This was the second year I volunteered at Sundance. You may remember when I wrote about my first year volunteering at Sundance on my old blog Beat Jeremy Coon.
I don't plan to volunteer a third time. Enough is enough. I didn't
have a bad time or anything, but I don't want to go back unless I'm
going as a filmmaker. Why should I be de-icing sidewalks when inferior filmmakers like Clark Gregg are walking down the path I cleared with a cocky strut? They should be slipping and I should be strutting.
I know everyone wants me to compare this year to last. That's how
people make sense of coincidental and random happenings. This year I
networked with two film guys, a significant improvement over last year,
when I networked with one. Especially since the guy I networked with
last year mainly just seemed afraid.
I met a filmmaker this year who
lives a few blocks from me and, incidentally, called me handsome almost immediately after
I introduced myself. A far cry from terror, and hopefully we'll
collaborate on something, though we haven't met up in Brooklyn yet.
All I can say about Sundance 2008 is "attack of the doppelgangers, people!" This year
most of the people I met looked almost exactly like people I knew last
year. That wouldn't be so strange, except that as soon as I saw the
similarities, the original version would come up and start talking to
me and the doppelganger! Not supposed to happen. Only in Utah, right?
Last year I had a brush with death on the icy Utah highways when a
car slipped into my lane from the wrong side of the highway, and I
tapped my brakes and spun out, almost into a ditch. This year I had a
less dramatic brush, but one that left a bruise. While walking up Main
Street, where all the free junk is, I heard a creaking noise, then a
crashing noise, then felt a sharp pain in the back of my jawbone.
A monster icicle had fallen and exploded, sending frozen water shrapnel
everywhere. It could have murdered someone if anyone had been closer. A father next to me even took some perverse pleasure in this,
telling his little children, "You kids were lucky today, you almost got
killed, ha ha!"
Oh, and I was in the New York Times!
My first day on the job, I was out putting Sundance banners on
barricades, The Times was there, and I finally got my close-up, Mr.
Demille.
I guess it's not soooo close. That's me in the brown coat, watching someone work.
I have to admit that my new position this year as a barricade
dresser, de-icer and propane tank replacer worked out better than I
imagined.
The first couple of days were bad. I had almost nothing to
eat both days and as a consequence, I was turning into a misanthrope. Plus,
originally I was told I'd be working four hours a day, and then when I
signed in, they told me 8. It ended up being more like one to two hours
a day. It was worth it.
The housing meant I could see more movies this year, so I saw 41
instead of the 20-something in '07. So this entry may be
longer than last year's. To mitigate that, I'll try to write only short
capsules for each film. Like last year, I'll order the movies from best
to worst. That way you can stop reading after 39 or so.
American Teen:
You should always start a film festival by watching the the second best
movie in the festival, and end the festival by watching the first best
movie. I messed up that rule in regards to the start of the festival. I
saw "I Always Wanted to Be a Gangster" first (the 36th best movie) when
I should have seen "Towelhead." But at least I did finish with the best
movie, American Teen.
The premise of American Teen is: "look, teenagers in a high school." Not too original sounding, I grant. Centenarians
in a high school would be more surprising, or even babies in a high
school. It's like, number one, who put the babies in the high school?
And two, do they still have cliques in baby high school even though
babies can't talk or think yet? Well, they should, because then there
would be the punk/skater babies, and everyone loves a baby with a
mohawk.
But American Teen is a documentary, and a documentary about baby high school would be unethical, because it would be a lie.
Real though it may be, American Teen is fascinating.
Director Nanette Burnstein picked her location and her characters
flawlessly, discovering the previously unmapped town of Warsaw, Indiana
(not to be confused with where I grew up, Jastrzębie
Zdrój, Texas) and recruiting Warsaw High School's "queen bee",
basketball star, most awkward nerd, and most dynamic "arty misfit" to
be followed by cameras almost every single day of their entire senior
year.
What she discovered is that high school reality, if condensed, is
just like high schools in the movies. Well, maybe more "My So Called
Life."
I loved every second of it, so I was surprised to see that Variety's review had some complaints: "one thing missing is any sense that 'American Teen' has something specific to say about teenagers now.
There's nothing about the cliquishness, personal problems, alcohol
usage and apparent sexual activity here that's any different from the
Middle American teen experience a generation or more ago."
Fool, of
course all that stuff is the same; high school doesn't change! Even
Frederick Wiseman's 1968 documentary "High School" resembles high
school today. And surely when that came out, people complained that
Wiseman's depiction was too reminiscent of high schools in the 1940s.
What has changed in the lives of teenagers, if "American Teen" is
to be believed, is that technology seems to have given them some
amount of freedom. The best example of this is when a topless photo of
one of the students gets emailed to just about everyone in the school.
Just kidding, that's an example, but not the best one.
Also, the students here seem a little
more self-aware and conscious of their world and how it manipulates
them than I remember most people in school being. At times they act
like the characters from Scream, who know they're in a horror movie, so
they study the classics to learn the rules. Of course everyone is aware
of cliques in high school, but these kids seem especially articulate
about the impossibility of escape and quite accurately predict the
failure of one romance because it crosses clique lines.
As I said before, Burnstein picked her stars well.
The most powerful girl in the school, Megan Krizmanich,
has a dark side that gets her in trouble and threatens to undo her
dream of going to Notre Dame, the school where her dad and almost all
of her siblings went. Colin Clemens, the sports star, is a lot like
Chris Klein's goofy and amiable jock from Election, but smarter. And with dire consequences looming.
Jake Tusing, the geek, is
paaaaaaainfully awkward yet certifiably girl crazy, sabotaging himself
every second there is in a minute. "Boy, I'm such a loser, aren't I?"
he'll say to his date when he brings her to the dance slightly early.
Even worse, he'll up the ante with something like, "at least you're a
loser too!" No wonder jocks are popular. What is a girl supposed to say
to someone who says, "There's a grease spot on the table because I put
my face there"? Nothing. And that's exactly what she does say.
He
doesn't even have the nice guy thing going for him, as he discloses his
strategy of going after a Freshman transfer student because she hasn't
met anyone yet and thus wouldn't have realized how much of a loser he
is compared to everyone else.
The star of the movie is unquestionably
Hannah Bailey, the "arty misfit" who seems to be the victim of a
horrible mix-up. What is she doing going to high school in this
dead-end small town? What's she doing in high school, period? In just
about every scene, she bursts with giddy energy, wit, emotion, spontaneity and talent,
qualities generally looked down upon in school.
In all respects, she's
above the world she's been unjustly sentenced to. Yet interestingly,
she's not immune from its machinations. She actually appears to be the
most vulnerable of all.
Even hopeless Jake fares better after his
break-up with the Freshman transfer student than Hannah does with her
own heart break. After she's dumped, she's so traumatized, she doesn't
go to school the next day. Or the day after that. Or after that. Until
she's been gone so long, she's in serious danger of being kicked out.
No! Don't throw Hannah into the brier patch!
She's the sort of high
school oddity that other students tend to not understand at the time,
only to later grow up and realize she was obviously the best girl
there.
That could be why the audience - mostly
men past high school age - seemed to fall so in love with her. One guy
shouted, "We love you Hannah!" almost every time she came on the
screen. "You fool!" someone else shouted at a guy in the movie who
turns down Hannah's offer of a walk. Nobody said "Marry me, Hannah!",
but would I be shocked if some people were thinking it? Hardly.
