James Marsh is a heralded documentary filmmaker with Wisconsin Death Trip, Man on Wire, and Project Nim to his credit. He’s also an apt dramatist with the underrated The King and Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1980, the best film of that trilogy. His new Belfast-set IRA thriller Shadow Dancer is effective, especially since Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy just proved that slow-burning story mechanics are better than chases, explosions, and shouted exposition. Andrea Riseborough stars as Collette McVeigh, a single mother and active member of the IRA who turns informant for MI5 after an aborted bombing attempt in the London subway system. She falls into the noble hands of Clive Owen‘s mid-level agent, who lays out her ultimatum. Despite bouts of unoriginal dialogue and overt symbolism (Riseborough wears a red trench in almost every scene after she turns mole), traces of familiarity end there. Even Owen’s superior, Gillian Anderson, misinterprets his effort to protect Collette as he goes a bit rogue once he realizes a second, more entrenched informant is in the mix. There are two nice twists at the end, one of them ambiguous.

Room 237 is billed as a “subjective documentary” on hidden meanings in the film version of The Shining. It’s definitely a crowd pleaser for people who think the world will end this year, or those who have played Dark Side of the Moon while watching The Wizard of Oz. Interviewees offer up a series of insights that blur the line between credibility and fanaticism, but director Rodney Ascher, who also edited his work, knows how to respect his cast while entertaining his audience. The notion that Stanley Kubrick created the film as a way of dealing with his feelings about the Holocaust and American imperialism are viable, while some people take what can only be continuity errors to another level of our obsessive search for meaning. More than anything, the documentary is a testament to Ascher’s editing skills, as he recontextualizes footage from Kubrick’s oeuvre with a deft hand. I’m unsure if his work will be picked up for theatrical release, but I think a long shelf life awaits.

LCD Soundsystem leader James Murphy has always come across like a fantastic man on record and in interviews, so imagine how crush-worthy he is in Shut Up and Play the Hits, in which he reflects on his music career to date as LCDSS’s final show approaches. Exuding the kind of cool that comes from humble self-consciousness, Murphy’s answers to writer Chuck Klosterman‘s guiding questions touch on his love of art and community as he illuminates some of the feelings behind his decision to end LCD at a creative zenith. The footage from the Madison Square Garden show is emotional, and you will probably tear up for the 1,000th time during a live rendition of “All My Friends”.

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I had to exit the V/H/S screening about 30 minutes into the feature, not wanting to be the second case of someone passing out during the horror anthology. Ti West is the best known of the directors, but he’s in fit company with David Bruckner, Glenn McQuaid, and others. The premise finds a group of violent guys hired by an unknown person to retrieve a videotape from someone’s property. They are the kind of people you hope meet a horrific fate, and by the end of the first segment, it’s pretty much a given that will happen in time. I hope the demon who looks like a wicked version of River from “Firefly”/Serenity factors into the overall narrative, because gross males need to be disposed of properly. Like her, I am a delicate creature; shaky-cam and hyper-editing are no good for my flora. Perhaps I will have to watch this one segment at a time. There was applause after the first chapter, something I’m sure never occurred once during The Devil Inside‘s opening weekend.

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Beats, Rhymes and Life was one of the best documentaries to emerge from last year’s festival, and it fared well in theaters, too. Ice-T‘s Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap does not seem destined to mirror that success. As co-director and interviewer, the guy who wrote “Cop Killer” and espoused the pimp lifestyle sure does conduct a series of stale interviews.

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Also somewhat zzz is Bones Brigade: An Autobiography, a documentary on the pioneering skateboard crew that included Tony Hawk and Steve Caballero. Of course the 1980s footage is ace and might inspire you to pull out your old Independent Truck Company t-shirt, but director Stacy Peralta made a classic with Dogtown and Z-Boys, and Bones doesn’t achieve the same level of greatness by default.

I have a nasty little cold, which is unsurprising for Sundance, and I went to buy my “Fisherman’s Friend” cough drops in the local store. Ahead of me was a stocky, gregarious looking guy who said to the checkout lady, “Am I glad Sunday is coming.” “Why?” she asked. “End of the festival,” he said, shaking his head.

