Sundance Film Festival

Tonight’s awards ceremony handed out 26 awards to feature-length films. You can peruse the list here

This year 118 features were programmed from 21 countries, including 42 first-time directors. U.S. submissions of feature-length films totaled 1,905. An additional 1,756 features were submitted from outside the U.S.

That makes a total of 3661 features submitted, or 230 days of screening if viewed in their entirety. How does Sundance manage it?

If you consider that the typical indie feature takes three to four years to write, fundraise, shoot, and post, and costs hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars—and that the odds of theatrical success not to mention recouping investment are slim to none—what drives this activity?

I’d like to see a post-doctoral study in applied economics that models the intrinsic motivation for this mass activity, absent evident extrinsic rewards. It might win a Nobel someday.

(It certainly wouldn’t include the closing night party which follows the awards. Once the crowning event of the Festival, a showy promenade of Festival filmmakers and VIPs, it’s now a blow-out for festival volunteers and whomever’s still hanging around. Catering this year consisted of trays of Apple cobbler, raw veggies on a skewer fit for rabbits, and miniature candy apples–think peanuts on a Delta flight.)

In spite of the fact that no one surviving a week of Sundance can physically attend more than 30 films out of about 120—at best a quarter of what’s presented each year–here are my Mondo picks for 2009. Apologies to those I missed or skipped.

Dramatic Must-See:

Most powerful nightmare: Johnny Mad Dog. Liberian child soldiers on a rampage. Little left to the imagination. Phenomenal performances and music/sound design. Seizes you by the neck and doesn’t let go.

Flat-out funniest: In The Loop. Sharpest, fastest writing, wittiest acting of the entire Festival. A parable of governments bumbling their way into a recent war. Lacerates everyone. Great turn by James Gandolfini as a raging Pentagon general. No one profanes the English language like the English. I’m ready to see it again.

Most charismatic adventure: Sin Nombre. Mexican filmmaking has been on a roll for several years. This includes actors and cinematographers as well as directors. Amazing performances, verisimilitude you know is truthful (although you’ve never chilled with a Honduran gang), plus the most beautiful wide-screen photography of trains against distant landscapes since David Lean. Focus Features is distributing this, hopefully to a theater near you.

Most charismatic inner journey: Humpday. Will they or won’t they? The fun is getting there, as two college buds, one now married and settled down, the other stroking his inner Jack Kerouac, drunkenly concoct an art project: two straight guys having sex on camera, starring themselves. Superb acting in one long emotional close-up.

Documentary Must-See:

Best thriller: The Cove. The original trainer of TV’s Flipper prepares a high-tech assault on a Japanese village with an awful secret: the mass slaughter of bottle-nose dolphins in a hidden cove. Weapon of choice: tiny HD camcorders to show the world what’s going on. No audience departed dry-eyed.

Best myth-making: We Live in Public. ‘90s dot-com millionaire and driving force behind Manhattan’s Pseudo.com Internet TV studios, Josh Harris, was always ahead of his times—or was he? My memory of those times and the people who inhabited them is different from what is presented here, but one thing is certain: as a gothic tale of metastasizing ego and sociopathic manipulation that would awe Machiavelli, this documentary has no equal.

Best restorative: The Yes Men Fix the World. And they do. From exposing corporate malfeasance (up to and including mass murder) in the case of Dow Chemical in Bhopal, India, to FEMA’s fecklessness in New Orleans, this dynamic duo raises use of false pretenses, hyperbolic impersonation, and public hoax to an art form. You won’t stop laughing–or marveling at their chutzpah.

Best videotaped stage play: Passing Strange. Not a documentary (as advertised) as much as a remarkable recording of the most vibrant Broadway rock musical to come along in ages. Spike Lee’s 2 hr. 15 min. version of writer/composer/performer Stew’s award-winning autobiographical coming-of-age jaunt from LA to Amsterdam to Berlin does everyone proud, especially the Sundance Institute, which nurtured this extraordinary musical from the outset. (Stew originated and workshopped “Passing Strange” at the Institute’s Theater, Screenwriter’s, and Director’s Labs.) Multicamera editing by long-time Spike collaborator Barry Alexander Brown is nothing short of masterful.

OK, that’s it. Over and out from Park City. Thanks for following my Sundance blog.

Let’s meet up again next year for Sundance 2010!

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