Gary Dretzka
Leonard Klady
Emanuel Levy
David Poland
Doug Pratt
Ray Pride

Is it encouraging and amusing to the drunk?

There is an ancient text from India, which gives three rules for the theater:
One, that is must be encouraging and amusing to the drunk;
Two, that is must respond to the person who asks, "How to live?"; and
Three, that it must answer the one who asks, "How does the universe work?"
(repeated by Jonathan Cott)

Which is pretty similar to my hopes and expectations for movies and conversations and interviews each year at Sundance: how does the universe work, and not only the one defined by the making of movies and cutting deals?

On the plane bound from Chicago to Salt Lake City, it's packed. East Coast Sundance-bound passengers have made connections at O'Hare. (My flight's a couple hours before the blizzardy ruckus starts to dump upon the East Coast.) In First Class, middle-aged A1 and A2 have scripts in their laps, open to the first page. Lawyers? Money guys? They look like Chicago brokers, not east coast.

I'm seated next to someone working for an extreme games film festival joining all the reindeer dances. He's skiing, but we don't talk about snow: platform convergences, VOD, marketing, product placement, and sports-media-mouth Mark Cuban is a genius or a misguided maverick. It feels like conversational inoculation to the national branding already pimped by name in tsk-tsk day-before pieces in major metro dailies, the logos that will be gaily draped across chunks of Park City, violating the long-held spirit of the resort community's building codes demanding demure signage.

The priest and the church

The first two movies I see are superb; two accomplished documentarians making consummate work, modest in means yet effortlessly concentrated. Emotionally, the intensity of Kirby Dick's Twist of Faith was nicely juxtaposed by the goofy joy of Steve James' Reel Paradise. Dick's feature is a forthright portrait of the damage that eddies outward from child abuse, finding, after some searching, one Toledo, Ohio, victim to be the center of the piece, a 34-year-old firefighter and loyal Catholic with a wife and small daughter, who discovers that his alleged abuser lives five doors down, a priest whose videotaped depositions - emotionless, amoral - are the most chilling part of this disturbing, heartfelt, unflinching, forthright film.

While a dysfunctional family's at the center of Reel Paradise, it's several worlds away from the history of abuse in Steve James' last feature, Stevie. Reel Paradise briskly follows the history of veteran producers' rep John Pierson, taking only a couple of minutes to get to the Fiji Family Pierson, when the family spent a year running a movie theater on a Fijian island that the international date line runs through.

Pierson's expression of insouciant delight at 280 Fijian children cutting up over Steve Martin and Queen Latifah pounding at each other is a sweet parallel to the scene of convicts laughing at Mickey Mouse's cutups in Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels, capturing the joy of moviegoing, the joy of being a child, and the joy of caring what happens to children. But it's not a Pollyanna portrait: the family's conflicts are the stuff of telling comedy, and the conflicts between the Pierson quartet and the already ethnically conflicted community are explored in a plainspoken, articulate way.

The 180 Meridian Theater, which Pierson, while sweeping one morning notes as "indisputably one of the all-time dirtiest theaters in the world" is simple, but a palace, a church. He needed a break, and it makes for lovely comedy, especially when his son Wyatt wise-asses back at dad about why "independent" moviemaking means anything at all. Pierson's also blunt, with remarks like, "Frankly, independent film on a certain level gets as tedious and boring as generic Hollywood does." As well as noting on the uprooting of his clan and his tendency to pronouncements, "I'm the guy in Mosquito Coast."

No title; 9 Songs

A few movies to preview in a late first night session, including a movie that doesn't premiere until later in the week, and early reviews aren't encouraged, so I might even give this veteran director's latest teensy-weensy effort another variation of the common mangling of the Wittgenstein quotation, "That which we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence."

I'd hoped to compare The Unnamable Movie with the first movie I saw on Friday, Michael Winterbottom's sexually explicit 9 Songs. (That'll have to wait 'til later in the week.) An incompetent digital video opens for 9 Songs, which the distributor claims runs a trim and glib 69 minutes. Several uninteresting vignettes of someone's German girlfriend having sex on a train across Spain includes explicit fellatio, and an odd habit by the woman of lifting her skirt and displaying her shaved pudendum.

