After four days of the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, I’m tempted to call it weak tea. So far there’s been no Call Me By Your Name, no Mudbound, no Big Sick. By my sights the only moderately pleasing narrative films have been Tamara Jenkins‘ lightly comedic Private Life and Jessie Peretz‘s Juliet, Naked. And that’s it.

Update: I saw Lynne Ramsay‘s You Were Never Really Here late Sunday evening, and it’s easily the strongest film — half narrative, half fever-dream — I’ve seen so far in Park City, hands down. It’s bloody and gooey, bothered and nihilistic, but it’s so beautifully shot and unto itself, so self-aware and finely controlled — an arthouse rendering of a Taken-style flick.

Otherwise this festival seems to be largely about “woke”-ness and women’s agenda films — healings, buried pain, social ills, #MeToo awareness, identity politics, etc. Sundance ’18 is like being at a socialist summer camp in the snow.

Headstrong critics have been embracing this or that narrative film and trying to make hay, but generally speaking the ones I’ve seen (or have read or heard about from trusted colleagues) have fallen under the headings of “not bad, awful, meh, fair” or “extremely tough sit”…none have that special propulsion.

You can’t count Mandy, the Nic Cage wackjob thing. Too specialized, cultish, bloody.

Tweeted last night by MCN’s David Poland: “Sundance has never really been a sausage party, as films go. It’s also embraced inclusion for decades. The festival business is changing…full stop. The crazy amounts streaming companies are paying is one thing. But also, high-quality unseen product gets more and more rare.”

So far the only films I’ve felt truly touched and levitated by are three highly intelligent, smoothly assembled but very conventional documentaries — Susan Lacy‘s Jane Fonda in Five Acts, Marina Zenovich‘s Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind and especially Matt Tyrnauer‘s Studio 54.

I’m pretty familiar with the Studio 54 saga (I went there three or four times in ’78 and again in the early ’80s after it reopened under Mark Fleischman), but Tyrnauer’s doc has landed the elusive Ian Schrager, one of the two founding partners of this legendary after-hours club (the other being the late Steve Rubell). This perspective alone is worth the price.

The film itself is a brilliant, levitational recapturing of a quaalude dreamland, a pre-Reagan, pre-AIDS vibe, a culture of nocturnal abandon that bloomed and thumped and carried everyone away but is long past and gone forever. (Naturally.) It’s sadly beautiful in a certain way.

I liked Studio 54 so much I’m thinking of catching it a second time on Friday morning, just before I leave town.

I wish I could say I’ve been aroused or energized by something more daring, but so far the reachy stuff has felt flat or frustrating or slightly disappointing. Tell me I’m wrong.

A couple of hours ago Glamour‘s Abby Gardner, speaking on behalf of the “woke” Twitter comintern, lambasted the editors of a just-published L.A. Times‘ Envelope issue (dated 12.21) for excluding actresses of color from the cover and the conversation.

The issue celebrates six top contenders for the Best Actress Oscar — Lady Bird‘s Saoirse Ronan, I, Tonya‘s Margot Robbie, In The Fade‘s Diane Kruger, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool‘s Annette Bening, Wonder Wheel‘s Kate Winslet and Molly Game‘s Jessica Chastain. All of them fair-skinned with blonde or ginger-colored hair…shame!

Gardner’s complaint is, of course, complete bullshit for two reasons: (a) the idea was apparently to highlight leading Best Actress contenders, and (b) this year there are, lamentably, no non-white actresses in serious contention for that trophy. (Best Supporting Actress is a different story — Mudbound‘s Mary J. Blige, Girls Trip‘s Tiffany Haddish, Downsizing‘s Hong Chau, Shape of Water‘s Octavia Spencer.)

The only woman of color who might have made it into the 2017 Best Actress circle is Natalie Paul, who was excellent in Matt Ruskin‘s Crown Heights but who never really campaigned or found traction of any kind.

If there’s a “problem” with the Envelope cover it’s because three leading contenders — The Post‘s Meryl Streep, The Shape of Water‘s Sally Hawkins and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri‘s Frances McDormand are missing. And honestly? The only actresses on the current cover who really count and deserve the highest consideration for the Best Actress Oscar are Ronan and Kruger.

