Sundancebuzz2008 Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Upstate New York, and the cold is thin and sharp in the weak harsh light of morning. Ray (Melissa Leo) sits in the driveway in her nightgown, having a smoke, barefoot. The company's bringing her family's new double-wide trailer today, and all she needs to do is give them the first payment. But that money's gone, stolen by her husband, taken to the casino, just like before. The company won't drop off her new home without the payment; they head back to the lot. She gets her sons ready for school, digging lunch money out of the few coins she has left, and then she's going to try and find her husband at the bingo parlor on the Mohawk reservation before working her part-time shift at the American Dollar discount store. She can't give up. She's going to get that home delivered before Christmas. But that's going to take money. And getting that much money that fast is going to take everything.

Written and directed by Courtney Hunt, Frozen River began as a short film that bowed at Sundance several years ago; like Half Nelson, that short became a feature film. The Grand Jury Prize winner from the Dramatic Competition at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Frozen River is anchored by strong performances, carefully crafted and shot on DV with an eye on art, not mere economy. Ray's search for her husband brings her to the Mohawk Reservation; she finds her husband's car, but not her husband. When Lila (Misty Upham) drives off in his sedan, Ray follows her to a trailer in the woods. Lila thought the car was abandoned; the keys were inside. And she needs a car with a push-button trunk. ...

An award-winning photographer, Lauren Greenfield's work has appeared in magazines, newspapers and her own books; her debut documentary, Thin, was an impressive and sensitive examination of eating disorders in America through the lives of women at an outpatient center recieving treatment for their problems. She's back at Sundance with her short Kids + Money, an examination of shopping and spending among L.A. teens. Greenfield spoke with Cinematical about finding her subjects, whether school uniforms help keep kid consumerism at bay, and her own high school years in Los Angeles. Greenfield thinks her mix of L.A. kids -- from striving lower-class ones to pampered and privileged ones -- all have something to say about the mindset of teen America: "Sometimes the stories that they tell seem shocking or seem extreme, but I really think they speak to the mainstream that young people are experiencing all over the country."


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Nanette Burstein's documentary American Teen opens not far from John Hughes country, both geographically and artistically: we're introduced, in quick order, to four students at the high school in Warsaw, Indiana, on the first day of class. But while the camera work and voice-over has the glossy fizz of fiction, it's nonetheless a real school, and while the kids we meet all correlate roughly to the archetypal teens of fiction, they're real too. We meet Hannah, the plucky, artsy outsider; Colin, the star athlete with a heart of gold; Megan, the prom queen whose school-spirit high-fives hide an iron fist; and smart, insecure, dorky Jake, all in quick succession. And while part of your mind reels at the clichés -- we're just one Judd Nelson-type away from a straight flush, for heaven's sake -- as Burstein's film unfolds, we realize that if there ever was a place cliché's were true, it's high school.

And even then there are curve balls, large and small, thrown our way. For example, the montage of Megan's cluttered calendar of extracurricular activities gives way to scenes of her firing off a nine-millimeter pistol at a firing range; I don't recall Molly Ringwald busting caps. Colin turns out to be a surprisingly funny kid, just like his dad, but there's tension under the laughter. Hannah lives with her grandmother, as her depressive mom can't seem to cope and her dad had to move to Ohio for work. And Jake's self-confessed nerdiness is actually just camouflage over a slightly wounded soul; he's self-aware in a way that makes his life tougher, not easier. And as the kids talk about their lives, days become weeks become months, and the immensity of Burstein's achievement comes into focus; Warsaw Community High School may not be the place to find a perfect statistically average high school that represents America (as if any such school really exists) -- it's mostly White, impressively well-appointed, and looks fairly new -- but it's where Burstein shot, every day, for 10 months. And you get drawn into these kid's lives -- their struggles, their challenges, their triumphs -- so fiercely that you cannot help but be enthralled.

Morgan Spurlock -- whose mix of affable good humor, wise guy populism, shameless showmanship and participatory journalism made Super Size Me a breakout hit at Sundance in 2004 -- is back in Park City with his follow-up feature documentary, Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden? And those elements are all still very much in effect in Spurlock's sophomore feature film, even if they may occasionally feel in need of slight fine-tuning. Inspired by the impending birth of his first child, Spurlock hits upon one thing he can do to make the world a safer place for his yet-to-be-born offspring; find and capture Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind September 11th and the leader of Al Qaeda. As Spurlock notes in his introduction, "If I've learned anything from big budget action films, it's that complicated world problems are best solved by one lonely guy. ...." And while Spurlock may not actually answer the question of where, he actually tackles, with humor, probing wit and a certain grace, the much more important question of why.

And while Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden? offers more than a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down, at least there is a little medicine. After security training and an extensive battery of shots, Spurlock begins touring the globe to find out who Osama is and where he came from. A quote from Dick Cheney gives a party-line take on the roots of terrorist hatred for America: "They hate us, they hate our country, they hate the liberties for which we stand." But, as comedian David Cross notes in one of his charged stand-up bits, if the terrorists really hated freedom, then the Netherlands would be dust long before America got attacked. ...

So why do they hate us? Spurlock goes out into, as the op-ed pieces call it, 'the Arab street,' in Jordan and Morocco and Palestine and Egypt and Saudi Arabia and elsewhere to not only ask about Osama's whereabouts but also ask the people there how they feel about 9-11 and America. And with a mix of interviews and escapades and animations, Spurlock lays out a simple thesis: That America's image has been hurt and sullied for years by its own conduct, primarily by propping up authoritarian regimes that deny their citizens economic and political freedoms, with those angry, disenfranchised poor embracing Islamic fundimentalism as the only thing that will listen and violence as the only way they can be heard. (Oh, and invading Iraq. And supporting Israel's efforts in the contested territories. And ...) Al Franken notes that when Liberals say they love America, it's like the love in a long marriage -- "I love you, but I'm mad you didn't take out the trash ... " or "I love you, but I can't believe you gave billions of dollars in arms and aid to Iraq during the '80s." It's still love, but it's tough love -- which includes asking hard questions and raising ugly facts. Spurlock says, flat-out, that in our desire to support two precious resources -- anti-communism during the Cold War and oil right now -- we have helped create the poverty, hopelessness and anger that is the meat and drink of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism.

In Smart People, Dennis Quaid plays a lonely, semi-broken academic trying to re-connect with his work, repair his relationship with his fractured family (including his daughter, Ellen Page, and his adopted brother, Thomas Haden Church) and conduct a tentative romance with Sarah Jessica Parker's E.R. doctor -- who used to be one of his students. The feature-film debut of award-winning commercial director Noam Murro, Smart People's warm and winning script, by novelist Mark Poirier, is funny, yet never forced; rich, but always real. Parker, Church and Quaid spoke with Cinematical at Sundance about Murro's unexpected directorial choices, the film's surprising sense of stillness and grace ... and less noble topics, like dueling and character hair cuts, too: "One of the added benefits of doing a movie with Sarah Jessica Parker," Church explains, "is that you also have access to her hair and make-up people. ..."

This interview, like all of Cinematical's podcast offerings, is now available through iTunes; if you'd like, you can subscribe at this link. Also, you can listen directly here at Cinematical by clicking below: