January 31, 2005

All in all I saw 40 of this year's Sundance films. I am forcing myself, in the name of hacks everywhere, to make a Sundance 2005 Top Ten list. Over at MCN there's also a list of films I didn't see and was sorry I missed, a few I couldn't really care less about, a few in the ether, 23 that were good, but not that good, and six I didn't like at all.

And Now, The Top Ten Are ...

THE TOP TEN

MirrorMask - A bit of a reach for Top Ten status, this film is - in terms of storytelling - a mess. But the visual of it is pretty much unlike anything else you have ever seen in an extended story. It is a visualist effort, but it is not a work of whoring, using effects for the mere sake of showing off. And the flavors that can be taken from its visual stylings are, it seems to me, almost endless. It may not get any real distribution. But I suspect this will be one of the most influential films of the next decade, based alone on directors who can finesse a peek stealing from it.

Inside Deep Throat - It doesn't blow you away. But it doesn't suck either. This witty, fast-paced doc about a moment in both American and filmic history offers too much of both to be denied. From my perspective, a doc about 70s pornography that does not include Andrea Dworkin just hasn't done its job. But Fenton & Barbato make up for a lot with the wife of a Florida distributor who turns out to be the single most compelling character in the film. (I would tell you her name, but I can't find the press kit at the moment and, of course, she is not listed in the credits on IMDb or on the official site, as she is not famous… but she is the star of the movie.) Seeing the players now is also fascinating. If this documentary was as fully realized as the work that was obviously put into it, it would be a legendary piece of filmmaking.

Old Boy - This Chan-Wook Park film has been a geek classic for years, finally arriving on American shores officially only now. The story of a man who is scooped off the streets and put into isolation for 15 years in a Holiday Inn-like room with a working TV and no human contact, and the revenge he seeks when he is let out, speaks to what is best in the old and new Asian cinema. And Chan-Wook does not indulge in many short cuts. He is demanding of the audience, both our minds and our patience, and he calls on us, in his subtle way, to remember our responsibilities in the world.

Junebug - I must say, this movie has grown on me, starting even as I watched it. Amy Adams gives a home run performance that stays just this side of impossibly cloying. (If she is willing to do the film of Hairspray, as Penny, she would score big.) She has jumped out in the underrated Drop Dead Gorgeous and in Catch Me If You Can and she is ready for her close-up. Junebug is, amazingly, a cousin to Laurel Canyon, which also co-starred Alessandro Nivolo in pretty much the opposite of the role he plays here. In this film, he is a guy who has gotten away from his roots, living in the big city, even marrying without introducing his new, skinny, ethnic-looking, cell-dependent wife to his family - simply put - a bunch of hicks. But hicks can be smarter than they like, even while director Phil Morrison and writer Angus MacLachlan don't fall into stereotypes… well not too far. There is something about Celia Weston's ass and the way Morrison doesn't avoid it that tells you a lot about this film. And little things, like Embeth Davitz and Nivola repeatedly having sex in the house, even when they both must know they can be heard, that at first grates and then, in time, feels like a fair and honest representation of the urban ability to deny. This is far from a perfect film. But I liked it quite a bit.

Three… Extremes - Takashi Miike, Fruit Chan, Chan-Wook Park. How can you not enjoy three directors of such extremes? How can you not enjoy a film about one circus twin who is suffering guilt about killing the other, a woman who makes age-regressing dumplings from human fetuses in her blender and an extra who tortures a film director by threatening to chop off the fingers of his pianist wife? Exxxxxtreme!!! But, like the most interesting gorefests, these three are up to more than making you queasy. Fruit Chan even brings along Christopher Doyle to get just the right red for the fetus recipe. It reminded me of Trilogy of Terror, one of my all-time guilty pleasures. But the artistry along the way… so much more.

Murderball - Breaking the Top Five - which consists of four docs and only one feature - this is a great story and if anyone ever makes a feature of it, it will be a big hit and an Oscar contender for sure. This is the documentary about quadriplegic (meaning some loss of use of all four limbs, not four dead limbs) rugby players. The structural boundaries are two Olympic championships. And the characters are endlessly compelling. The film doesn't make it higher on my list because the filmmaking never is quite transcendent. But it is more than well worth watching.

Hustle & Flow - Manohla Dargis may hate this film and think we were all brainwashed into liking it so much, but I still admire Craig Brewster's writing and directing here and, most of all, the lead performance from Terrence Howard. To different degrees, eight of the films on this Top Ten list engage clear stereotypes and then overcome the limitations of them. That is a great source of power. Here, you could break it down to the pimp with the heart of gold… but that's not what this film is. For me, it is a good story wonderfully told, about someone who realizes that his life has hit a brick wall… and does something about it. He uses every resource he has, which is not always much to work with. But the human spirit, even the spirit of pimps and whores, can keep fighting to find a way.

Grizzly Man - Werner Herzog never knew the subject of his documentary, Timothy Treadwell. But with hundreds of hours of video footage shot by Treadwell himself, a one-of-a-kind student of wildlife, who lived with grizzly bears every summer until the summer when one ate him, Herzog honors Treadwell while shaping a narrative that speaks to his own feelings. Treadwell was intrigued by man vs. nature. Herzog is all about man vs himself. The result is the most compelling and easily the funniest film about a man who gets himself and his girlfriend eaten alive by a bear you will ever see. And as Herzog listens to the audio - the video cap couldn't be removed in time - of the attack that took these two lives, his reaction, sitting right with Treadwell's mother, makes for one of the great scenes of all time, without a visual element to be found.

Twist of Faith - I've written about Kirby Dick's now-Oscar-nominated doc before. This is the story of a "regular guy," an Ohio fireman with two kids and a loving wife, who is also haunted by the memory of being molested by a priest when he was a kid. I think the Oscar nomination was enough to kill any Sundance heat around this film, though distribution is still available in a pre-HBO window. (Nomination also went to last year's Sundance prize-winner Born Into Brothels and Sundance-launched box office hit Super Size Me) A great film. Go out of your way to see it.

The Devil & Daniel Johnston - My favorite film of Sundance this year, far and away, was this brilliantly constructed documentary about a loveable loser who has found a way to make himself a winner, time after time. I never heard of Daniel Johnston before seeing this film. I am now a fan… of his music… of his art… and of him and his parents. This manic depressive near-psychotic obsessive compulsive with delusions of grandeur, who goes from 100 pounds soaking wet to 230 during the course of the story, is in many ways the amalgamation of all three of the Crumb Brothers shown in Terry Zwigoff's great documentary. But he is more. He is truly charming in his own bizarre way. And director Jeff Feuerzeig, who has a real life, but spent four years on Daniel Johnston in order to make the film just right (his D.P. described one OCD moment for Jeff when the wrong cassette of a voice overlay was what they had on film and he re-shot so the cassette, which no one would be able to connect the dots to, would be the right one), did what he wished. He made a documentary that has all the visual impact that so called "new docs" are offering, but he never crossed the line to showing off or to distracting from his subject. Here is a songwriter who has been covered by many well-known bands and is admired by even more, but Feuerzeig never includes talking head homages or even clips of the covers. This is a film about Daniel Johnston. And by the end - unless you are utterly put off by the man in the first 10 minutes - you fall in love with him and his family and the strength of the human spirit that comes through even when we, who are not in any clear way handicapped, cannot see it ourselves.

E-ME.

Sundance Preview Part I
Sundance Preview Part 2

January 3, 2005 - Reflections On A New Year
December 31, 2004 - The Ten Best
December 30, 2004 - The Ten Worst
December 29, 2004 - Movies You Should Have Seen, But Didn't