I completely agree about Ted Chung‘s A Thousand Words, a five-minute dialogue-free short that was posted on Vimeo four days ago. It’s an elegant, concise and very affecting portrait of big-city loneliness and little instant connections that go “ping” and are gone seconds later. The emotions are halting, delicate, true. Beautiful piano score.

A Thousand Words from Ted Chung on Vimeo.

The HE reader who sent it along (i.e., “Paisley Merriweather”) is calling it an “absolutely phenomenal” short “that blows away any of the shorts shown at Sundance this year. Chung, working with no resources, could be the next Cuaron or Soderbergh.” The short is starting to blow up all across the web — over 7,000 views in 3 days.

Yesterday Variety‘s Todd McCarthy posted a wrap-up piece called “Sundance synchs with the times — Education, Push emblematic of Obama age.”

Bill Benenson and Gene Rosow‘s Dirt! The Movie is a straightforward tutorial movie that reminds us of the importance of keeping in touch with basic organic elements, and explains in numerous ways how it’s a profound mistake to live a 100% synthetic lifestyle, which applies to everyone who doesn’t work outdoors or isn’t dirt poor. It’s not all that clever or penetrating, frankly, but Dirt! is focusing on a critical quality-of-life issue that we need to pay attention to. As in urgently, muy importante, do-or-die, etc.

I’m referring to the fact that tens of millions of us, perhaps hundreds of millions of us, live like WALL*E tele-tubbies, and that choosing to exist this way is definitely hastening the end of the planet because it’s messing with the natural way of things as well as sedating our souls.

Inspired by William Bryant Logan‘s Dirt, the Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, pic “employs a colorful combination of animation, vignettes, and personal accounts from farmers, physicists, church leaders, children, wine critics, anthropologists, and activists to learn about dirt — where it comes from, how we regard (or disregard) it, how it sustains us, the way it has become endangered, and what we can do about it,” etc. Yes — the Sundance program notes make it sound a bit humdrum.

But it’s not boring. It wasn’t for me, at least. It’s moderately interesting. That said, I didn’t find it particularly arousing. I would never get into a fight over this movie, I can tell you that.

Dirt! The Movie reminded me of a Los Angeles aroma experience that happened in ’80. I had flown out from Manhattan to do some set stories, and I remember as I stepped onto the portable metal staircase (which airlines used occasionally back then) and walked down the steps and across the LAX tarmac that a delightful aroma filled my nostrils. It was partly the dry, half-sandy L.A. terra firma — a mixture of earth, gravel and beach sand — mixed in with the scent of grass and scrub brush growing on the nearby hills. I could also detect a faint whiff of sea air along with the scent of tar and concrete and gasoline.

Accustomed as I was to the stink of New York, it reminded me that L.A. was a city with a little organic unruliness — a place in which nature’s rough and tumble still existed in the margins. No longer, of course. In the 28 or 29 years since that tarmac moment, the last remnants of organic L.A. have been pretty much paved over and forgotten about. (Except in the hill areas and on the coast.) I’m 100% sure this same effect has manifested in every urban area in every corner of the world.

I remember the smell of earth from my time as a young kid. I used to play in it all day long on weekends and during the summers. It’s a pretty horrible thing to realize that earth aromas are not just being eradicated, but in all likelihood have been eradicated now and forever.

Last-chance Sundance screenings and the distraction of the Dowd-Anderson fisticuffs caused me to miss this Bagger video two days ago. N.Y. Times Oscar blogger and Sundance guy David Carr tries snowboarding with Woody Harrelson and falls four times. Backwards. Landing on packed snow.

N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis today posted a Sundance ’09 summation piece, in which she hugs Unmade Beds, Big Fan, Big River Man, In the Loop, Crude, Cold Souls and Lulu and Jimi.

And yet she makes no mention at all of Lone Scherfig‘s An Education . And I saw Manohla in line for this one! She obviously isn’t required to agree with me that it was far and away the best film of the festival, but to ignore it is… what’s the right word? Curious? Obstinate? Bewildering? Not mentioning a film that everyone has either praised or at least acknowledged as a huge festival favorite obviously implies a negative attitude.

But I love Dargis’s interpretation of Steven Soderbergh‘s The Girlfriend Experience, to wit: “Clearly far more interested in the metaphoric usage of flesh peddling than its impact on real bodies, Soderbergh turns prostitution into an allegory about moviemaking in which the whore is the filmmaker, her clients are the producers and the scum of the earth is — you guessed it — the critic who reviews her work (negatively).”

In an online chat earlier today between Washington Post columnist and film critic Ann Hornaday, a Virginia guy named “ArtMovieLover” voiced strong support for the hiring of the potentially pugilistic and hot-tempered John Anderson as a full-time Post critic.

