Ray Pride

The year's biggest Sundance story may have come up Tuesday morning, two days after the 2006 festival ended and a year after the premiere of "Hustle and Flow," with Terrence Howard's full-bodied roar as a Memphis pimp who dreams of rapping.

Howard's Oscar nomination as Best Actor suggests the question of how do a film festival's good works eddy out into the culture at large? And into film culture, especially?

After a week at Sundance, a memorably splenetic friend described his virgin experience as "a multidimensional 3-D multiplayer clusterfuck game." But sometimes it's a waste of energy and cliché to complain when there's another movie to miss, another panel to await, another conversation that could change your life. (Hey, Al Gore!) Lots of coffee and the occasional open bar should work against attitude sickness in the lofty clime. Robert Redford still says his original intention was to make Sundance distant and difficult, with lots of mini-Mohammeds coming to the mountain, and distant and difficult and demanding Sundance remains, a Taipei atop tall hills, Tokyo as a historical mining town.

Packing for Sundance the past four or five years, I tote along a valuable guidebook about the history of the Sundance Festival's hometown, called "Park City Underfoot." I leave it on the coffee table of wherever I'm staying, but no one ever consults it. The first draft of history is more urgent. Sleep-deprived and flu-ish in the thin mountain air, all is a swim of ecstatic and narcoleptic. There's always a moment like rushing to catch up with a Pakistani friend who's making a film about Kashmir at the Canadian party in the Japanese restaurant across the street from the Egyptian Theater. But other karma trips along. Who needs back-story when there's a hailstorm of privileged moments? (Nick Cave bumming a light; Paul Giamatti, repeatedly, always whistling; Wim Wenders telling you you've put too much cream in your coffee.)

Writing on the spot has its practitioners, but there seem to be only a limited number of gambits. More deadening than deafening, there are roiling yet seldom fresh gusts of bloggotry on every brightly lit street corner of the Internet. They hardly reflect the true unreality on the ground. The truest truth? Some fine movies made it into the mix--triple award-winner "Iraq in Fragments," by James Longley, is the kind of patient, longitudinal, eccentric, on-the-ground documentary portrait that festivals were born to showcase. And some crackling oddities--"13 Tzamati," a black-and-white gangster movie from former Soviet Georgia, anyone? There are too many disparate pieces for any sort of cogent overview. Anyone who pretends otherwise is a fool or a seer. Trends emerge from programmers' tastes and needs, but also from the marketplace, or as the case may be, the outlet mall of ideas.

Tragedy persists. Films shot on video seek justice. Children are mistreated. Heroin is bad. The two recurring, late-night male refrains about movies with female characters: they're either misogynist or there aren't enough boobies in them. Overheard conversations are found poetry in some situations. Sundance this year was not one of them.

Opinions are deadly things, and in the case of too many post-show scrums necessary to wade through to the exit and the cool mountain air, they're as welcome as a fart in church. There are some reviewers who want to keep their cards close to their chest, and don't want to hear what others thought about the movie while it's still digesting. After a screening for multimillion-dollar selling "Little Miss Sunshine," a greasy beard beneath a greasier hat was eager to complain, barking to no one in particular: "I've got two words for you! `National Lampoon's Vacation!'"

Volkswagen, Heineken, UGG, Chrysler and Frigidaire, among many, many others, had shiny-shiny wares to display. But more important in 2006 was the evolution of "platforms." Film festivals are already an alternate distribution circuit. What are the ways to distribute, sell and create awareness for films that have little hope beyond festivals? How micro can you go? Some business models suggest there are entrepreneurs who can foment a notion, and then there are managerial adepts who can shape the business model, and finally, the marketing mind that can conceive of how to maintain and "grow" a business entity. In terms of how to disseminate narrative in new models, the hills of Park City were alive with fomenters. Panels and presentations were more exciting than half the movies I could see or sample. Some things are happening, there are things in the air besides wet snow and the smell of wood fires, and hardly anyone has half a clue.

(2006-01-31)

Also by Ray Pride

Doll Parts
Steven Soderbergh is a wealthy workaholic who feels he has nothing to lose if a large chunk of the theater business closes its doors. Others in the film industry do
(2006-01-24)

Tip of the Week
Joseph Lovett's slight, hand-hewn "Gay Sex in the 70s" is that rare documentary that manages to be both celebratory and melancholy
(2006-01-24)

My America
"The New World" is ecstatic and generous and unforgettable
(2006-01-17)

Tip of the Week
In "Café Lumiere," Hou Hsiao-hsien's commissioned tribute to the centenary of the birth of the late Japanese minimalist master Yasujiro Ozu, he captures some of the quietly troubled family dynamics of Ozu's work, such as inexpressive fathers, and of alleys and trains within the sprawling metropolis of Tokyo
(2006-01-17)

Master Shot
(2006-01-10)

Tip of the Week
(2006-01-10)

Sketchbook Sentiments
(2006-01-03)

Del toro
(2006-01-03)

Tip of the Week
(2006-01-03)

Up "Wolf's Creek"
(2005-12-27)

Tip of the Week
(2005-12-27)

All gone
(2005-12-20)

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