Seattlest at Sundance: Take Four

Among the best movies we've seen at this year's festival is Sugar crafted with care by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, the filmmaking team responsible for Half Nelson. The title refers to the nickname of our protagonist Miguel, a young Dominican hoping to make it big in baseball. When we first meet the twenty-year-old pitching dynamo, he's about to leave his homeland for a minor league farm team in small-town Iowa. Of course, he barely speaks a lick of English, and there's bound to be players better than him along the way.

This ain't no rag-to-riches sports story, nor is Sugar in the vein of Behind the Music, chronicling a meteoric rise and fall; instead, it's a much more complex and realistic portrayal of the professional athletic system. Once again, Boden and Fleck prove their high level of screenwriting skill and directorial talent. They know how to write a nuanced script and they know where to put the camera. Who could ask for more?

Another film with a lot of Spanish subtitles was Sleep Dealer, which we've decided to retitle El Matrixo. For a few reasons: 1) it's set in a dystopian near-future 2) where people are literally plugged into a giant computer network 3) from which the network derives its energy, as well as manual labor.

The Mexican film has some sly commentary about Norteamericano relations, with the border officially closed, multinational corporations privatizing the Rio Grande to sell water back to Mexicans, and an American reality TV show that follows drone planes as they go after "the bad guys." However, there's not much new here, and the film ends predictably. Some of the visuals are kinda cool, but as far as science fiction goes, meh.

Not much need to comment about I Always Wanted to be a Gangster. Some people really liked this set of absurdist crime vignettes, but not us. The first piece was good, but that's because it was short. The rest of them went on for far too long and oscillated wildly between existential comedy and slapstick. What more can we say? There's a reason why the French have a reputation for not being funny.