It’s going to be an excellent summer for movies. As I’ll lay out tomorrow, The Avengers levels up the superhero movie. The fact that there’s already talk of a Snow White and the Huntsman sequel means we could be headed into a world with two big action franchises anchored by women. Prometheus looks visually and conceptually astounding. The Dark Knight promises to be a visually and intellectually rich conclusion to a powerful, darkly moral trilogy. Brave will finally put a girl at the center of a Pixar frame. But in the midst of this embarrassment of riches, I wanted to call your attention to a movie that won’t get a third of the promotional heft of any of these movies but that is audacious and wonderful, intimately engaged with questions of poverty and global warming, and that features a little girl as a superhero. I refer, of course, to Beasts of the Southern Wild, which was my favorite movie at Sundance, and finally has a trailer out:

In addition to being just hugely fresh in perspective and subject matter, Beasts is interesting to me because some of the special effects were crowdsourced. I’m curious to see how audiences react to them—and to what y’all think of this trailer amidst a blockbuster glut.

We’re at a moment when a cohort of actors who cut their teeth in hipster-friendly projects like Party Down and the Frat Pack movies are coming of age. Whether it’s Lizzy Caplan’s emergence as a viable romantic comedy star thanks to her wonderful turn on New Girl; or Adam Scott’s Parks and Recreation-minted heartthrob status; the wave of goodwill Jason Segel is riding right now after his successful reboot of the Muppts franchise; or Aaron Paul’s search for the role that will take him beyond his turn as morally conflicted meth cooker Jesse Pinkman in Breaking Bad, these actors are all starring in romantic comedies this year. It’s fascinating to see what, if anything, is different about this well-worn trope as taken on by actors less invested in traditional Hollywood glamor than in self-lacerating humor. Mostly it seems that they’re just as invested in marriage and commitment as prior generations, but the obstacles to their happiness are different.

For the younger set, there’s Damsels in Distress, a decidedly odd-looking comedy about a group of college girls (played by actresses way too old for the setting) out to save their classmates from the scourges of depression and cads with donuts and tap-dancing. The movie’s quirky enough that I can’t tell if there’s an abstinence metaphor or there will be an abstinence subplot here. But there’s still something interesting about a college sex comedy framed around a very different framework and with characters who have very different priorities:

Then, there’s Save the Date, which doesn’t have a formal trailer yet, but is one of the movies from Sundance that’s stuck with me most closely. Alison Brie and Lizzy Caplan play sisters Beth and Sarah, the former about to get engaged to Andrew (Martin Starr) a drummer in a rock band, the latter shaken by an unexpected proposal from Kevin (Geoffrey Arend), the frontman for that same band. When Sarah breaks up with Kevin, she embarks on casual relationship that turns into something more serious. To a certain extent, it’s a movie with very conventional themes: love can show up at surprising times! Marriages are more important than weddings! But it’s interesting to see those themes play out in a setting and with semi-bohemian characters who might have rejected marriage in another generation of movies:

Bridesmaids let it be known that sometimes women go a little crazy in the process of planning a wedding, even when they’re happy for the bride. Bachelorette, which also stars Caplan along with Kirsten Dunst and Isla Fisher apparently goes much darker, exposing a group of women who get decidedly vicious when the least conventionally attractive of their number gets engaged before they do. I’ll be curious to see if the movie is honest in its darkness or an occasion to paint all women as catty, status-obsessed, jealous, and willing to tear each other up:

At Sundance, one of the most powerful documentaries I saw as Love Free or Die, director Macky Alston’s chronicle of Bishop Gene Robinson’s fight to get the Episcopal Church in America to recognize gay clergy and gay couples’ marriages—as well as the story of Robinson’s own wedding to his long-time partner in New Hampshire. In addition to being a moving story about Bishop Robinson’s life and work, Love Free or Die is a counter to a major progressive assumption: that the gay rights movement will have to proceed largely without the help of major American religious institutions.It’s also the rare Sundance movie that you can help bring to your own community: details on how to do that are available on the movie’s website. I spoke to Bishop Robinson and to Alston in Park City about making the movie and arguing that gay people religious people shouldn’t have to give up their faith—and that the church shouldn’t have to lose its members. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

I was wondering if maybe both of you could talk about the experience of working together and for Bishop Robinson, about moving to the center of the frame in a documentary instead of being one of many subjects?

Bishop Robinson: This was a big decision for me, to allow a film crew into my life and my family’s life for, you know, three or four years…I wouldn’t have done it with someone I didn’t trust implicitly. And Macky has just been true to his word about doing this film with great sensitivity and taste, and we so agree on the message of the film, which is that love trumps everything, and when people get to know us as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender people, it changes everything, because then they’re not responding to an issue, they’re responding to a person.

