Park City, 1/26.

[T]he single most depressing and brutally honest remark I heard all week, the statement that seemed to sum up what Sundance has become for many attendees, came from a distributor who explained why he had stayed to watch a bad comedy that features a clutch of low-level film and television actors. The movie might be lousy, he explained, but imagine 'all those names on a box,' meaning, imagine all those recognizable names once they are printed on a DVD box. It didn't matter that the film was incompetently made and, from the half-hour or so of it that I watched, unfunny in the extreme. It didn't even matter that the film probably wouldn't make much money when or if it was released in theaters. The box would be aesthetically and intellectually empty, but the box would sell.

"One of the debilitating side effects of the pop-culture 'mainstreaming' (if I may use an ugly marketing term) of the Sundance Film Festival brand over the last 20 years or so has been the over-glorification of what I call resumé movies." Jim Emerson elaborates.

"Whatever it once was, today's Sundance has gotten ugly," begins Tim Wu in Slate, wondering why, "despite living in an age where bands are born on MySpace and blogs by basement dwellers out-rate CNN, the world of independent film seems strangely immune to the World Wide Web. Sundance and other film festivals represent the big running exception to the main media story of the 2000s: crowds besting experts in finding great independent material." Here's where he's going: "The real problem is not the technology, it's us."

At indieWIRE, Michael Lerman's got a great overview of the slew of films he's caught at Slamdance. I have a few entries on a few Slamdance titles halfway ready to post, but I'd love to see them fleshed out, and I'd love even more to see more reviews or reactions to more Slamdance films. Please do drop a line if you run across anything.

All those Oscar nominations, and now, "Brits reign at Sundance," too, according to James Mottram in the Independent.

Online browsing tip. Susan Gerhard's list of ten virtual paths to Park City.

Online listening tip. Basically, Kenneth Turan tells NPR listeners that, yes, you'll hear about Grace is Gone, but you ought to be hearing about Once.

Online viewing tip. A second Cinematical roundtable.

Posted by dwhudson at January 26, 2007 3:58 PM