Sundown at Sundance 2010

Like all good things, and indeed all bad things too, the 2010 Sundance film festival has packed its bags, said its farewells and naffed off out of town for another twelve months. With all the foresightedness of a fully-qualified soothsayer, Indie Movies cut out the hassle of the trip home but not bothering to attend in the first place, but we are still bringing you the last word on the hits and misses from this year's Sundance. Yay for us.

Whoa, don't let the sun go down on Sundance. That might have been Elton John's sentiment had he been amongst the hordes who descended on Park City, Utah for the 2010 edition of Uncle Bob Redford's pet film fest. Actually the foul-mouthed ivory-tinkler apparently was in attendance, putting in an appearance at the party for Banksy documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop. But he elected to keep his vocal powder dry. Perhaps he realised the futility of the sentiment – he knew in his heart of hearts that yes, the sun does inevitably have to go down on Sundance at some point. But hark, so too will it rise again. Or maybe his gob was too crammed with canapes. And if so, who could blame him? If there's a free buffet on the go, then it is advisable, if not essential to get as much on your plate as quickly as possible. Otherwise you're going to find yourself sucking on naught but scotch eggs and the mini-pizzas that didn't quite cook properly.

Getting in early used to be the name of the game when it came to film-buying at Sundance too. Back in that dizzying spell in the mid-to-late '90s it was the case that no sooner had the credits rolled at a Sundance screening than the director would find him or herself being slapped in the face with telephone number cheques from Miramax or Fine Line or whoever had a spare $5-10m burning a hole in their kilt. The way Peter Biskind tells it in his book Down and Dirty Pictures – which details the explosion of interest in American independent cinema during the last decade of the 20th century – film sales at Sundances past were often conducted with the kind of zealous alacrity and ice-veined ruthlessness you might more readily associate with a hostage negotiation situation. Well, not any more. Times are tough, belts are tight, money is being squirrelled rather than squandered. And if the indie film-making guys and gals at Sundance don't like it, then they can go suck on a scotch egg. Assuming Elton hasn't beaten 'em to it.

All of which is not to suggest that deals have not been done at Sundance this year. Just that the number of sales and sums involved have been relatively modest, certainly when compared to the Bacchanalian gorging at the product trough that went on in yesteryear. From the artists' point of view, one pretty much sure-fire route to tying up a distribution deal is to bag one of the festival's top trophies. Lee Daniels' Precious brought home the Grand Jury prize in the US Dramatic Competition last year, and hey presto, the film was swiftly snapped up by Lionsgate. Twelve months on it has already made a tidy profit, and come tomorrow it will in all likelihood be further boosted at the box-office by a shower of Oscar nominations. Can Winter's Bone, the 2010 champion in the Dramatic Competition, match that kind of success? Well, the story of Debra Granik's film revolves around an Ozark Mountain girl looking after her family while hunting for her drug-dealing father, so it has as equally uncommercial-sounding a premise as Daniels' movie. While there have already been some criticism of Winter's Bone as 'poverty porn' (mirroring the 'tragedy porn' stick with which The Playlist for one clobbered Precious with), a deal has been done with Roadside Attractions to get Granik's flick into US movie-houses. Whether anyone will go and see the darn thing is quite another matter.

As well as the Grand Jury prize, Winter's Bone also picked up the Waldo Salt screenwriting award, and the other major winners at Sundance 2010 were Restrepo, adjudged the best US documentary, Animal Kingdom, which won the World Dramatic category, and The Red Chapel, which is an offbeat Danish documentary about a journalist and two comedians sneaking into North Korea under the pretext of being a theatrical troupe on a cultural exchange visit. It seems to have been a bit of a bumper festival this year for Australian director David Michôd, who not only delivered the prize-winning Animal Kingdom, but also shared co-writing credit with Spencer Susser on the latter's Hesher, which stars Joseph “I'm too old to play Spider-Man” Gordon-Levitt, and sold to Newmarket in spite of decidedly mixed reviews. For those information completists who are genuinely fascinated by all the awards handed out at Sundance this year, then you can check out a full list of gleeful winners (and there are a surprisingly vast number of them) at The Hollywood Reporter.

