January 29, 2024
SUNDANCE 2024 ONLINE RECAP
By Dan Pal
Since the pandemic, the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah has been offering varying degrees of its yearly selections for online viewing. At first everything was available during the festival’s run. Last year, there was a smaller bunch of films that one could watch at home. This year there was a pretty large selection for online viewing but only during the final weekend in January. I caught up with eight of them and offer brief capsule reviews of each. Full reviews will be posted when (and if!) some of these films get official releases:
A REAL PAIN
DIRECTED BY: JESSE EISENBERG
STARRING: JESSE EISENBERG, KIEREN CULKIN, WILL SHARPE
RATING: 3 ½ out of 4 stars
This was one of the buzziest titles of the fest and should be released later this year by Searchlight. Jesse Eisenberg and Kieren Culkin (fresh off his Emmy win) play cousins who go on a Jewish heritage tour of Poland with the ultimate goal of seeing the home where their grandmother once lived. The script won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the fest and it really is a well-developed character study of, in particular, Culkin’s character. The actor has the showier role that isn’t that far off from what he played on Succession, minus the rich family. He’s a pretty in your face free spirit while Eisenberg is the more tightly wound cousin. The ultimate theme here is pain and how people deal with the inherited pain of the Holocaust vs. modern every day suffering. One is an atrocity while the other is a fact of life. The tone is relatively light but given the main characters’ personalities, that tone has a healthy share of both comedic and serious moments. It is a film to be enjoyed on a number of levels: the writing, characters, performances, and scenery.
BETWEEN THE TEMPLES
DIRECTED BY: NATHAN SILVER
STARRING: JASON SCHWARTZMAN, CAROL KANE, DOLLY DELEON
RATING: 2 ½ out of 4 stars
Another film with a Jewish themed storyline, Jason Schwartzman plays a cantor who prepares young people for their Bat Mitzvah. He’s dealing with depression having lost his wife many months earlier. Out of nowhere his former childhood music teacher (Carol Kane) turns up wanting to attend his class to study for her own Bat Mitzvah while in her early 70s. The set-up is original enough but the execution is quirky and full of questionable narrative and technical choices with a number of curious cuts, moving cameras, freeze frames, and close-ups that seem to come out of nowhere. The tone varies between drama and comedy yet when fast motion is suddenly employed it seems out of place as if Silver suddenly wants this to be a screwball comedy. The problem is that much of the film isn’t that funny. What ultimately saves it is a dinner scene that brings all of the characters together in a fast moving heated discussion that rivals key scenes found in everything from Downton Abbey to The Bear.
LITTLE DEATH
DIRECTED BY: JACK BEGERT
STARRING: DAVID SCHWIMMER, SANTE BENTIVOGLIO, GABY HOFFMAN
RATING: 3 ½ out of 4 stars
Little Death is a film that features a split narrative – meaning two almost completely separate and tonally different stories. There are multiple characters and in one case two actors of opposite genders playing the same character. It’s about drugs, addictions, dreams, and relationships. In the first half of the film David Schwimmer plays a miserable, chemically dependent Hollywood writer with an unsupportive, cold wife. Much of this early section is very reminiscent of Spike Jonze’s 2001 film, Adaptation, including the writer’s sacrifice of his dream story to satisfy Hollywood’s audience driven goals. However, this first narrative is also highly creative with animated and CGI visual recreations of Martin’s conscious and dream mindset. But then there is a shift in the narrative that changes everything. The film starts focusing on completely different characters. Like in the first half, most of them struggle with addiction and relationship issues. Stylistically, the second half is also very different than the first. Gone is the playful creative energy surrounding Schwimmer’s story. The narrative might frustrate some viewers who don’t want to see the first part of the film end its particular story. However, it’s worth trying to sort out what the connections are between the narratives to fully enjoy this inspired and fairly original script. The film won the Innovator Award at the festival.
THELMA
DIRECTED BY: JOSH MARGOLIN
STARRING: JUNE SQUIBB, FRED HECHINGER, RICHARD ROUNDTREE
RATING: 2 ½ out 4 stars
Another big film at Sundance this year, Thelma, probably drew more attention for it featuring 93-year old June Squibb in the title role than the quality of the film itself. It starts with a great premise but then gets sidetracked with some ridiculous plot development and misdirected actors. One day Thelma receives a call from someone she thinks is her grandson Daniel saying he’s been in an accident and needs $10,000. This puts Thelma into a frenzy as she gathers the money and mails it off via the post office. This premise makes for a very good film idea. I’m sure many of us know older people who have fallen prey to such phone scams and perhaps even gave up their life savings. Initially Thelma goes to find the culprits to get her money back but how she gets there and what writer/director Josh Margolin chooses to focus on becomes convoluted and poorly executed. Richard Roundtree is very good in his final role as her buddy who helps her in her pursuit and there are some social statements being made about the good and evil sides of technology and its effects on older generations but the tone and plot are a bit too uneven for this to really be considered a success.
