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January 31, 2003

No-Snows
The opulent futuristic failure, It’s All About Love, offered a neat parallel to smirk at in drought-stricken Utah, with temperatures in the forties and fifties, and Chicago and the East coast stilled by near-zero temperatures. Celebration director Thomas Vinterberg’s sincere but leaden whimsy ends with ice creeping across the planet, and a narrator, played by Sean Penn, trapped in a plane that cannot land anywhere on earth. (It might make a neater metaphor for the interesting movies that almost, but not quite, hit their mark which, unlike the films that sell for millions of dollars to major distributors, never see the light of day or satellite channels again.)

Requiem for a Teen
Veteran production designer Catherine Hardwicke’s writing-directing debut is a horror story, a deeply felt, beautifully made horror film about contemporary girlhood, so hyped-up it could be called "Requiem for a Teen." Evan Rachel Wood (Simone) is startlingly good as the girl gone wrong; Holly Hunter, as her indulgent, drink-prone mother, radiates hapless sorrow.

The Lower Sweet Side

I caught at least one masterpiece, Peter Sollett’s Raising Victor Vargas, a masterful miniature about kids growing up on the streets of New York’s Lower East Side that again proves there’s no subject larger than the beating of the human heart. Sollett made a short with two of the performers, then worked for two years, observing them, asking about their lives, and bringing the fruit of their friendship to the screen. “Victor Vargas” shows affection without sentimentality and a wry acknowledgment of the complexities of a family’s conflicting desires. (It’s also one of the great portraits of how teenagers tease each other.) There’s always hope when filmmakers work with open eyes.

Every Which Way But Loose
Of the thirty or so movies I saw, only a handful need be dishonored with silence. Among movies arriving in theaters in the next couple of months, I adore All The Real Girls, David Gordon Green’s follow-up to his brash debut, George Washington. His pair of ill-starred small-town young lovers experience so many conflicting feelings of desire and admiration and possession that all they can do is detonate. It’s a terrific portrayal of youth’s tremulous indecision and shattering desire with its vast, unstemmable hormonal surges. Memory is a scalpel, and Green’s sensational work cuts deep with its parallels to the splintered style of Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood For Loveand the emotional hyperbole of Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass with an edge of small-town melancholy reminiscent of The Last Picture Show. Here’s a longer piece I wrote for indieWIRE, at YAHOO! Movies.

All the Realities
Among nonfiction work, Balseros, a Spanish documentary, about the lives of Cuban boat refugees and their lives in the U.S. after several years here, is diffuse in its impact, but deeply emotional and filled with unexpected ironies. Look for it later this year on HBO and HBO Espanol. Before the debut of Commandante, another HBO presentation, my colleague Mark Ebner confronted Oliver Stone on the red carpet with an impertinent parry or two about his reputation for insanity, more probing than Stone ever is in his scattershot but amusing love-fest with Fidel Castro. Traditional in form, The Murder of Emmett Till still packs a wallop in its description of a terrible murder of a black child in the Civil Rights era. Richard LaGravenese and Ted Demme’s A Decade Under the influence, an IFC production, is rich with interviews from the survivors of the 1970s Hollywood Renaissance. Jesper Jargil‘s The Purified is a prolonged sit-down with the four “brothers” of the Danish Dogme 95 movement, including Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, and it’s amusing and entertaining. The personality quirks of the quartet are patiently observed by Jargil, who has made two other docs about Dogme work (including The Humiliated, an on-set report on von Trier’s The Idiots). On a large screen in Trier’s living room, they watch clips from their films and admonitions from their collaborator and mentor Mogens Rukov (who co-wrote The Celebration and It’s All About Love). His teasing eyes dominate the frame, as he hides behind his classes, full beard and ever-present cigarette: what have you boys gotten up to, he wonders, and how can you do better the next time? It may sound like inside baseball, but it’s a wonderful study of how four talented artists work together and give each other hope.

As always at Sundance, family dysfunction was Topic A, yet the best this year were all about love, such as Hoop Dreams' director Steve James’ documentary Stevie, a marvel of empathy that recounts his relationship with the grown man he played Big Brother to as a troubled 10-year-old. Steve, middle-class and successful, finds himself unable to help Stevie, poor, angry, self-destructive, and accused of a horrible crime. It comes to theaters soon, and its complex real-life narrative is a gem. The winner of the best feature film jury prize, American Splendor is another sort of marvel, mixing documentary and fiction in recalling the life of grumpy comics mainstay Harvey Pekar, whose stories detail the minutiae of his mundane life working in a hospital in Cleveland. The clever mix of materials never obscures the heart of actors like Paul Giamatti and Hope Davis, nor the soul of curmudgeonly, long-suffering Pekar. United Artists and InDigEnt’s Pieces of April is yet another story of a family get-together that may go wrong, yet writer-director Peter Hedges (What’s Eating Gilbert Grape; About a Boy) has the right black humor and compassion, along with Katie Holmes, memorable as a lifetime fuck-up and black sheep who wants to get it right just once.

Swag the Dog
While uncommon portraits of common lives were among the hundred-plus features, docs, international films and shorts on display, there was another Sundance: the one filled with stealth marketing and stealth celebrities. Buffets and concerts and parties abounded, and despite the state of the economy, the small former mining town’s Main Street was lined with storefronts rented by the car companies and jeans makers that had no affiliation with the festival, to give cool stuff to those they considered the cool tastemakers. (The festival was not pleased, concerned for their corporate contributors.) Still, The Sundance Channel’s swag-bag was a coveted gimme, a plush brown suede Kenneth Cole bag jammed with several dozen luxury products, a down jacket, DVDs, CDs and a year’s membership in a national chain of gyms. (The Chicago Tribune’s Marc Caro got an entire column out of listing the contents.) HBO’s Project Greenlight threw an event that led to worse chaos, with those hoping for a Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez sighting making streets impassable for hours. Britney Spears flounced about; catching sight of her mask of a face at a party was less amusing than local fashion-challenged blondes on the street mistaking other local blondes for the reformed virgin herself.

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