The opening weekend of the 25th Sundance Film Festival: The stars! The movies! The non-stop parties! The quest for sleep! A taste, then, of the festival so far:
Thursday: Jetlagged
in the wilderness
"Did we pick this film because it was animated? No! Did we pick it because it was Australian? No! We picked it because it was great!" exclaims festival director Geoffrey Gilmore of the opening night film, Mary and Max.
Mary and Max is also an hour and a half of brown and grey claymation about a lonely mistreated eight-year-old with a birthmark the "colour of poo" and her pen-pal relationship with a 44-year-old Jewish man with Asperger syndrome in New York. Just the thing to lift you up after eight hours of travel. At 11. p.m., instead of attending the opening night party, I go to bed. Wake up at 3 a.m. listening to either coyotes howling in the mountains, or party revellers rolling down Main Street.
Friday: Totalitarians,
boxers and zombiesOver breakfast at the B&B, Mary Pat Avery from Los Angeles shows me her three-minute trailer of her new parachute-diving movie on her iPod touch, which looks majestic, in a matchbox-sized way. On to the big screens.
The Iranian film The Glass House is about a centre for troubled teenaged girls in Tehran, who have problems with crystal meth addictions, "temporary marriages" to abusive boyfriends and frustrated rap music careers. What possible earthly good is a totalitarian religious regime if it can't even put a lid on teenaged sex, drugs and popular music?
There's a totalitarian connection in Thriller in Manilla, a BBC documentary chronicling the last of the three boxing bouts between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali, which was held in the Philippines to provide positive publicity to Ferdinand Marcos's dictatorship. The movie labours to cast Ali, who barely emerged as the winner, as the villain who incited racial hatred against Frazier before the fight. The trouble with the film is Ali's not only a famous athlete and cultural figure, he's also one of the great screen presences of all time and even as the bad guy, he steals the show.
At 9 p.m., Sundance's younger cousin, Slamdance Festival, opens with I Sell the Dead, a modest but entertaining Irish horror comedy about a 19th-century grave robber and vampire hunter. The festival also features such titles as Zombie Girl and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead. Slamdance focuses on first-time filmmakers and since everyone at the festival looks 17, I can identify with every grey, wrinkled zombie who has ever crashed a teen party in the woods.
Saturday: Emotional Rescue
Helen is one of about a half-dozen features at Sundance focusing on mental illness. The Vancouver-shot film is a German-Canadian co-production. The interviews for the film take place in an abandoned basement bar, where Ashley Judd (who's superb in the film) is wearing shades. I'm ushered into a backroom to talk to director Sandra Nettelbeck ( Mostly Martha) a 42-year-old, with a warm, boho vibe.
In 1993, she says, she lost a good friend to suicide. She researched the subject of depression extensively. She studied film in the United States and wanted to write her script in English because "there's so much more literature about depression in English."
For financial reasons she needed a big star and Judd (who went into a treatment residence for emotional problems last year) readily agreed to the demanding role. When it comes to the star and director's personal experiences of the subject, Nettlebeck points out they're far from exceptional.
"Who doesn't have a connection to depression nowadays? It's pervasive. I wouldn't dare say 'This is what depression is about.' We're just trying to tell the story of one woman's experience"
Meanwhile, the Americans rush to see juicy films such as Spread, with Ashton Kutcher as a Hollywood gigolo who makes a living by hustling older women, and The September Issue, about Vogue editrix Anna Wintour. I opt for Canadian fare, with back-to-back screenings of Victoria Day and Paper Hearts.
Set in May, 1988, director-author David Bezmozgis's intelligent and poignant Victoria Day has echoes of Ang Lee's 1997, The Ice Storm, focusing on the difficulties and desires of the teenaged characters.
The film stars Mark Rendall as Ben, a young hockey prodigy in North York, dealing with his first sexual experience, the demands of his Russian immigrant parents and the disturbing disappearance of a fellow high school student. Then it was on to the big buzz film, Paper Heart, co-starring Brampton, Ont. native Michael Cera and his real-life girlfriend, Charlyne Yi, a comedian and musician who acts like a bumbling, giggly seventh-grader. Paper Heart is what director Nicholas Jasenovec calls a "narrative film with documentary support."
Yi co-wrote the script with Jasenovec as what initially appears to be a documentary in which she interviews people around the United States about the nature of love.
At one point, she attends a party with the film crew and meets Michael Cera. They start to date and the camera crew continues to follow them around, until the camera's presence begins to ruin the relationship.
The concluding scene, purportedly at Cera's Brampton home, was actually the first scene which was shot. Though he stresses he and Yi always planned to make a narrative movie in documentary disguise, "if audiences get a bit confused, that's cool."
I go to bed, nervously awaiting for the nightly howls of the party animals.
Sunday morning:
Where am I again?
This isn't quite like Sunday morning on Main Street in any other little American town. The SUVs are snaking up and down the streets, being guided by guys in orange vests. Television reporters are standing every half-block, talking earnestly to their camera men. In a 15-minute walk, I swear I hear three conversations about headache cures.
Inside the lobby of Queer Lounge I find myself zero degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon. He's been doing interviews for Taking Chance, in which he plays a marine officer who's taking a dead soldier's body home.
I run into Mary Pat again, the iPod-touch-parachute-movie woman. When she arrived here on Thursday she was without accreditation. Now she has a pass. She ran into a composer friend, got a ticket to his film, went to the after party, and subsequently wrangled a pass to a VIP lounge where she met Stephen Baldwin and other Very Important People.
"This is a great place to do business," she says. "Now I've just got to tap into my closing energy to get a deal." I walk away inspired. Just six more days to tap into my closing energy.
Liam Lacey