Everyone at the Sundance Film Festival this year agreed: It’s no easy task to tell a good story. There’s always reason to complain about the annual Park City gathering for growing commercialized, overpartied or just too damn cold—but the recent spate of rants focused on the movies. While the documentary categories gleamed with calculated topicality and observant portraiture, quality among the narrative features was sparse. Fortunately, a relatively barren creative landscape left ample room for several contemplative works to blossom as heralded discoveries, and only a few remain in the chilly festival void without theatrical distribution.
The solid conventional entry came from a familiar place: Sugar, the sophomore feature from Half Nelson directors Ryan Bowen and Anna Fleck (whose debut marked the last bona fide Sundance success), chronicles the steadily involving plight of its eponymous baseball player (Joendy Pena Brown), whose training in the Dominican Republic can’t prepare him for the vicious culture clash of the U.S. minor leagues. Spoken mostly in Spanish with a cast of newbies, Sugar has the exploratory feel of a documentary, and enough uplift to fit the sports-movie mold. One critic suggested it’s the best baseball film since Field of Dreams. I think that says more about the genre than the product, but it could certainly use that title if it weren’t already taken.
From the experimental playing field of the festival, the diamonds were emotionally rough. Love Comes Lately explores the lonely plight of an aging writer (Otto Tausig) whose fiction overwhelms his life. Adapted from several Isaac Bashevis Singer novels, Jan Schutte’s playfully philosophical feature suggests a Kafkaesque Starting Out in the Evening. Exploring another age where solitude and nostalgia loom large, Momma’s Man scrutinizes the struggle of a fledgling adult (Matt Boren) to leave his parents’ Tribeca loft and return to his wife out west. Crisply directed by Azazel Jacobs as a minimalist look at the vanity of preserving childhood, Momma’s Man showcases strong performances from the filmmaker’s parents, avant-garde film champ Ken Jacobs and his artist-wife Flo. For its New York angle, the movie made the ideal transitional piece for me as I returned to the hallowed metropolis featured in its plot.
Distinct in tone, but similarly honed on a conflicted young demographic, the dopey comedy Baghead—from the brothers who brought you The Puffy Chair—has both love and pity for the latest generation of wannabe movie stars. A quartet of Los Angeles actors journey to the woods for a remote pitch session, and they find themselves at the mercy of the titular stalker. But just when Baghead turns to horror, it chidingly backpedals, hurling a merciless prank at professional desperation. Mark and Jay Duplass direct with a disarmingly light touch, which makes their films the access point to the eccentric mumblecore movement. Another sibling pair, David and Nathan Zellner, kept them company this year, with the American tragedy Goliath, a mockingly sour account of a missing cat and the gloomy divorced man who misses him. Members of the same makeshift posse, the Zellners match the mold.
While Goliath and Momma’s Man remain unencumbered by subtle humor, The Wackness spurts its comic mayhem across a messy canvas of mid-1990s remembrance. It’s got a bong-wielding Ben Kingsley in a frumpy wig and Josh Peck as his troubled teen disciple. Jonathan Levine, the director, has a far more conventional horror movie coming out in a month, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane; here, he displays a real desire to work outside the box. Set in 1994 with Giuliani-era New York City politics as the vague urban backdrop, The Wackness shows Peck’s thuggish stoner character during his last summer before college, an uncertain time for the plucky guy when anything goes. Drugs, virginity and the lease on his apartment all come into question, as does his sense of identity. With vibrant Method Man beats on the soundtrack (the rapper also plays a small role) and plenty of visual flair, The Wackness has a hypnotic effect even as it strains to make the most (at 110 minutes) of its basic premise.
As far as simplistic ingredients go, the festival’s best genre film, Timecrimes, has none. Spanish filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo builds a wickedly dense serio-comedy about the pratfalls of trying to close a problematic loop after accidentally going back in time and screwing up the natural order of things. His clueless protagonist (Karra Elejalde) has the horrific look of somebody woken from a dream of the fluffy sci-fi aura from Back to the Future by a sudden bludgeoning of real world possibilities.
Speaking of the real world: It would be disingenuous to discuss the positive elements of Sundance without outlining the rich nonfiction components. First, there’s Bigger, Stronger, Faster, a fantastic survey of the steroid controversy from bodybuilder Chris Bell, a one-time Rambo devotee. Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desiredreveals that the legendary filmmaker’s notorious rape trial was a shady one-sided affair; Gonzo: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson also posits about as much, in a loving way, about the late journalist. Sudden catastrophes form the centerpieces of Stranded: I Come From a Plane that Crashed on the Mountains (like Alive, but freakishly believable) and Trouble the Water (a hip-hop artist chronicles Katrina-ravaged New Orleans on home video as the water rises—like Cloverfield but, again, freakishly believable). Super Size Me director Morgan Spurlock unveiled Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?, a light exploration of post-9/11 anxiety that I’ll always remember as the screening where phones lit up throughout the room with texts announcing the untimely demise of Heath Ledger—a catastrophe for the industry that no Hollywood spectacle could possibly imitate.