Okay, you could maybe add Robbie to the hottie list, but Bening, Chastain and Winslet aren’t happening.

It’s 9:41 am and I’ve nothing to say here. West Coast twitter coverage of last night’s SNL Trump-Clinton debate spoof surged around 10 or 10:30 pm, and was all but spent when I awoke this morning at 7 am. Okay, Kate McKinnon‘s cough, cane + somersault introduction was special. She was the life of the party. Alec Baldwin nailed Trump’s voice, posture and hand gestures (SNL even got the makeup right with the reverse-raccoon white circles around his eyes) but Trump’s relentless self-parody on the campaign trail (his Hillary imitation last night in Manheim, Pennsylvania is an instant addition to his reel) makes a comedic spoof, no matter how sly or skillful, a moot point.

An observation in a 4.21 Ross Douthat column (“The Democrats After Sanders”) woke me up this morning.

Bernie Sanders, he says, “was in many ways a non-ideal standard-bearer for a left-wing youth movement…he struggled to win over African-American and Hispanic voters, he seemed like too much of a long shot to win endorsements from the party’s most liberal interest groups, and his obvious lack of interest in foreign policy prevented him from fully exploiting Hillary Clinton’s major weakness.”

He follows this with a no-big-deal comment that Elizabeth Warren “would have had fewer of these problems if she’d decided to run, and given how well Sanders has done it’s reasonable to suspect that Warren could have actually defeated Clinton.”

Damn! Probably right. Warren is a firm proponent of the same economic populism Sanders has been voicing for the last several years and certainly since announcing his candidacy, and if she’d run she would have said so emphatically and repeatedly, and it’s entirely possible — “reasonable to suspect,” as Douthat puts it — that she would have siphoned away a sizable chunk of Hillary’s gender-based support, and that she very possibly might have won the Democratic nomination in the end.

Yes, that’s water under the bridge but think what a shot-in-the-arm it would have been for the progressive cause if Warren had beaten Hillary. We’d have a real Democrat running against Trump instead of a corporate-friendly, center-right incremental Obama with more hawkish foreign policy views.

I’m so late to the discussion about the moderately miraculous Jenny Slate in Gillian Robespierre‘s Obvious Child that I feel a little foolish bringing it up. It took me two weeks to write this piece because I felt so conflicted about this. But Slate is so alive and extra-dimensional and spunky with the right blend of vulnerability and brilliance with sprinklings of depression and self-destruction…I was floored. I still am. I asked about doing a phoner with her a week ago — here’s the mp3.

Everyone saw Obvious Child 11 months ago at Sundance ’14 or when it opened last June. I didn’t fucking see it until two weeks ago, and I knew right away I’d been a complete putz for not making a greater effort. Because Slate’s performance did something that more than a few current award-level performances haven’t. She woke me up and made me want more.

Slate plays Donna Stern, a Brooklyn-residing bookstore employee and stand-up comedienne. She’s in her late 20s or early 30s, and with the balls to just follow whatever’s on her mind when doing her act, which is kind of free-formish and scattershot. She’s less of a funny lady who “tells jokes” than a performance artist who’s sometimes funny and sometimes not, but she’s always riffing about her life. Right away I was saying to myself “okay, this woman is obviously wide open and super-vulnerable, and she’s either going to die of a broken heart or she’s going to rocket into fame but she’s not middle-of-the-road steady or flinty. She’s a bit shaky. But who isn’t?

A Bluray of Joe Dante‘s The Howling (’81) streets on 6.18. I’ve always had a soft spot for this film, probably because it doesn’t embrace werewolf tropes as much as satirically comment on them while slipping in social satire. On top of of which it’s tartly written (by John Sayles and Terence H. Winkless), performed just right, tightly edited and just an all-around pleasure. And short — only 91 minutes.

I stayed up late watching the debate replays and then I awoke early this morning, and so I was nodding out on the couch a while ago when the phone rang. It was a seasoned Oscar-campaign guy I’d called yesterday afternoon. And he told me this anecdote about speaking to an actress a few years ago who was all but certain to be in the game, and she said to him, “So this is your specialty, you do this every year. What am I in for?”

