Ry Russo Young‘s Nobody Walks (Eccles on Sunday, 12:15 pm) is about a 23 year-old New York artist (Olivia Thirlby) crashing with a Silver Lake family (John Krasinski, Olivia Thirlby, Rosemarie DeWitt, Justin Kirk, India Ennenga) and stirring the sexual pot all around. The script is by Russo-Young and Lena Dunham (Tiny Furniture), which indicates a tone of middle-class lethargy.

I haven’t the first clue what the plot is, but it would be fascinating and daring if Thirlby’s character is more centered and powerful than anyone else, and winds up seducing all four family members. The template for this sort of thing is Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s Teorema (’68) in which Terrence Stamp, staying with a wealthy Milanese family, was the stirrer-upper. Stamp did everyone except the family dog. Teorema‘s theme had something to do with spiritual satori and/or transformation.

I took a shared shuttle into Park City from Salt Lake City airport last night. Myself and two women, two guys. Steady rain in SLC became moderately heavy snow once we got into the Wasatch mountains. We dropped the women off in Kimball Junction (five miles from Park City) and then one of the guys near the main Park City ski resort. The last guy had to get dropped off on Lowell Avenue, a small, hilly street with a view of the city.

The driver, an older guy with no GPS, was cruising along looking for the number, which was 190 or something like that. “We’re gettin’ there,” he said as we nudged along with the snowstorm coming down like Jack London. “Is that…? What is that…178?…looked like 178…gotta be right up there…184…where’s 190? Somewhere. This must be it here.”

The driver got out and started checking doors and mailboxes. I GPS’ed the address on my iPhone and the red and blue dots were converged. We were there, all right, even if the number wasn’t immediately visible. I turned to the guy, who was sitting in his seat, and said “190 Lowell…that’s the address?” Yeah, he said, “but I don’t wanna be standing here all alone with my bags if we can’t find it.”

I said nothing, but I was thinking to myself what a little candy-ass this guy was. First, he doesn’t try to find the condo number himself — he waits for the driver to do it while he sits safe and warm inside the van. Second, there was no logical indication that we weren’t right on top of 190 Lowell — the map, the GPS and the driver’s experience said we were there. But this little guy, a Brit, wouldn’t budge until the driver had found “190” painted or mounted on something. What would Jeremiah Johnson say? Where was this guy’s spirit of adventure of discovery? Real men get out of the van and find the number themselves.

The morning after a snowfall is always peaceful, especially around 7 or 7:30 am. Nothing doing today during daylight. Two…make that four or five screenings tonight. Poking around the Park City Marriott right now. Filing, taking snaps, social stuff.

N.Y. Times reporter Brooks Barnes has reviewed the Sundance 2012 offerings and concluded (as I did before posting a summary on 12.29) that many of the narratives (including those contained in the docs) are about meandering, vaguely gloomy dysfunctional situations of one kind or another….the Tiny Furniture syndrome writ small, medium, large and extra-large.

“Many [Sundance] movies, about 25, look at 30-somethings whose lives have come apart for one reason or another — divorce, drugs, depression — and who are trying to get back on track,” Barnes reports. “At least eight fall squarely into the category of ‘America is broken.’ Four films gaze intensely at corporate greed [and] at least 14 selections look at moral decay.”

“I see a lot of movies in this year’s festival that aren’t made to be crowd pleasers but are instead made to say something about the moment,” Tom Bernard, the co-president of Sony Pictures Classics and a longtime festival attendee, tells Barnes.

In other words, we’re back in a Park City realm summed up by that immortal Victoria Wisdom line, “Sundance spelled backwards spells depression.”

Four years ago MSN’s James Rocchi said the following: “People mock ‘Sundance films,’ or joke that ‘Sundance’ spelled backwards is ‘massive depression. The reality of the matter is that if mainstream film offers us escape, independent cinema offers a necessary escape from escapism. Movie characters don’t seem to worry about paying the bills; most moviegoers do.”

I have some errands to attend to before catching my 4:30 flight to Salt Lake City so that’s all until I hit the airport, and maybe not until I hit Park City.

A restored version of William Wellman‘s silent, Oscar-winning Wings (1927) was screened last night at the Academy. Free copies of the new Wings Bluray were handed out. A friend says the black-and-white film had some color tinting, but the overall film was not, he reports, sepia-toned, as DVD Beaver’s screen captures plainly indicate. The audience clapped when 25 year-old Gary Cooper did his one scene cameo as Cadet White.

Gary Cooper in William Wellman’s Wings (1927).

