Sundance report: Are you watching wrestling again?

Norwegian night at Sundance continues with a delightful movie called Happy, Happy directed by Anne Sewitsky and written by Ragnhild Tronvoll.  If a wife walks into the bedroom where her husband is watching hot guys wrestling on TV, and she casually comments, "Are you watching wrestling again?" you know there's a closeted gay man in the movie. 


But that statement does a disservice to this wonderful film.  It's movies like this that keep me coming back to Sundance.  It was a complex story told simply.  It presented a cold, bleak environment shown with warmth and beauty.  And the acting was superb.  I love story telling this good.


Here's a story of two couples brought together by unexpected circumstances.  Kaja is the optimistic wife married to closeted Erik. They haven't had sex in a long time.  Elisabeth and Sigve have moved to this faraway place because Elisabeth cheated on her husband.  That creates sexual tension that can only result in a great story.


This is a movie that should have one of those depressing Sundance endings.  But somehow it doesn't.  This movie made me fight back tears more than once.  That's largely due to the great script and directing.  But it's also due to some brilliant acting by Agnes Kittelsen, Henrik Rafaelsen, Maibritt Saerens, and Joachim Rafaelsen.


Finally, I have to comment on the music.  The choral scenes with Kaja were beautiful and emotional.  And how about that hot quartet of male singers that provided interludes throughout the movie.  Their old-timey gospel songs, their slim cut suits, and their strangely relevant lyrics made this move sparkle. Where can I get the soundtrack? 


If you get the chance, see this movie.

Sundance report: TROLL!!!!

I started my 2011 Sundance experience with a Norwegian film called The Troll Hunter.  And writing a pithy headline for this show was easy.  I had a bunch of choices like, "Zombies are so Sundance 2010," "Troll is the new vampire," "Blair Witch Project meets the Brothers Grimm," or "Another good use for the blood of a Christian man."  I chose "TROLL!!!' because one of the best early moments of the movie is when the troll hunter runs out of the forest screaming, "TROLL!!!."


There are several problems with this movie.  It could have lost at least 10 minutes, maybe even 30 and I wouldn't have noticed.  This movie also is reminiscent of Blair Witch Project and that style of movie gets old fast for me.


But there's also plenty to like.  There are some seriously funny moments.  Writer/director of the movie, Andre Ovredal was there for a Q&A.  He noted that this was the first time an audience had seen the movie and that it was fun to listen to the audience laugh in all the right places.  He did say there were a few "Norwegian" jokes that we didn't get.  The humor worked thanks to the deadpan delivery of the actors.


And for a movie made on a budget of just a couple of million dollars, the special effects were fantastic. The trolls are really awful, in a great way.


A movie like this could start a whole new trend.  I'm thinking the next book in the Twilight series might see the vampires and werewolves teaming up to fight trolls.

And last, but not least.

I saw 16 movies this year at Sundance and I've arrived at the final movie post from my 2010 Sundance Film Festival experience. (I may have one or two more Sundance related posts but not about specific movies.)  The final movie was Nowhere Boy from director Sam Taylor Wood. 

This movie explores rock and roll in the 1950s by following a young trouble-making rock musician named John.  I think this film might be a bit of a tribute to the formative year's of John Lennon.

Nowhere Boy is beautiful with it's gorgeous 1955 clothes, cars, and hairstyles.  But it made me feel old.  I grew up in the 70s when the 1950s were a recent memory. We were still going to sock hops and watching Happy Days.  The 50s just weren't that exotic.

Now, a movie set in the 1950s feels like a period piece.  Seriously, all those slim-waisted house wives, and those leather clad troublemakers, and even those classic cars seem closer to the time frame of a Jane Austen novel than they do to a modern tale. I guess I should raise a glass to the good ol' days.

Much of what you've heard about computer geeks may be true.

Life 2.0 from director Jason Spingarn-Koff wasn't the best movie I saw at Sundance, but it was one of the most fun. It tells three stories of people who not only live in real life, they also live in Second Life. And these are three strange stories.

First up, a man and a woman who lives miles apart, meet in Second Life, and develop a deep and committed relationship.  Before long, they've left their respective spouses, have met several times in person, and decide to move their relationship from Second Life to real life.  Maybe this can work.

