Issue 03: Sundancepalooza, Honoring Jacques Rivette, #OscarsSoWhite
January is the month of new beginnings and, more importantly, the Sundance Film Festival. Sundance is always the first in line of the high-profile festivals (a club including, to my mind, Berlin, Cannes, Venice, Toronto, and New York). Being first brings with it the responsibility of setting the tone for the year to come in film.
Sundance has been responsible for launching the careers of a number of now high-profile directors: Stephen Soderbergh, the Coen brothers, Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson Richard Linklater, Ava Duvernay. With a pedigree like that, everyone with any sort of vested interest in the film industry approaches the annual showcase of independent film with eyes peeled for the Next Breakout Thing. Some years deliver; recent festivals have brought us “Beasts of the Southern Wild”, “Whiplash”, “Winter's Bone” and Jennifer Lawrence with it.
Other years are disappointments, and last year's slate of movies was so crushingly mediocre that it seemed to set the mood for the rest of the year in film (Berlin delivered some nice surprises, many of which have yet to be released in the U.S., but Cannes, Venice, and Toronto were full of disappointments last year). 2015's Grand Jury Prize winner, teen cancer drama “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” enjoyed a critical savaging and failed to catch much widespread traction once it actually hit theaters. Of the festival's other titles, “Tangerine” scored some late-season indie cred among discerning cinephiles and casual Netflixers alike; “Brooklyn” earned an Oscar nomination for Best Picture but rode that awards season wave while disavowing its Sundance beginnings in marketing and campaigning.
Take a peek at Twitter or the film website of your choice and the story of the 2016 Sundance Film Festival rings loud and clear: especially compared to the last iteration, this year was a smashing success. The problem I've found in trying to parse the volumes of 140 character-sized praise is that there are just too many movies this year worth keeping tabs on—and even more that keep creeping out from the shadows. Whereas the competition lineups of other festivals curate a selection of films with built-in buzz, everything at Sundance's half dozen or so sidebars bears the promise of discovery. Aside from the handful of films by returning directors each year, Sundance goers approach the festival expecting to be surprised and enchanted everywhere they turn.
With that mindset, even the smallest of surprises can get blown out of the water by critics running on three hours of sleep and deliriously caught up in the excitement of reconnecting with old and new colleagues in the snowy environs of Salt Lake (this year they even fabricated a Kristin Wiig film with which to catfish the internet for their insider amusement). When everyone is pouring out praise over everything, it becomes more difficult to discern what actually is worth seeing and, perhaps even trickier, appropriately temper your expectations to avoid a letdown later in the year. Not to mention that no two people viewing the festival from the outside will come away with the same set of movies to watch out for—it's humanly impossible to see every movie at the festival, so each critic or reporter in attendance will have a slightly different idea of what the best and worst of the year's offerings were.
So what should you keep your eyes peeled for this year? Here's a small sampling from what I've gathered:
“Manchester by the Sea”, the new Boston-based grief drama from “Margaret” and “You Can Count on Me” director Kenneth Lonergan;
“The Birth of a Nation”, the Nat Turner slave revolt biography that became the highest-selling acquisition in the festival's history (Fox Searchlight picked it up for a cool $17.5 million);
“Kate Plays Christine”, a documentary reenactment (?) of the real-life prefigurement of “Network”'s Howard Beale;
“Love and Friendship”, Whit Stillman's long-awaited Jane Austen adaptation;
“The Eyes of My Mother”, a horror film that already has me planning a night shut in at home with coffee and Austen;
“Weiner”, a documentary about Anthony Weiner (not to be confused with “Weiner Dog”, the story of how one dachshund touches the lives of a tapestry of unconnected characters);
“Swiss Army Man”: Look. This movie is probably terrible. It prompted dozens of walkouts at its premiere. But this is a movie—the movie—about a castaway Paul Dano making his desert island getaway astride Daniel Radcliffe's flatulent corpse. I…I have nothing to add.
One of the founding fathers of the French New Wave passed away last week, so I feel obliged to say a few words of tribute. Next to the likes of Godard and Truffaut, Jacques Rivette was an obscurity for American audiences. Whereas Godard beguiles with his obstuse experimentation and Truffaut enthralled with his critical exuberance and love affair with Hollywood templates, Rivette blew up the limits of cinema altogether We're talking about the director of the LEGENDARILY 13-hour long “Out 1” (I can hear you rolling your eyes from all the way over here).
Because Rivette's films are so long, and because their improvisations tend to eschew traditional storytelling formats, his movies have never reached a wide audience abroad. My sole brush in with his œuvre came this past December, when I took the train to New York for the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Lynch/Rivette retrospective. (Yes. I am now one of those people who will go to New York for the purpose of seeing movies I can't see otherwise. Look at my life, look at my choices—I know, I know.) While I was in town, they were presenting “Céline and Julie Go Boating”, all 3 and a quarter hours of it, paired up against “Mulholland Drive”.
Though it dates back to the 70s C&J never got a U.S. home video release, so this really was one of those cases where it was understandable to go out of my way to see it. Thirty minutes in, the movie had yet to arrive at a point. I couldn't help but stare on in bewilderment at the senseless, shapeless farce unfolding before me; by some stroke of sheer magic I was able to endure the entirety of the film without running to take the bathroom break a movie of such arduous length would seem to oblige.
So what did I get for my time and patience? Well…I'm not really sure. C&J is brimming with the sort of freewheeling caprice that only films of a certain length can muster up. In devoting so much of the first half of the film to trying to parse just what the hell am I watching, I realized about halfway through that I was missing out on half the fun. Rivette wasn't interested in using cinema in quite the same way as anyone else; his voracious appetite for film (he is said to have watched everything) engendered a peculiar sensibility that allowed him to see the possibilitiesbehind the usual constraints of filmmaking—palatable runtimes, marketability, marquee stars, plot, point. Stripped of all those so-called essentials and with no budget to make back, his films uniquely are able to depict the one thing that most movies adequately can't: the joy of experiencing life as an adventure with no predetermined beginnings or ends.
Articles, News, and Interviews
Not quite documentary, not entirely fiction: what's the deal with “The Big Short”? http://bit.ly/1OJRUoa
David Lynch's fingerprints are all over Hollywood. http://theatln.tc/1OOmZ7Z
Bill Simmons and Wesley Morris have a lot to say about the Oscars (podcast): http://bit.ly/1JiWYkm
Actually, lots of people have lots to say about the Oscars. Roxane Gay has for my money the definitive take on #OscarsSoWhite and why diversity should be such a big deal for not just the Academy, but the film industry. http://nyti.ms/1nNgcVx
…and to their small credit, the Academy was quick to respond to the outlash against this year's racially-vanilla nominees. Effective immediately, here's how they're planning on changing things up. http://bit.ly/1RNQfll
“Inside Llewyn Davis” bombed at the box office for precisely the inverse reason why superhero movies fare so well: failure may be inevitable in life, but nobody wants to watch a movie about it. (“Hail, Caesar!” on the other hand…) http://bit.ly/1SKmpOP
Kathryn Bigelow heads to Detroit for her “Zero Dark Thirty” followup. http://bit.ly/1RR1HfO
A writer grieves for her father through five 2015 movies. http://bit.ly/23xS8Xc
Poster of the Day
Say what you want about “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”, but this artistic interpretation of the spoof to end all spoofs is pretty rad. http://bit.ly/20ALqgJ