The Hot Button by David Poland

Sundance - Day Four

My first real rage of the festival took place, quite quietly, this morning. I went to a regular screening of a movie, so I needed to get tickets from the publicist. Not normally a problem. Only this publicist didn't know me. So, I stood in front of a theater quietly, just minutes after broadcasting live from Main Street on KABC in L.A. to an audience about the size of the readership of the L.A. Times, and about 10 times bigger than either of the trades, and watched as this publicist gave two tickets to two different writers who would not be writing about the film anytime soon. I stood and watched as they snuck in some other writer with fewer readers monthly than The Hot Button has on any given day. I watched as they snuck in Liev Schreiber's party of four. I stood there as some jacka** jumped in front of me in the mini-line that was created, when the publicist finally gave me a ticket about 5 minutes before the sold out screening, whining "I'm just trying to do my job here." I just stood there because if I had been the a** that I am capable of being just to see some movie, I couldn't look in the mirror.

And so, I started thinking about how I was going to ream the publicist in print today. After all, it wouldn't matter to that person or their boss...I'm just not that important. But as you can see, I changed my mind about that too. The politics of all of this can get pretty ugly in a hurry. And each of us can get equally as ugly in just seconds. My guess is that when this publicist told me, just seconds after coughing up multiple tickets, that I would have to wait until the last minute and then asked, "That's fair, isn't it?" and I responded, "No, it's not, actually," she decided that I was a jerk then and forever. But it wasn't fair and it wasn't right and worst of all, it was foolish and ignorant. Many of my colleagues would take this as an opportunity to tear down the movie in a review. Especially since admitting that they felt slighted by a publicist might seem petty in print. (Yes, I was aware of that.) I won't take that road. The movie didn't offend me, the publicist did. And after some thought, I decided I wasn't an unkind enough person to shred that publicist publicly either. After all, I like his/her boss, and mistakes are made all the time. Of course, when someone else who was stuck not seeing the film said as she left, "It wasn't your fault" and he/she responded "No, it wasn't," I had to laugh. Yes, in my case at least, it was your fault. And you are lucky that it isn't going to boomerang on your movie, even in the small way The Hot Button can be slung.

But I digress...

Joe Gould's Secret is Stanley Tucci's third film, following Big Night and The Imposters. It's the story of a real person named Joe Gould, a legendary writer/bum in the '40s whose claim to fame was that he was writing The Oral History, a constant work-in-progress. Tucci himself plays Joe Mitchell, a New Yorker writer who hears about Gould, spends enough time with him to write a piece about him for his magazine and then finds that he has a connection that is going to last a lifetime. Ian Holm plays Gould in a performance that stinks of Oscar® . In a variation of Dorothy Parker's acting putdown, Holm truly runs the gamut form A to Z. Funny, charming, agonizing, scary, pathetic, outrageous...Joe Gould goes into every corner of the human heart and Holm is up to the task. Unfortunately, Stanley Tucci and screenwriter Howard A. Rodman shorted Tucci the actor by not doing much with the ever-present Joe Mitchell other than to make him a straightman to Gould's antics. Did Mitchell become a better man for having met and cared for Gould? History suggests so, but this movie doesn't really say. Susan Sarandon plays an artist, who in a brief cameo shows more depth of pain and caring than Mitchell ever does as she washes Gould's scabby feet and legs so that he won't get any sicker. In an even tinier cameo (I can't even find the actor's name), an artist takes Gould in for the night without questions or judgements, again providing a richer palette than the Mitchell character. And that's a shame. Tucci has a unique visual style as a director, which sometimes works and sometimes fails. It's almost as if Tony Shaloub (and others, from Alison Janney to Holm) ruined him by filling his still frame with such energy in Big Night that Tucci decided never to make much effort with the camera ever again. But that can be forgiven when the story flies. Joe Gould's Secret is a story worth telling. I just wish it was told with a bit more balance.

After lunch, it was off to the press room to see Chuck and Buck. This may become the most divisive movie of the festival. It is, for all intents and purposes, a gay stalker comedy. You see, Chuck and Buck did some experimentation as children, and Chuck moved and had success and lives with a woman and seems to have a perfect life. But Buck remembers the good old days a bit too well and with his inheritance from his mother in hand, he moves to L.A., where Chuck (now Charlie) lives and invades his life as much as he can. All Buck seems to want is to rekindle his sexual relationship with Chuck, no matter how much Chuck says no. The movie is a mess of cheap laughs (mostly at the expense of Buck, who lives in a dramatically retarded adolescence), bad acting and ugly camera work. And then, near the end, it actually comes together as a philosophy. However, for me, it was a philosophy that I couldn't go with. Essentially, I believe that the film says that if you experimented with other boys as a child that no matter what you do as an adult, you are really gay and that being straight is really just a confused effort to be "grown up." Additionally, by giving solace to Buck at the end, the film suggests that stalking until achieving your goal leads to a positive result. In other words, had this movie been about a girl and a boy, it would be denounced all over the place as offensive and unacceptable. Not that I wish to indulge such political correctness, but I can only imagine the furor in the gay community if the stalker was straight and sought to "cure" a childhood friend of their homosexuality. I'm open to anyone who holds a differing viewpoint on this film and will happily give space to a retort that is factual and not just an attack on a straight writer taking issue with what is essentially a "gay film". In fact, Ray Pride calls the film "a giddy surprise" just a few column inches away. So maybe I just don't get it. But I just didn't like it.

