For me a great or very good ending is almost half the game. The rest is covered by (a) the famous Howard Hawks dictum about a good film needing “three great scenes and no bad ones,” and (b) the HE rule that a lead character can’t irritate or alienate or piss you off. But a great ending can persuade you to forgive a film for an awful lot of things.

It’s understood that most Sundance films either don’t get or are unable to subscribe to the great ending rule. And I realize, of course, that people would completely reject any Sundance film that tries to imitate the finale of Billy Wilder‘s The Apartment. We all understand that it worked back then, couldn’t work now. And yet this 1960 dramedy ends superbly according to its own terms and standards.

The fact is that none of the Sundance 2011 films I saw between 1.20 and 1.27 had the first clue about how to end their films even half as effectively. Most of them seemed to just stop or wind down or run out of gas.

I didn’t see everything I needed to see in Park City, as noted, but I saw six Sundance 2011 acquisitions that had weak or nonexistent endings, or no great scenes, or a major character who was profoundly irritating.

Gavin Wiesen‘s Homework (Fox Searchlight). Problem: The lead, Freddie Highmore , delivers each and every line and emotion exactly the same way with the same faintly self-amused expression, the same faint intellectual-hipster smile, the same space cadet/distracted-artist vibe, the same glassy-eyed expression. I wanted to see Highmore get hit by an MTA bus.

Sean Durkin‘s Martha Marcy May Marlene (Fox Searchlight). Problem: The mildly creepy finale hints at what might be happening — maybe, sorta kinda, probably — but it leaves you up in the air and scratching your head. I walked out saying to myself, “Wait…what happened…?”

Lee Tamahori‘s The Devil’s Double (Roadside). Problem: [Spoiler Warning] Any story about the demonic Uday Hussein is going to create a longing to see him “get his” at the end. And he doesn’t. He just gets shot in the groin area but survives to murder and torture another day until finally getting killed by U.S. troops in 2003. And his double is said to be off in Ireland somewhere. The ending leaves you with nothing.

J.C. Chandor‘s Margin Call (Lionsgate). Problem: It tells a very realistic but highly cynical story about some very smart and selfish Wall Street pricks (including Kevin Spacey‘s half sympathetic character). It ends in a pit of despair, shadows and defeatism.

Jacob Aaron Estes‘ The Details (Weinstein Co.). The ending — or rather a confession scene between Tobey Maguire and Elizabeth Banks — is probably the best thing about this film. But it leaves you convinced of the likelihood that God or fate or whatever is going to drop another piano on Maguire’s head any second.

Drake Doremus‘s Like Crazy (Paramount). Problem [Spoiler Warning]: A film about a very tender and trusting romantic relationship loses more and more energy during the third act. By the time it’s over you’re wishing you’d left at the halfway point. On top of which the middle-aged actors portraying Felicity Jones‘ parents don’t even faintly resemble her. They don’t even look like cousins.

I posted nearly 50 times during my eight-day Sundance stay — riffs, photos, reviews, video clips, complaints, praisings, interviews — and saw about 22 films, give or take. I was up at 6:30 or 7 am every day and usually quit around 1 am, and despite this I couldn’t cover what I wanted to cover and deliver decent HE material.

No one-man-band can beat that festival. You can only go there, work your fingers to the bone, do your best and not nail it. Every year my Sundance experience is about a win-lose ratio of 40-60, if that. You’re always missing two or three or four things in order to do one thing, and then the next day you’re seeing stuff that you missed a day or two earlier, but that means missing more new stuff. You tell yourself that you’re going to work harder than ever before, and it doesn’t effing matter.

It didn’t help that I was given a schlub-level press pass, despite pleas to the press office to please grant me the same kind of first-class, easy-access pass that i’ve been given for the last three years in Cannes. I got into several public screenings by the good graces of several publicist pals (thanks, guys!), but the schlub pass meant I had to spend at least two hours each day inside the Holiday Village press & industry cattle tent. Add that to the usual bus-and-taxi transportation time and that’s a big portion of the daily schedule.

Boo-hoo and poor me, right? I realize, of course, that several other press and industry persons were dealing with similar if not heavier pressures than mine, and that I’m nothing special. But you can’t cover what you need to cover at Sundance and write five or six stories per day — I know that. It’s just not possible.

For the last three years my pink-with-a-yellow-pastille pass at Cannes has allowed me to see most of the films at that festival and bang out fast-crack appraisals of most of them plus photos and whatnot, and I can’t really do that at Sundance. I can maybe see and attend and write about half of what’s doing, if that. I realize that Sundance lost the use of the Racquet Club this year, and that this has led to too many movies showing at too few venues.