The good people of Park City endure culture shock once a year as frenetic L.A. denizens descend upon their town with elevated expectations and little patience. The locals refer to festival-attendees as “PIBs: People in Black” though there appears to be less animosity this year. That may be because there has been very little snow and, with no skiers, the tourist trades need an infusion of cash, even if it’s from the PIBs.

Anyway, the guy in front of me was obviously someone who used the pejorative “PIB.” But I had to wonder, what did he do to make him so long for the end of the week? He looked too tired and too dirty to be either a driver or a bartender. He didn’t look big enough to be bouncer; those guys are huge. I gave up.

“What do you do?” I asked him.

“I clean hot tubs,” he said. “What I had to do this morning you don’t even want to know.”

Here’s to Sunday, my good man.

I usually have a problem when critics rip a documentary for being “a bunch of talking heads” because, honestly, watching people talk about their lives and their thoughts is a fascinating way to spend time and to reveal truth. About Face, which chronicles the lives and careers of past supermodels from the ’50s-’90s by director Timothy Greenfield-Sanders is one big talking head. And, for the most part, the heads aren’t that interesting but are smugly narcissistic. Christy Turlington, Isabella Rossellini (who wonders if plastic surgery is akin to foot binding) and Paulina Porizkova come off well. Best quote? “I didn’t do plastic surgery to look young, just well-rested.”

Grabbers was in my top ten to watch at Sundance, based solely upon its premise: “When an island off the coast of Ireland is invaded by bloodsucking aliens, the heroes discover that getting drunk is the only way to survive.” Sounds perfect for Park City After Midnight fare. But like a guy who is fun at two drinks and a bore at four Grabbers ceases to capitalize on the concept or the first half-hour setup. Once the town’s two police officers get the entire population into the only pub to get them all blindingly inebriated–with the bizarre position that they not telling anyone why they’re making them booze it up–the film loses its appeal.

A different kind of bloodsucker is featured in Gypsy Davy a confounding documentary by Rachel Leah Jones. Jones has the biggest daddy issues this side of stripper’s pole but she brandishes a camera instead, in a quest for the mythical father that abandoned her as a child. That father is Dave Serva (whose real last name is Jones), a Flamenco guitarist of some renown. Serva dropped women and his seed across two continents rarely providing emotional support and, seemingly, not being terribly bothered by it. The director, understandably, is bothered by it.

At first she spends time romanticizing Serva’s career and the place of Flamenco on the world stage of music. This tends to anger the viewer who would believe she’s still currying favor from this absent, exotic parent (all the more mysterious and attractive by his very act of being elsewhere). But then, as abandoned children and heartbroken women stack up it becomes clear that Leah Jones is calmly dissecting her father, with him damning himself with his own heartless, remorseless and shameless statements.

You find out that one of Serva’s kids, Martin Jones influenced Adam Duritz and the Counting Crows when he was with the band and that he’s the eponymous “Mr. Jones” of the hit song (something admitted by Duritz on stage in concert, run the first few lines of the song through your head, you’ll get it). Leah Jones discusses how Serva was a self-made man.

And it’s here, and the near the end of Gypsy Davy, that you maddeningly discover the director trying to give this wayward, deadbeat dad, an out, listing out a heartbreak of his own in his youth when Dave was “strumming his own pain.” It doesn’t wash nor does it make up for this joker pepper-spraying the world with his semen. He had so many children the odds were inevitable one of them would end up a filmmaker with daddy issues.

Ultimately, this film was likely an act of catharsis for Leah Jones. She is able to upbraid her father, expose his past sins and tell him she loves him and forgives him.

I got two things out of it: I’m putting Flamenco down in my “Acquired Taste” category for music and that sage, motherly advice is true: Don’t fall in love with a musician.

by Keith Simanton

Still from Compliance

Compliance has earned wildly mixed reviews here at Sundance, and I feel it’s successful for that reason alone, even though it’s a filthy piece of work.