The solid conventional entry came from a familiar place: Sugar, the sophomore feature from Half Nelson directors Ryan Bowen and Anna Fleck (whose debut marked the last bona fide Sundance success), chronicles the steadily involving plight of its eponymous baseball player (Joendy Pena Brown), whose training in the Dominican Republic can’t prepare him for the vicious culture clash of the U.S. minor leagues. Spoken mostly in Spanish with a cast of newbies, Sugar has the exploratory feel of a documentary, and enough uplift to fit the sports-movie mold. One critic suggested it’s the best baseball film since Field of Dreams. I think that says more about the genre than the product, but it could certainly use that title if it weren’t already taken.
From the experimental playing field of the festival, the diamonds were emotionally rough. Love Comes Lately explores the lonely plight of an aging writer (Otto Tausig) whose fiction overwhelms his life. Adapted from several Isaac Bashevis Singer novels, Jan Schutte’s playfully philosophical feature suggests a Kafkaesque Starting Out in the Evening. Exploring another age where solitude and nostalgia loom large, Momma’s Man scrutinizes the struggle of a fledgling adult (Matt Boren) to leave his parents’ Tribeca loft and return to his wife out west. Crisply directed by Azazel Jacobs as a minimalist look at the vanity of preserving childhood, Momma’s Man showcases strong performances from the filmmaker’s parents, avant-garde film champ Ken Jacobs and his artist-wife Flo. For its New York angle, the movie made the ideal transitional piece for me as I returned to the hallowed metropolis featured in its plot.
Distinct in tone, but similarly honed on a conflicted young demographic, the dopey comedy Baghead—from the brothers who brought you The Puffy Chair—has both love and pity for the latest generation of wannabe movie stars. A quartet of Los Angeles actors journey to the woods for a remote pitch session, and they find themselves at the mercy of the titular stalker. But just when Baghead turns to horror, it chidingly backpedals, hurling a merciless prank at professional desperation. Mark and Jay Duplass direct with a disarmingly light touch, which makes their films the access point to the eccentric mumblecore movement. Another sibling pair, David and Nathan Zellner, kept them company this year, with the American tragedy Goliath, a mockingly sour account of a missing cat and the gloomy divorced man who misses him. Members of the same makeshift posse, the Zellners match the mold.
While Goliath and Momma’s Man remain unencumbered by subtle humor, The Wackness spurts its comic mayhem across a messy canvas of mid-1990s remembrance. It’s got a bong-wielding Ben Kingsley in a frumpy wig and Josh Peck as his troubled teen disciple. Jonathan Levine, the director, has a far more conventional horror movie coming out in a month, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane; here, he displays a real desire to work outside the box. Set in 1994 with Giuliani-era New York City politics as the vague urban backdrop, The Wackness shows Peck’s thuggish stoner character during his last summer before college, an uncertain time for the plucky guy when anything goes. Drugs, virginity and the lease on his apartment all come into question, as does his sense of identity. With vibrant Method Man beats on the soundtrack (the rapper also plays a small role) and plenty of visual flair, The Wackness has a hypnotic effect even as it strains to make the most (at 110 minutes) of its basic premise.
As far as simplistic ingredients go, the festival’s best genre film, Timecrimes, has none. Spanish filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo builds a wickedly dense serio-comedy about the pratfalls of trying to close a problematic loop after accidentally going back in time and screwing up the natural order of things. His clueless protagonist (Karra Elejalde) has the horrific look of somebody woken from a dream of the fluffy sci-fi aura from Back to the Future by a sudden bludgeoning of real world possibilities.
Speaking of the real world: It would be disingenuous to discuss the positive elements of Sundance without outlining the rich nonfiction components. First, there’s Bigger, Stronger, Faster, a fantastic survey of the steroid controversy from bodybuilder Chris Bell, a one-time Rambo devotee. Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desiredreveals that the legendary filmmaker’s notorious rape trial was a shady one-sided affair; Gonzo: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson also posits about as much, in a loving way, about the late journalist. Sudden catastrophes form the centerpieces of Stranded: I Come From a Plane that Crashed on the Mountains (like Alive, but freakishly believable) and Trouble the Water (a hip-hop artist chronicles Katrina-ravaged New Orleans on home video as the water rises—like Cloverfield but, again, freakishly believable). Super Size Me director Morgan Spurlock unveiled Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?, a light exploration of post-9/11 anxiety that I’ll always remember as the screening where phones lit up throughout the room with texts announcing the untimely demise of Heath Ledger—a catastrophe for the industry that no Hollywood spectacle could possibly imitate.
