The balcony press lounge at the Park City Marriott — 1.26, 12:15 pm. I came here this morning in search of decent wifi, which this area definitely has (and thank God for that). The condo wifi, as noted earlier this morning, is dreadful.

AFI Fest programming director Robert Koehler (who’s also reviewing Sundance flicks for Variety).stopped by to say that Debra Granik‘s Winter’s Bone, the second-hottest Sundance title besides Crayfish…no, Catfish (which I’ll be seeing in two or three hours time), is “wildly over-rated..in fact the heat it’s been getting here is a demonstration of what’s wrong with the Sundance Film Festival. It’s the same thing with regular critics who sit through crap film after crap film, and then when something fairly decent comes along they’re so grateful that they over-praise it.”

Remove the first 20 or so minutes and Jay and Mark Duplass‘s Cyrus could be called a mature, somewhat comedic and satisfying handling of an unusual romantic triangle situation — 40ish love-starved guy (John C. Reilly), 40ish mom (Marisa Tomei) and quietly psychotic fat-ass son ( Jonah Hill). It’s “funny” here and there but mostly it’s just believable, buyable and emotionally even-steven. A truly welcome surprise.

In the hands of Adam McKay or Shawn Levy or any of the other big-studio whores who are always directing expensive Eloi comedies,Cyrus would have been a Joe Popcorn animal-bullshit torture chamber movie like Stepbrothers, in which Reilly costarred with Will Ferrell. But it’s something else with the Duplass brothers running the show. It’s quietly absorbing and occasionally hilarious, and made all the better by superb acting.

But those first 20 or so minutes are very weird. For during this period Cyrus plays like it was directed by McKay or Levy. Reilly behaves so over-the-top needy and neurotic and boorish and lacking in social skills that I was ready to leave. “I really don’t want to hang with this asshole,” I was saying to myself. I was just about to bolt when all of a sudden Reilly hooked up with Tomei, went home with her, fell in love and turned into a different person.

It plays as if the Duplass brothers suddenly changed their minds about Reilly’s character and decided to go with a much calmer and more emotionally secure vibe. It’s almost as if they sat down and said “we need to get the animals to see this so let’s make an animal comedy straight out of the Will Ferrell loser file so the Fox Searchlight trailer guys can sell this portion, and then turn around and make Cyrus into a whole ‘nother bird — a movie aimed at a smarter crowd — about 20 or so minutes into the running time.”

The Sundance press notes describe Derek Cianfrance‘s Blue Valentine, which had its big press screening last night, as “an intimate, shattering portrait of a disintegrating marriage.” That sorta works if you leave out “shattering” and replace it with “heavily affected in a way that may be tolerable for some viewers, depending on their tastes and limits.”

Michelle Williams, Ryan Gosling

It’s an old-fashioned arthouse relationship movie with next to no story but an intensely observational art-bubble thing going on in which we’re shown a relationship between Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams in two time periods — young, hot and feverishly in love and somewhat older, frustrated and not in love or certainly less so.

And on and on it goes for two hours. Back and forth, back and forth with lotsa stylistic coolness. I was in and out of it — admiring the naked emotionalism at times, dozing off, hating being in the world of another twitchy and heavily mannered Gosling performance with cigarettes, checking my watch, sitting there like a Val Lewton zombie and half-wishing I was somewhere else. But knowing at the same time I was watching a pretty good film, or certainly one made by some undeniably talented folks who would rather shoot themselves than make another relationship movie in the same old way.

For the most part Blue Valentine is about Cianfrance showing off his John Cassevetes chops — one deep invadin’, high falutin’ close-up intimacy moment after another with the camera doing the old duck-and-weave.

It’s basically about Gosling and Michelle Williams giving us their acting-class utmost as a couple of not-very-bright instinctuals who want each other and lah-dee-dah-dee-dah and then they’re older and life is harder with the burden of the cute little daughter and all. I couldn’t tell what was wrong except for Williams being frustrated with Gosling’s blue-collar complacency and Gosling going “whassa matter?….wait, wait, whassa matter?” and smoking so many damn cigarettes (even while holding his daughter) that I wanted to pick him off with a high-powered rifle.

Gosling drives me nuts every time. He’s always doing that rop-bop-a-loo-bop, always focused on behaving in his own particular way and making damn sure that we notice this.

Gosling is inventive and never predictable, and I’m going to loathe him for years and years to come for this very nimbleness, this determination to imprint and infiltrate each and every film he’s in with a Ryan Gosling mood spray. He’s a behavioralist who lives inside a very deep mine shaft, and when he takes over a movie (as he does this one) you’re suddenly deep in that mine with him and noticing that air is thin and wondering why but feeling it might be time to get the hell out of there, and yet knowing this would be heresy because Gosling is, at the end of the day, a very intense presence with a very shifty bag of tricks that most other actors would never devise, much less resort to.

I felt like I needed some kind of flu shot after watching 30 or 40 minutes of Blue Valentine. By the end the flu had totallly taken over my system. I felt defeated, spent. But it’s a pretty good film. There’s never a moment in which you’re saying to yourself “this is crap, I can’t take this.” What you’re saying is “this a high-end thing made by some fiercely committed people, and I can barely stand it.”

