(open on my chair, laptop at my side)
Many years ago at NCMC, when I could actually teach a film course on Stanley Kubrick and students would actually show up, the Liberal Arts Administrator right next door to my office fancifully told me I should go to the Sundance Film Festival to study up on film, as if time and money were no object to a freshly minted community college professor. Thankfully, a couple years after that, Michael Moore started the Traverse City Film Festival, which I went to for many years as the next best thing to Sundance. Sure, the TCFF had singular moments – I got to see Borat (2006) in a packed theater months before it had a release elsewhere – but generally, it was pretty punishing to sit next to entitled TC limo liberals as they munched on snacks and checked their cell phones and saved small uncomfortable seats. As much as I wanted to support local endeavors, especially those in the film biz, I went to TCFF less and less until I stopped completely a few years ago.
So when it was announced that the Sundance Film Festival was going completely online for 2021, I took the chance to finally take the plunge I wanted to over two decades ago. Initially, I bought a ticket for only one movie – The Sparks Brothers, a documentary directed by Edgar Wright – but at some point, I decided to cast the cinematic net a bit wider, so I ultimately landed on the following twelve films over this past week:
29 January: How It Ends + In the Earth
30 January: The Sparks Brothers + Passing
31 January: Knocking + On the Count of Three + Land
1 February: Eight for Silver + Mass
2 February: Pleasure + All Light, Everywhere + We’re All Going to the World’s Fair
Of course, I missed out on a few that I would have liked to have seen, but I feel like I supported the festival pretty well. I picked wry documentaries and genre exercises, psychological horror and films suffused with tragedy and loss, along with a couple of well-made movies that were distinctly unpleasant watches. In other words, it was a fantastic week of my kind of cinematic experience.
How It Ends – A meandering episodic picaresque with shambolic charms to spare, set on the last day on Earth, with an aces performance from co-director Zoe Lister-Jones, who seems to be able to do anything in front of or behind the camera. Brief cameos, comedic moments wrung from awkward misunderstandings and divergent paths, it managed to dab into the underlying pandemic buzz that seems to be humming all around, but with a tailored individuality that somehow speaks to everyone.
In The Earth – A pandemic-driven English folk horror with writer/director Ben Wheatley’s typical verve and energy, although I’m not sure the narrative was as coherent as it might have been (but then again, isn’t that the pandemic in a nutshell?) but with gross-outs and psychedelia and conspiracies abound, disambiguation was the order of the day. Not his best work, but one that possessed Wheatley's singular charms as a filmmaker.
The Sparks Brothers – It was almost 2.5 hours and I still wanted more from a perfect marriage of a beloved band of brothers and a superlative director who balanced cinematic craft and fanboy perspective. I was anticipating this movie for months ever since it was first announced, and I smiled here and there from beginning to end. Sometimes, all it takes is 50 years of laboring in semi-obscurity before someone notices.
Passing – An intricately crafted portrait of urban Black experience in the Roaring Twenties, told with whispers and glances and internalized struggles of race and class and gender and orientation, and a tragic example of how destructive those forces can be. It’s always great to see actors you admire for one skill set show that they can take another creative step, and writer/director Rebecca Hall turned the trick, creating a sealed Swiss watch of a film, a timepiece of elegance and beauty.
Knocking – The easy synopsis would be gaslighting as the daily horror for women, with psychological trauma manifest as externalities mistaken for reality. Not quite sure it nailed the ending, but it was a taut tightrope of mounting anxiety and incremental erosion, and I'm sure it would have packed a better punch had I actually watched it at midnight.
On the Count of Three – Jerrod Carmichael is a compelling performer in that he engages some rather weighty concepts in a relatively laconic and humorous framework, and if you’re attuned to the particular wavelengths he's putting out, his work on television and stand-up can be pretty rewarding. This was his film directorial debut, which follows two friends with a suicide pact over the course of a day. Obviously, there's a lot to unpack in that sentence, and at times the film both deepened and trivialized aspects of mental illness, but I’d rather have a film that took a lot of swings than one that didn’t. And there were laughs, and who doesn’t like laughs?
