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That’s So Sundance: Part 2

January 25, 2010 by Peter

Peter, Jeff and Jason are in Park City Utah to cover and uncover the Sundance Film Festival for the next 5 days.

(Thanks to Dan Vinh and Shawn Harris for some of these pics!)

Despite the Sundance Festival’s pretensions to democracy, it’s all about levels.

The theme of the festival this year is “REBEL”… they pop the word in massive letters on the screen before every movie. They’re trying to push the story that this year, Sundance’s 27th, marks a re-booting of the festival as a purveyor of underground cinema. But the real story is the note of desperation that creeps into everyone’s voice at the impossibility of steering the giant ship of commerce, an entire movie industry, which has anchored itself (in part) to the tugboat of this tiny luxury town.

There’s a new category this year, called “NEXT” which is supposed to signal the return to Sundance’s support of the small homemade American film. But from the bottom level, these movies and their directors and the stars of which are as inaccessible as the afterparties where Mark Ruffalo introduces American Idol also-rans and their Tony-nominated butt-rock bands:

And where very very lucky boys get to pose with Wire anti-hero Bill Rawls (John Doman) for the ultimate photo-op:

So in the end, the bottom level stays on the bottom, and the top level, more and more heavy from scrabblers and clingers-on, reels with vertigo.

This is what it looks like when you cant get into a premier (in this case, the Kristen Stewart/Gandolfini hooker-with-a-golden-heart flick Welcome to The Rileys):

(yes that band is actually called Bramble. They’re from Salt Lake and really awesome for 10 below 0)

theres no parking for plebians, so everyone crams onto these fuzzy party buses, even nyt reporters and donald sutherland (i think that was him) that look like this:

[ps thats the back of He's Just Not That Into You author Liz Tuccillo's hat, so my paparazzi career is burgeoning afaik]

Even though the movie stars are much more gracious than than I would be getting a camera in the face, even at a Camera-Face-Getting convention, there is a general awe even among the hardened festival press corpses–like the thrill an old jaded rabbi gets hauling open the torah. And the hoi polloi, especially on Main Street, are whipped into a frenzy when someone like (or exactly) Paris Hilton walks out of a a spa and into a coffeeshop, climbing the windows to get a picture of her hot choccy.

But that’s all just the culture. There are some great movies here, and some great opportunity to slide around with producers, distributors and actors (like the wonderful Dov Tiefenbach,  co-star of Mark Ruffalo’s directorial debut “Sympathy for Delicious”)
all of which is to say that somewhere, either at the top or the bottom, some great art is being made and plucked out of the capitalism.

Here’s Jeff first review:

Les 7 jours du talion (7 Days)

Director: Daniel Grou
Cast: Rémy Girard, Claude Legault, Fanny Mallette, Martin Dubreuil, Rose-Marie Coallier
‎1hr 45min‎‎ – Suspense/Thriller‎

Peter asked me to attend the press screening of Les 7 jours du talion (7 Days) so that he could shoot over to another flick that he had been wanting to see. I had not read anything about 7 days resulting in zero expectations. For all I knew, 7 Days was a kids movie about a cat and two dogs that go on a week-long cross-country adventure getting into all sorts of doggone catastrophes. Well, it wasn’t. Here’s a brief synopsis:

An 8-year old is brutally raped and murdered. The perpetrator is caught. The father goes commando and kidnaps the rapist/murderer, takes the guy to a cabin and proceeds to torture the fuck out of him for seven days. Here’s a break down of the torture if you were curious.

Day 1: The child rapist is strapped to some sort of a make shift operating table with all sorts of levers and pulleys. Father comes in and hits the guy in the knee cap with a fucking sledge hammer as hard as he can.

Day 2: The father rigs this system where the child rapist is hanging by his neck from a wire just close enough to the ground to have to put pressure on his sledge hammer crushed knee to keep from choking to death. He alternates between choking and standing on his bad leg. The child rapist is a great actor. His depiction of the pain is terribly real. I looked around the audience and the folks on either side of me had their heads buried in their hands.

Day 3: The father hangs the child rapist by his arms from the ceiling and starts beating him in the stomach with a long chain. At this point, I walked out of the movie. This was the first movie I’ve walked out of since my aunt took me to see the Doors with Val Kilmer and made us leave about half way through (I think because it was too graphic?). Don’t get me wrong, the movie is very well made. The acting is fantastic. When the mother of the little girl begins to sob after days of silence, it resonates, her sorrow will burn through you. The cinematography is crushingly bleak. I just can’t watch two hours of a dude being sadistically tortured, no matter how realistic his portrayal is.

So here’s my rating system: rather than ‘thumbs up’ we’ll use ‘thumbs cut off’.

**I give this movie ‘two thumbs cut off’**

–Jeff

Meanwhile the other “flick” I saw on Friday was the Bolivian movie “Southern District” which was like Brunel with more tiny bowlers. It’s the story of a doomed rich familiy, their native servants, and a wing-wearing kid who talks to his imaginary friend “Steven Speilberg”. Meanwhile, in every shot in the movie, every single one, the camera pans in a circle around the scene. The massive succes of the thing is that after about 10 minutes you forget it’s happening, but then after about 30 you remember as the kid perches on a roof and the camera circles a random spot in the air above him, swooping like a predatory bird. The plot may suffer from the thinness of a lot of upstairs-downstairs shit, but techinically it’s 100% brilliant.

More to come, including stories about how we got pranked by Orlando Bloom, a preview of the new MTV fake-reality franchise, and lots and lots more movie reviews. If you want to help, send dry socks and a life-preserver.

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