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Sundance 2005 Film Festival JANUARY 28, 2005

For the first time in the history of the Sundance festival the Grand Jury Prizes and Audience Awards for Documentary and Dramatic Competitions were presented to the same two films.

The Grand Jury Prize: Documentary and the Audience Prize: Dramatic went to God Grew Tired of Us, directed by Christopher Quinn. God Grew was the documentary that I heard about the most, after the sweet and enjoyable Wordplay, which now has distribution. But unlike Wordplay the kind of discussion that God Grew inspired was impassioned.

Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic and the Audience Prize: Dramatic was presented to Quinceanera, written and directed by Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer. I heard nothing about this film from really anybody. Of course, the film screened later in the week, after most people had gone home (well, except for the people who voted it for the audience award).

The World Cinema Jury Prize: Dramatic was presented to 13 TZAMETI, a harrowing film that made people pretty uncomfortable. It's nice to know that A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints won the Dramatic Directing Award for Dito Montiel as well as the for a Special Jury Prize for Best Ensemble Performance. Sundance, however, has an embarrassment of awards. Juries hand them out like Halloween candy. It's sort of like the end of a grade-school soccer season. It seems that everyone gets a little love so here's the link to the list: Full List of Awards

by Keith Simanton

Sundance 2005 Film Festival JANUARY 23-24, 2005

"Mediocre" is the word that summarizes most people's reactions to the overall slate of films at Sundance this year. No one film seems to hold the strong acclaim of public consensus. Some have raved about Stephanie Daley, the drama about motherhood and a woman's rights to her own body with Amber Tamblyn and The Chronicles of Narnia's Tilda Swinton. Wristcutters, a film about the after-world of suicides, stars Patrick Fugit and Shannon Sossamon, and it has a bizarre, cultish charm. But some films, which had early, healthy buzz, imploded upon contact with the high-mountain air.

I walked out of Stay, a tedious, poorly-shot, lazily written comedy by Bobcat Goldthwait. Though buoyed by a nice lead performance by Melinda Page Hamilton the film, about Amy, a woman who is seriously considering telling her new fiancé about a past sexual taboo she broke, is weak by any stretch of the term "funny." It mostly suffers from a tragic habit of creating scenarios of rib-jabbing "gotcha" comedy. Amy's father tells his future son-in-law that he's not to swear in his house and then, HA-HA!, he says a dirty word. Amy's mother is a prude who, it turns out actually HA-HA! had a three-way with Elvis when she was a girl. Bobcat, you scamp.

Faring much better as a feature film is Right at Your Door. Well-directed by newcomer Chris Gorak, about several toxic-laden dirty bombs exploding in Los Angeles and the following break-down of society, starts off as tense and as involving as any recent thriller. Surprisingly, however, the film decides not to elevate the tension as was done so well in The Trigger Effect but elects instead to be a more meditative film about the effects of isolationism and distrust and the ensuing problems that brings to even those who think they are the safest.

The Illusionist is also a near-miss, a well-intended suspense film. Edward Norton plays Eisenheim, a Viennese magician who has elevated his performance to an art. When his love for an old flame (Jessica Biel) puts him at odds with her new betrothed, the evil next-emperor to the throne played with paroxyitic fervor by Rufus Sewell, Eisenheim must use all his powers to try to save her. The best thing about the film, other than the backdrop of Budapest, is the game performance by Paul Giamatti, as the chief inspector of police who tries to match wits with the illusionist.

In the post-screening Q&A, a painful process wherein inane questions are lobbed at the filmmakers by audience members who usually are gushing at the same time, director Neil Burger claimed that he wrote the screenplay. I, however, recall that nearly fifteen years ago Stephen Ribello wrote an article for the now-defunct Movieline magazine about just such a screenplay, with the same title. I think I'm going to have to look that article up.

by Keith Simanton

Sundance 2005 Film Festival JANUARY 22, 2006

One film can change your perspective entirely. In much the same way that the September screenings of A History of Violence, Good Night, and Good Luck and The Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio changed the outlook of 2005 from a suspect year to a solid movie year A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints has rescued Sundance. It's the best movie I've seen at the festival so far and it reminds you of the power and innovation of film. Written and directed by Dito Montiel and based upon his novel, Guide features stand-out performances by Shia LaBeouf and Channing Tatum. Tatum, unless he screws it up himself somehow, will be a star. There have been some who have dismissed the film and they should be dealt with severely.

