Indecent exposures - Festivals: Sundance - 2002 Sundance Film Festival - Brief Article

Film Comment, March-April, 2002 by Gavin Smith

A similarly confused tone afflicts Justin Lin's stylishly nihilistic Better Luck Tomorrow, which depicts the anti-social activities of a clique of disaffected middle-class Asian-American high school students. Set in a suburban California of gated communities and status-conscious conformity, the film captures the sociopath-wannabe blankness of its characters. But as their behavior escalates from smalltime scams to theft to drug dealing and beyond, Lin can't decide whether he's framing the action as an amoral satire in which crime pays or as a troubling study of moral disconnection. As in Kids, parents remain out of sight, their convenient absence permitting the characters--or is it Lin?--to sustain their junior-league Goodfellas fantasies; yet, via a fleeting brush with a car full of real gang-bangers, Lin supplies a telling reminder of authentic social estrangement. Ultimately the film's moral short-circuiting, its inability to find a coherent perspective, may be as persuasive as its sociological detail-perhaps for better, mostly for worse. But at least the contradictions in Lin's film juice it up.

Another fired multiple-character episodic narrative about alienation, interconnection, and the human condition, writer-director Peter Mattei's Love in the Time of Money was saddled with a title that strained for significance beyond its reach. Conceived as a dotcom-era NYC La Ronde, it's a by-rote succession of entirely predictable acting-class encounters across class and age boundaries shot in notably hard-edged DV. Too bad somebody didn't come up with some ideas--or a film, for that matter--to go with that snappy title.

Biggest disappointments of the festival? Inevitably, they were all in the Premieres Section, where expectations run high. Three superior music video directors, Mark Romanek, Peter Care, and Michel Gondry, each stumbled in their attempts to cross over to features. From the discreet, controlled images in its opening moments, One Hour Photo immediately confirmed writer-director Romanek's visual genius. But the director's prodigious gifts are squandered on a script that shortchanges its intriguing premise: creepy, repressed photo lab technician Robin Williams leads a pathetic, vicarious existence through a perfect yuppie family's snapshots--until the husband spoils everything by having an affair, at which point the film becomes another stalker flick. (It's too bad Romanek seems to have swept his unclassifiable first film, Static, under the carpet. Made back in 1985, before independent film was fashionable, it showed potential he has yet to deliver on.) Surprisingly tentative in visual terms, Cares The Dangerous lives of Altar Boys is a standard issue coming-of-age story save for its animation sequences, in which the film's Catholic schoolboy protagonists fantasize themselves as superheroes fighting the malevolent forces of darkness embodied by Jodie Fosters disciplinarian Catholic school nun (is there any other kind in movies?). And then there's Human Nature, a satirical take on nature vs. culture in which a scientist (Tim Robbins) tries to socialize a man raised in the wild (Rhys Ifans), assisted and then sabotaged by his fiancee (Patricia Arquette), who has a severe body hair problem. This flat, labored goof, which I'm not sure sounds funny even on paper, was the result of the combined efforts of Gondry, director of some of the loopiest, most fabulously imaginative music videos ever made, and Charlie Kaufman, writer of Being John Malkovich. Come on lads, if David Fincher and Spike Jonze can do it, so can you.