I guess also, in the back of my mind, you know, all those kids that I hear from, literally every week, who are in some little town in Idaho or Alabama or halfway around the world, who seem to draw inspiration from my being public about who I am, and yet saying, you know, you don’t have to give up your religion and your faith just because you’re gay. And I wanted to make this film for them as well.

You talked about letting the camera crew into your life. Was that stressful? What were those conversations like with your family about deciding to go ahead, as well?

Bishop Robinson: I think they trusted me and my trusting Macky. And, you know, my husband – my legal husband now, but my partner for 24 years – is not a public person, particularly, and, you know, he didn’t know he was signing on for this 24 years ago…But he also believes, you know, believes in the power of integrity, and the power of one person’s story to inspire courage in many, many people. And our greatest hope for this film is that everyone will see themselves as a prophet, as a potential voice to call their Aunt Betty or to talk to that co-worker that works next to them about the gay and lesbian people they know in their lives, and that the discrimination that has historically been true for us is just simply wrong, so that each person can become empowered to do justice work, which is what this is really about. It’s really not enough to be compassionate, although that’s wonderful…Beyond compassion, we need justice. And that’s true to the Biblical record, that we’re, yes, we’re called upon to love, but we’re also called upon to fight for justice for those who are marginalized. And so our greatest hope is that this film will empower people to do that.

This is a documentary, but it fits into a larger pop-culture spectrum that has become more accepting of gay love stories but that doesn’t often bring the church or faith into those stories.

Bishop Robinson: Well, and, to be honest, when the church is brought into it, it’s almost always a negative. And I think the culture is behind the times a little bit, because the culture has so often written off religious institutions. They don’t realize that religious institutions are changing, and they’re changing at a remarkably fast pace. And I think one of the things this film will do is catch people up on the remarkable progress we are making in religious institutions for the full inclusion and acceptance of gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Macky Alston: The research shows also that we cannot skirt religious communities if we want freedom, our freedom, LGBT equality in the US, that the number one reason that people are voting against us is their religious convictions. And so…we have to speak from our own faith convictions, and we have to be engaged with people of faith to help them understand, help us understand how we can be better Christians, or Jews, or Muslims, living into a number one mandate of our traditions: to love your neighbor, whoever that neighbor is, and to do justice. So helping people understand the compatibility—in fact, the mandate—in their faith traditions to love and to stand for justice. That’s the only way that we’re gonna get the votes in 2012 in these critical states like Minnesota, Maryland, North Carolina, Maine. And one of my struggles with secular organizing in this movement is that, I think, folks just hope that we don’t have to go there, that in a separation of church and state-based society, we can stay separate.
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Over the past week or so, I’ve gotten more and more irritated by the indiscriminate use of the word “controversial” to describe art and pop culture. It’s a classic case of a word not meaning what the people who use it seem to mean. And in some cases, deploying it can be actively unhelpful in communicating to an audience what’s actually interesting or moving about a piece of art.

Take Compliance, one of my favorite feature films out of Sundance. The subject of the movie, the detention and sexual assault of a young fast-food restaurant worker named Becky, is undoubtedly uncomfortable viewing for some people. The first time it aired at the festival, some members of the audience by images of star Dreama Walker underdressed or nude and being mistreate (and in proof that being a rich progressive doesn’t make you classy, some creep decided to shout things about how hot Walker is in the midst of that discussion). But the subject matter of the movie isn’t actually controversial: nobody thinks that the things that happen to Becky should have happened, and the movie makes it clear that they’re awful. And the making of the movie itself doesn’t seem to be the source of the controversy. As director Craig Zobel told me, he worked with Walker both to make sure she felt she wasn’t being exploited as an actress, and to make sure she felt like the movie would be something audiences would walk away from having absorbed the messages that Zobel intended to send. There may be a controversy over whether artists should portray bad things happening to women at all, but our culture seems to have settled on an agreement that it’s generally fine as long as you’re not making snuff pornography. Compliance is challenging, uncomfortable, and deeply moving. It is not controversial.

The Los Angeles Times does a nice job of fisking another occurrence of the phenomenon, this time NPR describing the long-dead and long-canonized artist Jackson Pollock’s work as controversial. There are controversies adjacent to Pollock, of course: if a toddler does the same thing, but without intention, is it art? Is the painting authenticator Paul Biro claims to have verified as the work Pollockreal or part of a scheme by Biro to pass off fakes? But Pollock’s work itself is not the subject of a genuine controversy: describing it that way is just a way to gin up pageviews.

Or worse, alleging controversy where there is none is a way of indicating false equivalence in an attempt to avoid charges of bias. The claim of false equivalency is one of the biggest debates in journalism right now, the source of the debate over whether the New York Times should “fact-check” (probably the wrong term for it) politicians’ claims. But art, even more so than politics, is an arena where writers should feel comfortable making judgements and refusing to pretend there’s an equal debate, or a debate at all, where there isn’t. Labeling something controversial or treating it as dangerous when it’s merely challenging is a way of keeping people away from art rather than getting them to engage with it.

