Adventures in Filmmaking: Something Resembling Forward Motion

The other day I was grumping to my colleague Ray Pride about how I needed something to stir a fire in me to write about. Usually a stroll through my Twitter and Facebook feeds and my routine pit stops through my morning bookmarks is good way to shift my writing mode into gear, but I had this wicked post-Sundance head cold and my head felt all stuffed with cotton and I couldn’t think straight. I had a ton I needed to be working on, so my inability to churn through said fog-headedness and just get stuff done was stressing me out and making me anxious. And then I started obsessing about whether this was just a cold-induced writing block, or a gods-honest writing block that would mentally cripple me, rendering me unable to finish anything ever again, including this screenplay I’m eyeballs-deep in. When I’m anxious, I want a cigarette, but too bad for me — I quit smoking three weeks ago, so I couldn’t lean on a nicotine crutch, either. In short, I probably wasn’t a lot of fun to be around for a few days there. Sorry, family.
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The Komen Controversy: Rethinking Pink

The internet is all in a tizzy today over the Susan G. Komen Foundation cutting off a grant to Planned Parenthood. I don’t know why everyone is so shocked that an organization founded by a major GOP supporter would have an agenda around not supporting a pro-choice organization. It’s not like Komen CEO Nancy G. Brinker has exactly been hiding her GOP light under a faux-liberal bushel or anything.

Thankfully, Planned Parenthood has already very nearly made up what they lost from the grant, which came from an organization they shouldn’t have been working with to begin with. And frankly I think it’s better in the long run that people support the work Planned Parenthood does directly anyhow; donate directly to the causes you support, and know what they stand for.

But if you are pro-choice and you’ve been donating to Komen because you think that organization is all about being pro-woman? Do your research, and then donate your time and money elsewhere. And while you’re at it, take all the money you’d have spent on glittery feather boas and pink cowboy hats and hot pink leggings and what have you, and donate THAT directly to an organization involved in researching something useful, like the environmental causes of breast cancer. Or directly to your local Gilda’s Club. Or to your local hospital’s support group for Stage 4 breast cancer patients.

In the wake of all this brouhaha over Komen, though, I thought it might be interesting to revisit the film Pink Ribbons, Inc., which I saw at Toronto last year. In case you missed it then, here’s an email interview I did as a follow-up to that film with breast cancer activist Barbara Brenner, who was not what we might call a fan of the pink ribbon to begin with. She had some fascinating things to say; here’s an excerpt:

What you found about Komen’s focus of grant funding reflects who they are, and have always been. They have not funded environmental research. They recently gave a grant to the federal Institute of Medicine to review the information on environmental links, but that is basically a literature review, not new research. And the information Komen provides about environmental links on their website is often flat out wrong. Komen can’t get involved in environmental research in a serious way, in my view, because they are partnered with so many companies that are part of the problem. That they don’t tell anyone how they decide what to fund is a sad commentary on breast cancer research.

You can read the full interview with Barbara Brenner right here.

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And here’s the review of Pink Ribbons, Inc. that I wrote from TIFF:

Pink Ribbons, Inc.

This weekend, my neighborhood was filled with a parade of women (and a few men), bedecked in pink, cheerily walking for hours and hours in support of breast cancer research. At rest stations along the way, husbands banged on pink tambourines while wearing coconut bras, while moms and preschoolers waved posters bearing motivational slogans (“Go, walkers! You are the BREAST!” and “Hakuna My Ta-tas!” and the like).
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Sundance: Wrapping the Fest

My Sundance pace finally caught up with me, knocking me pretty much flat for a couple days, but here’s the last bit of my Sundance coverage this year. For me, this year was what my great-grandma would have called a “fair to middlin’” sort of Sundance. In other words, there were plenty of films that were decently good, or at least mostly harmless, but an awful lot of them were safe, what many of us have come to think of as “made for Sundance” material.

There were a few standouts: Safety Not Guaranteed had a warmth and depth that went far beyond what it seemed to be on its humorous surface, and featured a far more complex and interesting performance than we’ve seen from Mark Duplass in the past. Could he be one of those actors known for comedic work, who ends up being most intriguing when he’s working in the darker corners of the human psyche? I think he just might. Compliance was brilliantly edgy and uncomfortable and real in a way that Shame wanted to be but wasn’t, quite; For Ellen was a deceptively simple character study executed with patience and painterly beauty.

