The Screengrab : jennifer beals

Sundance Do-Overs: When the Buzz Turns to Fizzle

Phil Nugent — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

The Sundance Film Festival, America's largest and arguably most influential showcase for independent movies, has just wrapped up its twenty-fifth, or thirtieth or eighteenth, installment, depending on who's counting. The earliest version of Sundance, the Utah/US Film Festival, was first held in Salt Lake City in September of 1978. From the start, it reflected the taste and interests of its celebrity mascot Robert Redford, the festival's inaugural chairman; the first awards jury included Redford's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid co-star Katharine Ross, who was already at a point in her career where she must have been grateful for the work. In 1981, the festival moved to Park City, where the annual date would eventually be shifted to January to take advantage of the attractions of the ski resort there. As far as Sundance is concerned, "Sundance" began in 1985, when management of the then-struggling festival was taken over by Redford's Sundance Institute, which he ran with festival co-founder Sterling Van Wagenen. By the time the Festival had its biggest, buzziest hit to date with Steven Soderbergh's 1989 sex, lies, and videotape, insiders were routinely referring to it as the Sundance Film Festival, though the name wouldn't officially change until 1991.

sex, lies, and videotape, followed by the likes of Reservoir Dogs, Clerks, Hoop Dreams, and other films, would establish Sundance as a major way station for the films and filmmakers that would define the American indie movie scene in the 1990s. Today the festival is one port of call among many for new moviemakers looking to get some attention, but it remains the recognized big daddy of indie festivals, inspiring all the respect and resentment that label implies. Anyone looking to get a sense of the shape of movie fashions since the mid-1980s could do worse than to examine a list of all the movies that have been rewarded with prizes and press attention after playing Sundance. And, it goes without saying, that history includes some wrong turns.

STACKING (1987): Never one of the best-known of all Sundance entries and now one of the most thoroughly forgotten, Stacking is of interest only for the degree to which it sums up everything that was typical, and typically unappealing, about "indie film" before Soderbergh and company stormed the castle. Back then, it wasn't called independent filmmaking but "regional cinema", and wiseguys had another name for it: granola movies. The regions depicted in regional cinema tended to be those that were said to represent the American heartland, and which could be faked on location in Canada. They tend to feature stock characters--the stolid farmer trying to hang onto his land in the face of changing times, the bored wife wondering where her frisky youth frisked off to, the confused teenager with potential literary gifts, the sexy stranger who's just passin' through--who are often played by good actors earning cinematic karma points. (The cast of Stacking, for instance, includes Christine Lahti, Frederic Forrest, Peter Coyote, James Gammon, and Jason Gedrick.) The reigning master of granola cinema is Victor Nunez, a Sundance perennial fixture who helped launch Ashley Judd's career with the 1993 Ruby in Paradise and Peter Fonda's comeback with the 1997 Ulee's Gold, though his own career, and granola cinema in general, may be best summed up by the title of his early feature, Gal Young 'Un.

For whom were these movies made? Even when they managed to acquire a theatrical release, as Stacking did, they never got far out of the major cities before twitching to death in the hot sun. Certainly there was no audience for them among the people whose lives they tried to ennoble. Speaking as someone who grew up in a rural farming community, I can tell you that nobody who spends his days working on a farm wants to blow his mad money on the chance to watch some poor bastard wonder whether he'll be able to get this year's crop in. Basically, they were made only for the people who'd see them at a festival like Sundance: educated liberals who felt virtuous from seeing people in denim and broad-brimmed hats being boring on-screen and critics who enjoyed denouncing the public for not making these fine, well-meaning movies as successful as Lethal Weapon. One reason they're such period pieces now is that they were made before people started thinking in terms of the Red State/Blue State divide, which makes them bittersweet reminders of a time not so long ago when educated big-city liberals thought of the people who grow their steaks as dull but honorable tillers of the soil instead of that pack of dumbasses who re-elected Bush.

