[Chat] Sundance report

[WeinsteinM at aol.com]

One advantage of having your wife take a job in Salt Lake City is that they 
have this really great film festival every January.   This was our fourth year 
in attendance.   We saw 15 films, so I thought I'd share my impressions, since 
they generally get released one way or another in the course of the year.

Documentaries

Why We Fight
The top documentary prize winner this year.   An in-depth examination of 
American militarism.   The film keeps returning to two themes: Eisenhower's 1961 
farewell speech about the danger of the military industrial complex taking over 
our country and undermining our freedoms, and a retired New York City police 
officer whose son dies in the World Trade Center on 9/11/01 who initially 
supports the Iraq invasion until he realizes that the supposed connection to 9/11 
was just White House media hype.   The film doesn't offer much hope, mainly 
because it does such a great job of clarifying exactly how deeply entrenched the 
problem is.   

Mardi Gras: Made in China
Ever wonder where those beads come from?   Turns out it's a factory in China 
where teenage girls work 12-18 hour shifts six days a week for about a dollar 
a day.   The director said it took years to get access to the place, where he 
interviewed the factory owner and the workers at great length, recorded their 
work and living conditions, etc.   Nothing like seeing it with your own eyes.  
 Really exposes exactly what globalism means.   MardiGrasMadeinChina.com.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
The full story of the rise and fall from the people who were there.   

Inside Deep Throat
My wife saw this one and loved it.   The story of the people who made the 
porn classic from the 1970s.   The films basically takes the view that 
pornography, at least in that period, was primarily about liberation rather than sexism 
or oppression.   

Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire
Won the World Documentary Audience Award.   Romeo Dallaire was the Canadian 
general who commanded the outnumbered, outgunned, underfunded UN military 
peacekeeping force in Rwanda in 1993 and 1994 prior to and during the genocide.   
It's the story of how the world stood by and did nothing while 800,000 people 
were slaughtered in 100 days.  Powerful and deeply disturbing.   Based on 
Dallaire's new book of the same name, which took him 10 years to recover enough 
from the experience to write.   He's still deeply traumatized, and a 
controversial figure himself in some quarters -- mainly, it seems, among those who want to 
find someone convenient to blame for the tragedy.   

Rize
Another one my wife saw -- about the latest dance craze keeping poor kids off 
the streets and out of trouble in South Central L.A.   


Dramatic Features

40 Shades of Blue
This won the top jury prize.   A slow, quiet film about the pain of the 
trophy wife on the arm of the great man.   

Me and You and Everyone We Know
This was a really neat, funny movie about the crazy ways people try and fail 
and sometimes succeed at connecting with each other.   I'm sorry the writer 
and director, performance artist Miranda July, wasn't at the screening to answer 
questions.   

Steal Me
An engrossing story of what happens when a good family takes in a bad kid.   
I thought it was pretty well done.   

Kung Fu Hustle
A Hong Kong kung fu movie played strictly for laughs.   I enjoyed it almost 
as much as the people who got the references.   

Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing and Charm School
This was a sad and touching and ultimately satisfying love story between 
Robert Carlyle and Marisa Tomei.   The weak point was that the filmmakers made it 
too easy at times for unhappy people suffering from deeply rooted traumas to 
achieve breakthroughs and overcome their pasts.   But the two main characters 
were better done and well played.   

The Chumscrubber
Teen angst and alienation beneath the well-tended surface of American 
suburban affluence and materialistic superficiality.   The first-time director said 
it's based on his experiences growing up, and intended to carry out his 
father's directive that the best films are protest films.   

The Salon
Made in Baltimore!   Written and directed by Mark Brown, who wrote the 
Barbershop movies.   I didn't see them, but from what I heard, this is more of the 
same, but set in a women's beauty shop this time.  Nice light entertainment, 
with a heavy emphasis on talk about sex, race, and politics.   One member of the 
audience said during the Q&A that the overuse of black stereotypes was 
offensive to her.   Which is true, the movie relied very heavily on stereotypes, but 
I imagine that many of them will ring true for its intended audience.   Also, 
the film had a tendency to get preachy -- you could easily pick out the 
moments when you knew you were hearing the writer's own point of view about one 
topic or another, from the mistreatment of gays in the black community to the 
need to educate young people about African American heroes.   Obviously the 
filmmaker felt that the risk of appearing heavy-handed was outweighed by the need 
to make his points.   Richard Burton from the mayor's office had a small part, 
and O'Malley appears briefly, which probably explains why there were Believe 
signs everywhere throughout the film...

For fuller information, you can download the Sundance catalog at 
Sundance.org.   

Thanks for letting me take this as my chance to organize and record my 
thoughts!   Otherwise they all run together after seeing 1-2 movies a day for a week 
and a half...

-Matthew

 
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