Humpday was a film by Lynn Shelton about two old college friends. Ben (Mark Duplass) is married to a wife he loves, and the two are attempting to have kids. Everything gets thrown up in the air when Andy (Joshua Leonard), Ben’s old friend from school shows up on his doorstep at two in the morning. Ben is an artist, he travels, and lives a very “Kerouac-esque” life. After a drunken dinner party and subsequent night (while Ben’s wife sits at home with cold pork chops) the two entertain an idea that two straight guys having sex would be a perfect addition to Humpfest, a porn competition. This becomes a sort of macho challenge between the two old friends, each maintaining his commitment to this idea and each trying simultaneously to let the other know that its “okay” to back out. Eventually, Ben must tell his wife what his plans for Andy’s “art project” are, and things just go downhill from there. Deadset on facing the thing that makes both men most uncomfortable, simply to prove themselves, the situation is unmistakably funny yet also telling.

Mark and Lynn

With mostly unscripted dialgoue, the director says “the writing happened in the editing room”. Throughout the filming, neither the director nor the characters knew if both men were going to eventually follow through and enter the competition. This style of filming lent an air of sponteneity and realism that adds a lot to the film, with original dialogue such as “You know, you aren’t as Kerouac as you think you are, and I’m not as white-picket-fence as you think I am. These black and whites!” The film was shot in order, and over the course of ten days and was built entirely around the actors. It raised a certain philosophical question: should you do what scares you most, or makes you least comfortable, just for the sake of doing it? A funny, light comedy. Not ground-breaking or exceptional, but good.

My friend Matt Went is here at Sundance, although not with our Eckerd College program. He is part of a program called Real Ideas Studios. This program puts a group of aspiring student filmmakers together for the ten days of the festival, and each group produces a final film in one week to be screened at Slamdance on the last day of the fest. There were eight groups, and after the screening I think its safe to say they all put a tremendous amount of effort into their films. Each film was a documentary about various topics in or around Park City, and all were intriguing. Having spent quite a few days in Park City now, I recognized many aspects in their films, or had experienced some of the things their documentaries were about. 

The Real Idea Studios program is open to any filmmaker, or aspiring filmmaker, to compete for best documentary. The program seeks to redefine “real world experience” as a global collaborative and cultural immersion within mentoring creative arts programs. They also have an emerging filmmaker program at Cannes Film Festival. Contact Info: info@realideasstudios.org

Click here to watch them! (more…)

I’ve just left the theater after seeing the Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, and would go to sleep, however I’m too… well… excited. This film was great, not that “great” even comes close. Odd. Puzzling. Emphatic. Ambiguous. Invigorating. Hilarious. Unique. Well, I guess those are closer. But seriously, at what other time in your life could you feel your stomach churn with empathy, or anything at all for that matter, for a man sitting on his kitchen counter staring into the sink at a little blue fish that has recently exploded out of his butt?! This is one of the many feats director David Russo accomplishes with this film. You are drawn to investigate emotions, implications, and ideas in a story so far-fetched and unrealistic, and yet are entirely immersed that you hardly have time to doubt.

The film starts when Dory, a strangely religious man, loses his temper at his cubicle job and subsequently loses his job as well. After a fruitless job search, he falls in with a group of misfits that work at Spiffy Jiffy’s Janitorial Service. Late at night, while blasting heavy metal music over the loud speakers, the team cleans, investigates, and sometimes fornicates in the office building. However, this all gets messy when a product testing company decides to use them as guinea pigs for their new product: cookies that emulate oven freshness by warming in your mouth (because god forbid you actually bake your own cookies!). The cookies have some strange side effects though, including being completely addictive, inducing hallucinations and extreme sodium consumption, and quasi-pregnancies that result in the birth of a small blue fish. (more…)

On this day that I was given a name, I’d like to post about an incredible film I’ve seen here at Sundance called Sin Nombre (which means Without Name). Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, Sin Nombre stars Edgar Flores as Willy (or “El Casper” as he is known to his gang the Mara Salvatrucha). As a Mara, Willy is a wary veteran of the murder, rape, and violence that is regular to the gang. After recruiting a new member, 12-year-old “Smiley”, El Casper ends up on the wrong side of the gang’s ritualized violence and is caught lying about, among things, his girlfriend Marta Marlen. After some various atrocities, he is on the run from his gang hugging the rooftop of a train headed for the U.S. border on which he meets Sayra (Paulina Gaitan). Sayra, her father, and her uncle, are traveling from Honduras to find a better life in New Jersey. Circumstances throw the two together and soon Sayra is hopelessly attached to Willy, more or less a dead man, and is hoping to be lead safely to her destination in the hands of this devil.

