How does Sundance go by so fast, yet opening night feels like it was a year ago? On the closing weekend I got to see the last big premieres and catch up on some of the big movies I missed earlier in the week. Here are the last of my Sundance reviews in alphabetical order, and the first won the Best of Next award. We call that the Topel Bump. It worked for Whiplash.
Imperial Dreams
Imperial Dreams illustrates the complex flaws in a system that creates more problems than the solutions it intends to. Bambi (John Boyega) is released from prison but can’t get a job because he doesn’t have a driver’s license, and can’t get a driver’s license because he owes child support. The mother of his son didn’t ask for child support, but she’s in prison herself so the county filed for it as a matter of course. Every employment agency has a website and Bambi doesn’t have a computer.
This is incredibly frustrating, and you feel it with Bambi, but it’s never whining. It just is what it is and Bambi keeps trying to make good. He’s sincerely trying to stay out of crime and not get pulled back in. He’s smart about it, even when guns are drawn, he won’t shoot back. He just removes the weapons.
It’s still not enough though. Child services gets involved because he can’t get a permanent residence, and when he goes out looking for work they find his son. Once again Imperial Dreams sports handheld cinematography. It must be the Sundance aesthetic thanks to inexpensive digital cameras and short production schedules, but director Malik Vitthal keeps it very steady. The ending of the film is open. There are no easy solutions. The point is to just keep fighting.
Life Itself
Steve James’ documentary about Roger Ebert is a rather dry affair. It is thorough and features a complete biography with interviews of his colleagues sharing anecdotes, as well as stark footage of Ebert in the hospital during his last year of life. As someone interested in movies and film criticism, it’s all there, I just would have expected a documentary about entertainment to be more lively.
Life Itself features excerpts of Ebert’s reviews well illustrated by superimposing over film clips. Colleagues and historians speak about Ebert’s writing style, and the bulk of the film covers the “Siskel & Ebert” period. The anecdotes get better once they start producing the show, perhaps because there was more conflict, or just that the more famous he got the wilder the experiences he had.
I would recommend Life Itself to anyone who wants to know more about Ebert. It does include highlights like the Johnny Carson appearance where he badmouths Three Amigos! in front of Chevy Chase, and outtakes with Siskel and Ebert flubbing and insulting each other. When Ebert died, I spent days watching old clips of his reviews on YouTube. That told me more his role in the movies of the era and was more entertaining, but you could consider the clips DVD bonus features after you get the basics from Life Itself.
They Came Together
The relentless David Wain of Wet Hot American Summer and The Ten is back. He did well adapting his humor to more mainstream friendly comedies but They Came Together takes no pauses to help people catch up. They Came Together is the romantic-comedy spoof that Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker never made. Not that Wain is copying them at all, just that he has a strong sense of satire and spoof, including some of the literal visual gags but expanding them way further. I guess it was David Wain I was waiting for to save the spoof movie. Now that I think of it, Walk Hard got it right too, maybe because both Jake Kasdan and Wain’s films aren’t so much spoofing specific scenes, but the big pictures of their respective genres, which therefore lend themselves to some specific moments.
If Nora Ephron were still alive she’d either be touched or offended that Wain is onto the schtick she and for contemporaries coined. Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler play the mismatched couple who hate each other at first but then fall in love thanks to misunderstandings, coincidences and wardrobe montages. It’s a meta rom-com in which the characters analyze the format yet act completely oblivious to it. The gimmick is she runs a home grown candy store and he works for a corporate candy conglomerate.
If you’re not as into eviscerating movie formulae as I am, there’s still some wonderful non sequitur humor. It’s hard to describe without spoiling the joke, but a circular dialogue goes way beyond the comedy rule of threes. Seemingly unsubtle references like, “If you want to know that you’d have to ask my brother” turn out to be innocently literal. There is one gag that is repeated directly from The Naked Gun, but where it was a one shot joke in Naked Gun, Wain decided to carry it for a whole sequence that breaks the fourth wall and then some. I love that stuff.
Web Junkie
This documentary profiles a Chinese center for teenagers addicted to the internet. Really, they’re addicted to online gaming so it should be MMO Junkie. It’s not like they’re obsessed with porn or hate crime propaganda or Twitter. Web Junkie should make American parents lighten up though. If you think your kid plays too many games, at least he’s not taking it so seriously he’s wearing diapers. No American shits online or we’d hear about that on “Tosh.0.”
Web Junkie is sensitive to the teenagers in recovery, depicting the sense of accomplishment they get from games. In a culture that puts extreme pressure on grades, a C student can be a hero online. It also confronts the parents on the home environment they create and the idea that only children are lonely.
Some of the center’s education seems suspect, like the idea that gaming limits brain activity and excludes social function. That seems like a scare tactic but it’s still fascinating to document. The kids are onto the center’s agenda, so how can they really reach them in the areas where they do truly need help?
Web Junkie never leaves the facility, though I imagine it’s impossible to single out your subjects until they’re committed. Profiling their previous home life wasn’t an option. Even when some kids escape though, I guess they eluded the cameras because we only hear about it. This is also another documentary that is enamored with showing its subjects eating. A lot. Why do filmmakers think that seeing their subjects, fiction or otherwise, eating is in any way appealing? Especially giving interviews with their mouths full. Gross.
Young Ones
I am obsessed with post-apocalyptic movies where the survivors have to find supplies, so Young Ones already had me before the titles rolled. Set after a draught dried up all the land, Young Ones combines primitive living with a bit of future technology to create a unique world. And they have a cool stash of supplies.
Ernest Holm (Michael Shannon) is a farmer caring for his son Jerome (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and daughter Mary (Elle Fanning). They visit their mother at a convalescent center where elaborate technology allows her to walk and hug them. Mary’s boyfriend Flem Lever (Nicholas Hoult) makes a play for the Holm land setting off a chain of events divided in to three chapters focusing on Ernest, Flem and Jerome but adding up to an epic story.
Writer/director Jake Paltrow crafts an exciting western with beautiful technique. His CGI is minimal, a futuristic building here and there creating a world more believable than entire CGI cities. A major plot point involves a robotic walking drone that blends into the scenes seamlessly and subtly. Paltrow has a strong sense of the western standoff, and I believe the idea of a water pipeline is akin to the western where the big bad railroad is coming through. He also creates some multi-level cinematic images using dissolves.
It’s such an intriguing world because we see airplanes and all this technology and hear about cities, but we’re only seeing the wasteland side of things. They definitely don’t have water and Mary cleans the dishes with dirt. How that works will remain a mystery like the three seashells from Demolition Man. And just look at that cast. Everyone is phenomenal.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and The Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
