January 2006 Archives
As I write this, a fresh blanket of snow has turned Park City, Utah into a veritable winter wonderland and, in an unprecedented occurrence, the jury and audience members of the 2006 Sundance Film Festival have proved unanimous in their assessment of the best of the fest. In the dramatic competition, both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award were presented to co-directors Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer's Quincañera, about an Echo Park tee
nager who gets a most unwelcome surprise for her 15th birthday — she discovers she's pregnant. Meanwhile, in the documentary competition, the double winner was God Grew Tired of Us, director Christopher Quinn's portrait of three Sudanese immigrants making new lives for themselves in America. As it happens, of the 30-odd movies I saw over the past 10 days, I managed to miss both of these, but the awards make me want to see them. The question is: Will I have a chance? And more to the point, will you?
What I'm getting at here, of course, is that while both Quincañera and God Grew Tired of Us can look forward to long futures on the film festival circuit, where they go from there is anybody's guess. As of awards night, neither film had sold to an American distributor and, while I don't doubt that they now will, it's worth remembering that last year's dramatic Grand Jury Prize winner, 40 Shades of Blue, came and went in the blink of a box-office eye (despite scads of strong reviews), while the documentary winner, Why We Fight, has just opened to tepid business in New York and L.A. Such, of course, are the increasingly harsh realities of the independent film marketplace. But as Sundance 2006 wound to a close on the same weekend that saw Steven Soderbergh's Bubble make its historic cross-platform release, the future of specialized film distribution seemed to reach new levels of intensity. Earlier in the week, IFC Films announced the deployment of a new experiment by which the indie distributor will, over the next 12 months, release a slate of 24 films (including Hou Hsiao-hsien's magnificent Three Times) simultaneously in select theaters and via on-demand cable television, while the Sundance Institute itself announced a partnership with 14 art-house cinemas across the country (from Hilo, Hawaii to Waterville, Maine) to exhibit a series of recent and classic independent films curated by the Institute. Of his venture, Josh Sapan, Presdient and CEO of IFC parent company Rainbow Media, commented, "Between the two cities of New York and Los Angeles, there is a vast country of indie film lovers who do not have access to the indie films they read about and want to see." Let's hope he's right.
Though I may have done a poor job of picking this year's Sundance winners, the festival nevertheless ended for me on a strong note, with the screening of A Lion in the House. For six years, co-directors Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert trained their cameras on five pediatric cancer patients, their doctors and their families as they endured experimental treatments, remissions and sudden relapses, all the while attempting to carry on with their lives and remain courageous in the face of that inscrutable mystery that is the human body. Strongly recalling the great institutional documentaries of Allan King and Frederick Wiseman, A Lion in the House is strong, unforgiving stuff — a movie that affirms life while strongly cautioning against false hope and which, in one fell swoop, managed to make ten days of searching for cinematic diamonds in the rough seem unconditionally worth the effort.
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Last year at Sundance, the documentary filmmaker Kirby Dick (Chain Camera, Sick) came to town to premiere the excellent Twist of Faith, about the impact on one American family of the Catholic Church's sexual abuse scandals. This year, Dick is back with a scabrous, provocative and highly entertaining inquiry into another seemingly untouchable institution — the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings board — and the result is one of the most buzzed-about films in the festival. Admittedtly, the thesis of Dick's This Film is not yet Rated isn't exactly new. For decades, filmmakers and industry observers alike have leveled similar accusations — that the ratings board is tougher on explicit sex than on graphic violence; that it holds independent films to a stricter set of standards than studio fare; and that, owing to the collusion of newspapers, television stations and theater owners — most of whom refuse to promote and/or play unrated films — the supposedly elective ratings process instituted by the MPAA in 1968 is actually about as voluntary as death and taxes. But the persuasive power of Dick's film lies less in the arguments it presents than in the chorus of impassioned voices making them — namely, the very filmmakers (including Kimberly Pierce, John Waters and South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone) whose work has been slapped with the ultra-restrictive NC-17 (formerly "X") rating and/or who've been forced to recut their films in order to avoid such a fate. As they hold forth on their experiences dealing with the ratings board — and as Dick juxtaposes their supposedly incendiary bits of celluloid against scenes from other movies that did manage to pass the MPAA litmus test — a damning portrait emerges of an arcane censorship outfit whose methods are nearly as mysterious as the identities of its supposedly "average American" censors.
