine so the hell with it — here’s where I work from here on. Warm and friendly with a bus stop right outside the hotel. The only bothersome aspect is the occasional yappity-yap-yapping of the hotel guests and visitors. You’d think they’d want to dial it down like, you know, the members of an old world’s gentleman’s club in London. Note: Video captured today (Friday, 1.22) at 6:25 am.

A N.Y. Daily News story by Joe Dziemianowicz and Don Kaplan reports that Manhattan’s legendary Ziegeld theatre, which opened in 1969, is toast and will close in “a few weeks.” Fisher Brothers, the landlord, has informed lease-holder Cablevision that “they have a new tenant for the location and, therefore, we will be exiting our lease in the coming weeks to accommodate the new tenant,” Cablevision officials said in a statement. The theater is expected to re-open in the fall of ’17 as the Ziegfeld Ballroom — a high-end space for corporate events.

Eight months ago The Hollywood Reporter‘s Mattthew Belloni and Pamela McLintock reported that the Ziegfeld — the glorious cinematic temple with the greatest sub-woofer bass speakers I’ve ever heard, where I had my socks blown off while watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Apocalypse Now in ’77 and ’79, respectively — was on the verge of closing because Cablevision, which operates the legendary theatre, was sick of the way the Ziegfeld had been losing money hand over fist. (Around $1 million per year.)

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Last night I experienced three mildly unpleasant encounters in Park City. Okay, maybe not “unpleasant” but the kind of brushes with human behavior that make you roll your eyes and count to ten. We’re living in times that “try men’s souls,” and I was reminded of this last night, you bet. 

The first happened in the delicatessen department at Fresh Farms. There were three women working the counter, two 20somethings and a smallish woman in her late 60s or early 70s. I asked the older woman if I should take a number, and she said “we don’t do numbers here” — okay. She was busy slicing chicken meat for somebody. She was packing it up when a guy about 30 (definitely an out-of-towner) came over and asked to see it. “Are the slices extra thin?” he asked, inspecting with disapproval. “I said extra thin slices…I want to almost be able to see through them.” The woman rolled her eyes as she reached for more chicken. I felt sorry for her. “Ma’am…could I buy those chicken slices? Would that help?” She seemed relieved. I didn’t want the chicken but that guy was such a dick and he’d made her life more difficult.

The second encounter happened as I was walking up Park City’s Main Street. Three guys in their late 50s or early ’60s (skiiers, I guessed, or maybe distribution sales guys) were walking in front of me at a really slow pace, and of course they had the sidewalk blocked with their pudge-bods. Walking up Main Street is a cardiovascular challenge and I always do it with a certain vigor — I’m sorry but walking like a retiree with arthritis is not an option. So as I approached the three sea lions I said “excuse me?…sorry.” They glanced back and allowed me to pass, but not without comment. Their reaction was basically “sure thing but what’s your hurry?…have you ever heard of enjoying yourself and smelling the night air and not always racing when you walk?” My silent response: “Yeah, I’ve heard of it and I even walk slowly on my own from time to time, but never on Main Street uphill and especially when three guys are doing the mall meander in front of me.”

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Pizza joint on Park City’s Main Street — Wednesday, 1.20, 7:50 pm.

Park City Regency, suite #$204 — Wednesday, 1.20, 10:50 pm.

It’s always better if you eat less — the menu at Purple Sage.

I had to bring these pliers with me because I can’t get the zipper on my black leather motorcycle jacket to unzip wqithout a great struggle. It’s gnarly, not working like it should. I need the pliers to grab hold of the zipper-puller and yank it free.

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Hollywood Elsewhere arrived at the Park City Regency last evening around 6 pm. I shuttled right down to Fresh Farms (formerly Albertson’s) for groceries, went back to the pad to unload, and then hitched a lift to Main Street for dinner with HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko and David Scott Smith. After which the trouble started. Well, not “trouble” but certainly the first disappointment of the 2016 Sundance Film Festival.

Before Tuesday night’s screening of Hail Caesar! Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn told me about a little kickoff gathering on Woodside, which I naturally assumed was happening last night (i.e., Wednesday) as the festival’s first screenings — Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing‘s Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You and Chris Kelly‘s Other People — will happen at 5:30 and 9 pm, respectively.

On top of which Wednesday night is the only “free” social night for serious Sundance go-getters, many if not most of whom arrive on Wednesday so they can unpack, get groceries, get a good night’s sleep and hit the ground running on Thursday morning, which is what I’m doing as we speak.

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Very effective, I’ll admit. I was kind of irritated by the idea of this film until now. But the chords of “Bohemian Rhapsody” are responsible for a good 40% of the impact. You need to step back and, you know, not be taken in. “Worst. Heroes. Ever” = huge owesies to Robert Aldrich‘s The Dirty Dozen.

“It’s like Jaws, except the shark is a tsunami and Chief Brody is geologist Kristian (Kristoffer Joner, also in The Revenant), who is all ‘We’ve got to close the beaches!’ (so to speak, and speaking in Norwegian) when he suspects that a mountainside in the fjord near the postcard-pretty little town he lives in is about to collapse and send an 80-foot wall of water into the cafes and the marinas and the sightseers. His skeptical colleagues worry about false alarms scaring away tourist money — see also: Jaws — and even his wife, Idun (Ane Dahl Torp), who works in the big hotel, tells him to relax, that ‘the mountain will be there for another thousand years.’ It won’t.” — from 11.16.15 review by Flick Philosopher‘s Maryann Johanson.

Just to underline I didn’t say anything to Guardian interviewer Rory Carroll about “most Academy voters [being] happy to preserve the status quo.” Maybe they are but I didn’t address it. I reiterated my long-held view that the Academy needs overhauling, and once again pushed the idea of “weighting Academy votes so that those cast by people currently working in film carried more sway than those of people who retired years or decades ago,” as Carroll conveyed it.

Excerpt #1: “Jeffrey Wells, a veteran Los Angeles-based film blogger, said others shared his view that the NWA biopic Straight Outta Compton and Michael B. Jordan’s’ performance in Creed, for instance, were not Oscar-worthy but that few would say so publicly.

“’Anyone who is accomplished enough to be an Academy member knows how the game is played. They’re not stupid and so they will duck their heads to not be tarred and feathered for having (supposed) racist attitudes.’

“The media [are] equally skittish, said Wells. ‘Nothing terrifies them so much as being seen as being insensitive so they go along with it. No one stands up and says such and such isn’t worthy.’

Excerpt #2: “The blogger said Straight Outta Compton and Creed, which was directed by Ryan Coogler, were well-made crowd-pleasers but lacked ‘refinement’.

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