Sundance: Getting the Clap

[Film Fest] A comment to yesterday's posting about the Sundance Dramatic Competition Film North Starr raised a point worth addressing: How can my disdain for the first 15 minutes of the film be given any credence when it received such an OVERWHELMING STANDING OVATION?

If you have never attended a Park City public screening at Sundance, here is something you need to know: Pretty much everything gets an enthusiastic round of applause at Sundance. It is important to note that the audience for a typical Park City public screening usually includes filmmakers and actors, and thus a round of applause is only considered polite. Then there are the filmmakers' and actors' family and friends, their agents, their attorneys, their agents' attorneys, their producers' representatives, and a variety of other industry types in whose best interest it is to pretend that your movie is awesome. Occasionally a genuine groundswell of love is obvious at one of these screenings, but even that means nothing. Please keep in mind that Happy, Texas received one of the most rapturous receptions in the history of the festival a decade ago, and promptly disappeared off the face of the earth.

In summary: If one is basing one's defense of a film on the response of a Park City Sundance audience, one has an agenda. Love what you love, and get over the fact that someone else wasn't willing to endure another 100 minutes of agony for the possibility of hearing people cheer. (Scott Renshaw)

Sundance: The Extra "R" is for "Really Lame"

[Film Fest] Day Four is when my tolerance for utterly unredeemable crap at Sundance vanishes entirely. I'll start to bail out on the movies with that stench of "I had a DV cam and a burning desire to write a terrible script." Usually I last at least 30 minutes, hoping against hope that sometime around Plot Point #1 (read up on your Syd Field Screenwriting for Dummies, boys and girls), something interesting will happen.

North Starr did not invite me to make it to that magic half-hour mark. I knew I was in trouble when the film opened with a dream sequence, the filmmaking equivalent of “I really don’t know how to start my movie.” It got hilariously worse with a conversation between two African-American gentlemen – one of them an aspiring rapper, apparently, the other his “homey” – which appeared to be constructed out of a hip-hop-themed Mad Libs: “Yo, you packin’ a [street slang for gun]?” Apparently writer-director Matthew Stanton never saw Airplane!’s two jive-talking passengers, because he has re-made that scene as though it were not meant to be funny. After our protagonist flees Houston, having witnessed the murder of his pal, he wanders down a road, sits under a tree, smokes a cigarette and begins writing rap lyrics describing the scene we just endured – all in the course of a single static shot. I was done.

I have now spent more time writing about this movie than I spent watching it. (Scott Renshaw)