I liked
Hannah too, but as a movie character. That's as far as my affection
ever goes to anyone on the silver screen, whether fiction or
documentary. There is a strict line between audience and movie
characters that literally and physically cannot be crossed. What are
these people thinking? That she's going to crawl out of the screen and
propose to some random audience member who yelled out something
idiotic? If she did crawl out, it would be to laugh at these people.
Nobody tried to climb into the screen to marry Hannah, though, probably because they didn't want to be stuck in Warsaw, Indiana.
What's most amazing about the film is how perfectly it follows
Hollywood story structure. There's all these problems in the beginning,
and by the end, all of them are resolved in the most audience friendly
way possible.
The story thread with Colin, the star basketball player,
even has a distinct moral. By about the middle of the movie, his fame
is dimming; his dad has been pushing him to act like the star he is and
dominate the court, but he starts to falter, and dad warns him in an
American Soldier type development (see my review below) that he can't
afford to pay for his college without a scholarship, so if Colin
doesn't improve, he'll have to join the army. Which Colin really
doesn't want to do.
How Colin improves - if he does, since I don't want
to give anything away - is how just about everyone improves in sports
movies. But it's more satisfying and hilarious here because it's real.
Also impressive is the sheer volume of intriguing details and
surprising foreshadowing Burnstein was able to capture because she
filmed non-stop. In one quick shot, we see a subtle facial expression
on one character and we know someone else is about to be dumped, and
then that's what happens.
In another case, we see the beginnings of a
relationship between two people who have never met just by a
character's smile. Variety blames the magic of excessive filming and
editing for this, suggesting some of the footage may have been
manipulated. If it was manipulated, that's still a credit to Burnstein,
because that makes her the most brilliant manipulatress at Sundance
this year.
Thanks to the magic of theatrical distribution, you can see American
Teen in theaters in July. You should. Not only will you be seeing the
best movie at Sundance, you'll be seeing one of the best movies of the
year.
Towelhead:
Apparently this movie was a bomb at the Toronto Film Festival, so they
must have totally redone it from scratch, because it's a masterpiece
now. It's the directing debut of Alan Ball, who wrote American Beauty
and Six Feet Under. I saw American Beauty kind of recently, and you
know what? As much as I loved it when it came out, it doesn't hold up
at all. It's embarrassingly self-conscious in its suburb hate and
worship of beauty, and it just doesn't work now.
As for Six Feet Under, I've only seen two minutes of that show. The
first minute was a guy being split in half by a malfunctioning
elevator. I changed the channel after that, but then came back later in
the show to see someone describing that death and someone else puking
in response. So it wasn't Alan Ball that drew me to this screening. It
was the title: Towelhead. This being Sundance, I figured they'd be
handing out free towels at the screening. They didn't, but so what? I
loved the movie anyway.
Towelhead is based on Alicia Erian's novel of the same name, even
though as I was watching the movie, I thought Alan Ball had come up
with all the insane stuff that happens in it on his own. It's good he
didn't. It would have been nothing but elevators splitting people in
half and floating plastic bags. Instead, Towelhead is about a newly
pubescent half-Lebanese girl named Jasira whose mother sends her to
live with her Lebanese father in Houston after finding out that her own
boyfriend helped Jasira shave her bikini line.
But Houston isn't free of predatory men either, and they all kind of
descend upon Jasira and try to control and exploit her in some way.
There's the racist army reservist next door (Aaron Eckhart) whose fear
of Arabs has its limits - his attraction to Jasira. The kid at school
who wants nothing more than to take Jasira's virginity. Jasira's
father, who feels obliged to be the strict Arab father, even as he
attempts to embrace American culture. And the do-gooder neighbor
couple, who wants to protect Jasira from all of these people.
One intriguing thing about the movie is Jasira's reaction to all
these people. She is a victim, but somewhat culpable in her own mind
because she she's not asexual, and though she's not happy about the
things that happen to her, she is able to deal with them.
What pisses
her off the most is probably when the kid next door calls her a
"towelhead," which is not only offensive but totally absurd, since
neither she nor anyone else in the movie ever wears a turban. Even if
someone did, it wouldn't be her, since women don't wear them. That's
what's great about the title. Not the free towels it promises, but how
perfectly it sums up the stupidity of stereotypes.
Jasira's father (Peter Macdissi), who is trapped between
Middle-Eastern and Western culture and hilariously besieges Jasira with
constant contradictions - including his own racism against her
African-American boyfriend - is one of the movie's highlights.
Horton Hears a Who:
This wasn't at Sundance, but my brother Miles was an animator for it,
so I wanted to give it some publicity before it comes out on Friday. I
saw it at the "premiere" at the Ziegfeld, and I have to say, I really
liked it. I hadn't read the book in a while, so I forgot what a
profound story it is. Horton is an elephant who discovers a flower with
a spec on it: a spec that turns out to contain an entire world,
Whoville. Substitute "earth" for "Whoville," and you've got the story
of our planet.
Horton Hears a Who, the book, was the precursor to Carl
Sagan's Pale Blue Dot and the last shot of Men in Black, when the
camera pulls back and keeps pulling back out of the planet and galaxy
until we see that our universe is a small part of an alien's toy
marble. It's all about perception, folks, and Dr. Seuss knew that
better than anyone. Now someone - my brother - has finally done the
good doctor justice.
Bigger, Stronger, Faster:
A documentary about steroids in America. I didn't particularly want to
see this at first, because I don't really care about steroids, but this
movie made me care. Filmmaker Chris Bell puts himself in front of the
camera as he investigates the truth about steroids, what drives people
to use them (the American obsession with being number one is one
culprit), and even how steroids has affected his own family, as both
his brothers use them.
When there's a documentary with the filmmaker in
the movie, Michael Moore comparisons are inevitable, and Chris Bell
puts the one-sided muckracking of Michael Moore to shame. Bell has some
tough interviews with people, including with a father on a foolish
anti-steroid crusade because his son had used steroids before
committing suicide (he was also on anti-depressants known to have
suicide as a possible side-effect).
But Bell doesn't ask questions to piss people off, agitate them, or
make them look stupid. He asks questions to try to figure out the
truth, and as I've heard two people comment, Bell asks exactly the
questions the audience wants him to ask.
One of his most memorable
interviews is with Congressman Henry Waxman (D, California), the man
most responsible for holding the Congressional hearings on steroid use
in baseball. As Bell asks the most basic questions about steroids,
Waxman strains to show even the slightest hint of knowledge about the
drug he has essentially put on trial, and has to keep asking his
assistant for information. Amusingly, or maybe disturbingly, Waxman
even believes the drinking age to be 18, until his assistant corrects
him (it's actually 21).
The anti-steroid hysteria comes across as a farce here, but then
there's the family aspect, which adds an emotional depth to it. Bell's
mom struggles to deal with the fact that all of her kids have
experimented with this drug, and one of her big goals as a parent was
to make sure her kids never did drugs. And Chris's brothers lament that
steroids may have helped them get bigger and stronger, but they still
haven't achieved their dreams.
