I have been following the news from the Sundance Film Festival with rapt attention. Sounds like a lot of lousy movies are being screened. Here's a nice summary from The New York Times.
January 26, 2007
Gold Rush Mentality at a Hustlin’ Sundance
By MANOHLA DARGIS
PARK CITY, Utah, Jan. 25 — Midway through this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the festival sent out a news release that underscored why so many now swarm around this mountain resort town every January without a ski lift ticket: several films that were first shown here had been nominated for Academy Awards, including “Little Miss Sunshine.” It was, said the director of the festival, Geoffrey Gilmore, “refreshing” that the academy had recognized “the quality of the storytelling and the talent of the actors in independent films that originally premiered” here.
Well, that’s one way of putting it. Another way is this: the big Hollywood studios are generally adept at creating event movies (think “Spider-Man”) and often incapable of creating anything else. And so, among their various strategies, the big studios send some of their brightest people to Sundance to shop for films and future projects, potential stars and possible franchises. Sometimes those bright people get lucky, as the ones from Fox Searchlight, a division of Twentieth Century Fox, did last year with “Little Miss Sunshine.” And sometimes those bright people buy “Hustle & Flow,” a potboiler about sensitive pimps that was picked up here two years ago by the new team at Paramount Pictures amid a lot of crowing.
Several lead players on that team are now history, and “Hustle & Flow” is on DVD, having earned little critical or public interest. Not surprisingly, the hustling and the flowing and the pimping continue stronger than ever at this media-saturated event, where the signal-to-noise ratio has become seriously out of whack. There may not be another “Little Miss Sunshine” at this year’s festival, but you wouldn’t know it from the lucrative deals or the old and new media types that feed on the offerings with little discrimination and often less taste, pumping up already overinflated rubbish like “Hounddog,” colloquially known here as “the Dakota Fanning rape movie,” while giving a pass to more appealing and modest offerings like “The Great World of Sound.”
“Hounddog” and the media storm that accompanied its world premiere on Monday expose the contradictions that grip Sundance, which insists on its commitment to quality even as it continues to program work that suggests otherwise. A Southern gothic about a white girl (Ms. Fanning) who learns how to sing the blues from a kindly black man after she is raped, the film had earned censure sight unseen from the likes of Sean Hannity on Fox News Channel. By the time “Hounddog” was shown here, rumors of death threats against the film’s writer and director, Deborah Kampmeier, were swirling among the packed, visibly energized audience members, some of whom had waited hours to see a movie that, like some of the loudest noises detonated at the festival, will barely register a whimper at the box office.
As sincere as it is stupid, “Hounddog” is pure art-house exploitation, as evidenced by the images of its 12-year-old star dressed in a wet T-shirt and panties, of her writhing on a bed and of her awkwardly grinding in a hootchy-kootchy pantomime to the Elvis Presley song of the film’s title. As in “The Accused” (the Jodie Foster rape movie), the film’s narrative momentum builds to the rape, which is discreetly staged; unfortunately, it is also presented with some of the same tropes of the classic movie love scene: there is a shot of the girl’s clutching hand and, after the assault, a close-up of her face. Ms. Fanning’s commitment to this material is unwavering in its creepiness.
Much like “Black Snake Moan,” yet another Sundance film about an oversexed white woman whose demons are exorcized by a blues-singing black man, “Hounddog” is rubbish. But it’s the kind of rubbish that comes with a Hollywood star and attracts maximum media attention. “Black Snake Moan” is also the kind of film that most audiences will soon get a chance to see: entertainingly risible, the movie, which stars a showboating Samuel L. Jackson and a startlingly thin Christina Ricci, is being released by Paramount Vantage, the specialty division of Paramount Pictures. Once upon a time, its writer and director, Craig Brewer, who also brought us “Hustle & Flow,” would have been churning out grindhouse quickies for Roger Corman. At Sundance, however, Mr. Brewer is a conquering hero, an auteur.
Mr. Brewer landed at Sundance two years ago with an independently financed film and left with a studio deal. For many, his good fortune probably seems like the ultimate dream, the perfect ending to the independent fairy tale. It is a dream that has little to do with art and vision and the independent cinema of John Cassavetes or, for that matter, the work of an early Sundance stalwart like Victor Nunez, whose lovely 1993 film “Ruby in Paradise” would probably get lost in the Hollywood shuffle these days. Despite the best-articulated intentions of the festival, exemplified by buttons it passed out emblazoned with the hopeful motto “Focus on Film,” Sundance encourages gold-rush fever. There is no denying that many fine films are still shown here, but all too often they aren’t the ones that keep this festival in the news.
Mr. Nunez directed a few films after “Ruby in Paradise,” but like a lot of the filmmakers who helped put Sundance on the map, he hasn’t been heard from lately. There are all sorts of reasons for this, including the hard truth that none of his subsequent films have been as well realized. Yet it is also true that filmmakers like Mr. Nunez, who makes modestly scaled regional features about imperfect characters, have a much harder time creating a dent in the film world than they did even 10 years ago. Hollywood’s incursion into the independent film realm has not only radically affected festivals like Sundance and turned them into a growth market, it has also changed the stakes for everyone involved. Modesty, after all, isn’t much of a virtue when you’re releasing a film with a multimillion-dollar ad campaign on thousands of screens.
In this respect, the single most depressing and brutally honest remark I heard all week, the statement that seemed to sum up what Sundance has become for many attendees, came from a distributor who explained why he had stayed to watch a bad comedy that features a clutch of low-level film and television actors. The movie might be lousy, he explained, but imagine “all those names on a box,” meaning, imagine all those recognizable names once they are printed on a DVD box. It didn’t matter that the film was incompetently made and, from the half-hour or so of it that I watched, unfunny in the extreme. It didn’t even matter that the film probably wouldn’t make much money when or if it was released in theaters. The box would be aesthetically and intellectually empty, but the box would sell.
And “The Great World of Sound”? Well, maybe it will sell after the festival ends on Sunday, though I hope it makes it into theaters, not just into a box. Directed by Craig Zobel, who wrote the screenplay with George Smith, this film about scam artists selling phony record deals to musicians in the South felt like a throwback in the best possible way, a reminder of the Sundance of “Ruby in Paradise.” Shot in high-definition video, “The Great World of Sound” isn’t much to look at, but its sense of place, of lonely hotel rooms and fly-by-night offices decorated with spray-painted gold records, is as nicely observed as its morally compromised characters. Low-key and absent even any Sundance stars, “The Great World of Sound” was, perhaps unsurprisingly, shown out of the main dramatic competition.
There were a handful of other good films this year, some of which may eventually wend their way to your local art house or your television set. As is often the case at Sundance, many were documentaries, including Julien Temple’s diverting, smartly put together “Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten,” about the former front man for the Clash. Equally smart, though a much tougher experience, is “Bajo Juarez, the City Devouring Its Daughters,” directed by Alejandra Sánchez and José Antonio Cordero, about the hundreds of women who have been murdered in Mexican border towns. Like “No End in Sight,” a devastating critique of the administration’s handling of the Iraq war, directed by Charles Ferguson, a Brookings Institution senior fellow, “Bajo Juarez” retells an old story exceptionally well.
