| Print |

Written by Pete Timmermann Monday, 23 January 2006 11:52

Like practically every other movie I’ve written about today, it started out slow, but wound up being OK.

Thankfully, I have a little more time today to write this thing, as opposed to the nine minutes day before yesterday and the no minutes yesterday. Argh.

As I recall, I left off after Destricted, which was the last film I saw on Friday night. Well, since then, I’ve seen 11 more films, which I hope to ramble incoherently about before this computer kicks me off (I’m at the Park City Library again).

I had planned on seeing Off the Black with Nick Nolte on Saturday morning, except that I had scheduled an interview with the people behind Wordplay, one of the documentaries I was most looking forward to this year, a few weeks prior. Turns out that the interview with the Wordplay people was to take place during the press screening of Wordplay, which meant that, in order to be relatively coherent when interviewing them, I’d have to fight my way into the world premiere of the film at the Prospector at 11:30 a.m. Saturday morning. This, of course, meant that I’d have to skip Off the Black, and rearrange the entire day’s schedule.

To get into a public screening I have to wait in the waitlist line with the public (God forbid), which I might have tried to hurriedly explain the other day. Depending on how popular the film is (and, to a lesser extent, how big the venue is), anywhere from 0 to 100 wait-listers get in. I arrived at the Prospector around 10:15 a.m., and was number 169 in line. Lucky for me, I was able to track down the publicist, who produced a ticket for me.

I tend not to interview people at festivals because I suck at it and it is a scheduling nightmare (see above), so I was really counting on Wordplay to be good. Wordplay is about Will Shortz, the editor of The New York Times crossword puzzle, and about crosswords themselves. The filmmakers interview Bill Clinton, Jon Stewart, and others about why they like crosswords (especially Shortz’), and eventually covers last year’s American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, which Shortz founded in the ’70s. Based on that description, it sounded to me like the potential was there for this to become one of the breakout films in the festival, and luckily for me, it fulfilled this potential. It was as good a film as I was hoping for: very funny, very entertaining, and really makes you want to do some crossword puzzles (and I’m not really a fan).

After Wordplay let out, I ran off to the Yarrow where I saw Open Window, a thriller/marital drama starring Robin Tunney and the guy from Kinky Boots (which is playing here but I saw back in St. Louis before I left; it sucked). It wasn’t any good.

My interview with Wordplay director Patrick Creadon and Will Shortz was to take place immediately after Shortz finished a book signing at Dolly’s on Main Street. I had about 40 minutes to get there, so I walked, which took about 25. You’ll see the results of this interview in the relatively near future, so I won’t go into it now.

I just got booted off that last computer and had to get in line for another 30-minute session. Good thing I have a little bit of time on my hands.

OK, so ... after the interviews were over I saw the film that Joey Lauren Adams (of Chasing Amy and Dazed & Confused fame) wrote and directed, Come Early Morning. It stars Ashley Judd, whom I do not really like, and while I like Joey as an actress, I was not entirely convinced that this film stood much of a chance of being good. It started off very bad—Joey’s not a very good director of actors and the film had a very strong sense of having been done before (Judd plays a woman who likes to get drunk and fuck guys—that’s about the extent of it), but once it gains some momentum it wound up being OK.

I slept for a couple of hours (I got home about 12:30 a.m. from Morning) and then headed back to that Yarrow for Sherrybaby, the only film here that has Maggie Gyllenhaal in it this year (she’s a Sundance staple). Like Come Early Morning, Sherrybaby started off poorly, and to be honest, I didn’t really like it at all while I was watching it. After it was over I kept catching myself thinking about it, though, and I’ve come to decide that it certainly has some strong points; I think another viewing is in order before passing final judgment on it. Oh, and also like Come Early Morning, Gyllenhaal plays a girl who likes to fuck guys.

Next up was Stay, a comedy written and directed by Bobcat Goldthwait (Shakes the Clown). In its opening minutes, it reveals that the main character, a well-adjusted and pretty young teacher, once blew her dog when she was in college out of some combination of curiosity and boredom. While admittedly this does not necessarily sound like a promising premise—especially from hit-or-miss Goldthwait—he actually does a credible job of making it believable that this character would have done this but is not some sort of sociopath. The film is pretty severely flawed (it looks like shit, for one thing), but it was still far more entertaining than pretty much everything else I’ve seen here so far.

