Hey folks, Harry here... Well, getting the low-down on the crazed conservative woman's water bottle attack of Rogue was pretty important. It's not every day that a woman acts like a Wonder Twin "Shape of... A Water Bottle" and attacks a real X-Men character. Heh. Seems like this was a less enthusiastic film day for ol Memento Man, but let's get on with it...
Hi Harry!
Well, the big protest turned out to be not too exciting. I was hoping for thousands of people to come marching down Main Street in Park City to Sundance Headquarters and set the place on fire! Instead we got not much more than a dozen or so people with signs and some guy banging a drum. A small police car followed them from a safe distance. I guess the Protest-Against-the-SUV-War demonstration didn't get much support in a town where everybody drives SUVs.
In other news, we do need one small clarification. I was at the BUFFALO SOLDIERS screening where some crazed conservative woman screamed out her dislike for the film's liberal view of the U.S. military, accompanied by her throwing a water bottle. Contrary to rumor, the water bottle did NOT strike Anna Paquin in the head (which, I'll grant you, would have livened things up and made a much better story.) It merely fell on the floor in an aisle. Apparently crazed conservative women are not very good shots. It WAS pretty exciting, though, to have the Sundance police haul the woman off to who-knows-where (probably the place they take all the illegally parked vehicles--we may never see that woman again.)
Now, onto the reviews!
OFF THE MAP (Campbell Scott) * 1/2
Even one of my favorite actresses, Joan Allen, can't rescue OFF THE MAP. Allen plays the mom of a family in New Mexico that lives so far away, people can hardly find them without a hand-drawn map. One day, the IRS man (after searching for four days) finds the place and comes to talk to this poor family about their not filing tax forms for the last seven years. Instead he is stung by a bee and is nursed back to help by Joan Allen, with whom he promptly falls in love. Dad, meanwhile, is in a pretty bad depression. It's up to the young girl, Bo, to keep things together; it's a good thing she's got a new Mastercard. Grungy, dark lighting may be trying to complement themes of blindness, but all it really did was keep us from seeing these people's faces.
THE PURIFIED (Jesper Jargil) * * 1/2
Fairly interesting documentary that probes the depths of Dogme 95, an important new film movement that originated with four Danish filmmakers: Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg (whose non-Dogme IT'S ALL ABOUT LOVE is playing at this festival), Kristian Levring, and Soren Kragh-Jacobsen. Lars von Trier was the filmmaker who came up with the Dogme manifesto, a series of ten rules that were supposed to free cinema from the rubbish of the past and essentially purify the filmmaker to new levels of creativity. These four filmmakers banded together to take the "vow of chastity" (agreeing to abide by these ten rules of cinematic austerity. Some of these rules are as follows: the filmmaker must only use natural lighting; sound must be recorded at the same time as the image (no music or anything is allowed to be put in during post-production); no sets are to be built and no props are to be used (if something is not at the filming location already, it is not to be use! d.) (For more information, see wwwl.dogme95.com). The four filmmakers all made a film in this style, but von Trier declared that all of them broke one or more rules, and thus they aren't true Dogme films. Von Trier claims he has yet to see such a true Dogme film. To make THE PURIFIED, Jargil shot 500 hours of DV and then had to sit down and edit it down to a manageable size (currently about 74 minutes.) It's filmed entirely in von Trier's home as the four debate Dogme theory and watch their films.
At Sundance, THE PURIFIED is screening with the 35-minute film NEW SCENES FROM AMERICA made by the Danish filmmaker Jorgen Leth. Here we have shots of different scenes from America, beit a sign selling vegetables in the midwest, or a bartender in Sardi's showing us how to make a bloody mary. The pace has a purposeful European sensibility (read: deadeningly slow.) For example, we see a man with a violing for about ten seconds, then hear tell a bit about where he lives and what he does, then watch as the camera continues rolling for about ten seconds after he finishes speaking. You'll either think this is incredibly artsy, or you'll feel like you're together with your Aunt Betsy, reading her summer vacation photo book and just wanting her to turn the pages faster.
GOOD FENCES (Ernest Dickerson) * * *
Ernest Dickerson directs this quite funny look at what happens when a middle-class African-American family moves into a snooty, all-white neighborhood in the late 1970s. Whoopi Goldberg is hilarious as Mabel, a woman who suddenly finds herself having to make cucumber sandwiches for gatherings of the annoying neighborhood housewives. Danny Glover plays Tom, the husband who puts moving up the social ladder above everything else. The film nearly veers off course with a sudden change of tone in the last act. However, as a whole, the film is strengthened by creative cinematography (Dickerson, who was Spike Lee's cinematographer before becoming a director himself, has an eye for new lighting and camera moves.) It should play well on Showtime next month.
I'm taking tomorrow morning off to rest, but I'll be back with two more reviews tomorrow night! Until then, this is your anti-war correspondent, Memento Man, signing off!