And he said the following: “It’s like you’re twelve years old and you’ve just been given a free pass to Disneyland. You and your friends, all the rides you want, free food, go to town. And you get there and it’s all true. And you notice there are other kids there…other kids and their friends and some with their parents…but it’s still wide open and there’s no waiting and it’s glorious. Time of your life.

“And then a few hours pass and it’s the late afternoon and you’re feeling a little tired and say, ‘Well, that was really great, but let’s head home now.’ And the people who gave you the Disneyland package say, ‘Oh, didn’t we tell you? You have to stay until tomorrow morning. We’ve got it all mapped out for you. No naps, no breaks. And right now you have to go back on the roller coaster.'”

This video took me back to the malicious things that kids sometimes do to each other under the guise of pranks. The nature of the relationship of John, the ice-water splasher, to Nikki, his victim, is unclear, but this is the kind of thing that ten year-old boys will sometimes do to their older teenaged sisters. What does Iceman John mean by “Merry Christmas”? Why do I find this amusing? Sometimes the cruelest jokes are the funniest.

I’ve never pranked anyone like this; if anything I tended to be the victim when I was a kid. During a group sleepover at a friend’s beach house I was given an old-fashioned hot foot (i.e., two kitchen matches put between my toes and then lit while I was sleeping). To this day I can still recall the sensation of my toes getting hotter and hotter, and then the sudden muscle spasm that led to my levitating six inches off the floor.

Later that night the same pranksters put 30 or 40 ice cubes into a guy’s sleeping bag as he slept; an hour later he awoke in a state of uncontrollable shivering.

The only cruel prank I pulled was on a high-school acquaintance named Rick Callahan. He was in a bathing suit and lying sideways on a beach towel on an elevated sundeck next to a large community pool. He was leaning on his left arm, talking to a girl. In the area of the towel where Callahan would sooner or later lie down, three or four inches from his back, a friend and I stealthily placed a burning Marlboro cigarette on top of a matchbook. Then we scampered away and down some nearby stairs to ground level and waited. We were maybe 25 feet away. A minute or so later we heard Callahan’s howl.

2010 is, like, already one-sixth gone. In less one month’s time it will 25% gone. If 2010 was a day in which you woke up at 6 am and went to bed at midnight, right now it would be 10:30 am. Before you know it it’ll be lunch hour. So we may as well take stock of the best and worst so far. Herewith the Hollywood Elsewhere 2010 Excellence, Exceptions & Errata Movie Awards.

The two finest commercially-released motion pictures of 2010 so far are — no question, no disputes — Roman Polanski‘s The Ghost Writer and Jacques Audiard‘s A Prophet. Signed, sealed, chiselled in stone. Now watch everyone blow off the Polanski when they start tallying their best of lists next November and December.

The finest high-tension suspense drama of the year thus far is the German-produced, mountain-climbing drama North Face, from director Philipp Stolzl. I saw it at the Sunshine Cinemas four or five weeks ago, liked it, and then forget to write about it. I don’t have a decent explanation for this except for my reaction to the ending, which isn’t at all like Touching The Void‘s. But I know it’s a highly engaging piece of realism, and without any discernible use of CGI.

Most Nihilistic Indie-level Character Study of the Year: Andrea Arnold‘s Fish Tank.

The most over-rated and unintelligible indie film by a country mile is The Red Riding Trilogy. The year’s most absurd claim by a venerated film critic was David Thomson‘s remark that Red Riding Trilogy was either in the realm of or even better than The Godfather…good God. And Ridley Scott’s notion of remaking it as a stand-alone, North American-set feature is the worst remake idea in eons.

The most over-praised big-studio film, in a walk, is Martin Scorsese‘s Shutter Island, which contains Leonardo DiCaprio‘s least interesting performance of all time, despite all the anxiety and the sweating, etc. At least it provided an opportunity to discuss the friends-of-Marty syndrome among big-name critics.

The worst big-studio horror film so far is Joe Johnston‘s The Wolfman, which featured the worst performance ever given by Benicio del Toro, bar none. I didn’t think Benicio was even capable of this.

2010’s most unfairly dismissed low-budget scare-thriller is, I feel, Frozen, which I saw at Sundance and came to the conclusion that it wasn’t half bad.