And then there was Beasts of the Southern Wild – either the miracle of the fest or the most miraculously over-hyped, depending on who you ask. For me this film fell squarely into the realm of the remarkable; in spite of some flaws in its execution, its creative scope was far beyond the way most newer filmmakers even dare to dream, and its ambition was impressive. Filmmaker Behn Zeitlin could be a flash in the pan, sure … but when did we last see a filmmaker coming of the independent film circuit with this kind of fantastical vision? Beasts of the Southern Wild was, for me, good cinematic storytelling on its own, but it’s most interesting for what it foretells about what this filmmaker might do in the future. For that alone, it was one of the most exciting films of this year’s Sundance.

There tends to be more buzz about the US competition categories at Sundance, but very often the more interesting and challenging selections can be found in the other sections. Here’s a few to keep your eye out for.

Elena, Andrei Zvyagintsev

This lyrical, beautifully lit and shot poem of a film, which won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes in 2011, tells the story of Elena (Nadezhda Markina), a middle-aged woman comfortably ensconced in a marriage to a Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov), a wealthy, emotionally distant older man. Both Elena and Vladimir had adult children when they met; Vladimir rarely sees his rebellious daughter, and Elena’s son cannot support his family and is always hitting her up for money. Within their marriage, Elena’s role is more that of caregiver and companion than lover and life partner. It’s a compromise she seems to have accepted – until her husband, after a heart attack scare, has a briefly touching reunion with his estranged daughter and decides impulsively to change his will to leave almost everything to her.

Elena, who desperately wants to help her underachieving, slacker adult son, and pay the fee to get her equally underachieving grandson into university so he doesn’t have to go into military service, suddenly finds herself facing a desperate choice, and this seemingly docile wife reveals a determination belied by her earlier complacent ease. Zvyagintsev’s taut, controlled direction maintains tension without being overly manipulative, and the sound design, which augments every drip of water, chirp of bird, footstep on hardwood floor, effectively heightens our sense of being in the moment, watching what unfolds.

Father’s Chair, Luciano Moura

Still photographer Luciano Moura makes his feature debut in this gorgeously composed film that turns the coming-of-age tale on its head, by showing us the journey of a runaway teenage boy through the eyes of his father, who’s desperately trying to find him. We meet Theo (Wagner Moura, in a terrific performance), a well-to-do doctor whose marriage to his wife has fallen apart as both of them have focused on their careers, as his 14-year-old son disappears on an adopted horse, leaving behind a trail of clues as to his whereabouts and two parents suddenly reunited in their overriding concern for their son’s well-being. Theo’s journey to find his son finds him learning about the young man his son has grown to be, and forces him to confront some long-held beliefs about his own life.

28 Hotel Rooms

One of the genuine surprises of the fest for me. I ended up seeing 28 Hotel Rooms by happenstance, when a ticket for the screening I’d planned to attend failed to materialize. The publicist for 28 Hotel Rooms had reached out a couple days earlier, and with a sudden hole in my schedule I decided to check it out – and I was glad I did. Chris Messina and Marin Ireland play a pair of business travelers who hook up for what both of them think will be a one-night stand. Their attraction to each other proves intense, though, and the two sustain an sporadic union of sorts, played out over brief one or two day dalliances over months and years, through their other relationships and respective marriages, until they finally start to realize that it’s the relationship they have with each other that really may be the most permanent one of all.

Heartfelt performances by Messina and Ireland carry the film, which relies wholly on these two people and the snippets we see of them in these brief moments when their lives intersect to make us care about what becomes of their relationship. Direction by first-time writer/director Matt Ross is exceptionally well-constructed; this isn’t the easiest conceit to pull off and make it work without boring your audience, but he does so quite nicely. The program description made this sound like a film about 28 nights of indiscriminate hotel sex, but it’s really not. There’s sex in there, yes, but the focus of this film is on these two people, why they’re drawn to each other in spite of their differences, and what about each of them keeps their relationship as it is.

Wuthering Heights

An adaptation of a classic work of literature might not seem like the logical place for an award-winning writer-director of original films to head next. But Andrea Arnold’s striking interpretation of Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë’s singular masterpiece of obsession and unrequited love, is so starkly vivid and visually strong that it’s clear for that for Arnold, who works in realism, delving into the muck and mire of the Yorkshire moors is a very comfortable place to be. And really, it’s not that far a stretch from Arnold’s previous works, when you get down to it. Arnold’s Oscar-winning short film Wasp and features Red Road and Fish Tank, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2006 and 2009, respectively, are set in run-down housing projects, with characters who could be said to be outsiders of a sort, each in their own way.

