Breaking the Line

Sundance 2012: Power, Corruption and Lies

In the better late than never category, here's my overview of this year's Sundance Film Festival, published in the Philadelphia City Paper. Within, I take a bit of a slap at the buzzed-out about prizewinner Beasts of the Southern Wild (pictured), laud Craig Zobel's nervy Compliance and cover the latest addition to the saga of the West Memphis Three, Amy Berg's West of Memphis. Also on the docket: Joe Berlinger's Under African Skies, which covers the making of Paul Simon's Graceland and its attendant controversy, as well as Searching for Sugar Man, the audience award-winning doc about an obscure Detroit musician named Rodriguez whose albums became a touchstone of the South African freedom movement. (Those two make for a fascinating trilogy with Lionel Rogosin's recently rereleased Come Back Africa, which I reviewed for Time Out New York.) Touched briefly on Ira Sachs' Keep the Lights On and Ava Duvernay's Middle of Nowhere, both excellent character dramas of the kind Sundance was created to support and too rarely does. No room for the highly enjoyable Shut Up and Play the Hits, the chronicle of LCD Soundsystem's final show, but I'll get to writing about that one of these days.

Previously in Sundance coverage: features on Mark Webber's The End of Love and Tim & Eric's Billion Dollar Movie, with a skosh of Rick Alverson's The Comedy.

The Innkeepers: Slow-Burn Horror From a Rising Star

My short review of Ti West's The Innkeepers will be up at the City Paper's site whenever they get around to updating it, but until then, here's my longer take from its screening last summer, which has, to paraphrase the Firesign Theater, vanished mysteriously. (NB: That's Pat Healy above, who also starred in the Sundance buzzmaker Compliance, about which more next week.)

Unless you’re a diehard horror fan, you probably haven’t heard Ti West’s name, but it’s only a matter of time. Over the last six years, the Wilmington, DE native has been gnawing at the boundaries of the genre, setting out in a different direction with each of his five features: The Roost is a rural siege thriller, in which vampire bats attack a group of wayward travelers who take shelter in an abandoned barn; Trigger Man is art-horror, rough-hewn account of hunting buddies who become the target of an unseen sniper. Last year’s The House of the Devil was a deliberate throwback to the “Satanic panic” (and goofy hairstyles) of the 1980s, with an unsuspecting babysitter drawn into the plans of a demonic cabal. It also featured one of the greatest deaths in recent memory, which even now I’m loath to spoil.

Essentially a chamber piece in which two desk clerks ride out the last weekend in a mammoth New England hotel, The Innkeepers is West’s most assured film yet, a slow-burning creeper that pays off in spades. With only a handful of guests and one of the Yankee Pedlar’s floors already stripped bare, pixie-cut Claire (Sara Paxton) and hipster goof Luke (Pat Healy) have ample time to play amateur ghost hunter, seeking out the spirit of a suicidal woman whose body was hidden in the basement by the inn’s press-shy owners. 

It takes a while for even these bare facts to emerge, and longer still before the spirit’s presence is more than a faint whisper on the pair’s sound recorder. But West, unlike most whammy-driven horror filmmakers, isn’t afraid to take his time, building character and mood before pulling back the curtain. As if to placate, or razz, those expecting early jolts, West front-loads the movie with jump scares. Luke demonstrates one early on, planting Claire in front of his laptop to watch a moody, black-and-white clip of a solitary rocking chair. “Watch closely,” he tells her, as she strains to see evidence of the paranormal, perhaps a hint of movement or a wisp of white. The camera pushes in and the sound goes quiet as we hold our breath, and then WHAM! a pale-faced child jumps, snarling, at the lens, and the audience’s collective heartbeat doubles.

If that dark-eyed child resembles the exsanguinated J-horror tots who were all the rage a few years back, it’s no accident. West is acutely aware of the way his chosen genre is trending, and just as determined to head in the opposite direction. If the film’s pregnant wide shots, which crank up the suspense by not cueing us where to look, share something in common with The Strangers and Paranormal Activity 2, West’s insistence on fleshing out his characters, even at the (temporary) expense of tightening the screws, is very much his own. The scene where Claire steps out to grab coffee from an oversharing diner waitress (Tiny Furniture’s Lena Dunham) has nothing to do with ghosts or the supernatural, but it makes Claire more than a pawn proceeding towards a foreordained death, Final Destination-style. Ditto Claire’s talks with Leanne Reese-Jones (Kelly McGillis), a former TV star turned crystal-toting New Age healer; their back-and-forth reveals more about Claire’s lingering insecurities than Leanne’s vague pronouncements do about the inn’s incorporeal guests.

