Picking up (shorts).

You (unspecified, unknown, possibly nonexistent) devoted readers may have noticed that I completely failed to follow through with on-the-spot reporting from Sundance, following my initial post in January. I was truly excited about it! But not excited enough to forgo sleep or work to deliver what I'd promised.

Now that I have a little time I find, also, that I have a strange amount of recall of the things I wanted to write about, post-by-post-by-post. It was a unique trip that way - completely unexpectedly, it made a strong impression on me, and got my mind working in ways I was not accustomed to. Those grooves of thoughts seem still to be there.

So. We're going chronologically. The first films I saw in Park City were sets of shorts - one in the afternoon, as part of Slamdance, and one at midnight, a Sundance thing. I should mention that the Slamdance program included a film by produced by my good friend, Jacob Robinson, and so the fact that I preferred it may be due to personal allegiances.

Here's what I want to say about the two programs. It's a commonplace that shorts are the province of younger filmmakers, primarily because features cost too much. As self-contained works, shorts are very, very hard to pull off - you want to invest them with characters and ideas, and there's just no time. What I found interesting was that the Slamdance selections focused almost exclusively on character, whereas the Sundance shorts were more conceptual - and the former were, to my mind, more effective.

A rundown, if you're interested:

Slamdance:

• Gravity (Jacob's film): A married couple falling apart in isolation. From the director's bio (presumably self-written) "[Director Romanowsky] cares a lot about how things work, especially people"
• Animal Lover (the one with movie stars): Super-stylish, but fundamentally about frail men and somewhat frail women.
• Bird (the crowd favorite): Indescribable. A bird chooses a man. The man, reluctant, chooses the birds. The provided synopsis plumbs depths that are better left undisturbed. Really, the story just sings.
• Bunny Boy (the most gimmicky): The gimmick is the ending, purposefully disturbing. The leadup is about a boy, somewhat morbid, somewhat cruel, and used to being alone.

Sundance:

• Close: A couple fight. The difference between this and a film like Gravity is that here, they really are never not fighting. I'm all for showing people in extremis - but you only get mileage from it when you've seen them also at the center of who they think they are.
  
• Baby: A woman is pursued. She and we are terrorized.
  
• Stardust: Sorry, I really don't know what happens. I fell asleep. I think something blows up (a car?). I woke up and saw an explosion.
• Spring: A younger man is sort of terrorized by an older man, who could be/become his lover.
• I'm Having a Difficult Time Killing My Parents: Perhaps the most focused character here. The most self-actualizing. He doesn't do it.
• YEARBOOK: A series of interviews with high school students, documentary-style. One big idea behind them all.
• The Majestic Plastic Bag: Done in the style of a nature program, tracing the migration of a discarded plastic bag. No characters whatsoever (See!?!).
  

There is another way of thinking about the phenomenon I'm describing. In the Slamdance films, it seems to me like people are subjected to a stimulus and they react, in ways that are surprising or horrifying or endearing. At Sundance, it felt like the movies were more about about the stimulus. Not so much the reaction.

I would like to connect this to a more general sense that full-length movies have trouble telling simple stories these days. Action movies are, of course, dehumanizing, but even supposed small character films, it seems to me, are often about something massive that happens - a birth, a death, a small cataclysm. For some reason I keep thinking of Rear Window as an example of a film that doesn't get made today.

I would like to make this connection, but the truth is I know very little about movies, and see perhaps 5-10 new films a year. Which is probably worth bearing in mind if you're staying with me on this trip back to Sundance.

Love for Sale.

Anthology Film Archives is running a series on 1980's Hollywood Musicals, a category that includes Purple Rain as well as The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and may justify itself on that basis alone. Last night a friend and I went to see True Stories, David Byrne's film about a fictional town in Texas celebrating the state's Sesquicentennial, back in 1986. The tagline for the film is " A Completely Cool, Multi-Purpose Movie." It pretty much fits.

There are many reasons to see True Stories, amongst them: John Goodman's satiny voice and panda-bear physique, David Byrne's gnomic non-sequitur voiceover, which personally annoys me but many get a kick out of, and of course some terrific Talking Heads songs. But what struck me last night was how prescient the film was about the phase of innovation and development that the country was then entering, and that still obtains today. The movie focuses on the oddball personalities that one expects populate Byrne's imagination, but always in the background is Varicorp, a tech firm that might be standing in for Texas Instruments. One of my favorite scenes is a walk-and-talk in its white-paneled hallways (starting around 2:15), with a sincere and slightly smug IT professional talking about the creative potential of computers, a new kind of poetry. And then there's the dinner scene, which improbably morphs (around 2:00) into a kind of revelatory heralding of the new industrial model, out of Bell Labs and into people's garages. It speaks to the hope that we have for science and engineering to change our lives. It suggests businesses that transform the terms of employment from something financial to something spiritual. And it points out that when you get all of your nourishment from work, you no longer need your weekends.

And I think, "oh, so that's when that happened."