Mike D'Angelo at Sundance: Part 9

Peter Smith — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 19:05:00 GMT

Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:

As the festival winds down, some quick notes on movies I didn't have time to address earlier. (I'm gonna include the walk-outs here, despite the wrath of one reader who believes that saying anything at all about a movie you didn't see from start to finish constitutes dereliction of duty. Obviously, you should take such judgments with a grain or two of salt — and maybe an entire shakerful in the case of Ballast, which I'll very likely see again, and in full, at some point. But at the same time, you can get a mighty strong sense of a film in thirty-five to forty minutes.)

Traces of the Trade: A Story From the Deep North (Documentary Competition): Painfully earnest young woman with unbearably whiny voice — she narrates, alas — discovers that her esteemed ancestors were slave traders, corrals nine relatives for self-indulgent journey to sore spots from the family's past. For hardcore aficionados of liberal white guilt only. (W/O)

Time Crimes (Park City at Midnight): I'm a sucker for time-travel stories, but even I had trouble warming to this Spanish gloss on 2004 Sundance prizewinner Primer, in which a middle-aged schlub travels ninety minutes into the past and finds himself engaged in unwitting battle with other versions of himself who've developed wildly divergent agendas. Ineptly directed, for the most part, and the concluding twist is singularly unsatisfying. Come back, Shane (Carruth).

The Wave (World Cinema Dramatic Competition): German filmmaker Dennis Gansel turns the true story of a high-school history experiment gone awry into a glossy, pulse-pounding thriller, employing methods almost as fascistic as those of The Wave itself. Intentional irony? One can't help but be riveted by the spectacle of ordinary teenagers willingly submitting to autocratic rule — their überhip teacher is attempting to demonstrate that the Nazis weren't anomalous monsters — but earmarking one kid as emotionally unstable from the get-go means that we're just twiddling our thumbs as we await the inevitable moment when he finally snaps.

What Just Happened? (Premieres): Hollywood made yet another mildly lacerating self-portrait, that's what. Loosely based on the memoirs of producer Art Linson (Fight Club, Into the Wild, several Mamet films), it boasts the most relaxed De Niro performance in ages and a smattering of truly hilarious jokes, most of them involving out-of-control entitlement. Too bad Bruce Willis, sporting a Grizzly Adams beard that he refuses to shave prior to the start of filming on a new picture, isn't nearly as funny as Alec Baldwin must have been in real life. (Read Linson's equally diverting book for the lowdown; it happened on 1997's The Edge.)

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (Dramatic Competition): Michael Chabon's complicated first novel has been reduced (by Dodgeball's Rawson Marshall Thurber) to a simple bisexual love triangle, with two major characters — Arthur and Cleveland — melded into one, and another, the improbably named Phlox, distorted almost beyond recognition. And yet the movie still almost kinda works, mostly because Peter Sarsgaard commits himself so fully to his ludicrous bad-boy manipulator that we, like the dazed young protagonist, are completely taken in.

Downloading Nancy (Dramatic Competition): I'd had about enough of this repugnant exercise in nihilism at the point when Maria Bello, playing a masochistic housewife who's hired a stranger she found on the Internet (Jason Patric) to torture and kill her, walks barefoot into a mouse trap, over and over and over, shrieking with laughter each time it snaps on her toes. By all accounts from those who stuck it out, it gets much, much worse thereafter. At least the "revelation" that she was sexually abused as a child isn't saved for the final reel. (W/O)

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance: Part 1

Peter Smith — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 19:50:00 GMT

Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:

Sundance is playing things close to the vest this year, for some reason. Upon my arrival late Thursday night — too late, alas, to catch the opening-night attraction, In Bruges, which everyone who did see it seems to think is ill-served by its hyperactive trailer — I picked up a copy of the Salt Lake City Weekly, expecting to find my friend Scott Renshaw's capsule reviews of perhaps two dozen films that had been screened for local press before the festival proper even began. Instead, there only was a page of wild guesswork, advance screenings having apparently been scuttled. Nor were Friday's press screenings particularly appetizing, as most of the morning and afternoon was devoted to soporific-sounding selections from the World Documentary section. Did I really want or need to learn anything further about Mumia Abu-Jamal? (In Prison My Whole Life.) Would Up the Yangtze, about China's Three Gorges Dam project, be any more illuminating than Jia Zhang-ke's 2006 Venice prizewinner Still Life, just now opening in limited U.S. release? Hoping the homegrown docs might be more energizing, I stuck my head into Traces of the Trade, a personal-essay film in which the director and nine relatives tour the locations where their ancestors purchased slave labor with rum and molasses, but fled after forty minutes of unbearably self-indulgent white-liberal guilt.

As I write this, most of the potentially heavy hitters are still to come. Today, however, people are buzzing, with good reason, about yet another documentary, Marina Zenovich's Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. (Full disclosure: I roomed with Marina at Cannes a few years ago, though we barely spoke since I tend to fall asleep at festivals within fifty-two seconds of hitting my room.) As the title suggests, the film focuses on Polanski's 1977 arrest for "unlawful sexual intercourse" (plea-bargained down from rape) with a thirteen-year-old girl and his subsequent flight from justice just hours before he was due to be sentenced, resulting in what may well be lifelong exile in France. Even for those familiar with the general details of the case, though, Wanted and Desired will likely prove revelatory. Zenovich dutifully provides basic psychological context for Polanski's odious conduct — mom murdered by Nazis, pregnant wife slaughtered by Manson Family — and wittily illustrates various points with well-chosen clips from Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown, The Tenant, and other favorites. Ultimately, however, she's less interested in Polanski's crime than she is in the outlandish farce of judicial corruption that the banal crime somehow inspired. If you've ever run into a celebrity and found yourself instantly transformed into a babbling cretin, this fascinating film will provide some solace: At least the celeb's life and freedom weren't in your shaking hands.

The Screengrab : traces of the trade

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance: Part 9

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance: Part 1