Washington Post critic/columnist Ann Hornaday; two-fisted film critic John Anderson; Jeff “the Dude” Dowd.

“Now that your sometime colleague John Anderson has gone so far as to punch out Jeff ‘the Dude’ Dowd at Sundance over his endless advocacy for a documentary that Anderson didn’t care for, can the Post please hire Anderson full time?

“I know, I know. Such behavior is supposed to be seen as boorish and unprofessional, but frankly, I like it that Anderson doesn’t put up with endless lobbying over breakfast, even when coming from someone supposedly as laid back as ‘the Dude.’ Sock it to ’em, John! Let’s have your muscular prose at the Post full-time!”

Hornaday replies as follows: “You are too funny. I’m a believer in non-violence and never advocate physical aggression to solve problems. However, I also consider the breaking of bread a sacred act that should never, ever be desecrated. When someone’s eating, you back off, full stop. At Sundance, of course, you’re dealing with an environment of little sleep, a lot of stress, frayed nerves and inflamed passions. I understand John’s frustration, and I hope he and Jeff can find a way to come to terms.”

Caroline Kennedy was pretty awful with her shyness and sagging shoulders and “you knows” and whatnot. But New York’s just-appointed U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand isn’t that great either. She has a kind of yappy suburban-soccer-mom voice, she speaks in banal bromides, she’s short and she looks like the wife of a rural Austrian baker. I don’t feel any charisma, and I sense nothing in the way of intellectual force or serious Bella Abzug-styled backbone. And she’s clearly proud of her 100 rating from the NRA.

Moderately funny, but goes on too long. Good newscaster and politican “gets.” Good naked Jack Black. But the music is fucking awful. And…wait, was that Joseph Gordon Levitt?

For several months I’ve been suppressing a thought about MSNBC’s Chuck Todd out of a fear of sounding banal and superficial, but — I think Andy Warhol would back me up here — the only thing lamer than saying something shallow is being afraid to sound shallow. So here goes. It’s real, it’s happening, and it can’t be ignored any longer.

Todd is only 36 years old, and his hairline is in serious trouble. As a TV reporter and the chief White House correspondent for NBC and MSNBC, Todd really doesn’t want to be a baldie — I know he doesn’t want to put out that metaphor — so he does need to do deal with it, Joe Biden-style, before it’s too late. The remedies are simple and affordable.

The financial woes that KO’ed Rod Lurie‘s Nothing But The Truth last month were briefly forgotten when this incontestably fine film, which I called “Lurie’s best, hands down” in my 8.18.08 review, was honored last night as the opening attraction at the 2009 Santa Barbara Film Festival.

Nothing But The Truth costar Noah Wyle, director-writer Rod Lurie at last night’s after-party in downtown Santa Barbara.

The Bob Yari Chapter 11 tragedy, announced on 12.13.08, turned Nothing But The Truth into an instant dead horse — no bookings, no ads, no nothin’.

I praised NBTT “because it’s feels smoother and crisper and more confidently dug into the soil than The Contender or Resurrecting The Champ or The Last Castle. It’s a growth-spurt thing, a movie that says, almost with a kind of shrug, ‘Okay, now I really know what I’m doing.’ And because each and every actor nails what they’ve been hired to do like the pros they are, and I don’t just mean the leads — Kate Beckinsale, Vera Farmiga, Alan Alda and Matt Dillon, all of whom hit triples and homers.

“I also mean costars Noah Wyle and David Schwimmer and even the homie-girl actresses who play Beckinsale’s cellmates when she goes to the pound for refusing to give up a source. I mean everyone up and down. Everybody delivers , nobody ‘acts.’

“Yes, I know and am friendly with Lurie, but I know good craft and good material when I see it, and I’m sure as hell not going to sit on what I know and feel because of a reverse-blowjob concern.”

Outside Santa Barbara’s State Street hotel — 1.23.09, 7:05 am.

Wetness from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo.

Who wasn’t shocked at yesterday’s announcement about Stephen Daldry‘s The Reader being one of the Best Picture Oscar nominees? The Envelope ‘s Pete Hammond, for one.

In the wake of last week’s BAFTA announcement in which The Reader received several key noms including best picture, Hammond wrote that “this is the movie that has cropped up again and again in conversations I’ve had with academy members, not The Dark Knight.

“That decidedly unscientific survey has again proven to be right,” Hammond said yesterday. “My ‘group’ has in previous years pointed clearly to upset victories for My Cousin Vinnie‘s Marisa Tomei, Crash and Marion Cotillard winning for Best Actress. I’m getting on the phone with them right now to see who wins on Feb. 22. I’ll let you know.”