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”.

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Well, what a week or so it has been. Sundance is officially over, but it isn’t over for me. I still have two more movies to see this evening and a few more posts to write. Writing so much about movies is fun, but it gets a bit difficult to fit into the spare moments of every day. That is, if you try to do it well. It is good to get it all out of one’s system while it’s fresh.

In the middle of my Sundance forays a couple of things, worthy of thought, came up and took me off track for a while. I’ll just touch on one of them now.

While doing my teeny chore of web-based research on the film Freedom Riders (an excellent documentary about groups of white and black students, primarily, who rode buses into the deep south in 1961 as a way of forcing desegregation of interstate commerce), I found myself sidetracked, at considerable length. The film got me thinking, for the first time, about how pro-integration whites were treated in the South. This has some import for me because I was, for my first six years which were spent in Arkansas, a pro-integration white boy in the South or, at least, the swaddled bundle that my pro-integration parents lugged around.

My father was a reporter for the anti-segregation Arkansas Gazette, then an editorial writer with the, also anti-segregation, Pine Bluff Commercial, then a Nieman fellow at Harvard for a year, then an editorial writer at the Arkansas Gazette. My mother was a part-time writer for smaller, largely union-owned, papers. She had the master’s in journalism from Columbia. He was, more or less, the Brad Pitt character in A River Runs Through It (without the Brad Pitt looks). It was the late fifties and early sixties and we all know about how that was for professional women in the “masculine” careers because we’ve seen the Madmen.

He was born on a proverbial dirt-scrabble farm in the proverbial tar-paper shack in northwestern Montana (between Kallispell and Libby) and ended up in journalism by ways and means that I’ve never understood. My parents met in Washington state where they were both reporters. He realized that the South was going to be the place to be for journalists of that era and sent clippings to the notorious Harry Ashmore.

I know a bit more about their (our) time in Arkansas than I did a few days ago because I found the University of Arkansas, Arkansas Gazette Project. Done for historical purposes, while most of the journalists of the civil-rights era were still alive, this is a collection of oral histories. There are around 130 interviews of most everyone who worked with my father at the Gazette, including a 78 page interview of him, done in 2001, a year before he died, which I didn’t know existed. Guess what I did all weekend.

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A flawed film that changes everything.

OOh OOh I am so excited.  I’ve lost some of my love for the concept of winter. We all fall prey to this moment at some point in life and my time came a while back.  So I could gladly toss my last shovel-full of driveway fluff  (although for some reason or another fluff is in extremely short supply in Park City this year). I’ve also never been much for the holidays. So the one thing that makes winter for me these days is the Sundance film festival and it is just around the corner.  I’ve lucked out again and landed a very high spot in the local’s ticket lottery, allowing me my choice of flicks.  And, there is to be a nice digital presence (seminars on the making of movie marketing with social networks and the new internet) which I intend to check out.  Fourteen films and as many seminars as I can get into should keep my mind whirling.  Which, of course, is my favorite condition of the human condition.

I’m especially interested in Howl (Ginsberg deserves more credit for his influence on everything that came after), Freedom Riders (my journalist parents were part of that whole scene), and films covering John Lennon as a pup and Jean-Michel Basquiat as … (well, you know).  My eldest daughter is forcing me to attend a 3D flick about toads that take over Australia.  Her taste in films is of notorious ill repute.

Since my last post I’ve seen Avatar in 3D and think that everyone who enjoys cinema owes James Cameron a good deal of thanks.  I’m not a Cameron fan per se, having seen only one of the Terminator movies and not having seen Titanic.  On many levels Avatar is bad film.  The plot is tired and clearly directed at reconsideration of American involvement in Iraq.  I have been against that particular war from the get-go, but think the standard progressive take on it (that we did it for the oil)  is almost as lame as the standard conservative take (that we did it because Sadam was a bad bad man and we are a moral country). The answer can be found in a quick gander at the French conflict in Algeria in the early sixties I suspect.  But that is a bit off topic.  Also the aliens are aesthetically lacking.  Many have compared them to smurfs, I think gumby is a better match.

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