Seattlest at Sundance: Take One
January means one thing, and that's Sundance. This is actually our fourth year in attendance, and this time around, the festival is extra-super-dee-duper green. Which means Brita is handing out reusable (and BPA-free) Nalgene bottles, and you can't find a plastic bag to save your life. Seems that the economy is even taking its toll on Hollywood; compared to previous years, there's not as much swag, fewer press and industry folks are around, and audience figures are, we've been told, about 60 percent of normal. Well, we're still here, and so far we've seen four films.
We started things off at the world premiere of Endgame, a political thriller from the UK set in South Africa in the late '80s. The movie doesn't quite work for a few reasons. It's not the source material--it's based on The Fall of Apartheid, Robert Harvey's book on the end of the racist political system. But the film lacks structure. We thought we were in the second act of the film when the credits started rolling, so obviously the entire plot was really anticlimactic. Another problem is the film's use of real historical figures. Not that Thabo Mbeki and Nelson Mandela aren't important to the story, but we don't want to see them in a thriller--just like we don't want to see Thomas Jefferson and George Washington in a heist flick. Also, SPOILER ALERT: Nelson Mandela gets out of prison. The End.
Next up was Victoria Day, a Canadian film about what happens to a community in 1988 Toronto when a high school kid named Jordan goes missing. At the center of the story is Ben, a smart hockey player from a Russian immigrant family, who didn't really like Jordan to begin with, but lent him five bucks for drugs on the night he disappeared. Things get a little more complicated when Ben makes out with Jordan's little sister. We appreciate the portrait of adolescent awkwardness, and liked Ben's family (uptight Russians are way more interesting than your typical boring movie parents), as well as his jackass fireworks-loving friends, but this film didn't really go anywhere. We don't need things all wrapped up in a bow, but we need a little resolution, please.
Next: El General, our first documentary of the fest. Sundance's dirty little secret is that the documentaries are generally better than the features, and El General was definitely better than the previous two films. Director Natalia Almada's great-grandfather was Plutarco Elias Calles, a general during the Mexican Revolution and then President from 1924 to 1928. Almada examines his life via the audio recordings her grandmother, Calles' daughter, made when she was planning on writing his biography. In a sense, Almada is finishing the work her grandmother began, and she uses her tapes and archival footage of Mexico in the '20s, along with scenes from Mexico City today to illustrate two not-so-contradictory things: 1) The dreams of the revolutionaries for the future of Mexico have definitely not been realized, because 2) the more things change, the more they stay the same.
The only film we've seen so far today is Sin Nombre, another movie about Mexico, but this time the tale is focused on the trip across the border, featuring intertwining stories about a family from Honduras and a gang in Chiapas. This is a solid feature debut from director/screenwriter Cary Joji Fukunaga, and the fact that he used to work as a cinematographer is clear. The film is shot extraordinarily well, and the cast (primarily non-professional actors, including some scary-ass gang members) is strong. The only knock we've got is that it's pretty clear where the story is headed early on, and then you just have to wait to get there. At least by the time you arrive at the final destination, you've seen some vibrantly crisp visuals.