Documentary Shorts Program:
I didn't go out of my way to see short films this year, but I'm glad I
stumbled into this program. Probably the best of the bunch was "La Corona,"
about a beauty pageant at a women's prison in Columbia. Each cell block
nominates a representative, and the contestants battle it out in beauty
and talent competitions, the standard beauty pageant things, except
they're in jail, which steals a little from the joy of winning. The
other shorts verged almost to the experimental, but just enough to be
innovative yet not unwatchable. I liked them all.
The biggest crowd pleaser
featured two old Irish women smoking and debating with each other about
whether they should quit smoking. Another was about a paralyzed guy who
has learned to find as much pleasure in a kiss as he used to through
sex.
And I really loved "Kids & Money,"
a collection of interviews with kids in Los Angeles from different
economic backgrounds and how having or not having money affects them.
All of the kids come across as intelligent, but my favorite was
Emmanuel, a relatively poor Jewish kid who confesses to a predilection
toward designer clothing that his family can't afford.
At one point
while he's talking about how his family used to have money and then
suddenly didn't, a chicken walks into the screen in the background,
pecking the ground for food. Funny how having a chicken makes someone
seem especially poor, when if you think about it, someone who has a
chicken is one chicken richer than someone who doesn't.
Man on Wire:
A documentary about Philipe Petit, the French guy who did a high wire
act between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in the 70s,
without getting permission first.
The movie has extraordinary original
footage of his less ambitious earlier high wire walks, like at Notre
Dame, but for some reasons his co-conspirators didn't bother to film
his big climax at the twin towers. No matter, they got some beautiful
photographs, and the recreations do an excellent job of showing how
they sneaked into the towers and put up the wire without being caught.
This is the sort of movie that makes you wonder, "hmm, am I really
doing everything I could to squeeze the marrow out of life?" Because
you're not. And the World Trade Center being gone is no excuse. Stop
reading this and go squeeze that marrow. And Rhys, you stop writing
this. Go. GO!
An American Soldier:
A documentary about one of the most successful Army recruiters in the
country, Clay Usie. Besides being powerful and charismatic, one of his
main advantages, the movie suggests, is that he's based out of a poor
small town where the kids don't have prospects or money or anything
else to do.
But we see it's not only about that in the brief subplots
about the other recruiters at his station, all of them miserable
failures in face of the unpopularity of the Iraq war. Unlike them, Usie
exudes a confidence and a genuineness that had me about ready to
enlist. Even his verbal gaffes like, "Let's call an ace of spade an ace
of spade" - which he has a lot of - are charming. He may be sending these kids off to their
likely demise, but he does seem to care about them and believe in the
foolhardy mission eager to gobble them up.
He believes so much that at the funeral of one of the soldiers he
recruited, he tries to recruit the surviving younger brother of that
soldier. He's downright unflappable. He'd probably recruit someone even
if he knew for a fact they would die in the war. He'd probably go back
to the war even if he knew he was going to die. But for what?
It reminds me of the stunt woman who died for Gone Fishin',
the worthless Joe Pesci/Danny Glover comedy that gets a 6% fresh on
rotten tomatoes. That film was not a worthy cause for anyone's death,
even someone who signs up knowing they're putting themselves at risk.
The Iraq War is the Gone Fishin' of international relations. And Clay
Usie is the Joe Pesci.
The Wave:
A German film about authoritarianism, the suppression of individual
identity, how easy molded are the youth, the demonization of outsiders,
the willingness to commit atrocities against your better instincts in
order to fit in, the lust for power, and group-think that leads to
extreme violence. Not a very surprising theme coming from the country
that produced filmmakers like Fritz Lang, Werner Rainer Fasbinder and
Werner Herzog. And Nazis.
A rebellious teacher in a German high school who believes in "rock
and roll high school forever" is ready to teach a class on anarchy for
the school's "project week" when he learns he has to teach autocracy
instead. At first he's bummed, but when he figures out how to make
authoritarianism fun and interactive, he gets into it. So too do his
students, who are disturbingly quick to become obedient subjects of the
regime he cooks up, The Wave.
They are soon dressing in white button-up
shirts, excluding outsiders, and greeting each other with their secret
hand signal: pointing their hand toward the sky, curving it back down,
then flattening it out - a literal wave, unlike the sloppy and
inefficient American version of flapping our hands from side to side.
And that's just the beginning of the week.
The depiction of German youth seems right on. The dialog is natural,
the characters are distinct even as they're trying to blend into a
mass, and the burden of their Nazi heritage and their subsequent
anti-patriotism weighs on them; when Herr Wenger asks them to name one
authoritarian government on the first day, and nobody answers, he
chastises them, "Oh, come on." "The Third Reich," they groan, leading
to what must be a common debate about their responsibility for
something that happened before they even existed.
Having a national
past like the Germans do can encourage skepticism of authority and a
healthy self-awareness, but it can also lead to resentment and a
longing for a group identity to be proud of. This could be why The Wave
quickly takes on a dangerous life of its own.
I like movies that are about ideas, and this is a smart and
entertaining exploration of how far humans will go to find and maintain
some kind of identity. At times, rarely, I thought The Wave was almost
too much of an idea movie, just out to prove its thesis. But I
shouldn't complain. At least it has a thesis.
Yasukuni:
A fascinating documentary (what documentary isn't "fascinating"?) about
Yasukuni, the controversial shrine in Tokyo dedicated to Japan's fallen
soldiers. If it weren't for Japan's aggression during WWII and the Rape
of Nanking, nobody would mind this shrine so much.
But because even
Japanese soldiers who decapitated civilians all over Asia are enshrined
at Yasukuni, as well as non-Japanese people who were forced to fight
for the Japanese, it is quite controversial. Especially when the Prime
Minister considers a visit.
The Chinese film crew, perhaps aware of their perceived bias, take a
very observational approach. There are hardly any interviews, and the
main interview they did do isn't illuminating at all. The subject of
the interview, the man who forges swords at the shrine, is like a prole
in 1984, completely unable to say anything helpful or remember anything
interesting about the shrine's past. Yet just seeing him for minutes
just thinking, unedited, is remarkable.
But beyond this, there is less editing here than I can remember in
any documentary. Instead of cutting back and forth between various
stories, Yasukuni follows individual sequences from their beginning
until their end, and then moves to then next one.
One involves an
American who comes to the shrine to protest in favor of the Prime
Minister visiting the shrine. He expects to be a crowd pleaser, and he
does accumulate some fans, but his American flag upsets the hard liners
who don't care if he's pro the shrine if he's waving a non-Japanese
flag around there. Eventually the police come and make him leave
because he's causing a disturbance.
In another sequence, some protesters chant against the shrine during
a performance there, and angry shrine partisans chase them down and try
to attack them. The movie follows the slow-paced chase the entire way
until the protesters (accused by one angry man of being Chinese) are
cornered, and then saved by the police.
Unfortunately, this will probably not be distributed here, not even
on TV. It's just too controversial. Just kidding, it's too poorly shot.
One reason documentaries have editing is to disguise shaky shots and
blurry moments and parts where nothing is happening, but Yasukuni
avoids making those cuts. There's even one long segment in the rain at
night where something was going on at the shrine, but I had no idea
what. Yet for me this was part of the appeal. I guess I'm probably not
the only one who feels this way, but I'm not sure if there's enough to
merit distribution of any sort.
The material really is fascinating, though, and the shrine comes
across as fairly harmless, despite all the screaming. Like an inanimate
Jim Holt, people make the shrine into what they want it to be, and they
judge others by how they see it.
