<HTML><FONT FACE=arial,helvetica><HTML><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Times New Roman" FAMILY="SERIF" SIZE="4">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.<BR>
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</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Times" FAMILY="SERIF" SIZE="4"><U>Documentaries</U></FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Times" FAMILY="SERIF" SIZE="4"><BR>
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Why We Fight<BR>
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. <BR>
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Mardi Gras: Made in China<BR>
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.<BR>
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Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room<BR>
The full story of the rise and fall from the people who were there. <BR>
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Inside Deep Throat<BR>
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. <BR>
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Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire<BR>
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. <BR>
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Rize<BR>
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. <BR>
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</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Times" FAMILY="SERIF" SIZE="4"><U>Dramatic Features<BR>
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40 Shades of Blue<BR>
This won the top jury prize. A slow, quiet film about the pain of the trophy wife on the arm of the great man. <BR>
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Me and You and Everyone We Know<BR>
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. <BR>
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Steal Me<BR>
An engrossing story of what happens when a good family takes in a bad kid. I thought it was pretty well done. <BR>
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Kung Fu Hustle<BR>
A Hong Kong kung fu movie played strictly for laughs. I enjoyed it almost as much as the people who got the references. <BR>
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Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing and Charm School<BR>
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. <BR>
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The Chumscrubber<BR>
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. <BR>
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The Salon<BR>
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...<BR>
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For fuller information, you can download the Sundance catalog at Sundance.org. <BR>
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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...<BR>
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-Matthew<BR>
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