This Film is not yet Rated uncovers its share of genuine scoops, not least the revelation that the MPAA's ratings appeals board — a disgruntled filmmaker's last refuge of hope — includes one Catholic and one Episcopalian clergyman. But so brisk and breezy is Dick's style that, as a journalist, he leaves some of his bases uncovered, and already by the time of its second Sundance screening, This Film had generated several negative editorials accusing Dick of omitting important historical information, railing against the establishment without proposing a viable alternative and otherwise bending the truth to suit his own whims. Those claims aren't completely without merit, but to these eyes, Dick doesn't even aspire to more than a cursory overview of the MPAA and its monolithic power. Rather, he has his finger on a different, more troubling pulse — that of a new age of cultural conservatism in a country where, 30 years after Jon Voight's paraplegic Vietnam vet sent Jane Fonda into orgasmic ecstasy in an immortal moment from Hal Ashby's Coming Home, the puppet sex of Team America: World Police is seen as a threat to our moral fiber.
Heaven knows what the MPAA will make of Destricted, an omnibus film (just when you thought, following Eros and Three…Extremes, it was safe to go back into the cinema) presented as part of Sundance's annual Park City at Midnight sidebar. Consisting of eight short films ranging in length from 2 to 40 minutes and directed by a cross-section of film-world and art-world enfants terribles (including Matthew Barney, Gaspar Noe, Larry Clark and Sam Taylor Wood), Destricted promises porn and, for the most part, delivers only artistic pretension or (in the cases of Barney and Noe) unintended self-parody. However, Clark's Impaled, in which a typically Clark-ian teenage slacker screen tests for a role in a porn film against a series of comely (and considerably more experienced) actresses, is one of the best pieces of film (or, to be precise, video) I've seen this year in Park City — sly, sexy, funny and marked by the extraordinary delicacy Clark has time and again achieved with neophyte adolescent actors.
Much the same can be said of Clark's latest feature film, Wassup Rockers, in which a gaggle of Latino skateboarders from the wrong side of the 110 Freeway embark on a satiric odyssey through the garden parties and glittering backyard pools of the West L.A. elite. Suggesting nothing so much as a punk variation on John Cheever's The Swimmer, the film is uncommonly sharp on matters of race and class in Los Angeles, and on the sweetly naïve expressions of teenage sexuality. Wassup Rockers could also be seen in Park City this year, albeit not in Sundance, but rather at Slamdance, which after 11 years of continuous operations can hardly be called an upstart competitor anymore. In the six years that I've been attending both festivals, there have been major discoveries here, including the documentaries Hybrid and Stone Reader, and even Sundance itself (which this year screened Slamdance co-founder Paul Rachman's documentary, American Hardcore, in the midnight program) seems to have buried the hatcher and realized that this town is big enough for the both of them.
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I can't imagine what Harvey and Bob were thinking when they snapped up the exceptionally daft The Night Listener, unless they consider the sedate $3 million they paid for this dreary Robin Williams vehicle but a drop in their roomy bucket, which is shortly to be filled to overflowing by Sin City 2. As a performer, Williams has a wonderfully volatile range; as an actor, he commutes between over-sincere and over-sinister. Both modes are on full monochromatic display in this stolid noir thriller by Patrick Stettner (who made the overheated The Business of Strangers), based on a roman à clef by Armistead Maupin about a late-night radio talk show host who may or may not be the subject of an elaborate hoax. By turns unctuous and sulky, Williams spends most of the movie stumbling around nighttime rural Wisconsin, chasing or being chased by a pathetically misused Toni Collette as the blind putative guardian of a putative young victim (Rory Culkin) of child abuse.