If you're against the shrine, you have
no patriotism and you don't understand what it means to be Japanese,
and if you're for the shrine, you are a historical revisionist and a
war monger. Yasukuni is about the contradictions of growing up in any
country that doesn't have a spotless past. Which is every country.
Except Switzerland.
Besides Nazi gold.
The Wackness:
Don't worry, the title makes sense when you see the movie. The Wackness
is about a hip-hop-loving recent high school grad/small-time drug
dealer in Manhattan in the 90s (Luke Shapiro) who trades pot for
therapy sessions with Ben Kingsley and falls in love with the daughter
of his shrink, that other girl from Juno. This was a lot of people's
favorite movie at Sundance. I liked it too, but not as much as I liked
American Teen, Towelhead, Bigger Stronger Faster, the Documentary
shorts program, Man on Wire, American Soldier, The Wave or Yasukuni.
But I did like it more than all the movies below.
Smart People:
With Juno and now Smart People, I could be convinced to see just about
any movie with a role for Ellen Page. Or Thomas Haden Church, for that
matter. They steal the show from Dennis Quaid and Sarah Jessica Parker
in this story about a professor (Quaid) who is over-analytical yet
totally self-absorbed and thoughtless.
Quaid's pretentious professor finds potential love with
Sarah Jessica Parker, a nurse who treats him for a concussion he
achieves through sheer arrogance, but his affection for his dead wife,
his instinctive elitism and his meddling young republican daughter
Ellen Page threaten to undermine the one thing that can save him.
Thomas Haden Church is Quaid's parasitical and mostly carefree adopted
brother whom Quaid hires as his driver after the concussion.
Disturbed
by Ellen Page's determination to exclude everything fun about life in
her quest for the perfect SAT score, Church sets out to teach her how
to live, which backfires horribly when she falls in love with him. How
he solves this - by hiding - is one of the many funny surprises in
the film. I don't mean to take away from Quaid. He's good too. But the
real reason to see this is Ellen Page in her Juno riff and Haden Church
in his Sideways spin-off.
Fear(s) of the Dark:
Essentially a collection of animated nightmares. The only one I can
remember right now takes place in a small town in Japan, where the new
girl to school is picked on, so to prove her cred, she goes to a
graveyard known to be haunted by the ghost of a murderous Samurai. Yes,
the ghost exists, and unfortunately, he's still murderous as ever.
I
liked the other segments too, even if I can't remember them right now.
The only one that didn't quite make sense for me was a segment
interspersed throughout of a woman's voice describing fears that can
only be described as liberal guilt. She's worried about contributing to
global warming, having more money than other people, possibly being
racist, etc. This would make sense as a single realistic segment to
contrast with the more outlandish and violent fears people have, but as
a sort of narration to the movie, I don't understand its purpose.
Slingshot Hip Hop:
If you thought all Palestinians were suicide bombers, you're obviously
a fool because there would be no Palestinians left; but if you're a
hip-hop loving fool, you might learn something from this political doc,
which argues that not all Palestinians blow themselves up or fire
deadly rockets into Israel. Some fire verbal rockets and strap on
verbal suicide jackets instead.
Slingshot Hip-Hop follows the lives of rappers in the West Bank,
Gaza and The Territory of '48 (what Palestinians call Israel). Most of
you are going to stop reading here, as the dominant view in the United
States is that the West Bank and Gaza are illegitimate rebel provinces
that must be reined in by the only legitimate country in the Middle
East, Israel. While I agree with this position, at risk of alienating
all of my readers, I must admit this is too simplistic a view.
Then again, the view of this movie - that Israel deserves to be
slandered ceaselessly in scathing hip-hop attacks - is simplistic too.
The hip-hop artists profiled in this film, some of whom live in Israel,
are pretty relentless in their hatred for the Israeli occupation, and
the movie is on their side the whole way.
Some Jewish leaders said Steven Spielberg was "No friend to Israel" after he made Munich,
a not-so-flattering portrait of Israeli-vengeance in the face of
Palestinian terrorism. Well, Jackie Salloum, director of Slingshot
Hip-Hop, is even less of a friend to Israel, if such a thing is
possible.
The documentary opens with the group that purportedly initiated
Palestinian rap - DAM - which lives in Lyd, in Israel. The founder of
the band saw a Tupac music video as a teen, immediately related to him
and his hood, and learned English so he could rap like Tupac.
Eventually he realized his English rapping was horrible, decided to rap
in Arabic, and DAM was born.
Young, hip Palestinians soon love them for
their break-out song featuring the refrain"Who's the terrorist? You're
the terrorist!" By that DAM means Israel, not their fans. I guess a
more nuanced rhyme like, "Who's the terrorist? Not Palestinians and not
Israelis, only Hamas and Hezbollah" isn't as crowd-pleasing.
In one of the movie's best scenes, a member of DAM keeps calling
over a random little kid to hang out with him and the film crew, but
the little kid just ignores him. "His loss. I was going to give him a
fish," he jokes. Well, Israel's cool, but these guys can't be so bad
either, you realize.
Other Palestinian rappers - inspired by DAM - grow big in The West
Bank and Gaza, and one of the most damning critiques of life as a
Palestinian is that none of these rappers are allowed to meet, as
influential as they are on each other. That's because Gazans can't
leave Gaza, West Bankers can't leave The West Bank, and the '48ers in
Israel can't go to either.
Gazans are the worst off, as they can't even
drive the few mile distance between the two major cities in 26-mile
long Gaza without waiting 5 hours at a checkpoint. You can see why
Palestinians resort to hip-hop. What a hellish existence. There can't
be many worse places to live.
But is hip-hop really the answer?
Well, I'd much rather see DAM Vs. Matisyahu in a rap/reggae-off than
rockets, suicide bombings and school massacres vs. military
retaliation. But that wouldn't accomplish much either.
It's unclear what the rappers in the movie are asking for exactly.
Like people on both sides, they rap about what's wrong, but they don't
have a specific solution. They don't claim to want the end of Israel,
though I doubt that would upset them very much. It just seems like
they're pissed. But instead of channeling that anger into violence,
they bust rhymes. So that's good.
A Raisin in the Sun:
This is an ABC TV movie, but Sundance premiered it, and I gotta say, to
really appreciate it, you have to see it on the big screen. Not really,
but I know I would never have watched it on TV, so I'm glad I saw it at
Sundance.
Sean Combs stars as Walter Lee Younger, a working class man
in Chicago whose get-rich-quick schemes always fail, and whose family
is starting to doubt him.
Of course the major theme is racism in
America in the 1950s and how it affects African-American identity and
the struggle to survive. It opens with a voice-over from
Morgan Freeman, which is the worst cliche in the world by now, but this is solid material and the
cast (which includes Clair Huxtable) is good enough for it, even though
Sean Combs probably wouldn't have got the part if he weren't the
producer.
The Yellow Handkerchief:
I would never have seen this movie if my friend hadn't dragged me,
purely because of the title. It sounded disgusting. I mean, The Yellow
Handkerchief? Why is the handkerchief yellow? Yuck! Luckily, it's not
the reason you think, and the movie isn't as boring as it sounds. It
opens with that most reliable of movie openers, a man getting out of
prison. The man is William Hurt, and hurt is the best description for
him. This man's soul aches.