Land – By now, it’s pretty clear that Robin Wright is an upper echelon talent as an actor, and here she steps into the film director mode as well. Grief is always a rich well to explore cinematically, and Wright ticks the boxes by exploring her body and her environment effectively under such emotional strain, but – and I’m still thinking about it, days later – there's a variation of the “Magical Negro” trope (where a person of ethnicity is the catalyst for change in a white character’s thoughts and behaviors) that put a slightly sour tinge on the character arc. Then again, if you’re talking about the character being a bit stubborn and unlikable so as to offer less-than-saintly shadings, then Wright the director did Wright the actor a service.
Eight for Silver – I’m not sure if my mood and expectations sabotaged this experience for me, but my hopes for this weren’t met in the slightest. To be fair, I’m a fan of neither jump scares nor “it was just a dream” shit, and this film frontload these in a way that drained me of caring pretty quickly. Some of the character beats were underdeveloped, the CG added to the practical effects was dodgy, and the promise of the story – and don’t get me wrong, there was serious potential here – just didn’t cohere into a narrative and presentation that I cared for. Instead, as I watched, it made me think of other werewolf films that were better (An American Werewolf in London) or more entertaining (Silver Bullet, a kinda-adaptation of Stephen King’s Cycle Of The Werewolf), and it’s never good when your mind wanders to better iterations of a genre.
Mass – Holy shit, was this a rough watch, and I can only imagine your experience if you have kids. Regardless, it was a performance tour de force, with four great actors playing parents with children on opposite ends of a deadly school shooting, eliciting empathy and understanding for all parties without the customary pedantic swerve into politics. It’s mostly a play-like presentation with some well-done and needed cinematic flourishes, as perfect a film about this topic as one could imagine. The greater messages of hope and forgiveness resonated, and I hope that Mass finds a way to a wider audience and greater recognition.
Pleasure – Holy shit, was this a rough watch, but in an entirely different way. The basic bones of the story are a skeleton as old as time – a character naively enters a superficially desirable domain that gets progressively more dehumanizing and distancing – but when so many still cling to some sort of Pretty Woman fantasy about pornography, this film is an ideal antidote. So many intense moments where the banality of labor suddenly snaps into vivid and intense physical and psychological distress, where power dynamics and the performance of masculinity can be so inescapable that the poisons internalize, desiccating morality as it seeps. Both the journey and the destination erode basic elements of humanity, and the consumption makes us all complicit.
All Light, Everywhere – A tapestry of a documentary on how the average punter still thinks what we see is objective reality, when instead it’s all a construction prone to biases and incomplete inputs and missing scenes. And once you throw the Invisible Hand of the Market into the technological mix, you get a pixilated canary in the coal mine of our perceptions, how algorithmic models of prediction are fucked from the very beginning by human error and implicit bias coded into a rigid and inflexible system. And it's only going to get worse.
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair – If the concepts of MMORPG and Creepypasta horror are foreign to you, as they largely are to me, it’s a ripe curiosity to see how those creative phenomena might impact and effect the actual people involved in the art of identity and reality creation and recreation. The late Lou Reed said that the biggest lesson he learned from Andy Warhol is that you can be anyone, and the internet has constructed a digital playground for artifacts that is as seismic in potential and impact as the printing press. Is it any wonder that damaged people might gravitate to an environment where they can reinvent and start again, and that those damaged people might connect with each other through stories of nightmares and dread?
Yesterday was the first day since 28 January that I didn't have at least a couple movies to watch, and I felt that nagging withdrawal one has when a cool moment in time has passed. The COVID-19 outbreak has accelerated many social changes, and with respect to the film industry, it kicked open the door to streaming opportunities. I'm hopeful that once we have the virus and the variants under greater control, we don't lose opportunities like the virtual Sundance, because I can't wait to tape my eyelids open and do it all again.
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