Rodrigo Cortes‘ Red Lights, which screened at 10 pm last night, plays differently than you might expect — I’ll give it that. But in my view it suffers from a silly and confusing second half or, in the view of others, a terrible ending. Either way this faux-spooker didn’t go down all that well with the crowd. They were being polite, but they were somewhat confused and hadn’t really bought it.

Cillian Murphy, Elisabeth Olsen, Sigourney Weaver during last night’s post-screening q & a.

Rodrigo Cortes

It’s about a pair of investigators, Margaret Matheson (Sigourney Weaver) and Tom Buckley (Cillian Murphy), who specialize in debunking bogus paranormal claims. Weaver is persuaded there’s no such animal as a ghost or messages from the after-life or anything along those lines — it’s all about theatre and seducing the gullible. The story gradually builds into an epic confrontation between the Weaver forces and Simon Silver (Robert DeNiro), perhaps the greatest paranormal performer or hoodwinker of all time…or is he?

The first 40 minutes are devoted to exploring Weaver’s literal and rational-minded reasons for being a skeptic, and a little about her own personal background involving a comatose son. And then something happens that I shouldn’t divulge, but when that thing happens the tone set by Weaver’s rationality is thrown out the window and the film devolves into a kind of emotional madhouse with “boo! surprise” jolts thrown in from time to time, plus a lot of raging emotion and red herrings that don’t lead anywhere and plot threads that aren’t developed and/or are abandoned.

It just goes nuts, this film. A kind of ComicCon idiot gene takes over. I was saying to myself, “What happened here? This thing was smart, absorbing and moving along pretty good fora while and then wham…a cheesy cheap-shock virus invaded and it went south.”

I got so sick of Murphy shouting and getting angry and parting his mouth and going “whuh?” when a shock moment occurs and driving like an idiot and stumbling around with blood on his face I was ready to throw something at the screen.

A guy asked during the post-screening q & a if Cortes could please explain the last five minutes, and most of the audience chuckled and some applauded. When that happens you’re dead. It means you haven’t provided the right information and tied things up with sufficient clarity.

Cortes is an obviously intelligent young director who’s unfortunately into second- and third-act wham-bams (yelling, violence, boo!, exploding lights) rather than developing things internally. As an audacious Latino who’s made a “things go bump in the night” flick, I regret to say that Cortes doesn’t begin to approach the poise or expertise of, say, Juan Antonio Bayona (The Orphanage) or Alejandro Amen√°bar (The Others). So this one gets tossed on the heap, I’m afraid.

Sigourney Weaver’s snowboots.

Just to recap the day so far: West of Memphis (excellent, highly absorbing…best film with Peter Jackson‘s name on it since Heavenly Creatures), I’m Not A Hipster (slightly downish but smartly written, emotionally affecting with intriguing breakout performance by Dominic Bogart), and Simon Killer (a disaster film). Next is a West of Memphis party and then Rodrigo Cortes‘ Red Lights at 10 pm.

Late this afternoon I suffered through Antonio Campos‘ Simon Killer at the Eccles. It’s an empty, meandering audience-torture film about sex and nihilism and stupidity in Paris. Brady Corbet (the slightly dopey-looking guy who briefly boffed Kirsten Dunst on the golf course in Melancholia) plays a grungy-looking dork who seems “normal” at first but then things turn dark and deranged as he morphs into a psychopathic asshole.

Approaching Park City shuttle outside the Eccles following this afternoon’s screening of Simon Killer.

There are no resonating echoes or metaphors that add up in this bleak nihilistic film. Corbet is a recent college graduate who’s distraught about a breakup with his girlfriend of five years, and is visiting Paris to…whatever, hide out and do nothing for a while. His primary trait is that he’s obsessive.

I saw him as a whiner with little cash and nothing on his mind except jerking off and fucking and money and extortion and hurting the women who like or love him. One of these is Mati Diop, a drop-dead beautiful cafe au lait girl who works as a prostitute and eventually lets Corbet stay with her because he’s broke, and who lets him goad her into a half-assed “john” blackmail scheme.

I didn’t relate to Corbet or get what he was about or anything. I hated his unshaven cheeks and chin and neck. And so I just sat there and watched…and watched…and nodded off for a few minutes…and watched a bit more. And then Corbet finally flew back to the States and it was over.

I thought I might at least enjoy a few shots of Paris, but Campos and cinematographer Joe Anderson are very careful to show us nothing recognizable whatsoever. When Corbet is roaming around the camera is always focused on the back of his head and the rest is always in soft focus.

