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.

I posted this scene from Robert Altman‘s California Split three years ago, but this is the first time I’ve seen/discovered/posted a YouTube version.

I’m always hoping for snow during the Sundance Film Festival, and it usually happens. The forecast is for modest snow between now and Saturday with a major northwest snow storm brewing. Every year I have to remind myself that I’m not going to be joining Jack London for a snowshoe hike across frozen Alaskan tundra. At most you’re walking from a theatre to a bus stop and occasionally trekking up and down Park Avenue or Kearns Blvd. Ear muffs, long underwear, layers, black cowboy hat, gloves, comfort boots.

Fair warning: If I see any 20somethings walking around Park City in shorts, no socks and lace-free slip-ons I’m going to take photos and post them and go to town.

As I said last year: “No generation or culture in the history of the planet earth has ever dressed this stupidly for cold weather.

“I know what they’re doing. I mean, I think I get it. They’re embracing a kind of X-treme sports aesthetic and making a kind of statement to themselves and to women who happen by that says, ‘I’m so hardcore I’ve willed myself into a state in which serious cold doesn’t matter all that much…my lower legs are beet red from the exposure but I’m totally fine, really, because I’m all rugged-ass and hearty and just not into bourgeois protection…I am the weather and the weather is me. Bring it on and let me honestly feel it.’

“But of course, they’re being ridiculous all the same. Thousands of years of civilization and people have always bundled up when it’s cold. And then along comes GenY, saying to hell with warmth and any kind of sensible cold-weather attitude.”

I meant to post this footage of the Fox Searchlight Golden Globes after-party yesterday morning. It’s noteworthy for (a) the reaction of In Contention‘s Kris Tapley as I begin my roam-around and (b) the ecstatic “hiya!” from The Descendants costar Judy Greer (glimpsed on the left side for an instant). She’s the one I’m going “hey!” to at the end of the clip. Why post something this anecdotal on the site? Because it conveys emotional color, and it does no harm.

I once quoted Sir Thomas More to David Poland during a debate a few years ago: “I do none harm…I say none harm…I think none harm.” And he went, “Yeah…right!”