Slumdog Millionaire has already won a lot of big awards this year.  You may have seen an earlier post giving it the official endorsement, because it’s a great.  But a lot of people think that movies like this are ‘rare.’

We’re lucky in that Carrie and I live right here in Park City, home of the Sundance Film Festival.  The truth is we’ve seen maybe even dozens of movies over the years that are so good, emotionally riveting like Slumdog, and excellently made.  It’s just that there isn’t a whole lot of demand for them.  Slumdog, through it’s atypical release and reasonably well know director and producer, happened to catch the waive and hit the mainstream.  This is great, and in my opinion a long time coming.  But I’ve been emailing links of movies that are just as good to my friends for years…

My favorite movie of 2008 Sundance was Mancora, a film that sort of like Kids meets Dazed and Confused meets a surf movie.  And it’s in Spanish.  This move is *awesome* but no one’s ever heard of it.  I think it’s because it has subtitles because it’s from Peru but it also has some of their most famous young actors in it.  These actors are awesome, good looking, and everything that could fit into Hollywood.  It seems no one wants to bother with subtitles I guess…

Carrie (my wife) is the ultimate ticket master, she has spreadsheets and whole system for getting good movies via our local’s ticket lottery system regardless of the time slot.  This year we had a so-so slot (6PM on the first day).  Last year we were at 9AM on the first day, so 10 out of our 13 movies were premiers, including the Crosby Stills Nash and Young premier CSNY Dejavu, and a DeNiro movie premier (that was so-so, but had a lot of great actors who were also right there).  It’s pretty cool to be feet from Neil Young or Robert DeNiro or Bruce Willis or Robert Redford himself, even just for curiosity.

This said, one of great pieces of advice we’ve gotten for Sundance is generally the less well-known actors, the better the film.  And that’s the truth, something like 3000+ films compete for about 60 spots.  So if it’s obscure, chances are it’s pretty good.  But of course we’ve seen a couple weird movies that have squeaked through.  But that’s a rarity, not the norm.  Some of the amazing ones have been a gay themed one that made the whole audience cry, completely appropriate and right up there with Brokeback or even better.  A couple of Danish movies including one that was possibly the funniest movie I’ve ever seen.  Also, some of the best movies we’ve seen have been from Mexico.

Carrie’s technique this year, as we’ve been learning over the years, is go for movies with subtitles.  No one buys the tickets and usually they’re not just great but are awesome (again, to be able to make it to Sundance).  A lot of the documentaries are amazing as well.  One I saw last year documented the thorough incompetence of the Bush administration (by interviewing Bush administration members, speaking in their own words), if you want to see just how deep the rabbit hole of Bush era corruption goes.   Some of the world wide documentaries are real gut-wrenchers too.   Finally, an excellent technique is to buy or acquire tickets to the award winners (locals get to see award winners for free at the end).  You don’t get to see the actors as it’s towards the end of the fest, but you know it will be a good movie.  The audience awards are a little less predictable (popular choice wins) but these are usually good.

Our movie break down this year is:

Sneak Preview 2 (Steven Soderbergh premier)
Carmo, Hit the Road
Sin Nombre
The Yes Men Fix the World
Heart of Time
Rough Aunties
Toe To Toe
Rudo and Cursi

Award winner tickets:

Best of Fest 1
Best of Fest 2
Audience Award Dramatic
Dramatic Grand Prize Award
Grand Jury Prize Documentary

Look for a writup on the winners during & after the festival!