Retro Sundance: 2001's Memento

When Memento arrived in 2001, it was a total buzzfest: Everyone was talking about it. It had a Wachowski level of cool (even co-starring Wachowski favorites Joe Pantoliano and Carrie-Anne Moss), it had a gritty noir sensibility, and an innovative time-bending structure deftly designed to get you inside the brain-damaged mind of Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce). It left Sundance that January with the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, hit movie theaters in March, and when awards season came it was nominated for an Oscar for the Screenplay (Chris Nolan's first Oscar nomination) as well as the Editing prize. The movie has lost none of its cachet in the intervening years, retaining a 92% “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and clocking in at #46 on the IMDb Top 250.

But I have a personal reason for loving this movie, as well as a story (I always have a story) if you'll indulge me after the jump...

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Retro Sundance: 2000's You Can Count on Me

Team Experience is looking back on past Sundance winners since we aren't attending this year. Here's Kieran on Kenneth Lonergan's directorial debut

In many of the write-ups about Kenneth Lonergan's delicate and perceptive character study, the one aspect people seem to be on the same page about is the believable sibling dynamic between Sammy (Laura Linney) and Terry Prescott (Mark Ruffalo). Watching Sammy and Terry's first face-to-face interactions, I thought "Yes! This is how brothers and sisters behave!" It's such a tricky thing to depict, and it's often done poorly. How does a writer/director effectively convey a relationship between two adults whose shared histories are such a constant, inescapable presence? It's a subtle tightrope to walk.

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Sundance Buzz Pt 2: Certain Women, The Intervention, Christine, More...

Robert Redford wanted this Sundance season to be about diversity of voices and young voices, too. We covered some of that in the last buzz installment but this here's installment of buzz is mostly about women. Well, and Logan Lerman. He's one of many stars hoping to up their game and thus career by way of indie drama success. That is a quick way to up your cred as an actor -- look what it's done for Kristen Stewart recently -- but its weird that it works so well to keep careers going since box office is so rarely part of the equation. At least for festival pick-ups in the increasingly fragmented post-festival market. Do you go video on demand, streaming, theaters, or some weird ass combo of both?

The trick for actors is being great in a movie and also lucking out and having that movie around you be up to your level or at least accessible enough to provide you a nice showcase. 

Christine, Certain Women, and more female led films after the jump... 

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Retro Sundance: 1999's Run Lola Run

Team Experience is looking back on past Sundance winners since we aren't attending this year. Here's Manuel on a late 90s German flick...

Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (Lola rennt) won the 1999 Audience Award (World Cinema) at Sundance in 1999, an early accolade that would make it one of the most critically acclaimed foreign films of the year, a notion more than cemented close to a year later, when it would win the Independent Spirit Award for Best Foreign Film, a BAFTA nomination and seven aptly titled Lola (German Film) Awards. In case you’re wondering, Germany didn’t submit Tykwer’s film as its Foreign Language Oscar entry—they went instead with the lesbian Nazi film Aimée & Jaguar, which failed to make the cut with the Academy who eventually bestowed the prize on Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother.

I hadn’t revisited it since I first caught way back in college and all I could remember was its propulsive storytelling and near-frantic filmmaking. And really, on second viewing, that remains the film’s most distinctive feature...

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Retro Sundance: 1991's Poison

Since we're not in Sundance this year, a look back at Sundance classics. Here's David on Poison...

Glenn kicked off our Sundance retrospective with a look at Desert Hearts, a film with more than a passing resemblance to Todd Haynes' Carol; a few years down the line, and we come to Haynes’ own appearance in the Utah festival, with his feature debut Poison. Winner of the 1991 festival’s Grand Jury Prize - Dramatic, Poison is considered a vital film in the ‘New Queer Cinema’ movement of the early 1990s, as coined by B. Ruby Rich the following year. Rich’s theory involved not just the presence of LGBT characters and themes, but the queering of filmmaking form itself. Haynes had already demonstrated his inventive, radical eye in the controversial short film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, and Poison, with its triptych of homonymic narratives, consolidated the director’s manipulation of nostalgia and classic cinematic forms to produce a strikingly different approach to cinema.

Each segment is presented in an individual and vivid stylistic form. 'Hero', the story of a young boy who shoots his father and literally flies away, comes as an oversaturated tabloid news documentary, containing interviews with scandalised neighbours, incisively lurid narration and tremulous recreations of the event itself. [More...]

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