IN THE SOUP (1992): It's not exactly unheard of for a movie to be greeted with awards and recognition at Sundance and then die on the vine when it's sent out into the cold, unfriendly world to fend for itself. That was certainly the case with this comedy, starring Steve Buscemi as an aspiring filmmaker and the veteran character actor Seymour Cassel as a Life Force, which was directed and co-written by Alexandre Rockwell, the rtist formerly known as Mr. Jennifer Beals. (Beals is in it, too, as are Jim Jarmusch, Carol Kane, Stanley Tucci, Debi Mazar, Sam Rockwell, and the late '80s indie stalwart Rockets Redglare.) The movie's Grand Jury Prize wouldn't be so embarrassing if it weren't for the competition: among the movies it beat out was Reservoir Dogs, which got a legendary bad reception from a festival crowd put off by its violence and gaudy showmanship. You don't have to be a Tarantino enthusiast to compare the reaction his movie got to the soft, clumsy whimsey of Rockwell's and feel that Sundance, just three years after sex, lies... had taken it to a new level, was already in danger of seeming out of touch. Nothing Rockwell ever did again would garner as much attention; his biggest break came when Tarantino invited him to contribute a segment to the disastrous implosion of a multi-director feature, Four Rooms. The real winner of this round would be Steve Buscemi, who could boast of having starred in the year's big hit at Sundance and also having a breakout role in the real-world hit that smoked the Sundance hit.

THE BROTHERS McMULLEN (1995): Never has anybody gotten more out of a pretty face and a knack for making connections--he was working in the offices of Entertainment Tonight while making his movie and managed to slip a copy of the film to Redford himself when the great man was on ET plugging Quiz Show--when he had nothing, literally nothing else, to back it up than McMullen star and auteur Edward Burns. Burns's movie, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and went on to be a modest hit in theaters, was a half-assed sitcom that benefited from his lack of an eye and his inability to parlay his $28.000 budget into a halfway-decent-looking or decent-sounding movie; for a while, people taken with Burns's puppy-dog eyes, floppy locks, and the notion that making a movie while working as a production assistant on Entertainment Tonight counted as a struggling-artist story assumed that the rough poverty-row look of the film must confer artistic respectablity on it. Burns cleared up any lingering misunderstanding with his second film, She's the One, where his lame script was given a pricey big-studio mounting and consequently just looked lame. (He also publicly humiliated his McMullen co-stars Mike McGlone and his then-girlfriend Maxine Bahns by casting them alongside real actors such as John Mahoney, Cameron Diaz, Amanda Peet, and Frank Vincent. McGlone's "performance" in She's the One, which consisted of having a petulant, screaming fit in just about every scene he was in, made him in particular look like a prime candidate for the title Supreme Asshat of the Known Universe.) Burns has directed half a dozen movies since then, none of which has garnered any real attention; he also acts, sort of, in better directors' films, most notably in Saving Private Ryan from back in the days when his name had some heat attached to it. Technically, his name still does, in the sense that he now must spend a certain amount of time wondering if he's obligated to correct people who think he's the Ed Burns responsible for The Wire.

THE SPITFIRE GRILL (1996): This movie about misunderstandings and redemption in rural Maine was the only feature film written and directed by Lee David Zlotoff, best known for his work in TV, as a writer and producer on such series as Remington Steele and Navy NCIS: Naval Criminal Investigative Service. The real creative force behind the movie was Roger M. Courts, a direct mail fundraiser and CEO of a Mississippi-based Catholic fund-raising organization called the Sacred Heart League, Inc. Courts was interested in making a movie that could serve as a film equivalent to the "testimonial" literature religious groups passed around, and he spent many years looking for a script that had what he saw as the right mixture of Christian teaching and solid narrative values. He decided that he'd found it in Zlotoff's screenplay about a young ex-con (played by Alison Elliot) whose death at the end of the movie turns her into the fresh-faced Christ figure of Pepperidge Farm. It seems likely that the humanist audience at Sundance missed the religious undertones completely and simply took the movie's heavy-handed moralizing and rustic dullness as a throwback to the good old days of "regional filmmaking", and that the movie won the festival's Audience Award partly on the strength of nostalgia for the days before Miramax deals and Tarantino rip-offs. Ironically, the movie's popular success at the festival led to a high-priced bidding war among distributors. In the end, it was Castle Rock Entertainment that paid top dollar for the privilege of seeing the movie crash and burn in theaters later that year. The material has since found its true level as a play (with a de-sacrificial happy ending) that is popular with regional theater groups.