Best Docs So Far: Don Argott’s Art of the Steal; Spike Jonze and Lance Bang‘s Tell Them Anything You Want (put on DVD last Tuesday); The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.

Worst Chick Flicks of the Year: Valentine’s Day, When In Rome.

Most Underwhelming & Inconsequential Youth Comedy: Miguel Arteta‘s Youth in Revolt.

Intended To See It, Never Did, Waiting for the DVD, No Hurry: Martin Campbell‘s Edge of Darkness.

Most Original & Under-appreciated Vampire Movie of the Year: Daybreakers.

Least Engaging Dramas of the Year: Creation, Extraordinary Measures.

Apocalypse Nothing: The Book of Eli.

Forget the Best Actor win odds of the moment, which probably still favor Sean Penn winning for Milk. Mickey Rourke‘s BAFTA win the other night awoke me to the late-blooming realization that his winning the Oscar for his Wrestler performance will deliver an emotional payoff like no other, and that’s what matters to most of us.

I’m guessing that others are thinking the same thing right now, and that this may prod those who haven’t yet voted (the ballot deadline being a little more than a week away) into voting for the guy. Despite all the political missteps he’s made since the campaign began last fall. Or possibly because of them, in a way. Because everyone is relating right now to hard times for obvious reasons, and Rourke, symbolically, is an emblem — the emblem — of error and faux pas and past political misjudgment, and people are sensing that what we all need in our lives is a little charity, a little kindness, a little bit of a helping hand to those who need it, even if they made their own bed and should’ve known better at the time.

Voting for Rourke allows people to feel extra-generous because he hasn’t quite played the game in the carefully orchestrated way that Russell Crowe, another bad boy, did when he campaigned for his work in Gladiator. And compassion and generosity in the face of economic terror, I sense, has become a stronger current out there than the safely liberal human-rights/remember the scourge of Prop 8/salute-a-noble-martyr message that voting for Gus Van Sant‘s Milk would be, Penn’s excellent performance notwithstanding.

Yes, Academy voters (most of whom have allegedly already voted) may have decided that Rourke has already benefitted tremendously from his Wrestler restoration and that’s enough. Maybe. But something tells me he might take it all the same. Because no other win would provide a stronger emotional meltdown on Oscar night.

Okay, now I’m not not leaving Oxford. The festival guys put me into another hotel — a nice plastic Holiday Inn — that has flawless wifi. All’s well again. I missed, however, this morning’s critics & media panel, which was moderated by James Rocchi somewhere on the Ole Miss campus. I was scheduled to take part, but I was so angry at the wifi troubles that I blew it off. I stayed up really late trying to fix things, couldn’t sleep, woke up at 4:30 am, cranky and dog tired…the hell with it.

It’s time to set things straight about Gavin O’Connor‘s Pride and Glory. I saw it last night, and as far as I’m concerned it’s the absolute opposite of a “problem movie” despite last fall’s diseased, head-scratching decision by New Line’s Bob Shaye not to release it in 2008. That may change.

Edward Norton in Pride and Glory

The issue was aired last February when O’Connor complained to Variety‘s Michael Fleming that New Line’s honcho Robert Shaye had done obvious harm to his film by pulling the plug on a 3.14.08 release date and bumping it into 2009.
Costar Colin Farrell elaborated during an In Bruges junket interview when he said “there’s this rumor going around that [Pride and Glory has been bumped] because it’s a mess or it’s a really bad film. I feel the need to kind of speak up, not from my own end but genuinely for Gavin O’Connor because he wrote and directed it. It’s just a really really strong piece, but I think New Line lost the bollocks on The Golden Compass…and they literally don’t have enough money to market things.”
Having finally seen O’Connor’s film, I can say with authority that Shaye’s decision was cowardly and pathetic. In this context, he was just as much of a criminal as the murdering, drug-dealing cops in the movie. Pride and Glory isn’t letter perfect from top to bottom, but it’s much, much better than I thought it would be, and the truth is that I drove home last night feeling close to delighted. If you’re a distributor, you don’t yank movies like this. You need to show some moxie and push them as best you can because quality wills out, damn it, and demands a day in the sun.