No doubt les frères Weinstein will hitch their marketing campaign to the hullabaloo around recent hoaxters like James Frey. To me the movie is of interest only for its embrace — barely explored in a languid subplot about the talk show host's breakup with his boyfriend — of the eternal ambivalence of writers about tapping the lives of people they know and/or love for their work. I'm a case in point, being one of the few critics who thought that Noah Baumbach fetched his helpless, barely disguised parents a cruel hatchet job in The Squid and the Whale — even as I gear up for an essay on the family in cinema that I'm pretty sure will be the duller for not mining the troubles in my own family that turned me into a moviegoer in the first place. In the end this debate may be decided on matters of tone, but it gives me pause when far more burnished minds than my own, among them V.S. Naipaul and Marguerite Duras (neither one of them known for being nice or squeamish), held off writing about relatives until they were safely dead.
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As I am writing these words, I have been awake for nearly two days straight, and in that time I have managed to see no less than three films which take sleep (or lack thereof) as their very subject. Needless to say, this is sensitive territory for the festival-going critic. My itinerary began with The Science of Sleep, in which an aspiring artist named Stephane (Gael Garcia Bernal) returns to France from Mexico at the behest of his mother, lands a dead-end job working a typesetting machine at an ad agency and finds himself falling in love with the quirky Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who makes him so nervous he can't even bring himself to tell her he lives in the apartment right across the hall. The film is directed by Michel Gondry, the enormously talented music video director who two years ago teamed up with writer Charlie Kaufman for a little ditty called Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Here, as there, Gondry takes us deep into that dense matter between his protagonist's ears, and the elaborate fantasy sequences that unfold therein rival Sunshine for their freewheeling absurdist brio: Entire cities are constructed of miniature buildings and toy cars; an anthropomorphic electric razor adds hair to your body instead of taking it away; and Stephane is indisputably master of his domain. Nobody is trying to vacuum out any of his memories, mind you, but like Jim Carrey's Joel Barish, Stephane finds it easier to express himself in his dream life than in his waking one, especially when it comes to his love for Stephanie. I'm generally in agreement with those who feel that Gondry — loosed from Kaufman and Spike Jonze and more or less given carte blanche by the French film studio Gaumont — has a penchant to overindulge his flights of visual fancy, though I'd still rather journey through his overindulgences than, say, Terry Gilliam's bar none. But the soul of Gondry's work — and the thing that makes The Science of Sleep, warts and all, one of the two or three truly indispensable films to emerge out of Sundance so far this year — is its richly imaginative and painfully felt understanding of a generation hopelessly tongue-tied when it comes to matters of the heart.
From Sleep, I segued to Wide Awake, another gloriously eccentric achievement by the documentary filmmaker Alan Berliner, who once made a film (The Sweetest Sound) about everyone else in the world who has the same name as he does, and who always manages to make a movie primarily about himself and his own neuroses no matter what he sets out to do. Here, the subject is Berliner's battle with insomnia and his lifelong efforts to overcome it — from counting sheep to aromatherapy to alcohol and sex. Nothing works, but then again, Berliner isn't entirely sure he'd like to adjust to a more normal schedule of wake and sleep, given that it is in the wee morning hours that nearly all of his films have been put together. Along the way, there are humorous asides about a one-time global campaign to find the cure for jet lag and Berliner's own personal theory that the oft-iterated phrase "human error" may be but a metaphor for fatigue.
