I lasted ten minutes with Lymelife earlier this afternoon. I was talking to MCN’s Kim Voynar about her damaged left foot, the lights came down, the movie played a bit and I was starting to think about escaping less than five minutes later. I knew I had to five minutes after that. I know from ten-minute bailouts. I don’t make a habit of them — maybe five or six times in my life — but I now if films aren’t going to work for me very quickly.

We all know what it’s like to feel intrigued and curious and be unsure what a film is doing or where it’s going during the first 10 or 20 minutes. This wasn’t like that. The energy was wrong, the vibe was off, the fatigue factor had manifested within minutes and it just wasn’t happening.

This was “I’m not going to sit through a leafy suburban movie with Keiran Culkin playing Alec Baldwin‘s son.” This was “I’m not going to watch the weathered-looking, saggy-faced Timothy Hutton — it takes decades of partying to get a face like his — play an emotionally repressed weirdo for the next 90 plus minutes.” This was the “oh, no, I’ve been here before, I know what’s going to happen” indie Sundance blahs/blues.

I might get stuck with it on a plane some day and watch it all through. But maybe not. I just know/knew I couldn’t sit there and get into a movie starring Keiran Culkin, especially one with him wearing a truly dorky looking light-blue mixed with dark-blue winter jacket.

“I didn’t see you at the [today’s] Moon screening,” a distribution guy wrote me just now. “If you weren’t, you missed the first breakout hit of the festival.

“It’s a sensational piece of indie sci-fi with cult potential. Brilliantly conceived. A superb performance by Sam Rockwell — award-worthy in fact.

“The only problem is that there’s a big twist about 45 minutes in that would be criminal to reveal. I hope respectful critics like yourself won’t spoil it! Definitely one to make sure you see.

“I believe Sony Classics has the rights for the US, England and Australia, although I don’t know if

that’s public knowledge yet. If it isn’t you didn’t get it from me.”

It can very get awfully tiring…depressing, really, to watch groups of credentialed, shaggy-haired, snow-booted Sundance journalists and filmmakers who are sitting near you in the lounge smiling and gleefully laughing with each other, one joke after another, chit-chat, chuckle-chuck, hah-hah, grins and mirth…no end to it, constantly, hour after hour. It’s cool for the first hour or so, but after the two-hour mark I could just scream.

A little part of me — okay, one that I don’t admire and probably shouldn’t acknowledge — wants to go up to one of these groups, bend over and say in a very quiet voice, “I’m sorry, guys, it’s obviously none of my business…but did you know that the stuff you say in conversation doesn’t always have to be funny? I mean, you don’t have to laugh uproariously all the time? You can just sit there and chill down and be heavy-cat Zen types. You could even be silent for a bit and read about the jet that splashed into the Hudson yesterday. Oh, I’m sorry — not funny enough, right?

“I’m mentioning this, no offense, because your constant smiling and chuckling and laughing are driving me up the wall.”

I moved this morning from the shitty condo with the cold-air seeping through the living room window and no wifi and the total-agony mattress from Jakarta to a really sublime two-floor condo on Upper Norfolk (i.e., about 150 feet above Main Street) with great wifi, a comfy bed, a flat-screen TV, a nice kitchen, two full bathrooms, and a snow-covered outdoor porch with a great view.

Twi-story condo on Upper Norfolk — Friday, 1.16, 10:25 am.

After moving my stuff to the new pad I took a cheap cab (only $5 bills — driver gave me a break) to the Yarrow hotel — the only place in town with decent free wifi — for a little work, and then walked across the frigid, snow-blown parking lo to the Holiday Cinemas to line up for the press screening of John Dower‘s Thriller in Manilla, a very decent doc about the long rivalry and bitter feud between Muhammud Ali and Joe Frazier that climaxed in their legendary1975 heavyweight championship bout in the Philiopines. (More on this later.)

But all this morning and some of the afternoon have been taken up by AT&T wi-fi air card issues. I had to download a new AT&T Communication Manager and load new drivers, etc. Then I had to call the AT& T tech guys again when something called “error 680” came up. Then I went over to the Park City Marriott to do some more writing only to discover that the free wi-fi is overloaded by too many people trying to use, the result being that the service stops after 10 minutes of use (or less). And the AT&T air card still isn’t working. It’s been hell, nothing but hell.

