Blogs by Empire contributing editor Damon Wise (@yo_damo)
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Tuesday, 1 February 2011
Sundance Film Festival 2011: Senna, Page One, Perfect Sense, Like Crazy, The Convincer, Letters From The Big Man
A confession: I've been very slack with documentaries this year, but the two I did see were probably my alpha and omega of the festival. If push came to shove, I might even crown British director Asif Kapadia's Senna (pictured) as the best film of Sundance 2011, since not only did it satisfy as a retelling of the tragic life of the famous Formula One racer, it also comfortably held its own against pretty much all the fiction features I saw here. The breadth of footage available to Kapadia is simply breathtaking: from the late 70s when he emerged in the UK as a little-known go-kart racer to the series of Grand Prix wins that saw him become three-times world champion, there is next to no major event of his life that we do not see. Given that Kapadia eschewed distracting talking-head interviews in favour of much more compelling audio interviews, Senna keeps us constantly in the moment. Noting that the director has never made a documentary before, I was doubly impressed; this is, for me, up there with Man On Wire and I'm going to stick my neck out now and say that I think, if handled properly by Universal, Senna will follow that film's stellar trajectory.
Page One: A Year Inside The New York Times was far less successful to me, representing a very bitty 12 months with the media desk rather than an exhaustive expose of a major inky. Rather than repeat myself, here's a link to a piece I wrote for the Guardian last week.
David Mackenzie's Perfect Sense is another curveball from a director I keep hoping for great things from; I like that he has a unique and distinctive voice, but I'm not always convinced by the things he chooses to say with it. His latest is an episodic, apocalyptic love story, starring Ewan McGregor and Eva Green as newly acquainted young lovers who fall for each other just as a series of viruses descend on the earth, cutting off each of the human senses in turn. In his very nervous introduction, Mackenzie referenced Chris Marker's La Jetee (also an influence on Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys), and I do see that it shares that film's elegiac tone. However, the film it most reminded me of was Fernando Meirelles' much maligned Blindness (which I actually didn't mind). Like Blindness, Perfect Sense somewhat backs away from the existential void it opens the door on and never quite satisfies as a feature, ultimately feeling like a very handsomely padded and artful short.
Like Crazy is one of my hits of the festival; even though I can't imagine what its commercial prospects will be in the UK, it's a very lovely, authentic film. Many people have said that this, too, should have been a short but I disagree. It begins with two LA students falling in love – Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones – but since one is a Californian (him) and the other a Brit (her) the inevitable visa complications ensue to keep their transatlantic love affair apart. Really, nothing happens except that the two fight the slings and arrows of inclement US-immigration-department fortune, but the performances are so believable and touching I couldn't tear myself away from it for a second. Director Drake Doremus was here last year with Douchebag, which I didn't see but didn't hear great things about either. By all accounts this upbeat spin on the the Blue Valentine formual represents a major leap forward, and this may be a calling card at last for the adorable Felicity Jones, who could be propelled further up into the axis of Keira/Carey/Gemma on the strength of it.
The Convincer was just something I rocked up to out of curiosity, and though I wasn't sucked in by the first 30 or 40 minutes, a sudden twist pulled me in for the duration. Another insurance movie (cf Cedar Rapids), it stars Greg Kinnear as Mickey, a shady insurance salesman who becomes embroiled with a scatty, borderline-senile local farmer (Alan Arkin) who seems to have a vastly ancient and expensive Austrian violin on his property. Mickey's plan to switch the violin with a cheap replacement doesn't quite go to plan, which is where the psychotic Randy (Billy Crudup) comes in, but it would be unfair to say any more, since the intrigues of Jill Sprecher's film are pretty much the main things going for it. Fargo is a very close comparison, and though the film relies a lot on voiceover and very heavy exposition, it was one of the most purely enjoyable fiction films here.
Letters From the Big Man is not likely to be something you'll see any time soon in the UK, but it's not a film I'll easily forget, even though it goes on a little too long and has a somewhat sleep-inducing, hypnotic tone. Lily Rabe plays Sarah Smith, a government-sponsored ecologist exploring a remote part of Oregon. Though she is travelling alone, Sarah finds herself being followed – not by other humans but by the legendary sasquatch, a presumed mythical creature that uses subsonic sound frequency to soothe or unsettle humans as per its needs. The first half is the chore of this American Uncle Boonmee, but the second half assumes a strange beauty, as Sarah reveals that her familiarity with the sasquatch is not quite as remote as it seems. Director Christopher Munch has only made five films in the last 20 years, starting with his experimental, unrepresentative John Lennon movie The Hours And The Times, and though Letters... didn't blow me away, I had a soft spot for it and I like the fact that, like the sasquatch, there are directors like him out there.
