Erin Broadley

Jack White

​"Make as much noise as you want," recommended The White Stripes: Under Great Northern Lights director Emmett Malloy, before the film's premiere at the SXSW Film Festival on Friday night. In practice, the audience didn't make much noise at all: we were, for the most part, stunned by this portrait of the last great epic American rock band, that somehow etched into the mystery of the White Stripes, without relieving it completely.

Shot mostly in the Stripes' red, white and black palette (one shot looks like black and white film, filtered red), Lights chronicles the band's unprecedented attempt to tour Canada, playing shows in every province. Some of these "shows" wouldn't count on the average tour roster: Jack and Meg played a bowling alley and a small private boat; they played Blind Willie McTell for Inuit elders and "The People on The Bus" on a Winnipeg city bus. And then at night, they'd rock the usual large theaters, and Malloy shows these "real" gigs as if they're all one long gig in progress. Rarely allowing a full song to play out, he montages highlights of a single night into one continuum of noise.

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The day before the Sundance Film Festival. I blogged about five films I was looking forward to at the festival. As so often happens at film festival overloaded with premieres, most of the films I was excited to see failed to live up to my expectations, while a number of titles for which I had zero expectations ended up making a much better impression. After the jump, check out the five films that I left Sundance unable to shut up about.

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At its bursting public screening on Thursday night, Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman's social networking-gone-wrong documentary Catfish was described by Sundance programmer Kim Yutani as "a film you really cannot talk to another person in depth about unless both parties have seen the film." 

I won't be the asshole and spoil Catfish's twists here, but the publicity strategy of protecting the film's "secret" is frustrating. It gives the impression that the major thing going for Catfish is the element of surprise, when in fact, the craft of this film is uncommonly impressive. You could remove the mystery quotient altogether and Catfish would remain the rare ultra-low-budget personal hybrid documentary with an extraordinary visual logic, and an even more extraordinary sense of compassion for its subjects. Even--especially--when its subjects take a turn for the superweird. 

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It sure is fun to watch decently-written comic dialogue performed by movie stars.

That was the thought that popped into my head about ten minutes in to The Kids Are Alright, the Lisa Cholodenko film that touched off a bidding war here and was eventually purchased by Focus Features. It was the same thought that popped into my head about five minutes into It's Complicated, Nancy Meyers' latest romcom for ladies "of a certain age" to love, and for film critics to poop on. Between Hollywood's tentpole mania and the fall of most of the studio-dependent labels willing and able to make a film like this, we're all so starved for the pleasures of an old-fashioned, glossy grown-up movie that here at Sundance, Kids was greeted like a revelation. But even if we're all okay with base competency being something to celebrate, Cholodenko's film is less worthy of such accolades than the latest trifle from the much-despised Meyers. It's less entertaining. It's less accurate as a portrait of adult sexuality. It's less honest. It's less than.   

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Before this festival actually began, Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine was pegged as one of the "hot" acquisition titles of 2010. And then, as so often happens here, the film screened, and the proverbial word on the street changed. Valentine slipped from the center to the margin of the general sales conversation, not because it disappointed--in fact, it's probably the most passionately loved film of the festival amongst the cadre of journalists and indie industry persons with whom I spend my evenings drinking--but even those who love it admit that there's no confusing Blue Valentine with an easy sell, and in fact, there may be no way to sell the film at all at a lower altitude. The initial buzz must have come from an ignorant extrapolation of what little was known about the movie. Blue Valentine may be a flashback-heavy, tear-jerking romance starring Ryan Gosling, but it's sure as shit not The Notebook.

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Mark Duplass is the Big Man on Campus of Sundance 2010. The actor (Hannah Takes the Stairs, The League on FX) and director (he collaborated with brother Jay on features The Puffy Chair and Baghead, as well as countless shorts) produced three narrative features premiering here, including NEXT titles Bass Ackwards and The Freebie (directed by Duplass' League co-star and wife, Katie Aselton) and Lovers of Hate, a triumph of uncomfortable comedy competing for the US Dramatic jury prize.

All of which pales in significance to Cyrus, the Mark and Jay's third full length-directorial effort, and a powerful symbol of Sundance as a festival at a crossroads. Produced and soon to be distributed by Fox Searchlight (the studio that brought you Little Miss Sunshine and Juno), Cyrus' very existence validates both Sundance for "discovering" the Duplasses and supporting their work for nearly a decade, as well as the mumblecore style that the brothers' films helped to popularize. In pushing the usual Duplass style into the realm of the male bonding/battle comedy most often associated with Judd Apatow, Cyrus feels like a scientific experiment: what happens when a cinema developed within economic limitations is given the new limitation of guaranteed dissemination into the mainstream?

