Like a shark, a journalist has to keep moving at Sundance or he/she risks dying; stop to reflect on what you’ve just seen, and you may miss the one shuttle that will get you to a make-or-break screening in the boondocks. On average, press corps see between three to six a films a day, and you’re lucky if you can blog about two key titles to meet deadlines. I’m no math magician, but I do believe that leaves a vast percentage of movies uncommented upon by the time most folks shuffle glumly to the SLC airport.
So, as the dust settles on Sundance, I offer a few brief words on the good, the bad and the ugly that I caught during my nine-day jaunt but didn’t get around to covering in my daily blog account. Here were ten from ’1o that were noteworthy in one way or the other, in alphabetical order and with star ratings. Sundance 2010 is dead. Long live ’11.
Animal Kingdom: Too serious for Ozploitation yet far more degenerate than your typical ABBA-soundtracked Aussie imports, writer-director David Michôd’s better-than-average crime drama from Down Under plops a motherless teenager (James Frecheville) in the middle of a war between the cops and his extended bank-robbing relatives. Guy Pearce does a variation on his shining-knight cop from L.A. Confidential, while Picnic at Hanging Rock’s Jackie Weaver (see above photo) delivers the creepiest mobster matriarch this side of Shelley Winters. The MVP award, however, goes to Ben Mendelsohn for turning a cliché—the scary loose-cannon crook—into a truly unsettling terror. That this genre flick managed to nab the World Dramatic Jury Prize was a surprise, but a welcome one. ****
Blue Valentine: Take two incredible talents—Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams—and cast them as an older married couple on the brink of complete matrimonial meltdown. Intercut scenes of their younger lovelorn selves, just for a nice contrast. Sit back and watch the duo batter each other like birthday-party piñatas. The fact that director Derek Cianfrance alluded to several autobiographical moments in this domestic disaster film during the premiere’s Q&A makes me want to call an MFT therapist for him ASAP. It divided audiences and critics, but if nothing else, the movie suggests that both Gosling and Williams are only beginning to hit their stride. ****
Catfish: Inarguably the hot-ticket hit of this year’s Sundance, Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman’s documentary on the havoc that social networking hath wrought proved to be a hot-topic conversation starter. A correspondence between Ariel’s New Yorker brother, Nev, and a family living in Minnesota turns into something intimate; to reveal more would ruin the surprises, if you could call them that, which await the film crew. Suffice to say, this real-life tale of isn’t nearly as clever as it thinks it is and actually says precious little about how Facebook, et al., have changed contemporary communication. Is it a cautionary tale? A morally dodgy piece of vérité exploitation? A dessert topping? A floor wax? We’ll just settle for overrated curio. **
Cyrus: The Duplass brothers have perfected a certain sort of shaggy-dog charm (see The Puffy Chair) that set them apart from their mopey M-core peers, and most folks would’ve thought that doing studio work would have meant sanding off rough edges. So give the siblings a hand for making a cringe-comedy about a schlub (John C. Reilly), his new dream girlfriend (Marisa Tomei) and her codependent son (Jonah Hill) on Fox Searchlight’s dime and making, well, a slightly more-polished Duplass brothers movie. This modest middle ground is actually where these guys belong: Their offbeat take on rather mainstream material adds just the right amount of wonderful weirdness to the mix, while using real actors and having a decent budget lets them fully realize their comic sensibility. Also, casting one of Judd Apatow’s stable of man-children as a clingy adult-olescent was pure genius. Well-played, old beans. ****
Four Lions: Anglophiles and Britcom junkies know Chris Morris as the genius behind The Day Today, Brass Eye and a host of other notorious BBC media satires. The rest of the English-speaking world will now regard him as the gent who dared to turn Muslim jihadists into the butt of a sensationalist sick joke. When the film focuses on a small cell of bumbling suicide bombers, Four Lions turns into a sort of broad Three Stooges take on terrorism and the incompetent authorities trying to combat it. Then Morris occasionally skews serious, notably through a sympathetic stand-by-your-martyr wife, and delivers something far more intriguing than your usual farce yet tonally erratic to a fault. There are some truly hilarious lines (”People are playing stringed instruments…it’s the end of times, brother!”), but given the comedian’s usual take-no-prisoners modus operandi, the whole thing should have been tighter, sharper and funnier. ***
I Am Love: Sundance’s Spotlight section can be commended for forgetting about chronic festival premiere-itis and simply showcasing noteworthy films that have already played Cannes, Toronto, etc. Besides A Prophet and Lourdes—both coming soon to a theater near you—this swoonworthy fable from Italian director Luca Guadagnino was the highlight of the sidebar. Tilda Swinton is a maternal figurehead who watches the familial tomfoolery from a discreet distance. When her son befriends a handsome young chef, however, sparks start a-flyin’. Like Arnaud Desplechin’s symphonic melodramas, I Am Love plays its various narrative strands off each other in the most elegant of ways and allows Swinton to deliver another desire-driven grande dame performance. Magnolia Pictures will release the film in the spring; see it by any means necessary. *****
Jack Goes Boating: Not so much adapting his 2007 LAByrinth Theater production of Bob Glaudini’s play as transposing it onto film, Philip Seymour Hoffman keeps his directorial debut in a nice, safe comfort zone and nonetheless scores. The actor reprises his role as Jack, a socially awkward limo driver who’s content to schlep through life alone. Jack’s two best friends (John Ortiz and Daphne Rubin-Vega, also culled from the play’s original run) decide to set him up with an equally odd woman (Amy Ryan). Thus begins a Minnie and Moskowitz–style courtship that, in Hoffman’s and his fellow castmemember’s hands, becomes a spiky ode to connecting against all odds. Not perfect, but in terms of an eccentric character study designed to show off acting chops, it’s a perfectly satisfying first-time effort. ***
ODDSAC: Question: How does a run-of-the-mill avant-garde freakout featuring mud, fire, masks, nocturnal bloodsuckers and epileptic editing turn into something other than an experimental tangent? Answer: When the critics’ darlings of deconstructionist indie rock, Animal Collective, contribute a batch of brand-new songs to its soundtrack. The band and director Danny Perez worked together for three years to concoct this “visual album,” and the result is exactly what you’d expect, i.e., anything-goes narrative fragments scored to AC’s compellingly farkakte tunes. Fans and people on seriously hard drugs, you may proclaim its genius now. Everybody else should start scratching their heads stat. **
Restrepo: Journalist Sebastian Junger and war photographer-filmmaker Tim Hetherington embedded themselves with a 15-man platoon as the outfit was stationed in Afghanistan’s Konegal Valley—an area notorious as a death trap surrounded by mountain ranges and snipers. You could argue that the duo did little more than turn their cameras on as, along with the soldiers, they are repeatedly shot at and simply try to survive a shit detail. But the longer you spend time with these grunts—some of whom don’t make it back to HQ—and watch them fail to convince hostile locals to help bring democracy to the region, the more you realize they’re stuck in a no-win endgame. “Yeah, we take their hearts, and then we take their minds,” says one soldier in reference to the platoon’s goal; that he bitterly emphasizes take over the other words only makes his cynicism more tragic. ****
Winter’s Bone: A rural setting, poor people struggling to meet ends meet, an absent ex-con father and the law threatening to foreclose a family’s house: There’s no reason to think that Debra Granik’s follow-up to Down to the Bone is going to be anything other than a typical life-is-hard Sundance drama. Then the film’s young female protagonist (Jennifer Lawrence) decides to go up against Missouri’s mountain-folk Mafia, and you find yourself neck-deep in a tightly wound hillbilly thriller. (A fellow critic dubbed it the first great Ozark noir.) Lawrence was the only redeeming factor of The Burning Plain, and here proves that she can carry the weight of a film with ease; the way that backwoods badass John Hawkes utters “I already told you to shut up once with my mouth” will drop your blood temp slightly below subzero. Most of the fest’s Dramatic Grand Jury selections are traditionally duds. This prizewinner couldn’t be more deserving. *****
The rugged, Brandoesque character actor unveiled his directorial debut, Sympathy for Delicious, here in Park City and…how can I put this? It’s a freakin’ mess. You can see what he’s going for in this satire about a bitter, homeless paraplegic and former turntablist named DJ Delicious D (screenwriter Christopher Thornton) who suddenly finds himself blessed with a healing touch. A priest (Ruffalo) wants to use D’s powers to fund a “state-of-the-art homeless shelter”; two scuzzy rock stars (Juliette Lewis and Orlando Bloom) see the reluctant miracle worker as an opportunity to break their band into the big time. Cue digs about fame, faith, fate and the fact that Angelenos are often a-holes.
