I just happened upon this beautiful photo this morning on Twitter. I had an emotional reaction that’s stayed with me all day. I had to a chance to watch a digitally remastered Apocalypse Now inside the beautiful Werner Herzog Cinema at last September’s Telluride Film Festival, but I went to see Wild instead because that was the hotter film at the moment. I’m really sorry I did that.

“My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It’s what it was really like. It was crazy. We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.” — Francis Ford Coppola speaking at a press conference during the 1979 Cannes Film Festival.

The 2015 Sundance Film Festival opening-day press conference was the exercise it’s always been — an attempt to define what the climate is and what’s changing, and an attempt by journalist to goad Robert Redford into giving them a tasty quote or two. The aging Sundance Kid was asked virtually all of the questions and obliged with his usual honesty. Festival director John Cooper and executive director Keri Putnam added their two cents from time to time. It was an okay discussion and frank as far as it went, but the answers at these conferences are always influenced by diplomatic sidestepping or at least a tendency to sand off the edges. Incidentally: I was struck by a bland, vaguely grotesque mini-mall across the street from the Egyptian theatre, where the conference took place. Bit by little bit Park City, which had a vaguely historic aura 20 years ago, is losing those remnants of the old mining town that it used to have. A kind of cultural blight is spreading. Shallow entrepreneurs catering to the rich and the tasteless are coming in and rebuilding it to fit their bullshit sensibilities.

(l. to .r) Salt Lake Tribune‘s Sean Means (moderator), Sundance Film Festival director John Cooper, exec director Keri Putnam, founder and costar Captain America costar Robert Redford during this afternoon’s press conference.

The ugliest addition to Main Street in many years — big and sprawling and exuding not a hint of personality or charm — a form of nouveau riche arrogance by way of architectural blight.

The Riverhorse Cafe used to be a pleasant gray — now it’s been repainted a dark gray with a touch of forest green. It almost feels funereal. No accounting for taste.

In a 1.22 Daily Beast article, Michael Musto chats with a (presumably New York-based) Academy voter, and he…sorry, she has a lot of refreshingly candid views to share. One of them is that Alejandro G. Inarritu is not a day at the beach to work with…big deal. Occasional creative tempest will manifest — it goes with the movie business, which has never been a bowl of cherries. Sometimes making a special film takes more effort, and then more on top of that.

Musto: What do you think will emerge triumphant, Boyhood or Birdman?

Oscar Lady: In my book, Birdman. I don’t get Boyhood as a movie. I don’t understand how it was nominated for screenplay. That was one of the weakest things about it, in my opinion.

Musto: [What about] Supporting Actress?

Oscar Lady: With Keira Knightley [in The Imitation Game], you can throw that one away. Like, “Why? Really?”

Musto: The wife of the gay guy!

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On top of my previously posted Sundance Hot 25, I’m adding four newbies. Will I manage to catch them all? Well, I can sure give it hell. Addition #1: Adam Salky‘s I Smile Back, about a libertine mom (Sarah Silverman) whose bacchanalian ways threaten to detonate her life. Addition #2: Stevan Riley‘s Listen To Me Marlon, a doc portrait of the late Marlon Brando constructed with previously unreleased audio and visual materials. Addition #3: Leslie Headland‘s Sleeping with Other People, a sex-addict romance with Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie…I can smell the broadness but I’ll give it a shot. Addition #4: 4. Josh Mond‘s James White, in which Christopher Abbott (hunky guy on Girls, beefy truck hijacker in A Most Violent Year) plays “a hedonistic, raw-nerved son of a woman (Cynthia Nixon) who’s dying of cancer,” etc.

Christopher Abbott in Josh Mond’s James White.

David Koepp‘s Mortdecai is looking like a contender for the Worst of 2015 roster, to go by early reviews. The arch, ultra-mannered Johnny Depp farce has an 11% Rotten Tomatoes rating as we speak. But I had a great time with Robbie Collin‘s Telegraph review. Excerpt #1: “It’s hard to think of a way in which the experience of watching the new Johnny Depp film could be any worse, unless you returned home afterwards to discover that Depp himself had popped round while you were out and set fire to your house. Excerpt #2: “What’s fascinating about the film, other than its early and near-impregnable status as the worst of 2015, are its superficial but nagging similarities to Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, a project to which Depp was once attached. Both films center on fey but sexually rapacious men who belong to bygone eras, and both involve a missing art treasure. Perhaps in a parallel universe, Ralph Fiennes missed a train by a fraction of a second, and Depp is now the star of a tragicomic Academy Award nominated masterpiece, while Fiennes gropes co-stars half his age and jokes about statutory rape.”

During a segment on last night’s The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, screenwriter and former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett described the one-eyed-jacks milieu in Washington, D.C. Politicians, he said, “put one face out to the public and, behind the scenes, they’re devious lunatics. They’re headcases…broken, garbage people. They are. They’re terrible, short-sighted, venal, cowardly douchebags. Some of them.”

