By Jeff Michael Vice
It hit me, as I was trying to relocate the dislocated toe in my foot: I just wasn’t excited about the Sundance Film Festival this year.
First things first, I somehow managed to dislocate the middle toe on my left foot. In my sleep, no less. Trust me, it was less fun and was considerably more painful than it sounds. And after the severe swelling and subsequent treatment for the self-inflicted injury, that meant I was going to miss at least two days of this year’s festival, which ran Jan. 16-26.
Who knows how that influenced my mood and general disposition towards the festival, known worldwide for being the premier showcase for independently produced feature films and documentaries in the United States. I’ve now been to 18 of them as an “industry professional,” so there was also bound to be a certain level of festival burnout, and that certainly didn’t help my general malaise.
But I regret to say that I wound up seeing a grand total of one Sundance movie during the festival: “Mitt,” the surprisingly watchable documentary about one-time U.S. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, which was actually produced for Netflix by director Greg Whiteley, a Sundance alum, who was there in 2005 with “New York Doll”). Worse, I watched that one online, with a link provided by the film’s publicists, so my physical presence at the festival was negligible at best.
In fairness, I should mention that there were Sundance 2014 films that did have some interest for me, such as “Life Itself,” the documentary profile of late film-reviewing great Roger Ebert, the Nick Cave documentary “20,000 Days on Earth,” Zach Braff’s Kickstarter-funded follow-up to “Garden State,” “Wish I Was Here,” and the martial-arts/action-thriller sequel, “The Raid 2.” However, I knew all of them either had secured theatrical distribution or were in the process, so I could see them in the future, without having to hit the festival screenings.
Since the 2014 festival concluded over the weekend, I’ve been having an internal back-and-forth about the merits and problems of the festival, which has been praised by the independent-film community and criticized by some members of that same community because of the “star-gazing” media circus that’s become so prevalent at Sundance over the past decade.
So bear with me as I run down some of the pros and cons of the Sundance Film Festival, asking “Is Sundance still relevant?”
PRO: THEY SHOWED MORE, INDEPENDENTLY PRODUCED FILMS THAN EVER.
According to festival organizers, Sundance showed 118 feature-length films in 2014 – from 37 countries and from 54 first-time filmmakers. These films were selected from 12,218 submissions (up 72 total submissions from the previous year. Breaking that down: 4,057 were features and 8,161 were shorter-length works.
Of the feature-film submissions, 2,014 came from the U.S. and 2,043 were international. And 97 of those feature films were world premieres.
CON: WE’VE SEEN THIS FESTIVAL SLATE BEFORE.
Murders in small-town Texas (“Cold in July”). Somali pirates (“Fishing without Nets”). Juvenile delinquents (“Hellion”). Musical romances (“God Help the Girl”). Gay-marriage documentaries (“The Case Against 8”). Transgendered musicians (“My Prairie Home”). Groundbreaking scientific discoveries (“I Origins”). Perpetual adolescents (“Laggies”). Nazi zombies (“Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead”).
What do they have in common? Earlier Sundance features with the same exact plot (among them, “Ain’t Those Bodies Saints,” “Thirteen,” “Once,” “8: The Mormon Proposition,” “Dark Matter,” “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” and the first “Dead Snow”).
If that wasn’t bad enough, one of the Sundance 2014 “Park City at Midnight” features not only had the same plot as a 2007 selection, it had the same exact name: “The Signal.”
PRO: IT REALLY WAS ABOUT THE MOVIES AND NOT THE CELEBRITIES THIS YEAR.
If you followed the news wires (as I do faithfully), the impromptu photo shoots and celebrity news from Sundance 2014 petered out pretty quickly, which probably pleased the festival’s head honcho, Robert Redford – who’s always trying to take the emphasis off the “star-gazing” and directing audiences to the movies, even as he’s being followed/stalked by the paparazzi himself.
CON: OH, YEAH? LINDSAY LOHAN, WHAT’S UP WITH THAT?
Lohan didn’t actually have a movie in this year’s festival. But that didn’t stop her from hitting Park City to get some attention from the celebrity hounds. (She used the media circus as an excuse to announce a new movie project, the psychological thriller “Inconceivable,” as well as promote an Oprah Winfrey Network reality television show in which she stars.)
Ironically, Lohan also told the press she hadn’t been to the festival before – conveniently forgetting her appearance at Sundance 2007, with the thriller “Chapter 27.”
PRO: THERE WERE GENUINE SLEEPERS IN THE 2014 FILM SLATE.
No one was really talking up the musical drama “Whiplash” (featuring Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons), the aforementioned “Fishing without Nets” or the documentaries “Watchers of the Sky” and “The Overnighters.” But those four films wound up taking the lion’s share of Sundance competition and Audience Awards, and were hot properties for studios trying to acquire festival hits for U.S. theatrical distribution.
CON: WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME SUNDANCE HAD A GENUINE HIT?
Unfortunately, those films still might not wind up at your local googolplex and may not make back their respective filmmakers and studios’ investments.
While such previous Sundance selections “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire,” “Hustle & Flow,” “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” “In a World … ,” “In Bruges,” “Winter’s Bone” and “The Cover” all won festival awards – a couple even got some Oscar nods and wins – they weren’t exactly box-office successes.
In fact, the last certified hits from Sundance were “Garden State” and “Napoleon Dynamite.” And that was 10 years ago, believe it or not.
IN CONCLUSION: IT STILL MATTERS. WHERE IT COUNTS.
Obviously, commercial success is not the be-all, end-all of filmmaking, despite what Hollywood would like us to think. And there will always be down years in filmmaking quality and diversity. It’s not Sundance’s responsibility to make directors produce breathtakingly, mind-blowingly original works. It’s the festival and Institute’s responsibility to show the best works of a particular year, and to foster creativity through Sundance’s screenwriting and filmmaking labs.
And stars like Michael B. Jordan, Elizabeth Olsen and Jennifer Lawrence gained real legitimacy through Sundance showcases recently, as did actor-turned-filmmakers Lake Bell, Zach Braff, Joshua Radnor, Brit Marling and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
Sundance is adding new categories to the festival and is continually changing things up to make things fresher. A new “Sundance for Kids” section, featuring animated works that were more family friendly, was a welcome change of pace.
Plus, there’s always next year, right?
Jeff Michael Vice, aka Jerk-bot, can be heard reviewing films, television programs, comics, books, music and other things as part of The Geek Show Podcast (www.thegeekshowpodcast.com), as well as be seen reviewing films as part of Xfinity’s Big Movie Mouth-Off (www.facebook.com/BigMovieMouthOff