Down to the last dance

I can feel the festival simmering down. I will still have about five films on Saturday, but the energy of the town is bubbling down. Now that all of the films have been played at least twice, a lot of the deals have been done. So the dog and pony show of celebrities is pretty much over. But the one thing remaining is the awards.

Sundance is broken up into categories for international and domestic documentaries and features. There are also awards for shorts. So they leave these blank spots in the schedule that are audience favorites or juried winners. We have bought tickets for Saturday’s Juried Feature Award winner. We have no idea what the film is. We may have already seen it. I think we are both rooting for Winter Bone.

There are some favorites that we hope will win, but we also hope that it is a film we haven’t seen. This is just another example of the festival coming to an end.

I have had the best time this year. I have covered a lot of ground as far as sheer volume of screenings, but as importantly I have more than a dozen new contacts. I met so many interesting people this week. Directors, screenwriters, distributors, actors, and, of course, other film fans have all made this week fascinating. It is like a parallel world where ideas and the arts are king. I love it and feel very uplifted to be here. It is a real honor.

It is going to be great for CFF to have all these contacts. I will begin emailing all the films that I liked and start figuring out how to get in touch with the folks that I did not meet. The name of the game now is to get screener DVDs so I can have our programming committee get to work finding the best films for our community. If I have collected 10 business cards, Doug surely has double that number.

I saw a film that troubled me so deeply that I held my gut as I left the theater. It is called Shock Doctrine. It argues that the ideas of economist Milton Friedman have led to capitalism profiting off of disaster. Disaster comes in many guises--hurricanes, coup d’etats, and wars. The film purports that the leaders who rise out of these crisis moments are people like Donald Rumsfeld, Augusto Pinochet, Boris Yeltsin, Margaret Thatcher, the Russian oligarchs, and Paul Bremmer during the shock-and-awe period. It is a heady, compelling, and shocking film. If you want to know more, check it out here.

Sundance is just the start of a nine-month process that actually gets filmmakers and their films to come to our community. Even though I have another scintillating day ahead of me, I can feel the magic and mirth of Sundance coming down a notch. The race is coming to an end. We have been on fire. Entranced in the sorcery known as cinema.

Tom

Crazy film head

I love going to the movies. LOVE IT! So I have been taking in a few shows. Like five a day. I kid you not. Five freakin’ movies a day.

After a while you can’t tell what time of day it is anymore. I get so many thoughts swirling in my head and feelings gurgling in my belly that I start to speed up. Like no one will walk fast enough or talk fast enough to keep up with the great swirl. Just in the last two days, I have been to Pat Tillman’s funeral, the decimation of the Yanomami Indians by anthropologists, a Bromance called Douchebag, a Peruvian gay love story and a film about Jean Michel Basquiat. It is a total head spinner to try and digest this much culture. It is like putting your head inside a spinning dryer.

To keep it all straight, I keep a journal. It is small and black. I try to write in it after each screening. I write furiously so I don’t forget anything. It comes out in a stream-of-consciousness scrawl. With bullet points, plot points and character arcs. Everything is noted.

Tom

3D comes to Sundance

I saw a 3D movie. Yep, we had the goggles and looking behind me felt like a strange flash back to the ‘50s. But this was no regular 3D film, this was Cane Toad or what the filmmaker called “Avatoad.”

This was a very funny and trippy account of the species invasion of Cane Toads in Australia. They were brought to kill the grubs that were devouring the sugar crop, but now become pestilent on a biblical level in Eastern Australia.

Tom

Sundance & climate change

Sundance is concerned with climate change. I have seen more than a couple of documentaries this year that grapple with climate change. The base line seems to be, “Wow, we are all going to perish as a species in about 100 years.” Some films say it is a man-made phenomenon and can be reversed with drastic and immediate actions. Is it just a cycle in the earth’s cycle? One film, Climate Refugees, tries to put a human face on climate change and is predicting mass migrations of hundreds of millions of people from heightened water levels. They see Bangladesh and Indonesia going under first. The same film predicts that a scarcity of water will also cause mass migrations from northern Africa. The film also mentioned that there is an ever-growing desert that is just 100 miles from Beijing. See here for more on that.