I especially admired Gosling’s receding hairline in the parts in which he’s somewhat older. The whole time I was wondering if Gosling’s hair is really thinning and that he wore a hairpiece for the youthful scenes, or if he and Cianfrance decided to have his head partly shaved and then have the makeup guy give him a very realistic thinning-hair coif. Either way I was mesmerized. Blue Valentine deserves some kind of special commendation for this aspect alone.

My AT&T air card wifi keeps failing — connects weakly and then dies, connects weakly and then dies. And the wifi at the Park Regency is worthless. The guy at the desk says it can’t keep up with the increased demand from festivalgoers. The situation is so bad I wish I had an extra phone line so I could try dial-up. (Remember dial-up?) I’ve been trying to post a piece about Blue Valentine and two other films I saw yesterday. I guess I’ll hump it over to the Yarrow and work there. This is a kind of hell.

“I knew where the American people were on health care….they wanted somebody to get up and fight for it…I don’t believe in bipartisanship….after the way they ran the country down for the last eight years, what the hell do you want me to work with them on? I told Gibbs he was full of shit..and he gave me the Senator Leahy f-bomb…[I said] do you understand that you’re losing your base?”

MSNBC’s Ed Schultz tells it very well. If only someone like him would stand tall and strong within the Obama inner circle. “It’s my mission to tell it like it is…I’m only trying tio do the movement a favor…It’s money, it’s dirty, it’s wrong…it’s not us, it’s not the American people,…mistakes are made, but tomorrow’s another day…if we don’t have a course correction, who else is going to do it?…We’re with you, but you’ve gotta be with us.”

I got up around 7:30, wrote most of the morning and then saw two Sundance films this afternoon — Jay and Mark Duplass‘s Cyrus, an exceptionally well acted mother-son-boyfriend relationship dramedy, and Adam Green‘s Frozen, the Open Water-on-a-ski-lift movie in which the predators are frigid cold and wolves. I don’t know what’s wrong, but I can’t make myself write about them. The engine won’t turn over. Tomorrow morning, I suppose.

Tonight I’m seeing Derek Cianfrance‘s Blue Valentine and Dan Klores‘ Reggie Miller vs. the New York Knicks.

Vanity Fair.com’s Julian Sanction has assembled a list of indie-film tropes and the Sundance movies that employ them. Car crashes, dead children, prominent cigarette smoking, slovenly beards indicating despair, deadbeats, dead parents, dead pets, etc.

It’s awfully nice to be named as one of the top 50 movie blogs, except that 50 is an awfully large number. I’d rather be on a list of the top 20, say — that would matter a bit more.

Four days ago The Gothamist‘s John Del Signore posted an interview with A Serious Man costar Fred Melamed — i,.e., the bulky balding bearded guy who plays Sy Abelman. I adore Melamed’s performance in this film, but then I love every aspect of this under-loved Coen brothers’ masterpiece.

“It’s funny, people always talk about the ending,” Malamed says. “They say they’re unsatisfied by the ending, they didn’t like it — friends of mine, people I respect. To me, the ending of the movie sends you back into the movie. The endings of some movies ease you out of the movie and back to your normal life. You say, ‘That was an interesting movie, now I’m going to have my dinner or whatever.’ But somehow this movie stays in some part of your brain, at least it did for me, and you really wind up thinking about it a lot.”

In his 1.25 Movieline review of Michael Winterbottom‘s The Killer Inside Me, Seth Abramovitch describes the brutal scene in which Jessica Alba is beaten to a pulp by Casey Affleck‘s Lou.

“After making love [to Alba] and discussing their plans to reconvene a few weeks down the line, Lou pulls on a pair of black gloves, then begins to punch Alba in the face, at full force, repeatedly. The camera does not turn away, and as he takes a good dozen shots at her head, her features begin to distort at each impact with his closed fist. As she lies on the floor, unconscious, unrecognizable and barely breathing, he asks if she can hear him. He tells her he loves her, and that’s he’s sorry. He then [delivers] several more punches.”

The backers of this film are anticipating that Joe Popcorn will want to pay to see this? The deal as I understand it is that if Eli Roth is directing it’s totally deplorable torture porn, but if Michael Winterbottom is directing it’s a Sundance entry and a film that upscale cineastes might want to see.

Remember Cary Grant‘s irritation in Bringing Up Baby when Katharine Hepburn told her mother that his name is “Mr. Bone”? In that light, Winter’s Bone, Debra Granik‘s dramatic competition entry, is arguably the strangest-sounding and most unintriguing title among all the films showing at Sundance 2010. (The other contender for this prize is Restrepo, Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington‘s doc about an Iraq War veteran.)

But MSN’s James Rocchi assures that Granik’s film ranks very high on his list and that I should make every effort. My next and only remaining shot at seeing it will be at the Racquet Club on Tuesday at 8:30 am. Granik’s last film was the memorable Down to the Bone (which included a break-out performance by Vera Farmiga), so she obviously has a thing about that word.