Beyond the Multiplex

The festival offers up films about dead rock stars, undead Angelenos, man-horse sex and teeth in strange places. Plus: Dick Gephardt made me cry!

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Sundance Film Festival, Beyond the Multiplex

 

Clockwise from top left: "Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten," "Teeth," "For the Bible Tells Me So" and "Zoo"

Jan. 22, 2007 | PARK CITY, Utah -- You can start out a weekend at Sundance, as I did, irritated by all the minor inconveniences of this place and end it, as I also did, sitting in a roomful of strangers weeping at an impromptu late-night speech delivered live by Dick Gephardt. In between came a lot of other things: a grisly horror movie about a girl blessed with a unique ability to repel sexual advances, a lyrical documentary about men who love horses (in a manner illegal in most jurisdictions), a faux-documentary about the growing population of zombies (aka the "non-living community") in Los Angeles. My favorite film of the festival so far, beyond a doubt, is a documentary about a dead '80s rock musician that I almost didn't show up for.

No question about it, Sundance can be a pain. Sometimes, as you're trudging through the icy muck from one distant venue to another, or waiting in the bone-numbing wind, while your extremities turn exquisite shades of crimson and ivory, for a shuttle bus that will putter along so incrementally you'd be better off just trudging through the icy muck, thoughts occur to you. Thoughts like: Whose idea was it to wedge a major film festival into a ski resort at the peak of snow season, when it's freezing cold, insanely expensive and plagued with blond people recklessly driving SUVs and recklessly wearing headbands?

Oh, that's right. It was Robert Redford's idea. Make sport of Bob if you will, but he's probably done more to further independent filmmaking as an art and a business model than anybody else on the planet. One can have mixed feelings about the way all that has played out in recent years, but still. If he wants to invite all these people to a party in his backyard -- in January, when the temperature might break 20 degrees on a nice day -- I guess he's entitled to.

As the list of movies above might suggest, there's a strange current of change -- mutation or adaptation, perhaps -- running through the 2007 Sundance Film Festival at the close of the first weekend. Documentary filmmakers are experimenting, stretching the form, defying conventions and blurring the customary boundaries between truth and fiction. Narrative filmmakers, in contrast, seem like the sober materialists of the movie world, focused on hard social and political reality.

OK, that's too simple. You can't describe an entire film festival in glib phrases, and it's not like there aren't earnest talking-head documentaries and winsome relationship indies among the movies being trotted out this week. But it does seem as if Sundance is itself mutating, struggling to adapt to its own bigness and self-importance, to adjust to the fact that it long ago stopped being an outsider institution and now plays a central role in the movie world's political economy. This year's batch of films is more diverse, cosmopolitan and formally ambitious than we usually see at Sundance. There are more overtly political, ripped-from-the-headlines films. There are definitely more zombies. And for some reason I cannot explain, there are two movies with the number 27 in the title. (Those would be "Girl 27" and "Chapter 27.")

Brett Morgen's documentary "Chicago 10," which opened the festival, set the tone with its inventive blend of period footage and motion-capture animation (you can't make a self-respecting documentary without animation these days), and also with its obvious desire to strike a rebellious spark. If I wanted to set somebody afire with the potential of aesthetic and political revolution, though, I'd take them to see Julien Temple's rich and exhilarating documentary "Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten," which premiered here on Saturday.

Temple's film is much more than a biopic of the late Clash frontman, and still less a hagiography. Like the director's outstanding Sex Pistols doc "The Filth and the Fury," it's a portrait of the peculiar convulsions of British society in the late 1970s and the exciting and often self-destructive pop culture it produced. "Joe Strummer" has all the energy, passion and high style of Temple's many music videos, but the sheer complexity of the subject makes it his best film by a fair stretch.

Strummer came from an atypical background for a punk hero; he was middle-class, attended boarding school and had traveled all over the world. He was a hippie R&B musician before he was a punk, and was pushing 30 when he got his crack at stardom. He'd had lots of time to reflect on how not to become a cliché rock star -- rich, famous, stoned and out of touch -- so the fact that he did anyway is one of pop culture's great cautionary tales.

Temple gathers Strummer's friends, former friends and ex-bandmates around a series of outdoor campfires, which lends his interviews an intimate, ritualistic quality the subject himself would have appreciated. For a film that directly addresses aging, mortality, depression and betrayal, among other salubrious subjects, "Joe Strummer" is an incandescent experience. It celebrates Strummer's fecundity and self-invention and honors his reticence and private despair, reminding us along the way what a contradictory and amazing affair a single human life is.

Next page: Flesh eaters, horse lovers and one scary set of chompers