CulturePulp 046: Postcards from Park City


Words & pix by Mike Russell; greytones by Chad Essley
High-rez PDF: PostcardsFromParkCity.pdf

As my boss Shawn Levy left the Sundance Film Festival, I flew in to spend a few days at Slamdance.

Slamdance is Park City’s other, smaller, less deal-obsessed festival. It’s nestled in the belly of the Sundance beast — operating out of a small office on Main Street in Park City, Utah. Slamdance movies tend to be weirder and scrappier. Some are amazing. Most never leave the festival circuit. (Though there are exceptions: “Napoleon Dynamite” made its debut here — as a short called “Peluca.”)

Thanks to a press office that loaned out DVD screeners of almost everything showing at Slamdance, I powered through something like 16 movies in a few days -- and found time to borderline-stalk some very relaxed filmmakers. Here are some memories of the trip.
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Endnotes and Digressions:

1. Want to learn more about Slamdance -- including info on their video-game and online-short-film competitions, plus who won this year's awards? Visit Slamdance.com.

2. Also, for the mildly curious: Here's a list of everything I saw during my few short, weird, high-altitude, sleep-deprived days in Park City. I'll add more capsule reviews later. Click on the title links for more info.
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SLAMDANCE FEATURES and DOCS:




• The Holy Modal Rounders: Bound to Lose
Using extensive interviews with rock critics and fellow folkies (plus Dennis Hopper and Sam Shepard), "Bound to Lose" charts the long, sad history of psych-folk rockers The Holy Modal Rounders.
Co-directors Sam Wainwright Douglas and Paul Lovelace follow the band from the '60s Greenwich Village folk scene through a couple of abortive fame-shots (on "Laugh-In" and the "Easy Riders" soundtrack), all the way up to co-bandleader Peter Stampfel's attempts to get his musical partner and occasional arch-enemy Steve Weber under control long enough for a reunion. But Weber's such an undisciplined burnout, and Stampfel is so passive-aggressively resentful, and everyone's short-term memory is so fried, that you spend much of the film's second half laughing and cringing as the band self-destructs onstage again and again. (Which is a shame, because -- as the doc also points out pretty successfully -- amid all the train-wrecking, the Rounders created some genuinely interesting music.)




• Sasquatch Dumpling Gang
This was the big crowd-pleaser at Slamdance. Produced by "Napoleon Dynamite"'s Jeremy Coon and written and directed by Tim Skousen, it's a laugh-out-loud funny mix of "Rashomon" and, I don't know, "The Goonies."
The movie recounts the same story from several different perspectives, with comic-book chapter headings splitting the perspective-shifts. In broad strokes, it's about a community's over-the-top reaction to a Bigfoot sighting in "Clackanomah County," and like "Dynamite," it's family-friendly oddity -- mixing teen romance among SCA nerds with the misadventures of a pair of Trans Am-driving metalheads (Justin Long and Joey Kern).
The script doesn't quite stick the landing, and Carl Weathers isn't as funny as he could be as a cryptozoologist with a hard-to-place accent. But Long and Kern are a riot, and the movie's got heart; it's just this fantastic gut-check of all the stuff that seemed important when I was a kid -- muscle cars, corn dogs, fantasy movies, laser tag, skee-ball, and running around in the park like an idiot looking for adventure.




• The Call of Cthulhu
This relentless, 47-minute adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft story may be the first movie to truly capture the feverishly overwritten (or, as the press kit puts it, "atmospheric") tone of Lovecraft's prose. There's a simple reason for this: Writer Sean Branney and director Andrew Leman -- apparently filming on a shoestring budget in their garage -- decided to shoot the flashback-driven story as a black-and-white silent Expressionist film, complete with title cards, lurid makeup, angular set design and stop-motion monsters. It's a fabulous, freaky piece of work. You can buy it on DVD from the filmmakers' Web site.




• b.i.k.e.
An unflinching documentary about bike activists who often seem more interested in hedonism, art-school pranksterism and their own raging egos than politics. (Or is it just the movie that's more interested?)
Having ridden with Critical Mass for a comic strip, I was absolutely fascinated to hear that this documentary would go behind-the-scenes with the Black Label bicycle club -- a secretive group known for jousting on "tall bikes" and partying and fighting with such enthusiasm that even CM doesn't like to associate with them.
The film's co-director, Anthony Howard, is also its main character. He's a middle-class kid turned artist, filmmaker, and heroin-addict who desperately wants to be invited to join the Black Labels -- and his self-destruction is so overpowering, I honestly thought Jacob Septimus was listed as co-director because Howard died somewhere before the end of the doc. (So imagine my surprise when I saw Howard looking healthy and flirting with the star of "We Go Way Back" [I think] at a party, and imagine my further lack of surprise when I told him how much I loved his film and he looked me up and down like he was sizing me up for a fight before saying "thanks.")
Howard's a dark rock star -- Kim Morgan would adore him -- and he's a perfectly unsteady guide through Black Label's world of idealism, ad hoc family bonding, pranks, recklessness and thuggery.
Also, I salute the filmmakers for digging behind the progressive propaganda that so often dilutes preaching-to-the-converted films about bike activism. This is a film about some very flawed human beings, captured in a DIY style that really suits the subject.