HAPPY, TEXAS (1999): Sometimes, the family vibe at a big festival, where a lot of steady filmgoers mix and mingle with filmmakers, can inspire a certain amount of self-deception. This godawful comedy, starring Steve Zahn and Jeremy Northam as escaped convicts posing as gay beauty pageant directors (while Northam fends off the advances of gay small town sheriff William H. Macy), was received with rhapsodic abandon at Sundance, which can best be interpreted as an explosion of love for Steve Zahn, who had delivered a steady stream of amazing supporting performances in such movies as Reality Bites, That Thing You Do, and Out of Sight, and who had his biggest role to date here. He won the Grand Jury Prize for his performance, which isn't completely off the wall: he's very funny in it. But Miramax's decision to shell out what was variously reported as anywhere from $2.5 million to $10 million dollars for the movie itself proved, shall we say, ill-advised. At the time of the purchase, there were actually outraged bleatings in the trade press from people complaining that Miramax got all the cool movies. But after Happy, Texas collapsed in theaters, the movie would be remembered only as the centerpiece of stories about how Harvey Weinstein couldn't be trusted alone with his checkbook at Sundance.

Girl DisemPowering: Nine Films That Didn't Do Feminism Any Favors (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:30:00 GMT

And now that we’re all feeling nice and empowered from our Top Ten List of films with strong female characters and themes, here’s the other side of the coin: nine movies we’re guessing you won’t find on Gloria Steinem’s Netflix queue (unless she’s researching a new book on movies that didn’t exactly do wonders for the feminist movement).

(Oh, and while we're on the subject, a special P.S. to Katherine Heigl: Really? Knocked Up is more sexist than 27 Dresses? That's a fascinating theory. Please, tell me more!)

PRETTY WOMAN (1990)

Although she later improved her girl power street credit with her Academy Award-winning turn as an indomitable single mother in Erin Brockovich, Julia Roberts’ breakthrough role was about as healthy (and irresistible) as a deep fried bacon Twinkie for the mobs of women (and men) who made it a blockbuster hit. I mean, I’m a dude and I certainly have my issues with some of the more strident tenets of feminism, but even I was offended by the film’s basic premise about the whore-with-the-heart-of-gold who charms a rich Prince Charming with her sparkling personality (and fellatio skills) to the point where he decides to keep her for himself, making her dreams come true by paying for all the overpriced jewels and fashion she could possibly want. Oh, and he goes down on her on a Steinway...the movie’s one true nod to progressive gender relations. This movie is offensive on so many levels, it’s hard to know where to begin. The blatant portrayal of women as whores who only get what they want by attracting successful men? The offensiveness of Jason Alexander’s loathsome chauvinist pig character, a personification of the film’s equal opportunity anti-male stereotyping (unattractive men are icky slobs and probably rapists, whereas good looking men are more trustworthy and morally superior)? The ridiculous depiction of prostitution as an Outward Bound-style empowerment program (complete with Laura San Giacomo’s mother hen prostitute telling a fledgling whore at the end of the movie that she expects big things from her, y'know, on par with Roberts’ home run of man-bagging)? Oh, sure...it’s just a movie, and an insidiously charming one at that, and maybe I’m reading too much into it and getting all het up for no reason...yet, at the same time, it’s also worth noting that many of the girls who grew up watching Pretty Woman (not to mention the film’s original audience) now enjoy (and sometimes embody) the film’s sex-for-crass-materialism ethos in pervasive cultural incarnations from Paris Hilton and The Real World to just about every show on the E! network.

