Stories from the Sundance Film Festival
Every year, stories from cities all across the globe are translated into film. And every year, these stories come to a small mountain town in Utah for the Sundance Film Festival. Filmmakers come from all over the world to showcase independent features in hopes of acquiring a distribution deal. For many, the Sundance Film Festival is a preview of some of the upcoming year’s most intriguing films. This year, the Film Festival, opened by Robert Redford, turned 25 years and showcased feature films and documentaries that covered a wide range of subjects – from zombie Nazis to the destruction of the environment. Two hundred films were showcased out of over 9,000 submissions, the most in the history of the festival. I had the distinct opportunity to attend it, with unlimited access to all the films. Here are a few of my picks for 2009.
Five Hundred days of Summer is a romantic comedy about the pitfalls of relationships and the havoc they wreak on post collegiate co-eds. However, this is not your standard chick flick movie. The film, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel in main roles, jumps backward and forward through pop culture references, improvised musical numbers, and the gut wrenching misery and heartbreak that is unrequited love. Director Marc Webb weaves the modern tale of boy meets girl, boy falls in love, girl doesn’t. Gordon-Levitt nails the hopeless romantic Tom and Deschanel reasserts her status as one of Hollywood’s most charming, and funny leading ladies.
Unmade Beds, the second film from Alexis Dos Santos, explores the exuberant London teeming with angsty youth, lusty adventures, and the search for self. When Spaniard Axl comes to London searching for the father that abandoned him, he falls into a hotbed of creative warehouse filled with artist’s and poets. Among them is Vera, a beautiful girl looking to restore her faith in romance after a chance encounter with a mysterious stranger. Dos Santos captures the immediacy and urgency of youth, creating a visual collage of emotions while using a soft ethereal score to accentuate characters’ interior states. Teetering on the edge of whimsy, Unmade Beds provides a benevolent warmth that is so often overlooked by cynical youth.
The Internet sensation Derrick Comedy tries to solve a murder in Mystery Team, where high school outcasts get their big break to relive their glory days as amateur detectives. Directed by Dan Eckman, Mystery Team is a cross between American Pie, Encyclopedia Brown, and Napoleon Dynamite. Derrick Comedy has taken his Internet shorts and expanded them into a wonderful full blown adventure, filled with a blend of innocence and seedy humor. When they were kids, The Mystery Team solved cases like “who stuck their finger in the pie” and now they are about to graduate high school they still haven’t grown up. But, when a little girl asks them to solve the mystery of who killed her parents, the Mystery Team realizes this could be their chance to prove to the whole town they are real detectives. A dark comedy mixing the naiveté of youth with the violence and crudity of the real world, this is a must-see comedy.
Crude, the follow-up to 2004’s Some Kind of Monster, Director Joe Berlinger follows the trial of 30,000 indigenous Ecuadorians versus Chevron, one of the world’s largest oil producers. Who is responsible for dumping 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the Amazon? This film delves into the 13-year-old battle between communities nearly destroyed by oil drilling and development and one of the biggest companies on earth. Berlinger, takes us through this battle with a fairly balanced lens. He does not vilify either side, but instead provides a rare look at multinational companies and the immense power and opportunity afforded to them and the incredible odds the underclass of the world must face in order to protect their livelihood.
After the success of their first film, The Yes Men are back and this time they are going to fix the world! In, The Yes Men Fix the World, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno impersonate top executives and government officials and make outrageous declarations at public events. In the film’s opening scene, Andy makes a false announcement on behalf of Dow Jones Chemical on BBC TV live, broadcast to 300 million people, which resulted in the Dow’s stock to plummet over two billion dollars on the worldwide exchange market. Needless to say, hilarity ensues. If you like watching people stick it to “the man,” then this is the film for you.
Films to check out that didn’t make the final cut: Paper Heart, The September Issue, Shouting Fire, We Live in Public, Prom Night on the Mississippi.
Short URL: http://www.themountaineer.org/?p=348
Posted by Oz Skinner
on Feb 11, 2009 Filed under First-Person.
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