Seth Grahame-Smith‘s historical mashup genre meets Troma attitude and expertise in Garrett Brawith‘s FDR: American Badass — ostensibly a feature looking for a distributor but you never know. It could just be a glorified trailer. Clearly funded with a debit card, this is going to make Timur Bekmambetov‘s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Killer (20th Century Fox, 6.22, budgeted at $70 million) look masterful, and Roger Michell‘s Hyde Park on Hudson…forget it.

There’s probably not much difference, tonally-speaking, between Barry Bostwick‘s Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Brad Pitt‘s Lt. Aldo Raine in Inglourious Basterds. Flagrant caricature can work for a trailer, but it’s always hard to take over 90 or 100 minutes if every character in the film is doing this. Ludicrous material has to be played straight or you’re dead. Look at John Landis‘s Schlock, a gorilla-on-the-loose comedy that’s clever and amusing because Landis (who directed and starred) did everything he could to not “announce” that he was spoofing. He directed the actors like they were in something written by Hecht and MacArthur.

The costars are Lin Shaye (Bob’s younger sister), Bruce McGill, Ray Wise (“Shut the fuck up, Einstein!”), Kevin Sorbo and William Mapother.

It’s entirely fair to say that Peter Schade, vp Universal Studios Technical Services, gets the Hollywood Elsewhere viewpoint on film grain. “Now that we’re scanning off the original negative at very, very high resolution and creating very high resolution digital images,” Schade says, “it does…make grain more apparent.” Wow…somebody who knows the realm finally repeats what I’ve been saying for years!

“Film grain is one of the things that makes film look like it does,” Schade continues. “We certain don’t want grain to be nonexistent and make everything look flat, but where it causes an objectionable or distracting aspect of enjoying the film, we do want to manage it.”

Easily the best of behance.net’s Alternate Universe posters. John Ford would’ve never even flirted with anything like this, of course. But it would have been the perfect Rebel Without A Cause followup for Nicholas Ray. (On top of which he couldn’t gotten out of directing Bigger Than Life.) And forget Clark Gable as Shanon — try Mickey Shaughnessy or Mickey Rooney.

In a 1.22 New York Times Sunday Magazine piece, Bryan Curtis reports in an apparently sincere, un-ironic tone that Red Tails director George Lucas “has decided to devote the rest of his life to what cineastes in the 1970s used to call personal films.

George Lucas, Robert Duvall during shooting of THX 1138.

“They’ll be small in scope, esoteric in subject and screened mostly in art houses,” Curtis explains. “They’ll be like the experimental movies Lucas made in the 1960s, around the time he was at U.S.C. film school, when he recorded clouds moving over the desert and made a movie based on an E. E. Cummings poem. During that period, Lucas assumed he would spend his career on the fringes. Then Star Wars happened — and though Lucas often mused about it, he never committed himself to the uncommercial world until now.”

What? Lucas did “commit himself” to the uncommercial world several years ago, at least in interview quotes. He’s been talking about this for a long time and doing zip about it.

Three and a half years ago I quoted a Devin Faraci CHUD piece that no longer exists. “I don’t know what your thoughts on George Lucas are, but I talked to him yesterday and cornered him on why he hasn’t made one of those art films he’s always going on about,” Faraci wrote. ” It seems like the guy has the resources and ability to make pretty much any movie that strikes his fancy. He sort of blew off the question, but I think the way he blew it off was interesting.”

I’m expecting to hear tomorrow which foreign-language films are on the Oscar shortlist, but in the meantime TheWrap‘s Steve Pond has predicted that my two biggest favorites after A Separation — Gerardo Naranjo‘s Miss Bala and Jose Padilha‘s Elite Squad: The Enemy Within — will not make the initial list of six.

Is Pond envisioning a scenario in which even the executive committee won’t step up and include them? I can’t imagine Mark Johnson and pallies, who have the power to add three extra titles for a total of nine, not putting Miss Bala on the list…c’mon.

All of the films on Pond’s list fit the conventional older person’s definition of what a Best Foreign Language Oscar nominee ought to be — contemplative, character-driven, heartfelt, intimate, a theme about social discord, Holocaust-y: Monsieur Lazhar (Canada), Le Havre (Finland), A Separation (Iran), Footnote (Israel), Where Do We Go Now? (Lebanon) and In Darkness (Poland).

Pond hears that Superclasico “played very well to the general committee.” (I recently saw it at the Palm Springs Film festival — it’s a decently done, mildly appealing adult comedy.) He adds that Belgium’s Bullhead, whose “director and star are getting a lot of heat”, is another contender. I saw it a month ago and it’s not bad, but it’s nowhere near the level of Miss Bala in terms of striking style.