As in The House of the Devil, West builds up more than he can pay off. Once they come out from under the bed, the movie’s monsters turn out not to be so scary after all. But then again, perhaps it’s a good thing the movie slacks off at the end. Otherwise the audience would be up all night.

Mark Webber and "The End of Love": A Father Mourns His Marriage and Celebrates His Son

And in genuinely new stuff, here's my second Sundance dispatch, on Mark Webber's second film as a director, The End of Love. Philadelphians are well aware of Webber's backstory, how he was raised, at times on the street, by local welfare-rights activist Cheri Honkala, and rose from roles in shoestring productions like Todd Solondz's Storytelling to minor movie stardom. (The applause as he took the stage in Park City was as enthusiastic as that greeting any of indie film's biggest stars.) In The End of Love, Webber starts opposite his then two-year-old son, Isaac, as a struggling actor mourning the death of his wife and faltering under the weight of single parenthood. It occurred to me midway through watching the film that you almost never see children that age on screen, for the simple reason that they're too young to act and too old to just lie there like a cute lump of flesh. As the father of a child who's almost exactly the same age as the one in the film, I'm perhaps not entirely objective, but I'm also extremely qualified to report on how accurately Webber captures that particular stage of life. (The most resonant moment for me is when Webber counsels his son to chew his food more thoroughly before eating, then picks up the leftover food when his son abandons it, only to have the boy repeat his father's advice back at him, word for word. That happens in my house at least once a day.) Much more on the pleasures and dangers of shooting with your own toddler in my Inquirer feature.

Tim and Eric on Their "Billion Dollar Movie," the Hipster Armageddon of "The Comedy," and Getting Rango'ed

 

Returned from Sundance last night — 28 movies, 7 interviews, zero parties and a whole lot of peanut-butter sandwiches — and here's the first fruit of my labor: my interview with Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, who've parlayed cult TV shows Tom Goes to the Mayor and Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! into their first feature, Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie. (The film is availble on demand beginning tomorrow, and will be in theaters from March 2.) As is typicall the case with their disassociative oeuvre, the movie both resists summary and renders it moot, or to put it in Heidecker's words, "This isn't a story you tell your friends." But it's as loopy, inspired and fitfully disturbing as their fans have come to expect, another step in their fairly astonishing success story.

Heidecker also stars in the Sundance premiere The Comedy, a substantially more unsettling, and deliberately less funny, portrait of moneyed, amoral hipsters living the Willamsburg life. Heidecker's character, who seals the deal with prospective sexual conquests by taking them back to his boat, doesn't do much of anything, but he has an abiding fascinating with manual labor, pitching in unbidden with a crew of Spanish-speaking landscapers and eventually applying for work as a dishwasher. But mostly, he just fucks around with his friends, a group that includes Wareheim and LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, playing pickup Wiffle Ball or stripping down to their skivvies and spraying each other with cheap beer. It's a grueling watch at times, particularly when Heidecker launches into verbal attacks on service workers who can't fight back, one that apparently prompted some tense exchanges at the movie's second public screening. Not surprisingly, The Comedy is still awaiting distribution, but here's hoping it'll go on to start arguments all over the country. UPDATE: It's not a distribution deal, but The Comedy is now "presented by" David Gordon Green and Danny McBride's Rough House Pictures, which is a step in that direction. Here's a clip, from Alverson's Vimeo page:

    

This Is the Way the World Ends, Maybe: Evaluating Cinematic Apocalypses

 
Anyone who had the misfortune to ask me about Sundance 2009 knows that there was one movie I couldn't shut up about: Irena Salina's devastating documentary Flow. Although I tend to meet informational docs with a heavy dose of skepticism — if you just want to put facts across, you're better off writing a nice long New Yorker article, or getting Elizabeth Kolbert to do it for you — the information in Flow was alarming enough to overwhelm my habitual antipathy towards Sundance's traditionally po-faced issue films. In essence, the movie argues that the most endangered natural resource of the 21st century is not oil but fresh drinking water, which a combination of environmental degradation and exploding population makes scarcer and more precious by the day. Apart from the obvious humanitarian implications — the U.N. says that waterborne illnesses are the leading cause of death in developing countries — the political pressure generated by the increasingly valuable commodity has already begun to express itself in terms of military conflict. Former Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali has predicted that "the next war will be fought over water, not politics."