This thing, I swear, has a carefully parsed intensity that woke me out of my usual Wednesday-night blahs. Most of it seems to happen in Brooklyn or Queens with a little Manhattan thrown in. It’s wild and manic and surging with energy and sometimes mad as a loon (but rightly so, given the dirty-borough-cops storyline), and it really left me open-mouthed at times. I get that way when confronted by fierce but subtle acting, and especially when it’s all beautifully shot and swirled together in a big fat energy milkshake.
About halfway into the screening it hit me that the performances reach and even surpass, at times, the level of delivery in Michael Mann‘s Heat. Seriously. Power and Glory is an exceptional high-throttle thing that absolutely needs to see the light of day this year. Word around the campfire is that with New Line now reduced to a small production company status, Picturehouse or Warner Independent or perhaps Warner Bros. itself may acquire it and do just that.
The plot and the milieu are familiar, but it’s the singer, not the song. Emotionally complex and yet clear-headed with a carefully worked-out story, it’s basically about working-class ethics and morality under pressure and under fire. Like with James Gray‘s We Own The Night, Pride and Glory is about a big blue-collar family of cops, this time called the Tierneys. It’s primarily about having to struggle with crime and corruption within their own ranks.

It’s also similar to (though much better than) David Ayer‘s Street Kings, which dealt with a gang of rogue cops involved in drug dealing and all the attendant sins.
The conflict comes when Ray Tierney (Edward Norton) investigates a case that involving the murder of four policemen, and eventually leads to a dirty-cop scandal involving his brother-in-law Jimmy (Colin Farrell). The third brother, a go-alonger named Francis Jr., is played by Noah Emmerich. Their father, Francis Sr., a king of rationalization no matter the crime or the level of stink, is played by Jon Voight.
The script apparently began with an original by Robert Hopes, and then a rewrite collaboration between O’Connor and his brother Greg, and then another rewrite by Joe Carnahan. I just wish it wasn’t titled Pride and Glory, which unfortunately suggests an emotionally simplistic sports saga.
The gifted O’Connor (Miracle, Tumbleweeds) has put together something very vulnerable, soulful and alive-in-the-moment. Pride and Glory is a cup-runneth- over drama in that intensity rules and emotions are often (but not always) fully cranked. All I know is that I was driven half-mad with exasperation as I sat through similar stuff in We Own The Night, but I felt aroused and lifted during last night’s showing. This is not just another crazy-sick-cops movie. Melodrama is melodrama and the form is the form, but special things happen when exceptional craft and restraint are brought to bear.

Noah Emmmerich, Norton in Pride and Glory

I don’t know when I started to realize that P&G was a few cuts above, but it was early on. It started with the combination of Declan Quinn‘s darting hand-held photography, the knockout editing by Lisa Zeno Chrugin and John Gilroy, and the acting…my God! We’re not talking just two or three standouts but several brave, refined, super-intimate performances.
Norton is as good here as he was in The 25th Hour, and by my standards that’s as good as it gets. Farrell has now hit three homers in a row playing tragic, troubled losers — in O’Connor’s film, Martin McDonagh‘s In Bruges and Woody Allen‘s Cassandra’s Dream. Emmerich is as good here as I’ve ever seen him. John Ortiz (who played Russell Crowe‘s corrupt detective partner in American Gangster) is also special, and so are Frank Grillo, Manny Perez, Jennifer Ehle (whose head is shaved in this thing — what’s that about?), Wayne Duvall, Ramon Rodriguez, Carmen Ejogo, Shea Wigham.
Some IMDB guy wrote a few months ago that Pride and Glory “is the kind of American movie you don’t see anymore, a throwback to the big themes and dramatic tone of the 1950s, when Elia Kazan was making movies like East of Eden and On the Waterfront and Arthur Miller was writing plays like Death of a Salesman and All My Sons.
“Family, honor, corruption, right and wrong, fathers and sons–these are the kinds of issues that director/co-writer Gavin O’Connor is taking on, and in doing so he’s made a timeless film. Sincere without being sentimental (much like Miracle, O’Connor’s last effort) and familiar and original at the same time, this is a muscular, old-school American film, with big themes splashed on a big canvas. In the Age of Irony, these are the kinds of movies you rarely see anymore.”