The drama puts the employees of a fast food restaurant through an incredible scenario orchestrated by a prank caller. Posing as a police officer, he contacts the store manager and makes her an unwitting ally in a plot against a pretty cashier, whom he accuses of stealing money from a customer’s purse. The manager quarantines the young woman, and for the remaining duration of the film she is subjected to a series of dehumanizing acts illustrate how some bend to the will of others without true resistance.

I think writer-director Craig Zobel slips up by placing value judgments on his characters, especially in the film’s coda. And the lurid camerawork is as sleazy as the true events that inform Zobel’s work. This is especially questionable and perhaps short-sighted filmmaking from a guy who has worked with David Gordon Green from George Washington through Undertow.

Still from The Imposter

More successful is The Imposter, an immersive missing person documentary that reveals one person’s fraud and one family’s potential crime and cover up.

13-year-old Nicholas Barclay vanished from his San Antonio neighborhood in 1994. Some three years later, a young man in Spain materialized, claiming to be Nicholas. We’re introduced to this man, Frédéric Bourdin, at the beginning of The Imposter, and he guides us through how he duped authorities on both sides of the Atlantic and was accepted by the Barclay family as being Nicholas.

Keep in mind that Nicholas was a blonde haired, blue-eyed boy with a small frame at the time of his disappearance, and Frédéric, who was in his early 20s when he posed as the boy, was a Frenchman who bleached his dark hair the day he was reunited with his would-be sister and had three small tattoos inked on him according to Nicholas’ missing person report.

Wait, a tattooed 13-year-old boy?

That’s when I felt a greater sense of curiosity and suspicion about the Barclay family history, and director Bart Layton does a fantastic job at balancing Frédéric’s amoral deception with a sense of Nicholas’ true fate; he even lassos in a private eye who provides bits of welcome comic relief as he takes up the case against the Barclays.

A&E IndieFilms is behind the work, which plays like a superior TV documentary. That’s a polite way of saying I’m surprised this was programmed at a top-ranking film festival, but it is definitely worth seeing as Nicholas’ case remains open.

Still from How to Survive a Plague

In recent years, with the queer-rights movement trained on the issue of marriage equality, and as sectors of the HIV+ population have achieved and maintained undetectable status, the AIDS/ARC timeline has blurred for some of us. What first shook me back into consciousness in David France‘s documentary How to Survive a Plague was the footage from the first ACT UP event, which went down on Wall Street in March, 1987. Those wavy videotaped moments reminded me that the response to the AIDS epidemic was started by a few and embraced by many. This was a time when Mark Harrington and Peter Staley became community leaders and people who had never been politically involved, such as chemist Iris Long, emerged to help put together a plan of action for treatment.

By keeping the focus on the key players in the fight against AIDS in New York City, director France has created a historical document that resonates with today’s Occupy movement, and beautifully frames the period where a group of people educated themselves, fought against the status quo, and made inroads with the FDA, pharmaceutical companies, the National Institute for Health, the media, and the White House.

Plague benefits from the hours of archival footage, from the early community meetings through ACT UP’s split into two separate, sometimes combative organizations. What captivated me was this dissolution, where a few of ACT UP’s founding members created the Treatment Action Group in order to concentrate on research for AIDS treatments and co-infections, being labeled elitists by ACT UP in the process. Leave it to writer/activist Larry Kramer to find the true definition of the community’s collective anger by announcing that they were in the midst of a plague and their internal combustion must produce positive results.

Whether you are a survivor of that time period or a member of the generation that followed, How to Survive a Plague is a radical and inspiring document of a social movement that has not lost its power, influence and hope over the last 35 years.

Bingham Ray

Sundance continues under a pall in the wake of the news that indie film lion Bingham Ray passed away Monday. “It’s a big shock,” said Christian Gaines, senior manager for festivals for Withoutabox. “It’s hard to imagine the festival circuit without him. He’ll be sorely missed.”

I only knew Ray slightly, having exchanged festival pleasantries several times, which consist of “When you get in/get out?” and “What have you liked?” We had one long animated conversation about the commercial prospects of Teeth (Ray was really really right, I was really, really wrong). He always seemed a quick wit and a gracious soul. We at IMDb send our condolences to Bingham Ray’s friends and particularly his family for their loss.