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"Jail fucking bait!" exclaims record producer Kim Fowley (Michael Shannon) upon learning his new find, blonde bad girl Cherrie Currie (Dakota Fanning), is only 15. "Jack fucking pot!"

This line got a huge laugh at last night's Sundance premiere of rock biopic Runaways. It sums up a certain kind of Hollywood thinking, and is simultaneously a fine example of why this crowd-pleaser would never be produced by a major studio (it will be released by Apparition, Bob Berney's newish indie distributor).

Underage girls are big business -- this is why Fanning and Stewart, both involved with the Twilight franchise, are considered bankable names -- but at the same time, media made for the teen girl market almost never acknowledges the uglier truth of their budding desires. The first image in Runaways is of a splatter of red menstrual blood on pavement, and from there on out, writer/director Floria Sigismondi concentrates on the power, beauty and tragedy of the teen girl libido unleashed. Runaways tells us that fifteen year old girls want to do nothing but get fucked up and fuck, and have a completely rational hatred for everyone except for the few people they desperately want to get fucked up with and fuck. Not only that, but the film has an uncommon interest in the commodity value of teen sexuality, and the gray area between empowerment and exploitation.

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In two days, two documentaries about paparazzi have screened at Sundance. One, Smash His Camera, was directed by Leon Gast, who won an Oscar for When We Were Kings. The other, Teenage Paparazzo, was directed by Adrian Grenier, who has been nominated for two Teen Choice awards for his work as the star of Entourage.

The gap in quality and seriousness between the two films is not as vast as you might imagine. Both use the same exact footage from La Dolce Vita to explain to origin of the profession, both include montages of talking heads discussing the significance of the fact that the word paparazzo is Italian for mosquito. Both blame the death of the Hollywood star system for destroying the old, comparatively orderly celebrity publicity machine, and bringing on, to quote Liz Smith in camera, "whatever we have now." Both films are flawed, a bit too in love with their subjects, intermittently insightful, consistently entertaining. Neither fully accomplishes it alone, but together the two films document the changing face of celebrity, an evolution in what the public wants from their stars, and why.

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At the risk of damning it with faint praise, The Company Men feels like the film Up in the Air might have been, had it been made by and for grown-ups.

A comparison between the two films is hard to avoid. Like Air, Men focuses on beneficiaries of American boomtimes thrown into a soul search by a seemingly endless run of layoffs. Likewise, Men makes use of significant star power; 1 Ben Aflleck + 1 Tommy Lee Jones =  1 George Clooney. Both films treat corporate culture as an aphrodisiac, although Men's literal interpretation of that metaphor is far less romantic than Air's (and less blinkered). There's even a character-setting montage in Men describing the morning routines of its three main men that, with its insert shots and object fetishism, recalls Air's visual valentines to efficiency. Finally, if Men, the film directorial debut of TV producer John Wells (ER, The West Wing), is superior to that previous film festival hit in most areas of craft (particularly screenwriting and cinematography, credited to Wells and Roger Deakins, respectively), it's also mercifully free of the smug superiority that Jason Reitman injects into his portrait of corporate America in meltdown.

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After the world premiere Please Give, director Nicole Holofcener and her cast (including Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, Rebecca Hall and Catherine Keener, who has starred in each of Holofcener's films) sat on the front edge of the stage at Eccles, legs swinging over the side, for a casual Q & A about the filmmaker's fourth feature. Answering a question about a subplot involving a teenager's acne, Holofcener succinctly summed up the appeal of her entire filmography: "It's so small, but it's the world to us. Just like all of our little problems."

 

Holofcener's fifteen-year career is an anomalous independent success story. Alternating between highbrow series television (she's directed episodes of Sex and the City and Bored to Death, and Gilmore Girls) and her efforts as writer/director (including Walking and Talking, Lovely and Amazing and Friends with Money), Holofcener has achieved a kind of autonomy that's incredibly rare for a female filmmaker of her generation (or, really, of any generation). Think of her as a less prolific, estrogen-producing Woody Allen: though her films are not remarkably different from one another in tone, style, structure, and theme, she's creating a body of work charting the evolution of a life, and of a lifestyle. Like Allen, her areas of interest tends to be specific to awfully strict class parameters, but unlike Allen, Holofcener always deals directly with the fine nuances of "comfort," as construct that unavoidably bundles economic status with psychology.