Park City Dispatch. 1.

Granted, some may feel Sundance "jumped the shark" some time ago, and (as Shannon Gee notes) there are plenty of reasons to gripe about the event. It's cold, very cold, crowded (though so far not unbearably so, and I find filmgoers generally a very cordial lot), some films are a disappointment, and it's a pain in the ass to get to. But it's Sundance, and it's still damned exciting to be here.

You'd think my expectations for my first film ever at Sundance would be unfairly high, but that wasn't the case. I knew I'd see quite a few films while here, and knew very little about Weapons other than the names of a few of the young actors in the cast. Those young actors would turn out to be among the few highlights in this, yet another entry in the nihilistic suburban youths gone bad genre. I described it to one of my colleagues as "Larry Clark and Quentin Tarantino do an Afterschool Special," and while that's probably not completely fair (I'm trying to cut it some slack, knowing how sleep-deprived I already am), the number of clichéd teen "issues" ticked off the checklist in Act 3 alone - teen pregnancy, check; abuse, check; rape, check; feud over a girl, check; drug abuse, check - that the woman sitting next to me finally got up and left in exasperation, muttering to me as she walked past, "Okay, one cliché too many." (Maybe she was sleep-deprived, too.)

Still, it's frustrating to have to give this one the thumb's down when the cast is so strong (and their sweet earnestness when appearing after the screening made it even more painful) - including the underused Mark Webber, Paul Dano (from Little Miss Sunshine; although I wish he'd start doing something other than the sullen teen number), Nick Cannon - a good young actor often in bad movies, and, in a bizarrely bravura turn in one scene, Arliss Howard channeling Dennis Hopper. And there are moments of genuine black humor - including the tense sequence before Cannon and his posse are heading to a showdown with the teen they think has beaten Cannon's sister, in which Cannon is hurried (and nattily dressed) because he's got a job interview - that I found myself wishing first-time director Adam Bhala Lough had gone more in that direction. Instead, the precocious filmmaker chose the more pretentious, earnest route - trying to distract us from the ill-focused story by playing a shell game with the structure, moving backwards a la Betrayal. But Pinter is a long way from Weapons. By the end, I was echoing a line from one of the characters: "I just don't give a fuck."

Posted by dwhudson at January 20, 2007 5:41 AM