Story two, a woman who designs clothes and houses for Second Life residents.  She lives with her parents, works in her pajamas, and is raking in a six-figure income from her Second Life designs. Well at least until some hacker starts stealing her designs and selling them for himself.  She responds with a law suit which she wins.  Seems like Second Life isn't immune to the real life legal system.

The third story is about a young man engaged to be married who creates a Second Life avatar that's a teenage girl. I don't want to give away the ending, but I'm guessing you can figure the general outcome of this tale.

The filmmaker uses some ingenious devices.  He creates his own avatar in Second Life (complete with video camera slung over his shoulder).  He then conducts several of the film's interviews in Second Life.

One of the reasons I go to Sundance is to see stories about people who are outside my world view.  People I might never otherwise meet.  And this movie introduced me to some of the most interesting, strange, and slightly creepy characters I've ever met.  And I loved them all.  I'd definitely add this movie to your Netflix list (if it's available).

Life's a bitch. And then your dad dies. And then you have to cut his hands off with a chain saw to prove he's dead.

You know you're at Sundance when you see a movie like Winter's Bone from director Debra Granik.  I have to say, I'm not surprised that this film won the Grand Jury prize at this year's festival.  It's the kind of movie Sundance loves.

Winter's Bone is the stark tale of an Ozark teen whose father is a missing meth cooker and whose mother has gone a little crazy.  When the daughter learns that her father signed the family shack over for a bail bond and that she's about to lose the home for her brother, sister, and mother if the dad doesn't show up for his court appearance, she sets out to find her father and ensure he makes it to court.

I can see why Sundance loves movies like this.  It's a startling story told from an independent perspective. I'm pretty sure you'd have a hard time selling this script to a major studio.

Jennifer Lawrence deserves a big shout out for a stunning performance as the main character. And it's not just the acting that makes this movie work.  It's filmed with such honesty and in places that are so obviously not sets, that the story becomes surprisingly real.  That is, until they break out the chain saw.  I won't give away everything (well maybe the title of this post did) but the moment the chain saw comes out, the movie went from a beautifully told, bleak tale to a cheap-thrills horror film.

But even with that misguided turn, this is a movie worth seeing.  Even if you'll leave the theater a little more depressed than when you walked in.

We're all in this together.

If you want to feel like the human race is one big web of interconnected lives, or if you want to believe in the power of kindness, or if it just seems like the world's troubles are so big that there's nothing you can do to make a difference, you should watch A Small Act from director Jennifer Arnold.  And if you missed it at Sundance, you'll have a chance to see it later this year when it airs on HBO.

This is the story of a woman in Sweden (Hilda Back) who sponsors a child in Kenya.  The cost? About $15 a month.  The woman has no idea how the money is really used and isn't sure it's doing any good.  Meanwhile in Kenya, the money is paying the tuition for a poor student's secondary education. (Apparently, high school isn't free in Kenya.) The student does well and gets into college where he studies law. He then gets accepted to Harvard where he gets a master's degree.  He then wants to give other poor students the same opportunity he got so he creates the Hilda Back Education Fund, even though he's never met the woman and has no idea who she is. Eventually the two meet and develop a long friendship.  

The movie also follows three students hoping to qualify for a scholarship. And these are intense stories.  It's amazing how much tension the filmmakers create as we, the audience wait for the students' test scores.  The dramatic gasp from the audience as the results were announced says a lot about how well this movie is made.

There's a lot of serendipity in the story. This is a movie that had the potential to be a very long version of one of those bad, for-just-a-few-dollars-a-month-you-can-sponsor-this-poor-foreign-child ads. But instead it tells a gripping story that makes you want to go out and do something good. Even if it's something small.

From Basquiat to Banksy.

I gotta give the Sundance programmers credit for the Friday night programming at the Tower Theater.  They put two films back to back that some how made for a perfect cinematic evening.  It started with Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child (see my previous post) which was followed by Exit Through the Gift Shop, Banksy's first feature length film.  The two films together were like a mini tutorial of street art turned fine art.

Banky's film is presented as a documentary in which a French filmmaker (Thierry Guetta) follows the street artist (and other street artists like Invader and Shepard Fairey) in the hopes of making a great movie.  But when the first cut turns out to be a disaster, Banksy recommends that Thierry give up filmmaking and become a street artist.  Thierry does just that and is soon creating work that rockets him into art stardom.

