Park City: A Few Additional Thoughts

Despite my best efforts, I've settled right back into the rhythms of Second Borough existence in the City that never sleeps. It doesn't quite miss sleep like Park City the third week of January though. Having returned, I marveled in how quickly I was back to my old act; I feel like I'm one of the few coastal dwellers I've talked to who returned from the mountains without a cold or flu. I've thought much about the films I saw in Utah, and while I may have second thoughts about some of them, (Was Reversion really that interesting? Was Ballast as much of a phony as I initially thought?) I stand by most of my observations, and in particular, since I was unable to get around to it last week, I want to briefly point out just how wonderful Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden's Sugar is, and just how artistically, intellectually and emotionally bankrupt Clark Gregg's Choke turned out to be. Here's hoping that the fine people at HBO decide to go theatrical with Sugar and that by it's August 1st release date, Fox Searchlight pull some Harvey Scissorhands action on the most pointless, aesthetically banal attempt at provocation I've seen in awhile.

Sugar is, simply put, the most effecting movie about loneliness and cultural dislocation I've seen in sometime, a fish out of water tale that is sweet, funny, sad, tough, immensely loveable and never cliched. Fleck and Boden, again working with stud DP Andrej Parikh, opt for a more classical lensing style than their previous indie, which was shot in graceful but conventional hand held. This film, full on slow dollies, gentle rack focuses and wide angle lenses, captures the uninflected beauty of the game of baseball in a way I thought previously impossible. The details are all just perfect, Bodens cutting expressing the simple cause and effect relationship of pitch placement to strike out, ground ball to double play or strike out to infield toss around with a joy and genuine fascination that is just rapturous. Beyond that, we find a film that perfectly understands the notion of baseball, our oldest and grandest game, as a symbol of the American Dream for so many Latin American ballplayers. They are represented by a stunning ensemble of hungry young men and given a special voice within the stunning, understated debut performance by Algenis Perez Soto, who plays a gifted young right handed pitcher Miguel Santos. A fiery 20 year old Dominican who like so many, may not have all the tools, which although physical are mostly mental and emotional, to get to the majors, Soto steals every scene. A sports film about someone who is not quite good enough, and must come to terms with finding a more adequate place in which to put his skills for and love of a game is quite a departure, as radical a reversal for a genre as Boden and Fleck devised for the patriarchal white teacher in the ghetto drama that they deconstructed with Half Nelson. This is a beautiful film that must be seen, if not least for former Reds pitcher Jose Rijo, perhaps my favorite of all time, at whose Dominican baseball complex a number of early scenes were filmed, and who plays a small role as the man who informs Soto of his trip to America.

Choke doesn't work in any way. It's funny, al least sporadically, during its first half. How could it not be. The source material, from Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk, was hysterical at times and conceptually audacious. But after the initial shock and renewed interest that builds as such a biting series of concepts and satirical targets are introduced, one quickly realizes that Mr. Gregg's movie is flat and seemingly undirected. He coaxes the most uninteresting lensing out of the consistently wonderful Tim Orr that I've yet seen. As the sex addicted, colonial theme park working, Choking to feel something, mommy issues galore protagonist Victor Mancini, Sam Rockwell is having a whole lot of fun. It's too bad the audience isn't. I read the book long ago, but everything seems to be reduced, stripped of its layers and made to seem cheap and small in Choke. Angelica Huston is miscast as his borderline nihilist, Italian-American mother who is currently wasting away in a nursing home and who holds a dangerous if absurd secret that will transform Victor's life forever. Her scenes are sometimes painful to watch, Huston seeming unsure of just where to take this material. As are Kelly MacDonald's as his love interest, a worker at the nursing home who may not be everything she claims to be. The pervasive irony from the book is present in every frame, but not the sad undercurrent with which we proceed through the book, which gives it a smidgen of meaning, the acidic aftertaste which allows Palahniuk to approach Burroughs instead of pomo hackdom. Especially unforgivable is the ending, which takes one of those especially ironic/sad episodes from the novel (the beginning of Mancini's sex addiction, as personified by a random hook-up in an airplane bathroom) and re-appropriates it as his way to true love with MacDonald's character. Not only does it not live up to the entire logic of the narrative, but it proves that the director either didn't understand or didn't care about the author's intentions. The relevatory, transformative notions about Victor's identity, which build to a terrific, if somewhat unsatisfying climax in the novel, are completely scrapped. The film begins to move in this direction, and then abruptly stops, the original ending, which was shot, a victim of poor production values. Sad as it is, this film isn't worth the stock Fight Club was printed on.