LOVE ME
DIRECTED BY: SAM & ANDY ZUCHERO
STARRING: KRISTEN STEWART, STEVEN YEUN
RATING: 3 ½ out of 4 stars
The premise is a bit bizaare: after Earth has become extinct, a lone buoy and a satellite make contact. They are trying to understand what humans were. Their primary source of information comes from internet data that remains left behind. They become fascinated by a couple of reality stars, Deja and Liam. Is what these YouTube stars demonstrate a reflection of true human interactions? The buoy takes on Deja as an avatar while the satellite becomes Liam. They are wonderfully voiced and played by Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun respectively. The film explores many of the questions from the perspective of technology in the future. If it looks back on our planet what will it see? How will it interpret what we left behind? But even in this context the film becomes a fascinating look at how we define ourselves. Do we really want to be like what we see on the internet? Love Me zeros in on our own identity perceptions and anxieties today. It’s not making larger statements about what caused humanity’s extinction but how we as individuals might look from a distant future’s perspective. The film won the Science in Film Award at the festival.
EVERY LITTLE THING
DIRECTED BY: SALLY AITKEN
STARRING: TERRY MASEAR
RATING: 3 out of 4 stars
This documentary focuses on hummingbird rehabber Terry Masear who lives in a large mansion in Los Angeles and has developed a hotline for people to call if they find an injured hummingbird. Some are brought to her home where she tends to them for however long it takes for them to be rehabilitated and freed back into the wild. She has a series of cages and techniques she uses to care for and clean them. Masear refers to this part of her home as the ICU for hummingbirds. Masear is an interesting character herself. She has a very nurturing and motherly quality when it comes to the birds and talks to them and gives them names. The big selling point of this film for anyone who is fascinated by nature is the cinematography. These often fast-moving birds are captured with multiple lenses and slow speeds so that we can view them in ways we’d never be able to in our own backyards. They are really quite brilliantly and beautifully captured.
SEBASTIAN
DIRECTED BY: MIKKO MAKELA
STARRING: RUARIDH MOLLICA, HIFTU QUASEM, INGVAR SIGURDSSON
RATING: 3 ½ out of 4 stars
How much lived experience is necessary for writers to have when creating a story that is not directly related to their own lives? That is one of the major themes of Sebastian from writer/director Mikko Makela. The primary character is Max who is an aspiring novelist working for a magazine in London. He’s made a decision to write a story about sex workers. In order to do so, he takes it upon himself to research the field by selling his body for money. As a film experience, Sebastian is full of graphic sex scenes that spare little to the imagination. We see the character in a variety of positions with many different men while trying to explain to his publisher that he has been “researching” and interviewing sex workers. Max can’t quite admit to what he himself is gaining from his encounters. Sex is usually the focus of many such gay stories but Makela is going for something more here: a fully rounded character with a variety of evolving ambitions and desires. Sebastian is not a film for everyone but it is a rich character study that also explores the world of a writer trying to find himself in his own writings.
Agent of Happiness
DIRECTED BY: ARUN BHATTARI, DOROTTYA ZURBO
RATING: 2 ½ out of 4 stars
The subject of this documentary is pretty fascinating: The country of Bhutan is typically reported to be one of the happiest in the world. As such, its King established a plan to have agents travel the country to conduct a happiness survey. The idea is to find out what makes its citizens happy and use that information for policy decisions to keep people and the country continued happy. The agents interview a variety of people including a transgender woman and a man with multiple wives. Numbers are flashed on the screen giving each person a happiness score. The problem is we really never find out how these scores are achieved (some get points for the number of cows or donkeys they have.) The film then moves away from this central focus and begins to center on a couple of people, including one of the agents. These scenes go on a bit longer than necessary and lose some of the personality of the earlier sections of the film. There’s not a lot of satisfying conclusions at the end except to say that we make our own happiness and that whatever pain we have inside, we must learn to be happy.
