Park City Dispatch. 7.

With the glow of the 2006 Sundance Film Festival fading, I'm convinced that the documentaries carried the day, although I stress that I make this judgment without having seen all the dramatic features.

Iraq in Fragments tells more than one story just in its title. The documentary is composed of fragments of scenes and landscapes seen through the eyes, first of children, then of Shias, then of Kurds. The fragments are also the city of Baghdad torn into fragments by war, but they could be the fragments of any city in Iraq. If these kids are the future, we're not taking any large steps forward. Like all children, they learn day by day of the gulf between their fantasies and the world in which they live.

In this trilogy - we should really call it a triptych, since the three-part film deals with images more than with stories - information itself is fragmentary. So is wisdom. So, surprisingly, is the nostalgia that even children feel.

The word critics will be tempted to use is "impressionistic," the vague fallback deployed to describe just about anything that challenges accepted story logic. "Atmospheric" might be better.

There is even humor here. A principal tells the students who are going back to school as the city rebuilds slowly that they will not be able to bribe their way to good grades. Why not? Bribes seem to accomplish everything else there. It all adds up to a task that is more difficult than the loftiest of ambitions, and images from the landscape of the war that we are not getting from everyday media.

I write all of this as the media reports on the wounding of Bob Woodruff, an ABC news anchor who was injured by a bomb that struck the vehicle in which he was riding, a Soviet-era truck of the sort used by Iraqi soldiers, which means that it was less armored than a vehicle that would have been used to transport American soldiers. Something seems fishy here. Woodruff was embedded with a US unit - usually a way to get nothing more than the war seen from the perspectives of his hosts. It's incomplete, but at least it's safe. The fact that he got more than anyone anticipated - and who but a fool anticipates anything but danger in Iraq - is a tragedy for him and his family, yet it makes you wonder why ABC News sent an anchor out to pose as a reporter. Ratings, we're told. Was it to give street credibility to a guy who will spend most of his career in makeup, behind a desk, reading copy that someone else wrote for him? I can't help thinking of the plane flown by a young girl that crashed and killed its young pilot a number of years ago, as the girl and her family were trying to meet a deadline set by the Today show. Exposure is everything.

Yet one American casualty to a news reader pushes the many deaths of the week out of spotlight, whether these are deaths of US soldiers (who are paid far less than a TV newsreader) or of the countless numbers of Iraqis killed. Who knows how many they are?

The Shias here aren't predisposed to mourn any misfortune that befalls an American. As they see it, in between prayers and self-flagellation, the Americans have come in conquest, even though those same Americans have overthrown the regime of the Shias' most hated enemy, Saddam Hussein. Amid all the war lyricism of a film that was elegantly shot under tough circumstances that have gotten a lot tougher (just witness what happened to Bob Woodruff), we're reminded that Iraq isn't the slam dunk that former CIA director George Tenet told White House officials it would be. Now Tenet has the National Medal of Freedom, and we have more bodies to bury.

A less lyrical perspective on the war comes from Patricia Foulkrod in Ground Truth: When the Killing Ends. Foulkrod focuses on the sell-through military that hypes adventure and college tuition in the recruiting pitch, without much emphasis on killing until basic training sets in. Then, of course, comes the adjustment when troops who took part in that killing come home. If those soldiers are wounded, it's even worse. Now-neglected soldiers who Foulkrod follows talk frankly about killing civilians in Iraq, lots of civilians. Let's hope they won't be attacked as John Kerry was when he talked about the killing of civilians in Vietnam. One again, we're looking at the documentary form as substitute journalism, the kind of coverage that the "support our troops" media should be doing.

To be fair, the New York Times recently ran a long inquiry into the new kinds of wounds that soldiers in Iraq are suffering. C-SPAN has gone into Walter Reed Hospital and talked to wounded soldiers with missing limbs and faces burned off. Ground Truth gets them by themselves, and they speak candidly about their wounds, and about calling in fire on "ragheads" and "hajis" that they knew to be civilians. If this doesn't sound like Vietnam, what does?

On the Home Front, Kirby Dick made one of the best films of the festival, This Film Is Not Rated, an investigation into the ratings process for films that might as well be called "The Censorship Office That Dare Not Speak Its Name."