Park City Dispatch #3 - "A Good Day To Be Black and Sexy" & "Ballast"

Fest screenings after the first weekend of films is always my favorite treat in Park City. As word of mouth builds for little known titles and arguments erupt over headlining films, a new intensity starts to grip the experience of watching some of these movies. As the hordes of starwatching partygoers begin to leave town, one can really begin to "focus on film", as Mr. Redford would have us do. A few gems came across my radar early in the week, while the most disappointing film was of course the first to sell.

A groundbreaking film, Dennis Dortch's "A Good Day To Be Black and Sexy" is, despite its provocative title, getting only a smidgen of the notices that Lance Hammer's "Ballast" is when people begin to talk about so called "Black" films in Park City. The films exist on almost completely opposite ends of the filmmaking spectrum - "Black and Sexy" is a frank, joyous, aesthetically alive comedy of manners, where "Ballast" is an oblique, joyless superimposition of the Dardenne Brothers style on the overwrought concerns of tragedy stricken Blacks living in the Mississippi Delta.

Dortch opens with a card that reads "A 1976 experience" and a title logo that suggests the blaxploitation era. Given theses early indicators and title of the film, one immediately assumes they're in for another reductive series of colonial gazes at the black body. Yet over the course of six wonderful vignettes among the young, black middle classes in LA, Mr. Dortch's film is as earnest and consistently amusing about the sexual behavior of post millennial Los Angelenos, black or not, as any filmmaker has been in a long time. Full of jump cuts, naturalistic camera work, and situations never before glimpsed in narrative films , "A Good Day To Be Black and Sexy" exorcises the demons of Toms, Coons, Mammies and Bucks that honest black cinematic representation is constantly attempting to dislodge from the American psyche. Never salacious or mean spirited, the vignettes don't shy away from the uncomfortable aspects of modern sexuality and maintain a healthy irreverence in their sexual politics. Mr. Dortch is quite a find and we'll forgive him for siting the consistently bubbleheaded Melvin Van Peebles as an influence during his Q&A, his film's style closer in spirit to Paul Morrissey and the French New Wave.

"Ballast" is a closed system. It's long take, diagetic sound heavy style, borrowed from any number of films on the European fest circuit, isn't so ill suited to black stories; its just that it feels so unnaturally imposed on these particular people, who find themselves in a situation so grim that the film doesn't know how to treat it other than with a stiff upper lip and a style that's better at suggesting meaning than actually finding it.

A pair of twins attempt suicide. One, whose child and ex-lover live next door, is successful. The other, despite using a gun instead of pills, is not. What follows is a depiction of how he, his nephew and his brother's ex-lover (we're never sure if they were married) come to grips with these dire circumstances, amidst the poverty and boredom of lower Mississippi. Only the milieu and the characters' behavior rarely ring as authentic in a film that is positing its authenticity from frame one. Save the struggling mother, no one laughs or cries, emotion having been drained completely from the men's visages. None of the down home, aw shucks humor that has sustained oppressed, poverty stricken southern black since the Middle Passage can be found in this vacuous movie. Like most films working in this mode, we are given next to zero exposition up front, having character information parsed out to us piece by piece over the course of the film's running time. Hammer is certainly a talent, and "Ballast" will appeal to a liberal, largely white art film constituency that has very little connection to the representational issues the film isn't really aware of. For a film taking place in a seat of African-American culture, it has little to say about these matters, it being so cloistered and locked off in its pretensions to resonate as anything other than a failed and not especially noble experiment.

Park City Dispatch #2 - "Sleep Dealer"

Synthesizing the concerns of the third world with elements of mainstream sci-fi films like Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days and David Cronenberg’s Existrenz and a touch of William Gibson’s futuristic cynicism, Sleep Dealer, Alex Rivera’s long awaited directorial debut premiered last night at Sundance to a mostly appreciative audience, although this particular critic was left cold by the film’s lack of urgency and it’s simplistic take on the challenges of globalization. It’s a complex and aesthetically accomplished movie at times, a narrowly focused, clumsily structured and haplessly executed movie at others, but without a well defined antagonist for its cast of attractive Latinos, it’s only baiting the liberal, largely white audiences that make up Sundance screenings and coastal specialty filmgoers. A shame, because Rivera is clearly a gifted conceptualist and his movie has all the elements of a haunting cautionary tale, with a script bursts with contemporary relevance, but falls apart, much like Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, because of its lack of thematic cohesion and ideological clarity.

