old joy Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Director Kelly Reichardt's much-anticipated follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2006 fest circuit hit, Old Joy, continues to show Reichardt's remarkable gift for classically simple, deeply engaging storytelling. Wendy and Lucy is the story of Wendy (Michelle Williams), a down-on-her-luck girl who's hoping to turn things around for herself with a summer job at a fishing cannery in Alaska.

Wendy's making the trek from Indiana to Alaska in her beat-up Honda, accompanied only by her dog, Lucy, and about $600 to make the entire trip. When her car breaks down in a small Oregon town, Wendy is forced to make a series of increasingly difficult choices, and to rely upon the kindness (or not) of strangers to resolve her plight.

Hey, not everyone can afford to go to Sundance just for fun. If you don't live in or near Park City, it's pretty darn spendy to travel to the fest. Or maybe you've gone to Sundance in the past, and you'd just like to relive the memories. Sundance Channel is bringing you 31 days of Sundance, starting right ... about ... well, two days ago. But there's still plenty of good watching left. Every night at 9PM, the Sundance Channel will screen a film from past fests, and the lineup is pretty darn impressive, including some of my own fave films such as Adam's Apples by Anders Thomas Jensen (that one's tonight, so set your TIVO or DVR if you'll be out), and ... oh! Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy is on Sunday! Next Wednesday is So Yong Kim's In Between Days, and Ramin Bahrani's Man Push Cart airs January 16.

Thursday, January 17 you'll have a chance to catch the Duplass brothers' hilarious-yet-poignant Puffy Chair (their new film, Baghead, will be reviewed as part of our Sundance coverage this year), and Saturday, January 20 has Half Nelson (directed by Ryan Fleck, starring Ryan Gosling in a breakout role as a crackhead middle school teacher). There are some really good films showing all month long. Seriously, especially if you live in a city without a lot of access to indie film, this is your chance to catch up on a TON of great indie fare, for free.

The films above are just a smattering of the awesome lineup. You'll find the full schedule over at the Sundance Channel website, so make sure to mark your calendar for the ones you don't want to miss.

Before I landed the stable, glamorous and lucrative job of film critic, I lived in a small town (population about 4500) with two movie screens (the theater expanded to a whopping five screens in the spring of 1985). As of the fall of 1984, I was already a movie nut. Over the course of the year, my parents drove me to see Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Gremlins, The Karate Kid, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Starman and Dune. But it was in December that I saw the light. On their TV show, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert counted down their lists of the ten best films of 1984, which contained many titles that I hadn't seen and many others I hadn't heard of: Once Upon a Time in America, Amadeus, The Cotton Club; Paris, Texas; Love Streams, Stranger than Paradise, Secret Honor, This Is Spinal Tap, The Killing Fields, Choose Me, Entre Nous, A Passage to India, Micki & Maude, The Natural, and -- oddly -- Purple Rain. I scribbled down the titles and spent the next several months hunting for them on video, feverishly watching them on my family's primitive, but then brand-new, VCR.

Nowadays, with the Internet and all, people can look up dozens (hundreds?) of ten-best lists, and unless you have a favorite critic, the result is going to be more or less a consensus of all those lists. Sadly, that generally singles out the lowest common denominator choices, the films that have been specifically created, screened and promoted as award contenders. (In other words, the films that wound up on Richard Roeper's list.)

Kelly Reichardt's latest is a subtle, elegant meditation on friendship and identity in a cultural moment where honest cultivation of either is treated like a luxury. The NYU professor's second feature in twelve years, Old Joy stars indie folk/rock legend Will Oldham, and Daniel London as two old friends grown distant. Oldham steals the show as Kurt, a scrappy manchild who calls clean-cut father-to-be Mark out of nowhere and suggests they embark on a camping trip that afternoon. Both men appear to be in their late 30s, but that's where the similarities end. Mark channels his ample liberal guilt into self-righteous volunteer work; when Kurt mentions a recent wild night with an old, mutual roommate, all Mark can remark is that the guy owes him money. Kurt, meanwhile, is the prototypical neo-hippie space cadet, and is clearly getting too old for his practiced nomadism. He's still together enough to know that he's a little far gone – he's riding that fine line between knowing how crazy his ideas sound aloud, and knowing with equal certitude that his eccentricities are all he has left.

