Ray Pride

Neat metaphors showered at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival.

My favorite: Celebration" director Thomas Vinterberg's opulent futuristic failure, "It's All About Love," ends with ice creeping across the planet, and a narrator played by Sean Penn trapped in a plane that cannot land anywhere on earth.

A parallel to smirk over in drought-stricken Utah, with temperatures in the forties and fifties, and Chicago and the East Coast stilled by near-zero temperatures. It may be a neater metaphor for the interesting movies that almost, but not quite hit their mark, which, unlike the films that sell for millions of dollars to major distributors, never see the light of day or satellite channels again.

As always at Sundance, family dysfunction is Topic A, yet the best this year were all about love, such as "Hoop Dreams" director Steve James' documentary "Stevie," a marvel of empathy that recounts his relationship with the grown man he played Big Brother to as a troubled 10-year-old. Steve, middle-class and successful, finds himself unable to help Stevie, poor, angry, self-destructive and accused of a horrible crime. It comes to theaters soon, and its complex real-life narrative is a gem. The winner of the best feature film, "American Splendor" is another kind of marvel, mixing documentary and fiction in recalling the life of grumpy comics mainstay Harvey Pekar, whose stories detail the minutiae of his mundane life working in a hospital in Cleveland. The clever mix of materials never obscures the heart of actors like Paul Giamatti and Hope Davis, nor the soul of curmudgeonly, long-suffering Harvey Pekar.

"Thirteen," veteran production designer Catherine Hardwick's writing-directing debut, is a horror story, a deeply felt, beautifully made horror film about contemporary girlhood, so hyped-up it could be called "Requiem for a Teen." Evan Rachel Wood ("Simone") is startling as the girl gone wrong; Holly Hunter, as her indulgent, drink-prone mother, radiates hapless sorrow.

Of the thirty or so movies I saw, only a handful need be dishonored with silence. Among movies arriving in theaters in the next couple of months, I adore "All the Real Girls," David Gordon Green's follow-up to his debut, "George Washington." His ill-starred small-town young lovers experience so many conflicting feelings of desire and admiration and possession that all they can do is detonate. It's a terrific portrayal of youth's tremulous indecision and shattering desire with its vast, unstemmable hormonal surges. Memory is a scalpel, and Green's sensational work cuts deep with its parallels to the splintered style of Wong Kar-Wai's "In the Mood For Love" and the emotional hyperbole of Elia Kazan's "Splendor in the Grass" with a touch of the melancholy of "The Last Picture Show."

"Pieces of April" is yet another story of a family get-together that may go wrong, yet writer-director Peter Hedges ("What's Eating Gilbert Grape"; "About a Boy") has the right black humor and compassion, along with Katie Holmes, memorable as a lifetime fuck-up and black sheep who wants to get it right just once. Then there's a masterpiece, Peter Sollett's "Raising Victor Vargas," a masterful miniature about kids growing up on the streets of New York's Lower East Side that again proves there's no subject larger than the beating of the human heart. Sollett made a short with two of the performers, then worked for two years, observing them, asking about their lives, and bringing the fruit of their friendship to the screen. "Victor Vargas" shows affection without sentimentality and a wry acknowledgment of the complexities of a family's conflicting desires. (It's also one of the great portraits of how teenagers tease each other.) There's always hope when filmmakers work with open eyes.

Yet while uncommon portraits of common lives were among the hundred-plus features, docs, international films and shorts on display, there was another Sundance: the one filled with stealth marketing and stealth celebrities. Buffets and concerts and parties abounded, and despite the state of the economy, the small former mining town's Main Street was lined with storefronts rented by the car companies and jeans makers not affiliated with the festival, to give cool stuff to those whom they considered the cool tastemakers. (The festival was not pleased, concerned for their corporate contributors.) Still, The Sundance Channel's swag-bag was a coveted gimme, a plush brown suede Kenneth Cole bag jammed with several dozen luxury products, a down jacket, DVDs, CDs and a year's membership in a national chain of gyms. HBO's Project Greenlight threw an event that led to worse chaos, with those hoping for a Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez sighting making streets impassable for hours. Britney Spears flounced about; catching sight of her mask of a face at a party was less amusing than local young blondes on the street mistaking other local blondes for the reformed virgin herself.

(2003-01-29)

Also by Ray Pride

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Indelibly fun to watch, "City of God" is a self-mythologizing portrait of the allure and despair of juvenile crime in a milieu that offers no other escape.
(2003-01-22)

Short Runs
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Lynne Ramsay's second feature, "Morvern Callar," is the kind of film to drive lit-minded (and literal-minded) critics up against the wall.
(2003-01-22)

Tip of the Week
Thirty-two-year-old Jae-eun Jeong is one of South Korea's few female directors, and her coming-of-age story about five young women in the working-class port city of Inchon struggling against life after high school is a tender delight.
(2003-01-15)

Short Runs
(2003-01-15)

Which way the wind blows
(2003-01-15)

Short Runs
(2003-01-10)

Tip of the Week
(2003-01-08)

Good cop, better cop
(2003-01-08)

DVD Tip of the Week
(2003-01-08)

Tuman show
(2003-01-08)

DVD Tip of the Week
(2003-01-02)

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