“You should really check out Don’t Let Me Drown at Sundance,” a guy just wrote me. “It’s by far the best movie here,” he said. How does he know that, and what dies “best” mean? I’ve heard good recommends from two others, but not along the lines of it being the mother of all 2009 Sundance flicks. I’m catching the press and industry screening at 6 pm — an hour from now.

MySpace Celebrity and Katalyst present The Presidential Pledge

You can’t do the kind of column I usually do (seven or eight stories daily, if not more) and see three films daily plus attend a social function at day’s end and get five or six hours in the sack — it just doesn’t work. One or the other has to suffer. And these eighteen-hour days wear you down after four or five days. Not so much physically as emotionally, psychologically.

It’s right around this time during Sundance — middle of the fifth day, three nights and two days to go — that the sum total of all the films you’ve missed and are likely to miss come crashing down upon you. And you begin to feel almost paralyzed. And if that isn’t enough to make you want to reach for medication, there’s also knowing that you’re not posting enough. (I’ve experienced or have been told about several intriguing things since last Thursday morning, and written about none of them.) On top of which is the presumption that HE’s Sundance readership tends to be a bit less because people don’t kow the movies, don’t relate, etc.

I’ll snap out of my funk before long. The process has already begun by writing this item.

A guy just wrote me about this 500 Days of Summer trailer and asked what I thought of the finished film. I’ve had two chances to see it, I told him, but I’ve wound up doing other things because of my Joseph Gordon-Levitt problem, which is fairly severe. I don’t want to get hung up on this, but his internally mannered acting style bugs the hell out of me. It began with Brick and intensified with The Lookout. For me, I mean.

I spoke briefly to An Education’s Carey Mulligan — the big breakout star of Sundance ’09 — yesterday at a post-screening party that was held at Park City’s Village at the Yard. Mulligan is easy to talk with and sharp as a tack, which is always the case with the super-talented. She’s just starting to happen with the press due to the wow eception to Lone Scherfig‘s film here at Sundance, but the talent community has been on to her for a while now.

An Education‘s Carey Mulligan, CAA agent Chris Andrews.

Besides her supporting role The Greatest, a Sundance film which I haven;t yet seen, she also has a small role in Michael Mann‘s Public Enemies . But her career is only now about to take off.

I couldn’t believe it when Mullligan told me she’s sat down with Warren Beatty to talk about a project. Beatty is all but out of the business as far as the public is concerned, but he’s just as plugged in as ever to the latest whatever and whomever. The meeting happened with the facilitation of her CAA agent Chris Andrews.

I told Mulligan I’d seen her performance as Nina in the Broadway production of The Seagull (which also starred Kristin Scott Thomas and Education costar Peter Sarsgaard) but didn’t mention that I didn’t recognize her when I saw An Education, probably because she wore a blonde wig in the play. I think I’ve fulfilled my inanity quotient for the day with this last paragraph.

A lot of people said “Gump!” when Benjamin Button was first screened. This video is for those astute minds who initially waved the comparison off.

The tone of Glenn Ficarra and John Requa‘s I Love You Phillip Morris is hard to describe. It’s a kind of dark comedy (i.e., there are bits that are intended to draw laughter), but since it’s a tale of obsessive gay loony love there’s really not that much to “laugh” at. But there’s conviction in it — the emotions are as real as it gets — and the performances by Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor as the lovers are intense and out-there and fully grounded. Nobody’s putting anyone on, I mean.

The tone is somewhere between high-toned soap opera and hyper-real absurdism, but it’s more or less fact-based. And the things that make it respectable and worthy and bold (which I feel it definitely is) are the sad moments, the irrational I-love-you acts, the bad behavior, the hurt. It’s nuts, this movie, and that’s what I liked about it. Love is strange, silly, demeaning, glorious, heartbreaking. A drug and a tidal wave that can destroy as easily as restore. And I Love You Phillip Morris is not laughing at this. At all. It’s a movie with balls and dicks and loads of heart and soul.

I have to go to the breakfast being hosted by IFC Films for Steven Soderbergh (which starts in half an hour). I can get into Phillip Morris a bit more this afternoon.

I like this line from the Sundance notes: “As a primer on the irresistible power of a man who is either insane or in love (is there a difference?), I Love You Phillip Morris surely serves to remind us of the resilience of the human spirit.”

Longtime writing partners Ficarra and Requa are making their directing debut with this. It’s based based on the true-life tale of Steve Russell (Carrey), a onetime married police officer turned gay Texan con man, and his passionate love he shares with “blonde southern queer” named Phillip Morris (McGregor) whom he meets in prison, where he’s been sent for credit card fraud.

Carrey’s website says that “after reading the script, he immediately signed to do the movie, explaining that there have been only three scripts that he truly felt compelled to do — The Truman Show, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and this.

“The film had a very low budget, estimated to be just $14 million,” it reads. “It was initially to be directed by Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting), but he dropped out to make Milk. So Carrey agreed to let Ficarra and Requa direct. The financing is from director Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp. The filmmakers hope to sell domestic rights at the Sundance Film Festival.”

Lone Scherfig‘s An Education, a coming-of-age period drama set in 1961 London, is the absolute shit — the best film of the Sundance Film Festival, a finely tuned and deeply engaging film by regular popcorn-watching standards, an award-calibre drama that will definitely be in contention at the end of the year, and a movie that has launched a genuine movie star in an old-fashioned and yet very new-fashioned sense — 23 year-old Carey Mulligan.

