Sundance 2011 Preview

SUNDANCE 2011 - PREVIEW

So I just found out I'll be heading to the Sundance film festival this year. It's last minute and totally unexpected. The circumstances of the opportunity are unfortunate, but I'll be replacing my boss and repping the Jacob Burns Film Center in Park City. I've been going to the Toronto Film Festival for nearly a decade and feel completely comfortable with the process of driving up to the Queen city and spending a week gorging on movies, poutine and the opening weekend of glorious NFL football. I've never been to the Sundance festival, I've only spent one day in Utah and I'm wary of the stories I've heard about over-crowding and transportation in a tiny resort town flooded with Hollywood bigwigs. It's also much more of a buyer's festival than TIFF and its reputation for L.A. types strutting around like cock of walk (and presumably crowing about their nest-eggs) leaves me cold. It's not a festival I really ever considered important for my job - it's a shake hands, go to parties, gravy-and-cheese-curd-less kind of scene. I just don't need to see all the CAA-funded quirk-fests that never get picked up for distribution, nor do I have the slightest curiosity about them. Hilariously, now that the opportunity has arisen, I'm thrilled to be going and very excited to see the city and take in all of that which I've been led to believe I'll hate. Am I a Hollywood phony yet?! I'm very interested in telling you all about my latest script concerning a magical otter...and a little boy who learns to believe.

Truthfully, I think the festival suffers from a bit of an identity crisis: South by Southwest has replaced it in the critical imagination as the premiere showcase for independent American cinema - there's a distinct contrast between Austin's line-up of painfully hip, cred-obsessed "art" films and Sundance's studio-backed, high-price tag, celebrity-laden "independent" cinema. In the 90's, Sundance became synomous with bidding wars, excessive swag and the idle famous slumming it. While its relevance as a marketplace has dwindled, it still has been unable to escape its reputation as a wasteland of faux-ness with no finesse to its agent and studio-driven selection process, the place where sad hype-bombs like Hamlet 2 are detonated and calorie-heavy, nutrition-free morsels like Little Miss Sunshine and Juno begin their long process of being jammed down our throats. It's the place where Olsen sisters we never knew existed are announced as major new acting talents and we first get to see the Preciouses of the world stuff their face with fried chicken while crying. I'm not sure what the point is and I'm not sure the founders of the festival know any longer what the point is either, but it's a festival that needs to exist, if only because there's a real audience for that sort of thing - or if there's to be an audience for that sort of thing, it needs a festival to start the promotional ball rolling. For better or for worse, Sundance is that festival, the natural home of the latest quirky Josh Radnor-directed rom-com. But who knows, maybe the hype about the hype could all just be hype and the festival could be nothing like the cliched reputation I've just outlined. I'm sure, to an extent, it is inaccurate because everyone is wrong about everything constantly and why should anything be different in this case? Maybe it'll be a totally unexpected experience. In which case, I'll have to go back to hocking my script ideas on seedy NYC street corners.

