January 8, 2003

Everything old is new again….

Something happened at Sundance last year.  It’s hard to explain.  I wasn’t there, for the first time in years, and even from Miami I could hear it.  Redford questioned the purpose of the event.  Lots of people stayed away, using the Olympics as an excuse.  And the biggest sale, the alleged $5 million for Tadpole, led to a box office dud (about $3 million total) that didn’t even cover its acquisition cost, much less P&A.

I really like Sundance, though I must admit, I missed the great old days.  I had attended the festival on the spur of the moment over a decade ago and had a great time.  That was when you could sit in a room with 50 other people for a Robert Altman Q&A and get dinner without a two-month old pre-paid reservation.  But the last five years of Sundancing came after it became a money festival. 

The 2001 festival was marked with a distinct lack of sales, the most significant purchases being Super Troopers, for $2.5 million, going on to gross almost $20 million domestic, and In The Bedroom, bought for $1.5 million and going on to score almost $35 million at the domestic box office and a bunch of Oscar nominations.  Still…

Going into this year’s festival, there is an odd reticence in the air.  The usual suspects will be in attendance.  And movies will be sold.  But what is Sundance now?  I don’t know that the answer is all that clear.  It is still a great place for skiing, skirt-chasing and seeing movies. 

Opening night is always a slot that you want but don’t want.  The honor is nice, but the film has turned out to be a dud, year after year after year.  This year, screenwriter Ed Solomon makes his feature directing debut and he has a hell of a cast lined up in Levity.  

The newly minted Park City Opening Night features the movie that happens to be my most anticipated film of the entire festival, Keith Gordon’s big screen version of Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective.   Perhaps a new tradition…

The rest of the Premiere section is little spotty, both by definition and potential.  Dan Algrant’s People I Know is a Miramax film that Miramax has been sitting on for an extended period.  Two terrific films, In America and The Secret Lives of Dentists, premiered at Toronto.  Alex Proyas’ Garage Days opened commercially in Australia in October to very mixed reviews.  There are new films from Thomas Vinterberg, The Polish Brothers, James Foley, Neil LaBute, Frank Pierson, Campbell Scott, Earnest Dickerson and Oliver Stone.  Beefcake’s Thom Fitzgerald is also back.  The potential surprises in this section are Matthew Parkhill’s dot the i and Seinfeld writer Larry Charles’ Masked and Anonymous.

Documentary Competition is, as always, loaded.  The highest profile doc is A Decade Under The Influence, which serves as a distinct counterpoint to the Raging Bulls, Easy Riders documentary, based on Peter Biskind’s book, that’s opening Slamdance.  While RB,ER features Peter Bogdanovich, Roger Corman and Karen Black, this IFC-funded doc, directed by Richard LaGravenese and the late Ted Demme, offers Polly Platt (Bogdonavich’s ex-wife), Francis Coppola, William Friedkin, Julie Christie and others.

Bukowski, Emmett Till, Tom Dowd, Gore Vidal and The Birth Control Pill all have biopics at the festival.  Death gets action in two docs, one about life in a morgue (A Certain Kind of Death) and the other about the AIDS crisis in Africa (State of Denial). 

The darkhorse likely to be on everyone’s lips coming out of Sundance is Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing The Friedmans.  This is ostensibly a doc about a family that becomes subject to cruel and unusual scrutiny in the era of the McMartin trial fiasco.  But home movies and personal footage make it much, much more. 

Dramatic Competition is a bit less clear-cut.  The most likely hit of the group is American Splendor, the rare Sundance feature financed by HBO, produced by Ted Hope and directed by documentarians Sheri Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini. Currently headed direct to HBO, a good reaction at the festival could well get the low-budget flick a theatrical release.  Bet on Focus Features to take it home.

Camp is likely to be the “coastal” hit of the group, destined to great success in New York and L.A. and obscurity everywhere else other than Chicago’s Near North and The Castro.  But make no mistake.   The really gay movie of the festival will be Die Mommie Die, the Charles Busch vehicle. 

IFC’s Pieces of April could gather heat though, inherently, it already got distribution.  Katie Holmes plays against type for the directing debut of About A Boy co-writer Peter Hedges, it also has the new Parker Posey of the indie world, Patricia Clarkson.

