By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com
Sundance Dispatch: Rants and Raves
It’s officially Day Four for me here at the Sundance Film Festival, and so far I have yet to see a film I actively dislike at the fest — which, if you’ve ever been to Sundance, you know is a bit of a minor miracle. Granted, I’ve been cherry-picking those films that I think have the least likelihood of being wretched, but still, to be 11 for 11 on Day Four at Sundance is pretty flipping amazing.
The press line situation at Sundance this year, though, has been unusually problematic. For whatever reason — the loss of one of the major venues, the Racquet Club, perhaps? — the fest is now using the big screening room at the Yarrow Hotel, which used to be reserved for P&I screenings, for public screenings. P & I screenings have been largely relegated to three screens at the Holiday Village cinema, which is problematic because those theaters are all relatively small. And for the first time since I’ve been coming to Sundance, they’re queuing up press out in the tent in the parking lot for the P&I screenings, when we used to be able to just walk right up and sign in 15-20 minutes before the screening started.
The combination of smaller screening rooms and what seem to be a lot more industry passes than I’ve ever seen, and the cattle-chute line-herding process they’ve put in place, have all added up to folks getting shut out of screenings — a lot of folks in some cases (see: Margin Call and Like Crazy, among others). This and the loss of the press lounge at the fest this year have added up to a good deal of grumbling on the ground among the press corps, who need to be able to see these films in order to do the jobs they are here in Park City to do.
Because of the shutouts, people are now lining up for many of the screenings an hour or more early — something I’ve only experienced before at this fest for a few hotly buzzed titles. Once people start lining up early, everyone else who’s showing up later realizes they needed to get there earlier, so then they start lining up even earlier, and so on, and so on, and so on. It becomes next to impossible to hit screenings back-to-back when you have to allow an hour of padding just to get in line.
And while the free Sundance wifi works in the tent, there’s nowhere to sit but the damp, dirty floor, and nowhere to plug in if your laptop starts running low on juice. I’m seeing roughly 30 films at Sundance this year, so if I spend 45 minutes to an hour waiting in line for most of those films, I figure I will have spent maybe 24 hours total just waiting in line. That represents a lot of time that I could be spending either watching other movies or being productive writing about those I have seen.
So for press, the line issue isn’t just something to bitch about here at Sundance, like we might good naturedly bitch about the apocalyptic theater loop shuttle or the wretchedly bad food at the Chinese buffet (which finally shuttered this year, taking with it a long-standing Sundance tradition among my pack of friends of taking our chances on getting food poisoning there at least once during the fest).
The line situation directly impacts our ability to work, and it doesn’t have to be that way. Queue people up using the bar codes on our badges (what happened to the handy-dandy bar code guns anyhow? Why have they been replaced by the very 1990s method of volunteers writing down every single name and outlet on a clipboard)? Or use the method I recall from a few years back of wristbanding people in the order in which they lined up (this was handy for preventing the ubiquitous line-jumping, too … people couldn’t slip into line ahead of the pack because they didn’t have wristbands.
However! None of this is the fault of the fest volunteers, and since I have seen a more than a few cases of rude and pissy P&I folks yelling at volunteers, I feel compelled here to insert what sadly has become a regular fest rant for me: These people are volunteering their time to make YOUR job easier. So don’t — repeat — DON’T be a dick. Or bad fest karma shall surely befall ye.
Anyhow. Enough about the line situation, I’ll put it in a memo in the end-of-fest survey. What about the films? Apart from those I’ve reviewed already, and those for which I’m working on full reviews as we speak (Like Crazy, The Future, Pariah and Terri), I’ve seen a couple others worth noting.
The Roger Corman doc, Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel, was surprisingly engaging, funny, and touching, albeit perhaps a tad longer than it needs to be. Jack Nicholson is interviewed it, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him come across as so real and honest. I learned a great deal about Corman from watching it, and it’s definitely recommended viewing for any would-be indie filmmaker who thinks it’s just too hard to do it on your own.
Corman’s philosophy of keep trying, and trying, and then trying some more was inspiring, but my favorite bit was where he goes off in an interview about the studio tentpole system that we have now, and how wasteful, socially irresponsible, and downright disgusting he finds it for a studio to spend $30 million making a movie. Makes you wonder what he thinks of the $100 million films.
I also caught a film called The Salesman the other night; it’s a Canadian film about Marcel, an older gentleman who’s been a successful car salesman his whole life. The town’s main employer, a paper plant, has been unofficially shut down for almost a year, which has had a detrimental domino effect on the town’s economy and morale. Marcel’s daughter Maryse would like him to retire, but with his wife deceased and no family besides his daughter and young grandson to keep him occupied, the vivacious, extroverted Marcel prefers to keep working at the car dealership, where he’s consistently salesman of the month and looked up to by the other employees.
This film is very deliberatly paced (when I say “deliberately paced,” I mean: think Tulpan, Silent Souls, Meek’s Cutoff, Claire Denis, et al). The film starts off with a haunting image of a dead moose in the snow on the side of a highway, being hauled by a wench onto a trailer, blood trailing vividly against the white snow, and then pans to a wrecked car, also on a trailer. Visual imagery of endless white snow blowing, blanketing cars, dusting pedestrians, covering everything, permeates the film (it it was grainier and in black and white, and accompanied by droll narrative, it might evoke My Winnipeg).
It takes over an hour for things to really start coming together; once it does, though, it’s worth the long set-up. At 107 minutes it clocks in about 20 minutes too long; there’s a moment I felt would have been emotionally perfect for ending the film, but then it keeps going. And then there was another moment about 10 minutes after that, when I thought, “Okay, great, end it right there.” But it keeps going. This is the first feature from director Sebastien Pilote, though, and no doubt he’ll learn how to trim a story down to the essential emotional points so as not to lose the audience. With some trimming, though, this film could play well to the arthouse crowd.
P.S. One last rant before I end this dispatch: People, seriously. You’ve all been to fests before, right? You know there’s this generally understood concept about NOT TEXTING DURING MOVIES, right? So stop it. Just stop. Yes, I mean you. And you. And you, too. Yes, I know who you are, and I still don’t care. Stop it. Thanks.
