It�s Saturday morning, and I�m breaking down. A glitch in the electronic ticketing system made it appear as though there were 20 tickets remaining to films with, oh, maybe a couple left, so I spent a good five hours commiserating over collective misfortune and a precious two snoozing. I say this not to whine so much as to give an idea of the pervasive filter through which I was watching films: over-caffeinated, sleepless, so irritable as to reflexively bang on the keyboard every other minute. So if the coverage starts to subside into vfdvrgiodjfnbjgd bjbf jnfxzzvlljk, I hereby excuse myself on grounds of necessary deprivation.

Anyway, I kicked the day off, blanket and pillow in tow, with Carlos Bolado�s egregiously stupid God Only Knows, and lasted 40 minutes or so. The film is frenetically edited with no discernible logic, and it�d give a decent idea of my enervated psyche to track the devolution of noted influences from Jonas Mekas, to Michael Bay, to Diet Coke commercials. And it�s not even the infinite-coverage deluge of shots, nor the abundance of fast-mo redolent of one of those shitty MTV make-over shows, that drove me out, per se. God�s first half-hour is an onslaught of clumsily planted Winstons and conspicuous lack of real incident. We�re supposed to be too swept up in the film�s Indie Geekdom 101 soundtrack (Interpol! The Libertines!) to see clues whizzing by us, or mind the hilariously undernourished sketch of Diego Luna as a PETA-sensitive pretty boy. When the Doves began blasting, I bolted.

And slept. And then�

Sometimes I envy a curmudgeon like Mike D�Angelo: two days in, I feel like I�ve fawned over a film too many, waiting for my hard-ass engine to start revving. Wait a bit longer: A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, written, directed by, and about Dito Montiel, is masterful from its tremulous first shot, and all the more astonishing for its autobiographical roots: how exactly did hustling Holes kid grow into the Hollywood cognoscenti, let alone an extraordinarily intelligent and sensitive filmmaker, reinvigorating the rise-and-fall crime saga by peering fearlessly into his own past? Montiel doesn�t dwell on his intellectual growth, but is expertly critical of its result: as modern-day Dito, Robert Downey Jr. evinces a new-agey So-Cal reserve his friends and family understandably mistake for condescension. Montiel�s dynamism is evidenced in the discrepancies between Dito the Character (reassuringly optimistic, reticent) and Dito the Filmmaker (uncertain, identifying silence with weakness). How many filmmakers call themselves meek, bald-faced liars? Just as Montiel�s ultimate stolidity alienates him from home, he identifies alienation, not excess, as the monster that killed his friends; this is perhaps the most sober American gangster film since GoodFellas falsely ensured that garishness + expiation = art. xIf you�ve ever received a late-night phone call from a friend desperately afflicted by his own idleness, you�ll understand the simple, un-gratuitous power of this movie. Montiel alternates between past and present with nothing to hide, serving up half a propulsive, effortlessly nuanced thriller and half a Resnais-like excavation through the remains of his adolescence, the double-edged problems of inescapable Time and Self overriding any pleasure he takes in reliving the past. If A Guide were a song, it�d be Johnny Boy�s eponymous theme.

And karma bites me back: next came the first big disappointment, Julian Goldberger�s The Hawk Is Dying, the long-anticipated follow-up to his promising trans. The latter suffered from lack of incident or consequence, but got by on intriguingly large disjunction between material and tone, on-the-lam potboiler and hospitable looseness. Goldberger has changed: Hawk heightens any and all, attempting to escalate Paul Giamatti�s archetypal ornery codger to bold Shakespearean dimensions, and while the departure is noble, it�s spread too thin for comfort. Goldberger has inherited from Jim Jarmusch the strength of letting minor characters co-exist with full-blooded interests of their own, but here he�s timid to embrace it, sculpting a centrifugal hurricane around Giamatti�s struggle between consuming passion and encroaching homelife in which pensive bird-watching soliloquies rule all.

Goldberger isn�t the only Sundance auteur emerging fresh from hibernation. Hilary Brougher aped the dead-pan acting style and stilted dialogue of Hal Hartley so precisely in her The Sticky Fingers of Time, that despite a 10-year window between the two, I expected her to continue the imitation-as-flattery with Stephanie Daley. But it�s considerably less otherworldly, both style- and content-wise, substituting two generations of modern repression for the overlapped post-WWII and pre-9/11 NYCs of Fingers, and while her characters still fire witty, cryptic aphorisms and off-kilter line-readings � Amber Tamblyn�s troubled teen suggests years of lonely ankle-deep winters just by slurring �Denverrrr� — they at least feign normalcy. This normalcy is crucial to Tilda Swinton�s awesome performance, all unctuous casualness concealing her personal and professional lives. Everything Swinton says is declarative, a note to self, and it allows for some freakishly insular, Marlene Dietrich-esque flashes of emotional reconstitution.