However I'd bet a lot of money that this is no documentary but is instead Banksy up to his usual antics of shaking up the establishment.  I say that for two reasons.  First, Banksy's own admission that everything in the movie is true "except the parts that aren't."  Second, by the time you get to the end of the movie, the interviews with Bansky and Fairey just aren't believable.

I almost wish this had been a real documentary. My favorite parts of the film followed street artists Invader, Fairey, and Bansky as they take their art to the streets.  It was really interesting to see how these artists work within their urban galleries.  And even though Banksy pans the work of Thierry Guetta (whose street name is Mr. Brainwash), I liked alot of the art.  And I'd bet money that it was all created by Banksy himself.  The posters that mashed Warhol's Marylin with pop culture icons like Michael Jackson and Leonard Nimoy were ingenius as were the Campbell soup spray paint cans.  I also liked the way Banksy commandeered Damien Hirst's spot paintings.  They almost made sense within the context of street art.

I'd recommend this movie to anyone remotely interested in the instersection of street art and fine art.  And I'm certainly glad it made it to Sundance, since Banksy followed.  I can't imagine any thing else that would bring the elusive artist to Salt Lake City and Park City where left behind a few reminders of his existence.  I'll have a post on that soon.

Is it just me. Or were the 80s really hard on artists.

It was tough being an artist in the 80s and early 90s.  AIDS was killing off artists left and right from Keith Haring to Felix Gonzales-Torres. Andy Warhol died unexpectedly. And a lot of artists were dieing from drug overdoses.  One such artist is Jean-Michel Basquiat, the subject of a new documentary by Tamra Davis. 

The filmmaker knew Basquiat and interviewed him on video in Los Angeles.  When the artist died shortly thereafter, the filmmaker put the video interview away and did nothing with it.  Some 20 years later, the video interview is the basis for this Sundance documentary.

Even though it's a little long, I like this movie for its insight into Basquiat's life.  The interviews with those who knew Basquiat including art luminaries like Julian Schnabel are fascinating.  And the way the film ties Basquiat's life to the reality of the time (Madonna and Deborah Harry show up several times) makes the story more engaging.

I also liked seeing footage of the original Basquiat gallery shows.  I've always thought Basquiat's work was interesting but much of it seemed trivial.  Seeing the work in their original exhibitions gave me a new appreciation for the raw power of Basquiat's style.

The best moments of this film are from the filmmaker's original interviews, even though the quality is awful.  Every time Jean-Michel Basquiat looks directly at the camera, you see a sparkle of genius in his eye. You witness his devious smile. And you understand why we as humans are somehow drawn to the mystery that of the artist.

An introduction to Lesbionics.

I had the recent good fortune of hosting a couple of lesbian friends as holiday house guests.  It was the perfect opportunity to experience first hand what my friend Felix and I have come to call Lesbionics. What is Lesbionics?  Well, it's the unique way in which lesbians communicate and react to the world.  The speech.  The academic ideals. The whip-smart humor.  The body language. The drama.

If you don't have lesbian friends to introduce you to the joys of Lesbionics, then I highly recommend The Kids Are All Right from director Lisa Cholodenko.  There's all the humor, intellect, and drama you expect from lesbians.  And you get a great love story to boot.

First, let's get this out of the way.  Annettte Bening and Juliane Moore are really good in this movie with performances that approach perfection.  And Mark Rufallo is fantastic as the young sperm donor turned middle-aged bachelor/organic gardener/restauranteur.  Even Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson who play the teenage children of Bening and Moore turn in some pretty impressive performances. 

This movie does something that not many movies are even willing to consider.  Instead of focusing on the wonder of new love, this film explores the demands of maintaining a relationship over decades.  And it does it in a way that suggests a non-traditional family can be surprisingly average which turns out to be a reassuring sentiment.

I enjoyed the way The Kids Are All Right takes a non-traditional relationship and blankets it in the trappings of the everyday. The normalness of family dinners.  The kids leaving for college. The nighttime chats in the bedroom.  The obligatory on-the-town dinners with friends.  It all points to the boredom that can set in when couples spend a lifetime together. And boredom can lead to some heartbreaking situations.

My 2010 Sundance experience just keeps getting better.  It started off a little lame but it has  redeemed itself. This is the best movie I've seen so far. The scene near the end, with Annette Bening on the couch surrounded by her kids, and Julianne Moore apologizing for her mistakes is just plain wonderful.