Amidst the sorrow Sundance affords some wonderful insights and stories. Before the screening of Monsieur Lazhar, announced as a Best Foreign Language Film nominee this morning, director Phillipe Falardeau admitted that he’d had a nightmare the night before about our very screening. He said the screening had started and he was content but nervous. The projectionist seemed to have everything in hand. The house was full. But then, to his horror, he realized that the entire film was no longer in French but in English and no longer eligible to be in the Foreign Language category. He awoke from his nightmare to share a breakfast of Lucky Charms with his producers. Once the Foreign Language noms came in all they heard was “From Canada…” uttered and they then began yelling so loud that they never actually heard “Monsieur Lazhar” spoken.

Lazhar is a delicate film about a political refugee from Algeria who becomes a substitute teacher for a class whose former teacher had committed suicide in their classroom at the beginning of the year. It features outstanding performances by several children and a noble turn by Mohamed Fellag, as Lazhar.

Safety Not Guaranteed is a quirky but largely satisfying film about three editors in Seattle who follow the story of a man who has placed a classified ad stating “Wanted: Someone to go back in time with me. This is not a joke…You’ll get paid after we get back. Bring your own weapons. SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED. I have only done this once before.” Mark Duplass (who seems to be getting better with each performance) is the guy who submitted the ad and Aubrey Plaza plays the intern who investigates his claims.

Comedian Mike Birbiglia co-wrote, directs and stars in Sleepwalk With Me and, for those who’ve heard his stand-up routine over the years, a lot of the material will be familiar. It helps that it’s good material and that Birbiglia leaves sentimentality behind. Much like Howard Stern‘s Private Parts the story here is about the struggle to start in a tough profession and how revealing personal, private details turned a faltering career around.

by Keith Simanton

I credit Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim for helping make cable TV a destination for gonzo, unstable comedy. “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” served up 12-minute bits of peerless schtick that undoubtedly inspired plenty of amateurs who have since found immortality on Funny or Die or YouTube. So it’s a bummer to assert that their feature-length film, Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie, is a semi-baked story idea stretched into a painfully long run time where even their support staff (Zach Galifianakis, John C. Reilly, Will Ferrell) don’t deliver gold, or in this case, diamonds (you’ll see, but it’s not important). It’s the sort of bore where, if you were sitting next to me, I’d understand if you started to check your phone for texts, or even status updates.

The shambling plot follows Tim and Eric after they make a F-grade movie that cost a billion dollars loaned to them by the mobster-like Schlaaang Corportation. In order to pay back their debt, they skip town, refashion themselves as a public relations duo, and accept an open invite to renovate the Swallow Valley Mall, trading Robert Loggia‘s death threats for Will Ferrell’s winking promise of financial redemption in the process. As they ready the mall for a grand re-opening, squatters are evicted, ghosts are unmasked in the yogurt shop, Tim takes custody of the son of a vendor who specializes in selling used toilet paper, and Eric spends a night getting “Shrimed” in a bathtub, then discovers Tim passed out in the adult toy store with Katie, a balloon vendor and the object of Eric’s lust. (How dare you defile Miss Geist.)

Before the screening, I surveyed several film writers, and they all said the movie will satisfy fans, and the sudden appearances of Reilly or Galifianakis make up for the draggy bits, though I disagree with both claims. Suspiciously absent or tuned down are many of T&E’s trademarks — the faux commercials, cable-access style graphics, special effects, and looping edits that helped solidify their small but devoted following. The most disengaging part of the movie is the ending, which proves that surrealist comedy writers still fall prey to typical three act structure and its typical failures. Conversely, the funniest moment is at the very beginning, where a barrage of Schlaaang vanity cards introduce the feature.

When you soften the edges of a cult TV program in order to appeal to a wider audience, purists will grumble. I’ll be interested to see what the reaction to the movie is once it’s on VOD and in theaters. Obviously there’s a huge difference between being a fan who sees this for free and one who shells out for a viewing, be it at home or otherwise. If I had paid to see this film, it would have overwritten the last major TV-to-movie letdown, Strangers with Candy: The Movie.