Sometime in the near future, Memo (Luis Fernando Pena), a young man who’s rural Mexican town has been ravaged by the daming of a local river by an American Corporation, builds something resembling a satellite dish which allows him to access the internet like network in which all information is exchanged and a reality TVesque show depicts a remote controlled fighter plane killing terrorists. Live. His father and family, still tied to the land and traditions that have governed them and their ancestors, don’t quite grasp his ambitions, his father, while staring out at the dam which ruined his farm, telling his son that “he doesn’t know who he is”.

It’s only when our identity challenged protagonist recognizes, while watching the show in which the fighter, bent on destroying the “Aqua Terrorists” who threaten various Mexican dams, his father’s nearby home as the target, the roof of which serves as the dish’s home, does Memo realize he’s made a fatal mistake. His father, in just one of many campy, poorly executed CGI sequences in Sleep Dealer, is blown up by the fighter. The man controlling the drone, Rudolph Ramirez (Jacob Vargas), a star Mexican-American fighter pilot, senses he’s done something wrong, but of course, won’t be able to rectify he’s “I was just following orders” moment until act three.

Ramirez, like the Mexican workers Memo soon joins to find work to support his family, is connected to a central mainframe by neon blue wire which feed to “nodes” up and down there arms and back, allowing him to flight the plane from a module in Southern California. Memo starts a romance with Luz (gorgeous newcomer Leonor Varela), whom he meets on the bus to Tijuana. She installs nodes in his body, and soon he takes a job, in a room full of “connected” workers, who control drones which construct buildings, babysit children, and clean houses across the US.

For an indie, the film is full of provocative ideas and wonderful futuristic details like this, but it loses its way as it begins to tighten circumstances that bind Rudy and Memo. Rudy is paying Luz, whom he knows online, to deduce Memo’s motivations for coming to Tijuana. Ultimately, after telling the man he killed his father (by far the film’s most dubious, implausible, emotionally underserved sequence), he enlists Memo’s help in his attempt to destroy the dam.

Almost sensual but not quite, Lisa Renzler’s crisp, colorful Super 16mm lensing can’t help but make the poorly executed CGI look even worse. The film is nothing if not anti-American in many of it’s sentiments and perhaps deservedly so, but the narrative’s bait and switch, in which the natural Latin antagonist become the agent of positive, if not quite revolutionary change by picture’s end, is pretty lame. Still, a film as packed with ideas as this one can’t be completely written off.

Park City Dispatch #1 - "Reversion"

The festivals with dance at the end of their monikers got underway yesterday, with Mr. Redford trading in 2007's theme, "Focus on Film", with the even more oblique, "Film Takes Place". While the glitter of opening night at the Eccles was all about playwright turned film director Martin McDounough's "In Bruges", friday morning the Egyptian Theater, Sundance's signature screening palace, played host to Mia Trachinger's weird, beguiling new take on the low-fi, sci-fi dystopia genre, "Reversion". In front of a less than sell out crowd for a 9:15am screening, Trachinger, whose "Bunny" was a major success of the festival circuit a few years ago, unspooled her new pic, shot in low end HD, but with ideas and concepts that more than make up for its pedestrian aesthetics. Like "Alphaville" or "Code 46", the film visits a future that resembles the present, with ordinary spaces (in this case, west Los Angeles) dominated by bizarre social pathologies, technological dislocation, the erosion of conventional morality, and in the case Trachinger's fascinating if not entirely satisfying film, a sub caste of outsiders afflicted with a strange, debilitating ability to see into their own futures. The picture avoids exposition altogether, throwing us right into the chaos of Eva's world, who, as embodied by the terrific newcomer Leslie Silva, spends her time stealing cars, guns and food when she isn't haunted by visions of a murder she can't help but commit. That the future victim is her boyfriend, also afflicted with the prophetic syndrome, sustains the narrative with some tension, even if Trachinger seems more interested in the philosophical and ideological issues raised by her narrative than with the people who inhabit it.

Although it doesn't engage on an emotional level, "Reversion" presents an allegory for the inability of post-modern Americans to prevent themselves from contributing to their own demise. Deluged with information about the myriad ways in which we, in collusion with our gutless leaders in Washington, are polluting the Earth, destroying our international reputation with needless wars and are increasingly susceptible to disease, famine and terror, most Americans (and perhaps most humans) find themselves resigned to an increasingly bleak outlook on the future of the planet. Like "Children of Men" or "Time of the Wolf", albeit on a much smaller scale, "Reversion" shows us what happens in a world devoid of hope, where men find themselves reverting to their most animalistic, ungovernable impulses even as consciousness. Hopefully a brave distributor will be willing to take on this difficult but rewarding movie.