I'm not going to finish this post in celebration of Lesbionics. Instead, I'm going to celebrate all those couples, gay or straight, who live normal, everyday, try-and-raise-the-kids-right lives.  I'm a little bit jealous.

This movie brought to you by the letter E . . . oh and Jews.

Sundance delivers again with another story you just won't find anywhere else.  Holy Rollers is based on actual events about Hasidic Jews who smuggle Ecstasy from Amsterdam to New York City.  This is a movie loaded with questions about faith and tradition.  And as someone who's not only questioned my religious upbringing, but also denied my spiritual heritage, I could relate to Sam, the young Hasidic Jew who cautiously embraces a job that forces him to consider life in a very different world.

The young actors in this movie are spectacular, with performances that are not only believable but lovable, even when they're breaking the law.  Sure, I knew something bad would eventually happen and that the smugglers would have to get caught.  But I found myself cheering for the drug dealers, I wanted them to get away with it.  Ultimately, they all went to jail.

This is a classic Sundance film; it presents a wild ride of emotions from hilarity to immense sadness. And as is frequently the case at Sundance, this is a movie without distribution.  So there's a good chance that if you didn't see it here you won't see it.  And that's too bad.

Dang homosexuals; they're all a bunch of troublemakers.

If you were looking to get your gay cinema on at Sundance, Wednesday night in Salt Lake City was your moment, with two films involving same-sex rabble rousers screening simultaneously.  You could go historical with Howl, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's bio pic about Allen Ginsberg's poem and the obscenity trial it spawned.  Or you could choose a more current option with former-Mormon Reed Cowen's film about how the LDS church influenced the vote on Prop 8 in California (8: The Mormon Proposition).  I chose Howl, largely because I've grown tired of listening to the gays and the Mormons pick on each other. I think I made the right choice.

Before I comment on the film, I offer this observation.  If you want to clear a theater, don't yell fire.  Just show a sexually charged, gay-themed film.  There was a steady stream of people leaving the theater. And they all seemed a little miffed that they'd just lost $15.

I like this film.  Because it's the kind of film you hope to see at Sundance.  Surprising actors, in surprising roles, telling unexpected stories in fresh, independent ways.   James Franco is intoxicating as Allen Ginsberg. And Mary-Louise Parker's cameo as an uptight English professor is delightful.  Jon Hamm made me nearly shed tears (and I'm not kidding) with his portrayal of the lawyer defending Ginsberg's poem.

This is less a bio pic than it is a film poem, with a wide range of cinematic devices used to tell a gorgeous love story.  The film moves from black and white to color to psychedelic animations and the result is stunning. But what matters most are the words. Whether it's the poetry, the Ginsberg interviews, or the gripping courtroom dialogue, the words in this movie deliver real impact.

There was a lot I needed to hear in this film. Maybe I need to be more open to the ideas of others.  And maybe I need to be more open about who I am.

Twilight without the vampires. Oh, and a better story.

Kristen Stewart (yes that Kristen Stewart, star of the Twilight movies) makes her Sundance debut with James Gondolfini in Jake Scott's Welcome to the Rileys.  This is the story of a suburban couple struggling to maintain their marriage years after their teenage daughter is killed in a car accident. While at a plumbing convention in New Orleans, the husband (Gandolfini) innocently meets an underage prostitute (Stewart) and develops an unusual friendship. This forces all the characters to step out of their comfort zones and into surprising new realities.

The first half of the movie crept slowly across the screen. But once the action moves to New Orleans, the film gets a lot more interesting.  And Stewart, just ho hum as a brooding teenage in love with a vampire, is pretty dang good as a brooding teenage stripper.

A fresh crop of docs.

Documentaries are always big at Sundance. Except when they're small.  This year's selection of documentary shorts was one of the best programs I've seen so far.  They were all good but here are a few of the highlights:

Quadrangle by director Amy Grappell. This movie is the result of a daughter interviewing her estranged parents; parents who befriended another couple in the 70s and soon found themselves swapping partners.  The split-screen dialogue was strange and a little shocking.  I expected that.  I didn't expect it to be so warm and funny.

Drunk History: Tesla and Edison by directory Jeremy Kramer. Speaking of funny, this is the most hysterical short doc I've ever seen. Here's the idea. Take a guy, have him drink a six pack of beer and a half a bottle of absinthe, and then film him as he recounts history.  That alone was funny enough.  But the Kramer took it a step further, with bad history-channel-like reenactments featuring John C. Riley as Tesla and Crispin Glover as Edison.  Brilliant!  I've heard there are other Drunk History lessons on YouTube.  I can hardly wait to investigate.