With no apparent direction now that he's
done the time for his mystery crime, he goes to a dinner (a man's gotta
eat) and is intrigued by a just-dumped Kristin Stewart and her
white-looking Native American acquaintance Gordy. The trio take an
automotive odyssey across Louisiana in which hard truths are revealed,
pasts are stirred, the future is just a spec on the horizon, and
friends are the family that you pick.
Despite all that, the movie
works. And seriously, you will not believe why that handkerchief is
yellow! Or is it handkerchiefs (Spoiler Alert)?
Incendiary: Another movie from Bridget Jones's Diary
director Sharon Maguire that stars an American actress as a Brit. Does
Maguire believe that to be born female in Britain is to be born without
acting chops?
Apparently so, but Michelle Williams is good as "Young
Woman," a bored British housewife who cheats on her dull husband with
mystery man Ewan McGregor. When her husband and child are killed in a
terrorist attack at a "football" (soccer) match during one of her
run-ins with McGregor, her life collapses.
The major flaw is Young
Woman's voice-over that obnoxiously addresses Osama Bin Laden. Bin
Laden is the one person in the world who isn't watching this movie. If
he watched movies like this, he would never have masterminded the
cataclysmic events of September 11. So everyone in the audience feels
left out.
Narrative Shorts Program III:
The best thing about Narrative Shorts Program III is that the screening
accidentally opened with a short from Narrative Shorts Program IV. But
some of the Program III shorts were good too. They were all mostly
about sex, except one that was about an Inuit who kills another Inuit
over a radio (see what technology does to these previously pure
people?), and then asks another Inuit to cover for him.
The Drummer:
This is a crime thriller with a drumming in the mountains twist that
stars Jackie Chan's son Jaycee. Most of the time I was just happy
knowing that I was watching Jackie Chan's son. But at the same time I
was sad, because he wasn't doing martial arts. Will the family
tradition die with Jackie?
I liked this movie because it takes place in
Hong Kong and Taiwan, two places I want to go. Jaycee Chan sleeps with
the young wife of a Hong Kong gangster close to Jaycee's dad, another
gangster. The cuckolded gangster wants spoiled and rebellious Jaycee's
hands chopped off, since he's a drummer in a rock band and thus it
would be the ultimate punishment.
But instead dad (not played by Jackie
Chan, a real missed opportunity) sends Jaycee to the safety of a small
town in Taiwan, where Jaycee is seduced by the sound of drums echoing
from a nearby mountain.
He joins the group, cocky and sure of himself,
but the discipline of the mountain drummers' way of life teaches him a
lesson. A lesson that can perhaps help him to defeat the evil gangster.
The movie kind of loses its way at the end, but so what? It's not bad.
Time Crimes:
I woke up early almost every day at Sundance, and the midnight movies
were the unintended victims of this policy. I kept nodding off in Time
Crimes, and as a result, the movie made almost no sense to me. From
what I gathered, it's about a man who accidentally travels back in time
for half an hour, which causes mayhem when he runs into different
versions of himself.
It was a decent movie to fall asleep to, because
it's very dreamlike.
Anvil! The True Story of Anvil:
I saw this documentary about Canadian heavy metal band called Anvil a
couple of days before I saw Sling-Shot Hip Hop, and the contrast made
the failure of these Canadians even more stark. Anvil was a popular
Canadian heavy metal band in the 80s that never quite took off, but
somehow is still at it.
This movie follows their attempt to revive the band with a European tour and a new CD. Their generic, dated metal style has failed to evolve with the times, however, which amplifies the This is Spinal Tap elements to an even more absurd level. The one place that still loves them? Japan. You can always rely on Japan.
Hamlet 2:
A weird high school theater teacher who delights in staged versions of big hollywood movies like Erin Brokovitch is forced to try something new when the precocious brat who writes theater reviews for the school paper keeps trashes his latest effort, and the school threatens to take away his funding. So he writes a sequel to Hamlet that tries to put a more positive spin on the famously sad tragedy.
There's a lot of funny moments, but in a sense it's too easy. A lot of comedies end with an absurd play, because people always laugh at absurd plays, and obviously that's the only way this movie could have
ended. But it's funny, so who cares if they took the easy way out? This was the most expensive purchase at Sundance, for around $10
million, but it's a little hard to see why. Maybe it will make its money back, but it seems like they could have got it for less.
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired:
Before I went to Utah, this was the one movie I'd seen in the Sundance
schedule of films that I for sure wanted to see. I didn't end up seeing
it until my very last day, but missing it entirely wouldn't have been
that big a tragedy. I was intrigued by the description, which seems to promise a new revelation about Roman Polanski's statutory rape trial and vindicate him in some way. But it didn't really do that.
The main critique of his trial is that the judge didn't know how to sentence Polanski and was asking different people what he should do, even asking a reporter for advice. That certainly shows incompetence.
But once indisputable evidence turned up that made Polanski look unquestionably guilty, the judge still wanted to give Polanski the lightest slap on the wrist possible. But the annoyance of dealing with it all was too much, and Polanski fled. His decision isn't the movie's fault, even if is cinematically uncompelling. It's just like, dude, why'd you flee?
Animated Shorts: More short films, this time animated. One was nominated for an Oscar, and I could see why. It was the best one.
Mermaid: A
Russian film that will remind a lot of people of Run, Lola, Run,
because the protagonist is a girl who dies her hair a weird color, and
is obsessed with fate. Mermaid is better than Run, Lola, Run, but I
didn't like Lola, so don't get too excited if you love that movie.
Alisa, who isn't really a mermaid even though she swims a lot, grows
up in a small seaside town in Russia. We learn through one of those
cutesy Amelie-like openings that she was conceived through a one-day
stand with a mysterious sailor, and now she's desperate to find out who
her dad is. She's always on the lookout for boats, even though her
overbearing overweight mom is always telling her it's a waste of time.
Eventually she does give up on finding him, and then on life, so during
an eclipse, she pretends to go mute.
Even though there's something cliche about a protagonist who becomes
a self-proclaimed mute, I hadn't eaten anything for a little over a day
when I saw this - my blood sugar was low and I was starting to go
misanthropic as a consequence - so the idea of a mute hero was
appealing to me. My only complaint was she wasn't totally mute,
because she would still speak in voice-overs.
So she's a mute in this small Russian seaside town, but she starts
to hate the town, so she blows into the ocean, causing a hurricane that
destroys their town and forces her mom to take her and her Grandmother
to to Moscow. She's still a mute, and thus is stuck getting crappy mute
jobs in Moscow.
Obviously she soon wants to kill herself, but someone else jumps off
the bridge before she can, and she dives in and saves him,
mermaid-like. The next morning she wakes up in his bedroom and he's
forgotten the whole thing and isn't interested in her, even though
she's in love with him and even resumes talking for him.
The rest of
the movie is mostly about her trying to woo this apparently worthless
man who never quite warms to her. One problem could be that he's a
grown man, and even though Alisa is supposed to be 18, and the actress
is even older than that, she looks like she's 14. But I'm not sure if
the movie is aware of that.
This film could represent the beginnings of a new Russian cinema
that isn't just depressing realism. A cinema unfortunately
overly-influenced by movies like Amelie and Run, Lola, Run. But not
quite as shallow. Mermaid's hyper-stylization isn't as arbitrary as in
those films.