Guide, a reminiscence of Dito's life in late `70s, early `80s New York, is powerful and sublime. In it LaBeof plays young Dito as he attempts to free himself from the common, suffocating effects of his friends and family, personified by his father (the great Chazz Palminteri). Robert Downey Jr., who is excellent, as always, plays the adult Dito whose journey back to Astoria, Queens, set about flashback we're watching.

Guide is not a perfect film. It goes on too long and doesn't really seem to want to leave the stoop it's been hanging out on, much like some of the entrenched locals in Dito's film, but its raw energy and surprising love and tenderness can not be ignored. It also goes to some length to resurrect the image of Eric Roberts, who has a cameo (not a "and Sean Connery as King Richard" kind of cameo, but a surprise nonetheless).

Lacking in the same kind of animal magnetism is Wordplay, which makes it up by being a light, enjoyable documentary that avoids cliché and delivers a thoroughly watchable film.

The film chronicles last year's crossword puzzle championship as well as the fascination people have with crossword puzzles, the New York Times, and the New York Times crossword puzzle editor, Will Shortz, who organized the event. The documentary features insightful, and sometimes just fun, interviews with Jon Stewart, President Bill Clinton, legendary filmmaker Ken Burns, and even pitcher Mike Mussina. Though it lacks the sheer drama of Spellbound or the eccentrics in Word Wars it does clip along, introducing us to the contestants and delivering an enjoyable feature.

by Keith Simanton

JANUARY 21, 2006.

Park City's most time-honored ritual has begun. Is it chattering at a bus stop in temperatures in the low teens? No. Is it wondering who the hell that person is, because you're sure you recognize them, and realizing that it's just Parker Posey? No. No, as sure as the sparrows return to Capistrano, as sure as pundits around Oscar time bemoan the Best Actress category with the concomitant "damn, aren't there any good roles for women anymore?" complaints you can bet that, come day two of Sundance, film critics will start whining about the movies here.

And since if I'm anything I'm a traditional guy, I'd like to join them. It seems that the milder pleasures to be had from Kinky Boots and the wafer-thin, low-carb morsels in Friends with Money may be the best thing to come out of the kitchen. If so, it will be a meager offering.

The film with the most buzz in the last day or so has been Little Miss Sunshine which boasts a talented cast including Greg Kinnear, Alan Arkin, Toni Collette and, most notably, Steve Carrell. They play an insanely dysfunctional family traveling to the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant, a kind of Griswold family from National Lampoon's Vacation on Prozac (or needing a subscription for it). Carrell is marvelous, showing a further range available to him, one of dry, sardonic wit dispensed just so. Kinnear, Collette, heck the whole cast is quite good. Abigail Breslin, who plays the little girl, turns in the kind of superb performance that gets you cast in the next Spielberg movie (if he figures Dakota Fanning is too old).

But Sunshine never really manages to tackle some problems that, from the outset, doom it to the kind of cult status enjoyed by Michael Ritchie's Smile. Kinnear's character, Richard Hoover, a father trying to create another one of those self-help systems designed to turn losers into winners, is a one-note punching bag, always bound to say and do the conventional, paternalistic thing, with the rest of the cast, including his wife, sniggering behind his back (and sometimes to his face). Sheryl, Collette's character, is a bizarre concoction of harried spouse and former smart-ass. Since Collette rarely makes such missteps, one has to turn to first-time directors Jonathon Dayton and Valerie Faris. They may know how to do wacky, but, unlike David O. Russell's Flirting with Disaster, they build no initial base of normalcy for the audience. It just gets increasingly, frenetically, discordantly wackier.

The final pageant, where Olive dances like a stripper, is the final straw for anyone in the audience who wants any of this to gel, as credulity is strained to the point of tearing. Olive had been taught by their heroin-snorting grandpa (Arkin) and she mimics the bump-and-grind moves of the best pole-dancers. Since the film has established no set of rules, one is left grasping to make the joke worth the stretch.

Perhaps one of the other weirdest things, and one can only imagine this was at the heart of the script, is satirizing a child beauty pageant. The Jon-Benet Ramsey-esque beauty pageant world is cheap and easy prey. Mocking something as discomforting and kitschy as these competitions is just puerile, particularly since it's done so broadly and without much wit.