I had considered skipping the next film I saw, Songbirds, to come here and work in 20 or so minutes of Sundance diary time, but my movie total so far has been low (as of this writing, I’ve seen just 16 films in three and a half days; I saw 44 in 11 days last year), so I decided to see it. Besides, it is a doc wherein women describe how they landed in jail, and then sing the story in a music video-type scenario, which just sounded too bizarre to pass up. Unfortunately, it could have been passed up. While it had moments of humor (a sample lyric: “I’m oh so very sorry that I spit my blood at you/And I’m oh so very sorry that I split your head in two”), it was really poorly made, and not really even all that kitschy; just boring.

Immediately after Songbirds let out, I ran across the parking lot to catch Factotum at the Holiday Village, which played at the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes last year (I didn’t see it there, though) and was very popular. It stars Matt Dillon, Marisa Tomei, and Lili Taylor in a story based off of the writing of Charles Bukowski. It maintains Bukowski’s dry humor, and was one of the better films I’ve seen so far (although it doesn’t really feel like it counted, since I have been hearing for eight months now that it is very good).

I ate a little bit of food and then went back to the Yarrow for The Proposition, a neo-Western that Nick Cave wrote and that Guy Pearce stars in. Like practically every other movie I’ve written about today, it started out slow, but wound up being OK. If nothing else, there are a couple of scenes of exceptional violence, and the score, courtesy of Warren Ellis (a member of the Bad Seeds as well as Dirty Three), is very good.

The last film I saw last night was Steel City, the film that Brian Jun, the dude who went to Webster about the same time as me, made. I had been hearing good things about it from people ranging from Joe Williams at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to total strangers, and really wanted to like it, if for no other reason than that I know some of the people involved in the production. Alas, I did not really like it, but that’s OK, as I seem to be in the minority; pretty much everyone I’ve talked to that has seen it has liked it quite a bit, and I’ve talked to a lot of people about it. I didn’t think it was bad, mind you; just middle ground, like so many other films I’ve seen at the festival so far.

This morning I’ve seen The Hawk Is Dying, starring Paul Giamatti, and Half Nelson, starring Ryan Gosling, both of which were of the higher-anticipated films showing here this year. Dying comes from Julian Goldberger, who made a little-seen (but very good) film called trans (sic) that played here back in the late ’90s. The Hawk Is Dying is based on a Harry Crews novel about a troubled intellectual who traps hawks and tries (unsuccessfully) to train them. Borderline unrecognizable Michelle Williams and Michael Pitt co-star. Giamatti’s performance here was fantastic, but no one really expected any less. The film was perfectly solid, although it didn’t really blow me away. It ranks just below Destricted and Wordplay as one of the best films I’ve seen here so far this year.

And below Half Nelson, that is. Ryan Gosling made a name for himself here a few years ago with The Believer, and has since achieved a modicum of mainstream stardom, thanks mostly to The Notebook. Half Nelson can do nothing but help both his indie credibility as well as his mainstream credibility, as it is an entertaining and accessible story of a very charismatic and well-liked junior high history teacher, who also happens to do a bunch of drugs on his own time. The bulk of the story is devoted to one of his 13-year-old students finding out, and the cultivation of a friendship with this student. It probably sounds from that description that the film would be way too sweet and hit you over the head with a moral, but it doesn’t, really. It all feels very natural, and everything that happens in it does not discount any sort of credibility. Everything that happens to each of the characters is earned.

Well, I’d better be off before this computer kicks me off again. I’d like to eat something and change my socks before seeing Who Needs Sleep? At 4:30 (it is 3:00 now). Later tonight I’m seeing the Kevin Smith–produced small town gay bar (sic, again) and Stephanie Daley. Now that it is not the weekend any longer I will have easier access to computers, so hopefully there won’t be any more skipped days or nine-minute writing sessions.