This is four months old, but it’s still pleasing to note that others have used the term “water buffalo” to refer to grotesque, low-rent, self-absorbed moviegoers who interrupt your concentration during a film by talking and/or eating in a loud or rank way. (The term “wildebeest” also applies.)

I’ve seen Martin Scorsese‘s Shutter Island (Paramount, 2.10) and am holding my water. But the latest tracking is looking really good for it. Three weeks from opening and it has almost 40% definite interest in all four quadrants. This should translate into $30 to $35 million on opening weekend. Not everyone is going to like or love it, I’m guessing, but 40% DI in all four groups hasn’t been seen since…what, Sherlock Holmes?

As noted yesterday, Lovers of Hate is partly about a 40ish guy sneaking around and peeking at a couple (i.e., his estranged wife and younger brother) enjoying an erotic weekend in a Park City mansion.

This triggered a recollection of a true story that happened to an old high-school friend — let’s call him Gerry — during his first or second year of college.

I forget what university town this happened in, but Gerry was enjoying a back-door romance with a young wife of a blue-collar guy. He was in bed with her in the middle of a weekday, presumably because daylight hours were safe and private for the wife, when all of a sudden they heard the husband’s truck pull up or maybe the front door opening. Something sudden, no time to think. The buck-naked Gerry quickly leapt up, threw his clothes under the bed and ducked into the closet.

The wife didn’t have time to do anything. The husband walked into the bedroom and found her pretending to be sleeping or just waking up. The guy became aroused by her bedsheet nudity and started making some playful moves. The wife, obviously anxious if not freaked, reciprocated her husband’s interest as a way of distracting him or making herself feel less guilty or whatever. Before you knew it they were rolling around and the husband was shedding his greasy overalls and work boots.

Naked Gerry was four or five feet away, peeking and listening and getting more and more freaked. He started imagining what might happen if the husband did the whole nine yards with the wife and then happened to open the closet door. The guy would have obviously exploded if he discovered Gerry when he first arrived, but if he found a naked peeper who’d watched and listened to him make love to his wife from inside his closet he might resort to a knife or a gun or a baseball bat.

After a few minutes of growing panic, Gerry figured it was slightly better to be found out before the husband fucked the wife than after, so he opened the closet door and stepped out and said, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be here, I have to leave,” etc. Shouts and punches resulted, but Gerry escaped and lived to love another day. I assume the trauma of this episode ended the affair with the wife.

If I had been In Gerry’s position I would have stayed in the closet and hoped for the best. If there’d been no discovery he could have kept the thing going with the wife. And if he’d been found out he might have been slugged or bloodied, okay, but he could have pushed the husband off at some point and run out into the street and caught a nearby bus. (Maybe.) Or at least scurried around in back alleys and eventually made his way back to the dorm and picked up his clothes and wallet and keys from the wife later on.

“Given the dogmatic leftism/tree-hugging/granola-chewing/global warming alarmism, etc. that the Sundance Film Festival has always embraced, the only real act of rebellion within a Sundance context would be to present a smart film that questioned any of these positions,” writes Variety‘s Todd McCarthy. “I honestly cannot remember ever seeing what could remotely be described as a conservative documentary at Sundance.

“Granted, not many are made, and I would frankly be amazed if any would be accepted if submitted. But I, for one, would love to see a genuinely critical examination of the many blunders and chicken-hearted actions of the United Nations; a documentary holding up for scrutiny the many wild prophecies of the esteemed Paul Ehrlich, whose doom-ridden predictions about population growth were the first words I heard out of any professor’s mouth as a university freshman, or a film that looked with unbiased clear eyes into the extent of Soviet communist infiltration and financing of American unions, academia, social organizations and other institutions from the 1930s onward. There are many potent unmade films.

“In this light, I was greatly heartened this year by the excellent documentary Waiting for Superman, which vividly and heart-rendingly takes on the dismaying state of public education in the United States. As the director is Davis Guggenheim, who made An Inconvenient Truth, there was no question where this film was coming from. But the film is bracingly non-partisan, as it sweepingly presents how every president since LBJ has tried and failed to improve the system, critically points out how Republicans but, even more so, Democrats are in the pocket of the American Federation of Teachers and is unafraid to demonize the change-obstructing leader of the latter organization.