SUNDANCE 2024 ONLINE RECAP
By Dan Pal
Since the pandemic, the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah has been offering varying degrees of its yearly selections for online viewing. At first everything was available during the festival’s run. Last year, there was a smaller bunch of films that one could watch at home. This year there was a pretty large selection for online viewing but only during the final weekend in January. I caught up with eight of them and offer brief capsule reviews of each. Full reviews will be posted when (and if!) some of these films get official releases:
A REAL PAIN
DIRECTED BY: JESSE EISENBERG
STARRING: JESSE EISENBERG, KIEREN CULKIN, WILL SHARPE
RATING: 3 ½ out of 4 stars
This was one of the buzziest titles of the fest and should be released later this year by Searchlight. Jesse Eisenberg and Kieren Culkin (fresh off his Emmy win) play cousins who go on a Jewish heritage tour of Poland with the ultimate goal of seeing the home where their grandmother once lived. The script won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the fest and it really is a well-developed character study of, in particular, Culkin’s character. The actor has the showier role that isn’t that far off from what he played on Succession, minus the rich family. He’s a pretty in your face free spirit while Eisenberg is the more tightly wound cousin. The ultimate theme here is pain and how people deal with the inherited pain of the Holocaust vs. modern every day suffering. One is an atrocity while the other is a fact of life. The tone is relatively light but given the main characters’ personalities, that tone has a healthy share of both comedic and serious moments. It is a film to be enjoyed on a number of levels: the writing, characters, performances, and scenery.
BETWEEN THE TEMPLES
DIRECTED BY: NATHAN SILVER
STARRING: JASON SCHWARTZMAN, CAROL KANE, DOLLY DELEON
RATING: 2 ½ out of 4 stars
Another film with a Jewish themed storyline, Jason Schwartzman plays a cantor who prepares young people for their Bat Mitzvah. He’s dealing with depression having lost his wife many months earlier. Out of nowhere his former childhood music teacher (Carol Kane) turns up wanting to attend his class to study for her own Bat Mitzvah while in her early 70s. The set-up is original enough but the execution is quirky and full of questionable narrative and technical choices with a number of curious cuts, moving cameras, freeze frames, and close-ups that seem to come out of nowhere. The tone varies between drama and comedy yet when fast motion is suddenly employed it seems out of place as if Silver suddenly wants this to be a screwball comedy. The problem is that much of the film isn’t that funny. What ultimately saves it is a dinner scene that brings all of the characters together in a fast moving heated discussion that rivals key scenes found in everything from Downton Abbey to The Bear.
LITTLE DEATH
DIRECTED BY: JACK BEGERT
STARRING: DAVID SCHWIMMER, SANTE BENTIVOGLIO, GABY HOFFMAN
RATING: 3 ½ out of 4 stars
Little Death is a film that features a split narrative – meaning two almost completely separate and tonally different stories. There are multiple characters and in one case two actors of opposite genders playing the same character. It’s about drugs, addictions, dreams, and relationships. In the first half of the film David Schwimmer plays a miserable, chemically dependent Hollywood writer with an unsupportive, cold wife. Much of this early section is very reminiscent of Spike Jonze’s 2001 film, Adaptation, including the writer’s sacrifice of his dream story to satisfy Hollywood’s audience driven goals. However, this first narrative is also highly creative with animated and CGI visual recreations of Martin’s conscious and dream mindset. But then there is a shift in the narrative that changes everything. The film starts focusing on completely different characters. Like in the first half, most of them struggle with addiction and relationship issues. Stylistically, the second half is also very different than the first. Gone is the playful creative energy surrounding Schwimmer’s story. The narrative might frustrate some viewers who don’t want to see the first part of the film end its particular story. However, it’s worth trying to sort out what the connections are between the narratives to fully enjoy this inspired and fairly original script. The film won the Innovator Award at the festival.
THELMA
DIRECTED BY: JOSH MARGOLIN
STARRING: JUNE SQUIBB, FRED HECHINGER, RICHARD ROUNDTREE
RATING: 2 ½ out 4 stars
Another big film at Sundance this year, Thelma, probably drew more attention for it featuring 93-year old June Squibb in the title role than the quality of the film itself. It starts with a great premise but then gets sidetracked with some ridiculous plot development and misdirected actors. One day Thelma receives a call from someone she thinks is her grandson Daniel saying he’s been in an accident and needs $10,000. This puts Thelma into a frenzy as she gathers the money and mails it off via the post office. This premise makes for a very good film idea. I’m sure many of us know older people who have fallen prey to such phone scams and perhaps even gave up their life savings. Initially Thelma goes to find the culprits to get her money back but how she gets there and what writer/director Josh Margolin chooses to focus on becomes convoluted and poorly executed. Richard Roundtree is very good in his final role as her buddy who helps her in her pursuit and there are some social statements being made about the good and evil sides of technology and its effects on older generations but the tone and plot are a bit too uneven for this to really be considered a success.
