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Written by Pete Timmermann Thursday, 26 January 2006 03:42

Glastonbury had many highlights, such as the Velvet Underground playing “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” Nick Cave doing “Red Right Hand,” Bjork singing “Human Behaviour,” and Pulp playing “Common People.”

 

Well, we’re past the halfway point of the festival. While normally I don’t pay to much attention to this, there are two notable things I’ve observed this year: 1) I seem to have achieved a movie-watching zone (as if I weren’t in one before), where my back and ass have adjusted to spending 12 hours a day in glorified folding chairs, and to where I feel like I could watch ten movies a day if there was only enough time for it, and 2) the “good” or “big” press screenings are all almost in the final couple days, which is odd; they are typically held the first couple of days. I see Thank You for Smoking, Alpha Dog, The Science of Sleep, The Illusionist, The Night Listener, Art School Confidential, and a bunch of other big ones in the next couple of days. Plus, I finally saw Little Miss Sunshine today, which has been getting press out the ass (despite the fact that the press screening hadn’t occurred until just now) because it was the first sale at Sundance this year, going for an unprecedented $10 million and 10% of the final gross.

Before I get started, though, I just got an email stating that IFC acquiring distribution rights to Wordplay, so good for both IFC and the Wordplay folks. Between producing This Film Is Not Yet Rated and my favorite film of last year, Me and You and Everyone We Know, IFC is really making a name for themselves in grabbing the rights to the best of American independent cinema.

After the break I took to write yesterday’s entry, I saw the Michael Rapaport vehicle Special about a meter maid who signs up for a program to test a drug that is about to go to market. It seems that a side effect of the drug (one that only he experiences) is that he gets super powers, like levitation, the ability to walk through walls, etc. Either that, or he’s schizophrenic. I usually have a strong dislike for Rapaport, but he’s actually quite good and likeable here, and writer/directors Jeremy Passmore and Hal Haberman do a good job of maintaining the ambiguity of whether he is actually gifted or just confused.

When Special let out, I headed over to the Yarrow to catch Glastonbury, a doc about the festival of the same name that takes place in England every year. The film is directed by Julian Temple, the man behind The Filth and the Fury, and, despite being over two hours long (long movies are the bane of the festivalgoer), it is very entertaining and never boring; I could have actually done with it having been longer. It has a nice combination of footage of bands playing previous fests, interviews with people involved with or just attending the festival, and some random behind-the-scenes stuff (for an example in the latter category, there’s some footage of guys cleaning out the port-a-potties that had the audience squirming). Although I didn’t recognize all of the bands and the lion’s share of the footage seemed to be from recent festivals, there were still many highlights, such as the Velvet Underground playing “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” Nick Cave doing “Red Right Hand,” Bjork singing “Human Behaviour,” and Pulp playing “Common People.” It’s one of the best music docs to come along in some time.

The last film I saw last night was American Blackout, a documentary about how black voters are being disenfranchised from the system. Well, not quite. The film is billed as being about that, but most of it is centered around Cynthia McKinney, one of the most outspoken people on the subject. Not that those two things don’t go together, and the film is good, but it wasn’t quite as thorough or as wide-reaching as I was expecting.

First thing this morning I saw A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, a film written and directed by Dito Montiel, who wrote his memoir of the same name about three years ago. Guide has a big, recognizable cast (Robert Downey Jr., Rosario Dawson, etc.), and has been getting a lot of comparisons to the work of Scorsese, especially Mean Streets. Like practically half of the other movies I’ve seen here so far, I spent the majority of the film not liking it, but by the end it had won me over, and I need to see it again before passing final judgment. My instinct says that it wasn’t that good, but we’ll have to wait and see if I continue thinking about it.

Next up was a film in the midnight movies series here, Subject Two. It was the worst movie I’ve seen at Sundance 2006.

And just now I got out of Little Miss Sunshine, which, like Guide, has a large cast of recognizable people (Steve Carell, Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, Alan Arkin, etc.). It’s as funny as you or I have heard, but one thing that is striking about it is how mainstream it feels; it’s weird that it was independently financed and then picked up here. It seems set to make back way more than the $10 million spent on it in the domestic box office.