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Hits, misses and general oddities

Roster is mixed, deals are hot at Sundance

By DUANE DUDEK
Journal Sentinel film critic

Posted: Jan. 24, 2004

Park City, Utah - Trying to gauge the mood of the Sundance Film Festival on the evidence of having seen about 30 films - and from comments overheard on the slow-moving shuttles from one venue to the next - is like sticking your toe in a stream running through the Wasatch Mountain range that rings this tiny ski community and trying to guess the temperature of the ocean.

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Things are bound to be deeper, colder and more mysterious than you think. But all you really know for certain is that your toe is wet.

There were 137 documentary and narrative films at this year's 20th anniversary edition of the festival, which wraps up today. And whatever themes or trends that seemed to recur could also be explained away as a kind of temporal dislocation brought on by exhaustion.

While loved ones shivered back home, snowless Sundancers basked in sunny days with moderate temperatures that dropped to single digits at night. Party-goers complained that events, like the roads and sidewalks, were more crowded than ever; one publicist got 1,200 RSVPs for an event at a club that held 400. And Peter Biskind's book "Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film," with its unkind portrait of festival founder Robert Redford, gave Sundance a hangover before the party even started.

One brash PR firm gave out copies of the book in its goody bag.

Many fine films ultimately were shown here. Yet an early impression of being underwhelmed and ambivalent lingered until the end, although a frenzy of questionable bidding activity, with films selling in the $2 million to $5 million range, suggested otherwise.

Sundance crested early with the opening-night film "Riding Giants," a surfing documentary by "Dogtown and Z-Boys" director Stacy Peralta. It was the first of numerous films to attract buyers, suggesting that studios were here to spend money, regardless of the quality of the films being shown.

Also sold were:

Feel-good, feel-bad

There were feel-good films about underdogs.

"Lbs.," a plus-size "The Station Agent" about an obese man who moves to the middle of nowhere to lose weight, stars Carmine Famiglietti, who wrote the screenplay to force himself to lose weight, and lost 170 pounds during filming.

"Edge of America," by "Smoke Signals" director Chris Eyre, stars James McDaniel as an African-American coaching a girls high school basketball team on an Indian reservation. The film has a "Bend It Like Beckham" vibe.

There were feel-bad films, like the intensely involving "The Woodsman," with Kevin Bacon as a guilt-racked pedophile trying to go straight; "Book of Love," about a marriage that becomes untethered by an indiscretion; and the unlikable "Marie and Bruce," about a squabbling married couple played by Matthew Broderick and Julianne Moore.

Some films should never have been here at all, like "Eulogy," a chaotic and overly commercial tale of a funeral whose ensemble included Ray Romano and Debra Winger; and "Never Die Alone," the vulgar gangsta film with DMX.

Some ambitious films never caught on, like "November," with Courteney Cox as a woman traumatized by her boyfriend's shooting death and whose fragmented narrative is resolved with a thud; and "Primer," whose tail-chasing technological narrative left audiences baffled.

New faces and familiar ones

There were newcomers such as Rodney Evans, whose engrossing "Brother to Brother" explores gay life during the Harlem Renaissance, and Joshua Marston, whose "Maria Full of Grace" is a lovely and understated character study of a girl who was a "mule," swallowing drugs for transport from Colombia to the United States.

And there were lions of the cinema, such as "Croupier" and "Get Carter" director Mike Hodges, with the film noir "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead"; and Bernardo Bertolucci, kept away from the festival by a bad back but who defended his new, NC-17-rated film "The Dreamers" in taped comments, saying "better an orgasm than a bomb."

Like "Bowling for Columbine," many colorful documentaries threw both bombs and bons mots.

"The Corporation" dissected modern society's "reigning oligarchy." In the caustic "Super Size Me," which explored obesity, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock ate McDonald's food for 30 days, and ended up gaining 27 pounds and endangering his health; and "The Yes Men," by Milwaukee-based filmmakers Chris Smith, Sarah Price and Dan Ollman, was about anarchist performance artists.

Redford, whose appearance in the kidnap drama "The Clearing" marked the first time one of his films had been shown at the festival, summed up this year's entries by "the first batch of filmmakers post 9-11" as being about "confusion, anxiety, not knowing where we are going and what to do with where we are."

That description might also apply to Sundance itself, which felt like it was at a crossroads where ambivalent festival-goers waited for marching orders.

E-mail Duane Dudek at ddudek@journalsentinel.com.