Just one such gloating victor was Happythankyoumoreplease, winner of the audience award in the US Dramatic Competition. Now anyone who for whatever reason might be desirous of a quick, clean vomit this Monday afternoon, your moment is about to arrive. Check out the following IMDb synopsis for Happythankyoumoreplease, and promptly commence upchucking till you can upchuck no more.

Captures a generational moment – young people on the cusp of truly growing up, tiring of their reflexive cynicism, each in their own ways struggling to connect and define what it means to love and be loved.

Now excuse any typos from here on in but my fingers are now splashing in little puddles of my own ejected sick and bile. Happythankyoumoreplease is written, directed and stars Josh Radnor from TV's How I Met Your Mother and also features Watchmen's Malin Ackerman and Zoe Kazan from Me and Orson Welles. While Ain't It Cool News called it 'a very sweet tale... populated with enough talented actors and solid writing that it proves to be very charming', from this vomit-stained position it looks suspiciously like Radnor is trying to horn in on Zach Braff's territory. And if that's the case Radnor, then forget it! There's only room in Hollywood for one irritating slacker boy-child with what appears to be a hibernating badger balanced atop his empty cranium, who writes, directs and acts in movies about the ennui felt by that noxious strain of spoiled, self-important what-about-me?-ers that are responsible for draining approximately 98.7% of the joy out of the world despite only accounting for 0.00000000000001% of its populace. Tossers.

Speaking of whom... another New York youth flick to debut at Sundance this year was Twelve, based on the novel of the same name by Nick McDonell and directed by bête noir of Batman fans, Joel Schumacher. Published in 2002, McDonnell's book owes the kind of debt to Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero that the Royal Bank of Scotland owes to the UK treasury, although the fact it was penned when McDonell was only 17 is pretty darn impressive. When most folks are 17 they are incapable of washing a teacup without making an international incident out of it. However the movie adaptation failed to impress Dark Horizons: 'Another Sundance, another self-important diatribe into the dangers of drug taking by the rich'. The presence of Gossip Girl sock puppet Chace Crawford in the lead role of drug dealer White Mike suggests that the ability to pull off cute 'n' moody was privileged over dramatic range when Schumacher came to cast Twelve.

It is not all angst and anguish at Sundance. There is also room for blood, guts and senseless violence too. The Hollywood Reporter's Risky Business blog showered love on just one such offering, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil; a gore-comedy in which Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine's good-natured hillbillies find themselves tagged as Deliverance psychos by a group of college kids. RB wrote that, 'Eli Craig and Morgan Jurgenson's inspired twist on the kids-go-into-the-woods trope is clever and original and very funny'. Although the same outlet was less impressed with The Violent Kind by the wonderfully-named Butcher Brothers, remarking, 'it's fun and all, but, uh, randomly bizarre and way too long in places. It also lacks a protagonist with screen presence, since the actor who plays Cody [the gentleman's name is Cory Knauf], the conflicted antihero of the piece, would lose an audition to plaid wallpaper.' Aw, don't feel too bad Cory Knauf. The plaid wallpaper would have the drop on Chace Crawford too, and he's a big ol' A-lister. Of a fashion.

The movie that set the most tongues wagging in terms of its violent content was The Killer Inside Me, an adaptation of a 1952 Jim Thompson novel by the oft-brilliant, ever-prolific British director of 24 Hour Party People and A Cock and Bull Story, Michael Winterbottom. Centring on Casey Affleck's unhinged deputy Lou Ford, the movie apparently features extended scenes in which both Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson are severely beaten. This lead to what was reputedly a tense post-screening Q&A session, with the first 'question' faced by Winterbottom coming in the form of a female audience member yelling “Disgusting!” at him and storming out. Critics too seem to have been divided on the film's merits, with Ain't It Cool proclaiming, 'The Killer Inside Me is dark, brutal and beyond fucked up, but it's also fantastic filmmaking... it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to compare this movie to No Country for Old Men.' Risky Business took an alternate perspective on Winterbottom's film, noting that, 'the truth about Killer is that most of whatever attention it eventually draws will come in the form of prurient interest in its sickening brutality and its rough, S&M-tinged sex, complete with Hudson and Alba displaying their perfect bare asses to relentless belts and bruises.' In a move perhaps not wholly unconnected with that last quote, Deadline Hollywood reports that IFC has coughed up somewhere between $1m and $2m for the rights to The Killer Inside Me, with a view to releasing it in North America sometime in late summer.