One of the visual moments I liked was when a giant ad is
put up on Alisa's new building in Moscow, covering all the windows.
Alisa cuts out the section of ad covering her window, which happens to
be a woman's eye. When Alisa stands in the window, she becomes the
woman's eye, which, well, looks cool, even if it doesn't do much for
the story.
Not all of this stuff works, though. Every time Alisa ages so much
as a day, there is a title card announcing Alisa's age down to the
day. Alisa ages a lot of days, so we have to suffer through these
obnoxious cards too often. Writer/director Anna Melikyan should have
used these cards as a device to help her screenwriting, and then taken
them out as soon as she was ready to film.
I liked seeing Russia this way, and even though the movie has a
Euro-film sort of feel, it seems pretty distinct. But next time, I hope
nouveau Russian cinema can think up a more coherent story.
Quid Pro Quo:
If someone had told me this romance between a Nick Stahl in a
wheelchair and a woman with a wheelchair fetish (the psychiatrist from
The Departed) who wishes she were disabled was going to be my favorite
movie at Sundance, I would have said they were insane. And I would have
been right. Nevertheless, it's not too terrible. It's less gory than I
thought it was going to be (nobody has any body parts cut off, even though the Sundance description eludes to that practice) and the relationship is interesting enough. There's also a
decent twist near the end. Plus, seeing the woman from The Departed made me reminisce about The Departed, which is always fun.
Donkey Punch: The only reason I wanted to see Donkey Punch was because it is a horror film on a yacht, and regular readers of my blog Idea Province
may know that I had an idea for a horror film in a slightly similar
kind of situation (I'm not saying what exactly, since I took that idea
off Idea Province and plan to write it as my next feature script).
Not
too surprisingly, Donkey Punch bore little resemblance to the idea I
had beyond the very superficial. Inferior as it was to my idea, I still
liked it. Some British party kids gather on a yacht, thanks to alcohol,
drugs, a misunderstanding, and a fatal sex position, everyone is soon
killing each other. It's nothing like my next script at all.
Sunshine Cleaning:
At the Q&A after Sunshine Cleaning, someone asked if the filmmakers
were worried about comparisons to Little Miss Sunshine since Alan Arkin
was in both films playing a free-thinking grandpa who encourages the quirky
dreams and rebellious streak of his young grandkid.
The
irritated-looking producer took the mic. "Uh. No." he said, and then
paused to allow the question-asker to realize what a stupid question
he'd just asked. "If Alan Arkin wants to be in your movie, you don't say no to Alan Arkin." What a jerk.
Admittedly, Alan Arkin was right for the role of Grandpa Joe in Sunshine Cleaning. He was
nominated for an Oscar for the exact same role in Little Miss Sunshine. Except he was Grandpa Edwin that time. I was waiting for the scene where Grandpa Joe dies; it didn't happen, but
there was one scene where we're supposed to think he died. I think the questioner made a good point.
But lead thesps are Amy Adams and Emily Blount, who play two sisters who start a lucrative business cleaning up bloody crime scenes. Their slogan is, "mop a killing and make a killing!" Blount plays a kind of wise-cracking Juno-lite, the aimless sister who has to be dragged into this and is more curious about the people who died than about the most efficient blood-removal techniques.
Blount tracks down the daughter of one woman whose death they clean up, and this leads to the most intriguing subplot as this woman grows attracted to Blount, and eventually Blount to her. She grows bored of her boyfriend, probably because she's just realized she's gay, and then suddenly she's not gay. And then she has to go on a road trip in the last scene to figure it out, I guess? So that was lame. The movie overall was just passable. But everyone was really excited about it because it had sunshine in the title, like Little Miss Sunshine.
George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead:
It seems clear by now that George Romero's fate is to make zombie
movies. This one is pretty good, but the Blair Witch/Cloverfield touch
of having the entire film shot by the characters themselves makes him
seem a little like an old man finally catching on to an already
outdated trend.
In the Q&A, Romero claimed this movie was a satire
of media and how it doesn't tell the truth, but you wouldn't know that
from watching the movie. There are some scenes with the media, but they weren't exactly enlightening.
The very last scene, which has little to do
with the rest of the movie and seems tacked on, is exactly like the
last scene in Night of the Living Dead, in which we see humans
brutalizing trapped zombies, and someone points out that humans may not
be worth saving. I suppose this is a message that bears repeating: Humans torture zombies. What does that say about humanity?
THE CUT-OFF POINT. NOW WE'RE AT MOVIES I DON'T RECOMMEND.
Ballast:
This was considered one of the best films of the festival, but I was
really sleepy when I saw it, and it was way too slow for me in that
state. I don't think I would have liked it much more if I'd been awake,
though. When I was able to focus, Ballast reminded me of something
David Gordon Green would have made in the "George Washington"/"All the
Real Girls" stage of his career, before he sold out to Hollywood to
direct stoner comedies like his adaptation of "A Confederacy of Dunces" and "Pineapple Express." And I much prefer
Green's sell-out stoner comedy stage.
Ballast, directed by Lance Hammer, takes place in a mostly
African-American small town. Two twin brothers run a general store, but
then one of the brothers kills himself. This dead twin had a family, a
wife and kid, whereas his surviving twin has no one.
The wife can no
longer support her fatherless kid, who takes to robbing the surviving
twin at gunpoint for drugs. But even though she was married to an exact
duplicate of this surviving guy, there's bad blood between her and the
duplicate, so his attempts to father the out-of-control son aren't
welcome.
After sleepily mulling over the last scene for a few minutes, I was
able to see what it was getting at. "Oh, the little kid redeemed
himself and his Uncle," I realized. So I was proud of myself for
arriving at some kind of coherent thought in my fog. But Ballast should have been a short film.
Assassination of a High School President:
When I was sixteen, I took a screenwriting class at Richland Community
College from Harry Preston, an old man with an old fashioned
sensibility (he didn't think a good movie had been made since the
1960s). After getting to know my early writing attempts, he suggested I
write something about a high
school student investigating a crime at his school, a sort of high
school Nancy Drew. If I'd written
Assassination of a High School President, he would have been very, very
happy.
This is the second movie I've seen with that stuttering kid from
Rocket Science. I didn't like Rocket Science, except for the stand-out
performance by Nicholas D'Agosto, mainly because that stuttering kid
was such a weak protagonist. But in Assassination of a High School
President, he plays a non-stuttering hard-boiled high school newspaper
reporter, and I liked him a lot. The plot about stolen test scores and
a cover-up is a little silly, but impressively intricate. Harry Preston
would have wept.
PS: I demoted this movie from recommended to not recommended after seeing it again at the SxSW film festival. Though the movie doesn't hold up as well upon a second viewing, the main reason is that the first time I saw it was in a press screening with no Q&A, and this time there was a Q&A, and I really didn't like the director. I wasn't so into the writers either, but they didn't come across as awful people like the director did. The director quickly struck me as a little off in his insistence of calling this "my movie", even though he didn't even write it. Even if he did write it, he would still be obnoxious for leaving out the cast and crew. He corrected himself once when he accidentally made a reference to the screenwriters having some kind of creative influence, and clarified that it was him and only him. He constantly belittled his star, Reece Daniel Thompson ("I guess you could call him an actor.") and for some reason allowed Misha Barton's name to appear at the top of the credits, even though she's just a supporting character, and isn't even the biggest star in the movie (Bruce Willis is). There's a song in the movie that's different from how the writers originally wrote it, and he had to get his friend to re-write it. So he kept referring to "The writers' shitty song," which the writers laughed about at first, but eventually got more annoyed about as he kept saying it. The writers, for their part, were lame and not very charismatic or compelling. Plus, they didn't stand up for themselves against the director in the Q&A. The only one who came out okay was Reece Thompson. So go see his next movie. Or see Rocket Science, which at least has Nicholas D'Agosto in it.
