Sgt. Angle reporting for duty. Ash took a powder from the Cinegasm column, but before he puffed out he handed me the pen, and the sword. I took the pen and threw that sword into a big ass lake. Good luck finding it. In the meantime, Cinegasm Paradise is where I will reign.
Welcome. “I’ve come before you to stand behind you and to tell you something I know nothing about.” This week, we take a journey to Film Festival Territory. Independent films and festivals have become the resource and lifeblood for all the movie coolness and hipness and quote quoting and mid-mid-life pontification that the rest of movie general audiences don’t think about or recognize until it’s a year too late unless you’re a hipster cinephile. You know, for example, the deification of dialogue-ridden, quirky anti-heroes like Vincent Vega and Jules Winfield, my man from Inglewood. Independent film and the trickle-down effect of this style of storytelling has woven its’ way into the comic-book universe as of late, and has already been known to parody itself (see: Spaced, Shaun of the Dead).
You’re all familiar, I hope, with the Sundance Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival, Venice, Cannes, and Telluride. The altitudes and regions of these gatherings present a multitude of options for filmmakers and movie-lovers to experience new worlds and fresh characters with other folks in the audience alternative (read: snobs) to the normal mall/multiplex crowds (those “others” who prefer the loudest explosion, steamiest sex scene, or the plain-old scream of a flavor of the week hot-chick over the pleasant character study that is The Visitor).
SUNDANCE: The Sundance Film Festival, located in Park City, Utah, has unfortunately become more of a tourist and celebrity hot spot than a center for film purchasing and behind-the-scenes deals. After all, selling the distribution rights to a low-budget, self-financed feature was the bedrock for Robert Redford when he started the festival. Nowadays, you’re more likely to find Paris Hilton offering free VD body shots at the Avian after-party than you are to find Tom McCarthy even standing outside of a movie theater (yeah, he’s the director of The Station Agent and The Visitor. Welcome to the Indie Filmmakers’ celebrity one-sheet).
TELLURIDE: Telluride has always been the “filmmaker’s” film festival; a celebration of and for the people who live for the cinema. The screening program for Telluride is not released until the first day of the festival, so if you’re going there, you go because you love film. You go because you love GOOD films. Blue Velvet, El Mariachi, Talk to Her, Juno. All of these films and more debuted at Telluride and eventually won over critics and/or audiences, and accelerated the careers of the filmmakers involved.
CANNES: Cannes is known for its’ scenery and lavishing praise and celebration of multi-national filmmaking, but you must be an industry professional to attend. No schmoes just off the boat will be wandering into the theatre just to stay warm, which is a pity for the general public. But you know, sometimes it’s good for a culling to take place in order to benefit the networkers who seek to better their careers, and stand above the rest of us.
VENICE: Venice is the oldest film festival in the world:
Ahhh, Venice.
JURIES: Most festivals have a Grand Jury – a set of filmmakers, critics, professors of cinema, etc. who serve to select the finest of the films in competition and bestow awards upon them (Palme d’or, Golden Lion). There are also Audience Awards, which are determined by ballots collected after each screening of an eligible film, on which each audience member will rate the film on a scale of 1 – 5 to help determine the most well-liked film of the bunch.
It is the audience award which brings us to the major bit of news for the week about the little movie that is getting huge praise all across the board: Precious: Based on the Novel by Sapphire. Directed by Lee Daniels (Producer of Monster’s Ball), Precious is about an overweight, illiterate teen in Harlem who is pregnant with her second child and is invited to enroll in an alternative school in hopes that her life can head in a new direction. It stars newcomer Gabourey Sidibe, Mo’Nique, Mariah Carey, and Lenny Kravitz. Yes, Lenny Kravitz.
As you can see by the trailer, “Precious” is a joy ride with a princess in New Orleans not an uplifting Disney-fied flick with colorful birds and mice who sing to you (there may be cockroaches lurking in that apartment, but rest assured they will not sing). The style is uniform, the acting appears genuine, and the issues and personal struggles in the face of never ending adversity and conflict ring true to anyone who has ever had to climb the muddy walls of a deeply dug ditch. Because, at the end of the day, whether you’re the one who broke ground or whether you were just born in the pit, you’re in the ditch. The only way to climb out is to inject your nails and pull.
Precious is gaining a lot of ground this awards’ season, and should be on ever
yone’s radar – cinephiles and general audiences alike. When debuting at Sundance, Precious won the Audience Award, the Grand Jury Prize, and a Special Jury Prize was awarded to Mo’Nique for her performance as Precious’s mother. Winning both the jury prize and the audience award is an achievement that is rare in the festival world, as the jury and audiences rarely agree on best of the fest. After Sundance, Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey signed on as executive producers, pushing the film in front of the handy executives at Lionsgate, who purchased distribution rights for a cool $6 million.
Giant floating head make woman strong
Then, in September, the film won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival – voted by all audience members. That means that, aside from the honor of besting the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man and Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air, starring George Clooney, Precious also became the first film EVER to win the audience award at both Sundance and the TIFF. EVER. If Precious wasn’t on anyone’s radar before, it should be at the center of the film-going bullseye from now until the end of the year. This is why the story of Precious is news, and while it may look as depressing as Requiem for a Dream, swallowing a bottle of pills and drowning yourself a one-time viewing experience appears to be necessary to feel the effect.
Previous Toronto People’s Choice winners include Whale Rider, Slumdog Millionaire, Eastern Promises, Amelie, Life is Beautiful, and The Fisher King. Previous Grand Jury Prize (Sundance) winners include Primer, Quinceneara, Frozen River, American Splendor, Welcome to the Dollhouse, and The Brothers McMullen. An uplifting bunch to some, but still a powerful collection for anyone’s film library.
In other perhaps more quirky festival news, Fantastic Fest ended on October 1. It is the largest genre film festival in the US, featuring Horror, sci-fi, fantasy and action films. It’s held at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin. This year, a film called The Human Centipede (First Sequence) directed by Tom Six, seemed to take the cake for most interesting movie to look out for. Take a look at a few clips below, as found on Youtube.
Yum.
Relieved of Duty, until next time,
Sgt. Angle
