Sundance Roundup Part 2

This is the second part of Mitchell Salem’s overview of some the more notable films screened at this year’s Sundance Festival. You can read the first part HERE.

The Catechism Cataclysm (No Distributor)  
Todd Rohal’s would-be cult comedy starts as a somewhat conventional wacky farce about a priest (Steve Little) and a guy he idolized in high school (Robert Longstreet) deciding to take a river canoe trip one day – and then it turns into... something involving Japanese girls, mind control, and religious awakening. Perhaps it’s great if you’re high.

The Details (TWC)
Unaccountably, this terrible black comedy, which was greeted with almost no laughter by an audience of 1200, became the festival’s single biggest buy, reportedly selling to The Weinstein Company for $7.5m. We should never underestimate Harvey Weinstein – but there seemed to be little crowd interest in Jacob Aaron Estes’s story of a miserable couple (Tobey Maguire and Elizabeth Banks) whose attempt to renovate their house and get rid of some raccoons leads to adultery, treachery and murder. Only Laura Linney, on her own wavelength, gets some laughs as the couple’s crazy neighbour.

Salvation Boulevard (IFC)
No festival would be complete without a picture that has big names but no other reason for existing – although this one, with its corrupt, murderous preacher (Pierce Brosnan), at least fitted into Sundance 2011 thematically. An extraordinarily fine cast—including Greg Kinnear, Marisa Tomei, Jennifer Connelly and Ed Harris – can do almost nothing with George Ratliff’s obvious and witless script (written with Doug Max Stone). Surely – for the love of Whomever – Sundance could have left out just one religious-angled film from its line-up.

Little Birds (No Distributor)  
Elgin James’s directorial debut is classic Sundance: two teenagers (Juno Temple and Kay Panabaker) who don’t fit into their small town ache to see the big city – in this case, LA – and arrive only to find that life there is tough and scary. It’s pretty familiar stuff, but the film is notable for the standard of its photography (by Reed Morano) and cast, and achieves some real tension in its second half.

Take Shelter (Sony Classics)  
Another apocalypse: Michael Shannon plays an ordinary Midwestern guy (albeit one with a family history of psychiatric issues) who finds himself overwhelmed with nightmares about a coming storm that will end the world. Writer-diretor Jeff Nichols does a good job of setting this obsession in a milieu in which all else is completely normal, and after a while nothing comes to feel normal at all. Shannon, who perhaps has played enough men on the edge of crazy for a while, nevertheless pitches his performance perfectly, and Jessica Chastain keeps up with him as his increasingly troubled wife. The film is beautifully shot by Adam Stone, although the low budget is sometimes evident in the special effects used in the nightmare sequences.

Red State (Self-distributed)
Ah, yes – perhaps you’ve heard of this one. It would be satisfying to say that Kevin Smith’s opus is either fabulous or dreadful, but in truth it’s somewhere in between. Although he insists on putting it in the horror genre (introducing the film, his best line was that it wasn’t a ‘comedy like Clerks – it’s a horror movie... like Jersey Girl’), it’s actually a thriller that turns into an action movie, with black comic overtones.

Three idiot small town teens are lured, by hopes of hot sex, into the clutches of a homicidal church, and the feds rush in – but since Smith is as disgusted with the government as he is with the religious fanatics, there are no real heroes. Smith, unfortunately, will never be known for his filmmaking chops, and while his script has some wit, a few surprise deaths and the benefit of great genre performances from Michael Parks (as the insane pastor) and John Goodman (as the head ATF agent) none of it is particularly exciting or even infuriating. It’s a mixture of fun and self-indulgence likely to appeal only to Smith’s core audience.

Benavides Born (No Distributor)
In another earnest film from the Sundance factory, a Mexican-American girl in Texas (very well played by Corina Calderon) tries to parlay her weightlifting abilities into a college scholarship while dealing with various family tensions and other stresses. Amy Wendel’s film (written with Dan Meisel) gets points for not succumbing to sports movie clichés and for showing an honest concern for its characters but, ultimately, there’s not much here that’s distinctive.

Kaboom (IFC)  
Say this for Gregg Araki: there’s never much doubt about whose movie you’re watching. Like all his films (apart from the more mature Mysterious Skin), Kaboom is a neon-bright romp about youthful sex of all kinds, some drugs and rock ‘n’ roll – this time mixed with a doomsday cult and sprinkled with witchcraft.  The cast (including Thomas Dekker, Haley Bennett and Juno Temple, very different than in Little Birds) is attractive, eager and not shy, and there are some goofy laughs to be had.

The Devil’s Double (Lionsgate)  
Oddly enough, this story of Uday Hussein and the man he forced to serve as his double (very loosely based on a true story) is far more horribly violent than Red State, and features some fairly explicit torture and sexual violence that one imagines may have to be cut for the film to receive an R rating in the US. Dominic West clearly enjoys himself playing both Uday and his morally conflicted double, but the picture, directed by Lee Tamahori and written by Michael Thomas, goes off the narrative rails. It’s more Scarface than Battle of Algiers.

The Music Never Stopped (Roadside Attractions)
Jim Kohlberg’s film, written by Gwyn Lurie and Gary Marks, is based on an Oliver Sacks case history about a brain-damaged man unable to communicate with his parents or the rest of the world unless the music of his youth (which here means the music of the 1960s) is playing. J.K. Simmons, as the father, is always great to watch; Julia Ormand is good as a doctor; and there are certainly affecting moments. On the whole, though, the filmmaking is rudimentary, and it all becomes very sentimental and simplistic before it ends.

Knuckle (Remake rights sold to HBO)  
It’s easy to see why there was a competition to tie up the rights to remake this documentary as fiction: the basic idea – Irish clans who battle out their decades-long feuds by way of bare-knuckle prizefights – sounds inherently fascinating. Ian Palmer’s documentary itself, though, doesn't have much of a dramatic arc, despite copious footage of the fights.

Mitchell Salem is an attorney and business affairs executive in the entertainment industry who, in his spare time, sees far too many movies
 

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