Sundance Is Over

email this story
read comments (14)
post a comment

The Sundance Film Festival is a 10-day event, but it's always over as of Wednesday morning, or five and a half days after the opening-night festivities on Thursday night. The voltage turns down, there are fewer people on Main Street, all the presumably hot titles (i.e., name casts, advance-hyped) have been screened. I was going to stay until Friday but with this virus in my system and the general enervation and lack of excitement I'm figuring "screw it." I'm on the phone to Southwest right now, get myself on a plane tomorrow morning.

Sundance '08 wasn't bad but it sure wasn't great. There was a general feeling of deflation, an almost-but-not-quite vibe. There was no surprise knockout...no Little Miss Sunshine, no Once. Film after film seemed to fall short in this or that way. More than a few were greeted with "respectful but tepid applause," to quote a college film professor who had just come from The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Nobody except Variety's Bob Koehler came up to me and said, "You have to see this film!" Over and over I heard qualifiers -- "not bad," "I was okay with it," "Almost worked," "didn't blow my socks off," etc.

I saw five films that I was genuinely aroused and moved by -- In Bruges, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, Patti Smith: Dream of Life, Dog Eat Dog (Perro Come Perro) and The Escapist. Everything else was a half-and-halfer, a "meh" or an outright dud.

I admired the pared-down, Lars von Trier-like atmosphere of Lance Hammer's Ballast, which I saw the day before yesterday, but I also found it draggy and almost comatose at times. There were something like 15 movies here that dealt with suicide. I only saw the beginning of American Teen, which Paramount Vantage is apparently buying, but I was instantly bored by its focus on four cliched high-school archetypes.

I missed tons of films. That's normal, of course. You can't possibly see everything you want to see. I play it like anyone else, starting out with my own list and ready to shift gears any time I hear about a really special film. But with very few exceptions, all I heard about were films that vaguely disappointed. Or I passed along the bad news myself. Barry Levinson's What Just Happened? never connected for me -- wasn't believable, lacked heart, emotionally aloof characters. I was mostly "meh" with Mark Pellington's Henry Poole Is Here as it struck me as overly gloomy and enervated. And so on.

I should have seen Choke, Hamlet 2 and Sleepwalking. Getting sick yesterday and being sick today is my best excuse. The virus just took over, although I managed to bang out a few Oscar nomination reactions. I was sleeping on a couch when a friend called in the mid-afternoon about the death of Heath Ledger, so I got up and tapped out an okay-this-happened piece. Then I crashed again.

I have to get out of here. I want only to escape. I just want to leave it all behind and start over in warmer weather.

Heath Ledger is dead<< previous | next >>Cursed Gilliam & Tragedy of "Parnassus"

Posted by Jeffrey Wells on January 23, 2008 at 6:59 AM

comment #1

rocco says ...

a dozen variations of "meh" and "half-and-half" without a single "mezzo-mezzo"...it's officially retired.

Posted by rocco at January 23, 2008 8:45 AM

comment #2

K. Bowen says ...

Last year, uncouth sports bar barbarians. This year, an epic struggle with a killer flu virus. Maybe Sundance is trying to tell you something.

Posted by K. Bowen at January 23, 2008 9:09 AM

comment #3

MattyC says ...

I always sort of hated mezzo-mezzo, but it's just so Wells-ian that I don't know how I feel about its departure.

Posted by MattyC at January 23, 2008 9:48 AM

comment #4

MickTravis says ...

I would be extremely interested in "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh" if I wasn't already aware that the writer/director has completely changed the characters and events in Chabon's novel.

I'm a big fan of the book, but I read the script and was flabbergasted by it. And I don't flabbergast easily.

Posted by MickTravis at January 23, 2008 10:02 AM

comment #5

Monument says ...

Michael Chabon has said more than once in interviews that he's fine with the changes, but he might just be playing nice.

Posted by Monument at January 23, 2008 10:08 AM

comment #6

carla kolchak says ...

Posted by Jeffrey Wells on September 13, 2007 at 07:17 AM

The Toronto Film Festival is over as of this morning. All that's left to do is run sum-up pieces and catch the supposed so-so, straggler and left-over films because there's nothing else to do. The coffee talk this morning is that TIFF programmers should ideally be re-screening the better films from the front-loaded first five days that people didn't see because the schedule was so jammed.

Posted by carla kolchak at January 23, 2008 10:14 AM

comment #7

Jeffrey Kunze says ...

I recently read Choke (by the author who did wrote Fight Club) and thought it was an okay novel that would make an interesting movie. The main character was very reminiscent of Fight Club's Ed Norton (did his character even have a name in that movie?).

Would have liked to heard Jeff's reaction to it at Sundance.

Posted by Jeffrey Kunze at January 23, 2008 10:19 AM

comment #8

gruver1 says ...

Wells to Carla Kolchak: So? Every festival is over after five or six days. What's your problem?

Posted by gruver1 at January 23, 2008 10:21 AM

comment #9

MickTravis says ...

re: "Michael Chabon has said more than once in interviews that he's fine with the changes, but he might just be playing nice."

In an interview I read, the director (who made "Dodgeball" -- not hating, just saying) claims Chabon signed off on the script from the get-go. Maybe, but I have trouble imagining that. The screenplay is an surprisingly ugly abomination of a story that was just fine on its own.

Posted by MickTravis at January 23, 2008 10:23 AM

comment #10

Ju-osh says ...

You want a sneak peek at Choke?
Click here.

Posted by Ju-osh at January 23, 2008 10:36 AM

comment #11

Armin Tamzarian says ...

Y'all should have seen ANVIL: THE STORY OF ANVIL. Didn't break much new ground, but was easily my favorite of the dozen or so films I caught up there.

Posted by Armin Tamzarian at January 23, 2008 11:10 AM

comment #12

carla kolchak says ...

Carla to Jeff: I just thought it sounded strangely familiar and, yeah, I found that you'd said almost exactly the same thing in Toronto.

And, since you asked, it strikes me that there are probably lots of smaller, lower-profile films--as opposed to 'the presumably hot titles (i.e., name casts, advance-hyped)'--worthy of your attention over the remaining days of Sundance, and perhaps some attention like that might even help get a distribution deal for a deserving film that would otherwise fly under the radar. Now, I don't know whether that kind of thinking qualifies as a 'problem' or not, but that is what was on my mind when I posted the previous comment.

Posted by carla kolchak at January 23, 2008 5:42 PM

comment #13

Craig Kennedy says ...

I'd give Jeff the benefit of a doubt on this one because he's sick, but Carla isn't the only one to spot a familiar tone in the coverage. Cynical and jaded are the words that spring to mind.

Am I just impossibly naive to hope that someone covering a film festival would at least be slightly inspired by the sense of discovery? It's always all about finding the next Little Miss Sunshine. Being there for the next big thing so you can be the first in line to report on it.

Granted, Wells has been to a lot more of these things than I have so he probably has every reason to be blasÃ©, but sometimes I wonder why he continues to bother. I certainly wonder why I continue to hope the reporting will be any different than it was the year before.

Posted by Craig Kennedy at January 23, 2008 9:31 PM

comment #14