Newsletter: Indie Focus: Sundance 2017 maintains political edge right to the end
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen, and welcome to another Sundance edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
The Sundance Film Festival announced its winners on Saturday night. The awards spread the love among titles and had a few surprises, capping this unusual year in Park City, Utah, with one more unpredictable moment. Macon Blair’s grungy genre tale “I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore” won the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize. Dan Sickles and Antonio Santini’s “Dina” won the U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize.
Audience awards went to Matt Ruskin’s “Crown Heights” in the U.S. dramatic section, Jeff Orlowski’s “Chasing Coral” in the U.S. documentary section and Justin Chon’s “Gook” in the Next section.
Steve Zeitchik and I attended the awards ceremony and filed a fuller rundown of the evening.
For all of the Los Angeles Times Sundance coverage, go to latimes.com/sundance. Sporting their finest winter looks are Justin Chang, Amy Kaufman, Kenneth Turan, Jen Yamato and Steve Zeitchik (and me), along with photographers Jay Clendenin and Kent Nishimura and videographer Myung Chun.
You can find not just one but two separate photo galleries from our L.A. Times photo studio in Park City: traditional portraits and Polaroid-style instants.
As all those people were making their way through the photo studio, we grabbed a few for video interviews too, including Jim Strouse and Jessica Williams, Craig Johnson and Judy Greer, Roxanne Shanté and Michael Larnell, Dee Rees, Brett Haley and Sam Elliott and plenty more.
Steve and I ran down the list of the big sales at Sundance, including “The Big Sick,” “Patti Cake$,” “Thoroughbred” and “Brigsby Bear,” and gave some consideration as to what might make them all a success down off the mountain as well.
Amy Kaufman attended a luncheon populated by many notable women in Park City. What should have been a polite afternoon turned unexpectedly heated during an exchange on race and identity between Salma Hayek and Jessica Williams.
“When I talk about feminism, sometimes I feel like being a black woman is cast aside,” said Williams. “I always feel like I’m warring with my womanhood and wanting the world to be better, and with my blackness — which is the opposite of whiteness.”
Jen Yamato wrote about “Get Out,” the festival’s surprise title, the debut as writer-director from Jordan Peele and a horror film analogy on contemporary race relations.
After the screening, Peele said, “This movie was meant to reveal that there’s this monster of racism lurking underneath some of these seemingly innocent conversations and situations.”
Justin Chang wrote about Luca Guadagnino’s “Call Me by Your Name,” starring Michael Stuhlbarg and Armie Hammer and by many accounts one of the real revelations of the festival.
As Justin wrote, “Guadagnino isn’t just one of the great sensualists of contemporary cinema; he has become a veritable deconstructionist of desire… Lusciously beautiful surfaces and sexually suggestive foodstuffs are par for the course in Guadagnino’s work. It’s the compassion and wry wisdom of ‘Call Me by Your Name’ — beautifully articulated by Stuhlbarg as Elio’s erudite, progressive-minded father — that catch you off-guard.”
Steve wrote about “Crown Heights,” directed by Matt Ruskin, based on the true story of Colin Warner, a young man wrongly jailed for 21 years, and his friend Carl King, who fought tirelessly to get him out. Lakeith Stanfield plays Warner and Nnamdi Asomugha plays King.
The real-life Warner said even he doesn’t entirely know why King worked so long on his behalf. As he said, “I tried to question Carl many times. I don’t think he knows the answer.”
Steve also spoke to the team behind the documentary “The New Radical,” directed by Adam Bhala Lough, including subject Cody Wilson, described as a techno-anarchist.
“I don’t ask anyone to be sympathetic to my position,” Wilson said. “I don’t think I’m a very sympathetic character.”
Kenneth Turan dipped into the lineup of the concurrent Slamdance film festival to write about “Strad Style,” director Stefan Avalos’ portrait of Danny Houck, who makes exacting replicas of rare violins.
“For a documentary filmmaker, Danny was a dream subject. He was quirky, intelligent, great on camera, the whole works,” Avalos said.
And I spoke to Mike White and Miguel Arteta about their ongoing collaboration. They were at the festival this year with “Beatriz at Dinner,” which stars Salma Hayek and John Lithgow in a story of a dinner party gone wrong when a spiritual healer interacts with a fat-cat real estate mogul. (It goes about as smoothly as you’d imagine.)
The movie feels like it was made for a post-Donald Trump world, even though it wasn’t conceived as such. As White explained regarding how the movie has changed post-election, “I think it would have been the same movie literally on the screen, but I do think that it has a different resonance because of the world we’re in. But everyone is going to have their opinion. It’s going to be as polarizing as the world is.”
Email me if you have questions, comments or suggestions, and follow me on Twitter @IndieFocus.
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