LOVE ME
DIRECTED BY: SAM & ANDY ZUCHERO
STARRING: KRISTEN STEWART, STEVEN YEUN
RATING: 3 ½ out of 4 stars
The premise is a bit bizaare: after Earth has become extinct, a lone buoy and a satellite make contact. They are trying to understand what humans were. Their primary source of information comes from internet data that remains left behind. They become fascinated by a couple of reality stars, Deja and Liam. Is what these YouTube stars demonstrate a reflection of true human interactions? The buoy takes on Deja as an avatar while the satellite becomes Liam. They are wonderfully voiced and played by Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun respectively. The film explores many of the questions from the perspective of technology in the future. If it looks back on our planet what will it see? How will it interpret what we left behind? But even in this context the film becomes a fascinating look at how we define ourselves. Do we really want to be like what we see on the internet? Love Me zeros in on our own identity perceptions and anxieties today. It’s not making larger statements about what caused humanity’s extinction but how we as individuals might look from a distant future’s perspective. The film won the Science in Film Award at the festival.
EVERY LITTLE THING
DIRECTED BY: SALLY AITKEN
STARRING: TERRY MASEAR
RATING: 3 out of 4 stars
This documentary focuses on hummingbird rehabber Terry Masear who lives in a large mansion in Los Angeles and has developed a hotline for people to call if they find an injured hummingbird. Some are brought to her home where she tends to them for however long it takes for them to be rehabilitated and freed back into the wild. She has a series of cages and techniques she uses to care for and clean them. Masear refers to this part of her home as the ICU for hummingbirds. Masear is an interesting character herself. She has a very nurturing and motherly quality when it comes to the birds and talks to them and gives them names. The big selling point of this film for anyone who is fascinated by nature is the cinematography. These often fast-moving birds are captured with multiple lenses and slow speeds so that we can view them in ways we’d never be able to in our own backyards. They are really quite brilliantly and beautifully captured.
SEBASTIAN
DIRECTED BY: MIKKO MAKELA
STARRING: RUARIDH MOLLICA, HIFTU QUASEM, INGVAR SIGURDSSON
RATING: 3 ½ out of 4 stars
How much lived experience is necessary for writers to have when creating a story that is not directly related to their own lives? That is one of the major themes of Sebastian from writer/director Mikko Makela. The primary character is Max who is an aspiring novelist working for a magazine in London. He’s made a decision to write a story about sex workers. In order to do so, he takes it upon himself to research the field by selling his body for money. As a film experience, Sebastian is full of graphic sex scenes that spare little to the imagination. We see the character in a variety of positions with many different men while trying to explain to his publisher that he has been “researching” and interviewing sex workers. Max can’t quite admit to what he himself is gaining from his encounters. Sex is usually the focus of many such gay stories but Makela is going for something more here: a fully rounded character with a variety of evolving ambitions and desires. Sebastian is not a film for everyone but it is a rich character study that also explores the world of a writer trying to find himself in his own writings.
Agent of Happiness
DIRECTED BY: ARUN BHATTARI, DOROTTYA ZURBO
RATING: 2 ½ out of 4 stars
The subject of this documentary is pretty fascinating: The country of Bhutan is typically reported to be one of the happiest in the world. As such, its King established a plan to have agents travel the country to conduct a happiness survey. The idea is to find out what makes its citizens happy and use that information for policy decisions to keep people and the country continued happy. The agents interview a variety of people including a transgender woman and a man with multiple wives. Numbers are flashed on the screen giving each person a happiness score. The problem is we really never find out how these scores are achieved (some get points for the number of cows or donkeys they have.) The film then moves away from this central focus and begins to center on a couple of people, including one of the agents. These scenes go on a bit longer than necessary and lose some of the personality of the earlier sections of the film. There’s not a lot of satisfying conclusions at the end except to say that we make our own happiness and that whatever pain we have inside, we must learn to be happy.