In a movie that bandies about Proust and Nietschze to its own self-satisfaction, it seems an exercise in classicism of the worst sort, the snotty snort. Look at the well-educated, unconventional family who deride such meaningless, sexist exercises! "We shall upbraid you, bouffant-wearing, bourgeois women, by showing that you're prostituting your young, we merely lay it bare!" How revelatory.

Of course, the movie got a standing ovation (about a fourth of the back of the Eccles auditorium, where the film debuted, stayed seated). "Off the chain!!" yelled the first person in the question-and-answer session. There has to be a term for the false expectations that must be raised in the hearts of the filmmakers by the rapturous receptions received at Sundance but I don't know what it is. I think this is an example of one, so let's say that the crowd "Little Miss Sunshined" Little Miss Sunshine.

I was steered towards the overly long and largely didactic The World According to Sesame Street, a sort of U.S. News and World Report meets Mr. Rogers's Neighborhood. Sesame shows the good work being done by the Children's Television Workshop all over the world, as they try to promote literacy and cultural tolerance.

The intent is good, Lord knows the work of the Workshop is good, but it's the bran-fiber approach of the filmmakers that undoes the documentary.

The press and industry screening had many walk-outs, not all that uncommon, but there was something much worse going on in the seats around me. Film buyers and acquisitions people ended up not looking at their film, but instead into the soft-white aura of their Blackberries, checking up on e-mail.

Rumor has it that the same glow was emanating at Lucky Number Slevin, a film starring Josh Hartnett, which has been picked up by the Weinstein Company.

The party held for the film, however, was pretty damn good. In addition to Hartnett, who looks like he's auditioning for lead singer in a slash-metal Germanic succubus band, Scarlett Johansson was there. Cold weather seems to pucker her face up more than normal. She was wearing a kind of medieval wench's costume; one expected her to be proffering the Heinekens they were dispensing. She and Hartnett looked chummy.

Overheard, snippets of conversations thrust upon the reporter by folks loudly talking into their cell phones:

Gal Producer Type: "Why are we now talking Thomas Jane when we were talking about Sam Rockwell? Is that the two million dollar category?"

by Keith Simanton

JANUARY 20, 2006.

Sports films have a certain tried-and-true formula. We know that a sports film will eventually end up with the big game, with everything on the line. Just how invested we are at the point of the big game and wishing to see the protagonists win it, even though we know they will, is the ultimate success or failure of the film.

Kinky Boots follows a different tried-and-true cliche; the Thatcher Bootstrap Formula. In the Thatcher Bootstrap formula, a British community that has fallen on hard times finds some unconventional method to overcome bureaucracy and cultural stagnation to pull themselves up by their bootstraps to become successful and win back their self-respect (and usually get together with someone on the team in the process). In Saving Grace a nice respectable lady became a dope dealer. In Brassed Off it was marching bands rising above conditions of their mining town. In The Full Monty it was, well, the full monty (men completely stripping) to combat the ennui of the dole (unemployment). Like the sports film, the proof of the pudding of the Thatcher Bootstrap film is your desire to see the community succeed, come the finale.

In Kinky Boots, a factory that once manufactured men's quality shoes turns to crafting drag queens' quality footwear. Lola, played with a steady presence by Chiwetel Ejiofor, is the drag queen who is the inspiration for the change in product. It's another notable turn by Ejiofor (he was also the assassin in Serenity and memorable in Dirty Pretty Things. His Lola is not, by any stretch, attractive, and I doubt with Lola's vocal abilities that she could attract customers to an ongoing cabaret act, but the actor has charisma in loads. Joel Edgerton, as the scion of the shoe manufacturer, is a disarming, if not necessarily magnetic, actor

By the time that everyone has learned the lessons they're supposed to learn and confronted their fears and prejudices, the film has broken very little new ground, but it gets to us emotionally with a satisfying "they won the game!" exuberance. With ground as heavily trod as the Thatcher Bootstrap, that's remarkable.

It's also a safe, audience-friendly film to open Sundance. Perhaps they got tired of premiering films that were controversial non-starters or non-controversial non-starters such as last year's Happy Endings, On a Clear Day (just getting a limited release now), The Laramie Project, Edge of America or Riding Giants.

Friends with Money isn't controversial and has its charms, but it's still a non-starter. Directed by Nicole Hoefecenerererer (okay, it's actually, Nicole Holofcener, a perennial Sundance fave who made Walking and Talking and Lovely and Amazing), Friends stars Jennifer Aniston as a woman whose affair with a married man disrupts her psyche so completely that she quits her job as a teacher and becomes a maid. Her friends, including Joan Cusack, Catherine Keener and Frances McDormand, are all well-off and married, though not necessarily happily.