FATAL ATTRACTION (1987)

One of the most polarizing blockbuster hits of the '80s, Fatal Attraction presents us with Glenn Close as the image of the sexy, successful unmarried career woman and turns her into what the movie confidently assumes is every man's nightmare: the one night stand who won't go away. Seen alone in her apartment at night, she's not really confident at all: she's a lonely neurotic wreck -- this is what being without a family, or at least a man, presumably does to a woman, what all career women are really like underneath. Then, after the married guy (Michael Douglas) who thought they were both just having a little fling stops putting up with her, she turns into an avenging harpy, and in the process she says all the things that women who are sick of being badly used and treated as objects have said. They don't apply to the situation, and you may think the fact that she thinks they do shows how sick she is, but given that this is the era of Reagan, AIDS, the "new chastity" and the anti-feminist backlash, a lot of people in the audience thought the fact this fruitcake was saying them proved what she was saying must be crazy in any instance. The movie isn't exactly misogynist; its real cunning is the way it uses the recently politicized concept of "family" to justify its turning Close into a she-devil while advocating the use of violence or whatever else it takes to ward off attacks by outsiders who try to damage the holy unit of family. As everyone knows, the movie originally ended with Close committing suicide and framing Douglas for her murder, an ending that was actually more plausible in keeping with the character's psychology, and one that pissed off test audiences who were denied the revenge-killing catharsis they'd been made to expect. The movie was probably always fated to end with Close getting it, but the stroke of genius was in putting the gun in the hand of Douglas's wife (Anne Archer) and making it a battle between the good wife and the hussy, a choice that made some women in the audience cheer louder than the men. The family that slays together...

LEGAL EAGLES (1986)

Everything about this slapped-together, thoughtlessly conceived comedy-thriller, starring Robert Redford and Debra Winger as dueling lawyers and Darryl Hannah as a pair of frosted lips sitting atop mile-high legs, is a testament to the hackish instincts of the director, Ivan Reitman, and the screenwriting team, Jim Cash and Jack Epps, Jr. (whose other collaborations include Top Gun, The Secret of My Success, and Anaconda). It's the kind of movie that seems to have been made by people who were in a rush to get the shoot completed because they couldn't wait to show up at the red carpet premiere, the kind of movie where less important things like telling a story or entertaining an audience never crossed anyone's mind. About the only thing of note about it is the example it provides of just how much damage simple hackishness can do, because Legal Eagles also wasted the time and bent the brain of one of the white-hot talents of the '80s, Debra Winger, at just the point in her career where she was lined up on the runway and poised for full takeoff. Her role here -- a foil to Redford and, ultimately, a damsel in distress -- is so stupidly written that it's an insult, and she's the only person in the large, talented cast who still hadn't had the idealism beaten out of her to such a degree that she knew enough to just go through the motions and collect her check. You can see her trying to bring some kind of truth to what she's doing, and you can see how unhappy she is that she isn't succeeding, and her unhappiness is contagious. The movie is said to have done Winger extended career damage, partly because it soured her on the movie business but also because the industry was appalled that she was so impolite as to complain about the director in interviews. Anywhere but in Hollywood, expressing confidence in Ivan Reitman as a director would be grounds for having a judge take away your power of attorney.

FLASHDANCE (1983)

This MTV-styled sleazefest was bad for women, sweatshirts, steelworkers, strip clubs, movies, lobster dinners, pit bulls, warehouse lofts, Top 40 radio, and Jennifer Beals' dance double. (It was also a little rough on Maureen Marder, the real-life stripper-welder who "inspired" the screenplay outline, and who was persuaded to sign away the movie rights to her life story for a flat payment of $2300. After the movie grossed in excess of $150 million, Paramount, in an industry that routinely writes checks to squelch nuisance suits, actually let Marder drag them in front of a judge after she came around begging for more money, secure in the knowledge that the agreement would hold up in court. Then, in an amazing act of chutzpah, the movie studio actually sued over a Jennifer Lopez video that was painstakingly designed as a tribute to the movie. Not that people shouldn't be penalized somehow for paying tribute to Flashdance.) It makes all the horrible sense in the world that, for this "inspirational" story of a girl who doesn't give up her dream to dance, the director Adrian Lyne cast an unknown who couldn't dance (but who had the "look") and then tried to suppress the information that her dancing was performed by a double, Marine Jahan, whom he subsequently threatened to punish for daring to publicly take credit for her own work in the movie. (He may have been successful in this: Jahan only appeared in one other movie, 1984's Streets of Fire.) Given the flashy fast-cut style that Lyne developed (with his work in TV commercials before transposing it to movies), this could just as well have been the story of a carefully lit can of peas that never gave up its dream to be a zucchini. Not trying to give you any ideas, Adrian.