No doubt the great cinematographer Haskell Wexler (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, In the Heat of the Night) would be among the first to agree with Berliner. Exactly six hours after the conclusion of the midnight screening of Wide Awake, having spent that interim time back in my condo writing, I returned to the exact same Sundance festival theater and sat in the exact same seat for an 8 AM screening of Wexler's aptly-titled Who Needs Sleep? — and suffice it to say that, unlike Berliner's film, Wexler's is no laughing matter. Inspired by the tragic deaths of Hollywood film crew members who have been killed in auto accidents caused by falling asleep at the wheel, Who Needs Sleep? is an impassioned, angry plea for more humane working hours in an industry prone to resorting to sweatshop tactics all in the name of "getting the shot." At any hour of the day or night, Wexler's film is, no pun intended, a powerful wake-up call, not just for the movie industry, but for an entire nation that once fought passionately for the 8-hour work day and now, ever more willingly, works itself to death. Certainly, I was convinced. After soldiering on from Wexler's screening through three other movies, by the time I finally stumbled into my first party of this year's festival that night, I walked right up to one critic colleague, mistook him for a Warner Independent Pictures executive to whom he bears a passing resemblance, and asked him if it was true that he had closed a deal to buy the U.S. distribution rights to The Science of Sleep. And as I write this, the keys on my computer keyboard are starting to blur and dance about in a most Gondry-an manner.
More to come. But for now, off to bed.
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It's a wonder any of us journalists actually get to the screenings here at Sundance — we're too busy deleting the hundreds of e-mails inviting us to the myriad swag shops that spring up like poisonous toadstools all over Park City during the festival. I wouldn't care if we were actually being offered some decent swag. No, they want us to witness celebrities who already have everything scrambling for even more for free, and then give this edifying spectacle coverage. Don't look for any in this space, unless someone makes it worth my while.
Just to give you some idea of how hot the buzz was around Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris's Little Miss Sunshine Friday night — a rumor I'd like to think was apocryphal was circulating among the dense mass of ticket holders outside the capacious Eccles Theater that tickets for the public screening were going for $200 on eBay. Actually, if I didn't have press credentials, I'd willingly have coughed up $50 for this uproarious caper featuring a terrific Steve Carell as a suicidal gay Proust scholar (I swear) who's forced to move in with his sister (Toni Collette) and brother-in-law (Greg Kinnear)'s screwed-up family, then drive cross-country with them to California so that their seven-year-old daughter (a very capable little Abigail Breslin) can compete in a kiddie beauty pageant. Michael Arndt's script is sharp and funny, and the direction swings confidently between broad farce and a genuine feel for the pain of all kinds of failure. The ending, a bravura set piece skewering the insanity of commercial beauty contests for children, not only drove the audience wild, but had half a row of ordinarily dour critics around me rolling about laughing. In the post-screening Q&A, a dewy-eyed audience member asked Alan Arkin, who plays the recreational-heroin-using lech of a grandfather, if it was true that he hated film festivals. "Not at the moment," he said sweetly. A bidding war was going on during the screening, and though one studio executive told me afterwards that he had doubts the movie would go for a large sum because it was "too American" for the crucial international market, it was snapped up for a cool $10 million by Fox Searchlight.
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SCOTT FOUNDAS: I'm glad we're starting off this blog on the 2006 Sundance Film Festival by giving a tag-team report about the opening night film, Friends with Money. It seems particularly fitting in that two of the characters in the movie are a husband-and-wife screenwriting team (played by Catherine Keener and Jason Isaacs), who sit opposite each other in their office and shout prospective lines of dialogue back and forth across the room. I'd like for people out there in cyberspace to imagine that this is how we're working together right now.
ELLA TAYLOR: And don't think I didn't record every one of your loud guffaws, Scott Foundas, even though you claimed at the end that you only liked it "here and there."
FOUNDAS: True. But before we go any further, we should probably say that this is a movie about a quartet of lifelong female friends and their significant others (or lack thereof) who navigate the perilous (if refreshingly racism-free) terrain that is life in Los Angeles. There're the aforementioned screenwriters; a high-end fashion designer (Frances McDormand) with an effeminate husband (Simon McBurney) who everyone assumes is gay; the privately wealthy Franny (Joan Cusack) and Matt (Greg Germann); and the slacker/pothead Olivia (Jennifer Aniston), who's recently quit her teaching job, taken to cleaning houses for a living and who pines for the married man with whom she once had a 2-month fling. The writer-director of the film, Nicole Holofcener, who made Walking and Talking and Lovely & Amazing (and who clearly has a thing for three-word titles), writes very funny dialogue and she made me laugh a lot — particularly in one scene where McDormand has a histrionic meltdown after someone cuts in front of her in line in an Old Navy store. And as in Holofcener's previous films, a lot of those funny moments are rooted in a kind of painful truth — in this case, the idea that you can be fabulously rich and still utterly miserable (as Keener and Isaacs are), or realize (as McDormand does) that you've arrived at that place in life where life has very few surprises left to reveal. But for every moment like those in Friends with Money, there were at least two others that felt overwrought and false.