In the A.V. Club, my colleagues and I poll a wide variety of expert observers on the feasibility of a wide variety of cinematic disaster scenarios, from the likely (the variably catastrophic climate change of An Inconvenient Truth) to the less so (Pontypool's language-borne virus). I think it's pretty clear what movie I chose. My entry is fairly straightforward, but the more far-out examples draw some pretty fascinating results.

Philadelphia Film Festival "Preview": Banksy, Tilda, Loach and more.

For reasons too complex and too depressing to get into, Philadelphia's film-festival landscape has been in turmoil for the past couple of years. First the 18-year-old Philadelphia Film Festival (originally the Philadelphia Film Festival of World Cinema), split in two, with the PFF's artistic directors — essentially the management of local chain TLA Video — keeping the traditional April dates for what they renamed Cinefest, and the non-profit Philadelphia Film Society keeping the name and moving to the fall. Then, after abruptly closing TLA's flagship South St. store, Cinefest's management announced they were "suspending" this year's Cinefest. (They also recently cancelled the remaining screenings in their French Cinemathèque series, which does not bode well.) Re-enter the PFS, who announced a free "film festival spring preview" on what would have been Cinefest's opening weekend. Given that most if not all of the films being shown over the next three days will have opened theatrically or shown on TV by the fall, the "preview" seems, at least in part, to be a means of occupying Cinefest's landscape without violating whatever legal wrangling was necessary to effectuate the split. 

Regardless, the upshot is a bunch of good movies showing for free, including Luca Guadagnino's Desplechinian I Am Love, starring Tilda Swinton as the displaced Russian matriarch of an Italian industrial family, and Ken Loach's Looking for Eric, a tart fable about a depressed postman who takes guidance from a manifestation of former Manchester United star Eric Cantona that hearkens back to the heights of Ladybird, Ladybird and Raining Stones. Those films, along with Kim Ji-Woon's "kimchi Western" The Good, The Bad and the Weird and the Romanian omnibus Tales from the Golden Age, scripted and co-directed by 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days' Cristian Mungiu, are reviewed in the Philadelphia City Paper, along with my colleagues' takes on the Aussie noir The Square — basically a far less prepossessing remake of Blood Simple — and Hoop Dreams documentarian Steve James' portrait of ex-Sixer Allen Iverson, No Crossover. 

A late-breaking addition to the preview weekend, the Sundance hit Exit Through the Gift Shop didn't screen early enough for review, but it's well worth checking out if you can't wait for the film's April 16 opening. Credited as the directing debut of the celebrated and enigmatic street artist Banksy, the documentary began as the work of one Thierry Guetta, a French-born Los Angeles vintage shop owner whose obsession with street art and video documentation yielded thousands of hours of videotape. A charismatic maniac who freely uses the language of addiction to discuss his compulsive filming, Guetta becomes both Boswell and Friday to Banksy, Shepard Fairey and dozens of others, keeping one eye on his viewfinder and the other scanning for the cops as they plaster, paint and glue their works to buildings, overpasses and sidewalk curbs. As self-promoting as Banksy is private (which is not to say Banksy's anonymity isn't its own kind of hype), Guetta takes a step into street art by plastering L.A.'s streets with larger-than-life stencils of himself, his enormous head almost dwarfed by a disproportionately large camera. As Guetta starts to fancy himself as a peer to Banksy and Fairey rather than their faithful sidekick, Exit Through the Gift Shop morphs into an examination of the volatility of contemporary art culture, where the rush to discover the next big thing takes precedence over whether the art in question is any good at all. If not quite up to Amir Bar-Lev's fascinating My Kid Could Paint That, the movie also comes with fewer troubling ethical questions attached. 

Sundance: Closing the Book

Yes, I know we've all moved on to Berlin and SXSW, but cast your mind back if you will to a few days ago, before the 2010 Sundance Film Festival had evaporated from our increasingly diffuse consciousness. Done? Well okay then. To aid your trip in the WABAC machine, I present my overview of some of the festival's highlights in the Philadelphia City Paper, and a look at the ideas behind the Black Panthers-in-exile feature Night Catches Us with stars Anthony Mackie and Kerry Washington and writer-director Tanya Hamilton in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Among my favorites are Chris Morris' jihadist comedy Four Lions, Vincenzo Natali's unpredictable genetic-engineering thriller Splice (pictured above), and the breakout documentary Catfish, which does for social networking what Jaws did for the beach. I managed to score a rare interview with the elusive Morris, the straight-up genius behind Brass Eye and The Day Today, although that won't see print until the movie gets distribution (which, I'm warning you, it had better). Just for completeness' sake, here's a review of ski-lift thriller Frozen, which premiered at Sundance and hits theaters this week.

