Sundance Postmortem: Best Of The Fest

This year marked the first time Cinema Blend was represented at Sundance, and as a bunch of newbies I think we got a pretty good taste of what Robert Redford’s film festival is all about. Sadly, we did not see Mr. Redford… a great disappointment to my mother in-law whose only request was a Bob Redford photograph. We did however see lots of snow, exciting since I’m from Texas and had never actually seen white stuff that thick before, and disconcerting since our Hot Wheels-sized rental car wasn’t exactly built for plowing through snowdrifts. By the time we left town we were all cold, tired, and utterly worn out. Sundance had made us its bitch. Or rather Park City did.

The people involved with running the festival, volunteers mostly, were all spectacularly friendly and helpful. The people involved with running the city, government employees mostly, were all sadistic liars who seemed to take special pleasure in sending out of towners in the wrong direction. Transit is a real bastard of a problem in Park City, for all the talk you’ll here from people about how you shouldn’t drive and should instead take the bus, the bus system is a mess and we ended up wasting hours every day just trying to find the right ride. A lot of the time, it was better to give up and simply walk a mile or two through the cold, which may explain why I now have this hellaciously awful cough.

We winged our way out of Park City last Tuesday (after a pit stop to try a mug of Polygamy Porter in Salt Lake City… good beer), but the Sundance Film Festival kept going without us. Sundance wrapped up this weekend, handing out awards to whichever movies Quentin Tarantino and the rest of the Sundance Jury thought were best. Never content to let other people hand out awards for us, Cinema Blend’s Sundance team got together this weekend for one last Park City pow wow, to figure out which Sundance films we thought were best. Here’s our picks for the best things seen at Sundance this year. Look out for them as they hit theaters later in 2008:

Josh:

I waded through the snow into Park City expecting to see some of the best movies I’d see all year. Instead I got a few decent movies like The Visitor and Sunshine Cleaning, a lot of mediocre movies like The Great Buck Howard and August, and a few outright awful movies like Red and Savage Grace. And then there’s The Wackness. Seeing The Wackness made the trip for me, and if it’s handled right it could be a huge hit once it gets released in theaters. The movie is fantastically period specific, and if like me you went to high school in the mid-nineties you’ll feel like you just stepped out of a time machine and back into the glory days of A Tribe Called Quest. Word. I love The Wackness, and if it had been the only movie I saw at this year’s Sundance, I’d have to call the trip a huge success.

Steve:

It’s far more difficult to choose my “best of the fest” movie from last week’s Sundance Film Festival than I imagined. To be honest, I was far too disappointed to have a film that is truly the “best.” Thus, it almost feels that this choice becomes a mediocre entry that didn’t make me gauge my eyeballs out. But there were two films that I just simply enjoyed sitting through. You don’t get to know the other one, but using advanced dart board technology I’ve chosen Sunshine Cleaning as my movie of the year at Sundance. The story of two sisters starting a crime scene cleanup business may have swerved away from the comedy setup expected, but the growth of the Lokorski family was quite endearing. It doesn’t hurt that Emily Blunt and Amy Adams, two of the finer actresses working in Hollywood today, played the sisters.

Kelly:

It seems almost unfair to say that Hamlet 2 was my favorite film of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Since it didn't feel like a low-budget indie film, I feel like I'm cheating by picking what is clearly the most mainstream of all of the movies I saw. Plus my love of Chuck Palahniuk's work could easily have swayed me to choose Choke as my #1 pick but in the end, I have to go with my gut. Directed and written by Andrew Fleming, Hamlet 2 follows a failed actor as he tries to save a high school drama department with a stage production of a self-written sequel to Hamlet. If you think the premise sounds ridiculous, you're not wrong but thanks to some of the funniest (albeit politically incorrect) dialogue I've heard in awhile, great acting, superb comedic timing and catchy musical numbers, this film delivers big laughs.

ALL OF OUR SUNDANCE COVERAGE

Josh:

Dispatch: Checking in with Jackie the Jokeman

Review: The Visitor

Review: Bottle Shock

The Great Buck Howard

Review: Savage Grace

Review: The Wackness

Revew: Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

Review: Be Kind Rewind

Review: August

Review: Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?