Sunday was another busy day for us at Sundance. I guess that’s kind of a given at this point. Since I’m the team’s designated go-to reviewer, being busy meant spending all my time cooped up in dark movie theaters while Leanne and Kelly hob-nobbed with celebrities. I made it to three movies today, and bumped into Jack Black on my way into see Be Kind Rewind. Well, maybe bumped into is too strong a word. I saw him from the back in a crowd as I worked my way into a theater. It wasn’t until the Q&A afterward that I even realized who I’d just seen. Jack is a lot taller than I’d have thought. Maybe he’s taken to wearing lifts.
Here’s a quick look at what I hit on this, the fourth day of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival.
August
August is the story of a dot com billionaire struggling to hold his company together when the bubble burst on the industry back in 2001. But in a broader sense it’s about the death of a dream, the dream that the internet represented for about five minutes, until the same old wealthy corporations snatched everything up and turned it into just another way for the rich to get richer.
Josh Hartnett stars as Tom, the head of a company called LandShark which he started with his brother and turned into an overnight sensation. Tom exists almost entirely in a dimly lit, rockstar world. Austin Chick, the film’s director, shoots most of it as if he’s making a vampire movie instead of a straight up high finance flick. August has a gritty, edgy look and it helps propel the audience along with Tom as he rides the edge of the dot com bust.
At first, Tom is an unforgivable asshole. An arrogant son of a bitch, who got rich with his brother (Adam Scott) and now thinks he’s the cock of the walk. But as things go south, Tom changes and we see him for what he, and everyone whose career died with his back in 2001, really was. An idealist, being buried under the wheels of big business. Tom represents the dream of freedom and creativity the internet once promises, and August is a dark and hyper-stylized look at the days when that dream first started to die.
Be Kind Rewind
The trailers for Be Kind Rewind make it look like a geeky-awesome nostalgia trip through much loved blockbusters of the past. This however, is not the story of two lovable nerds remaking every movie they’ve ever loved. Instead, Michele Gondry’s latest is about two guys trying to make a quick buck, and a community coming together by inventing a community identity centered around jazz musician Fats Waller. Personally, I would have rather seen the movie advertised in the trailers.
Mos Def stars as Mike, the guy behind the register at a soon-to-be torn down VHS rental shop. His best friend Jerry, played by Jack Black, accidentally erases all the VHS tapes, when in an accident with a power line, his body is magnetized. To save the rental business, the two buddies decide to simply re-shoot all the movies themselves and, to their surprise, people love them. Yeah I know, that sounds a lot like the movie advertised in the trailer.
But it’s not. Black and Def’s adventures in remaking are only a catalyst for a movie about community building and a lot of waxing poetic over musician Fats Waller. Ok, maybe it’s not the movie I was hoping for, but this other movie seems like a good idea. Unfortunately, while it is filled with great individual moments, Gondry’s film is put together in a manner that’s confusing at best and shoddy at worst. Note to Michele Gondry: Just because you’re making a movie about amateurs throwing together haphazard movies doesn’t mean your movie about them has to be put together haphazardly as well. Characters are introduced into the plot without a name or any explanation of where they fit into what’s happening. Plot threads, like a lawsuit by Hollywood’s movie studios, are started but then never completed. Be Kind Rewind is kind of a mess, and a potentially brilliant idea for a movie has been squandered.
Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
I’ve long been in love with the work of Hunter S. Thompson, if not necessarily the man himself, so it was with much enthusiasm that I lined up with the press for a documentary about his life. Alex Gibney’s documentary mixes selected re-enactments of Thompson’s work, narrated by Johnny Depp reading directly from the pages of Hunter’s books, with old footage of the man himself.
If as I am, you’re a fan of Thompson, there’s plenty here to grab your attention. But it’s hard not to notice that the best moments in the movie happen when Johnny Depp is simply reading Thompson’s words. We could have gotten that same pleasure by simply picking up “Fear and Loathing” and reading it ourselves.
It’s also somewhat baffling that a movie called “The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson” skips over nearly 30 years of his life. The film’s narrative jumps from the mid-70s to his death in 2005, ignoring middle-aged Hunter and missing out on paying tribute to later released, brilliant Thompson work like “The Rum Diary”. They spend so much time languishing over Hunter in the 70s and drawing obvious parallels between his fight against Nixon and the current state of the world that the film never really lives up to its title.