Arnold shifts the perspective of the novel away from Nelly Dean, the storyteller, and Lockwood, the rapt listener, by truncating the tale to focus almost entirely on the relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff. This shift of perspective is subtle but important; as a literary device, the entire tale is filtered first through Nelly Dean’s perspective as a storyteller, a gossip, and a lover of stories herself, and then through Lockwood’s own class biases as he listens to the tale; this greatly affects how the events are interpreted. In other words, where the book never attempts objectivity because the tale being told is clearly an embellished one, here there is no observer within the story itself, leaving us to interpret the events as if they are, in fact, objective truths within the world of the story.

For me, this didn’t quite work because without Nelly Dean’s embellishment and romanticizing, Cathy feels even less sympathetic in that she comes across as caring solely about money and security rather than love (true enough), while Heathcliff seems to be always just stomping around glaring angrily, slamming doors, and being generally ungrateful and recalcitrant without the sympathetic glean of Nelly Dean’s interpretation of events adorning them. Without Nelly’s lens to focus the tale, we have two characters who aren’t, in and of themselves, greatly likable; thus this adaptation becomes more an observation of events than a tragedy in which we come to feel significantly invested.

Nonethless, the issues of class and love that seem to drive much of Arnold’s work are very present. Here, Wuthering Heights, where the younger Cathy and Heathcliff (Shannon Beer and Solomon Glave, both terrific) roam, play and love freely and wildly on the moors is contrasted vividly with the more genteel Thrushcross Grange, where Edgar Linton ( James Northcote) will offer Cathy wealth and security, if not Heathcliff’s fiery passion and unending angst. The class differences in Wuthering Heights, emphasized not only by the physical aspects of Wuthering Heights verus Thrushcross Grange, but by the difference in the way dark-skinned Heathcliff is treated by Cathy’s father (the respect and kindness of benevolent charity), by her brother Hindley (the rage and anger inflicted by the usurped upon the perceived usurper), by Edgar Linton (master and servant) and by Cathy herself (love and its flipside, cruelty), all call upon themes that underscore much of Arnold’s work in more modern settings.

Visually, Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights is stunningly beautiful, with desolate frames of windy moors, and the most realistic depiction of the sanitary conditions of its time since, perhaps, Tom Tywker’s Perfume. You can practically feel the chill, damp wind blowing you nearly sideways, the muck of the mud holding fast to your shoes with every step. Sound, too, is excellently used in augmenting the storytelling and creating a sense of time and place. But when we get to older Cathy and Heathcliff ( Kaya Scoldelario and James Howson), somehow we lose much of the passion that underlies the tale; the fire that smolders in Heathcliff’s breast, this ancient, destructive love , Heathcliff’s unrelenting fierce anger at being denied what he wants even after overcoming a lifetime of servitude and indignities, are played up by Nelly Dean’s sympathetic perspective, and that element is missing here. Arnold’s version of Wuthering Heights is certainly the most visually stunning of the film versions of this tale, but from a literary standpoint, Cathy and Heathcliff need Nelly Dean to soften them up a bit and make them more palatable.

Sundance Docs Roundup: Detropia, Queen of Versailles, and Ethel

Detropia

Sundance vets Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing were back this year with Detropia, a look at a city that’s gone from being the fastest growing city in the US to one of the most rapidly declining. Detropia has a palpable opinion about its subject matter (Ewing grew up just outside Detroit), and the filmmaker’s views on the deterioration of Detroit and the reasons it’s happening are made pretty clear. They’re not offering up ideas on how to fix Detroit, they’re holding up this visually compelling, artfully constructed, beautifully shot film about a city falling apart before the lens of their camera. And somehow amidst the ruin, the despair, and the wrecking balls, the residents sticking it out still have spirit and a determination to bring Detroit back from the brink of disaster.

Working from a thesis of “as Detroit goes, so goes the nation,” Grady and Ewing forego their typically structured style for a more free-flowing approach, where painterly visuals are used to tell the story, the people interviewed acting as an enraged Greek chorus commenting on what we’re seeing rather than an collection of individual voices meekly complaining. Grady and Ewing use Detroit as a microcosm case study of what happens to a city when a declining economy, corporate greed and job outsourcing strip away the livelihoods of tens of thousands of workers, effectively cutting the beating heart out of a once-thriving city.