• Wassup Rockers
According to the press notes, director/photographer Larry Clark ("Kids") spent a year following around a real-life band of Latino skate punks who dress like The Ramones -- working these non-actors into a story about, um, a band of Latino skate punks who dress like The Ramones.
In the movie, the kids go to Beverly Hills High to thrash, then have surreal adventures (including sex with preppie rich girls) as they try to make their way back to South Central, "Warriors"-style.
Even Clark's fans probably won't be surprised to hear the end result is a low-key, vaguely pervy mess. The pace is beyond leisurely. The dialogue, which sounds mostly improvised, is mostly damned silly. The kids are relaxed and charming as hell -- though I personally could have done with far fewer creepy, fetishistic shots where Clark's camera lingers on a close-up that travels from a peach-fuzz lip down a neck to a pubescent nipple. The journey back to South Central is just plain goofy -- with our young heroes dropping in on pool parties and running afoul of celebrities, leaving a couple of dead bodies in their wake and never really grieving any of it.
But just when your patience is at an ebb -- which happens repeatedly -- Clark goes for a long shot of the kids skating down the street, backed by Spanish-language punk rock, and you suddenly think they're the coolest little sumbitches on earth. I honestly have no idea if I liked this.




• Downtown Locals
A longish, very fine documentary, in which filmmakers Robin and Rory Muir interview -- and then follow home -- a half-dozen New York subway buskers.
The silver-painted, mannequin-posing "Mercury Man" -- a struggling actor -- is hilariously sardonic as he reflects on his inability to get a permit to perform in the subway, much less onstage. But the other performers are far more heartbreaking, mostly because they're driven by such unrealistic visions. There's the woman who plays with accordions and puppets, but comports herself like a bohemian duchess. Even sadder is the burnout musician who says he'll quit street life as soon as his CD comes out. Right after he says that, the Muirs cut to him jumping on a pay phone to call a guy he met at Burger King to check on the progress of that CD deal.

(BTW, a word to the wise: Watching several documentaries in a row about hopeless strivers is incredibly disheartening -- especially when you're at altitude and sleep-deprived and bordering on a nasty flu. It gets you thinking long and hard about how few people have anything exceptional to say -- including perhaps yourself -- and yet how many people buy into the media-driven delusion that we're all owed success if we work hard enough. I mean, really: Did all these people's worldviews stop evolving after they saw "Breakin'"?
Putting it another way: Watching wall-to-wall humanizing portraits of struggling dreamers, one after the other, has a strange effect on your psyche. It gets you thinking about the sheer number of such portraits that could be filmed in any one American city. And while any one of these documentaries, taken individually, tends to boost your admiration of the human spirit, watching several such documentaries in a row tends to give you an acute sense of overwhelming futility.)




• The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief
Speaking of hopeless dreamers: Here's a documentary about "hosts" -- young Japanese men who doll themselves up like glam anime Rod Stewarts, then flirt with women in an Osaka nightclub for money. The movie's a little slow and redundant, but it sets up an absolutely fascinating Moebius loop of emotional manipulation that goes something like this:
(1) Hosts get lonely (and frequently gorgeous) women addicted to their attentions.
(2) The women get so far into debt supporting their host habits that they have to turn to prostitution and escort work to pay their bills.
(3) The women then become even more addicted to the hosts, whom they pay to listen to their problems -- because their problems are now magnified by the fact that they're working as prostitutes ... much like the hosts are, but for completely different reasons.
Anyway. This all unfolds very slowly, and it's a sad little portrait of sexual politics that's so outlandish, with the subjects sometimes playing a little too neatly to the cameras, that I frankly wondered aloud if the whole thing was staged.




• The Other Side
This no-budget action movie concerns a bunch of dead schmucks who somehow escape from Hell -- only to get chased around on the mortal plane by three indestructible bounty hunters. It's a perfectly decent pulp idea, with one not-terrible plot twist, but the execution is also totally derivative -- style-checking everything from Raimi to "The Matrix" to "The Terminator" to "Dark City." (It's the sort of flick where the female bounty hunter is always wearing black leather, and escapees from Hades are easily identified by an arm tattoo that looks like an Id Software game logo.)
But at the same time, there's a certain giddy energy to the endless homage. "The Other Side" feels like a really slick version of the sort of video that geeks make using their pals and a camcorder at 16. And it has two other things going for it: (1) The action editing is way slicker than it has any right to be, and (2) There's a scene where the Grim Reaper (skull, cloak, floaty, the whole nine) gets kicked into the grill of a church bus and shot in the head. I mean, how harsh can you be on a movie after seeing something that awesomely ridiculous played totally straight?

• We Go Way Back
• The Guatemalan Handshake
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Slamdance Shorts:

• Phone Sex Grandma
• Yard Sale
• Ride of the Mergansers
• Daylight Hole
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Sundance features and docs:

• American Hardcore
• So Much So Fast
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Sundance short:
• Beyond Iraq




Lettering too small? You can download a high-rez PDF of CulturePulp 046 right here: PostcardsFromParkCity.pdf

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Posted: Sat - February 4, 2006 at 05:20 PM        

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