It would appear from the recent Sundance Film Festival press release that there will be enough candy on the shelf this year to satisfy the cultural sweet tooth of even the most hard-to-please independent film buff. Jars-full of eye candy, ear candy, left- and right-brain candy, and, as is usually the case, highly esoteric candy, once again await the celluloid enthusiast.
I always look forward to getting my first peek at the lineup of films chosen to be screened at each year’s festival. And, although I often whine about my wish-list-to-ticket-acquisition ratio, the process is something I enjoy. Anyway, many of the films I miss during the festival itself often show up later through the Park City Film Series, the Salt Lake Film Society, in general release, or on DVD.
As a “doc-head” (documentary fan), I immediately default to the U.S. Documentary Competition category and, on the surface anyway, this year’s selections appear to be quite texture-rich.
“Freedom Riders” chronicles the courageous story of those civil-rights activist who put their physical well-being where their mouths were back during the early ’60s when the nation’s status-quo mindsets either fought them tooth-and-nail or stood by while the Ku Klux Klan and their redneck cronies bashed in their skulls. In this day and age of Limbaugh-Palin revisionist history, this should be required viewing in schools everywhere.
Another world premiere doc, “I’m Pat _______ Tillman,” emerges from more recent headlines. The story of the football star who quit the NFL to become a U.S. Army Ranger and lost his life back in 2004 in a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan is now familiar to most. This film follows the family’s struggle for truth during the aftermath.
“Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child” is a story that didn’t get much attention as it played out in real time. Focusing upon the short life of a Brooklyn-born, Haitian-Puerto Rican graffiti-poet and musician, it provides an inquiry into his art, which both contributed to and transcended the African-influenced modernist idiom of Picasso and Matisse during its journey from the street to the museum and beyond.
Sebastian Junger, author of the riveting book “The Perfect Storm,” along with co-director Tim Hetherington, are coming to town to premiere their documentary “Repostro,” a film both out of the box and out of the foxhole, as it were. Filming required digging in with a combat platoon with the camera rolling for a year in Afghanistan while attempting to put the Taliban on the run. I imagine they saved money on set decoration and craft services.
What first caught my eye in the U.S. Dramatic Competition category, the film that cut closest to my cultural bone as it were, is the “non-fiction drama” entitled “Howl.” Centered around the young Allen Ginsberg as he attempts to locate his poetic muse, write and perform his iconic work “Howl,” and the subsequent precedent-shattering obscenity trial of publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the film, as the poem was so judged, is rumored to contain “redeeming social importance.” That’s enough for me!
Another film, “Herser,” got my attention when a short blurb used the phrase “anarchical trickster” when referring to its protagonist. That and the fact that Joseph Gordon-Levitt was the first cast member listed and Natalie Portman the second.
With performances such as the young Norman Maclean in “A River Runs Through It,” the wry hardboiled gumshoe in 2004’s classic high-school whodunit “Brick,” and the troubled Iraq-vet in last year’s “Stop-Loss,” Gordon-Levitt has had a way of suspending disbelief each time out. As has Ms. Portman since her feature debut at age thirteen as hit-man Jean Reno’s young friend and improbable protégé in “The Professional.”
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is also involved in an off-screen production at this year’s festival which Sundance describes as “part media workshop, part social network, and part art exhibition.” Called “hitRECord.org,” it is a “hybrid production enterprise that taps crowd sourced creativity and topples traditional ideas of artistic ownership, online communication, and art production.” Sounds like a Norman Maclean line to me.
Kristen Stewart is back and, I must say, although I haven’t seen any “Twilight” films, that I found her laid-back style in both “Into the Wild” and “Adventureland” quite ingratiating. “Welcome to the Rileys” also stars James Gandolfini but I don’t think anyone gets “whacked.”
I found “His and Hers,” a film screening in the World Cinema Documentary Competition and featuring 70 Irish women talking about relationships, both intriguing and chill-inducing. Somewhere in the back of my mind I have a feeling that I’ve been there and done that.
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and a free-lance writer with a background in commercial and community radio, among other pursuits. He has been a columnist and feature writer for various Park City publications going back to 1973.