{"id":25634,"date":"2025-01-31T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-01-31T19:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=25634"},"modified":"2025-02-02T17:45:54","modified_gmt":"2025-02-03T01:45:54","slug":"sundance-2025-dispatch-devastating-docs-and-post-apocalyptic-podcasters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/sundance-2025-dispatch-devastating-docs-and-post-apocalyptic-podcasters\/","title":{"rendered":"Sundance 2025 Dispatch: Devastating Docs and Post-Apocalyptic Podcasters"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The grumbles I\u2019ve heard from Park City<\/a>, as I geared up for this year\u2019s version of our virtual coverage<\/a>, were that the documentaries at Sundance this year were strong across the board, and the narrative features were\u2026 very much not. Time will tell on that (I still have quite a few to work through), but I will say that in my decade-plus of attending Sundance, in person and online, I\u2019ve rarely seen a movie as accomplished and affecting as Train Dreams<\/em><\/strong>, Clint Bentley\u2019s adaptation of Denis Johnson\u2019s novella. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It will no doubt be described by many as \u201cMalick-esque,\u201d because of its aesthetics: nature photography, lens flares, hushed narration whose lyricism matches the sweeping beauty of the images. But it more directly recalls the shorthand of his storytelling \u2014 how he\u2019ll let an offhand moment or an unexpected tableau tell us everything about the characters and their relationships. It\u2019s a tender, achingly accurate portrait of overwhelming grief, ranking with Loving <\/em>as Joel Edgerton\u2019s best work to date, mostly in his heart-wrenching and devastating reactive moments. And what a delight it is that William H. Macy is now old enough to play coots and codgers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the other hand, Plainclothes<\/em><\/strong> is the kind of thing that too many people associate with a \u201cSundance movie\u201d: a clumsy indie, full of good intentions but only able to communicate them in the bluntest terms. The premise is provocative, a kind of earnest Cruising<\/em> in which an undercover vice cop tasked with luring and busting gay guys must grapple with his own, long-repressed homosexual tendencies. The storytelling is overwrought and the acting is mostly amateurish, though writer\/director Carmen Emmi manages to viscerally convey the agony and anxiety of living in the closet. She also sets the story in the late 1990s, and apes the mixed-media montage of Oliver Stone\u2019s films of the period. That aesthetic, coupled with the borderline-Reefer Madness <\/em>hysteria of the third act, makes it feel like a movie that was, indeed, made in that era\u2014and has aged poorly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s easy to imagine how a documentary that casts a critical eye on the investigative series To Catch a Predator<\/em> could turn into an apologia for sexual predators, so it\u2019s a small miracle that David Osit\u2019s Predators<\/em><\/strong> <\/strong>walks that line with such grace and precision. He gives a complete history of the show, which ran from 2004 to 2007 as part of Dateline NBC<\/em>, working in conjunction with local law enforcement and an online group called Perverted Justice, to ensnare potential child predators and humiliate them for our collective entertainment before turning them over to cops; he questions not the aim, but the methodology, interviewing participants and experts, and reviewing raw footage (particularly of a 2006 tragedy that should have ended the show, and was instead used as promo fuel).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Predators<\/em> is thoughtful and inquisitive and (certainly) empathetic, in a way the source material never was; it interrogates true crime with real insight, and Osit refused to let himself off the hook either. \u201cI\u2019m thinking about the morality of what I\u2019m asking people to look at,\u201d he explains, and that\u2019s a tricky knot to try and unravel, even when he lands an interview with host Chris Hansen, who\u2019s currently doing a pale imitation of the show on YouTube. That interview, and how Osit handles it, sticks the landing in a really powerful way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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There\u2019s an odd new subgenre of documentary film, in which a director takes us into his confidence and walks us through a project (or projects) that didn\u2019t get made, for whatever reason. Last year, one of my favorite documentaries was Chris Wilcha\u2019s Flipside<\/em>, a rumination on his inability to complete a feature after his breakthrough doc The Target Shoots First<\/em>, which became a thoughtful exploration of success, failure, and letting go. And now, the Sundance Film Festival is premiering Zodiac Killer Project<\/em><\/strong>, in which director Charlie Shackleton explains how he nearly made a true crime documentary, adapted from an obscure book about a police detective\u2019s investigation of an off-the-radar Zodiac suspect, only to have it fall apart due to a rights issue. So he just made it anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He uses a combination of location scouting footage, wry voice-over, and \u201cevocative B-roll\u201d\u2014one of the many tropes of the true-crime doc that he explains, uses, and