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Is Sundance "over"?

   
I know, I know — the same nauseating question, asked annually by any critic fortunate enough (or unfortunate enough, if you ask some of the veterans) to attend Robert Redford's indie meat-parade in the snowy peaks of Utah. It's also a bit of a veiled insult to one's audience, since most of the people reading these navelgazers have never been to Sundance. See what you missed? it seems to say. But don't worry about thinking of going, cause it sucks now.Yeah, fuck you, too.

   
Still, it seems as if the naysayers multiplied this year. Variety's reigning kingmaker, Todd McCarthy, didn't even wait for the snow to melt off his boots before lashing out at the festival for being "user-unfriendly" and the films screened as "visually clueless." Joining him was Newsweek's David

promotion

Ansen, deeming the fest "borderline-dysfunctional." Even Robert Redford acknowledged that it might be getting too big. Luckily, Anne Thompson of the Hollywood Reporter and Eugene Hernandez of Indiewire were there for some perspective. Thompson was particularly astute when she called McCarthy out for not changing with the times: "He's been covering Sundance a certain way for a long time and doesn't want to adapt to the new reality. Which is: don't stay in Deer Valley, far away from all the screening rooms. Don't drive. If you do drive (which I do) and your favorite parking spots are blocked, find new ones and walk." It's the deep, dark — and no doubt unsurprising — secret of film criticism: The things that make a film critic cranky are the same things that make your Uncle Carl cranky when he trudges in for Christmas dinner complaining about the weather, the traffic, the parking, and those damn kids today with their rap music.

   
Suffice it to say I had a perfectly good time at Sundance. I found it fairly easy to navigate; the crowds were a nuisance only around Main Street, which is thankfully not where most of the films screened. I know of a number of critics who never even once strayed out to that teeming, half-mile-long stretch of humanity, and still got to see dozens of titles, some of which they even enjoyed. It seems to me that anyone who can brave a Times Square movie theater should be okay with a packed house at Sundance.

   
Which brings us to the films. This year's Sundance had its fair share of the usual fest fodder, some of it good, some of it dreadful. I found myself falling for the raw, unapologetic grit of the otherwise-typical family drama Steel City, as well as the moody longing of the wan, fragile In Between Days, proving that the same-old same-old can be invigorated by good direction, great acting, and solid writing. It goes the other way, too: I was totally

Boilerplate addict flick Sherrybaby was lame even though Maggie Gyllenhaal goes topless.

turned off by the smug histrionics of boilerplate addict flick Sherrybaby. Some other critics, on the other hand, found value in it (perhaps because it featured a look-at-me performance from an often-topless Maggie Gyllenhaal). Evidently, it's a thin line between the electrifying and the stultifying.

   
Most Sundance wrap-ups invariably focus on the big titles to come out of the fest: The major award winners, the big sales, the audience pleasers, etc. Is there much to say about these films other than to say they sold for a lot of money and won a bunch of awards? It seems to me they'll be seen soon enough, and viewers will judge for themselves. But in the interest of due diligence: Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer's Hispanic coming-of-age tale Quinceanera won the Jury Award for Dramatic Feature as well as the Audience Award. Christopher Quinn's Sudanese lost boys doc God Grew Tired of Us also scored a similar double-win in the documentary category. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris's Little Miss Sunshine, starring Greg Kinnear, Steve Carell, and Toni Colette, sold for millions, as did Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep, starring Gael Garcia Bernal.

   
Now, for the movies that truly stood out for me:



Iraq in Fragments

The best Iraq-related title in the festival was this breathtaking documentary.

James Longley's documentary was one of a number of Iraq-related titles at the festival, and far and away the best — not only a breathtaking portrait of the social dissolution of that country, but also a haunting aesthetic experience. ("Visually clueless"? Whatever, dude.) Weeks after the festival, its imagery still lingers, perhaps because Longley captures a type of voyeurism unique to our experience of the Iraq War. The director fragments his perspective, often giving us the same situation from a multitude of angles, usually swiftly cut together. What emerges is a kind of pop-cubism — the camera eye is everywhere, its vision fractured by its own multiplicity. A perfect correlative to a particular early-twenty-first-century geopolitical phenomenon: Iraq is a country disintegrating in slow motion, with the world constantly watching, waiting, prying, speculating. Longley's film witnesses a nation dissolve through a thousand different eyes.



This Film Is Not Yet Rated

Kirby Dick's blistering exposé of the MPAA was too fun to quibble over.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Kirby Dick's This Film is Not Yet Rated, a blistering exposé of the MPAA's hypocritical ratings board, might be the most enjoyable doc to come out of Sundance this year. I have reservations about a few of its theses. Dick rarely acknowledges that the NC-17 rating is the kiss of death primarily because many media outlets won't allow advertising for such films. He also makes the typical, and correct, observation that the ratings board is far too lenient on violence than on sex, but then trots out the makers of Gunner Palace, a film with plenty of violence and no sex, to support his general broadside. But when a movie fillets its subject with this much sharpened glee, such complaints become mere quibbles.



