Travicity
01-21-2011, 11:04 PM
Weekend Streaming - Sundance Movies Worth Seeing
As we freeze our way through the Sundance Film Festival, here are some alums worth your time that are streaming legally on the web.
Moon
Duncan Jones was the Man Who Fell To Park City two winters ago when he presented us with Sam Rockwell going bananas on the moon.
This remarkable one-hander (kinda) had actual science behind it (save us Helium-3!) and remarkable production design. It is so entertaining and engaging it feels wrong to call it an art film.
Pi
Darren Aronofsky's low budget debut film is a wonderful blend of paranoia, religious mysticism, number theory and cyberpunk.
Do artithmatic sequences hold the key to predicting the stock exchange? Or decoding messages from God? Or will they make you just want to drill a hole in your brain.
Considering this season's Black Swan, it is especially neat to go back and see where this remarkable filmmaker came from.
Napoleon Dynamite
There's no shortage of quirky coming out of the Sundance Film Festival.
While an overdose can kill ya (or kill a career, like has happened to Napoleon Dynamite's Jared Hess) there's no foul in looking back and remembering this little gem from 2004.
Yeah, this movie certainly got too popular (and overly quoted) for its own good, but that's hardly the movie's fault, you know? We'll still vote for Pedro.
Reservoir Dogs
Laugh at me if you will, but I think Reservoir Dogs is as massive of a tectonic shift in cinema as, say, Citizen Kane or Easy Rider or Battleship Potemkin or 2001: A Space Odyssey or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
That doesn't mean it is as good, and it also doesn't mean there weren't precursors to this type of filmmaking; Jim Jarmusch, The Coen Brothers and John Woo all played a hand. Nevertheless, this blend of comedy, violence, meta-dialogue and slick mise-en-scene was an absolute revelation when it tore up Sundance in 1992. And the movie still kills today.
Sherman's March
We'll never really know the true provenance of Sherman's March, but if you believe the legend, Ross McElwee was given public funding to create a documentary about General Sherman's devestating Civil War campaign through the South. The PBS-ish elements of the film last about 30 seconds before the (pre-digital) one man film crew takes off on an existential journey, examining his relationships and society.
It is sad, sweet and funny - and a great example of how to stick it to the Man.
Trust
One of the great, lost lions of 1990s independent cinema was Hal Hartley. He's fallen off the face of the Earth now, but for a while, he was consistantly turning out delightfully odd romantic dramas that would dip into surreal wordplay or gorgeous tableaux.
His Sundance winner, Trust, is considered by many to be his greatest achievement. Adreinne Shelly plays a pregnant teen and Martin Donovan an electronics whiz who refuses mediocrity. The two wander around Long Island pontificating with a hand grenade and the result is, somehow, funny and touching.
Splice
Vincenzo Natali began his career at Sundance with Cube and took it to gross, sexually deviant places with Splice.
This love-it-or-hate-it picture has combating globs of spiked ooze on a convention dais, so I don't know how anyone couldn't get into it.
Once
This marvelous look at artistic spirit is microcosmic in its budget and story-arc, but as big as anyone can dream.
Dublin buskers share a platonic bond and create music in an epically humanist masterpiece. Can you tell that I love this movie?
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Okay, so this buddy outlaw Western picture never played at the Sundance Film Festival, but it is where it gets its name.
Festival founder Robert Redford named the yearly event (and high price point catalogue of winter gear) after his character from this film. Had the roles been reversed, we'd be talking about the Butch Film Festival. (Wocka.)
UGO
As we freeze our way through the Sundance Film Festival, here are some alums worth your time that are streaming legally on the web.
Moon
Duncan Jones was the Man Who Fell To Park City two winters ago when he presented us with Sam Rockwell going bananas on the moon.
This remarkable one-hander (kinda) had actual science behind it (save us Helium-3!) and remarkable production design. It is so entertaining and engaging it feels wrong to call it an art film.
Pi
Darren Aronofsky's low budget debut film is a wonderful blend of paranoia, religious mysticism, number theory and cyberpunk.
Do artithmatic sequences hold the key to predicting the stock exchange? Or decoding messages from God? Or will they make you just want to drill a hole in your brain.
Considering this season's Black Swan, it is especially neat to go back and see where this remarkable filmmaker came from.
Napoleon Dynamite
There's no shortage of quirky coming out of the Sundance Film Festival.
While an overdose can kill ya (or kill a career, like has happened to Napoleon Dynamite's Jared Hess) there's no foul in looking back and remembering this little gem from 2004.
Yeah, this movie certainly got too popular (and overly quoted) for its own good, but that's hardly the movie's fault, you know? We'll still vote for Pedro.
Reservoir Dogs
Laugh at me if you will, but I think Reservoir Dogs is as massive of a tectonic shift in cinema as, say, Citizen Kane or Easy Rider or Battleship Potemkin or 2001: A Space Odyssey or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
That doesn't mean it is as good, and it also doesn't mean there weren't precursors to this type of filmmaking; Jim Jarmusch, The Coen Brothers and John Woo all played a hand. Nevertheless, this blend of comedy, violence, meta-dialogue and slick mise-en-scene was an absolute revelation when it tore up Sundance in 1992. And the movie still kills today.
Sherman's March
We'll never really know the true provenance of Sherman's March, but if you believe the legend, Ross McElwee was given public funding to create a documentary about General Sherman's devestating Civil War campaign through the South. The PBS-ish elements of the film last about 30 seconds before the (pre-digital) one man film crew takes off on an existential journey, examining his relationships and society.
It is sad, sweet and funny - and a great example of how to stick it to the Man.
Trust
One of the great, lost lions of 1990s independent cinema was Hal Hartley. He's fallen off the face of the Earth now, but for a while, he was consistantly turning out delightfully odd romantic dramas that would dip into surreal wordplay or gorgeous tableaux.
His Sundance winner, Trust, is considered by many to be his greatest achievement. Adreinne Shelly plays a pregnant teen and Martin Donovan an electronics whiz who refuses mediocrity. The two wander around Long Island pontificating with a hand grenade and the result is, somehow, funny and touching.
Splice
Vincenzo Natali began his career at Sundance with Cube and took it to gross, sexually deviant places with Splice.
This love-it-or-hate-it picture has combating globs of spiked ooze on a convention dais, so I don't know how anyone couldn't get into it.
Once
This marvelous look at artistic spirit is microcosmic in its budget and story-arc, but as big as anyone can dream.
Dublin buskers share a platonic bond and create music in an epically humanist masterpiece. Can you tell that I love this movie?
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Okay, so this buddy outlaw Western picture never played at the Sundance Film Festival, but it is where it gets its name.
Festival founder Robert Redford named the yearly event (and high price point catalogue of winter gear) after his character from this film. Had the roles been reversed, we'd be talking about the Butch Film Festival. (Wocka.)
UGO