One of the people interviewed by the filmmakers refers to Detroit as the proverbial canary in a coal mine, and it’s clear the filmmakers are sending an urgent message here: Look at what’s happened to this once great city. This could be your city, your hometown next, because the problems that plague Detroit are hardly endemic to this one place. Even as they paint a bleak picture of a city on the verge of complete flatline, though, Grady and Ewing keep a finger on the pulse that’s still keeping the city together: the resilient residents, pissed off at the auto companies for taking away the jobs that built their city to begin with, but determined not to give in; the politicians desperately struggling to figure it all out before the state steps in and takes over completely; and the artists inspired to capture this moment in history on canvases, through songs, through written and spoken word.

Queen of Versailles

One of the surprises of this year’s Sundance was Queen of Versailles, Lauren Greenfield’s “rags to riches to rags” documentary about David and Jackie Siegel, who had more money than they knew what to do with, and all the power and freedom that goes along with that – until the 2008 economic downturn delivered a reality smackdown that neither of them was prepared for.

The vividly symbolic representation of the Siegel’s spectacular success and failure is Versailles, the 90,000 square foot house the couple were building in Florida (their current house, at only 27,000 or so square feet, being a little too small for their abundant possessions). Versailles was only halfway built when the economic bubble burst, causing David Siegel’s wildly successful condo timeshare business to deflate, threatening the company’s new showcase towers in Las Vegas and forcing thousands of layoffs within the company. Although the land and house were paid for, Siegel took out a mortgage against the property to keep his business going, and with his hard-fought business collapsing around him like a flimsy house of cards, Siegel takes to retreating more and more to solitude in his room, where he surrounds himself, monk-like, with stacks and stacks of business papers, desperately struggling to keep everything afloat.

Jackie, meanwhile, still has eight kids to raise – a perfectly reasonable number of kids when your husband is super-rich and you can afford a pack of nannies and a household staff of 19 to keep everything clean and functioning, but a little overwhelming when you don’t have the support to which you were accustomed. With their belts tightened, though, the Siegels have to face the reality of needing to make some serious cutbacks, reducing the household staff down to just a couple of nannies, switching their kids from private to public schools, selling off the private jets and whatever other big-ticket items they can.

A blond beauty queen smart enough to graduate from RIT before she met and married David Siegel, Jackie remains the primary focus throughout the film – a great call on Greenfield’s part, because while in the first half of the film you can’t help but just roll your eyes at the family’s extravagant lifestyle, by the second half Jackie, desperately trying to hold things together for her family, painting a strained smile on her face as she tries to offer support and love to a husband too far lost in depression and gloom to do more than half-heartedly swat her and their children away, becomes a much more sympathetic character.

David Siegel is cocky and arrogant at the beginning of the film, but even then we see a glimpse of his insecurities when he wonders aloud what his much younger, beauty queen wife sees in him. We see Jackie’s insecurities, too, as she nervously half-jokes that David had told her that once she turned 40, he was going to replace her with two 20-year-olds (ah, rich old white guy humor, heh heh, what a kidder). And we see both of their insecurities refracted hugely through their hoarding of wealth and possessions; it’s not just the 90,000 square foot house, it’s the eight kids, and the however-many dogs, and a Christmas shopping trip to Wal-Mart (multiple carts worth) in which Jackie throws random toys in the cart, barely looking at them.

The childrens’ Filipino nanny is used to great effect as a part of Greenfield’s storytelling, as we learn that she left behind her own children back in her home country to come to the US to work as a nanny to support them. She sends her family all that she makes, but hasn’t seen her own kids in many years; instead, her young charges have become the surrogates upon whom she’s lavished her love. And there’s a poignant scene where she shows the little house in which she lives – a small playhouse that belonged to the twins that they no longer use, that speaks volumes about status and class in the era of the 99% versus the 1%.

Ethel

Ethel, Rory Kennedy’s documentary homage to her mother, Ethel Kennedy (widow of Robert F. Kennedy) is a warm, lovely portrait of a woman who’s passion for life and philosophic value system supported her husband in his political aspirations, and the 11 children she was left to raise when he was killed. The undeniable poignancy of the film is derived, in large part, by Rory Kennedy’s search to understand her father, a legend and political hero who was killed six months before she was born. As the only one of her large pack of siblings not to have any memory at all of her father, one has to imagine that she grew up with this enormous hole in her life where her father should have been, and that a lifetime of being referred to as the daughter of RFK had its impact on her. But it’s Rory’s mother, Ethel, who’s the heartbeat and pulse of this story, as she was in the lives of Rory and her siblings, and structurally, she and her filmmaking team do a fantastic job arcing the story of this fiercely loyal, independent, fun-spirited woman who we don’t know all that much about, against the familiar historical events surrounding Jack and Bobby Kennedy.