“With overriding compassion for the millions of kids tragically cheated by persistent inadequacies, the film praises charter and magnet schools that were long derided and blocked by liberals and insists that change is possible, but only by throwing the bums out. And there’s no question who the bums are.

“[Another standout] would be Obselidia, directed and written by a Scottish-born Santa Monica resident named Diane Bell. The film caught my eye from the catalogue due to the description of the female lead as “a beautiful cinema projectionist who works at a silent movie theater.’ (Well, if it worked for Inglourious Basterds, why not?) I’m not saying that this utterly eccentric, movie-loving quasi-romance between two intellectual misfits living vastly out of their proper eras is necessarily the best film in its category; indeed, quite a few Sundancers didn’t like it much at all.

“But this one was my guilty pleasure, a film out of step with current fashion, a gorgeous work in which every frame has the appearance of having been hand-crafted in an art studio. It centers on a man whose mindset is much older than his years, a fellow who, convinced the world is going to end sooner rather than later, devotes himself to collecting obsolete things and writing a compendium about them.

“Although he’ll use a computer in the library where he works, he won’t own one; he prefers a manual typewriter, uses a rotary phone, doesn’t drive (although he lives in Los Angeles, albeit a wonderfully unrecognizable and car-deprived version of it) and fills his home with all manner of faded or useless objects. While more of this world than he, the lady projectionist approves of his sympathies and takes him on an eventful road trip to Death Valley, a place that potentially resembles what the rest of the world will look like in future.

“It’s yet another film about the coming environmental apocalypse, but without a single special effect, collapsed building or zombie-like cretin roaming the landscape. It’s all in a man’s mind, in a film temperamentally indebted to the French New Wave, Woody Allen and Robert Bresson, among others. It’s a total oddity and indisputably a rebel in its utter defiance of and, perhaps, obliviousness to, ‘independent cinema’ as a concept and unified front.”

Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil began running DGA predictions yesterday. So far the score is 20 experts for Team Bigelow and 8 for Team Cameron. The Bigelow boosters are not indulging in wishful thinking. As the PGA awards showed, there’s a good chance that The Hurt Locker could take Best Picture besides. The Directors Guild awards ceremony will happen Saturday evening

Not bad. The cell phone joke is pretty good. Douglas eyeballing the homies climbing into a limo — that’s funny too.

A discussion followed an early-evening screening at Park City’s Eccles theatre of Mal Whitecross and Michael Winterbottom‘s The Shock Doctrine, a smart 80-minute doc based on Naomi Klein‘s 2008 book. The panelists were Whitecross, Winterbottom, Robert Redford, Klein and a writer from The Nation whose name I didn’t get. I huddled with other photographers at the foot of the stage and shot two or three portions.

The doc explains Klein’s “disaster capitalism” theory, which perceives that neo-liberal Chicago School capitalism (the seed of late economist Milton Friedman) feeds on natural disasters, war and terror to establish its dominance. The doc didn’t turn my head around because it more or less says what I already suspected or agreed with. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I can speak only of the last 55% of Bryan Poyser‘s Lovers of Hate, which is how much I saw of this mumblecore pic early this afternoon. The part I caught is inspired low-key slapstick — a revelation. I’ve never liked Blake Edwards-style slapstick because it’s always played too broadly, going for the big yaw-haw. Poyser is playing the same basic game, but with a low-key, toned-down approach. What he delivers is like Noises Off but played at cruise speed, and spiked with typically earnest mumblecore emoting.

Richard Linklater, Lovers of Hate director Bryan Poyser during this afternoon’s party at home of Austin Film Society board member Deborah Green,.

The basic setup is about a successful fantasy-novel writer named Paul (Alex Karpovsky) having arranged an assignation in a Park City mansion with Diana (Heather Kafka), the estranged wife of his older, less successful brother Rudy (Chris Doubek). When the still attached, possessive and enraged Rudy realizes what’s going on, he drives up from Austin to Park City to try and win his wife back. (Or at least guilt-trip her.) What he actually does is engage in a little first-hand espionage and a revival of the hide-and-seek games he used to play with his kid brother.

Lovers of Hate is smallish but engaging, tightly cut, well written, randomly sexy and occasionally quite funny. I like my physical humor natural and un-pushed.