An Education star Carey Mulligan during post-screening q & a at the Egyptian — 1.18.09, 5:05 pm.

I know that special old-soul-mixed-with-youthful-effervescence quality that you see in very few actors and actresses over the years, and trust me, Mulligan has it. A wondrously true and satisfying film has broken out of the Sundance ’09 pack, and a brand-new actress with just the right face and just the right approach and precisely the right touch of sadness in the corners of her mouth has hit one out of the park.

If I was a buyer I would have left the theatre at the 45 minute mark and started offering whatever it takes. When a movie works this well you don’t need to see the whole thing. You want to see it all, of course, but you know five minutes in that it knows what it’s doing and is playing the tune with just the right pitch and calibration.

It helps greatly that An Education is a sublime coming-of-age piece that’s been directed with fine assurance by Scherfig (Italian for Beginners) and that it has a wonderfully tart and wise and natural-sounding script by Nick Hornby. And that it also has a perfect cast that includes Peter Sarsgaard, Dominic Cooper, Alfred Molina, Cara Seymour, Olivia Williams and Emma Thompson . But it all rests squarely on Mulligan’s shoulders, and she keeps it fully aloft for its 95 minute length.

Nick Hornby, Carey Mulligan, Lone Scherfig, Dominic Cooper after this afternoon’s screening of An Education at Park City’s Egyptian.

Within two or three minutes I knew I was watching someone extraordinary. Mulligan’s Jenny is a very bright and vivacious 16 year-old living a somewhat stifled, middle-class life and pinning her hopes on being admitted to Oxford University. She is spirited but not daffy, off-beautiful and clearly wise beyond her years. What’s extra-special about Mulligan is that she possesses — in this film, at least — a perky A-student Audrey Hepburn quality that makes you fall for her at the drop of a hat.

The odd thing is that An Education is set at a time when Ms. Hepburn’s career was going great guns, and it has a special made-in-the-60s quality — you’re thinking right away that John Schlesinger of 1965 or ’66 could have directed it, or Francois Truffaut — that is quite intoxicating. It sort of allows you think that you’re watching it in the ’60s, and that the very-new-to-the-scene Mulligan is about to knock Hepburn off her pedestal because she has the same kind of pluck but a lot more soul and melancholy in her eyes.

The story is about how Jenny, bored to years by her suburban existence, is instantly smitten by a much older but very urbane and amusing guy, David (Sarsgaard), in part because he brings so much in the way of excitement and sophistication into her life. A bit of a rascal and a con artist and yet a man of taste with a sense of real fun, David half-persuades but more often hoodwinks Jenny’s parents (Molina, Seymour) into letting him take her to this and that concert, art auction, grand party or late-night dinner with his two lah-lah friends, played by Cooper and Rosemund Pike.

David essentially becomes Jenny’s new teacher — her escort-guide into a glam but shady world whose true nature and agenda reveals itself only very gradually. But when it becomes clear…well, let’s spare the details for now but it’s a serious breath-taker. But our Jenny is no basket case waiting to crumble. The fact that she’s strong, bright and focused is one of the pleasures of her character. There’s never any worries on that score.

An Education, trust me, will be announced as a Fox Searchlight or Focus Features or Sony Pictures Classics acquisition within hours. Okay, by tomorrow.

Doug Pray‘s Art & Copy turned out to be a little thin. It’s basically a chapter-by-chapter history of the most legendary ad campaigns of the last 45 or 50 years, each chapter with a corresponding flattering profile of the advertising exec (or execs) who dreamt each one up.

But there’s no arching theme to it, no undercurrent, no inquiring line of thought. Pray doesn’t begin to think about the odious implications of modern advertising (as Adam Curtis did in The Century of the Self). Nor does he think to draw parallels between certain legendary ad copy lines and the contours and tendencies of the culture from which they sprung.

One example of this was pointed out by Tom Wolfe in his legendary 1976 essay “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening.” In 1961 a copywriter in the employ of Foote, Cone & Belding named Shirley Polykoff came up with the line: “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!” The basic attitude of having “only one life,” said Wolfe, contradicted a general belief among families and nations that had existed for centuries, which you could sum up as a belief in “serial immortality.”

Boiled down, serial immortality means that we’re all part of a familial stream — our lives being a completion or fulfillment of our parents’ lives and our children’s lives completing and fulflling our own, and everyone understanding that we’re part of the same genetic river of existence and spirit. Polykoff’s copy line, which was written for Clairol hair coloring, basically said “the hell with that — it’s just me, it’s just my life and my goals, and I’m going to satisfy myself!” By the time the early ’70s rolled around the culture had begun to believe in the “me first” philosophy en masse.

I just wish Pray had decided to dig into this and other correlations between advertising and cultural values.

I’m about to see Duncan Jones‘ Moon at the Yarrow. Then comes Lone Scherfig‘s An Education at 3 pm at the Egyptian, and then 500 Days of Summer, a Fox Searchlight film, at 7:15 pm. I don’t know how to do all this and get in the writing time. I don’t know how to do the writing and see the right films. I do know that items like this are boring to read. I’ll try and post sometime between 5 and 7 pm today.

If you’re trying to see a film at the Yarrow hotel press-and-industry theatre, you have to go into this tent and wait. Okay, you can always rebel and refuse (as I did last night) but most people submit. It’s not some terrible indignity, but it does feel like a stockyard pen inside.