So I'm sitting in a theater, waiting for The Natural History Of Chickens to begin. The guy next to me nudges my shoulder and says, "Hey, is that Molly Ringwald's dad from Sixteen Candles?" And sure enough, it is. He's walking down the aisle, starting in on his popcorn as he goes. "Far out," the guy next to me says.
That kinda encompases what the Sundance Film Festival's held for me: lots of good documentaries and features that will likely play in Omaha shortly after the Hell Public Works Department has to buy snowplows and salt trucks, lots of celebrities of the sort you wonder if that isn't "that one guy from that film with the trees," and lots of friendly strangers to jaw with (provided they're not already talking elsewhere on their cell phones).
In 3 days, I've caught 10 films. Not bad until you know there are 107 films playing this year, and as you wander down Main Street in Park City you'll hear each one declared to be somebody's favorite so far.
And that's not even everything going on. There's also NoDance, Slamdance, TromaDance, Freshfest (a film festival sponsored by Subway) and probably more. And all of these gatherings have good independent film making. I caught part of FreshFest's showing of Six Days In Roswell, a documentary about a guy from Minneapolis' visit to Roswell that had me laughing harder than anything I've seen in a multiplex in recent memory. Nebraskans even have a presence here, too, as NoDance is showing Nebraska Supersonic which was filmed in Omaha a couple years ago. And then there are the parties, the lectures, the discussions, making this a great place to be but a bad place to get any sleep this week.
Sundance is getting gargantuan, or at least that's what the veterans are saying. This explains the placards on trucks and streetcorner signboards which say things like "Sundance Sucks" or "Sundance sold out!" Some will say that, by accepting movies with studio connections and big-name actors, Sundance has lost some of its "independent cinema" charm, that it's the smaller festivals which have the real spirit which this event claims to have. Personally, I support those folks, but have to admit I came here to see movies I probably won't have any other chance to see. And I'm far from alone, as more than 20,000 people came last year, and they expect more this year to spread out among the 15 screens in Park City, Salt Lake City, Ogden, and Sundance.
And it certainly is a fun gathering of people. Part of the "experience" is not having tickets you could have braved constant busy signals weeks ago to buy. This means you stand (more likely, sit)in line for Waiting List tickets. Anywhere from 20 to 200 seats open up before a show as they save blocks of seats for volunteers, press, and those who bought the tremendously expensive passes ($2500) which can guarantee you admission to any movie your little heart wants to experience all festival long. So without that kind of money to spare or a first-born child to trade in, people line up, sometimes starting more than 2 hours before a movie in the hopes that enough people with passes will decide to stay home and watch Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
And you never know. 2 days ago, I waited 2 hours, got #43 in line, and didn't make it in. The next day, trying to see the same movie, I showed up only 45 minutes early, was 74th in line, and got in easilly.
It's in the lines like these where you meet people and find out that almost everyone here (80% by last year's demographics) works in some aspect of film making. I've met gaffers and grips, sound guys and cinematographers, the producer for George Plympton's animated Mutant Aliens, the head of Troma Entertainment (which brought us movies like The Toxic Avenger and Surf Nazis Must Die). After most screenings, too, there are Q&A sessions with directors, producers, actors, and more; and for the most part, those who work on the films stay accessible, the makers of Roof To Roof passing out Armenian cookies, others handing out postcards and fliers, many being open to schmucks approaching them on the street to ask about film stock.
The films here get organized by several classifications: you have short film programs and documentaries, premiers (which already have a distributor) and dramatic (which don't). Plus, there are categories for foreign and domestic made films which aren't competing for the documentary or dramatic prizes.
Despite the lines, I've made it into a number of excellent shows. My first was Some Body, a tender, funny, bizarre, deep character study of Samantha (Stephanie Bennett), who leaves her long-time boyfriend, a best friend who cooks and cleans for her, as she feels the need for "more." "More" ends up being a lot of alcohol and sex, effectively contrasted with her job as a first grade teacher.
Similar to this, "Jack The Dog" portrayed a womanizer (Nestor Carbonell) trying to break away from his past and become a good kind of family man. Despite the stampede of cliches this might set off in your head, the movie ends up working rather well, particularly with the addition of a son to the equation.
And similar only in that it also features a profound amount of sex, Intimacy is the story of, well, people and lonliness and relationships, I suppose. At times, it looks like a well-acted porn flick (with some truly good performances), yet it still finds a way to leave you horribly depressed. Yes, it was made by the French.
The American Astronaut stands out as the weirdest I've seen. It's Rocky Horror made in black and white and with money actually shelled out for good cinematography. Writer/director/star Corey McAbee describes it as "an autobiographical space western" as it flips through some of the most amazingly bizarre song and dance routines, ranging from one in a bar's restroom where a sort of singing telegram gets delivered for a man on the toilet to a routine on the planet Venus where McAbee sings a song called "The Girl With The Glass Vagina."
The two documentaries I saw, The Natural History Of The Chicken and Trembling Before G-D, were pretty much opposites on any spectrum. Chicken told stories about chickens and chicken raising, from fantastic stories where a woman saves a chicken with mouth-to-beak resuscuitation to facts about poultry production in America. Trembling Before G-D told about gay orthodox jews, giving moving testimonies of gay men and lesbians struggling to stay afloat in their religious worlds. Both documentaries kept audiences stuck to their seats, though, with amazingly well-done narratives.
One of my favorites among the dramas was Scotland, PA, a movie that certainly deserves distribution. It resets Shakespeare's Macbeth to 1970's Pennsylvania with growing fast food chains instead of courts and kingdoms. Sound ridiculous? Well, it is at points, particularly where they play with the more famous dialogue. The movie moves through jokes at a fast pace, making a hilarious ride that somehow stays true to the Shakespeare.
My favorite movie was another dramatic feature, Memento, which tells the story of a man with a memory problem. After seeing his wife's murder, Leonard (Guy Pierce) loses his short term memory, meaning he can remember everything in his life to the point of the murder but now can only hold onto things for a few minutes. As implausible as this sounds, director Christopher Nolan keeps it working astoundingly well, telling the story in scattered fragments which work backward through the film, essentially doing to the audience what Leonard is going through as everything unwinds backward to an ending which left me breathless.
Speaking to volunteers who staff the events here, it looks like it'd be worth it to come back next year as a worker, if I could. The volunteers recommend I start checking the website (www.sundance.org) next September. In the meantime, I have movies to line up for.
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