There’s a particularly poignant moment in the film when Rory asks her mother about the day RFK died. Immediately, her face is etched with buried grief, her eyes fill with a well of deep, long-suffering sorrow, and she tells her daughter simply, I don’t want to talk about that. It says all we need to know. Her daughter focuses instead on the woman who refused to wallow in grief and despair when her husband died, his tragic death following that of his brother’s and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s such a pivotal point in our nation’s history, holding her head up and turning her focus to raising his children to be the kind of adults he would have been proud of.

This is an engaging, compelling film, filled with abundant never-before-seen home video footage of what Bobby and Ethel’s life was like, with their brood of happy kids tromping around their farm, their mother forever thinking of interesting and daring things for them to do, and their staunch Catholic insistence that their children not only appreciate all the privilege that comes with being born a Kennedy, but that they learn about the problems in the world and put their minds and their social and political power to use in finding ways to be a part of the solution.

Sundance Review: Safety Not Guaranteed

One of the biggest surprises of this year’s Sundance is just how terrific Safety Not Guaranteed, Colin Trevorrow’s film based on a real Craigslist ad seeking a companion for time travel, turned out to be. The film’s quirky premise, which sends three magazine employees to investigate whether the man who placed the ad really thinks he can travel through time, seems funny enough just based on the premise (and it is), but like the writers who go off in search of what they think will be a wacky story to poke fun at, we find instead a very human film that’s complicated and genuine and never cruel in its use of humor. I thought this was by far the strongest script at this year’s Sundance in terms of sheer quality of writing and execution of idea, and apparently I wasn’t the only one; screenwriter Derek Connolly won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for Safety Not Guaranteed at last night’s awards ceremony.
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Sundance Review: Goats

There’s a good deal to like in Goats, a coming-of-age tale adapted by Mark Jude Poirier off his own 2001, semi-autobiographical novel, and helmed by first-time feature director Christopher Neil (nephew of Francis Ford Coppola, cousin of Sophia Coppola). The film focuses on Ellis Whitman (Graham Phillips), a 14-year-old kid, wise and responsible beyond his years, who lives with Wendy (Vera Farmiga) his child-like, trust-fund mom in a posh, comfortable home in Tucson. Ellis’s dad, who his mom calls “Fucker Frank,” is long-gone and barely a presence in Ellis’s life; filling the gap left by his absence is Goat Man (David Duchovny, very funny here and almost unrecognizable in a desert-prophet full beard and long, wind-blown hair), a friend of his mom’s who’s lived in the pool house rent-free for as long as anyone can remember, taking care of her property, cleaning the pool, and raising goats and a spectacular greenhouse crop of pot.
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Sundance Review: For Ellen

So Yong Kim (In Between Days, Treeless Mountain) is back at Sundance this year with For Ellen, a quiet, meticulously paced character study about Joby (Paul Dano), a would-be rock star , who takes a road trip back to the small midwest town where his soon-to-be ex and young daughter live so that he can sign divorce papers. Joby needs the financial settlement the divorce will give him in order to finish his latest album — which he sees as his last chance to make it or break it. Upon his arrival, though, he learns that his inept attorney (Jon Heder) has negotiated a settlement that will require him to give up all rights to the daughter he hasn’t seen since she was a baby. Faced with this choice, Joby’s suddenly he’s not so sure what he wants.
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Sundance Review: Compliance

Craig Zobel, who was last at Sundance in 2007 with Great World of Sound, a sharply directed and acted film about a record producing company scam, is back at Sundance this year with a film about a different sort of scam, Compliance, an equally sharp examination of what happens when Sandra, a fast food restaurant manager, receives a phone call from a police officer informing her that one of her young employees, Becky, has been accused of stealing from a customer’s purse and must be detained.

