Smells Like Indie Spirit: Our Favorite Sundance Films Of All Time (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 23:00:00 GMT

SLACKER (1991) & CLERKS (1994)

I was struggling to extricate myself from college and move from Boston to L.A. when Richard Linklater's Slacker premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, reminding me that filmmaking wasn't just about Hollywood, but instead happened whenever and wherever a bunch of motivated creative types could get their hands on a camera. By painting Austin, Texas as a low-rent wonderland of hipsters and weirdos, Linklater inadvertently popularized the city and its filmmaking scene to the point where the rents got too high for most of the slackers (and businesses) depicted in the film. Nevertheless, despite attracting higher budgets and Hollywood friends thanks to the unexpected cult success of his debut (and the astonishing starmaking power of his follow-up, Dazed and Confused), Linklater stayed loyal to Austin, doing his best to Keep It Weird for the city's less famous residents.

A few years later, like much of Generation X, I was toiling on my own independent feature, dreaming of my own big Sundance debut when Clerks received the Filmmaker’s Trophy (and an acquisition deal from Miramax) in 1994...and so there was more than a little envy mixed in with my original lukewarm reaction to the Kevin Smith comedy. “It’s not THAT funny,” I thought, sitting in the Sunset 5 multiplex during the film’s theatrical run. “And the production values are crap!” Yet, in retrospect, the foul-mouthed riffing between cynical wage slaves Dante (Brian O’Halloran), Randal (Jeff Anderson) and national treasure Jason Mewes is, in fact, hilarious (reminiscent of John Waters’ “good” bad taste verbiage rather than just run-of-the-mill dick jokes). Moreover, like Linklater, Smith was and remains exactly the kind of Indiewood Horatio Alger even a bitter guy like me can’t begrudge. For one thing, he’s not a trust fund kid or the scion of Hollywood royalty: he filmed his movie at night in the very New Jersey convenience store where he toiled for pittance during the day, and if not for the good fortune of Sundance Advisory Committee member Bob Hawk seeing and liking the movie at the Independent Feature Film Market in New York, Smith might still be paying off the credit cards he used to finance his labor of love. Yet even after hitting the big time, Smith never went Hollywood (give or take his post-fame fling with Joey Lauren Adams and the occasional high profile screenwriting job): though sometimes uneven, his work since Clerks has remained idiosyncratic and personal, reflecting the sensibility of a smart, admirably humble working class jamoke who never got too big for his (admittedly gigantic) britches.

BLOOD SIMPLE (1984)

Sundance wasn't even Sundance yet when Blood Simple won the Grand Jury Prize in 1985; it was still known as the US Film Festival the year the low-budget Texas noir took top honors. As part of the first wave that led to the indie boom, Blood Simple is more notable for the careers that it launched than its own merits as an offbeat thriller, yet it still holds up remarkably well. Critics like Pauline Kael disdained the "camera whoop-de-do" at the time, but by today's standard, Blood Simple is a restrained piece of classical filmmaking. The plot is a sort of chess game where all the players are missing a few pieces, as a cuckolded bar owner (Dan Hedaya at his greasiest) hires a shady private eye (M. Emmet Walsh, ditto) to dispose of his wife and her lover. The wife is played by Frances McDormand making her motion picture debut, and the film not only marked the beginning of an impressive acting career, but also a remarkably long-lasting marriage (by show biz standards) as McDormand met her soon-to-be husband on the set. That was, of course, director Joel Coen, who along with brother, co-writer and producer Ethan Coen couldn't have known that Blood Simple was only the first chapter of one of the most storied filmographies of the past quarter-century. If not for Sundance, by any other name, it might never have happened.

SHERMAN'S MARCH (1986)

Ross McElwee's film -- subtitled "A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love In the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation" -- pulled triumph from disaster and constituted a bit of a landmark in the evolution of the "personal documentary." McElwee succeeded in taking a conceit that could have just been irritating -- providing a chronicle of his flailing love life in the course of showing how he managed to not deliver on a plan to make a film tracing the path of General Sherman's march through the South -- and dressing it with enough bittersweet humor and tart social observation to turn what could have been an act of self-exposure into a real picture of the times. (Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 1987 festival.)

TO SLEEP WITH ANGER (1990)

Writer-director Charles Burnett's first feature Killer of Sheep would be selected for the National Film Registry, but this film, made a dozen years later, would finally earn Burnett his first play in real theaters. A blisteringly funny application of African-American folklore to a contemporary family, it is a cornucopia of wonders, not the least of them the performance of Danny Glover's career. It helped launch the steady simmer of Burnett's career that finally resulted in the restoration and theatrical and DVD release of Killer of Sheep last year, but ironically, To Sleep with Anger itself remains unavailable on home video and basically out of circulation. Burnett won a Special Jury Recognition prize when it was shown at the 1990 festival.

