Thursday, January 4, 2007
By Sean P. Means
We know the titles, and a little bit about the casts and plots, of the 122 feature films that will screen at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 18-28 in Park City, Utah.
Will any of them be any good? Sundance's track record suggests the answer is "yes" - especially among the documentaries, where the batting average has been outstanding over the years.
What looks good?
Here are a few impressions, based on glimpses:
Black Snake Moan (Premieres), by Hustle Flow director Craig Brewer, has been buzzed about for months, because of the explicit sexuality of Christina Ricci's character and the charged racial overtones of that character's connection to Samuel L. Jackson's character.
Waitress (Spectrum) was picked for the festival even before writer-director Adrienne Shelly was murdered in her New York office in November, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Shelly was a darling of the indie-film world, for her acting in early Hal Hartley films - and her final film's appearance at Sundance will be a fitting farewell.
Delirious (Spectrum) is the latest by Tom DiCillo, who wrote and directed the greatest movie ever made about independent filmmaking, the comedy Living in Oblivion.
Red Road (Spectrum) is directed by British filmmaker Andrea Arnold, whose short Wasp won top honors at Sundance on its way to an Oscar.
Zoo (U.S. documentary competition) starts with a "News of the Weird" story about a Seattle man who died from having sex with a horse.
Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (New Frontier) - I'm no soccer fan, and I only heard of Zinedine Zidane after he head-butted his way out of the World Cup final, but this project - which follows Zidane through an entire soccer match - sounds intriguing.
Everything's Cool (U.S.
documentary competition) is about crusaders against global warming, which doesn't sound like an energizing movie topic - except that filmmakers Judith Helfand and Daniel B. Gold made a funny and entertaining doc on a similar topic a few years ago with Blue Vinyl, about how Helfand warned her parents about the environmental dangers of vinyl siding.
Another fun thing you can do with the Sundance film slate is devise your own movie programs, based on whatever criteria you choose.
Here are a few I like:
The numerology-driven double-feature: The documentary Girl 27, about a scandal at a 1937 MGM stag party; and Chapter 27, with Jared Leto playing John Lennon's killer.
The rocking-to-the-movie program: The Future Is Unwritten (about The Clash's Joe Strum-mer), X: The Unheard Music, Once (featuring the Irish band The Frames).
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