Sunday, January 28, 2024

MIND-ALTERING SUNDANCE 2024

website: https://www.jamesawicks.com    contact: jawicks75@gmail.com

Once again, in its continued tradition running 40 years strong now, Sundance films exactly do not fit into that tiny range of experience that capital seems to require of us to replicate itself. I'm probably off course by making this over-simplified conclusion at the outset of this post, yet do find that the requisite skills neoliberal culture seems to value above all others, including working overtime, war mongering, and stepping over others to get ahead, can be boiled down to the rather simplistic and leave us empty. No wonder people are unhappy even when they "make it": we're starving for more on spiritual, physical, and intellectual levels. 

Sundance films explore the realms outside of our window of restricted vocations, interactions, and culture. The categories Sundance films explore aren't inherently complex, but since they're just a bit outside the norm, it's a breath of fresh air.

Monday Jan. 22, 2024

Malu (2024) was delivered by Brazilian director Pedro Freire who explained before the screening I attended that back in the day, when he rented films from video stores, he grew to love Sundance films because the laurel stamped on each film's cover ensured that the story would at the least be well scripted and well acted--his two favorite things--and that he wept when he found that Malu was selected for the festival this year. The film traces the story of a woman pitted between her 20-something daughter and conservative aging mother. Malu lives straddled between the past (failed communist revolution) and the future (unrealized dream of creating a theater company) with neither emotional nor intellectual reserves to manage the present in spite of the charm and gravitational pull of her personality. 

Malu director and cast, Sundance, 2024

In the evening I attended the Midnight Short Film Program--Sundance’s violent and un-categorizable fare--featuring 6 of the 53 short films submitted to Sundance out of 12,098 (including one of mine lol). The buzz of the crowd even before entering the theater was palpable. Once inside unfiltered anxiety, fear, and joy melded together throughout the welcome, screenings, and Q&A session. My favorite film of the fest--the singular "The Rainbow Bridge" (Simakis), which comically and nearly savagely presents a pet owner who discovers how to connect with her dying pet on a celestial plane so that she can say goodbye in a language they can both understand--typified the collection of films here with loglines that search engine algorithms can't quite quantify. 

Sundance programming is at it’s best when the out of this world meets a community there for it. I left the theater after the Midnight Shorts wondering “do I know too little or do I know too much?” and before settling on “probably neither," the realization that followed on its heels was “anything is possible." It's a certainty the films revealed by pulling ideas out from under the rug where concepts of infinite possibility can unwittingly be swept.

Tuesday Jan. 23, 2024

Love Machina (Sillen) documents the love story of Bina Rothblatt, currently in the process of downloading her memories into an AI system, and her partner Martine. The idea is that if we can create eternal versions of ourselves, then maybe we can love our partners forever. But part and parcel are questions surrounding consciousness, sentience, and immortality--not to mention the structural and systemic biases built into the foundation of systems and platforms from which AI is being built.

Winner (Fogel), featuring the pitch-perfect performance of Emilia Jones (who plays Ruby in CODA), tells the story of Reality Winner, a woman who at great personal cost sent private NSA documents to mainstream journalists which proved Russia interfered with the United State's 2016 elections. The film shows important events that preceded and those that followed this explosive event covered in the press, based on a smart, well-paced script. 

Presence is Soderbergh’s horror-drama of a spirit which haunts a house from the perspective of the haunting presence. Once the idea that first-person point of view will be used exclusively to tell the story, and after a handful of lines fall flat in the first 20 minutes or so, the film is an intriguing whodunit and quite enjoyable. The music is what particularly stands out in a film which rewards patient attention.

Wednesday Jan. 24, 2024

Never Look Back (Lawless) traces the radical life of the singular, remarkable camerawoman Margaret Moth, war correspondent extraordinaire. Extraordinaire in this case refers to a person instilled with a will to live with fearlessness which, while perhaps not replicable, does indeed provide a model of living to the fullest to inspire each individual within their own capacity. And Margaret Moth had the coolest 80s jet black punk hair, just saying. 

I had tickets at the beginning of the festival to the Napoleon Dynamite 20th anniversary screening yet nearly thought of giving them away (because I've seen it so many times!). But as the date approached I kept thinking: what if the cast and crew are there? And they were! Director Jared Hess stated via a recorded message that at the film's first screening at Sundance 20 years ago there were no opening credits--the film just opened with Napoleon standing in front of his house. 