RESERVOIR DOGS (1992)

Quentin Tarantino's visceral debut has been ripped off so many times in the past fifteen years or so, it's probably safe by now to forgive Reservoir Dogs for being something of a ripoff in its own right. While Tarantino may have drawn a little too heavily on the likes of City on Fire and The Killing, it was clear from the opening scene – a roundtable discussion of the subtext of Madonna's "Like a Virgin" conducted by two-bit criminals in a crappy diner – that a distinctive new voice in American cinema had been discovered. And while that voice would occasionally grate over the years, its unique blend of profane tough-guy banter and geeky pop culture chatter found its purest expression in this time-twisting tale of that old reliable standby, the heist gone awry. In Tarantino's version, we never see the heist, but we get all the awry we can handle – in fact, more than some could handle in the case of the infamous "ear-slicing" scene. An unrivaled hard-boiled cast, including Steve Buscemi, Michael Madsen, Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth and a sublime Lawrence "You're not Mr. Purple!" Tierney, expertly navigates the sharp turns from raunchy humor to shocking violence, all to the beat of your Super Seventies Favorites. Nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, Reservoir Dogs lost to Alexandre Rockwell's In the Soup. As Phil Nugent could tell you, the judges might have missed the boat on that one.

HOOP DREAMS (1994)

Steve James's epic documentary about the role that high school basketball, and the promise of professional sports careers, plays in the lives of two black kids and their families is a prime example of what Sundance's dedication to good liberal causes is good for. The movie itself is the kind of project that either pays off big time for the people involved or amounts to a waste of years of effort, and it wasn't a waste. (Winner of the Audience Award at the 1994 festival)

CRUMB (1994)

Terry Zwigoff's great profile of the underground comics master Robert Crumb slipped a little dynamite into the often staid documentary category. Rich, hilarious, painful and spiky, it's a wake-up call for anyone who thinks the standard documentary form is played out; all you need, Zwigoff reveals, is a subject who fascinates on a kaleidoscopic variety of levels and a determination to spend years chasing him to ground. At the 1995 festival it took both the Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary, and also a prize for cinematographer Maryse Alberti.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak & Phil Nugent

Fantastic Fest Review: “Zack and Miri Make a Porno”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

The tone was set before the Fantastic Fest screening began, as Kevin Smith took the stage and, correctly assessing the prevailing sentiment in the Paramount Theater – “Holy shit, is he fat!” – launched into a scatological monologue about his morbid obesity’s effect on a creaky toilet seat. If his speech scared anyone off, well, they probably had no business being in a theater where a Kevin Smith movie called Zack and Miri Make a Porno was about to unspool.

Rarely has there been a more clear-cut case of truth in advertising. Zack and Miri do indeed make a porno, and that is pretty much the extent of the plot. Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) are employees at a Starbucks-type coffee chain and also roommates, but their relationship is entirely platonic and their combined income isn’t sufficient to keep the lights on and the water running on a consistent basis. They decide to attend their 10 year high school reunion anyway, and are surprised to learn they’ve become viral video stars. Earlier in the day, a kid with a cell phone camera snapped footage of Miri changing clothes in the coffee shop, including a glimpse of her in oversized granny panties and a concluding shot of Zack mooning the camera. Thus a brilliant scheme is born: Why not make a porn movie and use the profits to pay off all the bills?

If you think Kevin Smith would use a premise like this as an excuse to pile up dick jokes like donuts – well then, you are obviously familiar with the work of Kevin Smith. Zack and Miri enlist a cameraman (Jeff Anderson, Randal of the Clerks movies) and a cast, including Smith regular Jason Mewes, Traci Lords, and actual porn star Katie Morgan (you may know her from Phat Ass Tits 4 or Interracial Cum Junkies 3). Their first effort is called Star Whores and features characters named Luke Skyballer and Hung Solo – yes, more Star Wars references, imagine my glee – but when that proves too ambitious, they decide to shoot the down-and-dirty Suck My Cockacinno right in the coffee shop.

Somewhere under all the balls and assholes in Zack and Miri, a heart beats. Zack isn’t thrilled with the idea of Miri having sex with someone else in the movie and vice-versa, and as their own big scene approaches, trepidation builds. Can they still be friends after doing the deed, even if it’s only for a porno? Thanks to the two leads, this question becomes more than just a throw-away. I’m expecting Seth Rogen fatigue to set in any day now, but he and Banks do make an endearing pair, and no one was more surprised than me to end up caring about them in the end. (Heh, heh – I said “in the end.”)

In a way, Kevin Smith has something in common with Tyler Perry. It’s doubtful that either one of them is ever going to progress as a filmmaker, but their loyal fans don’t really care. If you like Kevin Smith movies, this is probably one of the better ones. If you don’t, rest assured Zack and Miri is no quantum leap forward.

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Smells Like Indie Spirit: Our Favorite Sundance Films Of All Time (Part Five)

Fantastic Fest Review: “Zack and Miri Make a Porno”