So all this got me thinking. I flew roughly 2,000 miles to come to Sundance. I have a heated condo. I take the carbon spewing shuttle to every film. There is dissonance in my head; it is like sitting next to Noah building the boat and I am not lending him a hand.

Tom

Sundance rebels?

Before every film there is a bumper that exclaims the theme of this year’s festival. The word “rebel” seems to be it this year. Now I ask you, how could the institutional juggernaut of independent cinema be rebelling? What are they fighting against? Deals are being made. Stars are trotted about and the press corps dutifully snaps it all up. Big muckety-mucks from NY and LA are here. Lots of people are reading Variety and Independent Filmmaker. Sundance is THE MAN at this point. You can’t rebel because you are the man. You dictate and purvey your chosen ones.

Tom

The scuttlebutt on the shuttle bus

Probably a quarter of my time at the Sundance Film Festival is spent on the shuttles. In a way they are wonderful because you can chat with other film fanatics. All you have to say is, “Have you seen anything you liked?” You have an instant passionate 20-minute discussion on your hands. It is SO fun.

Some are industry types who see everything and are really articulate and you engage in a code dance of film references. Something like, “Well I agree that this reminded me of Jim Jarmusch’s last film, but don’t you think the script’s structure was more tapestry-like. You know like, Todd Solondz’s masterpiece Happiness?”

I am in Pig Heaven. It is a blast to banter about film with people who are totally enthusiastic and smart. I think it is my favorite part of the festival. Your stop comes and it is like leaving a wonderful meal 2/3 of the way through. My new best friend! Bye!

Tom

Greek tragedy from the Ozarks

Doug and I took in Winter’s Bone, a Gothic wonder that takes us into the ultra bleak world of Ozarkian mafia-like families. Blood ties can lead one into or out of violence when all that is possible is crystal meth labs, hunting squirrel for sustenance or escaping by joining the Army. The story follows a 17-year-old woman who is looking for her drug dealing father. He has disappeared. The way she finds him is right out of Greek Tragedy. Wonderful filmmaking. Here's more info.

Tom

Some thoughts about Sundance

All kinds of media are spouting off about Sundance and I am getting excited to get out there past the hype. Basically, what CFF does best is find really smart films that have been orphaned by the commercial juggernaut. We bring films to light that will NOT be playing at a theater near you. Often times that means not having mega wattage star power like Kristen Stewart, but I love CFF's programming niche because we don't have to make money. We just have to compel, challenge and delight our audience. It is cinema for the pure sake of its delight. We don't offer a market to sell in or a deal to get rich in. We just show great films to an eager audience. The purity of this thrills me.

There is so much bull in the film business. It is an awful Darwinian business. Everyone says, "Yes, of course, love to do it." The translation of that is "No way, not interested." When we make connections after screenings at Sundance, we aren't offering any fiscal payoff. We are offering a smart community that loves film and will fill the seats. Our community will roll out into the streets and talk about the films, not the hair styles or box office takes.

So I go with a renewed sense of purpose to find great stories.

Tom McCall

What's not in a name?

Movie titles alone can be intriguing. We assume that filmmakers labor--maybe even heatedly--over how to encapsulate tremendous amounts of time, energy, and financial resources into a word or a phrase to formally tag the final production. One never knows if the choice was right until the film is viewed. And sometimes it doesn't matter--the film defines the title. At any rate, CFF's Doug and Tom have some interesting titles in store for them at Sundance:

Climate Refugees

Winter's Bone

Obselidia

Imperialists Are Still Alive!

Splice

Sympathy for Delicious

Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radi

Douchebag

Smash His Camera

Contracorriente

GASLAND

Secrets of the Tribe

Holy Rollers

Shock Doctrine