Sundance Film Festival Report, Part 2

This is L Mag contributor Danielle DiGiacomo's second report from the Sundance Film Festival. Her previous dispatch can be found here.

Well, I never did get to see The Guitar; sometimes Sundance organization is baffling — putting Redford's daughter’s film in such a tiny theater, it’s like they’re just TRYING to shut people out. So my colleague at Indiepix.net (full disclosure: I also work in documentary acquisitions at Indiepix, so I was wearing two very warm, fuzzy hats at this year's Sundance) and I went to the Industry Lounge and caught up on some work before catching a screening of The Wackness, one of the most talked about films at the festival. Now, here's another disclosure: my uncle worked on the film, so I promised him I'd catch it. And another: I can't stand white rich Upper East Side dudes who want to be black. So I was initially put out by the protagonist, and perhaps that colored my entire opinion of the film. I think I was one of two people at the screening who just could not connect with this film, and perhaps I was just starving and annoyed at the way it was trying so hard to capture that 90s zeitgeist. (Far too many references to Kurt Cobain's death and Guiliani jokes; yeah, we GET it. It takes place in the 90s.) The story, before I get up on my soapbox, concerns the emotional life of one Luke Shapiro, an 18-year old pot dealer who has just graduated from high school. All is not well a la Casa Shapiro. Luke's father has just lost a great deal of money, and his parents fight constantly. Perhaps this is why we first meet Luke at the office of a psychiatrist — a psychiatrist of the “wacky” and “unconventional” variety (see Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting) who charges Luke for these sessions in pot, which he smokes out of a large bong as Luke is leaving. In a troubled and hateful marriage himself, this shrink (played by a remarkable Ben Kingsley) also has a hottie for a daughter with whom Luke (still a virgin, and claiming to be unpopular) starts a romance. The film is well-written in many ways, with Luke's awkwardness and ennui being well captured, but Kingsley's character — who goes out and gets drunk, drops things on people's heads as a prank, makes out with a hippied-out Mary Kate Olsen, and gets arrested for “tagging” — is just too over the top to be believed. There are elements of The Wackness that work, and admittedly did so for 90% of the audience there. But ultimately, I just didn't buy it. Still, I suspect it will pick up a high-profile distribution deal and be in theatres in the next few months, so I'll let the readers draw their own conclusions and send me angry hate mail.

Whereas my last year at Sundance was dominated by fiction films (Sarah Polley's Away from Her and Andrea Arnold's Red Road being the most unforgettable), this year, the docs ruled. I already shouted out Alone in Four Walls, but I must add to that Margaret Brown's The Order of Myths (a beautifully crafted exploration of a racially divided Mardi Gras in Mobile, Alabama); Nanette Burnstein's American Teen (which chronicles the senior years of four teenagers in small town Indiana and whose celebration party offered up champagne and free sunglasses); and Christopher Bell's Bigger, Stronger, Faster, an examination of America's so-called “steroid subculture.”  Also buzzed about were some films at nearby Slamdance Film Festival, the punk rock version of Sundance, which takes place in an Old West-themed hotel on Main Street. Cynthia Lester's My Mother’s Garden, the trailer of which I had the opportunity to see several months back, is a personal exploration of the director’s mother, a Polish immigrant with an extreme case of hoarding disorder. (She accumulated so much she was eventually forced to sleep in her yard.) The film also subtly touches on the American obsession with consumerism and acquiring “stuff.” Finally, I did not get a chance to see it, but insiders told me that Kurt Kuenne's Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father.

Up next, some more narratives, more fried finger foods, and the short docs program.