Hey folks, Harry here... Tonight we get another review of THE LARAMIE PROJECT which just adds to the praise which this film seems to have deserved enthusiastically. Roger Ebert has a nice write up about it and the first day's events at Sundance here, if'n you'd like a peek. However, we also get our first look at Gus Van Sant's latest project which seems to have been a miserable experience for poor Memento Man... Doesn't mean it is a miserable film, just decidedly not his cup of tea... and from the sound of it, not many others' cup either. We'll endeavor to find other opinions of that film as well. Here ya go....
Hi Harry!
Memento Man here again with today's scoop! Tonight I finally saw THE LARAMIE PROJECT, a film that was more moving, more filled with human emotions and real, poignant issues, than any I can recall seeing in some time. The film's director, Moises Kaufman was at the SLC screening tonight, and talked about how his theater group didn't necessarily want to talk about Matthew Shepard or the two young men who brutally attacked and left him for dead; they wanted instead to tell a story about the town of Laramie. After gathering hundreds of interviews with townspeople, Laramie seems to become a living, breathing protagonist that goes through a painful fall and is forced to try to seek out a sort of pseudo-redemption.
Several of the actual Laramie townspeople were in attendance at the screening tonight, which added to the emotions in the room. The stellar cast who played the townspeople included the likes of Christina Ricci, Steve Buscemi, Laura Linney, Summer Phoenix, Jeremy Davies, Janeane Garofalo, Joshua Jackson, and Peter Fonda. This truly is a powerful, complexity-exploring, emotion-wringing film that shouldn't be missed.
On the other end of the emotional spectrum was Gus Van Sant's GERRY, starring Casey Affleck and Matt Damon (all of whom were in attendance at this Park City screening.)
Before the film, Van Sant remarked to the audience that he couldn't remember feeling this nervous for some time.
I don't blame him. GERRY is so different that Sundance co-director Geoffrey Gilmore touts it as "making a major contribution to the reinvention of independent cinema." I couldn't disagree with him more.
The film is 103 minutes of Casey Affleck and Matt Damon wandering through a wilderness, and when I say wandering, I mean wandering. Long shots that seem endless show the two walking sans dialogue for ten minutes or more without a cut.
I've had more fun watching my toenails grow. OK, OK, so maybe the film was trying to reach the mythic level of the great quest which results in the discovery of a nihilistic nothingness. Instead, it was just empty. Maybe it was trying to be the postmodern WAITING FOR GODOT, where we all know that God isn't going to show up, so all that is left to talk about is a WHEEL OF FORTUNE episode or a memorable round of the computer game Civilization.
I just felt like I was waiting around to catch cancer. Maybe it was trying to capture minimalism in film (accompanied, of course, by its annoying minimalistic score) by having eternally long shots of the same action continuously recurring. It just felt like a minimal amount of substance to me.
Now maybe twenty years from now, this film will be seen as something like Andy Warhol's EMPIRE (a 13-hour shot of the Empire State Building as the light of the day changes) and will make for great coffee-house chats, but for now, I want my mythic quests to be worth the travel time I spend as a spectator. See LORD OF THE RINGS and skip the pretentious GERRYmandering.
Memento Man, signing off!
