Mr. Chick Goes to Sundance 2005
TomChick - Features - Comments - 02/05/05
The Good
3-Iron
A movie that exudes everything great -- and ultimately some of the things confounding -- about Asian cinema. The conceit seemed to be what if you had a love story in which the lovers never spoke to each other? And it builds wonderfully. The two leads do a heartbreakingly beautiful non-verbal dance as they get to know each other. But as it dissolves and fades into whatever the resolution is, it loses its drive and leaves you longing for the earlier parts. A lyrical movie that's ultimately too ephemeral, dreamy, and insubstantial.
The Dying Gaul
Craig Lucas' instincts have betrayed him. During the Q&A, he said his stage play of The Dying Gaul was about corruption. The title comes from a famous statue of a dying warrior who evoked pity among the Romans who saw him, and he therefore corrupted them by sapping their will to fight. It's a metaphor for Lucas' story of a gay man mourning the loss of his lover; his suffering corrupts a married couple. But Lucas says he changed the story into one about betrayal. And while this movie has a terrific wind-up, a terrific cast, and a terrific first two-thirds, it falls apart with a series of questionable character actions that seem written just to keep the movie from ending too soon. In fact, it gets downright silly.
Peter Sarsgaard should finally be getting the props he deserves; with The Dying Gaul and Shattered Glass, he seems to be taking his career out of playing background supporting roles. Patricia Clarkson and Campbell Scott are the married couple. As a high-powered Hollywood producer, Scott's performance skates a razor's edge just this side of comedy and gets better as the movie goes on. I could watch Clarkson just read the phone book, so it's just gravy that she parades around in the first twenty minutes of the movie in a bikini.
The plot of The Dying Gaul relies heavily on characters interacting across the internet. It's interesting seeing how internet chat has been built into narratives, either as a way for characters to dupe each other (Closer) or a way for characters to interact with each other (Something's Gotta Give). The way Internet chat drives The Dying Gaul -- the scenes are almost like Hitchcock -- is one of the more thrilling instances of internet communication I've seen in a movie.
Hard Candy
Another installment in the psycho stalker genre, the twist this time being that the bad guy is a fourteen-year-old girl who finds her victim in a chat room. The movie opens with the end of the chat in which they agree to meet, and then cuts to a two-person encounter that could be a stage play. Ellen Page is much better than you'd expect from someone her age playing a psycho (she was seventeen when the movie was shot) and there's some good dialogue between her and her victim. The early build up as the male character allows the conversation to turn sexualized is a great counter-balance to the standard psycho/victim dynamic. It's a tightly wound movie with some nice twists and a cringe inducing sequence that makes the hobbling in Misery look like a lashing with a wet noodle.
Matando Cabos
Someone's been watching a lot of early Tarantino. And luckily, that someone -- in this case new filmmaker Alejandro Lozano --appreciates the energy and humor required to pull it off. This black comedy is sometimes distinctly Mexican, which is why many people in the audience didn't seem to understand the jokes about a masked wrestler fighting low-budget zombies, but it captures perfectly that Elmore Leonard vibe of a big cast of confused characters folding in on each other. It's snappy, funny, and surprising. And it features one of the best car stunts I've seen in a long time.
Mysterious Skin
I like it when movies use horror motifs as a sort of metaphor for real life issues. In Ginger Snaps, the werewolf myth is representative of girls dealing with puberty. In Larry Fessenden's Habit, the vampire myth is representative of the demands a relationship puts on someone. In Greg Araki's Mysterious Skin, alien abductions stand in for child abuse. And like Todd Solondz’ Happiness, this is a movie brave enough to not simply condemn and be done with it.
Araki, working from a novel written by Scott Heim, gives the story his usual aggressively homo angle, but it's more matter-of-fact instead of in-your-face. He seems to be maturing as a filmmaker, transitioning from ‘Fuck you’ movie-making to storytelling. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who played the annoying long-haired kid on Third Rock from the Son, gives one of his two great performances at this Sundance (he was also in Brick).
Police Beat
Police Beat opens with a shot so common it's a cliché: someone is staring at a body in the water. But Police Beat isn't about the body in the water. It's about the cop looking at the body, which is promptly ignored as the cop goes about his beat in Seattle (gorgeously filmed across dozens of locations). All the crimes and misdemeanors he encounters -- and some he doesn’t encounter -- are presented and then ignored. This is not a movie about events. It is an odd languid inner monologue the policeman has with himself over a girl he loves, but doesn't trust. It's about how often he checks his messages to see if she's called. It's about someone so consumed by doubt and heartsickness that the horrible things people do to each other wash over him.
To further reinforce the idea that we're in someone else's head, the lead character is an immigrant from Senegal, talking to himself in an African dialect. He's also a Muslim. In one exchange, someone threatens President Bush and he actually defends the President. Yet he seems to be covering for his partner's peccadilloes. He's a moral enigma, a fascinating gorgeous character, who is both alien and familiar.
Three...Extremes
Half way into the first of these three horror shorts, I got queasy and had to get up and walk out of the theater. I went downstairs to the bathroom and splashed water on my face. I think it was something I ate, combined with having gotten very little sleep the night before and seeing a late screening at the end of a long day. It also might have had something to do with the fact that the characters onscreen were chopping up fetuses and eating them.
This was Dumplings, Fruit Chan's nauseatingly creepy story about a modern witch and the woman who comes to her to get younger. The second story was Cut, Chan-wook Park's stylish but unexceptional psycho-terrorizes-his-victim drama, and the third was Box, Takashi Miike's cinematic poem about something terrible that happens to contortionist sisters. The Miike and Chan piece were gorgeously shot (the latter by the inestimable Christopher Doyle) and had wonderful sound design. In fact, Miike's Box could play as a companion piece to Audition for the similarities in style, theme, and structure.
...on to the bad! This will be fun, I promise.
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