MONA LISA SMILE (2003)

The thing that makes Mona Lisa Smile – the story of a bohemian art history teacher who comes to shake things up at the hyper-conservative cartoon of an East Coast university in the stodgy 1950s – so incredibly frustrating, and qualifies it for inclusion in our list of movies that are particularly disempowering to women, is that it actually thinks it’s a feminist movie. Set at a version of Wellesley University so reactionary that the board of chancellors might as well have Snidely Whiplash mustaches, the movie asks us to believe that Julia Roberts’ character has come to show young women the possibility of more than just a perfunctory education to put some polish on their cocktail party chatter before settling down into marriage, but it subverts itself at every turn, to such a degree that it actually comes across as more sexist that the milieu it rails against. Roberts shows her students the liberation possible through art – but never manages to mention any female artists. Roberts teaches her young charges that there’s more to life than being someone’s wife – but all of the characters are essentially defined by their relationship to men. Roberts encourages her students not to let themselves be limited by the expectations of others – but Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character is clearly condemned in the movie for her loose sexual morals, and in one of the movie’s ugliest scenes, Julia Stiles’ character excoriates an ashamed Roberts for expecting her to choose a career over marriage. When it comes to defining women by their power and potential, Mona Lisa Smile is a path to hell that’s paved with good intentions.

Click here for Part Two of Girl DisemPowering

Click here for Part One and Part Two of Chick Hits: The Girl Power Top Ten

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Vanishing Act: Allison Anders & Alexandre Rockwell

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:30:00 GMT

It was a four-car pile-up with only two survivors. It was Four Rooms, an omnibus film by the hottest Sundance kids in town, the self-proclaimed “Class of ‘92” consisting of Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Allison Anders and Alexandre Rockwell. The directors of Reservoir Dogs, El Mariachi, Gas, Food, Lodging and In the Soup decided to join forces before Pulp Fiction went through the stratosphere, but the project didn’t materialize until afterwards. The premise was simplicity itself: each segment of the film took place in a different room in the same hotel, with Tim Roth’s befuddled bellhop as the only common link.

Tarantino’s runaway ego was on full display in his room, “The Man from Hollywood,” yet he would emerge from the wreckage virtually unscathed, along with Rodriguez, whose slapstick contribution “The Misbehavers” was generally regarded as the movie’s highlight. Despite revolving around a coven of topless witches played by Alicia Witt, Ione Skye, Valeria Golino and Madonna, Anders’ “The Missing Ingredient” managed to be both silly and dull – a description that equally applies to Rockwell’s “The Wrong Man,” featuring his then-wife Jennifer Beals gagged and tied to a chair.

Despite its critical and commercial failure, it’s probably unfair to blame Four Rooms for derailing the careers of Anders and Rockwell; both continued to work, at least for a while. Anders made a pair of rock and roll movies, Grace of My Heart and Sugar Town, both of which have their defenders but neither of which made much impact. Most of her work over the past decade has been in episodic TV, from Sex and the City to Cold Case. The exception is Things Behind the Sun, a dark drama about rape that played the 2001 Sundance Film Festival and earned some of the best reviews of Anders’ career, but never secured a theatrical release, premiering instead on Showtime. “I absolutely loved the experience with the distribution on this movie,” Anders said in a recent interview with Moviemaker. “It was a very tough decision to make to go to cable instead of going theatrical. I had a theatrical offer from some great people who really loved the movie, but I tell you I had such a much better experience. I loved that millions of people saw my movie! There's no downside, as far as I can tell.”

Rockwell made a quasi-sequel to In the Soup, spinning off two characters for 1998’s Louis and Frank, a movie that has left very little evidence of its existence. It played a few festivals and apparently had a run in France, but that’s about it. The offbeat 13 Moons, starring Steve Buscemi as Bananas the Clown, fared little better in 2002, securing a limited release but not much critical support.

These careers can be revived, however, and another anthology movie may be the answer. We suggest Anders and Rockwell team up to make an old-fashioned drive-in double feature, complete with fake trailers and plenty of gratuitous sex and violence. How could it miss?