Thursday, 18 January 2001

Premature evaluation. Dozens of men and women suffer from this terrible malady every year around this time. There’s no pill that can help. Kind of like premature ejaculation, the only real answer is to slow down and to stop trying so hard. (Not that I would know, of course. When it happens as a teenager, it’s not a malady, it’s an appetizer.)
But what about "The Answer?" Isn’t it the measure of the movie journalist to know exactly what will happen, before THE festival of indie film in America begins? Well, of course not.

Just because Sundance is the start and finish of over a hundred independent films every year, the magic is not in the business that gets transacted here. The magic is in the movies. Corny? No! So many of us are so worried about looking like rubes that we forget what happens every year, not just at Sundance but every weekend. We sit in the dark and we decide for ourselves. We are transformed or bored or enraged or disappointed or accepting or distracted. We laugh, we cry, we fall in love and we make judgments about the entire world, all at the sight of 24 frames per second.
As an industry columnist, I make my living by watching the ebb and flow of art and commerce and personality. I find it endlessly fascinating. But the movies live in their own ether. No one knew how wonderful You Can Count on Me would be last year… until the lights went down. With due respect to Laura Linney, she’s been in number of bad art films. Mark Ruffalo was unknown. Ken Lonergan had written a broad comedy (Analyze This) and The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle (a movie I think is grossly underrated, by the way) so who expected this gentle exploration of familial love? And then they showed the movie. BOOM!
I came up to Park City a couple of days early this year. The roughcut.com team is now here en masse but I wanted to have my first sinus headache and a bout of inspired moisturizing before the whole gang arrived. My managing editor, Laura Rooney, came up with me. We snuck a peek inside of The Egyptian, quiet and ready. The Eccles theaters are still filled with high school students. The big wood boards (sponsored by Entertainment Weekly) that soon will be covered top to bottom in promotional materials for movies from Sundance, Slamdance, and every freaky festival in town next week… empty. The Interactive Lounge… filled with computer boxes. The screening rooms at The Yarrow… still under plastic wraps. And 48 hours later, the carnival is swinging along at full speed.

Why?

The movies. It’s so simple.
Michelle Rodriguez made a car movie that she could barely stand to go back to work on after taking a break for Girlfight promotion. Donal Logue is doing some stupid Fox sitcom. Girlfight, Two Family House, Waking the Dead, The Tao of Steve, American Psycho, The Cup, Groove, Human Traffic, My Generation, Well-Founded Fear and The Ballad of Ramblin’ Jack barely dented the box office. Brad Anderson’s Happy Accidents hasn’t even been released.

But for those of us who saw those movies last January… these films are a part of our lives. Forever. Love them, hate them, or yawn at them, they are ours. And that’s what Sundance is really about. Because, in the end, that’s all there really is. That’s all we can really count on. The most complex form of communication this side of the human brain itself… film, DV, video, animation… it doesn’t matter. We bow at the altar and pray that every film is The One.
Where will we find the magic this year? Who knows? But if you really think that all that Sundance has become is the worst of what the indie business can be, you’re not fooling me. You’re fooling yourself. Because here you are, in the snow, fighting for a seat, searching, searching for the film you can look in the eye and proclaim your love for. And in that moment, all the cynicism floats away and you are six years old again, watching The Wizard of Oz, or nineteen watching Citizen Kane or in that too-cold or too-hot arthouse trying to figure out Tarkovsky. Mutual ovation.