Notes on the Other by directory Sergio Oksman. This beautiful film brings together a host of stories with surprising lyricism.  It begins with Ernest Hemingway's first encounter at the running of the bulls where he watches from a hotel window as a man is gored.  We meet the descendant of that very man who now barricades himself in the family business near the very location where his great grandfather was gored.  From this vantage point the shopkeeper takes dramatic pictures that look back towards Hemingway's historical view.  Throw in a gaggle of Hemingway look alikes and you have a movie that weaves a wondrous thread of human life.

Shorts weather arrives early.

Today, while riding the Sundance shuttles in a cold and snowy Park City, not one, not two, but three people got on the bus wearing shorts. What's the reason for their attire confusion? Maybe they were confounded by the rash of shorts programming at the film festival.

I went to the Shorts Program V and it was pure Sundance fun.  These movies are indie in the extreme.  And it always amazes me that strange themes seem to emerge from the group of films.  This group's themes? Unexpected pregnancies and women peeing.  Even one of the directors commented in the Q&A that he didn't know how his film made it into Sundance since no one was peeing. I'll admit it, watching all those women dropping their pants and squatting made me a little squeamish.

Here are a few of the highlights from the program:

Shimasani by director Blackhorse Lowe.  This story about a Navajo mother and her two daughters in the 1930s is lyrical and immensely melancholy.  It also features some of the most beautiful black and white cinematography I've every seen.

Tub by director Bobby Miller.  A tale of absurd horror.  When asked about his inspiration for the film, the direct blamed a friend who said he masturbated so much in the shower that there were babies in the sewer.  And yes, this is the story about a horny guy rebuffed by his girlfriend.  So, he masturbates in the shower.  And later that day, clears the plugged drain by pulling out a horrific baby creature.  Wow, this film is a lot better than it sounds.

Charlie and the Rabbit by directors Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck and Robert Machoian. A young boy watches Elmer Fudd hunting rabbits.  And then grabs his BB gun and heads out on his own hunting adventure.  A great story. The scenes of the kid on his bike are magical.  And putting a gun to a rabbit's head was never so shocking.  At least it all ends well.

These were some of my favorites but all the movies in this group were rewarding.  I liked the Swedish lesbian drama of Birthday.  The blue collar reality of Little Accidents. And the story of taboo love in Rob and Valentyna in Scotland.

Movies like this make me want to go out a tell great stories in ingenious ways.  Thanks Sundance.

They say that if you meet your double, you should kill him.

It's just not Sundance if you don't experience at least one weird art film.  One of this year's entry in the weird-art-film genre comes from German director Johan Grimonprez.  Double Take starts with Alfred Hitchcock (and a Hitchcock look alike).  Film of the famous director and clips from his films are woven together with television footage from the cold war and of politicians from the 1960s like Richard Nixon, Nikita Khruschev, and John F. Kennedy. My favorite moments were the clips of Folgers Coffee TV ads from the 60s.  Seriously, I could watch two full hours of these commercials.  Oh, for the good old days, when wives were judged on quality of their coffee.

I don't claim to know what this movie was about. But in the end, I liked the strange mashup of pop culture and politics.  Double Take is like mid-century modern for the film fans.

The good. The bad. And the animated.

If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all.  It is in this spirit that I'm writing this very short review of the Animated Showcase at this year's Sundance Film Festival.

Let's start with the good.  The hands-down star of the collection was Runaway, a Canadian film by Cordell Barker about a runaway train.  A clever, simple story that's animated with crazy antics that would be at home in a Road Runner cartoon.

Little Dragon by director Bruno Collet was also of note. It's the story of a Bruce Lee action figure come to life.  But even here the story left me wanting an ending.

Beyond that, I didn't like anything. I realize Sundance is about experimentation, but many of these films were so experimental that they just looked like really bad computer graphics. And no one likes bad computer graphics.

I want to be . . . an aborigine.

My favorite Sundance genre? The musical. Yes, they're few and far between.  But I go out of my way to support anyone who tries to tackle a musical on an indie scale. That's why I made sure to see Bran Nue Dae.  This Australian import is based on a stage musical created in the early 1990s.


