Let’s get right down to it (please note that some categorizations** are collective third-party assessments, aka hearsay):

Best Buzz: HappyThankYouMorePlease, Frozen, Buried, Winter’s Bone, Catfish, Waiting for Superman, Obselidia, Animal Kingdom, Boy

FFF: (Fine Festival Film…but that’s about it): Howl, Welcome to the Rileys,** Jack Goes Boating, Restrepo, Bran Nue Dae, The Company Men, Get Low, The Shock Doctrine, Casino Jack and the United States of Money

Worst Buzz: Hesher,** Sympathy for Delicious, Night Catches Us, Daddy Longlegs

Further Observations:

In the post-screening Q&A Phillip Seymour Hoffman protested too much that his film, Jack Goes Boating, was not the play it was originally based upon but a film, and a very different thing. But, despite his efforts and protest, the film still feels like a filmed play. Hoffman gets very good performances from his four leads, including himself. Jack is one of those arrested development adults that proliferate in independent cinema and Jack gets a chance to start his life anew when he’s set up with Connie (Amy Ryan) by their mutual friends Clyde (John Ortiz) and Lucy (Daphne Rubin-Vega). Jack bumbles into committing to cook a dinner for Connie which he has to do at Clyde and Lucy’s since they have a kitchen. While Jack and Connie are making tenuous steps towards a relationship, Clyde and Lucy are hanging on to theirs in spite of their history. It makes for an eventful evening and allows for some serious acting but not a very cinematic experience.

Babe Ruth, it is said, was not only the leader in home runs in many of his Yankee years, he was simultaneously the leader in strike outs. If that applies to making movies then Mark Ruffalo is soon going to bring forth Citizen Kane. I know because as director of Sympathy for Delicious, he has swung for the fences so hard, and fanned so colossally, that the air reverberating out of the theater where it debuted fluttered the pages of the hymn books of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir some 20 miles away in Salt Lake City.

Sympathy, from its pretentious title to the laugh-inducing final scene (and final song!), is so epically bad that it engenders its own kind of staggering, self-propelled energy, like watching kids sledding down a hill so steep that you know that they’re going to tip over but you find that you can’t look away.

Christopher Thornton wrote Sympathy and he plays the lead character “Delicious” Dean. Delicious is a DJ, a scratcher of some renown, who is paralyzed from the waist down (as is Thornton in real life). One morning, after attending a sham faith-healing service Dean discovers that he has the power to heal people. His gift is then appropriated by a local priest (Mark Ruffalo, going down with the ship), who starts to offer up Dean’s abilities as a gift from God. Dean is so self-consumed, however that he prostitutes his talents to a local, bad rock band. The band is led by The Stain (Orlando Bloom. Wow, Orlando.) and has (Juliette Lewis) as Mary Magadalene/back-up guitarist. Also doing penance is Laura Linney as a record promoter/manager.

All the actors get to include this in the “Charitable Gifts” category of their tax returns this year.

It must be said that Delicious is freighted with real-life human consequences outside of the film itself. Thornton is indeed consigned to a wheelchair and the film is dedicated to Scott Ruffalo, Mark’s brother who was killed in 2008. It’s easy to imagine where the earnest, forward thrust to this movie came from, even though Delicious was in pre-production when the tragedy occurred. But that doesn’t change the fact that this film, on its own, is a lamentable mess.

Casino Jack had some good buzz but it’s a surprisingly long, rather didactic tale of Jack Abramoff, the disgraced, imprisoned lobbyist whose greed was legendary. It is too ham-handedly jokey in one respect (Ralph Reed does not need to be lampooned further by animating religious iconography around him) and also tries to cover too much ground (did we really need to know that his partner, Michael Scanlon, moonlighted as a lifeguard?). Director Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side) seems so outraged by the graft and avarice that it made him party to characterizing these hideous individuals, which is beneath him and his film.