There's a kind of inherent queasiness to revisiting a dormant friendship, and Reichardt gets this exactly right.  Mark is clearly resistant to Randy's efforts to rekindle their bond, and it eventually becomes clear that time elapsed is not the only roadblock standing between the estranged friends. It's clearly been awhile since the heyday of these guys' relationship, and Reichardt uses the temporal distance between the men to paint an elegy for all things that time frustrates before it outright kills. If the primary concern of the film is a single relationship's demise, Reichardt uses the idea of time to deftly meander through other themes, and in its own way, Old Joy is just as much about the death of the small town and the privatization of nature as it is about these two guys. When Kurt asks about the local indie record store, Mark informs him that it's been turned into a smoothie place call ReJUICEnation; later, Kurt drunkenly mumbles something about the connection between sorrow and "worn-out joy", and the whole film clicks into place.

After the film's first SXSW screening, Reichardt acknowledged that she had prepared backstories for each of her characters – each actor was made aware of a past incident that had essentially ruined this friendship, and both were directed to work that knowledge into their performances without specifically acknowledging their traumatic past. And so one character waits until the pair is stranded for the night to break down and reference their shared distance, the other pretends like nothing is happening, and some kind of uneasy balance is reclaimed. Meanwhile, the film couldn't look better (it's gorgeously shot in matte primaries, with almost supernaturally green pines piercing a slate gray sky), and Yo La Tengo's mellow guitar score is the perfect accompaniment to Reichardt's highly economical film.

 

There are not many press screenings out there for which consenting to a $200 last-minute change-of-flight fee seems like a good idea. Hell, last week I failed to make a 20 minute trip on the 7 train in time to make a screening of The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things. So whilst a new Robert Altman film alone might not have been enough to get me on the phone with AOL Travel,  a new Robert Altman film, rumored to have been ghost-directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, in which Meryl Streep plays Lindsay Lohan's mom? You couldn't pay me $200 to stay away.

And so on Thursday afternoon I'll depart for Austin, one day earlier than originally scheduled, in order to make the Friday morning press screening of Prairie Home Companion. Starring, in typical Altman fashion, an ensemble cast of what seems like thousands, and based on and around Garrison Keillor's radio show of the same name, the production produced a swirl of ink last summer, when two items of interest hit the 'net. First, we learned that P.T. Anderson, who was nominated for an Oscar for the decidedly Altmanesque Magnolia, was hanging around the Companion set. Though some brushed his presence off as owing to the fact that his pregnant girlfriend, Maya Rudolph, was in the film, P.T. confirmed to the New York Times that he was in fact "pinch hitting" for the 80-something honorary Oscar winning director. This was apparently necessary because the wheelchair-bound Altman, as the second item of interest reveals, was busy giving young Miss Lohan some extra special tutelage.

Anthony Kaufman has an interesting bit up about three little gems from Sundance - Madeinusa, The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, and Old Joy - which all had good showings recently at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Kaufman reports that all three films won awards at Rotterdam, but seemed to be "under the radar" at Sundance, and wonders how many Sundancers actually saw them.

Interesting question. Given that pretty much everything was sold out before the fest even started, I'd venture to guess quite a few. I actually heard some buzz here and there about Madeinusa. All three films were on my personal list of films I wanted to catch, and I missed all of them. In fact, I don't believe any of our team of four reviewers saw those films, and collectively, we saw and reviewed over a third of the films at Sundance. There are only so many films you can see in 12 days. Hopefully, a lot of the under the radar gems at Sundance will be showing up at a film festival near you - and me - and we'll have another opportunity to see them.