But Ruffalo wasn’t at the festival solely as a first-timer; he also did double duty as an actor in Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right, and the disparity between the two films could not be more evident. The current breakout film du jour of the festival (next to Catfish…more on that one tomorrow), this unpredictable left-of-center farce about two lesbian moms (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore) dealing with the fallout of meeting their kids’ dim-witted sperm donor (guess who?) delivers on all fronts. By the time you read this, this last-minute addition to the fest will hopefully have a distributor, as a character-driven comedy this eloquent and complicated shouldn’t sit on a shelf.
In the mid-’90s, French expat and thrift-store owner Thierry Guetta started following around his cousin—a graffiti practitioner nicknamed “Space Invader”—with a video camera. Guetta soon started shooting other key artists in the emerging street art scene: Neckface, Buff Monster, Shepard “Obey” Fairey. The guy he really wanted to meet, however, was Banksy, a mysterious Brit best known for tagging London with satirically stenciled rats (see above) and spray-painting murals on the Israel’s West Bank wall.
Designed to be a sweeping statement of the State We’re in Today, John Wells’s The Company Men tackles the recession by looking at the effect it has on the workers who suffer through the era of downsizing, outsourcing and raise-the-stock-prices pink-slip shenanigans. By workers, of course, we mean whiny, well-off white-collar males like Ben Affleck’s arrogant prick of a salesman, and if you just threw up in your mouth a little bit at the thought of watching entitled guys moan about how they can’t afford dues at the country club, you may want avoid this woe-are-they parable like the bubonic plague.
Anyone wanting a historical context for our current economy without pity could do far worse than The Shock Doctrine, Mat Whitecross and Michael Winterbottom’s docu-adaptation of Naomi Klein’s best-seller about the rise of disaster capitalism. (The latter director is at Sundance with both this and his take on Jim Thompson’s serial-killer pulp classic, The Killer Inside Me, officially making this the Winterbottom of our discontent.) A mixture of Klein lecturing about how tragedies like military coups and Hurricane Katrina have been exploited by extreme free-market proponents and archival footage of said calamities, the movie benefits from drawing connections between disparate elements in a manner similar to that of Adam Curtis’s The Power of Nightmares. A short exploration of sensory deprivation and shock therapy techniques pioneered in the ’50s bumps up against the ideology of economist Milton Friedman and his disciples (hilariously referred to as “the Chicago boys”), juxtaposed with primers on Reagan, Thatcher and Augusto Pinochet. That these strands converged in both indirect and explicit ways gets spelled out with chilling clarity.
And then there’s the down-and-out downtowner of Daddy Long Legs. If you were lucky enough to catch Joshua Safdie’s 2008 drama about a young kleptomaniac, The Pleasure of Being Robbed, then you know that this next-gen filmmaker has a knack for blending lo-fi rawness and an odd sense of lyricism. His follow-up, codirected with his brother Benny, works a similar mojo as it follows Lenny (played by Frownland’s Ronald Bronstein) through his day-to-day dreariness. The one bright light in this divorced projectionist’s life are his two sons; the fact that he’s as much a doting father as a complete fuckup only makes his inability to parent correctly that much more poignantly. (And trust me: This guy ends up making some serious bad-dad moves.) Even when the Safdies swerve into the surrealistic—you’ll never look at the giant mosquito at the Museum of Natural History the same way—the emphasis is always on Lenny’s attempt to reconcile life in an occasionally harsh metropolis. It’s hard to be a saint when you’re living in the city, but this is an NYC that can be cold and unforgiving or can offer up the chance to experience something off-the-cuff and unique in a blink. Now this is an exciting, depressing, rough-and-tumble NYC that I recognize immediately. The movie is part of the Sundance Selects series via IFC’s on-demand (check your cable channels). Do not miss it.