Fukunaga

The film is a conversation between noir and social realism. The violence portrayed is heart-wrenching yet entirely realistic. Director Fukunaga researched the film extensively over four years, even taking three train rides, immigrant-style, across Mexico to add realism, and also to gain entitlement to a story that was neither his, nor part of his ancestry, as a half-Japanese film director. He took multiple trips to Honduras and Mexico for casting, trying to find the perfect Willy and Sayra, saying in his Focus Films blog, “The actors are the fabric of your film, they are the colors you paint with and I want them to be dope.” (more…)

Appealing only to my own taste, I hated this movie. Directed by Dennis Hopper, it started off all “born to be wild”, two guys score big on a coke deal, throw away their watches, and set out into the horizon on motorcycles for an adventure with only their American flag and faux western fringe leather coats on their backs. They take what comes to them: hitchhikers, free gas, meals from a hippie commune, etc. They “live it up” on their way to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. Although Dennis Hopper plays an absolute drug-addled loser, whose capacity for speech tends to halt after repeating back others’ words. The film thrived off of stereotypes: “hippies”, “hicks”, and “pigs”.

The duo end up in jail for “parading without a permit”, however they meet such hostility from many a small town along their adventure. In jail they pick up an alcoholic Jack Nicholson joins them on their journey in hopes of reaching a specific whorehouse in New Orleans. This small hope is never attained, however, as Jack Nicholson’s character is beaten to death when a mob attacks the three while they sleep. In New Orleans they visit the whorehouse in his honor, spend all night out frolicking, take acid, have a bad trip in a cemetery, then leave. Shortly after they are gunned down for no apparent reason by two Floridians in a truck. (more…)

Schizopolis, Steven Soderbergh’s unrated and hilarious film begins with an introduction to the film by Soderbergh. In this, he states his belief that every man, woman, and child should see this film, not during some matinee half-price sort of deal, but at full ticket price. He continues by saying that if any audience member doesn’t understand the film, it is their own fault and no fault of his, and they should see it again and again until they understand it fully. He follows this up by saying no expense was taken to create the film, and as such the introduction was not profit-oriented.

Funny, right? The film is a commentary about modern-day society, communication, and all of our schizophrenic tendencies. The 1996 film features Steven Soderbergh (writer and director of the film) as the lead characters Fletcher Munson as well as Dr. Jeffrey Korchek. The film contains such characters as nameless numberhead man, attractive woman #2, Elmo Oxygen, a psychotic exterminator that seduces lonely housewives and leaves pictures of his genitals on their cameras, and T. Azimuth Schwitters, the founder and spokesperson of the self-help company that Fletcher works for: Eventualism.

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John Sayles

John Sayles was born in Schenectady, NY on September 28^th, 1950. Who knew he would one day grow up to be such an innovative and influential independent film director? Now he is about 59 and 6′4″. Sayles got his start, like many, from Roger Corman, who had an incredible eye for young talent as he gave Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, etc their starts. Sayles’ first film was called The Return of the Secaucus 7 (1979). This film he made with $30,000 that he’d received from writing scripts.

Six of the "Seacaucus 7"

Based on seven former college friends who get back together for a long weekend in New Hampshire, and reminisce about the good old days and a time they were arrested on the way to a protest in Washington, D.C. This film was shot in one location and the story was set over a long weekend (so as to reduce costume expenditures) and was written about people Sayles’ age (so his friends could be used as actors). This low budget can be surmised from the static master shots that comprise a majority of the film. (more…)