..Leonard
Klady
..David
Poland
..Ray
Pride
..Patricia
Vidal
Terribly late
Still procrastinating, staring at the empty suitcases on my living room floor on Friday afternoon, I get three emails from friends already at Sundance, two journalists and a shorts filmmaker, about the announcement they'd just read in indieWIRE-there will no swag from Sundance Channel except for feature filmmakers. (That also means there will be no comprehensive lists of said extravagant largesse posing as journalistic critiques of the marketing, ambush marketing, and damn lies that will paper the old mining town on Park City.) "Why am I putting up with all this if there's no Sundance swag?" one journo whines, half-ironic.
Among the movies I've caught ahead of time, Thom Petersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself is a marvel, a three-hour analytical college of clips from movies shot on location in the Greater Southland. Barring some sort of super-clearance license, it will likely only be able to be shown outside of the U.S.
Of all the generalized comments I could make about Sundance programming, at least a few would be directed toward studio fare that doesn't belong, such as New Line's entry this year. I cower at the thought of more movies like The Butterfly Effect, which reminds me of Paul Schrader's comment that making a movie is like birthing a child and critiquing it is performing an autopsy. Instead of extending the autopsy metaphors, this vile, clumsy thing reminds me more of growing up in a small town in Kentucky where the volunteer firemen joked that their job was to "save the chimney," keeping fires from raging farther while admitting the house was a goner. Still, I don't think even a Sundance slot or Ashton Kutcher's rising star will save this chimney, this flammable grab-bag of time travel, preteen lust, pedophilia, jailhouse sodomy, Kutcher's pubic hair and, yes, several scenes teasing at and finally giving us a little Yorkie flambé.
Two Slamdance docs impressed me: Brett Ingram's Monster Road, a feature-length documentary about the complicated life of legendary clay animator Bruce Bickford, who worked for Frank Zappa, but now works alone in a small Seattle basement studio while tending to his Alzheimer's-afflicted father. Big City Dick: Richard Peterson's First Movie is another outsider story with punch, following the life of a Seattle musician who longs for stardom, who among other things, plays trumpet on the street, and indulges obsessions with Sea Hunt and Johnny Mathis. Quirky and dark and memorable.
Hector Babenco's Carandiru is a loud crowd-pleaser about a doctor's struggle to improve conditions in the overcrowded. Sao Paulo House of Detention at the arrival of AIDS. Humor and horror equals uplift? Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Last Life In The Universe, his follow-up to festival circuit favorite, Mon-Rak Transistor, is an eccentric set of love stories propelled by a failed suicide. Shot by genius cinematographer Christopher Doyle, the most ordinary setting is luminous and often surrealistic. A dream sprinkled with jokes and violence, with a strange, comic cameo by director Miike Takashi as a yakuza hit man, it memorably works its beautiful and wistful charm.
Penny Woolcock's grainy, mostly handheld The Principles of Lust is a raw little number about a blocked writer who falls into the lives of two troubled souls, a single mother and a Fight Club Jr. sidekick named Billy. Graphic sex, drugs and fist fighting ensue. I liked it a lot.
And while lengthy, Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott's The Corporation is a valuable anthology of the history of how corporations came to be.
Boss, deplaning, deplaning.
"Welcome to Salt Lake. Or wherever your destination may be," the stewardess intones. Yeah, Park City, where you can't park, up the mountain from a lake of salt. Let us pray for ambiguities instead of contradictions.
The same thought crosses my mind as it does each year I'm down the jetway and out into the salt Lake City Airport, seeing those white italic letters on turquoise: My ticket is changeable and there's so much I could be doing at home.
Which is actually a healthy thought: it means I'm not predicting what's going to happen the week or so I'm at Sundance.
The meter is running
I tried it in Toronto 2003, and again here: to spend as little as possible. I'm concerned about the final four days, where my lodging fell through and most of my closest colleagues are homeward bound. I started to keep a tally of how little and how much some things cost. It's more disheartening than entertaining. I may abandon the whole dumb idea.
Saturday. After eight-and-a-half hours in transit, I'm able to dump my luggage, get my credentials, check the schedules of movies and events. Exactly one press screening of a movie I want to see and it's going to be shown on a larger screen later. It's warm outside,
warmer than Chicago and certainly warmer than the one degree on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The sun is bright. No one's really bundled up. It reminds me of half a dozen years ago when it was blizzardy and ThinkFILM's Mark Urman, when he was still a publicist, was bundled up to the size of a small car. "I like Cannes better," he said, "Where everyone can be beautiful! Here? We all look like THIS!" I'm just hoping to see someone with a Hard Rock Heber T-shirt. The streets are alive with journos and filmmakers and a seam of the Britney-and-Tunnel crowd in search of celebrities and celebutantes, like the well-known P*a*r*I*s H*I*l*t*o*n (as recent spam has been spelling the name of the reality-porn star).I tumble into a series of meet-and-greets. I like the thin air but on the first day, it's cardio going up any flight of stairs. The Filmmaker Lodge's happy hour is sponsored by Discovery Channel, noting their first theatrically released doc. (I've forgotten its name.) The Skyy Vodka lounge has a concurrent HBO/Cinemax Documentaries pour. The walls of the gallery bear
photographs of the children of Calcutta's red light district, as featured in the documentary, Born into Brothels: Calcutta's Red Light Kids. There's a buffet of chicken skewers and salmon, cheese and ripe fresh grapes. A flutist and drummer play light jazz. The room's so packed people jostle the easels the photos are on. I'm introduced to David Friedman, the clown in Capturing the Friedmans who opens up his family's wells of anger. A shoulder away from Friedman, Al Gore is talking to someone about the superiority of interlaced video. He seems to be joking. Why's Gore here? Someone asks. "He saw the 'Brothel Kids' this
morning," comes the reply. More salmon spins past on a server's upturned hand.Downstairs, away from the crush, I sit with some water, discover I've got the first nosebleed of my life. I'm calm. I think: "Aneurysm? Nosebleed? Aneurysm? Nosebleed?" and realize I didn't really want to see that 7:45 afterwards. A pretty publicist looks my way. I instinctively cover my face with the black Skyy napkin I have in my hand, not wanting to look bloodied. In the washroom, yeah, I look in at least one small feature like Brad Pitt in certain scenes in
Fight Club. (Jared Leto, more accurately.) The moment the blood stops, someone raps on the window of the storefront: a producer I know with a film in competition. The cold air is wonderful. The bleeding stops. She tells me about the fury of just getting a picture seen up here as opposed to the more commonly-dreamt of furore of getting a movie sold, then distributed, even on video, then remembered, as even being not half bad. "It's like spilling blood," she says."Easy for you to say," I joke. "You're bleeding!" she says. And it's only Day One for me.
A shark tale
With the news that the shark drama Open Water has been sold to Lions' Gate, a fellow journo says, grinning, "I love sharks!" She belongs in Sundance, she does.
