If you want to know how strange the movie business is on the small indie end of things, two news stories today about a Sundance sensation offer a case study. Read more »

Grand Jury Prize, Dramatic:
Push (Based on the Novel by Sapphire), dir. Lee Daniels

Grand Jury Prize, Documentary:
We Live in Public, dir. Ondi Timoner

U.S. Special Jury Prize, Dramatic:
Mo’Nique for her performance, Push (Based on the Novel by Sapphire); director Lynn Shelton for “independent spirit,” Humpday

U.S. Special Jury Prize, Documentary:
Good Hair, dir. Jeff Stilso

World Cinema Jury Prize, Dramatic:
The Maid, dir. Sebastian Silva

World Cinema Jury Prize, Documentary:
Rough Aunties, dir. Kim Longinotto

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The ticket simply read “Sneak Preview 2.” Earlier in the week, the mystery event had been colloquially referred to as “An Evening with Steven Soderbergh,” as in a presentation of clips plus a Q&A. But everybody seemed to know what was going on: Yo, Steven Soderbergh is showing his new film, The Girlfriend Experience, on the down-low. Shh, don’t tell anybody. Except your friends. And people who incessantly blog. And Twitter. So when the director and Geoff Gilmore walked out onto the Eccles stage where two stools were set up, the packed house collectively waited for confirmation. “There have been a lot of rumors going around, saying that we’re going to show something,” Soderbergh said. “I don’t know how these things get started…[Dramatic pause]…except we are.” Whooping! Clapping! Did I just hear a wolf whistle? He mentioned a few caveats: This was a work-in-progress, it was being shown on a 1080p reduction from a 4k file (cue tech geeks’ uncontrollable drooling), a few kinks were still being ironed out. Then the lights went down.

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Last week when I spoke with Chris Rock about his upcoming film, Good Hair, a documentary on the history and evolution of African-American hairstyles currently showing at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, the comedian-turned-actor-turned-filmmaker told me point blank – white people will be shocked.

“What goes on in the movie most black people know about, maybe not to the extent that we covered it, but any white person who sees it is going to think ‘Wow, I had no idea.’”

No truer words have ever been spoken. As a Caucasian lady from the snow-white suburbs of Richmond, Virginia, watching Good Hair is like peering into an almost Narnia-like world I had no idea existed. White people – did any of you know that a weave can cost as much as $3,500? That many cost $1,000 and up? Did anyone of any race reading this post have any idea that human hair is India’s #1 export? And that much of it is gathered from ritualistic head-shavings and sold to the U.S. at a tremendous markup?

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Is it a coincidence that the two best things I’ve seen since slouching into Park City are essentially one-man shows, with one-word titles that end with -son and that center on raging psychopaths? (Actually, one of the gentlemen in question is more of a reformed madman, but we’ll get to that in a bit.) Does this say something about me? Should I be consulting a therapist and working through some buried issues? In any case, these respective portraits—one a biopic, the other a documentary—have stood out in what’s been a year of few valleys (Paper Heart notwithstanding) and even fewer peaks. But here are two men, each the human equivalent of a clenched fist, staring into the camera and chilling you to the marrow. They each took me to hell and back, left me trembling and made me grateful for the trips.

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When you walk up Park City’s Main Street during the festival’s first weekend, or go to any of the Premiere selection screenings at the mammoth Eccles Theater, you’re likely to see certain types of Sundance attendants. They’re usually the sort of well-heeled locals who sport big fur hats, expensive cashmere coats and pricey tans, or maybe they’re out-of-towners rocking impressive L.L.Bean winter wear, all lookie-loo-ing around in the hopes of catching a glimpse of a celebrity in the flesh. The press screenings, however, offer a far different variety of filmgoer. These folks are pale and pasty, in bulky coats and threadbare toques, blessed with a posture that suggests too many hours hunched over a laptop and a brain filled with obscure pop knowledge. They blink like moles when they exit the Yarrow Hotel’s screening room. Their social skills run the gamut from charmingly nerdy, at least among their own ranks, to borderline autistic. These are the press corp’s hard-core geeks. The number of journalists and industry players attending this year may be down significantly from 2008 (the decrease number was around 6,000, a figure I haven’t been able to confirm but seems totally plausible). Yet the movie Moorlocks are still legion here.

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Imagine, if you will, a Judd Apatow comedy in which settled-down married man Jason Segel hears a knock on his door at 2am. Hey, it’s Seth Rogen, his old college buddy who’s been living the proto-hippie wandering life and decided to show up unannounced! One night, after a large amount of recreational substances are smoked and spirits are consumed, the two chums make a bet to enter a local amateur-porn contest. Their entry: a short film of the two them screwing…each other. Oh, the uncomfortable, homosexual panic-soaked hilarity!

Humpday, the first competition film to screen at this year’s Sundance, doesn’t star either of those schlubby sex symbols. (How subversive would that be?) But it shares the exact same full-frontal-dude-ity vibe as the Apatow & Co. oeuvre, repackaged for the lo-fi crowd. The film’s premise just takes all those films’ latent bromance aspects and lets them bubble up to the surface. Neither Ben (Mark Duplass), the responsible adult, nor Andrew (Joshua Leonard), the wanna-be Jack Kerouac that’s decided to stay with his pal indefinitely, wants to get it on with the other. But once the proposition to do this “erotic art project” is suggested during a bacchanalian dinner party, neither of the macho guys will be the first to back down. You can blame it on good ol’ male pride; these heterosexuals would rather get their Genet on than be seen as closed-minded. Besides, they tell themselves, it wouldn’t be a gay sex film. “It’s beyond gay.” Methinks some people doth protest too much.

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“What Next?” You could almost hear the collective “Huh?” of the audience, as if they weren’t sure what they’d just seen. But yes, people, you read that correctly. It’s the tag line of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the one that appears at the end of the bumpers—the brief intros that run before each screening—and as the lights dimmed even further for the main feature, you could sense the invisible question mark forming above the heads of the parka-clad press corps. Seriously? “What Next?!?”

Yet as Robert Redford’s festival celebrates its silver anniversary, the summary phrase somehow makes perverse sense. Sundance makes you feel as if it exists in a state of perpetual transition, and your notion of what the festival represents depends on which version you’re referencing. Do you mean the small, regional event that gave birth to a cinematic revolution? The one that’s been accused of selling its soul to sponsors and celebutards? Or maybe the phoenix that’s semi-risen from the ashes, and become ground zero for the contemporary documentary movement and Indiewood’s inroad to the Oscars. It’s been asking “What Next?” for 25 years now, in one form or another. Now it’s just made its modus operandi explicit.

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