The movie most likely to be overrated going is The United States of Leland, which has Kevin Spacey as a producer, Sundance “find” Ryan Gosling and a writer director with three names. 

The most likely to end up in a small ball of twisted metal, gasoline and the slow drip of blood?  Sorry boys… Party Monster.  Great doc dudes Barbato and Fenton did the real story of Michael Alig.  Word is… a big stinking turd.  Again… sorry, guys.  I hope that “they” are wrong.

American Showcase should be renamed American Showcased.  I am excited about seeing the great Jessica Lange in Normal, with the great Tom Wilkinson in as a 50-year-old man who finally realizes that a sex change is his only chance at happiness.  But Buffalo Soldiers, City of Ghosts, Laurel Canyon and Raising Victor Vargas have all been around the block already.  And Salma Hayek’s directing debut… well worth a peek.  

And keep an eye out for Helmut Schleppi’s A Foreign Affair, starring Tim Blake Nelson, David Arquette, Emily Mortimer and Lois Smith.  It’s in American Spectrum and it could be one of the titles that jumps to the fore. 

There are more films there.  And we have to keep our antennae open to the potential of magic in them thar hills.  But I’m not sure what I am expecting from the festival this year, really.  And maybe that’s good.  Maybe that’s the start of a new crush that will lead to love.  But for now, I’ll be wearing a critical condom.

READER OF THE DAY:  NOT SAM writes:  “I have always been a fan of movies that are intentionally duplicitous, such as Fight Club, The Usual Suspects, Memento, etc.  What really makes the difference for me is not the trickiness, per se, but the interest factor in what's going on.

For example, Vanilla Sky is a tricky film, but it didn't play nearly as well as I'd hoped.  It's not that it's a bad film, but I stopped caring about what was going on about half way through.  The film doesn't convince us of its authenticity, which is surprising considering Cameron Crowe's obvious talent in making characters feel real or, at very least, interesting.  In comparison, every time I watch Jacob's Ladder, I get sucked into the world and Jacob Singer's plight.  I feel compassion in the middle of the nightmare, which is really something.

The other important factor is how many clues the film leaves as to where it's headed, and when those clues are revealed.  If a film doesn't play fair, then it's a miss.  The Usual Suspects almost does this, though when you go back and watch, you realize that the only perspective given is a false one; we're watching a two-hour lie.  Fight Club was criticized for this, but there is a pivotal scene way before the ending where the secret is revealed if you're paying close attention.  The best "trick" films give you just enough so that on a second viewing, your perspective clues you in to things you missed the first time.

The opposite sin is making things too obvious.  For example, the answer to the puzzle of The Sixth Sense lies in the first five minutes, making it a bore to those of us who caught on early.

It's a balancing act with these movies.  Done poorly, they are tedious. Done right, they are one of the reasons I'm still in love with film.”

And this from Rob Or What?:  “The reader support for Rules of Attraction makes me eager to come out of the Rules closet.  I enjoyed Avary's showmanship, but I was actually hooked by it emotionally, and I thought Van Der Beek, Shannyn Sossamon and Ian Somerhalder did a great job of grounding the more surreal aspects of the setting and storyline.  And it's a film full of great individual moments--the suicide scene, the Europe trip, the brilliant interlude with Faye Dunaway and the drunk, gay dilettante (I know several people for whom the line "It sucks cooooooooooock" has become something of a mantra).  There are probably a dozen or so of this year's movies that I like better, but this one really worked for me.

I also thought Lovely and Amazing, though well-regarded, didn't get its due.  This was just a beautiful film full of wonderful attention to specific character detail.  Each character's tiniest word or gesture rang eerily true for me, and all of the performances were so effortlessly convincing.  No other movie this year presented regular people so finely drawn.  The film's humor is so incisive and drawn from life that I found it hilarious but also a little sad and ultimately quite moving.  It's also one of the best-looking DV movies ever.

Other underrated movies: Cherish, Unfaithful, Frailty, Personal Velocity

And if Far From Heaven doesn't get a Best Picture nomination, I may picket the ceremony.“

EME:  What would make you picket the Oscars this year?