Amongst the films to serious earn kudos from the massed scribes of the planet's film press were the Jesse Eisenberg-starring Holy Rollers, of which The Observer raved, 'Holy Rollers is 1970s Scorsese in its dark Brooklyn nightclub and warehouse locations and muddled sound. But this is a terrific, wholly contemporary adaptation of the true, only-in-New York story involving Hassidic Jews and the smuggling of ecstasy. Rabbis, wig-wearing mothers and excruciating interpretations of the Torah are rendered respectfully.' Meanwhile, Dark Horizons heaped even greater praise on It's a Wonderful Afterlife, from Bend It Like Beckham director Gurinder Chadha: 'With references to Frank Capra, and even Brian de Palma's Carrie, Chadha's latest film about an Indian woman living in London is a classic screwball romantic comedy with a twist in its story about the pressures on Indian women to get hitched... a fresh, wonderfully original and visually gorgeous entertainment that never forgets that it is also deeply human and very smart... a comic masterpiece.' Blimey, do you think they liked it?

One movie which not only secured good critical notices but also a big fat sweaty pay-day was Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right. Starring Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as a lesbian couple whose teenage kids seek out the sperm donor who contributed so usefully to their existence (played by Mark Ruffalo), Cholodenko's film was praised for being 'full of funny scenes and dialogue' by Risky Business, while Deadline Hollywood reports that US rights went to Focus Features for a little less than $5m. Could RB's aside that The Kids Are All Right also features 'no shortage of R-rated graphic sex' have influenced Focus' quickdraw of the company chequebook?

The personal favourite Sundance winner of all-time for this Indie Movies writer happens to be American Splendor, which took the Grand Jury Dramatic prize in 2003. Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman, the married writer-director team behind that superb movie were back at the festival this year with The Extra Man, based on a book by Jonathan Ames. Paul Dano stars as an oddball loner/aspiring writer who rents a room from Kevin Kline's playwright and 'extra man' (a social escort for New York's high society widows apparently). Dark Horizons loved it, calling it, 'a magnificent, moving, hilarious and human work', and they also heartily approved of both Kline ('breathtakingly good') and Dano (effortlessly great, reminding one of a young Gene Wilder'). John C. Reilly, who has already attracted praise at Sundance 2010 for his role in the Duplass Brothers' comedy Cyrus, cameos as a squeaky-voiced neighbour.

We have just about limped to the end of this round-up, and by extension the Sundance Festival 2010 itself. It seems like we should end in style therefore, with one last movie which is witty, thrilling, entertaining, and packed with intellectual insights and scathing truths for our times. That is the kind of film we should be wrapping up with, but sadly our actual last offering is High School, the latest entry into the ever-increasingly crowded sub-genre of stoner comedy. It is about a would-be high school valedictorian who tries to get his entire class stoned so that he won't be the only one to fail a random drugs test. Yeah. Adrien Brody features as a heavily-tattooed drug dealer named Psycho Ed in a movie which Ain't It Cool reported, 'feels like an 80s comedy, populated by an ensemble telling a simple story with a ton of likeable characters.' Dark Horizons disagreed, calling High School, 'another low brow comedy that does little to enhance the reputation of a sub genre that reaches the lowest common denominator and then some.' Which is perhaps a slightly sour note on which to end this year's Sundance. So we will instead leave you with some nice pictures of omnipotent festival overlord Uncle Bob to gaze at in enraptured marvel. Oooh! Aaah!