After the screening 42West publicist Adam Kersh drove me and Eric Kohn up to the Park City mountaintop mansion where half of the film was shot. A party for the Lovers of Hate team and some other Austion-lined festivalgoers (including Richard Linklater, who helped the Hate crew in an unofficial way) eventually commenced. The hostess (and former co-owner of the mansion) is Deborah Green, a member of the Austin Film Society. It was she who donated the home for shooting last year at this time.

Deborah Green

Katie Aselton, Poyser

In a just-posted Movieline interview, Tillman Story director Amir Bar-Lev is asked how he feels about the pivotal, incriminating memo in the film, which was authored by General Stanley McChrystal, who currently commands our forces in Afghanistan. Bar-Lev answers as follows:

“Listen, it’s not a complicated answer. No one in the government has ever admitted that there was a cover-up, and to watch the contortions that these public figures go to in order to publicly flagellate themselves without admitting what’s pretty obvious to everybody — that they tried to cover up Pat Tillman‘s death — is absurd.

“General McChrystal is just one of several high-ranking figures who’s never been called to account for his role, and the story continues to this very moment. He gets up there at his swearing-in and basically says what has been said all along, which is, ‘I know what it looks like. I know that it looks like we deliberately covered it up, but believe us that it was this Rube Goldberg-esque chain of mistakes, blunders, and errors that look like a cover-up.’

“The only fucking idiots who buy that, the only fools who believe that, are the mainstream press. It’s just so clear to everyone else, and it’s the equivalent of saying, ‘Honey, I know that it looks like I’m f—ing your sister, but actually I dropped my wallet, and then my belt fell down, and she happened to be there.’ That’s what the military has done in the Pat Tillman case.”

“Catcher in the Rye” author J.D. Salinger, who disappeared and stayed that way after becoming known as the seminal author of adolescent angst and alienation in the 1950s and early ’60s, has died at age 91.

You could almost argue that Salinger played an unwitting, tangential and nonsensical part in the murder of John Lennon. You can’t argue that and actually mean it, of course, because it’s fundamentally absurd. But as John Guare wrote in Six Degres of Separation, “Catcher” proved to be a seminal tome for more than one malignant malcontent.

No plans except seeing Lovers of Hate at 12:15 pm (i.e., 75 minutes from now) and then going to an afternoon party that Richard Linklater will presumably attend and trying to write about Winter’s Bone and The Kids Are All Right, both of which I saw last night. And maybe catching one more Sundance film in one of those little black-drape DVD booths at the Park City Marriott headquarters. And then packing. Outta here tomorrow.

Winter’s Bone director Debra Granik and some of the film’s costars following last night’s screening at the Prospector. The film is straight, sturdy, “real.” But my primary thought as I left is that I’m glad I wasn’t born to poor folk in the Ozarks, and that I’d be accepting if not grateful if the Emperor of the Universe told me I’ll never visit this region ever again for the rest of my life.

I missed Chris Gore’s book-signing ceremony at Dolly’s Books on Main Street. I arrived two or three hours later, flipped through the book, wasted a little time, etc.

Wednesday, 1.27, 2:55 pm.

Thursday, 1.28, 8:10 am.

At Prospector Square cafe last night, just before screening of Winter’s Bone.

Hats off to Oregonian critic and author Shawn Levy for having dropped 50 pounds within the last year. He did the usual diet-and-exercise thing plus cut out drinking beer.

Wednesday, 1.27, 10:55 pm.

Serious cold and heavy snow outside, and this Sundance volunteer — a young Australian guy — was wearing shorts and sneakers. I half-admire the absurdity of dressing like this; I also felt a brief urge to grab this guy and smack him around.

“I’m fairly certain When in Rome (1.29) was not originally intended to be a theatrical motion picture,” writes OK magazine’s Phil Villarreal, “but a propaganda film meant to twist your mind into hating many things: Kristen Bell, the city of Rome — nay, the entire populace of Italy. And possibly life itself.

The Touchstone release is basically “a weak rehash of Love Potion No. 9, with Love Potion No. 9 replaced by crack. Random plotting, insipid dialogue and pathetic acting conjoining to become a medieval torture device in movie form.

“How bad was it? My friend’s easily impressed wife, who once called Get Smart the funniest movie she’s ever seen and actually enjoyed Leap Year, wasn’t all that high on it, dismissing it as ‘gimmicky.’

“Translation: It’s the worst movie ever created, with the possible exceptions of Hellboy II and the Super Mario Bros. movie.”