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

Uphill all the way

Sundance is like an uphill marathon for short-term memory, 10 days running like a month of Mondays.

While wending my way through, amazed by the roster of good movies some reviewers compile - discoveries, affirmations, epiphanies - hopeful, planning, juggling, a similar feat seems impossible, and of course it is. Unless you write for a metro daily. Something to remember is that the well-heeled, well-known name has an advantage over those with piles of charts and maps and a disorganized organizer: they've got a deluxe express pass, allowing front of line cuts by those with such clout.

Sigh. While some wrap stories, notably one in Monday's New York Times by A.O. Scott, made fun of how many different prizes were awarded by the various juries on Saturday, it was the first opportunity for me to realize how many good there were movies at Sundance 2005. (Let me weigh in with the chorus about the JibJab animations that preceded all screenings - sarcastic, cynical, bitter and stupid.)

Point of view to spare

There's point-of-view to spare in festival highlights, such as Jeff Feuerzig's engrossing, magical The Devil and Daniel Johnston. Beyond Johnston's musical output and his erratic life history, Feuerzig's many bits of fortune include the ultimate in interior monologue: Johnston's cassette recordings of his travails and troubles.

The evenhandedness and thorough weave of Eugene Jarecki's Why We Fight is bracing, too, keeping his analysis of what President Eisenhower dubbed the "military-industrial complex" from becoming dogmatic or didactic.

The nonfiction faction

More docs: Werner Herzog tries to shake sense into a dead man in Grizzly Man; Kirby Dick stares into the face of the legacy of abuse in the rich, heartfelt Twist of Faith; Steve James examines a dysfunctional family in Reel Paradise, capturing the culture clash when veteran producer's rep John Pierson ships his family to Fiji for a year to run a movie theater. While essentially light-hearted, there are intriguing comparisons to be made from James' previous family tale, the shattering Stevie. Greg Whiteley's New York Doll was an emotional surprise, too, following a decades-late comeback of New York Dolls' bassist and leader Arthur "Killer" Kane via a concert sponsored by Morrissey. Kane's recent years had been spent after a conversion to Mormonism working in the Church's Los Angeles Family Center, and the bonds of a long life, lived in unexpected ways, are examined with bittersweet grace. Robinson Devor's Police Beat is both dreamy and doc-ish, a horizontally oriented view of the wet topography of Seattle and the episodic journey of a Senegalese-born bicycle cop.

Other diversions

Panels and music showcases were worthy throughout the ten days; I caught maybe half a dozen, skipped Elvis Mitchell's "film church" rant, but a breathless Nellie McKay, running through her wordy, verby songbook, may have been my favorite bad motherfucker of the festival.

And there were stylish diversions among other movies I haven't mentioned yet: Matthew Vaughn's sleek gangsterismo in Layer Cake, much unlike his colleague Guy Ritchie's pictures; Kim Ki-duk's gorgeously absurdist, sometimes shocking, near-silent comedy 3-Iron; Park Chan-wook's claustrophobic, violent headrush, Old Boy; Thomas Vinterberg and Lars Trier's silly, implausible, yet fascinating ode to gun love, Dear Wendy; Miranda July's tender, confident sparkling surprise, Me and You and Everyone We Know; Noah Baumbach's lovingly acted family saga, The Squid and the Whale. Those with some knowledge of the contemporary travails of Buenos Aires society might find diversion, too, in Eduardo Pinto's Argentine-Depression-era gangster pic, a genre exercise with energy and allusions to spare.

Among more experimental work, there's gloomy, doomy class consciousness in Travis Wilkerson's Butte ballad, Who Killed Cock Robin? Stephen Marshall's This Revolution has a ragged fiction-verite mix that ought to inspire similar contemporary-set storytelling, plus a fierce role for Rosario Dawson, who has one monologue that sears with politics and emotion. For those who love the exotic, trippy early 1960s Cuban-Soviet super-collaboration, I am Cuba, there's a nice look behind its making in I am Cuba, the Siberian Tiger.

Conspiring toward a "conspiracy of taste"

At the end of the week, I'll catch up with a couple of shorts and a handful of Sundance entries. For the moment, a few thoughts about whatever conspiracy it is we inadvertently participate in while dipping a toe into the competing currents of any film festival. I've always hoped that those who love movies and those who make movies are deeply enmeshed in a "conspiracy of taste," but the truth is more elusive, the participants more evasive.

You probably don't realize it, the conspirators probably don't realize it, but it works out as surely as a missing reel from one of Alan Pakula's brackish early 1970s urban thrillers: if you go to movies other than the first-weekend the-carnival's-in-town pictures, but never, ever attend a film festival, your choices in the months that follow are still defined by the concatenation of people and taste and tastemakers and gatekeepers and gatecrashers and cash and grubby little practices by canny accountants.