This won't be as long as our epic Toronto previews, but I'd like to run through the line-up, the things for which I'm excited and the things I'm dreading. Getting thrown into the festival late, I've barely had a chance to look over the program guide, but a few things do jump out. For starters, Spike Lee has a new film - Red Hook Summer - which I couldn't be happier to get a chance to see. I'm just the worst Spike Lee apologist, I even wrote nice things about Miracle at St. Anna for God's sake, so I'm sure I'll be inclined to enjoy this new one which seems to recall his heavily underrated Crooklyn. Next on my excitement radar is genuinely eccentric Phantasm and Bubba Ho-Tep director Don Coscarelli's John Dies at the End. I know next to nothing about it (other than that it based on a novel by one of the editors of Cracked.com) and I'd like for it to stay that way - imagine if someone tried to explain the last 10 minutes of Phantasm to you before you saw it? I'd rather be surprised. After that, I'm curious about Julie Delphy's latest directorial effort 2 Days in New York, which co-stars her and Chris Rock. This is actually the sort of pseudo-independent movie on which I was just goofing, but I find her adorable and Rock has shown a willingness to get involved with interesting projects...which he then ruins with his wooden, unfunny acting. Delphy's first movie was a cut above the standard fare in the "neurotic attractive people worrying about their relationships" genre, so I'll give this one a go and hope she's taken a leap in terms of style and ambition as a filmmaker. I'm curious about the Ai Weiwei documentary, despite its terrible subtitle Never Sorry. He's one of those artists with whom I only have a glancing familiarity and would like to know more about. Stephen Frears has a new film starring Bruce Willis and I just watched The Grifters on Friday, so consider me having talked myself into this one. It's - what else? - a quirky romantic dramedy. One TIFF Midnight Madness film which I missed that subsequently went on to be the most hyped of the program and get picked up by Sony Classics will be screening: it's an Indonesian action movie called The Raid. Press materials are making a big deal about the martial arts featured in it called Silat, but the only other 2 Silat-centric action films I've seen sucked and Silat itself lacks the grace of Peking Opera-tinged Kung Fu or the brutality of Muay Thai. Still, an audience-pleasing action movie sounds like a good use of my time. The LCD Soundsystem doc as well as the Tim & Eric freakout will be there and while I'm not a huge fan of either, I've already had several folks ask me to see them and report back. I suspect both will be perfect for their audience and I like that stuff juuust enough to qualify as "their audience."

On the downside, there's a litany of films by directors who have never made a film that rises above "passable" but whom still continue to get funding: Kirby Dick, Ira Sachs, Todd Louiso. There's even a new Jarecki brother, to go along with Eugene and Andrew (Eugene has a new doc in the fest as well.) There's also a list of movies from directors with whom I'm not familiar that I dread just based on the their stupid titles: Meet Me at the Zoo, That's What She Said, Can, About the Pink Sky, Violette Goes to Heaven, Searching for Sugar Man, The Cloud of Unknowing, The Perception of Moving Targets, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, How to Survive a Plague. Big Boys Gone Bananas is a dynamite title, but when paired with the catalogue description perversely becomes a title that suggests a film not worth seeing. Lena Dunham (Tiny Furniture) co-wrote a movie, so there's one I will have to go out of my way to avoid. Joe Swanberg and Adam Wingard are involved in a horror omnibus project as part of their career plan to diligently imitate giant piles of shit for which no one should have nostalgia. Should be about as good their their other films. In general, the program guide features the words "poet" and "coming of age" waaaaaay too much. I'm afraid there will be no way to avoid seeing a movie about a poet coming of age. It will probably be named after a pop music lyric. I'll see Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights as a tribute to the great Marcus Pinn, but I'd being lying if I said I was psyched for it. The films that don't look promising are about what you'd expect: celebrities popping up in either too-earnest or too-quirky relationship dramas or romantic comedies. About makeshift surrogate families of damaged people. Or aspiring artists. Or poor people (from a class and background not shared by ther director.) Ice-T co-directed a documentary which is premiering at the festival, which I feel sums Sundance up pretty neatly. Disappointingly, it is not a behind-the-scenes look at Leprechaun in the Hood.

Overall, there's a lot here that I just don't know what it is, so I'm going to in with an open mind. Heck, I'm just excited to visit a city I've never been to before and drink deeply from the Pierian spring which is Sundance's line-up (you know what I'm saying: I better really dive into the films about which I know nothing or feel wary, otherwise I'll come across as a jackass who knows just enough to make a fool of himself. You might say that's the position from which I'm starting this preview: a smug neophyte on the verge of well-deserved comeuppance.) I'm going whole-hog, doing the full Sundance, ditching my preconceptions and finding some brass tacks on which to get down. Hopefully, I will not get involved in a bidding war over Hamlet 3: Happier Texas.

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