It’s a stressful day for Sandra, one that started with the discovery of a freezer left open and over a thousand dollars of food lost, and the looming possibility of a “secret shopper” quality control visitor, and perhaps that strain contributes to all that unfolds over the next 80 or so minutes of utterly riveting screen time as Sandra complies with the increasingly bizarre requests made by the the caller. And what happens in the course of this story would be unbelievable – if it wasn’t all based on a true case of a McDonald’s manager and employee in Kentucky.
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Oscar Noms Are Out. Now, Back to Sundance.

Happy Oscar Nomination Day from Sundance! A few quick thoughts on the Oscar noms …

The Good

Melissa McCarthy pulls off the Supporting Actress nomination! Fabulous.

Ditto Janet McTeer (Supporting Actress) and Glenn Close (Actress) for Albert Brooks

And awesome for Rooney Mara getting the Best Actress nomination, too.

Undefeated gets a nod for Documentary, huzzah! Co-director TJ Martin is one of the nicest, most genuine people you’ll ever meet.

And also happy to see Hell and Back Again in the running for documentary.

The Bad

No Tilda Swinton for We Need to Talk About Kevin. Sorry, but I’d rather have had her in there than Meryl Streep. Love Streep, but Iron Lady is … well, it is what it is.

No David Fincher for Dragon Tattoo? Sigh.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross not getting nominated for Original Score, also a disappointment.

No Best Supporting Actor nom for Albert Brooks (WTF, Academy?)

Young Adult being completely shunned, especially Charlize Theron for Best Actress, Patton Oswalt for Best Supporting Actor, and Diablo Cody for Original Screenplay.

The Descendants getting nominated for Adapted Screenplay. And Best Picture, for that matter. Lazy screenplay, mediocre film.

And no Buck for Documentary? Boo.

Sundance Review: The Pact

The Pact, directed by Nicholas McCarthy, played here at Sundance as a short film last year, and came back this year as a full-blown feature. Now I’m not much of a horror chick, though I do occasionally enjoy a good scare. For me (and, I’d have to say, a sizable percentage of the public screening midnight crowd with whom I saw it), The Pact delivers plenty of chills, jumps and squeal-worthy moments.
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Sundance Review: The First Time

The First Time , in spite of its title, isn’t at all the kind of raunchy teen sex comedy about a guy desperately trying to lose his virginity, and his friends trying to help him get laid that you might expect it to be. It’s a sweet, funny story about these two young people, Dave (Dylan O’Brien), who pines away for a girl who sees him only as a friend, and Aubrey (Britt Robertson), who’s already cynical about love by her junior year, who find each other unexpectedly. Things very quickly get way more complex than either of them imagined.

Of course, it’s no-brainer that you’d want to push this film hard at the teen market – the girls who will sweet talk their boyfriends into seeing a romantic teen flick, and the boys who see the title and think they might be able to segue straight from a film about teens having sex into a little role-playing of their own. Not to mention the girls who will see it over and over with packs of their girlfriends, so they can sit down afterwards and talk about how great Dave is, and how it would be so awesome if they could just meet a guy like that. And then they’ll go back to their lives, where they will continue to relegate the Daves of the high school world to the dreaded role of “friend” and hook up with the assholes.

However, The First Time also happens to be quite a good film that adults can relate to as well, because in spite of what my own teenagers sometimes think about my relative lameness, I was actually a teenager once myself, prone to all the angst and agony of those dicey first relationships when you’re still trying to figure out who you are and what you want and just how much of your sense of self worth is going to be built upon whether Mr. Washboard Abs wants to get in your pants. I’m not so far gone down the path of encroaching old age to not remember what it feels like to be anxiously trying to decide whether the potential – the cynic in me might say the inevitability – for a relationship to end up hurting one or both parties is worth however good it might make you feel for a while. And neither, probably, are you.

The First Time is relatable, also, to guys many years beyond that first flush of teenage hormones, especially the nice guys, the guys who forever find themselves relegated to the dreaded role of “friend.” Let me let you in on a little secret guys: You’re not always relegated to the “friend” position because we don’t find you sexually attractive; it’s often just that we women treasure our friendships with the opposite gender, and when you find a guy who’s nice, who listens, who cares what you think, who supports you and allows you to support him in return, do you really want to risk losing that by going down the path of “more?” to find that now you’ve blown it and have less? We just don’t want to risk it, which sucks for the nice guys who shake their heads in disbelief at our shockingly bad relationship choices, who’d love a chance to show us they would cherish us, treasure us, never treat us like crap. Why don’t we go for those guys more? It took me until I was in my 40s to really start to figure that out.

