Under the Radar

Sundance 2005

Park City is the only city I know of where you pass underneath a ski lift driving down the main street. Formerly a venue of the 2002 Winter Olympics, Park City still manages to draw a crowd for the two weeks it hosts the Sundance Film Festival. Tickets are highly sought after and extremely hard to get, but I did manage to see three films this year. Since Park City is just about an hour's drive from where I live, I thought I'd check out the action. Unfortunately, I was only there for the last day of the festival and the party seems to have already moved on. I did get to see a couple good films, however.

Partly in color, partly in black and white, Sugar is a movie full of tension. From the dark ambient soundtrack full of high pitched drones to the edgy camerawork and actress Samara Golden's expressive face, you will feel a sense of uneasiness watching this film. Except for the closing credits, the entire film takes place inside a single room, and with few brief exceptions, features only one actor. A woman moves into a new single room apartment, but finds it full of the previous tenant's remains. From answering machine messages and photographs to food left over in the fridge, his ghost continues to haunt the room. A slow contemplative film at first, we watch as the woman eats, brushes her teeth, clips her toenails, bathes, and cleans up the room. However, these mundane acts are full of tension. As the film continues, it becomes apparent we will never hear the woman speak, but we join in her descent to madness. Sugar has a very "student film" feel to it and the low budget special effects definately scream "independent" which is why it's featured at Sundance. Fans of movies such as David Lynch's Eraserhead will enjoy this surreal horror film. As I was leaving the theatre, I heard someone remark, "It's as if he wrote it while on acid" as if that were a bad thing. Directed by Patrick Jolley and Reynold Reynolds.

Three... Extremes is a trilogy of horror films by three different directors (Fruit Chan, Park Chan-Wook, and Takashi Miike). The first, Dumplings, relies purely on shock value as a woman eats fetuses to keep her skin looking young. The second, Cut, is rather reminiscient of the recent Hollywood film Saw. A man is forced to choose between killing an innocent child or watching as his wife's fingers are cut off one by one. Comedic moments make it watchable, but it too is ultimately reduced to shock value. The third, Box, is a Japenese ghost story with a nice atmosphere to it. There are times during the film with no sound at all, which is a very nice effect. However, Box suffers from one too many instances of the main character waking up from a dream, making the whole film rather pointless.

If the directors of Three... Extremes wanted to disturb people, they should have taken a cue from Crispin Glover. Glover (Back to the Future, Charlie's Angels, Willard) is best known as an actor who favors eccentric roles. So when I found out that he'd written and directed a movie, I had to see it. Partly filmed in Salt Lake, the aptly titled What Is It? features a cast of actors with Down's Syndrome. Described by Glover as "The journey of a young man whose principle interests include snails, salt, pipes, and finding a way back home while being tortured by an heiristic racist inner psyche," the film features a lot of nudity, sexual situations, violence, and pouring salt on snails. The hardest part of the film to watch was a snail being decapitated with a razor blade. It's kind of strange that violence against people doesn't cause modern audiences to flinch because we know it to be fake, but violence committed against snails does make us want to look away from the screen because it's really happening. Fairuza Balk contributes as the voice of a snail and Adam Parfrey plays a character who wants to become a snail. Crispin Glover appears in the film himself as the "Dueling Demi-God Auteur and The young man's inner psyche." I must say using an old scopitone music video for the closing credits was a nice touch.

At the Q&A after the show, Crispin Helion Glover explained some of his thinking behind this bizarre and confusing movie. "I purposefully was utilizing things that I knew just were not dealt with at all." Glover includes a picture of Shirly Temple dressed as a Nazi, features organ music performed by Church of Satan founder Anton LeVey, and has counter cultural publisher Adam Parfrey appear in the movie in black face. Glover explains that he added things to the movie that seemed interesting, while not being overly concerned about what they meant. Some scenes in the movie were improvised by the actors. So while the movie does have meaning, it is much more open to the interpretation of the audience than traditional films. Glover specifically wanted to avoid the dictatorial tendency that most movies have in what message is presented to the audience and what people are supposed to think about it, prefering that his audience use their own imagination in finding meaning in the film. Glover admits to being interested in the surreal, the unusual, and the counter cultural movement which questions everything we take for granted. The movie isn't about Down's Syndrome, even though most of the actors have it. It's more about Glover's sensibility concerning people who are outside the culture.

Orginally a short film, What Is It? is now part one of a trilogy of movies. The now deceased Steven C Stewart, an actor with cerebral palsy who appears in the film, wrote the second movie in the series which is currently in development.

Here's a large quote from Crispin Glover in response to a question: "There's virtually nothing in the media that has anything like that and so I think that when there's a movie that has a lot of these kind of images and concepts and themes that are not being dealt with at all it is disturbing. It's something that takes one back but I think what's more important than that is that there's a dialogue about this that it's understood that even if it's wrong - I mean, I don't advocate all of the things in this movie personally. There's things that - I mean the thing that I get the most comments about are the snail killing and I don't think about killing the snails. I think it's horrible, but I did feel like it was worth having that viceral element in the movie just to start a discussion. It is bad for culture not to have any kind of dissent and I think there's no dissent going on. It means there's only one conversation and it does have to do with corporate interests having a lot of control and I think that ends up making so people don't have a genuine education of the intellect because there's not a genuine dialogue going on about these things. These kinds of questions aren't allowed to come up at all because it's an expensive medium and yet it's the most influentional medium in the entire world. That's why I don't like to get into politics because it's easy to say politics are 'This is bad, that's good,' but I don't think politics - y'know the President of the United States - yes, they have a lot of military power but they're out within four to eight years no matter what and the media keeps on the same thing for decades and decades and generations and it's a much more powerful thing and I think much more destructible ultimately because it's the thing that's educating or in this case not educating people." Knowing that the film isn't commercially viable, Glover will be touring with the film to art house theatres all around the country. If you do plan on seeing it however, be warned that it is disturbing, even for those of us jaded to Hollywood violence. Although, one member of the audience commented, "It made me happy to see a movie that disturbed me so much."

That about wraps up the movie reviews. Nothing else to mention except that all around town I kept seeing moose. Cows in Harrisburg and moose in Park City. Go figure.