Napoleon Dynamite cast, Sundance, 2024

It was so awesome to re-live the film with so many passionate fans. We clapped for each new character introduced and voiced multiple cheers for Napoleon's antics and groans for Uncle Rico's behavior. It was an unforgettable night for all. Even the principal and Trisha were there! I may or may not have cried during the screening. And after the screening I may or may not have been photographed with Lafawnduh (Shondrella Avery) kissing my cheek, but I’m not the kind of guy who gets kissed on the cheek after a film screening and then tells.

Thursday Jan. 25, 2024

Richard Linklater returned to Sundance with Hit Man, staring Glen Powell (Top Gun: Maverick) and Adria Arjona (Andor), which I think of as a modern-day Fight Club (Fincher, 1999) in terms of the way the main character lives two identities. In this case, and based on an actual story, a college professor spends his off hours (I’d like a professor gig that has enough time for a part-time job, just saying) as an undercover contract killer for his city’s police department. The false identity Glen Powell's character creates bleeds into his “real life”-- the result? He has to pay for the repercussions of his transgressions, or does he?  

And so, are we re-entering an age of schizophrenic films just as we did at the end of the late 1990s, pre-9/11? At that time my supposition is that Generation X had endured sufficient time to take stock of the effects of global capital on the local psyche--and within this space for introspection filmmakers represented their meditations across cinematic genres. And Linklater was in the thick of it then, so maybe like those of us who experienced the late 90s he persists in producing what was then part of our daily lives: picking up the pieces of psyche’s fractured by the impact of living to make money in a society that, no matter how we went about doing so, we could not seem to escape the realization that we were contributing to structural and systemic inequality. 

Does Hit Man reveal the return of the repressed or are we at a new juncture in time--that is to say, is 2024 a moment when we have had enough time (since the pandemic, since Black Lives Matter, since Me Too) to take stock of all that we've inherited and all that persists, or is this the 1990s returning in a new dress? (And just as with today's return of 1990s fashion, accompanied and intermixed with the 80s and 00s haphazardly?)

Little Death (Begert) channels Fight Club directly during the first half--it's like watching Fight Club if it were written from a right rather than left-wing ethos and with the assistance of AI. The second half (thankfully) is something altogether different--the film radically changes course, as if two separate movies were crammed into one--which was Little Death's best quality.

So when I say "mind-altering Sundance" films in this blog's title, it’s not that these films are beyond the possible range of human experience in terms of gender, race, and class; rather, our cultural range of experience is limited and Sundance proves that. Moreover, their films become the new normal during the time folks are in attendance. The window gets cracked open a bit wider.



Park City photography © by James Wicks, 2024

Tuesday, January 9, 2024

SISTER: a short film by James Wicks

"SISTER" is a short film that came about as a fever dream while playing the guitar music for it during the pandemic. If you get a sec, please check it out. 

I submitted it to a handful of film festivals & none accepted it -- maybe when you watch it you'll agree and see why! 🤣 In any case, I'm super grateful to all who helped create it so that it can see the light of day.🙏


Friday, January 27, 2023

Sundance Film Festival 2023, Thursday 1/26: Fantastic Machine

Fantastic Machine (Danielson & Van Aertryck, 2023)

One amazing thing you can do at Sundance is accidentally go to the wrong theater, have the wrong QR code scanned so you get in, be surprised that the film is starting later than you expected, and then be totally stunned when the Sundance programmer let's you know that you're about to see Fantastic Machine rather than Mami Wata.

Then, when you're just starting to roll with it, the delightful directors thank the audience for being so responsive and vocal in previous screenings and that each one of us in attendance is a member of "a generous people"--which you never expected to hear ever in your lifetime as a citizen of the United States--confirming that yes, you're gonna stay and see what the Fantastic Machine is.

It's a movie camera, of course! A history of it, by way of sick narration and the most iconic images ever recorded...that horse with all of its feet off of the ground, yes pictures of earth after the moon landing, yes the moment when BBC television was first broadcast. 

At each evolution of the motion-picture camera--from nickelodeon to documentary war footage to television to news journalism to YouTube--there is a moment of optimism: more information, more education, more voices heard, the possibility for more harmony as we understand our neighbors across the globe. And at each evolution the reality that follows: media conglomerates, market capitalism, isolated voices in a sea of content, "fake news," and algorithms that dictate what we see online. It's a beautiful, tragic, compelling story. 