The most memorable thing that happened during the screening was when I nodded out for five minutes. I was holding a half-filled can of Monster, and as I dropped off the can slipped my grip and hit the floor…clahk!…and rolled out of my aisle and into the next, dribbling green Monster juice as it went along. Attorney Linda Lichter and L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turan were sitting next to me, and I’m sure they wondered what the noise was. I avoided looking in their direction out of embarassment.

Late this afternoon I suffered through Antonio Campos‘ Simon Killer at the Eccles. It’s an empty, meandering audience-torture film about sex and nihilism and stupidity in Paris. Brady Corbet (the slightly dopey-looking guy who briefly boffed Kirsten Dunst on the golf course in Melancholia) plays a grungy-looking dork who seems “normal” at first but then things turn dark and deranged as he morphs into a psychopathic asshole.

Approaching Park City shuttle outside the Eccles following this afternoon’s screening of Simon Killer.

There are no resonating echoes or metaphors that add up in this bleak nihilistic film. Corbet is a recent college graduate who’s distraught about a breakup with his girlfriend of five years, and is visiting Paris to…whatever, hide out and do nothing for a while. Paris is a good town to do that in, but the appeal of Paris plummets if you’re stuck hanging out with an asshole.

Corbet’s primary trait is that he’s obsessive. I saw him as a whiner with little cash and nothing on his mind except jerking off and fucking and money and extortion and hurting the women who like or love him. One of these is Mati Diop, a drop-dead beautiful cafe au lait girl who works as a prostitute and eventually lets Corbet stay with her because he’s broke, and who lets him goad her into a half-assed “john” blackmail scheme.

I didn’t relate to Corbet or get what he was about or anything. I hated his unshaven cheeks and chin and neck. I just sat there and watched…and watched…and nodded off for a few minutes…and watched a bit more. And then Corbet finally flew back to the States and it was over.

I thought I might at least enjoy a few shots of Paris, but Campos and cinematographer Joe Anderson are very careful to show us nothing recognizable whatsoever. When Corbet is roaming around the camera is always focused on the back of his head and the rest is always in soft focus.

The most memorable thing that happened during the screening was when I nodded out for five minutes. I was holding a half-filled can of Monster, and as I dropped off the can slipped my grip and hit the floor…clahk!…and rolled out of my aisle and into the next, dribbling green Monster juice as it went along. Attorney Linda Lichter and L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turan were sitting next to me, and I’m sure they wondered what the noise was. I avoided looking in their direction out of embarassment.

A 123-minute crowd-sourced Star Wars — a feature-length pic “that contains hand-picked scenes from the entire StarWarsUncut.com collection.” Uploaded two days ago and edited by Aaron Valdez and Bryan Pugh.

It’s getting so crazy now that I barely have time to file about the Sundance films I’ve seen and make the next film I want/need to see. It’s 2:45 pm and I have a 3:30 pm screening of Simon Killer at the Eccles…which gives me 15 minutes to wrap things up.

This morning I caught the 8:30 am screening of Amy Berg and Peter Jackson‘s West of Memphis — a completely solid and compelling doc about the West Memphis 3 that never drags and feels vital and necessary every step of the way. I…Jesus, 12 minutes to go! Homina, homina, homina. I agree entirely with John DeFore‘s Hollywood Reporter review…how abotu that?

I went right over to the Prospector Square Cinema after Memphis to catch an 11:30 am screening of Destin Daniel Cretton‘s I’m Not a Hipster, an absorbing, emotionally balanced, nicely written and well acted character drama about a scowling San Diego hipster-musician (played by the darkly charismatic Dominic Bogart) who comes to an emotional reckoning when his sisters and father visit town to dispose of his recently deceased mother’s ashes. Six minutes to go but Hipster is a smart, believable, honestly realized indie pic. Not “entertaining,” per se, but straight and true.

I’m outta here…

Lauren Greenfield‘s The Queen of Versailles, an oddly spelllbinding, must-see documentary that screened last night, is fundamentally about how the vacation-timeshare empire of former billionaire David Siegel started to collapse after the financial meltdown of 2008. But the focus is about how his marriage to 40something Jackie, a clueless, fake-boobed 40something bimbo, began to rot around the edges when the money began to evaporate and budgetary restraint became necessary.

Jackie Siegel and Sundance Film Festival honcho John Cooper at the Eccles theatre last night.

Jackie Siegel is truly appalling — a metaphor for a kind of profligate soul cancer, a poster lady for the insipid American emptiness of the 21st Century. She’s not without “good” qualities, but she makes Imelda Marcos look like June Cleaver. She admits to Greenfield that she had kids because she knew her nannies would take care of them. She is compulsive, immature and uneducated — an eight-year old. She’s had a deceased pet stuffed and keeps his remains inside a glass case. When times get tough dogshit turds are seen on the floor of her home. She asks a car-rental rep at an airport who her driver will be, and is surprised to discover that she’ll have to drive the car herself. (I wonder if this last bit was genuine — it seems too much even for her.)