TAYLOR: I do agree that Friends with Money doesn't pack quite the punch that Lovely and Amazing did; it seems more underdeveloped conceptually. However, I suspect there may be a gender thing going on in our disagreement. For starters, it would have been so easy for Holofcener to have confined this movie to a breezy farce (at which she excels) about the empty pretensions of L.A. West Siders and tie it all up with a shiny pink bow at the end. Instead, she has tempered the satirical one-liners with a wistful elegy to the loose inconclusiveness of life, I assume not only in Santa Monica. Frances McDormand has wicked comic timing, and Jennifer Aniston is awfully good at playing lost women who drift through life letting other people trample on them — up to a point. And I liked that the strategically ambiguous "gay" husband adores his wife and wants more children. The movie has a nice fluid feel, and Holofcener has a fine way with rhythm and pace. Her world view, such as it is, is built into the material and psychic insufficiency of these people's lives, rather than declaimed from the rafters.
FOUNDAS: I too was relieved that Holofcener didn't feel the compulsion to tie all her loose ends up into a neat package — a welcome departure, I must say, from last year's opening night film, Happy Endings, in which every storyline was predicated on such lugubrious coincidences and chance encounters that I wanted to run screaming from the theater. Friends with Money certainly isn't a bad movie, but when its brisk 88 minutes were up, I felt unsatisfied. The promise that this might be a movie about the ways in which people's financial status affects their interpersonal relationships is certainly left unfulfilled. But even taken strictly as a character study, I wanted to know more about these people, particularly about Aniston's Olivia, who I think really gets the shaft. We never learn why she's so unmotivated in life, or why she's so hung up on an ex-boyfriend who (in his one fleeting appearance) seems to be a total jerk. That's not to suggest that Holofcener owes us some Freudian hypothesis about Olivia's unloved childhood — that kind of armchair psychoanalyzing is too rampant in movies to begin with — but merely that we have to believe in a character's existence before we can become emotionally involved in his or her life, and I for one never felt Olivia was anything more than notes for a character still waiting to take full-bodied form in Holofcener's mind. But at the risk of not having anything left to say about the movie when it opens later this year, I'll break off here by saying that it was certainly an odd sensation to spend the entire morning traveling from Los Angeles to Park City, only to watch a movie filmed in highly recognizable, sun-drenched Santa Monica and West L.A. locales, all the while snow was pouring down in buckets outside. There are more than 100 new feature films and nearly as many shorts screening in Sundance this year, so I hope, as we venture out for our first full day of screenings, we may look forward to going places other than our own backyard.
TAYLOR: Oh come now, Squire, only a guy could fail to understand why it is that so many of us women stay fixated on total jerks long past the sell-by date. And most Hollywood movies are so psychologically over-explanatory these days that I appreciated Holofcener's steadfast refusal to explain her characters away. I was satisfied that we entered without preamble in the middle of these people's vaguely unsatisfactory lives, and satisfied to leave most of them not much the wiser. That's the statement, isn't it? I mean, not to mix apples and oranges, but you wouldn't dismiss Chekhov for the same thing, would you now? Anyway, we can agree that this movie isn't weighty enough for us to whine on forever about it. Friends with Money was an intelligently crowd-pleasing way to ease into the Sundance Film Festival, which was good enough for me. And so to dinner...
FOUNDAS: Me, I'll take Chekhov's Sisters over these Friends any day of the week.
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