This is a charming, sweet film, but it gets surprisingly under your skin, especially in the last act. There are some places where it could be tightened up a notch or two (it currently runs 98 minutes, and I’d love to see a cut with about 10 minutes shaved off), but for the most part this is a very solid, very marketable film. The cinematography has lots of flow and movement (though an attempt at a Fincheresque camera move doesn’t quite work), the editing and story flow are good, and I have to say, the production design by Keith Cunningham (who previously was art director for Bridesmaids, Zodiac, Star Trek and The Social Network) is just terrific.

Sundance Review: The House I Live In

This film started out a little slow for me, and it also does two things I’m generally not fond of in documentary films: it uses a great deal of voiceover, and the director integrates himself heavily into the story. But wait, bear with me, because if you stick with this film, it pays off very well in spite of — perhaps even because of — those things. Jarecki’s a tremendously talented documentarian, and he deftly weaves together his family’s personal history and his own relationship with Nannie Jeter, the Black housekeeper/nanny who cared for him and his brothers when they were growing up, with his own growing understanding of the disparity between the paths he and his brothers took and the paths the members of Nanny’s family, with whom the Jarecki brothers grew up, into a greater tale about the War on Drugs and its disproportionate impact on African-American men.
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Sundance Review: Beasts of the Southern Wild

Beasts of the Southern Wild, directed by Behn Zeitlin and made by Court 13, the New Orleans-based filmmaking collective of which he’s a part, is a fabulous piece of cinematic storytelling. The story itself is fascinating, intricate, and completely unique: The protagonist is Hushpuppy, a six-year-old girl who lives a free and wild existence in The Bathtub, an isolated Bayou community physically and symbolically cut off from the rest of the world by the levee. Hushpuppy lives with her wild-man father and the pack of lovable, independent miscreants who’ve carved out their own way of life in this singularly unique place; school in The Bathtub is where the ragtag pack of kids who live there learn about survival and the value of independence.
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Sundance Review: Celeste and Jesse Forever

If you were hoping for Celeste and Jesse Forever, one of the most buzzed about titles going into Sundance this year, to be this year’s Like Crazy, you’re in luck. Beautifully written by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones (the writing debut for both actors), deftly directed by Lee Toland Krieger (The Vicious Kind), and effortlessly acted by Jones and Andy Samberg in the lead roles, Celeste and Jesse Forever is exactly the kind of gem you have to think buyers at Sundance will be salivating over. It’s charming, it’s touching, and it’s very accessible to a mainstream audience.

The film explores what happens when Celeste and Jesse (Jones and Samberg), who seem on the surface to be the perfect couple, decide to amicably divorce. All goes pretty well at first, so long as Jesse’s living in his artist’s studio behind the house and the pair are still hanging out every day. After all, they’re best friends, so why should they have to give that up just because they’re splitting up? Sure, their friends think it’s weird, but they’re doing them a favor, too, by not making them choose between them. What could possibly go wrong?

With a lesser script, this would play out in all kinds of lame cliches that would have had me inwardly groaning, but the arcs of both characters are so remarkably imagined and well-drawn that everything about Celeste and Jesse’s relationship felt very real – painfully real – to me. Having gone through a relatively amicable divorce and then the whole process of moving on into other relationships with my children’s father in the past couple years, there are certainly things about my personal life that I brought into watching this film play out. For me, the writing of the character of Celeste – this driven, in-control, strong woman who has to be “right” all the time, who fails to see and nurture the positive things about her relationship with Jesse until it’s too late to go back and fix what’s broken, was wrenching and real. I’ll say this: After the screening, there were lots of weepy-eyed, sniffly women in the rest room talking about how true this film felt to them.

I think of both Jones and Samberg more as comedic actors, and they certainly bring a level of playfulness to their respective roles that’s particularly effective in making the close friendship of these characters feel absolutely believable. But this script requires both actors to bring their dramatic chops as well, and they deliver on that front too. The supporting performances, particularly by Ari Graynor and Eric Christian Olsen as an engaged couple who are Celeste and Jesse’s best friends and McCormack as a likable pot dealer bemoaning the impact of medical marijuana on the economy of his drug dealing business, are also solid. Emma Roberts turns up as a flavor-of-the-month pop star who Celeste despises on principle but has to work with when her branding company takes her on as a client. There’s nothing at all wrong with Roberts’ performance here, and I’m delighted to see her in a project like this, but from a story standpoint this, for me, was a bit of a weak spot in terms of whether it really needed to be there. It’s a fairly harmless diversion, plot-wise, but it’s not what I’d consider an essential element of the storytelling. But that’s a small quibble for what’s overall quite an excellent film.