Saturday night was my first in a real bed, and perhaps the at-the-time fest nadir, Patrick Stettner�s The Night Listener, was punishment for comfort. It features Robin Williams back in creepy mode as a gay radio host investigating a lost-child writing prodigy who may or may not exist, and his paranoia and subsequent comeuppance eerily summon memories of Daniel Auteil in Michael Haneke�s Hidden. But where Haneke�s film supplied cogent socio-political context, Stettner basks in lurid red herrings � e.g., Williams� gayness is simply a gateway to heavy-handed critique of homophobia via anti-pedophilia — and begs us to call him on bullshit. Sure.

Julianne Nicholson�s sheepish smile does wonders for Flannel Pajamas, Jeff Lipsky�s rambling chronicle of delicate love. A Molly Parker look-alike, and therefore irresistible, Nicholson, as Nicole, is the soul of myriad amazing shit � a flurry of “I love you”s receding into doubt, compliance as warring love and victimhood. Her opposite, Stuart (Justin Kirk), is blander, the sort of occasional volcano of hubris and sycophantry we can all relate to, but would rather not. The first half of Pajamas is a sometimes enthralling collision of power play and earnest romance: this is a love story that never teeters into bliss, too deep in insecurity. Just my bag, but a few late missteps, including a stylistically anomalous conversation between Stuart and Nicole�s mom that stays true to neither character and unconvincingly labels the latter as a pig-headed anti-semetic � you picture Lipsky waking up in a cold sweat, smacking his forehead and exclaiming “Social relevance! Fuck!” — hold it back from greatness.

When did Sundance get so � I�m so automatically tempted to spew this adjective that I feel a wave of guilt typing it — naturalistic? Ryan Fleck�s Half Nelson emanates emotions so fuzzy, if not warm, that I�m nearly at a loss for words: this is institutional observation on the level of Fred Wiseman, filmed with as jittery a fly-on-wall aesthetic. As an examination of black-white, schoolhouse-crackhouse dialectics, it consistently flummoxes platitude, or even thematic summation, unafraid to make its hero�s struggle almost absurdly complicated. In a telling moment, base-head pedagogue Ryan Gosling dismisses his vast away of political literature as frivolous: he�s a dilettante of the multicultural, and this movie is a beautifully diffuse survey of poetic anecdotes about class and race, without simplistically touting its role-reversals.

Oh dear. I�m starting to get twee and inarticulate. This always happens, post-movie #15, and it has much to do with fatigue as a sensory overload that leads to redundant or ungrounded observations. Worry not, should you have found my raves too-dazed; I�ll be rewatching Guide and Nelson on Friday, as tradition goes. I�m collapsing, and I still have three movies to cover. Quickies: Disliked The Illusionist. Meaningful wizardry less so than the average Harry Potter entry, and its interpersonal traditionalism, i.e. a rich-girl-poor-boy story with uniqueness drained, falls far below the standard of Hermione, Ron et al. Only notable for early dashes of Murnau within candle-lit, sepia exteriors. Hated Who Needs Sleep?, Haskell Wexler�s artlessly sappy tribute to Hollywood�s overworked, and only declined to walk out because the memory of darting past the 80-something legend would be a painful one. Wexler�s reappropriation of Conrad Hall�s death to sell his Message is especially offensive. Finally, I walked out of G�la Babluani�s much buzzed-about 13 (Tzameti), a thoroughly undistinguished assault on Francois Truffaut�s axiom to clearly show a film�s subject. A contributing factor were a couple of careless fucks in a wait-list line who spoiled What It�s Really About for me, not only tainting my experience but filling me with doubt, since this Secret is a fashionably tawdry and cruel one in the vein of Shirley Jackson�s �The Lottery.� This movie has won some acclaim, and the most succinct defense I can muster is Bad Vibes, but fortunately, I don�t care to elaborate. Thank god for a philosophy of appreciative criticism, and thank god for shitty movies extending my rest hours a bit longer. Good night, and good luck.