Perro Come Perro (Dog Eat Dog): I went to this South American crime movie hoping for a sort of City of Dog, but it was just a pointless unconvincing crime movie with a hero you can't root for and a villain that's more annoying than anything. My dog ate my homework? More like my dog ate my movie!
The Last Word:
Wes Bentley from American Beauty plays a grown-up version of that
character here, a more cynical character who is less interested in
beauty, but just as interested in death. He's a professional suicide note writer who tries to maintain his distance from his oft-dying clients, but things get personal when he falls in love with Winona Ryder, the sister of one of his success stories.
But she doesn't know how he knows her dead brother, and instead of coming out with it, he lies the whole movie. Which means the entire movie is him lying and then coming up with new lies when the previous lie fails. Eventually she discovers he's lying and she's upset. End of movie. Ricky Fitz wouldn't have lied.
The Escapist:
This film would be a lot better if it were inspired by the comic book
with the same name in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay. Instead, it's just a dumb prisoner escape movie that gives us no reason to root for the prisoners because we don't know anything about them, and so can only assume they're mass murders who deserve to be in prison. The flashback structure doesn't help either, though it is necessary for the Jacob's Ladder like twist at the end.
Hell Ride:
I didn't know anything about this when I went to see it, except
that Quentin Tarantino produced it. So when it opened in grainy 70s exploitation movie style with a sunglass wearing hitchhiker getting a ride from a transvestite with mummies
in the back of his car who has a device that records dreams
to VHS, I figured Hell Ride was attempting to duplicate the inestimable worldwide success of Tarantino's Grindhouse. Even though Grindhouse wasn't so great, Hell Ride seemed like it would be pretty cool.
The transvestite insists on bringing the hitchhiker to his home for the night, where he meets his daughter. She's beautiful but, "Very sick. Oh, she's very, very sick." She seduces him to her bed anyway, where she proceeds to puke on him until he's covered in green and red and she's dead. He casually leaves her room and takes off his sunglasses. We see his eyes for the first time, the one place not covered in throw-up.
He goes to the shed to find the transvestite has melted his brain while attempting to record one of his dreams, which involves a squirrel and a woman's breasts popping. All of this is sheer brilliance, and then the hitch-hiker goes to the road, still soaked with a melange of colors, unhappy to find it's harder to find someone to pick him up now. Then the credits roll and we find out this was "The Rambler", the short that proceeds Hell Ride.
Hell Ride itself is a stupid, not horrible, but basically worthless movie about bikers. Rent The Rambler instead.
Choke: I wasn't a huge fan of Fight Club, though I recently watched it for the third time, and it started to grow on me. I still thought I should see this movie, based on another Chuck Palahniuk novel, because my friend was in it. Everyone is miscast, except for my friend, the script is bad, the whole look of the film is kind of phony, and Angelica Houston pulls an Alan Arkin, playing the same unrealistically irresponsible mother she played in Darjeeling Limited.
The only good thing was I got to meet Crispin Glover afterward. Hellooo! McFly!
Goliath: I
walked out of this movie early so I could check my email. I didn't have any email, but I didn't regret
my decision. Goliath is about a lonely man who loses his cat, whom he had named
Goliath in better times, "because I thought it sounded cool." And yes, that's the best
line of the film. Except maybe every line in the movie after I left. I can't honestly say.
This sounded like it could be the American "Chacun Cherche
Son Chat," with a lonely man finally having to get out of his house to chase his cat around the neighborhood, and in doing so makes friends and falls in love. But instead, from what I hear, it ends with him macing a man in the hole in his neck he got from smoking. Actually, maybe that does make it the American "Chacun Cherche Son Chat."
J'ai toujours reve d'etre un gangster (I Always Wanted To Be A Gangster):
This is a movie that starts off dumb and barely tolerable and gets slightly better as it goes on. I felt like a frog in one of those pots that comes to a boil so slowly, it doesn't realize it's being cooked. If the movie had got worse than it was in the beginning, I would have left without a hesitation. But by slightly improving, very slowly, you can't quite justify leaving, so you sit through the whole thing, mad at yourself that you didn't leave after the first minute.
This is yet another movie about ineffectual small-time crooks. Like a lot of these movies, it's divided into multiple stories that all interconnect superficially. The main location in the movie is a
bar where all the signs are in English, and most of the beers are
American.
This was the one compelling thing about the film. I thought maybe it was a faux French film shot in
America. They apparently wrote a script in English, had it translated into French, found
a few French people in their town, or Americans who could speak French,
and suddenly they had a fancy foreign film on their hands, guaranteed a short run at all the art houses. But then later we find out they actually are in France, it's just that bar has a lot of American beer for some reason. Merde.
Pretty Bird: This is a well-made film, but with no apparent purpose. It's a pointless story about a huckster who convinces his friend to fund the development and marketing of a rocket belt, and hires a scientist to make it. Why a rocket belt? Not sure. The movie doesn't seem to know what it's about.
Billy Crudup is perfect as the huckster, but there's no reason to care about him, or hate him, or wonder what happens. I walked out, but I heard from a friend who saw the whole thing that the ending turns strangely violent, kind of like what happened in Goliath. A suddenly violent ending: a realistic depiction of the randomness of life or the last resort of a desperate filmmaker?
This
movie didn't get picked up for distribution, obviously, which allegedly led helmer Paul Schneider to fly into anti-Sundance rants on occasion during his stay in Park City. Rumor was he even spit on a volunteer during one of them. I can only guess that the volunteer was attempting to explain to him that the movie's lack of a reason for existing was more to blame
for its failure to find distribution than Sundance was.
Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?:
The problem with Morgan Spurlock is he's so easily amused by his own corny sense of humor, he thinks audiences will be too. He also has an annoyingly dull wife, who fatally plays an even bigger part in WITWIOBL than she did in Super Size Me.
For this, Spurlock's follow-up film, he picked a premise that he only pretends to care about, but correctly gambled would seem intriguing to a lot of people. Terrorism just doesn't belong in a world with women and children, he sarcastically explains in a monologue resembling the opening treatise to Super Size Me. So he goes on a quest for the creme de la creme of terrorists, the man responsible for them all, Osama.
But there are no scenes of Spurlock studying up on international terrorism, researching failed attempts to find Osama and figuring out where they went wrong. Instead he takes a few self-defense classes and he's off to the Middle East.
He travels to a few major Middle-Eastern countries, interviewing locals in grocery stores and on the street about where they think Osama is. It's not really a search for Osama so much as a travelogue, with Spurlock finding out in each country that Arabs hate the United States government but not The United States people. The other thing he learns from everyone he interviews is that capturing Osama isn't going to change anything, but Spurlock keeps pretending to care so he can have a movie.