Which is vaguely analogous to the difference between this or that person’s online rantings and the mild-mannered, comme ci comma ca personality they wear when you see them on the street. Very few, it seems, are the same person in both realms. The usual online tempest vs. a semblance of mature behavior when they’re standing two to three feet away, and the tempestuous stuff is usually closer to the nub of things. I’m mentioning this because a guy some of us know recently blocked me from reading his Twitter posts because…getting into it will only exacerbate but it was next to nothing in the general scheme. I’ll be running into him during Sundance and we’ll probably sort it out, but online temperaments are strange.

And yet, oddly, it’s more comfortable to live in our digital pods. Almost all interaction these days happens digitally while the face-to-face stuff…well, you can’t get away from it entirely. And I would’t want to. But oh, the irony of it.

Minutes after arriving at the Park Regency, Coming Soon‘s Ed Douglas (who’s sharing the pad for three nights) gifted me with an official “Yo, Whiplash!” hat. For the uninitiated, this was the original title of the story that was changed to “Miles Teller ‘Pervert’ Story,” which I posted on 10.24.14.

One of the many gloom-inducing things about Michael Mann‘s Blackhat are the Asian urban locales, which are mostly gray, grim, congested and corporate fuck-ugly with little else but high-rises, office buildings, freeways and skanky, neon-lit fast-food joints. The IMDB says Blackhat shot in (a) Jakarata, Indonesia, (b) Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, (c) Klang, Malaysia and (d) Hong Kong besides Los Angeles. They all seem like the same soul-less Asian hell-hole. Mann obviously decided to avoid the conventionally photogenic and emphasize the stinky, but good God. The footage of over-developed Bangkok in the 2nd Hangover movie made me feel the same way. In some ways the above-named burghs looked a bit like Tokyo, Seoul and Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon — cities I didn’t care for and have zero interest in ever visiting again.

Shot adjacent to a Burger King in Las Vegas’s McCarran airport — Wednesday, 1.21, 1:10 pm.

I’ve been in love with Preston Sturges‘ Sullivan’s Travels for 40-odd years now, and pretty much every time I’ve seen it (most recently a year or two ago) it’s looked sharp and rich and chromatically full-bodied. I just don’t see how I can justify buying the Criterion Bluray because I can’t imagine it delivering a noticable Bluray “bump”. And yet I took the leap with Criterion’s Foreign Correspondent and got a good bump out of it…go figure. Wiki excerpt: “Veronica Lake was six months pregnant at the beginning of production, a fact she didn’t tell Sturges until filming began. Sturges was so furious when he learned that, according to Lake, he had to be physically restrained. Sturges consulted with Lake’s doctor to see if she could perform the part, and hired former Tournament of Roses queen Cheryl Walker as Lake’s double. Edith Head, Hollywood’s most renowned costume designer, was tasked to find ways of concealing Lake’s condition.”

Today is 80% about Sundance travelling. Leaving for Burbank airport at 9 am to catch an 11:15 am flight. Better early than sorry. To save dough I’m flying to Las Vegas and then parking it for two hours, and then flying to Salt Lake City. I get in at 4:30 pm, and it’ll take at least 90 minutes if not two hours to get to the Park Regency with those slow-ass shuttle vans dropping customers off in way-out-of-the-way locations. And for all of it, there probably won’t be any snow to marvel at during the entire nine days. The last time there was any kind of Sundance snowfall was maybe three years ago. 11:10 am update: Southwest Vegas flight delayed by 30 minutes. 1:10 pm update: Enjoying superb free wifi at LV’s McCarran airport. My Southwest Salt Lake City flight leaves at 1:55 pm.

“After sitting through American Sniper twice, I’m more convinced than ever that there’s a level of sardonic commentary at work that is sometimes subtle and sometimes pretty damn obvious. Pay attention to Cooper’s increasingly congested body language, the posture of a man stricken with unmanageable psychic distress. Pay attention to the use of the phrase ‘mission accomplished’ late in the film, or the stateside scene in which Kyle runs into a Marine whose life he saved in Fallujah and can’t even make eye contact with the guy. This is a portrait of an American who thought he knew what he stood for and what his country stood for and never believed he needed to ask questions about that. He drove himself to kill and kill and kill based on that misguided ideological certainty — that brainwashing, though I’m sure Clint Eastwood would never use that word — and then paid the price for it. So did we all, and the reception of this film suggests that the payments keep on coming due.” — from “American Sniper and the culture wars: Why the movie’s not what you think it is” — Andrew O’Hehir, Salon, 1.20.

I still say the only decent thing Bill Cosby can do at this point is to cough up $10 or $15 million and dispense it to the 30-plus victims in some kind of indirect, half-assedly benevolent way, which would be a form of atonement without actually admitting anything. History will at least record that Cosby half-acknowledged his fiendishness and offered a little restitution as an oblique way of saying “I can’t say I’m sorry because I can’t say I’m guilty but…well, you know.”