The intricacies of the friendships and the piquant moments of the marital relationship have their moments but they hardly add up to anything more than nifty bits of dialogue. Like pretty kerchiefs hung on a line to dry, the individual scenes have their own attraction but they don't, as a whole, make an impression. Aniston has a nice moment or two though her character remains a shallow enigma at the end. She's in town and the premiere tent she was outside had so many flashbulbs going off it looked like a big strobe light being smothered by a tarp or a new reality show, Iron Arch Welders.

More movies to come today.

by Keith Simanton

Sundance 2005 Film Festival JANUARY 19, 2006.

On Sunday, January 15th the space vehicle Stardust returned from space and its visit to a comet named Wild 2. Stardust crash-landed in the Dugway mud flats of Utah, carrying fragments of the very origins of the universe inside its capsule. The scientists who planned this escapade obviously never watched Night of the Comet, wherein the return of a celestial comet, brings with it a plague that destroys most of the population. It leaves two young women to fend off the rest of the survivors who have been turned into zombies.

Those who live in Park City, Utah, to the north of Dugway, must feel like they relive Night of the Comet every year. Each January they're beset with zombies; cell-phone carrying, pushy, black-clad zombies. This year they've actually got a comet they can blame it on.

But they won't. They know that it's just time for the Sundance Film Festival.

I'm one of the horde that descends on this small burg that looks and feels most like a ski-town rather than a film town. I've got a press pass to see a bunch of movies in rapid succession and a belief that this is still a festival that matters to world cinema. What movies to see, what movies to see? The program that Sundance sends out helps you determine what you may want to see though you never know until you've sunk time and opportunity into it. But you can get some sense of what might be worthwhile and it seems that the films in this year's festival are attempting some sort of "best ensemble casting" award. Factotum (the word means "man of many jobs") is based on the novel by Charles Bukowski, so that's a lock right there. It stars Matt Dillon as Henry Chinaski, Bukowski's alter ego (the same one used in Barfly, the brilliant 1987 film by Barbet Schroeder, starring the then-brilliant Mickey Rourke). It's directed by Bent Hamer, he of the critically-acclaimed Kitchen Stories. Keep your eyes peeled.

Lucky Number Slevin stars Josh Hartnett as a man who is mistaken for his friend Nick, who is in deep trouble with underworld figures. With a cast that includes Bruce Willis (as a deadly hitman), Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley, Lucy Liu and Stanley Tucci this film would have to work at not being good. Slevin is directed by Paul McGuigan whose Wicker Park was, we heard, ruined by the studio (so the fact that it was a lousy movie might not hold the weight it otherwise would).

The Night Listener continues Robin Williams's disavowal of twenty years of rainbow suspenders and voice-overs. He plays Gabriel, a celebrated author and late-night radio host who becomes intrigued with the manuscript of a young listener, forcing him out of his home. The cast includes Toni Collette, Sandra Oh, Rory Culin, Bobby Cannavale, and Joe Morton (hooray, we love Joe Morton!).

There's also The Science of Sleep. Michel Gondry bombed out in 2001 in Sundance with the Charlie Kaufman-penned Human Nature but he has a visual flair that is distinctive and put to best use in The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He teams up with Gael Garcia Bernal for this new film, which is about a man whose wild dream life is making dangerous inroads into his waking life.

Thank You for Smoking is the first feature from Jason Reitman (yes, son of Ivan Reitman). He's made numerous smart and accomplished shorts (my favorite is Consent) and this film, about an amoral tobacco marketer (played by Aaron Eckhart) who must turn the focus away from the dangers of the death sticks and onto something else. The film made a huge splash at Toronto where it was also embroiled in a dispute over who had actually bought the darn thing (it ended up being Fox Searchlight).

Alpha Dog, directed by Nick Cassavetes, is based on the true story of Jesse James Hollywood, a ruthless drug dealer who became the youngest man ever to appear on the FBI's most wanted list. It stars Emile Hirsch as Johnny Truelove (representing Hollywood) whose vicious climb to infamy is now history. The film also stars Justin Timberlake, Bruce Willis and Sharon Stone.

Which film will be the alpha dog this year? Stay tuned. by Keith Simanton