While many Sundance musicals dazzled (remember Camp?), Bran Nue Dae was just OK.  Frequently the acting fell flat. And the story didn't hold together very well.  I wish I could see the original stage version to see if the story was more cohesive.


Bran Nue Dae is at its best (as are most musicals) when it's singing and dancing. The sequences in the roadhouse bar steam up the screen with sensuality and fun.  And Willie (Rocky McKenzie), the young lead, is completely awkward in his musical performances, yet somewhow it works perfectly.


I also have to say a note about the animated opening credits which are billiant.


I'll be surprised if Bran Nue Dae makes it theaters in the U.S. And if it does, I'm not sure I'd make the effort to see it in a theater.  But it would be worth adding it to your Netflix list.

Welcome to the magic of Sundance.

The Sundance Film Festival has returned to Utah.  It opened in Park City last Thursday.  But the official Salt Lake City opening was Friday, with a gala premiere of Get Low, directed by Aaron Schneider and starring Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Bill Murray.  I also have to add to that list, Lucas Black who was just as good as the big name names. 


This is a magical movie. Maybe I just relate to a crazy old man who's never been married, never had children or grand children, and doesn't even know how to "hold a baby."  (OK, I know how to hold baby.)  Or maybe I relate to the idea of throwing a party instead of a funeral.  I've always said my funeral should feature a DJ and a mirror ball instead of flowers and a casket.  But I don't think I'm the only one who loved this movie.


Robert Duvall is brilliant as the crazy old hermit.  And he's matched beautifully by Sissy Spacek's charming widow.  Bill Murray is perfect as the greedy funeral director who turns out to have a heart.  The surprise performance is Lucas Black, who infuses the film with a great big wonderful heart.


But it's not just the acting.  This movie is gorgeous.  The sets are unbelievable.  How did they just find these places? And I still want to how they lit this film.  It's amazing.


The director and three of the key actors showed up for the Q&A after the movie.  Bill Murray stole the show.  He's even better in person that he is on screen.  And Duvall's quiet comments made me respect him even more.


I'm sure this movie will make to theaters.  If you get the chance, see it.

Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Bill Murray, and director Aaron Schneider after the premiere of Get Low at the Rose Wagner Theater in Salt Lake City.

We're screwed.

Yes, I’ve been to yet another environmentally-themed, Sundance documentary. This time it’s Earth Days from director Robert Stone. Can you blame me? My birthday is April 22, the same day as Earth Day.

You know you’ve seen too many environmental documentaries when you start seeing the exact same stock video clips in multiple movies. And who knew Johnny Carson interviewed so many environmental activists?

There’s a documentary theme developing. What Art and Paper is to advertising, what I Knew It Was You is to acting, Earth Days is to environmentalism. It’s an opportunity to look back and celebrate the voices of the past, with little consideration for how these voices matter in the present or the future. And Earth Days left me hopeless.

The message I took away from the movies is, “We’re screwed.” Oh sure, we had a few environmental successes like ozone and cleaning up some of our water and air. But in reality, we’ve missed just about every opportunity to make real changes. Many of the environmental challenges we face today are the sames challenges faced by these early environmentalists. And we haven’t moved the ball very far. In fact I think things have only gotten worse. Sorry future generations, but we’re going to destroy the planet and there’s nothing you can do about it. There’s a Ronald Reagan speech in the movie that confirms our right as Americans to complete, consumptive excess. And I need to get busy because I’m certainly not doing my part to over populate the planet.

This movie wasn’t that great. I think it wanted to be celebratory, but it just scared me. It missed an opportunity to encourage similar environmental activism today. So let’s all go burn some fossil fuels and make some babies. It’ll make us feel better.

That’s so dirty.

Refusing my own advice to lay off environmentally themed documentaries, I decided to see a screening of Dirt! The Movie. The show (which is narrated by Jamie Lee Curtis who really doesn’t have a great documentary voice) offers some interesting information; I learned a fair amount. But the movie didn’t work.

First, the film is didactic, coming across as preachy, even morally superior. So while I should have been guilted into refusing to eat commercially farmed mono crops, I was kinda like, “whatever.”

And I know it’s all the rage these days to use cutesy animations to make documentaries more approachable (thanks Morgan Spurlock). But the animations in this movie are embarrassing, really embarrassing. And they have no visual consistency. Someone needed a good art director. I’ll be surprised if Dirt! The Movie has much of reach beyond the film-festival circuit.