I'm going to jump forward in time here to a late screening so I can end on a positive note. In this case, the publicist was exceptionally helpful even though he didn't know me either. Unfortunately, this movie appeared to have absolutely no philosophy to offend me and its production values were off the chart in the wrong direction. I thought I hated Chuck and Buck, but compared to The Intern, which has also had some positive buzz, Chuck and Buck was a good experience. Oddly enough, The Intern is essentially another gay-themed film, as it is set in a fashion magazine and 70 percent of the jokes come from gay men acting "gay," 25 percent from women's self-hatred of their bodies and about 5 percent from the love story, which seemed a little creepy throughout as the intern pursues and is pursued by someone higher up the magazine's food chain. I did enjoy seeing Peggy Lipton again and there was a great visual gag using the real-life Vogue front man Leon Andre Talley, but that was about all the joy I could find in Mudville. I truly don't understand what possessed the Sundance folks to include this film in the festival. Any five minutes of any episode of "Absolutely Fabulous" would be funnier and show more insight than the 90 minutes of The Intern. Writing any more would make me feel as though I was beating a lame horse. Dominique Swain needs to choose more carefully and really needs an actress friend to explain lighting to her, as this film's director found ways of making a beautiful young woman seem puffy and less attractive than she is about 30 percent of the time.

Okay, so here is the joy of my day. I actually went to the press screening of You Can Count On Me by mistake. I meant to be watching Snow Days at Eccles but went to the Yarrow by mistake. Thank God for small mistakes. (No offense intended to Snow Days.) You have your first-time director in writer Kenneth Lonergan. You have Laura Linney, who is a wonderful technical actress, but often seems to be incapable of relaxing. And you have the story of orphaned siblings in a small town. Smells like Sundance spirit. But this film really bowled me over. Lonergan, who wrote Analyze This, delivers a sharp, smart, bittersweet screenplay. He's still learning to direct, and at times his masters and close-ups don't match. But given the film he made, so what? Linney seems to have aged a bit (as we all must) and age has softened her classic blonde-haired, blue-eyed looks. For the first time, despite various nude appearances in other films, Linney seemed to me to be a woman who I would want to touch and who oozes a grown-up sensuality. I didn't know that Matthew Broderick was in the film, but he too is terrific. He does a less satirical turn on his character from Election and hits every mark the screenplay lays down for him in a somewhat thankless role. Also, there's another Culkin loose in the film biz and little Rory has all the energy and charm of Macauley when he was doing Uncle Buck and Rocket Gibraltar. But the real revelation of this film was actor Mark Ruffalo. Where did Lonergan find this guy?!?! (He found him in small roles. The former bartender also appears in Commited at this festival, which I haven't seen yet.) This is a good-looking guy with absolutely no vanity and the kind of energy that marks the great stars like Holden, McQueen and Cruise. I'm not kidding. This guy is the real deal. He and Linney are the center of this movie and together they tell the story of brothers and sisters as well as I've ever seen it told. There are certainly some imperfections here and it is a tiny story, but this is the kind of film that you love to find at Sundance.

Of course, there was more in my day. I had a lovely dinner with the crew from Fox Searchlight, but it was all off-the-record. (I can't tell you anything about the screenplays for the next two Star Wars movies that they slipped me at the table.) But part of the fun was meeting a wonderful woman named Fina Torres who happens to be a director. She's on the Latin American Film Jury here at the festival and is working on a film for Searchlight now. I look forward to seeing her films Celestial Clockwork and Oriana as soon as I return to L.A. She seems to be a woman of substance, so I suspect her films will be of some wonderful weight as well.

Also, there is the story of the Slamdance filmmaker, Farhad Yawari, who survived decades of oppression in Iran only to be arrested in Park City for handing out flyers to promote his film, Dolphins, on Main Street. It's hard to know what the city had in mind by shutting down the handing out of flyers on Main Street by ordinance, though some would say that it effects Slamdance and NoDance filmmakers a great deal more than it does Sundance filmmakers and that politics from up high in the mountain are involved. I have no way of knowing for sure. But I will say this. The aspirations of young artists, good, bad and indifferent, are what the entire Park City experience is about for me. I'm not sure why the circus should only be open to the publicists and the marketing pros. This is not Dennis Woodruff trying to sell you his video anytime you sit at a sidewalk cafe in L.A. We come to Park City to celebrate film. Let the kids play and we'll party for days.

READER OF THE DAY: From Bike: "Instead of the snowflakes, put that little picture of you that's all over roughcut, and have it falling from the top all the time, now that would be cool!"

And from Tim: "If people really hate the snowflakes, they can easily remove them from view by reducing the size of their browser window. In other words, it takes less time to remove the offending item than it does to write an e-mail complaining about it."

E ME: Should I be meaner or nicer?