No Boundaries

thesixtyone

All good things must come to an end, such is the case with this year’s Sundance Film Festival. I need to get back to doing other things. So it is with only a little further ado that I say goodbye to this year’s fest.

I had wanted to spend some time on: The Company Men, Wasteland and Freedom Riders (all good), and 3 Backyards (incomprehensible). Hopefully, I’ll get to them later in the year. On a kind note, my personal experience this time around was just absolutely fantastic. They have a new festival director and this may have been the cause, or it might have been a change in the general tone of film, or maybe I’m just getting better at the flick-picking. Almost all of the films I saw this year, documentary and dramatic, were hopeful and forward-looking, rather than the now slightly out-of-vogue 60-minutes style of nasty finger pointing. My wise mother has told me that America was that way (people looking for a cure rather than a cause) during the depression as well.

It began with an unfortunate mix of the first festival weekend (this is always a little crazy), a national snowboarding championship event, and a succession of the first real blizzards of the season. Things got funky.  Then everything opened up.  I’m enjoying Sundance much more now that the economy has slid and the hype (foregoing word should be capitalized, placed in a 30-point font and colored fluorescent pink) has died way-way down. All but one of the films I saw was either entirely sold out or close to it.

I started off with the tweet-seminar which was of greater value than I first gave it credit for, having allowed the concepts to sink in.  I also attended a “3D in film” workshop, which was excellent. It was kind of funny to watch many of the extraordinarily-attractive streaming out of the room when the filmmakers on the dais began discussing physics at length. We are entering an era where funny glasses will be necessary at almost every movie. That isn’t good. Avatar has established a direction, and everyone is going to be following it for a while. Avatar is only a meager beginning to something better and rather awesome when you think about it.

This is the first go-round where I can say that I didn’t see a bad film. A couple of the highlights included: being introduced to the audience (in the re-screening of the classic film Metropolitan) as the person who was sitting in the seat of Roger Ebert when the film was first screened in the early 90′s. Beforehand the director asked me to stand on cue. Everyone turned around, smiling, and then looked confused, thinking: “that isn’t Roger Ebert”.

The premier of Animal Kingdom was special for me. Just to be there when something important happens. Writer/director David Michod is certainly going places and that was the moment when he hit the big time. The film offered one of the two lines which I would choose as the best of the fest. Jacki Weaver, who plays the matriarch of the despicable brood: “I’m just having trouble finding my positive spin.” She was offered three new projects during the Q&A.

My other selection for a great moment in one of the films was in Freedom Riders. Robert Kennedy speaking on behalf of the Federal Government to the rest of the world in 1961:

“There’s no question that in the next thirty or forty years, a Negro can also achieve the same position that my brother has as President of the the United States….”

Moving on. I visited thesixtyone yesterday. It is a music site to which I’ve linked from my site for around a year now.  The direct sale of music without a large corporate gatekeeper is an appealing concept and thesixtyone implements it well. Anyone can upload songs and play-priority is selected by collective listener input. Once there, you can choose various moods of music or follow a series of songs which are picked by an algorithm using both song-ratings and the perceived taste of the listener.  The cool thing about yesterday’s visit is that the site has been completely redesigned using javascript very well.  It’s still bumpy with counter-intuitive features that take some figuring out. Still a work in progress. If you find yourself there, you could well be looking at, for better or worse, the future of the well-styled  internet for the next while. The Facebook Connect feature is particularly smooth. Audio delivery is in Flash.

The site brings up a couple of thoughts. The first is how dramatically design can  impact the experience of the user.  The site previously had a newspaper style layout and was much less enjoyable.  The second is that high resolution album art is back. All illustrators can collectively jump up and down in glee. Just get out there and find some bands to work with and make something powerful together.

Peace.