Even though my festival movie-watching has been cut into the last few years by a hectic schedule of conducting interviews and filing copy, I still always manage to see more than I can satisfactorily write about. Great movies that I didn't get to this year include Amir Bar-Lev's The Tillman Story, a probing and deeply outrage-provoking account of the U.S. government's attempt to cover up the "friendly fire" shooting of NFL star turned Army Ranger Pat Tillman. Even if you know the outlines of the story, the details will infuriate and sicken you: how Tillman's death was not an accident so much as a consequence of gung-ho comrades who were more eager to "be in a firefight" than determine what they were aiming at; how they shot TIllman once from 100 yards away, ceased firing, and then repositioned themselves more closely before blowing his head off; how Tillman died shouting out his name, giving the movie its original (quickly scrapped) title: "I'm Pat Fucking Tillman."

It was, overall, an exceptionally strong year for documentaries at Sundance. While the transition to the John Cooper era produced little to fulfill the "Rebel" theme that was plastered over every available surface, the doc programming showed a marked, and welcome, shift away from the po-faced political documentaries that have traditionally dominated the lineup (although Michael WInterbottom and Mat Whitcross' tendentious, incoherent interpretation of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine was bad enough to equal an entire slate of tub-thumbing agitprop — no wonder Klein has publicly disavowed the film). Perhaps the most gratifying surprise was Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg's Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, a revealing portrait of a landmark figure who is determined to go down fighting. Stern and Sundberg's excellent previous docs, The Trials of Daryl Hunt and The Devil Came on Horseback, were hard-hitting chronicles of injustice (in North Carolina and Darfur, respectively), which made the turn towards a comedienne best known for shredding celebrities' fashion sense a trifle curious. But A Piece of Work stands proudly alongside the rest of their oeuvre as the story of a tireless crusader, even if, in this case, the object of the crusade is keeping herself in the public eye. The filmmakers open, cannily, by demolishing Rivers' image as a catty plastic surgery-deformed freak, rolling credits over extreme close-ups of their subject's wrinkled, reddened skin as her makeup is stripped off layer by layer, and following it with an incendiary clip of Rivers performing standup in a small club, during which she refers to her daughter, Melissa, as a "stupid fucking cunt." Attention, you have been got. I had the good fortune to sit down with Rivers just before I left town, and although that interview will have to hold until the movie gets a theatrical release, I can assure you it's worth waiting for.

Sundance: Cane Toads, Armless

 I'm safely returned to the bosom of home, but Sundance goes on, as does my coverage. Today's entries: my review of Mark Lewis' Cane Toads: The Conquest, the Australian director's high-tech sequel to his cult favorite Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, which he introduced at the world premiere by welcoming the audience to "Avatoad"; and a profile of Habib Azar, whose debut feature Armless stars Old Joy's Daniel London as a suburban insurance agent who becomes obsessed with amputating his own arms. Azar's own story is only slightly more unusual. The first-generation son of Lebanese immigrants, he grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs, majored in music and drama with an eye towards becoming an opera director, and then, out of the blue, got a job directing episodes of As the World Turns. Although he's of an age with the mumblecore generation, Azar leans towards the hyperstylized — or as close as you can get on Armless' minuscule budget. Although the film was programmed in Sundance's NEXT section, restricted to films costing less than $500,000, Azar calls even that sum a "laughable number." "If we had half a million dollars," he says, "you'd be watching Citizen Kane." More on Azar in the Philadelphia Inquirer here.

Sundance: The Runaways

It's not as cool as the above photo, but Floria Sigismondi's Runaways biopic, which premiered to much ballyhoo at Sundance last night, gets a lot of the details right even if it misses parts of the big picture. Review at IFC.com.

Sundance: happythankyoumoreplease

 The first of my Sundance dispatches for IFC.com covers the romantic comedy happythankyoumoreplease, written, directed by and starring How I Met Your Mother's Josh Radnor. Suffice it to say that if the festival wants to rebrand itself as rebellious, this is not the movie to do it. On tap for today: Two features with Philadelphia ties, Armless and Night Catches Us, both of which I'll be covering for the Philadelphia Inquirer; The Perfect Host, with David Hyde Pierce as a persnickety dinner-party thrower who unwittingly shelters a fugitve bankrobber; and (with luck) musical sets by Joan Jett and the Roots.