Besides Spurlock's lame jokes, the most annoying them about him in this context is his embarrassing ignorance. He visits Gaza, which as we know from Slingshot Hip-Hop is a miserable hovel, and he asks someone there why Osama Bin Laden's main issue is freeing Palestine. Where in the world did he get that? al-Qaeda has barely done anything about the West Bank and Gaza, besides pay them some lip-service and diss Israel's right to exist.
Hamas and Hezbollah are the ones blasting Israel, not al-Qaeda. Reading even a single headline in the international section of USA Today would have told him that much. Based on this gross misunderstanding, Spurlock goes to Israel to see what Osama is so upset about there, and in a totally non-sequitur of a sequence, enters an extremely Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem.
He's not welcome there, but he hangs around until the angry Hasidim force him out. What is the point of this? That religion is irrational and divisive and can lead to anger and violence? Maybe in a smarter movie we'd get that point, but here's it's just gratuitous action footage.
So we have this ignorant unfunny guy taking us on a tour of a place he knows nothing about, with nothing insightful to offer. Sometimes, when Spurlock gets out of the way, the material manages to be somewhat interesting. In Saudia Arabia, he interviews some young students about their feelings on terrorism and The United States.
The kids, nervous of punishment, glance at the severe Saudi Arabians observing the interview and offer the most inane answers they can muster, until the observers call the interview off. Obviously, free expression isn't valued much in Saudia Arabia. But it's also not valued much in schools generally. You could get an interview scene resembling that one with an elementary school in The United States, if you had a mean principal hovering over the students the whole time.
Which could be Spurlock's point. Just kidding, he doesn't have a point.
I don't know if he finds Osama Bin Laden at the end. Judging from Spurlock's lack of preparation and the very minor effort he puts into his search, I have to guess that he doesn't. I guess I'll never know because I walked out with 10 minutes left to go, right as he gets to Pakistan, where most people think Osama is hiding. The look on people's faces as I left - "What? You're not staying to see if he catches him??" - was funnier than anything in Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?
My friend Joe Weisenthal had a good idea for a movie he wants to make, called Super Size Me. It would be a documentary about him eating nothing but McDonalds for 30 days. He would consult his doctor about it, get his health checked throughout the ordeal, puke up hamburgers, describe his mission to McDonalds cashiers, be lectured by his vegetarian wife, have a bunch of french fries shoved in his mouth in the poster, etc.
You know, it would be just like Spurlock's Super Size Me, except it would be Joe doing it many years too late. Hilarious, the sort of humor that's way over Spurlock's head. Don't waste your time on Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? Wait for Super Size Me instead.
Adventures of Power:
A pretty terrible Napoleon Dynamite rip-off with a relatively decent
ending. The protagonist, Power, is an air drummer in New Mexico. But nobody
believes in him aside from a little Hispanic kid, so he enters the
national air drumming competition to prove himself. He goes to Newark
to train for the battle, but most of these scenes seem to have been shot in Brooklyn. I'm guessing because the filmmakers were too
chicken to film in a dangerous city like Newark.
There's also a subplot with a deaf
girl love interest and a strike at a factory. And Adrian Grenier is
amusing as Power's rival, a rich and famous country singer whose
childhood ambition was air drumming, until his image-obsessed dad forced
him to suppress it for fear of the family name being tarnished.
This is the funniest aspect of the movie, though it
never quite makes sense; we never figure out if we're supposed to feel
for Grenier's thwarted rich kid character or not. The movie actually ties all these silly and idiotic
plot threads together quite nicely, making the movie almost tolerable
in retrospect. But still the third worst movie I saw at Sundance.
I saw this at a volunteer screening before the festival really started, and one of the most notable things about the Q&A was
that the director's twin brother, who was there because
he wrote the music, had his fly open the whole time. Now that's comedy.
The Guitar:
As I was watching The Guitar, I kept wondering, "how did this get into
Sundance?" Because it's not like bad movies don't get into Sundance,
but this kind of sentimental and stupid bad movie doesn't particularly
seem like the Sundance type. Then the movie finished and I saw "Amy
Redford" was the director. That explained it.
The movie is about a
woman who finds a new lease on life when she learns from her doctor, a
very stilted Janeane Garofalo, that she has a fatal disease and only
has a month left to live. Coincidentally, her boyfriend breaks up with
her and her boss fires her the very next day. Totally liberated now,
she orders a fancy Manhattan loft for a month and buys tons and tons of
stuff. She also sleeps with the married delivery man who brings all the
junk, and the pizza girl; first separately, and then together.
Then she learns she's going to live after all because her happiness
over this month cured her disease. Oops, but she bought all this stuff!
It was one of the more negative Q&As I'd seen. One woman asked
if someone buying a bunch of stuff because she was about to die was a
superficial reaction to facing mortality. Ms. Redford and the actress
who played this woman agreed that it was, but, well, you know, movies
can't always be perfect.
The only reason I'm ranking this movie as highly as I am is because
my friend was in it (the same who was in Choke), as the gay pizza girl. That, incidentally, was the
only reason I went to see this in the first place. So it was kind of
annoying when she wasn't even at the screening and didn't show up for
the Q & A. But if I were in this movie, I would have been too
embarrassed to show up too.
Reversion:
My heart sunk a few minutes into this film when I realized I was
trapped in the middle of the row and I might have to sit through the
whole thing. Luckily, it was objectively horrible and everyone to my
left walked out. I was right on their tails.
Reversion is about people
who have a genetic mutation that impedes their understanding concept of
time. They live only in the present, with no appreciation for the
future consequences of their actions. As a result, they do what suits
them in the moment, usually theft. At grocery stores, these mutants
wander the aisles, eating food without worries. To get around, they
steal cars, and if another mutant steals their stolen car from them,
they steal a different car.
Because these mutants have no understanding of time, they jump
between different moments in their life, reliving old experiences and
getting sneak peeks into future ones that haven't happened yet. "You
know you don't kill me yet," one character says to his ex-girlfriend,
who has her gun pointed at him. "Oops, my bad." And she puts her gun
down. This explains superheroes who can fly. They've never heard of
gravity.
The movie explains all this with lots of flickery type effects and
jump cuts, and repeat shots, and even entire scenes that repeat in
their entirety. That's not enough, though, so they have a sort of Greek
chorus in the form of two pot smokers who have nothing to do with the
story who are talking about these mutants in an awkward conversation
that only serves to explain the the premise to the audience.
"Dude,
have you heard of these mutants that don't understand time?" "Whoa,
what? Yeah right!" "Duuuuude, I'm not lying, they don't understand the
consequences of their actions and they live among us! You may recognize
them by the way they steal cars and don't care about the past or the
future. It's a gene that some people have, and more and more people
have this gene these days!"
Reversion is horrible.
Sorry to end on a bad note, but that's what
happens when you go from best to worst.
Actually, though, I just saw In Bruges today, the opening night movie at Sundance. I skipped it at Sundance because volunteer screenings were going on at the same time and I could see more movies that way. Plus I knew it was getting distribution. I'm glad I eventually did see it, because it's a terrific film and would have been at the top of my list if I'd seen it at Sundance. Bruges is beautiful and the writing/directing is first class, which surprised me because I stopped by a press conference about In Bruges and writer/director Martin McDonagh didn't look like he'd know what he was doing. But he did. So see In Bruges.
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