Sundancing has always been like this. I’m glad I went. I got a lot done, saw a lot, moved around and dug in here and there. I love the beautiful snowfalls and speed-walking down Kearns Blvd. and the chit-chats on the free Park City bus service, and I felt gratified that I stuck to my decision to cut back on the parties. I basically avoided talking to pretty ladies because that only leads to pointless distraction and downtime. I’m not saying it was an unhappy or terrible experience, but it’s grueling as hell — brutal — and I’m just glad it’s over.

Thanks very much to the Sundance press office for their tireless efforts (I can only imagine what they have to deal with), but please guys….please consider giving me a slicker Anthony Breznican-level press pass next time. Thank you.

“Anyone who has worked at the N.Y. Times understands that it is a uniquely complicated organism…the hubris, the institutional arrogance, the rigidity, the arena of court politics,” says TheWrap‘s Sharon Waxman. “[But still] a vital contribution to democratic society that we can hardly afford to lose.”

And yet Andrew Rossi‘s Page One, she says, “gives a rather superficial assessment of what everybody really wants to know: Will the Times make it, or not? Can the newspaper of record change fast enough, dramatically enough, to adjust to an upside-down business model? That Rossi doesn’t answer.

“In 2008, the Times cut 100 jobs, borrowed $250 million and re-leased its building. In 2009, it cut another 100 jobs. It is distinctly odd to hear someone say on film exactly what I felt at that time: ‘The mood is funereal.’ And, I might have added, not conductive to doing great journalism.”

The standout factor, for me, isn’t the violent conflict between young Egyptian militants and police in Cairo, or the economic factors driving the fury. It’s that none of this would be happening if it hadn’t been for the recent government overthrow in Tunisia. Political rage can ignite very suddenly. Why did many Eastern European socialist governments all topple within months of each other in 1989? All it takes is a flash of a match.

It’s too bad in a sense because Hosni Mubarak, autocratic dictator that he is, has been essentially pro-Israel and a force for political moderation and stablization for the last three decades. If he goes Egypt could become a Muslim brotherhood state, and that, of course, would threaten Israel. I wonder how many other dictatorial governments in the Middle East and northern Africa are going to come under siege?

There’s an almost romantic exhilaration that comes from joining mass street protests and yelling “throw the bums out.” Primal, primitive, decisive. “Violence and revolution are the only pure acts.” — Malcolm McDowell‘s Mick Travis in Lindsay Anderson‘s If…. But once this or that government has toppled and the thrill has subsided, that’s when the heartache begins.

This is very good, but the best repeated-slap of all (starting at 1:21) is self-administered. Anyone can slap anyone else, but when you whack yourself in a fit of self-loathing…watch out. Name the actress and the film. Hint: The self-slapper is being honored tonight at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.

My personal favorite isn’t included. That would be James Cagney‘s one-two-three slap of a bartender in William Wellman ‘s Public Enemy (’31) — choreographed as carefullly as one of Cagney’s dance steps in Yankee Doodle Dandy. First a backhand, then open-handed and downward, and then an upwards backhand on the chin. It starts at 1:15:

Every year (late January/early February) I come home to the same creamy yellow room on the 2nd floor of the Hotel Santa Barbara, and my soul goes “aaahhh.” Great wifi, nice rugs, ice buckets, nicely-situated, small little shitty flatscreen TV, wonderful white bathroom, really nice aroma, etc. And a really great complimentary breakfast in the lobby (fruit, cereal, coffee, croissants, bagels & cream cheese) every day from 7 to 10 am.

Hotel Santa Barbara, room #206 — Thursday, 1.27, 8:44 pm.

I was consumed all today with flying and driving and shoring up advertising revenue. White rental car, driving around, breakfast diner, Camarillo, Ventura…check-in, groceries, all that stuff. And once I arrived in Santa Barbara and unpacked I just felt this urge to succumb to a vegetable mindset. Once you give in to that kind of thing, it’s mesmerizing. And it’s good for the soul. Restful, soothing. I am the walrus & the brussel sprouts.

Three days ago the great political trends-and-numbers analyzer Nate Silver , the author-creator of FiveThirtyEight (now a N.Y. Times column) who was way, way in front of most of the political statistician crowd during the 2008 presidential election, began analyzing the Best Picture Oscar race for Melena Ryzik‘s Carpetbagger column.

This was a day before the Oscar nominations, of course, but Silver’s view is basically that The Social Network will most likely win. The core of his reasoning is (a) that the Academy has been closely following the preferences of the BFCA/Critics Choice awards in recent years and…uuhhh, hold on…uhmm…oh, yeah…and that (b) the Academy’s instant-runoff voting system, “which is no more convoluted than, say, the voting process for Dancing With The Stars,” he says, favors David Fincher‘s film.

“Instant-runoff voting can make a difference when there is a choice between an ‘agreeable’ candidate and one that some people love,” Silver writes, “but other people can’t stand, perhaps tipping the balance toward the former choice. This may have been the situation last year, when we had a somewhat weaker field overall.