A confession: I've been very slack with documentaries this year, but the two I did see were probably my alpha and omega of the festival. If push came to shove, I might even crown British director Asif Kapadia's Senna (pictured) as the best film of Sundance 2011, since not only did it satisfy as a retelling of the tragic life of the famous Formula One racer, it also comfortably held its own against pretty much all the fiction features I saw here. The breadth of footage available to Kapadia is simply breathtaking: from the late 70s when he emerged in the UK as a little-known go-kart racer to the series of Grand Prix wins that saw him become three-times world champion, there is next to no major event of his life that we do not see. Given that Kapadia eschewed distracting talking-head interviews in favour of much more compelling audio interviews, Senna keeps us constantly in the moment. Noting that the director has never made a documentary before, I was doubly impressed; this is, for me, up there with Man On Wire and I'm going to stick my neck out now and say that I think, if handled properly by Universal, Senna will follow that film's stellar trajectory.
Page One: A Year Inside The New York Times was far less successful to me, representing a very bitty 12 months with the media desk rather than an exhaustive expose of a major inky. Rather than repeat myself, here's a link to a piece I wrote for the Guardian last week.
David Mackenzie's Perfect Sense is another curveball from a director I keep hoping for great things from; I like that he has a unique and distinctive voice, but I'm not always convinced by the things he chooses to say with it. His latest is an episodic, apocalyptic love story, starring Ewan McGregor and Eva Green as newly acquainted young lovers who fall for each other just as a series of viruses descend on the earth, cutting off each of the human senses in turn. In his very nervous introduction, Mackenzie referenced Chris Marker's La Jetee (also an influence on Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys), and I do see that it shares that film's elegiac tone. However, the film it most reminded me of was Fernando Meirelles' much maligned Blindness (which I actually didn't mind). Like Blindness, Perfect Sense somewhat backs away from the existential void it opens the door on and never quite satisfies as a feature, ultimately feeling like a very handsomely padded and artful short.
Like Crazy is one of my hits of the festival; even though I can't imagine what its commercial prospects will be in the UK, it's a very lovely, authentic film. Many people have said that this, too, should have been a short but I disagree. It begins with two LA students falling in love – Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones – but since one is a Californian (him) and the other a Brit (her) the inevitable visa complications ensue to keep their transatlantic love affair apart. Really, nothing happens except that the two fight the slings and arrows of inclement US-immigration-department fortune, but the performances are so believable and touching I couldn't tear myself away from it for a second. Director Drake Doremus was here last year with Douchebag, which I didn't see but didn't hear great things about either. By all accounts this upbeat spin on the the Blue Valentine formual represents a major leap forward, and this may be a calling card at last for the adorable Felicity Jones, who could be propelled further up into the axis of Keira/Carey/Gemma on the strength of it.
The Convincer was just something I rocked up to out of curiosity, and though I wasn't sucked in by the first 30 or 40 minutes, a sudden twist pulled me in for the duration. Another insurance movie (cf Cedar Rapids), it stars Greg Kinnear as Mickey, a shady insurance salesman who becomes embroiled with a scatty, borderline-senile local farmer (Alan Arkin) who seems to have a vastly ancient and expensive Austrian violin on his property. Mickey's plan to switch the violin with a cheap replacement doesn't quite go to plan, which is where the psychotic Randy (Billy Crudup) comes in, but it would be unfair to say any more, since the intrigues of Jill Sprecher's film are pretty much the main things going for it. Fargo is a very close comparison, and though the film relies a lot on voiceover and very heavy exposition, it was one of the most purely enjoyable fiction films here.
Letters From the Big Man is not likely to be something you'll see any time soon in the UK, but it's not a film I'll easily forget, even though it goes on a little too long and has a somewhat sleep-inducing, hypnotic tone. Lily Rabe plays Sarah Smith, a government-sponsored ecologist exploring a remote part of Oregon. Though she is travelling alone, Sarah finds herself being followed – not by other humans but by the legendary sasquatch, a presumed mythical creature that uses subsonic sound frequency to soothe or unsettle humans as per its needs. The first half is the chore of this American Uncle Boonmee, but the second half assumes a strange beauty, as Sarah reveals that her familiarity with the sasquatch is not quite as remote as it seems. Director Christopher Munch has only made five films in the last 20 years, starting with his experimental, unrepresentative John Lennon movie The Hours And The Times, and though Letters... didn't blow me away, I had a soft spot for it and I like the fact that, like the sasquatch, there are directors like him out there.
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