Day: January 16, 2017

I used to try figure out the next Sundance Film Festival five or six ways from Sunday. Suss it out, call around, do the research, nail it down. It’s not that I’ve been reluctant to do this again, but I know what most of the heavy-hitters will probably be (including the Inconvenient Truth sequel and that suspicious-sounding Donald Trump doc) and I’m figuring “what the hell, just hit this film and that one and wait for the buzz and play it by ear, and above all pace yourself.”

I leave bright and early Wednesday morning, 1.18, and it all starts to happen the following day. Park Regency, here I come! The forecast is for snow showers during most of the festival — cool. Overcoat, gloves, four pairs of long-johns, motorcyle jacket, scarves, cowboy hat.

It’s a fairly safe bet that I won’t see some of the hotties as quickly as I might want to given my notorious press pass downgrade (thanks again, Sundance press office!), and that I might not get into everything I want to see. But you know what? Whatever happens, happens. I’ve got my instincts and my willingness to sleep only five hours per night for ten days straight. If anyone has any suggestions above and beyond the following premieres, please advise.

Posted on 12.5.16: While 35% of my time at any Sundance Film Festival is split between screens at the Library, the Holiday Village, the Egyptian, the Doubletree (formerly the Yarrow) and the Prospector Lodge, 65% is spent watching the premieres at the Eccles. So with today’s official announcement of the 2017 Sundance premieres, two-thirds of my Sundance agenda has now been determined. Here are my Eccles favorites:

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This might be an impolitic thing to ask, but among this particular group of directors — Mel Gibson (Hacksaw Ridge), Oliver Stone (Snowden), Denzel Washington (Fences), Damien Chazelle (La La Land), Mira Nair (Queen of Katwe), and Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) — who is the most likely to be commonly referenced by film scholars 50 years from now? The answer is Stone and Chazelle. Stone for his lightning period of the mid ’80s to mid ’90s, and Chazelle for what he’s done so far and will do over the next 25 or 30 years.

Every day publicist Lee Meltzer has been posting a banal, Kathie Lee Gifford-level question on his Facebook page. Some have been either/or questions: In-N-Out Burger or Shake Shack? Skiing, sledding or snowboarding? At first I was slapping my forehead, but then these questions began to remind me that when my kids were six, seven and eight they used to throw morbid either/ors at me all the time, except they were more than morbid — taken in the aggregate, they were almost mind-bending: “Daddy, how would you rather die — drowning in a huge vat of liquid boogers or being eaten by alligators?” Or “would you rather be torn apart by lions or squeezed to death by a boa constrictor?” So I mentioned the liquid snot-vs.-alligators thing on one of the Meltzer threads, and I got two replies. Meltzer himself said “I think I’d go with the liquid snot, probably not as painful” and another guy said “alligators might be quicker.” This is the kind of shit you get into on a holiday when there’s nothing going on. Sidenote: I used to have nightmares around that age about sinking into quicksand and adios muchachos. This thought still terrifies me.

Yesterday HE commenter Bobby Peru attempted a takedown of Frank Perry‘s Mommie Dearest, calling it a “florid embrassment” that uses “cheap, tacky artifice to generate cartoonish shocks” and “unintentional comedy.” I’m sorry but that’s been the prevailing rant against this film for decades, and it’s just as wrong today as it was 35 years ago. I explained what it actually is as concisely as I knew how.

“Mommie Dearest is maudlin soap-opera realism,” I replied, “overbaked but winkingly so, everyone in on the joke and yet taking it ‘seriously,’ and at the same time a melodrama that’s occasionally intensified and heightened to the level of Kabuki theatre. The comedy is not ‘unintentional,’ but at the same time it’s not really a ‘comedy’ — it’s a kind of hyper-realism with a campy edge.”

“If Perry had modulated Dunaway’s performance, some of the great lines — ‘No wire hangers EVER!,’ ‘Don’t fuck with me, fellas!’ — wouldn’t have worked so well. Those lines are the stuff of Hollywood legend, right up there with Bette Davis saying “what a dump!” and Vivien Leigh saying “I’ll never by hungry again.”

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Without taking anything away from the reputation and legacy of the great Martin Luther King, who was born 88 years ago today, I’ve always been more of a Malcolm X man. Not just on a level of admiration but of kinship. Yes, me — a suburban white guy from New Jersey and Connecticut. Without reservation I feel as close in spirit to Malcolm X as I do to Arjuna, the central figure in the Bhagavad Gita. I feel as much personal rapport with Malcolm X as I do with the spirits and legends of JFK, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Timothy Leary, Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, et. al. I admire and respect MLK, but I worship Malcolm X, and I mean going back to my teens.

I relate to his story (wayward and reckless as a youth but then finding the path as he got older…that’s me!) and the combination of bravery and emerging mental clarity that led to his political and spiritual metamorphoses. A person who stays in the same place — who can’t evolve and change as increasing amounts of light reveal increasing degrees of truth — is nothing, and in this sense Malcolm X was, in my eyes, one of the greatest human beings to walk the planet in the 20th Century. If I had my way we’d all celebrate Malcolm X day on on May 19th, and our nation would be better for that.

If you ask me Denzel Washington‘s titular performance in Malcolm X (’92) is hands down one of the most electric and rousing of all time, not just because of technique and commitment but because Denzel really seemed to channel the man — the voice, the spirit, physical resemblance.

Al Pacino‘s Scent of a Woman performance took the Best Actor Oscar that year (“Hoo-hah!”) but looking back I really think that was a mistake on the Academy’s part. Pacino’s win was part of a payback equation, his having been passed over for so many top-tier performances in the ’70s and ’80s, but Denzel really gave the more monumental performance. I haven’t re-watched Malcolm X in a good 15 years or so, but I just rented a high-def version that I’ll sit down with tonight. An HD Malcolm X on a Sony XBR 4K 65-inch…yes!

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