“The Social Network is much more than ‘agreeable’, though: yes, nearly everyone likes the movie, but also, some people think it’s absolutely epic . In our experiment, it got to both have its cake and eat it too, picking up a lot of first-place votes at the outset, but also serving as a failsafe for many voters once other films fell by the wayside. If its critical reviews are any guide, it needs to be considered the favorite to win Best Picture, and perhaps a prohibitive one.”

Several thoughts, riffs and reviews about the 2011 Sundance Film Festival are in my head, but Park City Transportation will be here in 11 minutes. I only had six full days of movie-watching here (i.e., last Friday to last night), and I caught only about 22 or 23 films. I’ll be in Los Angeles by 11 am or so. 90 minutes to disembark and rent the car, and then a two-hour drive up the coast to Santa Barbara with occasional stops (photography, seaside contemplation, whatever).

Scott Feinberg (Scottfeinberg.com), Pete Hammond (Deadline Hollywood), Steve Pond (The Wrap), Sasha Stone (Awards Daily), Anne Thompson (IndieWIRE), and yours truly will participate in a first-ever Blogger’s Panel at the Santa Barbara Film Festival next Sunday, 1.30m from 4 to 5:30 pm, at the Santa Barbara Museum.

Attendance by any festival-attending and/or Santa Barbara-residing HE readers would be greatly appreciated. There’s nothing worse than when the panelists outnumber those in the audience. And if you come, please ask slightly challenging and/or rude questions.

Moderated by Peter Rainer, film critic for the Christian Science Monitor and KPCC/NPR host, the panel “will engage in a unique discussion about the dynamics of this year’s awards race and speak on the differing reactions to blogging had by film critics, publicists, movie stars and readers,” the release says. “The ever-expanding reach of new media and its influence on the film industry makes this discussion both interesting to audiences and essential for aspiring and established filmmakers.”

For those who can’t make it I’m told the festival will be videotaping the whole thing and providing all the panelists with a postable embed code later that day. Cool.

My Rutger Hauer/Bloody Mary encounter this morning was cool, smooth and groovy. Hobo With A Shotgun, which I saw directly after, is a relentlessly low-rent Troma splatter film — another ’70s grindhouse flick in “quotes.” (You don’t mind the awful dialogue spoken by the bad guys, right? Of course you don’t!) But the title and the whatever-you-want-to-make-it metaphor are brilliant, and Hauer, 66, is reaping the benefits. His scumbag-blasting bum is the most iconic role he’s played since The Hitcher (’87), and before that Roy Batty in Blade Runner (’82).

Hobo With A Shotgun star Rutger Hauer — Wednesday, 1.26, 11:15 am.

If I was a director-writer, I’d write something for Hauer in which he plays the absolute opposite of an enraged, socially-avenging hobo. I would cast him as a rich, hip sculptor who lives in lower Manhattan and meditates and writes poetry and knows how to prepare Northern Italian cuisine and has his grandkids over on weekends. I would leave the hobo behind and never look back.

Hauer is gentle, polite, considerate. Being a famous actor he’s used to a certain amount of attention. And (I mean this in the most admiring way possible) he’s a bit of an eccentric. He talks about whatever mood he might be in. He goes outside to smoke. He politely declined to drink Bloody Marys with everyone else. (Discipline!) He wore black Converse lace-up sneakers — very cool.

When Jen Yamato seemed to indicate that her brief interview with him was starting to wind down, Hauer appeared to take mild offense — “What, is the fuckin’ interview over now?” I loved him for that. Actors put it right out there. They’re a particular breed. You need to keep the ball in the air and keep feeding the fire.

Hauer’s Converse sneakers

Falco Ink’s Steve Beeman got out a shotgun — a real one — for Hauer to pose with in photos. I snapped a couple in the hallway. And then Hauer and the shotgun charged into the room in which everyone has hanging out, playing the raging bad-ass and shouting, “You’ve seen your last movie!” Love any kind of playtime stuff. I’ll bet Hauer is great with kids.

We all drove up to the Egyptian for the 11:30 am showing in a Magnolia-rented SUV. On the way there I said to Hauer and Eisner with a grin, “I thought we were all going to walk up to the theatre with Rutger carrying the shotgun, and that maybe we might attract the attention of the Park City police.” Hauer, smoking again, was vaguely amused but said he was in the wrong mood for that kind of crap.

We pulled up to the theatre. I went in and sat down in the front, and Eisner and Hauer came on stage to rev the crowd. Hauer’s money quote: “We shoot fucking movies — we don’t shoot fucking people.”

A short while ago Film Experience‘s Nathaniel R. asked what would be the Best Picture lineup if there were only five slots. The knee-jerk answer is that The Social Network, The King’s Speech, True Grit, Black Swan and The Fighter would be the nominees. Right?