There are journalists who sometimes use the shorthand of finding a dynamic or dialectic between dissimilar movies that happen to be released on the same day in the same city - J. Hoberman in the Village Voice and Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader, for instance, or far too many articles in the New York Times' Arts & Leisure section. And then there are the journos who attend the festivals in Cannes or New York or Toronto or Park City, Utah, who are beholden, whether by custom or habit or editorial fiat, to track the choices of a festival like Sundance and divine "Where We Stand Now" and produce the dread "trend" piece, the limp ilk of crystal-ball-gazing that older journalists rue as "thumbsuckers."

Before leaving for this year's Sundance film festival, which ended on Sunday, I scanned lists of releases planned by smaller movie distributors before summer. The cupboard seemed bare. I did some research on films and filmmakers on their way to the land of Mammon (um, Mormon), checking out where they came from, quirky statements of intent, gossip, collecting links and a headful of random facts.

Meanwhile, industry pundits chattered about the changes in studio management. Would Miramax be silent, with the Weinstein brothers headed for Disney's exit door? Surprise, surprise, for the writers of leading headlines: the first pre-festival purchase was a near-$5 million purchase of Wolf Creek, an Australian horror film for Miramax's Dimension label.

Would the shaken-up Paramount be looking for poppy product to synergize across its horizontally disintegrating distribution arms (which include Paramount, Paramount Classics, MTV, VH-1, Nickelodeon and BET)? Would there be a Napoleon Dynamite, an Open Water, a movie that would inspire not critical encomiums or life-changing epiphanies, but the kind of shapely and imaginative marketing and advertising that is more the art form than the "product" the "artists" have made in a shed out back or in the sleepy meadow down the dirt road.

While the zookeepers of culture do "tracking" on projects in various stages of development, one of the little-commented facts of this whole film festival/indie biz is that, in effect, the filmmakers are subsidizing the film industry, working on "spec" through the production process of creating a feature film, rather than, say, a screenplay or novel. Rather than finding a way under the overhead umbrella of their corporate structure to make small, smart, terse, aching, intense, beautiful, idiosyncratic pieces of art, the larger companies are getting their R&D for free.

There's a notorious statement from a studio head in 2002, along the lines of this: certain kinds of stories require "perfect execution," but, as the quote goes, "we're simply not in that business anymore." Paying a million or two or five or nine (avoiding, of course, the notorious $10 million watershed price paid for the grim duds The Spitfire Grill and Happy, Texas) is a small sum to pay for an already-completed piece of work.

A possible Screen Actors Guild strike also loomed a few days ago, with an increasingly sensitive subject irritating the non-animated ranks of performers: international DVD sales. While studios want to replicate the almost $50 million gross of last year's Napoleon Dynamite, an end run around the SAG in case of a strike was considered another factor in a potential supermarket sweeps.

Like the era when the record industry cleaned up on CDs but shafted consumers and artists, the current distribution system is taking advantage of the glut of DVD sales and keeping the cash for themselves. The New York Times quoted an agent at ICM: "International home video is the last great profit center for the studios, and they are going to keep those numbers as smoky as they can for as long as they can."

On Saturday, after many of the sales at Sundance were completed, cupboards restocked, marketing campaigns in the works, the SAG's board approved a contract with movie and television producers, getting a nine percent pay raise and a record level of employer contribution to pension and health plans. Changes in DVD residuals? Nada. As Focus Features president James Shamus told the Times' Tony Scott, ""We are not in the business of making movies. The movie experience you have when you buy a ticket is subsidizing an ad campaign for a DVD and a cable show. You are legitimizing that by letting us pretend that it is a movie."

The sentiment behind the words "Sundance Award Winner" isn't seconded by later audiences as often as one might wish. For instance, 2004's innovative, haunting prizewinner, Primer, flopped, but you can catch it on DVD shortly, the aftermarket of both good and bad. The most meritorious (and only sometimes meretricious) movies I caught in Park City in 2005 will be coming soon to a theater near you, with mixed reviews in their wake. After a few days, the slopes turned into a giddy tradeshow. Look for Viacom-Paramount-MTV-BET's pimps-and-whores drama Hustle and Flow; Viacom-Paramount-Nickelodeon's Mad Hot Ballroom; Warner Independent-National Geographic's "Flippered Migration" penguin anthropomorph-fest, The Emperor's Journey; Lions Gate-Discovery Channel's Grizzly Man, an eye-opening Werner Herzog doc that finds the master confronting a dead man over the nature of death.

And after death? We'll be gone, the movies will live on, the legal boilerplate will withstand. Someone else will be for always counting the residuals, forever and throughout the world, in all media, whether now known or hereafter devised, through the universe in perpetuity. Conspiracies are simple and have very little to do with taste.