Sundance 2015

I wanna do a quick review of the five films I saw at Sundance this year. The first one I saw was

Cop Car

This was one of, if not my very favorite this year. Here's a premise that follows through and pays off. Very suspenseful. The slow pacing works well. At times, I was super anxious and on the edge of my seat. I read someone somewhere say it had a kind of Coen Bros. type of violent tone, and I agree.

Next I saw

How To Change The World 

It was very interesting to see how Greenpeace got started. I was struck by how the 'Save The Whales' phenomenon was so directly a result of one man (Robert Hunter) with a passion, and the small crew that were drawn to him. No one was thinking about whales before Greenpeace. Not really. There's great dramatic footage.  A harpoon is shot right over their heads in their first major encounter.  The most powerful moment for me, however, was when Robert Hunter and Paul Watson foreshadow the most powerful activist image of my lifetime when they both stand on the ice in front of a large ship thereby blocking it's path from the seal slaughter.

The third film I saw was 

Last Days In The Desert

This was the film I was most excited about, and the biggest disappointment. It was suppose to be about Christ getting tempted by Satan as he completed his fast, but what we got was made entirely out of whole cloth, and there were very few biblical references at all. I was hoping it would be a philosophical interpretation like Jesus Christ Superstar, but this film tries to create its own parable (about parenting) with characters never mentioned in the Bible. It fails pretty flatly. Any message anyone might have gleaned could easily have come from any old self-help book.  In the end, there's a completely gratuitous scene of Christ on the cross that has absolutely nothing to do with the preceding story.  Yeah, it was a flop.

Next was 

Finders Keepers

I spent much of this film with my jaw dropped. This clearly gets filed under 'stranger than fiction.' The odds of the two main characters of this documentary both having such weird back-stories, and then to be connected in such a bizarre way, are astronomical. You can't help but laugh, however, you also can't deny the tragic undercurrent. Perhaps the biggest success of this film (other than nailing it on the subject matter) is how it walks the tightrope between tragedy and comedy so well. It's so surreal when the man with the receipt (Shannon Whisnant) starts calling it, "his leg."

Finally 

Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead

This documentary about National Lampoon was a last minute addition for me, and I'm so glad I did it. It was great. John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, Chevy Chase, Harold Ramis, and so many more are connected to the National Lampoon family tree. It was an unprecedented era in American comedy. There were other surprising connections as well. John Hughes was a part of it as well as a couple of the Simpsons writers. If you're looking for a good 'party' documentary, this is the one.