Director of Programming James McNally is attending this year’s Sundance Film Festival from January 19th to 31st.
Festival Day 11
I’d been starting to feel reasonably human last night and that was fortunate since we were being tossed out of our lodgings at 10:00am this morning. Joel and Eric and I crammed our stuff into an Uber and rode back to HQ, where I stored my bag for the day. Lots of screenings of award-winners today and I wasn’t sure how busy things would be. I had a ride arranged to Salt Lake City for 8:00pm so I really had nothing else to do but see films today, and luckily I was feeling well enough to tackle it. I’m glad.
I began my day at the Yarrow Theatre, with an 11:00am screening of The Lure. This Polish musical featured two mermaid sisters who join a very odd cabaret show, with tragic results. Bags of style and the music was great. It may be the most visually gorgeous film I saw this year, too. I hope this one gets some sort of release in North America.
It was easy to just stay at the Yarrow, and I was happy that the 2:00pm screening was of Penny Lane’s animated documentary Nuts!. I’d met Penny back in 2014 at Hot Docs when she brought her last film Our Nixon and so I knew she’d approach her story creatively. And what a story! Dr. J.R. Brinkley was a pioneer of alternative medicine and of radio, and one of the savviest marketers in history. He made his name with an impotence cure that involved transplanting goat testicles into men, with seemingly remarkable results. It’s an amazing, funny, and ultimately very American story. Highly recommended!
After my lost day yesterday, I thought I’d missed my chance to see the Daniels’ Swiss Army Man but luckily their win for Best Direction in the US Dramatic category meant they’d get another screening, and that made me very happy. I ended my Sundance with the farting corpse of Daniel Radcliffe, and I laughed and cried in equal measure. If you can get past the rather crude setup, this first feature from the visually inventive team of Daniel Kwon and Daniel Scheinert is a plea for us to examine the things that separate us from each other. Paul Dano’s depressed character needs to form a relationship with a dead guy (Radcliffe) to see what it means to be human, and alive. Audacious and wears its heart (and its fart) on its sleeve. Sure, this isn’t for everyone (what film is?), but if you’ve seen their previous work (and especially Interesting Ball, which we showed you in 2015), you’ll get this, and hopefully love it as much as I did.
This 6:00pm screening at the Library got out just after 7:35pm, and although Daniel Kwon was there to do a Q&A (bless him, on the last day of a very long festival), I had to hurry back to HQ so as not to miss my ride. I never got to meet him, though I did briefly chat with his fiancée Kirsten Lepore, whose incredible stop-motion film Bottle we just showed a few weeks back. Maybe I’ll be brave and try to get in touch with them when I’m in LA.
Being out all day meant that I didn’t get a chance to dose up on Theraflu again and so the ride back to Salt Lake City found me sounding worse and worse and starting to feel feverish again. Susan, a local from SLC and first-time volunteer, had driven fellow volunteers from the airport at the beginning of the festival and made the same offer now to drive people back. She was nice enough to drop me at my AirBnB. I have two more nights in SLC before flying out to LA on Tuesday.
I felt like a horror film character as I met my hosts, who quickly boiled me up some water for my Theraflu. So my Sundance concluded with a bang (great films today) AND a whimper (still sick).