Monday, 29 January 2001

The Hot Button has moved to www.davidpoland.com ....

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It's Sunday night… Park City is almost empty of Angelinos and New Yorkers who have filled the streets for the last 10 days. We walked into the Riverhorse, scene of nightly insanity throughout the fest, shortly after the Super Bowl ended and were bodies 16-19 in the main dining room. The streets were cleared of Sundance signs and paraphernalia hours ago. The last screening of Sundance 2001 let out at 7:30 p.m. And tomorrow, we will all be in our respective homes. It is always amazing to me how quickly these things fade into the sunset.

Speaking of which, Hot Button regulars may want to commit my name to memory as soon as possible… as in DavidPoland.com. There's nothing there yet, but who knows what may come as the week progresses.

The award ceremony for Sundance 2001 was pretty much the same old same old. When I was broadcasting on KABC-790 Saturday morning, someone called in to ask whether Sundance was still as preoccupied with ethnic and gay film as it had been reputed to in the past. I answered that there was still a representative amount of film from many minority groups, but that Sundance had gotten over its predilection. And then the awards proved me absolutely wrong.

It was an awkward event for me, because I didn't really dislike any of the films that won. A few of the winners (Lalee's Kin and The Deep End, which won cinematography awards, Memento, which won for screenwriting and Tom Wilkinson & Sissy Spacek, who won a special award for their performances together in In The Bedroom) went to some of my favorite films from this year's festival. But I had problems with the unimaginative choices that many of the awards represented.

For starters, with all due respect, what the hell was Hedwig & The Angry Inch doing in festival competition? It is absolutely a crowd favorite and it was no surprise that it won the Audience Award for drama. But it was the only Dramatic Competition film to come in with major studio distribution, care of New Line. (Memento is with IFC distribution, which has never done a wide release, and the fact that they are still on the festival circuit is indication of how much help they feel they need.) And as cutting-edge as John Cameron Mitchell is, this is a movie made from a hot, long-running Off-Broadway hit. No other competition has a history that even comes close. I didn't see the film, so I can't take exception to Mitchell's win of the Directing Award, but the award seems to be somewhat misplaced. Perhaps a Special Jury Award for Exceptional Breakthrough Work In Front of and Behind The Camera would be right. But Hedwig is so one-of-a-kind, it seems that directing film is not the man focus of Mitchell's future and I wish the jury had taken that into account.

Likewise, the dual award winning Dogtown and Z-Boys is near the bottom of the list of documentaries that I feel called for a directing award. During the award ceremony, the film was repeatedly referred to as inspirational. I'm not sure where the inspiration was coming from. What I saw was an aggressively edited home movie that seemed to be (I didn't have a watch) about 20 percent moving images and only about half of that moving images made for the documentary. What did Stacey Peralta direct? Well, he may have been hands-on directing the editing, but in my book, you have to come up with something pretty extraordinary to be worthy of a Best Director award when you are making a found footage doc. I'm not sure that I would support a George Butler directing win for The Endurance, much as I liked the movie. And I sure as hell would not support a directing award for Billy Corben, had Raw Deal been in competition, though it was my most profoundly memorable doc experience this year. Chris Smith's work on Home Movie is glorious doc directing. Kate David, whose Southern Comfort I will complain about below, did a great job of directing her film. Doug Pray's work on Scratch deserved notice. But Stacey Peralta's feat was one of editing, not directing.

And I have other major problems with Peralta's documentary. I saw it Sunday in the screenings of award winners. (It also won shared the Audience Award with Scout's Honor – I'll get to that one later, too.) There is something I find deeply disturbing about a documentary made about one's own life that never acknowledges its first person status. Peralta was one of the Z-Boys from the nicknamed area Dogtown, in beachfront Los Angeles. They were, as cutting edge surfers and then skateboarders, superstars of a sort. Peralta has himself interviewed as just another talking head, despite being in charge. There are also myriad examples of interviewees referring to their interviewer as "you" or "You guys," as in "You guys were the best ever!!!!" I'm not disputing the skills or the importance of the Z-Boys. But if you are going to write an ode to yourself, it seems to me that you owe it to your audience to let them in on the gag.

Additionally, Dogtown and Z-Boys is so full of self-love that it never really explores any of the less attractive aspects of a bunch of teens suddenly having fame and money. And, unlike Southern Comfort, in which the documentarian would have to confront his subjects to get the answers that I craved, or Scout's Honor, which is much more of a political screed than an even-handed, challenging documentary, Peralta has no excuses…. he was there for all of it.

But back to Southern Comfort and Scout's Honor. Both films, as I've expressed before, fail in my eyes for one reason. They never ask the really hard questions. It is as though both stories are so uncomfortable to begin with that the audience is satisfied with the surface value that is provided in both. In Southern Comfort, Kate David gets access to a circle of transsexuals who allow her to film a short period of their lives together. And it is enlightening. Like Kirby Dick's infinitely superior Chain Camera, familiarity breeds comfort. And that's great. But once we get the idea that these are humans who deserve love and respect and should never be treated like freaks, I was quite ready for the rest of the meal. Quack doctors who do shoddy gender reassignment surgery are mentioned, but who are these doctors and where are they when the central person in the doc develops ovarian cancer years after becoming a man? Where are the families of these people? Why do transsexuals end up with other transsexuals as mates… or do they… or is this just a unique group? We get to see one of the boys that our center person birthed as a woman, but isn't there anything really difficult about this change?

It is absolutely clear that this is not an easy life. It is absolutely clear that these are good people. But there is something that feels inherently dishonest in a documentary that is reduced to being and advocacy film.

The same is true of Scout's Honor, which won the Freedom of Expression Award and split the Audience Award with Southern Comfort. I can't think of any film I saw this week that less represented the freedom of expression. Why? Because Scout's Honor is a one-sided bit of well-intended propaganda. Freedom of expression demands balance, because even those of us who lean left have to be willing to consider the opinions of others if we want to be honest in calling ourselves open minded. In Scout's Honor, anyone who thought that gays should not be in scouting was buried alive, often by their own words.

World Cinema winner The Road Home, by Zhang Yimou, coasted in on pedigree, in my opinion. It's not a bad film, but in a field of 27, it seemed way too soft to win on its merits. Others clearly disagree. So be it.

I did think it was nice for the Doc Jury to give a special award to Children Underground, the devastating tale of Romanian children who live on the streets. It is a kind of real world version of Larry Clarke's Kids and the power is, as a result, infinitely greater.

Finally, the Grand Jury Prize winner in the Dramatic Competition was The Believer, the story of a Nazi who grew up as an Orthodox Jew. It's not bad, but it's not among the very best films I saw this last 10 days. And it is symbolic of a year in which the Sundance Film Festival was, despite a wide range of very good films, a year without greatness. This was a year in which documentaries were better than the dramas and in which the dramas were moody and atmospheric and rarely revolutionary. That said, I would have supported fully half of the dramatic selections ahead of The Believer. But such is life.

Things should be back to the normal Hot Button grind tomorrow. Until then…

READER OF THE DAY returns tomorrow… so E-ME.