OCR Text |
Show I SPLENDID SUNDANCE Final Thoughts on the Festival and Its Awards JEREMY MATHEWS BY "7his year's Sundance Film Festival juries selected films M that earned buzz from critics and audiences during the festival. The Documentary jury awarded the Grand Prize to "Capturing the If Fnedmans," and the Dramatic Grand Prize went to "American Splendor." "American Splendor" is a biopic author on the life of comic-booHarvey Pekar that brilliantly com- bines the dramatic material, starring Paul Giamatti as Pekar and f lope Davis as his wife, Joyce, with real life interviews, voice overs and archival footage. This effort could have gone totally wrong, but directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini made the concept work effectively instead of distracting attention away from the main point of the film. HBO Films financed the project, and will hopefully run the film in theaters before putting it on the air. Andrew Jarecki's "Capturing the Friedmans" combined recent footage and interviews with home movies of a strange family who continued to tape themselves even when a child pornography scandal erupted. The Documentary jury gave best director honors to Jonathan Karsh for "My Flesh and Blood," accept her eagerness to learn old tribal ways because her twin brother who died at birth was expected to become the new chief. The Documentary jury awarded special prizes to "The Murder of Emmett Till," aboftt the racist the civil murder that "A to rights movement, and Certain Kind of Death," about the process of caring for the corpses of people who die alone. David Gordon Green's stunning, poetic "All the Real Girls," definitely one of the best films in either competition category, shared a special jury prize for "artistic merit and emotional truth" with A. Dean Bell's "What Alice Found," a clumsily shot digital feature about a high school graduate who ends up in the world of truck-stoprostitution. The jury also gave two awards for performances, one to Clarkson for her work in "All the Real Girls," "Pieces of April" and "The Station Agent," and one to Charles Busch, female who played a washed-u"Die Mommie in Die," singer which he also wrote. Dana Kupper, Gordon Quinn and Peter Gilbert won the Documentary Cinematography Award for their work on "Stevie," by "Hoop Dreams" director Steve James. The film is a touching investigation into the man whom James met which also received the coveted Documentary Audience Award, based on votes from the festival audience. The movie is a portrait of Susan Tom, a woman living with and caring for nine afflicted children, ranging from burn victims to the terminally ill. The film was touching in the way it showed both the pain and joy of some unfortunate but fascinating kick-starte- people. Catherine Hardwicke won the directing award for "thirteen," a frightening portrait of adolescence featuring an excellent performance by Holly Hunter as the mother of a troubled child. Tom McCarthy's "The Station Agent" won the Dramatic Audience Award. The film stars Peter Dinklage as a dwarf train enthusiast who inherits a train station in a small town in New Jersey and befriends a divorced painter (festival star Patricia Clarkson) whose son died and a coffee vendor who constantly feels the need to talk. The characters are very naturally written and the actors capture their humor and sadness. The film also won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. The World Cinema Audience Award, the only prize given in its category, went to Niki Caro's "Whale Rider," a huge crowd pleaser from New Zealand about a girl whose grandfather doesn't d p p now-grow- n 10-yea- rs Rabbit' Burrows Into Australian Racism Fence" Miramax Films Directed by Phillip Noyce Screenplay by Christine Olsen, based on the book Follow the Rabbit-Proo- f Fence by Doris Pilkington Produced by Phillip Noyce, Christine Olsen and John Winter "Rabbit-Proo- f Opens Friday at the Tower Rated PC themselves to recommend which children should be taken away. Kenneth Branagh plays A.O. Neville, the man who is officially in charge of all the aboriginal children. Neville feels that since they are half white, the kids can have the "savage" taken out of their natures. At one point, he gives a presentation that shows all traces of the race gone after three generations with white fathers. But first, Neville and his cohorts feel they have to modify the children to act like white people so that they can work as domestic servants. This includes denying them their native language and physically punishing responsibility of the government and its officials, who took the children from their homes to reform them. "Rabbit-Proo- f Fence" is about who were taken away three girls from their aboriginal mothers and, quite simply, want to go home. This basic desire is incredibly affecting and The children's white fathers worked on a fence that spreads t in order to keep the rabbits off farm land, and are now, in 1931, long gone. Fourteen-year-olwell-handle- P (out offour) coast-to-coas- by Jeremy Mathews d In more recent times than we like to believe, children who were born from mixed aboriginal and " white parents, called were considered the legal "half-castes,- f Molly (Everlyn Sampi), her sister Daisy (Tianna Sansbury) and their cousin Gracie (Laura Monaghan) are easy targets for the local police who take it upon ld see rabbit, page m earlier when he was his Big Brother. It was the only competition documentary shot on film instead of digital video. "Ouattro Noza" won the