Anyway who wants a free ticket to the 6 pm public screening of The Missing Person, get in touch. I decided to catch the 5:15 pm showing of Taking Chance at the Racquet Club instead. Oh, and tomorrow night’s 9 pm screening of When You’re Strange — I’m not going to that one either. I’m sitting in a 2nd floor lounge/lobby in the Park City Marriott adjacent to the press office until 4:30 pm, or just write.

Press office comp ducatsthat I requested in writing yesterday. The people running the press ticket hand-outs have been fairly efficient about it.

Adam Elliot‘s Mary and Max, which opened the Sundance Film Festival tonight with separate but simultaneous screenings for press and the public, is a very high-end claymation drama in every respect — adult yet sweet, tender but not twee, beautifully written, honest about handicaps and melancholia but full of warmth and caring and a general mood of oddball quirk. Older kids will roll with it (I hope) but it’s not aimed at the conventional family trade, which tends to prefer upbeat formula stuff with far-less-weird characters and euphoric endings.

Mary and Max ends sadly but movingly in a way that animation-claymation has rarely touched. It’s a lot darker, wittier, sadder, dankier, more morose and — this is a key thing — Asperger’s Syndrome-y than I expected, and so I kind of warmed to it early on. It could have been shorter — 70 minutes, say, instead of 92 — but that aside, it’s not at all bad and is actually something I can fully recommend.

Cheers to Elliott (who, I’m told, has a mild Asperger’s affliction himself, which explains some of the authority the film has) and his voice cast — Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Toni Collette, Barry Humphries and Eric Bana.

I realize I was full of resistance about seeing this film in previous posts. That’s actually a good way to come at a new film — i.e., expecting very little.

Variety‘s Michael Fleming and Dave McNary are reporting that Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox “have settled their battle over Watchmen with WB getting some face-saving points, but Fox getting the equivalent of a movie star’s gross participation.

“Warner Bros. gets the right to open its superhero pic on March 6th as planned, and the WB logo will be the only one on the film, sources said.

“Fox, on the other hand, will emerge with an upfront cash payment that sources pegged between $5 million and $10 million, covering reimbursement of $1.4 million the studio invested in development fees, and also millions of dollars in legal fees incurred during the case.”

The National Fisheries Institute has issued a video challenge to Jeremy Piven over statements he made this morning to Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America.

I caught Tom DiCillo‘s When You’re Strange, a 90-minute doc about Jim Morrison and The Doors, inside a viewing booth at the Park City Marriott early this afternoon. I also saw Ondi Timoner‘s We Live in Public, a doc about ’90s internet pioneer Josh Harris. A study and a history of internet obsession, Timoner’s film is easily the more thoughtful and provocative of the two. But DeCillo’s is more engaging because Morrison is still a fascinating wild man, and at the same time a little more average-human than he seemed in the Stone pic.

The short reaction to When You’re Strange is (a) it’s a much more perceptive dive into the legend of the Doors than Oliver Stone‘s film was, (b) it’s in love with Doors music (which I feel is a very good thing); (c) it has a good amount of heretofore unseen footage of Morrison and the band; but (d) it’s stymied time and again by DeCillo’s trite narration. And I mean “give me a fucking break” trite.

There has to be some way to recount the turnovers and disturbances of the hallucinatory ’60s without sounding like Tom Brokaw. You have to write and talk about those times with a sense of psychedelic impressionism. Or you have to talk about them like Peter Fonda did in The Limey — i.e., with subdued feeling and authority. I can only report that I began to go crazy listening to DeCillo’s litany of pat cliches. It’s not that the narration gets it “wrong” per se, but it makes one of the most electric and tumultuous times in American history sound so damn tidy and sorted out…almost vanilla.

And I didn’t like the voice of the narrator either. (I don’t know who it is, but he sounds like an ad agency guy who hasn’t done enough and hasn’t read enough.) It should have been narrated by someone with a hung-over voice, like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now. Speaking like Michael Herr in Dispatches, maybe, because the ’60s were nothing if not a war. A voice that sounds like it knows from strangeness and pot and other-ness, a little shade of the weird and the fanciful.

Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek has said he’s had no input into the film, but that he’s seen it and likes it, calling it “a tale of American shamanism” with a touch of the “supernatural”. He says there’s also some rare footage in there that even stumped the Doors archivist. That’s all true as far as it goes. I don’t want to sound dismissive of this film, but it occasionally irritated the fuck out of me.

Manzarek told Billboard earlier this year that When You’re Strange is “the anti-Oliver Stone… the true story of the Doors.” Fine. Close enough.