Interlude: A Word About Documentaries.

The World According to Sesame Street was basically an infomercial.

Sundance is probably the world's most high-profile venue for documentaries, but the festival program says nothing about infomercials. Yet that's what many of these films are. The World According to Sesame Street could have easily been titled Ain't Sesame Street Grand? Similarly, American Blackout might as well have been called Wow, Congressman Cynthia McKinney is So Awesome! Hell, at least the makers of Awesome: I Fuckin' Shot That! and All =Aboard! Rosie's Family Cruise had the cojones to call their breathlessly promotional pieces by their rightful names. (I should also add that the former, at least, is a pretty entertaining little flick.)

   
One noxious side effect of the recent rise of documentaries has been this surge in films whose sole raison d'etre is to serve as commercials for their subjects. That goes for the eminently worthy Al Gore doc, An Inconvenient Truth, as much as it does for Stewart Copeland's much-reviled Police film, Everybody Stares: The Police Inside Out. The films themselves can be good or bad. But that just makes real documentaries like Iraq in Fragments or A Lion in the House, Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar's grueling, hypnotic four-hour look at children with cancer, look like visitors from another planet. The Age of Documentaries, my ass. It's The Age of the 90-Minute Commercial You Have to Pay 10 Bucks to See.

   
But I digress. For those worried that Sundance is an endless string of recovering-addict melodramas, cancer docs, Iraq docs, and movies about existential heartland wastrels, all I can say is that you're pretty much right . . . but every once in a while, something comes along to recharge your spirits. Which brings us to . . .



The Foot Fist Way

This goofy comedy about an out-of-control Tae Kwon Do instructor was compared to Napoleon Dynamite.

This low-budget comedy, directed in North Carolina by Jody Hill, written by Ben Best and Danny McBride, and starring the three of them, is the kind of movie you want to tell your buds about — at least, those buds who have a sense of humor and a fondness for goofy theatrics. Maybe it's not for all tastes, but when I heard the description — a small-town Tae Kwon Do instructor goes on "a downward spiral, abusing his loyal students and making a fool of himself" — I was hooked. That pretty much describes the film, though its style reminded me more of Wes Anderson's Bottle Rocket rather than Sundance legend Napoleon Dynamite, to which it's often compared. Hill's film shares with Anderson's an ability to get into the mind of its delusional wannabe protagonists without ever disrespecting them. The Foot Fist Way is hilarious, but it's also rarely snide or demeaning, a rarity among comedies of any sort nowadays. Please, for the love of God, somebody buy this movie and put it in theaters. I want to see it again.

The Proposition

Nick Cave's Western had a blood-soaked, melancholy beauty.

On the other hand, John Hillcoat's Nick Cave-written Australian Western, which evokes the films of Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone with its blood-soaked, melancholy beauty, is so relentlessly severe that I'm not sure I'd want to revisit it, though I loved it. A bitter outlaw (Guy Pearce) is forced by a tough-as-nails lawman
(Ray Winstone) to go after his fugitive brother, a notorious killer hiding out amid the wastes of the Australian desert. The terse duplicity of the characters is matched cinematically by Hillcoat's marvelous eye for grime: Pearce acts through a cloud of dirt, sweat, and flies so thick as to render him — and, more importantly, his character's intentions — unrecognizable. The bracing brutality of The Proposition may prove to be a hard sell with audiences. I sort of regret seeing this at a press screening, as I really wonder what average moviegoers will think of it. But in Sundance's world of faux-grit and affected misery, it stands out as the real thing.

Old Joy

Old Joy, a slight film about two old friends in the Oregon woods, was the best thing at the festival.

Which brings us to what is probably the best film I saw at the festival this year. More in the vein of Sundance flicks of yore, Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy is the kind of meditative, quiet, disarmingly slight film that might get lost in theaters (I can see the screaming headlines: "Woodsy Buddy Flick Trounced by Boy Wizard at Box Office") but is perfectly suited for a festival audience. It's also, pace McCarthy once again, mind-bendingly gorgeous. Reichardt's whisper-thin account of a trip into the Oregon woods by two old friends who haven't seen each other in a long time might not seem like much of a narrative. Very little actually happens between our protagonists; they initially spend much of their time getting lost. Indeed, that's part of the point. The almost supernatural beauty of the world they're trying to reach remains largely distant — seen through the windshield of the car, or looming in the distance, or on the other side of the highway. When they finally get there, the elegiac tone doesn't stop. If anything, it hits its stride: The characters' passage through this natural world reminds us of their unreachable, unattainable destination. Watch closely and you'll see the words "You can't go home again" were never more appropriate. Luckily, Old Joy's desperate, tender beauty enabled Sundance viewers to experience the magnificence of a truly great film, even if only for a fleeting moment.
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