skewers here. The final product is an often hilarious deconstruction of the visual and narrative crutches of this lucrative, ubiquitous, and increasingly tiresome form, while also digging into thought-provoking questions of ethics and exploitation. It\u2019s not a comedy, nor is it a spoof, but it feels like it could become the Walk Hard<\/em> of true-crime docs, rendering them impossible to take seriously after you\u2019ve seen it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Move Ya Body: The Birth of House<\/em><\/strong>, on the other hand, is pretty straight down-the-middle, formally speaking, though it\u2019s fortunately telling a compelling enough story that we don\u2019t need much in the way of innovation. It concerns how house music rose up from the ashes of disco and went from a Chicago specialty to a worldwide phenomenon, and director Elegance Bratton digs into the social history of both the city and its music scene, keenly aware that it\u2019s just as important, in considering these origins, to understand redlining as it is to understand disco. The archival footage is dazzling and the storytellers are riveting; the only fumble is the use of dramatizations, which are both uninspired and unnecessary. The testimony of those who were there, and the recordings they made, are more than enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Violet Du Feng\u2019s The Dating Game<\/em><\/strong> <\/strong>opens with an alarming statistic: that nine years after the end of the One Child Policy in China, there are 30 million more men than women. This makes the dating pool a tad<\/em> unbalanced, which is where her subject Hao comes in; he\u2019s a \u201cdating coach\u201d with, he says, over 3,000 clients, most of them working class. Much of what follows focuses on a seven-day dating camp, in which Hao attempts to teach dating techniques \u2014 most of which involve some form of deception and\/or false bravado \u2014 to four hapless young men, resulting in candid confessions and failed pick-up attempts that are often painful to watch. But this isn\u2019t just rubber-necking; Du Feng provides historical, economic, and sociopolitical context for this contemporary crisis, while effectively using Hao\u2019s difficulty in maintaining his own marriage (to a woman who is, hilariously enough, also a dating coach) as counterpoint to his big ideas. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meera Menon\u2019s Didn\u2019t Die<\/em><\/strong> is a zombie story shot in stark, evocative black-and-white, so the Night of the Living Dead<\/em> comparisons are fairly inevitable. But this is less of a horror movie than a bone-dry observational comedy with a healthy dose of pathos; any movie that opens with a C.S. Lewis quote about grief isn\u2019t aiming for cheap thrills. It\u2019s a post-apocalyptic tale, with contemporary life wiped out by the outbreak of \u201cbiters,\u201d which gives the whole thing pronounced COVID pandemic vibes, while lead Kiran Deol is both charismatic and funny as a podcast host who\u2019s less concerned with staying alive than she is with keeping her show relevant as it approaches its 100th episode. (Been there.) Frankly, though it\u2019s programmed in the Midnights section, the conventional horror stuff is the least successful element; the themes of familial connection and sacrifice, on the other hand, land with real weight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of the bloodsucking ghouls in that movie, or frankly in any recent fiction film, could match the sheer villainy of the history teacher and avowed party man in the documentary Mr. Nobody Against Putin<\/em><\/strong>, shot in secret over two years by Pasha Talankin, a teacher, events coordinator, and videographer at a primary school in Russia. He painstakingly documents how the country\u2019s attack on Ukraine irrevocably altered their school, which was forced to adopt new \u201cfederal patriotic education policies,\u201d teaching propaganda in the classroom, while students were expected to recite \u201cpatriotic\u201d poetry and songs for Pasha\u2019s video camera. The mostly first-person camerawork adroitly captures his feelings of helplessness and anguish, while director David Borenstein and his editors build up genuine tension and dread as the teacher goes rogue. It\u2019s essential viewing \u2014 particularly at this moment, when it feels like an increasingly plausible peek into our own future. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Sundance Film Festival continues through Sunday, and many of these films are available to the general public for online viewing. Follow our coverage here<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our Sundance coverage continues with mini-reviews of \u201cTrain Dreams,\u201d \u201cPredators,\u201d \u201cZodiac Killer Project,\u201d and more. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":531,"featured_media":25635,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1416,340],"tags":[1419,1436,1809],"class_list":["post-25634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-festivals","category-movie-reviews","tag-film-fests","tag-reviews","tag-sundance-2025"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/531"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25634"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25652,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25634\/revisions\/25652"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}