And we're in it. In the end, we need communities that engage and discuss it, media literacy, and more community.

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Also of note was Shayda (Noora Niasari, 2023) a debut film by an Iranian filmmaker who depicts her experience as a child immigrant to Australian and her mother who moves them both to a women's shelter to escape an abusive relationship. The film allows each character to breathe: inhale...exhale. It allows us to access their space for a moment to experience both a mother-daughter relationship and a precarious journey.

A Winter Day Outside of Park City, Utah

Wednesday, January 25, 2023

Sundance Film Festival 2023, Wednesday 1/25: Rye Lane

Rye Lane (Raine Allen-Miller, 2023)

It's time for rom-com best of all time list to make room for a new film. Notting Hill, The Big Sick, Amelie, Crazy Rich Asians, Harold and Maude, and When Harry Met Sally...enter Rye Lane

Instantly rewatchable, Rye Lane depicts a day in the life (and more) of Dom (David Jonsson) and Yas (Vivian Oparah) who come together by chance after each of them experience breakups separately. It's fast and funny with scenes that you want to tell your friends about if they haven't seen it yet. And the script is top notch: why say you're ignoring something when you can say you're snoozing through your alarm clock--or something like that! I'm messing it up. It's so good. Go see it. 

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And really briefly: the performance of Inez (Teyana Taylor) in A Thousand and One directed by A.V. Rockwell is jaw dropping; meanwhile, the kid-friendly Aliens Abducted My Parents and Now I Feel Kinda Left Out turns on every dime, just as you'd expect, with joy and ebullience. 

Director Roger Ross Williams introducing Cassandro at Sundance

Sundance Film Festival 2023, Tuesday 1/24: Cassandro

Cassandro (Roger Ross Williams, 2023)

Cassandro is cinema. 

Cassandro post-screening Q&A with Roger Ross Williams center and co-writer David Teague speaking

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Also of note was The Eternal Memory (Maite Alberdi) which documents a famous Chilean couple dealing with Alzheimer's. And not to be missed: 

AUM: The Cult at the End of the World (Ben Braun & Chiaki Yanagimoto) which uncovers in detail the insane history of the Aum Shinrikyo cult which carried out sarin attacks on Tokyo's subway system in 1995. The latter's sprawling geographical setting, historical contextualization, and transnational relevance today in an era of fake news is sensational.

Monday, January 23, 2023

Sundance Film Festival 2023, Monday 1/23: Victim/Suspect

I remember remarking at my first Sundance: "this year's Sundance is so amazing" and the person I was with said "it's like this every year"--and they were right.

Thanks be to Sundance...another year--this is my fifth time to attend, the first being in 2013 when Ryan Coogler's Fruitvale was the standout film--and as always it blows me out of the water.

Today I watched A Little Prayer (Angus MacLachlan) starring Jane Levy, who delivers an Oscar-worthy performance, and David Strathairn. I also experienced the poetic and experimental film about rocks entitled Last Things by director Deborah Stratman at The Egyptian Theater. 

Director Deborah Stratman takes a picture of the audience at The Egyptian Theater


Victim/Suspect (Schwartzman, 2023)

But today's film that will stay with me for a long time is Netflix's Victim/Suspect by director Nancy Schwartzman. This documentary exposes systemic bias against victims of sexual assault in the United States who are not only disbelieved when they report their stories at local police precincts but are in turn accused of filing false reports which results in punishments including their imprisonment. 

The story centers around the investigative reporting of Rae de Leon (who works at the Center for Investigative Reporting) whose inquiry into one case leads to encountering over 200 cases nationally in which the victim becomes the suspect due to unfair police interview tactics and structural discrimination. In terms of presentation, a kind of love letter to the power of journalism, the doc itself feels like an investigation in the style of the reporters the director deeply admires while highlighting the brave women who are featured in the film and who were in attendance.

Victim/Suspect post-screening Q&A

"Street Legacy" Documentary, Broll Cinematographer

During the summer of 2022 I had the opportunity to work with fantastic up-and-coming film director Hunter Gregory Scheidt on the project "Street Legacy" as a b-roll contributor. I had my hands in some of the pre-production too!

Presented by Bar Seven Seven productions, Hunter's film outlines the "Street Legacy" street art exhibition at the Escondido Arts Center, curated by Tribal Streetwear's very own Bobby Ruiz and art professor and critic Jim Daichendt. Check out the doc, below:

And more info. is available here in this article by Toby Franklin.