Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with our first pair of reviews from the actual screenings at Sundance. The first one, WILD TIGERS I HAVE KNOWN, is set in Santa Cruz, California, which most film lovers will know from THE LOST BOYS. I grew up about an hour south of Santa Cruz and spent a very memorable 2 weeks at a weird kind of science-outdoorsy-appreciate-the-environment-you-little-bastards type school thing. I think they called it Outdoor School, but it was the closest I ever came to doing a summer camp in my life. The place really is beautiful. Go banana slugs!
Anyway, one of our spies who was kicking ass and taking names last year at Sundance, Grib, has returned to give us the skinny on a couple films he's seen in his first two days of the festival. First up is the aforementioned arthouse flick WILD TIGERS and after that is a look at a film fest comedy called SOMEBODIES. Could it be the next NAPOLEON DYNAMITE or SUPERTROOPERS? Read on!
Hi, Harry,
Grib here with my annual reports from Sundance. I'm here for the whole fest this year, so I'll have a lot to say. I've seen two films thus far, both good. Not great, but definitely worthy of inclusion in the Festival. Last night I saw Cam Archer's first feature-length film, "Wild Tigers I Have Known," which is precisely the type of art-house flick that Sundance was created for; I don't know where it's going to play in America, but it got a nice reception here. It's very much a mood piece, following a junior high school boy's search for sexual identity in Santa Cruz, California. The boy, Logan, is played wonderfully by Matthew Stumpf, who unfortunately was unable to attend the premiere screening. He deserved the applause his performance received even in his absence. Logan, a small, thin, awkward boy who lives in a ramshackle house at the edge of town with his single mom (played spacily by Fairuza Balk), is slowly realizing that he likes boys instead of girls. The focus of his desire becomes Rodeo Walker (Patrick White), a rebel without a cause who is about a foot taller than Logan and sulks on benches outside the school, smoking and mumbling about why he is too cool to actually enter the building. He and Logan strike up an unlikely friendship, and eventually Logan musters up the courage to share his feelings, with results he does not intend. Their ambiguous friendship (we're never sure if Rodeo is just toying with Logan or if he might also have some real feelings for him) is a strength of the film.
The narrative is only semi-linear, punctuated with voiceovers from Logan about his quest for identity and with blurry television images of a tiger (this has some murky link to the film's title, but it became tedious and labored very quickly, and was the only part of the film I didn't like). A motif running through the film is Logan's schools efforts to deal with a series of mountain lion sightings on campus; Logan sides with the lions, and spends a great deal of time in the woods looking for the lions' lair.
Filmed on location in and around beautiful Santa Cruz, the film is awash in color and natural wonders (there are a number of shots of a haunting moon rising over the ocean and of Logan in various pastoral spots). The soundtrack is wonderful, including a number of obscure old blues tunes and a children's choir singing the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows."
This is one of the strangest films you'll ever see, but it's worth checking out, likely on DVD. I can't see it playing outside New York, LA and maybe San Francisco.
A much more accessible film is "Somebodies," the debut feature of writer/director/actor Hadjii (no last name provided), which is one of the funniest movies I've seen in years. It is a refreshing look at the lives of a group of African Americans living in Athens, Georgia. Hadjii plays a young man who is ambling through life, drinking a little too much with his friends but still sliding through with passing marks at the University of Georgia. He sporadically attends a small local church run by a raucous minister with a deadpan sidekick deacon who provides Biblical quotations on demand during the minister's furiously comedic sermons. Hadjii eventually starts dating a fellow student, who does a hilarious imitation of Halle Barry's first love scene with Billy Bob Thornton in "Monster's Ball," a performance which both titillates and scares the hell out of Hadjii. The film drags at times and at others strains a bit too hard for a laugh, but the cast is incredibly likable and I think I laughed five times as often as I did during the supposed comedy of the year, "Wedding Crashers." "Somebodies" will make it to a theater near you, and you should check it out.
Update: I just caught a late screening of Matt Dillon in "Factotum," and it was awesome. I will review it tomorrow.