That palate-grimer done, 9 Songs sketches the physical relationship of a mismatched young London couple-a grizzled thirtysomething "glaciologist" named Matt and 21-year-old Lisa, a skinny barmaid on antidepressants-through nine concerts at London's Brixton Academy, which alternate with the explicit details of their sexual acts. The grimy, patron's-eye views of songs by the likes of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Primal Scream, the Dandy Warhols and Franz Ferdinand, have a certain electricity, and the gestures toward and during the couple's sex hold a universal banality that keeps the film both from becoming pornography or from becoming psychological drama. But the grimy video-to-film palate holds a certain truth about concerts and sex: everyone remembers different sensations while sharing the same electrified mood. There are a fistful of tossed-off lines that have some flutter-away authenticity, such as her reading of "Aw, baby, pay attention to me," and "Sometimes when you kiss me, I want to bite you, I don't mean in a nice way, I just want to bite you really, really hard and make you bleed." Ouch!

Truly painful are the more pre-determined bits, such as Matt's Antarctica-inspired musings, which seem unfelt and derivative, as does a dip into Michael Nyman's 60th birthday concert at their corner club. Compare the cold sentimentality of Matt's line while flying over the tundra, "When I remember Lisa, I don't think about her clothes, or her work, where she was from, or even what she said. I think of her smell. Her taste. Her skin touching mine" to these more literary lines from Ian McEwan's novel, "Enduring Love": "I caught in the fibers of her sweater the tang of the open air and Imagined I saw the sky spread before me. Everything was touch and breath." While the fellatio and ejaculation scene - notorious since the Cannes debut - is strong stuff, the remainder of the activity turns more Britophile: bondage games and a final act, a grim bit of coitus that's visually centered on the game actress' anus. Please, "Farther," not "Closer."

After a few too many conversations about bad sex that happens to okay movies, the Eccles evening premiere of the Brian Grazer-produced doc, Inside Deep Throat, held no charms after 9 Songs; no All-Fellatio Friday for me.

Did they screw the pooch?

More notes later on Pretty Persuasion, a bad taste teen comedy that I need a few more hours to think about: Skander Halim's script pushes a boundary or two, including invocations of school shootings and high school sexual scandals, but for the moment, let's just take one recurring bit, a line refashioned repeatedly by the 21st-century Heathers-istic lead character played by 17-year-old Evan Rachel Wood, who, at the dinner table (with dad James Woods!) repeatedly asks her airhead stepmother, "Did you fuck dogs? Did you fuck my dog?" If it's bought, I'll be interested to see what chunk of scenes gets recut or relooped or reshot to bring the movie down from "outrage" to "outrageous." Or, as another line goes, "Will you stop criticizing everything in my big bag of fun?"

Whole grain swag

We get email, if not an appetite for "healthy, nutritious meals": "Lean Cuisine will launch 100% Whole Grain SPA CUISINE, serving their new delicious line, featured in Fred Segal Beauty salon and spa and the Fred Segal boutique. Inspired by chefs from wellness spas across the country, these fresh-frozen entrees master the art of balancing taste with great nutrition. Invited guests will be able to enjoy a spa treatment while dining on dishes such as lemongrass chicken with brown rice and a colorful vegetable medley, or roasted chicken in a caramelized orange sauce with snap peas, brown rice, and pecans. In addition, SPA CUISINE will offer the first ever 24-hour food delivery service at Sundance to all patrons in and around Park City so attendees can stock their freezers for the week, and enjoy healthy, nutritious meals in the comfort of their rooms." Riverhorse, Chimayo, Grappa, begone!

Not Sundance, but as opening day rituals go

From the Associated Press: "At 1:10am yesterday, with the temperature below 20 degrees, a man in a heavy coat, his face obscured by a black pullover, appeared in the Baltimore graveyard where Edgar Allen Poe lies buried and observed his birthday by placing three roses and half-empty bottle of cognac at the site. The visit was the 56th in a series that began in 1949, a century after Poe's death. The three roses are believed to honor Poe, his mother-in-law and his wife, all buried in the graveyard. The significance of the cognac is unknown. No one knows the identity of the individual who carries on the tradition."

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