This is a very different kind of film than Krieger’s previous Sundance effort, The Vicious Kind (a film I still feel was vastly under-appreciated in its intelligence, depth and complexity). Nonetheless, you can see his particular style of storytelling in both films, in the way he has of getting his actors to dig under their skins and really find who these people are, and bringing them to life in a way that’s relatable. This is a superb job of direction. I do think there are a few places here and there where the film could still use a little tightening and tweaking (Krieger said in the intro that they just finished it a week-and-a-half ago), but there’s plenty of time to smooth out those few bumps before release if the film gets distribution – and I’d be surprised it if doesn’t. This one’s a winner.

Sundance Dispatch: From Snowpocalypse to Sundance

It was looking for a while there like I might end up missing a chunk of Sundance this year due to Snowpocalypse 2012 nailing Seattle. Usually when our weather men predict a Major! Winter! Storm! you can assume that in all likelihood, there might be a few wayward flakes, but a couple times a year we actually do tend to get a pretty good snow move in. Now I totally appreciate the stalwart nature of my East Coast friends, especially those in upstate New York, where we used to live, who scoff at what they see as Seattle’s overblown reaction to a little snow. I hear you. When we lived in Rochester, anything less than six inches of snow was a mere “dusting,” and it would take a serious blizzard to close schools.

But this is Seattle, which is built not just on one hill, but many hills. We have maybe two snow plows for the entire city, and one of those is some guy with a four-wheel drive pickup with a couple snow shovels duct-taped to the front. It’s dangerous to drive in Seattle when there’s snow, especially a lot of it, and even more dangerous when there’s ice. So when it looked likely that there actually might be a “snow event” moving in on Wednesday, I prudently decided to rebook my flight to Salt Lake City to Thursday, when the weather forecasters were predicting a warm-up to the low 40s and rain to melt all the snow away. Hah.

I woke up Thursday morning at 7AM to freezing rain. A lot of it. Buckets. Checked the weather report, it was supposed to be clear by noon. Noon came, and we were getting pelted so hard with a mix of freezing rain and snow I could barely see out my window. They changed the forecast — now it wasn’t going to clear until 3PM — right about when I needed to leave for the airport. Also, Sea-Tac was pretty much screwed, with the entire airport shut down for part of the morning until they could clear the ice that had fallen overnight from the runways. I anxiously tracked flights all morning: Delayed. Cancelled. Cancelled. Cancelled. Crap.

But, the one airline that seemed to be getting flights out was Southwest, which I happened to be traveling on. I had a gut feeling it might be okay, and that if we could just make it up the hill out of our neighborhood to the highway, it would probably be okay. My husband Mike volunteered to drive me, and so we left, just as the snow was really picking up. I just about had an anxiety attack on the hill. I was freaking out, telling Mike, forget it, forget it. Take me home, I’ll rebook my flight for whenever I can get on. We’re going to get killed. No, we aren’t, he calmly said. I got this.

And he did. We got up that hill, and the highway was (unsurprisingly) quite barren of traffic, save a few other idiots like us, mostly heading to the airport. The highway had been well-sanded, and the layer of snow coming down covered the layer of ice, and we made it, actually, in no more time than the trip normally takes in heavy Seattle traffic. I was prepared to sleep at the airport if my flight got cancelled, but miracle of miracles, it did not. We were delayed a bit to de-ice the plane, but we got in the air, landed with a bit of a bump 90 minutes later, and by midnight I was at our house in Park City. By 2AM I was settled in and watching a screener.

So far today, I picked up my press badge, put in ticket requests for public screenings, schlepped over to the Park City NPR affiliate to do a segment of The Daily Buzz with Film Society Lincoln Center’s Eugene Hernandez and Indiewire’s Dana Harris and Eric Kohn, schlepped back to the press office to pick tickets up, and caught three solid films so far: Elena, The Queen of Versailles, and Where Do We Go Now. Back at the MCN house for a quick bowl of soup and a sandwich and lovely cup of tea and then I’m heading off to Main Street to catch the midnight screening of The Pact.

I’ll be writing films up as I can in my downtime, but as at this past Toronto, I’m spending most of my energy these first few days of the fest into seeing as many films as I can, not into being the First! to write them up.