The press notes say that The Queen of Versailles has “the epic dimensions of a Shakespearean tragedy,” and there is a kind of grandiosity about the downswirl that affects the lives of David and Jackie and their seven or eight kids and their domestic staff.

It follows their riches-to-rags story over a two…make that a three-year period. It begins before the ’08 crash when Westgate, Siegel’s timeshare company, is bringing in millions hand over fist, and finishes with a financial move that David made in November 2011.

The material centerpiece of the film is a ridiculous, half-built, 90,000-square-foot mansion — inspired by the palace of Versailles — that David began building in flush times. And then comes the crash and it all gradually turns to shit.

The Queen of Versailles is a portrait of American cluelessness by way of absurd financial irresponsibilty. It’s a cautionary tale about the cost of living an unexamined life — of living an unrefined and largely uneducated life that’s solely about yourself and your tacky creature comforts and never seeing beyond that. What Greenfield shows is a metaphor about 21st Century American greed, and what happened to the faux-royal easy-money crowd after the good times stopped rolling.

It’s also a kind of comedy, if you watch it with the right frame of mind. I’m calling it another Al Qaeda recruitment film — the best I’ve seen since Sex and the City 2.

Siegel has sued Greenfield and the Sundance Film Festival because he fears that the film will harm his financial profile and/or make Westgate appear to have less value. He’s not wrong.

In this corner, wearing white trunks, industry pulse-taker and award-ranker extraordinaire Tom O’Neil of Gold Derby! And this corner, wearing dark blue trunks, the leading divining rod of conventional emotional-default thinking among award-season pundits…”Safe Dave” Karger! (The mis-synched sound courtesy of Blip TV.)

HE’s first two Sundance 2012 films will be Kieran Darcy-Smith and Felicity Price’s Wish You Were Here, which a buyer friend calls “a neat little Australian noir,” tonight at 6:30 pm, and then a p & i screening of Lauren Greenfield‘s The Queen of Versailles, a documentary about tasteless grandiosity by nouveau-riche types who, one gathers, have embraced a totally anti-Zen approach to life.

Amy Berg and Peter Jackson‘s West of Memphis has its first Sundance press screening tomorrow morning at 8:30 am. There’s been friction and contention, of course, between Berg-Jackson and Joe Berlinger-Bruce Sinofsky, makers of three docs about the Memphis 3 including the short-listed Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory. And it’s worth recalling a fact contained in Jason Guerrasio‘s 1.19 Indiewire article, which is that Berg-Jackson drew first blood.

“In 2009, Jackson called on Berg to begin work on a documentary that would reveal…new findings and hopefully exonerate the WM3 (Jackson is a producer on the film). Friction between Berg and Berlinger/Sinofsky built after Pam Hobbs, ex-wife of murder suspect Terry Hobbs, signed an agreement with Berg making her unable to be interviewed for any other film.

“Unable to work out an agreement with Jackson and Berg, Berlinger/Sinofsky felt they had to protect their film and decided to make a similar agreement with some of their subjects, blocking Berg from talking to them.

“Documentary filmmaker AJ Schnack points out this is hardly the first time two documentaries have been made on the same subject, but understands the mixed feelings to why West of Memphis was made.

“‘It’s certainly fair for filmmakers to tackle subjects that have been covered before,’ Schnack says. ‘As far as I can tell, Nick Broomfield holds no grudge that I made a film about Kurt Cobain,” referring to his film Kurt Cobain: About A Son and Broomfield’s Kurt & Courtney. ‘I’m pretty sure that both of us assume that other films will be made about him in the future.’

“‘What makes this case so unusual is that the West Memphis Three story is intrinsically linked to Joe and Bruce’s films. Damien may have been put to death if not for the light that HBO shined on the case and Peter Jackson is on record as saying that he became interested in the case because he saw the first Paradise Lost.'”

I’ve written about this before, but anyone staying in a middle- or lower-cost Park City condo is always reminded how second- and third-rate the construction materials are. Plugs fit too loosely in the wall outlets and sometimes fall out. The shower controls are a pain in the ass (i.e., turn the plastic knob to the right or left and nothing happens). The sheetrock walls feel a tiny bit flimsy. A general cheap-ass (i.e, “it doesn’t have to that good, people won’t notice or complain,” etc.) aesthetic. I don’t really care as long as the heater works.