Seattlest at Sundance: Take One

We had heard a lot of good buzz going into Sunshine Cleaning, starring the perpetually lovable and talented Amy Adams and the nearly as up-and-coming Emily Blunt as sisters who break into the lucrative niche growth industry of crime scene cleanup. Dealing with the literal blood, guts, and body fluids of the recently departed forces the ladies to examine some of the biohazards in their own lives. Wackiness and personal growth ensues. Unfortunately, the movie is good but not great, and the rest of the audience seemed to like it a lot more than we did. With a cute kid and Alan Arkin in tow as the sisters' crotchety dad, director Christine Jeffs is totally aiming for Little Miss Sunshine Cleaning, but with a wisp of a script and a couple overwrought scenes, this film ain't making it to the pageant.

Thank god for Incendiary. Who expected a fully formed female character from the director who last made Bridget Jones's Diary? Like Ms. Jones, the young British woman in this tale (played by Michelle Williams) has to choose between a nice guy (Matthew MacFadyen) and a cad (Ewan McGregor). But since this story takes place in the wake of a terrorist attack on a London soccer stadium, the film is about so much more than that. Based on a prescient novel released two days before the London bombings, Incendiary is a well-written, beautifully shot look at sex, politics, and grief in the aftermath of a personal and global tragedy. Williams (and the rest of the cast, for that matter) is superb, and our quibbles are truly minor. The guys we were with didn't quite "get" everything in Incendiary, but it had us weeping like big babies. Now that's what we call a festival film. More please!

The Linguists is a documentary that follows two geeky ethnographers who travel to places not on the map to record endangered, soon-dead languages. The premise is fascinating, but the execution less so. Sure, it's plenty interesting to watch these guys speak to the natives in a remote village in India or middle-of-nowhere Siberia (not to be redundant). However, the film is paced oddly (why start out spending significant time on each locale/population only to jump around between them for the latter third?), and ends abruptly. We know there's a larger point here: how colonization and, later, globalization force the underclass to give up their language, and in doing so, their identity. But the thesis isn't clearly stated and we were left with the distinct feeling of "and...?" The Linguists is a perfect example of how filmmakers can spend five years on one project, amassing tons of footage, and still not know where they're going with the story, or what precisely is the endgame.