Austenland
A romantic comedy about a Jane Austen devotee (Keri Russell) who takes a fantasy vacation to live out a role in an Austen-inspired setting. The directorial debut of Jerusha Hess, co-author of Napoleon Dynamite and wife of Napoleon director Jared Hess. This is a really fun movie. Russell is terrific as the girl next door. Jennifer Coolidge is fabulous and feels like she's been unleashed to be funny and outrageous and fill up the screen. Maybe the surprise is Bret Mackenzie, who was great in the Flight of the Conchords HBO series but demonstrated some really impressive acting chops and a magnetic screen presence. I expect this performance to catapult his acting career.
Both Rebecca and I really enjoyed this movie and I predict it will get gobbled up by a distributor and play pretty well at the box office. We ran into Jerusha Hess after the movie and chatted for a few minutes. She seems quite nice and friendly, down-to-earth and genuine. Watching the Q& A it was clear that she had created a loose and contagiously fun atmosphere on the set, and the positive energy really showed in the film.
Who is Dayani Cristal?
A documentary about illegal immigration with an interesting performance by Gael Garcia Bernal. The directors took a fresh approach, interspersing two story lines--one an attempt to discover the identify of a dead body found in the desert, and two a reenactment of sorts of a typical process of an illegal immigration from the Honduras, through Mexico, featuring Bernal.
The movie was quite well done and both informative and easy to watch. My one criticism might be that despite its efforts to move the audience emotionally, it never manages to quite pull that off.
Curiously, Rebecca and I saw a very similar movie--Crossing Arizona--in the exact same venue some years ago.
Fallen City
Director Zhao Qi follows survivors of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake as they rebuild their lives while the government rebuilds their city. Qi is a talented director and the documentary is beautifully shot. I was glad we stayed for the Q&A, as Qi is very well-spoken and his commentary helped me understand that the destruction and rebuilding of the city is something of a metaphor for the loss of the old ways of China and the government-sponsored replacement of bright, shiny, new materialism. We spoke to him afterwards, mostly with Rebecca asking him questions about the Mandarin dialect she had been trying to understand (he said that even he had trouble with it initially), and a few other observations born from her experience in China. That really is one of the joys of Sundance--especially the smaller movies. These directors LOVE to talk about their movies and they are extremely passionate. It inspires me to feel that.
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