Dramatic Cinematography Award tor Derek Cianfrance. The shorts jury awarded the top prize to "Terminal Bar," Stefen Nadelman's documentary on the tough New York City bar where his father used to work. On the whole, the juries picked e and films, Dramatic the although special prizes could have easily gone to "All the Real Girls" and Clarkson 'without sharing. well-like- well-mad- Si t some worthwhile films that weren't covered in the last issue. Matthew Ryan Hoge's "The United States of Leland" features a superb performance by Ryan Gosling as a teenager arrested for murdering a retarded boy and who is confused about what happened. Don Cheadle plays a teacher in a juvenile detention facility who wants to help the kid, but also wants to use him as inspiration for his book. The film weaves a delicate ensemble tale of regret, revenge and depression. The World Cinema category featured the interesting experiment "AKA," which had three different shots on a split screen through the entire film. The audience chooses whose face (or alternate blocking, or glimpse into the past and future) to look at. While the film isn't perfect, it's certainly an V 1 x ' . V 1 - -- r J . ,'f t .; . ' .) f' 'T ' - - f ' ' , Aboriginal children were taken from their parents In Australia so they could be 'reformed' as domestic servants. JANUARY 30, 2003 j RED Magazine Elliott, Jim True-Fros- t, J.K. Simmons and newcomer Valentina de Angelis as an girl whose father (Elliott) is suffering from severe depresNeil LaBute's "The Shape of Things" returned to the director's darker side. The film is about a couple who meets a when the female spray-paint- s BYU-alumn- penis on a sculpture's fig leaf in a museum the male is the museum's security guard. The film creates an elegant dark humor as the woman attempts to change the man. Alex Proyas, who made the visionary "Dark City" in 1998, followed it with the incredibly different "Garage Days," a lively musical about an Australian garage band without much talent, but plenty of spirit. Classic comic sequences include a montage of the band trying to raise money by doing things like putting on a koala suit and masquerading with a "Save the koala's" bucket and a dinner with one band member's parents in which everyone is accidentally on acid. jeremyred-mag.co- m ire Shrills on a itica I Bus Ride RsqI by Jeremy LB jp Mathews imimmi lift 11 1 t plays out as a thriller and it's a very dramatic thriller because the peo ple are not actors. In a fiction film, if someone gets shot, nobody dies," Jose Padilha said of his documentary, "Bus 174," a Brazilian film documenting a famous bus hijacking in which a street kid named Sandro do Nascimento held up a bus and took several hostages. The event had already been thoroughly covered in the media, but Padilha saw the documentary as an opportunity to explain what happened and outline the current problems with life in Brazil. "The regular media, which is composed of newspapers and television reports, is very different from documentaries," he said. "It's not that media is bad, it's a has it that very constrained just schedule. The Bus 174 incident happened on June 12, 2000 the next day, they've got to have the news. The regular media doesn't have the time to check out and create a certain understanding of why that happened." In his film, Padilha thoroughly illustrates the reasons for the hijacking. For example, do Nascimento had already done time in prison and didn't want to be captured, so Padilha examines the poor conditions in Brazilian prisons. "My aim with the film was to instead of report, to somehow jj day-to-da- J com-ing-of-a- sion. MORE HIGHLIGHTS As the festival wraps up after I saw 50 films in 10 days, there are day-to-da- k .r. - RjO d interesting experience. The Premiere category, which doesn't compete, featured several interesting efforts to look for next year (although others had no place on a movie screen, let alone Sundance). Campbell Scott's "Off the Map" could have been an ordinary story, but transcended the genre with excellent direction and thoroughly realized characters, played by Joan Allen, Sam y y explain. How did the guy get inside the bus? Why was he there? Why did he behave in that way? What had happened to him before? Why wouldn't he give himself up? These questions weren't addressed by the media at all," he said. "I don't think that subject matters that have been covered by the regular media are already understood. I think there is a place for other languages. Not only documentaries, but books too." The film serves as a portrait of an event for Americans, but for Brazilians who already knew about the incident, the film was an Padilha said. "We got a lot of newspaper articles and a lot of press in BraziL.say-inthat another thing happened from what everybody thought," Padilha said. To find out how the film would play in the United States, Padilha's friend set up a screening in New York City with American directors like Brian de Palma. This was when, he said, he realized the film had potential as a thriller. "Most documentaries are intellectual stuff," he said. One of "Bus 174's" most impressive qualities is its use of editing existing footage. "This incident was broadcast live for five hours," Padilha said. "And when I went to the TV stations to research the footage, I found out that they have 30 hours... because they had many different cameras there. My first work was to sync all those different cameras... so I day-to-da- y eye-opene- r, g slow-pace- see bus 174, page rii |