Ahoy, squirts! Quint here, newly returned home and ready to put my final thoughts down on my Sundance experience. I’ve avoided multiple mini-reviews, opting in favor of full reviews for every title (which probably means I’ve rambled quite a bit, so forgive me for that), and now that I’m home and looking over the last 5 reviews left I find I don’t have a huge amount to say for each title. And I’m tired and ready to be finished, so that too.
GRABBERS
There’s enough to like about this Irish film, a comedy with alien monsters in it, but not really a horror comedy, to give it a pass for its flaws. It’s a film I desperately wanted to see kick everything up a notch the whole way through because it has such a great premise. Lovecraftian, water-loving aliens crash into the waters off Erin Island and they come to land to lay eggs and eat the population. However they have an aversion to alcohol, which is a deadly weakness when attacking Irishmen.
Unfortunately, they only don’t like it when they ingest alcohol, which makes the townspeople safe from being sucked dry, but that doesn’t help them from just being killed by the variety of squishy tentacled badboys attacking the little pub that they all decide to hide out in.
Amidst all the craziness is a drunk cop in a love triangle with the teetotaler beautiful new guard and the local nerdy physician.
Having it be a plot point that your main characters have to be shitfaced in order to fight a monster is kind of genius, but the plot is erratic and the film seems to be more concerned with making sure we see connections to Jaws, Tremors and Critters than it is about telling its own story.
However, the cast (Richard Coyle, Ruth Bradley and Russell Tovey) are all solid, the supporting characters genuinely fun and the CG (minus a few key exceptions) is surprisingly good. Don’t be surprised to catch this one on Netflix in a year’s time and have a fun time with it. With the premise and obvious technical skill I was just hoping the movie would have been more than decently fun.
YOUR SISTER’S SISTER
This is a film that played Toronto, but it’s not a surprise that Sundance brought it in as a Spotlight title since Lynn Shelton’s Humpday was a big hit at Sundance back in ’09.
I thought Humpday was alright, but I’m not a huge fan of the mumblecore movement as a whole. I also wasn’t behind the dogme movement either. I like movies to have a script and I have a very low tolerance for experimental cinema. It takes a master to pull it off and most of the time it ain’t masters trying to do one.
There’s a fine line between getting a realistic performance through improv and just being either too lazy to have a script or too scared that your script is no good. My Sister’s Sister doesn’t really feel like mumblecore, feels much more organized and planned. If movies like this and Cyrus are what mumblecore meant then I wouldn’t be such a prick and rag on it all the time.
Thanks primarily to the central three performances (Emily Blunt, Mark Duplass and Rosemarie DeWitt), My Sister’s Sister was a pleasant surprise. It’s a very simple, low budget dramedy that takes place in a vacation cabin and explores that weird boundary between “Best Friends” and “In Love.” It’s tricky material, done a few billion times, but when you get quality, multi-layered writing like you find in Shelton’s script and three very good actors to flesh out these characters the why of the story doesn’t matter as much as the how.
The meat of this story is that unconventional love triangle, in which two of the characters aren’t even in love with each other, but have enough history to make things difficult. Since the main three are so good on the screen, so emotionally raw and believable as human beings, what is a simple low budget premise rises above the mediocrity it could have been.
Smart direction, fantastic performances and an emotional hook that actually works. If you have a heart you’ll find something to like about this movie. If you’ve ever found yourself in this situation, being in love with a good friend and unsure if letting them know is the right thing to do, then you’ll be emotionally invested right from the beginning.
SHADOW DANCER
Director James Marsh opened last year’s Sundance with the enraging documentary Project Nim and returned again this year with a feature called Shadow Dancer about an IRA informant in the ‘90s.
Andrea Riseborough stars as a young woman whose world was shaken by violence as a child and has since become a central figure in IRA’s terrorist attacks on the British Government. She’s quiet and inward, but driven. However, certain things come to pass that puts her in a corner and maybe changes her views on her IRA brothers.
Clive Owen recruits her to farm for intell as the IRA plans assassinations, but like any political intrigue story there’s more than meets the eye behind the scenes, which leads to some tense situations as Riseborough struggles with her own inner turmoil while also keeping her cover.
It’s the kind of slow build intrigue film you’d expect from this premise and it’s pretty involving, but for some reason felt incomplete. There’s a definitive ending to the story, but I couldn’t help but feel that the movie felt more like a feature length pilot for a kick-ass 6 part BBC mini-series.
The movie feels like a set-up to a larger story of this fascinating, explosive time in world history. It feels like we just got to the key players as the credits rolled and as a result I left a little unfulfilled.
It’s not a particularly exciting movie, but it does lull you in with its bleak world, dynamic characters and has enough tension just based on the story that you forgive there being a lack of occasional jolts of energy. A Children of Men-like action beat in the middle or at the end would have been enough, I think. It’d have to be something character-driven and intense to fit in this movie, but as it stands it feels like they missed an opportunity to me.
Owen is great as usual. Just watching his face in this movie I was struck that he’d make the perfect Quint should some sorry waste of flesh and blood ever even think of remaking Jaws. It’s a quiet performance, but he says a lot without saying anything.
Andrea Riseborough is a great lead, but she plays it understated all the time and I think part of that nagging feeling of the movie not being complete is that I didn’t feel her character quite grow at all in the couple of hours I watched her. I’d put most of the blame on the writing there because Riseborough does a great job with the character she was given, just doesn’t have much of a range as a character.
It was also nice seeing Scully back on the screen as Owen’s secretive boss. Gillian Anderson was quite compelling in this movie, actually, coming off as someone that is both a typical office manager and someone with the intel and resources to pull the trigger on some poor bastard. It made me wish we’d see more of her.
That’s about it from me on these three titles. I have one more piece with a look at midnight flick Excision and the big seller at the fest, The Words starring Bradley Cooper, Zoe Saldana, Dennis Quaid and Jeremy Irons. Stay tuned!
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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