Dick rounded up young independents like Kimberley Peirce (Boys Don't Cry), Kevin Smith, John Waters, Mary Harron and Matt Stone to explain from experience how the MPAA ratings affected them, with relevant clips from their offending films. All those "morally objectionable" scenes are far less offensive to me than the violence that gets by, but we all know that. Usually the end effect for the directors involves making a choice - either cutting out scenes to get an R rating or better, or limiting the release of their film, since many theater chains or video stores won't carry a film with an NC-17 rating. Dick also has Bingham Ray, founder of October Films and former president of United Artists, denounce the system as "fascist." I'd love to hear the MPAA's response.

The film gets funny - very funny - when Dick decides to do some of his own research, and hires a team of two private eyes, a lesbian couple in Hawaiian shirts who track down the raters and identify them by taking license plate numbers. They also get a photo of the MPAA's phone list when a security guard leaves his post. This part of Dick's probe is more anticlimactic than might be expected, although the investigation-lite tone keeps you laughing. The raters turn out to be middle-aged parents. No surprise that their conclusions are what they are. No surprise also when Kirby Dick gets stonewalled in the appeal phase after his film gets an initial NC-17 rating. It reminded me of dealing with an insurance company, except this one is committed to protecting your mind and soul. Dick makes sure you know by the end of the film that the MPAA is committed to ensuring that the studios' interests are protected in Congress and all over the world.

Forget Jack Abramoff. The other Jack, Valenti, the old Lyndon Johnson operative, stroked lawmakers for decades. There's nothing illegal about that. It brings us back to the boiling frog analogy; if the boiling takes place slowly, the frog in the water never notices that anything is wrong. As Hollywood's emissary, Valenti boiled frogs in Washington for years at a low heat that ensured thorough cooking - that the studios got all they wanted and that initiatives which the studios opposed, like government regulation in the form of a government ratings system, were never implemented. The problem, we see, is that it's all legal, all perfectly legal, including harsh penalties for using any trademarked materials that belong to the studios. Dick lists the penalties, and they're severe. If you ever wanted to see how a mindless unaccountable bureaucracy (albeit a private one) can be a gatekeeper that decides what you can and can't see, see This Film Is Not Yet Rated.

Back to fiction for a moment, since this was supposed to be one of Sundance's strengths, and is has been in the past. I saw Alpha Dog, by Nick Cassavetes, set among the drugged and gangster-ized privileged youth of Los Angeles, specifically in Claremont, California. I should preface any discussion of the setting with an admission that I was a huge fan of the unintentional humor in the inane moralism of Beverly Hills 90210, that ridiculous TV show that launched far too many acting careers. I'm suspicious of raunchy tales with lots of posturing and teen sex that pass themselves off as "cautionary."

In this one, the son of a hoodlum has set himself up as a drug lord, complete with a harem, a crew of teen hoods and a male house-slave (who owes him money, we assume). When another young gangster, this one Jewish, can't raise the money to pay his debt, the brawling and revenge plots are set into motion, and the young brother of our Jewish hood becomes a hostage. In a promising twist, the young boy gets a wild initiation into teen debauchery from some beautiful girls before meeting a grim fate. Cautionary? Yeah, bring condoms... and a gun.

Alpha Dog is the ultimate title - think Alphaville and White Dog and Reservoir Dogs. There's a dream-team cast here, with solid acting by everyone from Justin Timberlake, Bruce Willis and Sharon Stone, and the gauzy permissiveness of the atmosphere is convincing. I only wish the script were better. To be fair, fewer civilians are killed in Alpha Dog than in Ground Truth.

Why wasn't there more fiction at Sundance that you wanted to see? For one thing, making fiction is hard, unless you're James Frey - who remains on top of the non-fiction bestseller list even though his memoir has been exposed as a fraud. (Has the author's notoriety boosted the price of the inevitable movie deal in the works, whether you call the book memoir, fiction, or fraud?) But why not better fiction? It seems that many of the films in the festival were "developed" at Sundance labs, nothing if not a head start. Maybe it's a seasonal problem.

There are reasons to doubt my analysis, or at least to reserve judgment. I'd love to be proven wrong next year. I missed the highly-praised Quinceañera, by Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer. I also missed Son of Man, the South African version of the Jesus story.

One more thing. Sundance has now signed to remain in infrastructure-challenged Park City, Utah, until 2018. Now that's a challenge. I'm sure the deal benefits the festival and Park City. I'm at a loss to see how it benefits the filmgoers.

Posted by dwhudson at February 1, 2006 11:48 AM