It’s a festival. It’s a market. The Sundance Film Festival is a place to cut deals. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
The Airborne squadron in its matching pink parkas, handing out the packets of cold remedy, came too late. The second portion of the Sundance Film Festival 07 – which announced winners Saturday night – became a fever dream. Finally, now I am out of the grip of la grippe, here are some parting glances for the Park City indie fest that was.
Dishing on the deals
Bob Redford is not afraid to chide, which is fast becoming part of his curmudgeonly charm. At the opening press conference, the Sundance Institute founder announced he had one day to do so, then he would be off making a movie.
And so he sat onstage at the historic Egyptian Theatre, wearing bluejeans, a black sweater and a big button that read “Focus on Film.” Redford schooled attendees: “Sundance is a festival, not a market.”
This phrase, like the button, is part mantra, part admonishment. And whenever Redford insists on it, it has the ring of that old “SNL” skit in which John Belushi bellowed “we’re not a gang, we’re a club.”
Of course the festival is a market. And when Sundance is running on all cylinders, there are films that leave Park City and reshape the broader movie marketplace. That is the fest’s power and also its burden.
This year there was plenty of bartering. Some of the deals made: “Grace Is Gone,” starring John Cusack as an Iraq war widower; “La Misma Luna,” the saga of a sweet kid trying to make it from Mexico to his mother, an undocumented worker in L.A.; the late Adrienne Shelley’s debut feature, “Waitress.”
On the documentary front: “In the Shadow of the Moon,” “Crazy Love” and “My Kid Could Paint That” all have distribution. My fave: Jason Kohn’s striking look at Brazilian corruption and São Paolo’s kidnapping culture, “Manda Bala (Send a Bullet),” which won the grand jury prize for documentary, but doesn’t yet have distribution.
The South shall fall again
It was nothing but
some rubbish
lying all the time.
It was nothing but
some rubbish …
-To be sung to Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog”
Sundance, never without controversy, courted a bit more with writer-director Deborah Kampmeier’s “Hounddog” (not so affectionately known as the film in which Dakota Fanning is raped), and Robinson Devor’s documentary “Zoo,” in which the filmmaker talks to some men about a horse, or two.
The latter I didn’t see but wish I had, if only to learn what critics meant by “tasteful” in reference to a documentary about men who congregated on a Pacific Northwest horse farm and had congress with stallions.
“Hounddog” I did see, but felt like a sap for doing so. But then, how does one avoid a film in which America’s premier child actor gets raped? No one did.
Kampmeier’s salted ham about a girl whose abusive
daddy loves to have her shimmy to Elvis didn’t deserve to detract from worthier films. And the movie’s inauthentic version of the South makes “Black Snake Moan” seem like a masterpiece.
The distributor screened “Black Snake Moan,” Craig Brewer’s outrageous (in an interesting way, I think) movie for us before the fest, so we were robbed of seeing how many other jaws dropped watching the “Hustle & Flow” director’s tale about an attempt by a bluesman (Samuel L. Jackson) to save a poor, sexually tormented woman (Christina Ricci) from herself.
In December, Fanning sat at New York City’s Regency hotel talking about which actor’s career she might want to emulate. Jodie Foster’s name came up.
“Hounddog” is less “Taxi Driver” than “The Accused.” It was always infuriating that the 1988 film, based on the story of a highly publicized 1983 rape, was structured to make audiences wait and weirdly “hope” for the scene of the gang assault. At Sundance, one felt the same sort of unpleasant tug: We were waiting for “that scene.”
“Once” a small jewel
Thanks to the trifecta of “Once,” “The Savages” (Fox Searchlight) and “Rocket Science” (Picturehouse), Sundance could have ended on Day Two and sent me home a sated camper. Of the three narrative features, “Once” – Irish writer-director John Carney’s tender musical romance about a busker and a Czech immigrant – remains the small and perfect discovery of the festival.
At deadline, the film hadn’t sold. But with truthful, harmonious performances by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, and the fest’s World Cinema Audience Award: Dramatic prize, it’s just a matter of time.
“The Savages” a keeper
Forget “Chicago 10,” Brett Morgen’s formally compelling but aggravating doc with animation. “The Savages” is my alternative opening-night film. The nine years it took Tamara Jenkins (“Slums of Beverly Hills”) to make her sophomore feature turned out to be well worth the wait.
Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney play siblings called upon to take custody of their aged father who is sliding into dementia. “The Savages” is painfully funny, and so much more astute about the bodies in the world than last year’s overpraised Sundance darling “Little Miss Sunshine.”
Oscar picks at lightspeed
The chillest place to be at Sundance might have been the basement of 333 Main St. There you could descend into a cave of cultural engagement where the fest’s revitalized New Frontier section was going strong.
The day before Academy Award nominees were announced, I took in R. Luke DuBois’s “Academy” at the Frontier’s microcinema.
DuBois figured out a way, using algorithmic rendering, to compress an entire film into a single minute. So 75 years of Oscar winners in 75 minutes. Yes, 222 minutes of “Gone With the Wind” gone in 60 seconds. David Lean’s ample epics (“Lawrence of Arabia” and “The Bridge on the River Kwai”) made lean. The program says the 75 best picture winners (up to “Chicago”) remain “intelligible.” Arguably, that intelligibility was based on one’s familiarity with a movie.
How much easier it was to make sense – and get a kick out of – “All About Eve” than a lesser-known Oscar winner like 1931’s “Cimarron.”
Film critic Lisa Kennedy can be reached at 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com; try the Screen Team blog at denverpostbloghouse.com.
