It’s hard to get drunk on the streams of news and reviews that pour out of the big international film festivals these days. Everything exists in the shadow of Cannes and the Academy Awards – outlets track anointed favourites from festival to festival, hissing about ‘snubs’ and ‘buzz’ and nothing that has to do with love of film. Toronto and TriBeCa and Berlin and Venice are treated as data points on an increasingly elaborate graph.
That’s what makes the Sundance Film Festival an anomaly, still fun and exciting to follow after all these years. As a January festival geared towards independent filmmakers, most of whom have low profiles and modest budgets, it’s (relatively) egalitarian and its runaway hits are often unpredictable. Yeah, there’s always some weirdos who filter the Festival through the Oscars, but it’s easier to avoid all that, because Sundance isn’t dominated by studios and its place in the festival gauntlet.
This year’s no exception, and there’s plenty of films I’m gagging to see:
• Whiplash: the winner of the US Grand Jury Prize – Dramatic pits wunderkind Miles Teller and frequently-undervalued genius JK Simmons against each other as a ferociously ambitious jazz drummer and a vicious teacher-cum-drill sergeant;
• The Babadook: Loosely based on her weird, Kitchen Sink-esque 2005 short Monster, Jennifer Kent’s debut charts a depressed mother’s unravelling when the monster in a Gorey-esque storybook starts tormenting her house;
• What We Do In The Shadows: a supernatural Christopher Guest-style mockumentary by Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement about a Wellington flat of centuries-old vampires, which has received very positive reviews;
• Boyhood: Richard Linklater’s been filming this story about a boy’s development into adulthood for 12 years, which is reason enough to treat it as one of the year’s unmissable cinematic events;
• The Voices: Ryan Reynolds plays an emotionally-stunted murderer whose angelic dog and malevolent cat start talking to him in Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi’s pulpy-looking horror comedy;
• Dear White People: Justin Simien’s concept trailer sold a sharp satire of “being a Black face in a white place” by way of Whit Stillman’s patter and Wes Anderson’s visual language, and the end result looks equally appealing and confrontational;
• And others like Listen Up Philip, Concerning Violence, The Guest, Blue Ruin, The Better Angels, Difret, Blind and To Kill A Man.
But will we see them here? No doubt some will come through the NZIFF (and I would be lying if I said this post wasn’t a naked appeal to Bill Gosden and co). A couple might even get limited releases – bank on What We Do In The Shadows, Whiplash and Boyhood getting some kind of run in the next 12 months.
The problem is so much of Sundance is ‘uncommercial’, at least in the eyes of local distributors (see Thought One of my post on Short Term 12, a film that missed out on Sundance and premiered at SXSW). With few distributors willing to take a punt, and limited streaming and VOD options in New Zealand (obligatory reminder about Netflix and Hulu Plus), Sundance becomes a sad attempt at predicting what we might get, rather than a way of finding out what we will get. It’s still easy to get drunk on the barrage of premieres and reviews coming out of Sundance; ultimately, though, it’s a sad kind of drunk.