“There are only three ways to end your career as a rock star,” Stephen Colbert tells James Murphy in a clip shown near the beginning of Shut Up and Play the Hits, a good concert movie but not very revealing look at the end of LCD Soundsystem, which I saw at Sundance. “Overdose, overstay your welcome, or write Spider-Man: The Musical.” Clearly, Murphy and LCD Soundsystem did none of those things. And while the footage of their final, sold-out concert at Madison Square Garden is undeniably joyous, the movie doesn’t have much to offer in terms of explaining what it means to Murphy—or the other members of the band—that their grand experiment is over, or in terms of helping us understand Murphy himself.

I should admit that while I like LCD Soundsystem just fine, I’m not particularly bought into the voice-of-a-generation hype. The movie may work better for very, very passionate fans of Murphy and the band, especially since it spends a lot of time validating their greatness. The most direct and irritating form of this is a deeply grating interview with Chuck Klosterman that’s meant to tie together concert segments and scenes of Murphy wandering around New York in a day-after-it-all-ends haze. Klosterman spends about half his time expounding personal theories, like “the Internet was causing people to have a different relationship with history,” or that “bands are sort of remembered for their collected successes, but they’re sort of defined by their singular failures” that might have seemed profound when he was in college, but don’t elicit particularly specific or revealing answers. When he does manage to get something interesting out of Murphy, it’s usually by asking a question that’s fawning in the extreme, like how Murphy thinks the audience (which in the movie, includes a guy who’s weeping uncontrollably and Donald Glover) reacts to him. “I’ve never been to a show I loved where I didn’t believe something about that person,” Murphy tells him, though he never explores the gap between that perception and reality. “Up there, there’s something happening that I’m not a sixteen-year-old and I’m still transported by.”

Age and gender would have been other areas where the movie could have produced some interesting introspection, but instead, it never goes beyond the level of observation. “If you were a writer, you’d still be young. If you were an actor, you’d be right in the sweet spot,” Klosterman tells him. But the movie doesn’t talk at all what it means about the market that Murphy became a rock star at an advanced age, or what his gender’s allowed him to achieve that might not have been possible if he were a woman. “I’m 41, and I don’t have kids, and I want to have kids,” Murphy says at some point. But Shut Up and Play the Hits never tells us if he’s single or taken, and if single, why it hasn’t worked out previously for reasons other than the fact that he spent some time being a rock star. Watching Murphy lie on the floor of his expensive New York apartment, reach up and open the door of his fancy stove revealing a pizza stone within, and then closing it again, is not a substitute for information and insight.

That said, the music sounds dandy, and the up-close look at musicians putting together a show on stage with all the tweaks that implies is a lot of fun to watch. If Shut Up and Play the Hits were just a straight concert movie, it’d be a delight for fans to watch and a terrific introduction to the band for folks who are coming too late to the party. But the interstitial material only really works if you’re not just familiar with LCD Soundsystem but a supplicant at their particular altar.

The Atomic States of America, the documentary about nuclear power plants based on Kelly McMaster’s memoir Welcome to Shirley, is a timely post-Fukishima look at the risks and opportunities of America’s nuclear energy industry and the capture of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by Congress and the monied interests that influence it. It also does something that I think can be hit or miss: using old footage to illustrate where our attitudes towards the issue were, and how much or how little they’ve changed.

The movie starts with a fifties-ish voiceover declaring nuclear energy “the answer to a dream as old as man himself.” The cadences may be different, but the pitch is similar to a recent ad included in the movie, when a cheerful, high-def suburban mom tells viewers “We need to reduce our reliance on foreign energy, and we need clean air.” In old movie footage, a woman with fabulously sequined glasses tells her girlfriends “I declare, with all these atomic plants going up, I wonder if a girl’s safe anymore. I hope they know what they’re doing.” Later, we meet Dr. Helen Caldicott, the life-long Australian anti-nuclear advocate recalling her life as “a medical nun,” then flash back to video her in chic seventies clothing, fighting the cause even back then. It’s hard to believe it’s possible, but it makes Ann Coulter even scarier to see her parrotting the idea that exposure to a little radiation is just dandy when you realize she’s part of an established line of thinking.

The use of those historical warning signs is particularly appropriate given that The Atomic States of America is a horror movie. “I just assumed there was some kind of mysterious curse—breast cancer, lung cancer, thyroid cancer,” McMaster says of her town. “It wasn’t until college when people kept saying ‘why are you going home for all these funerals’ that I realized things were a little different.” She’s not the only one whose trust in authority, be it lodged in industry or government, reaps terrible consequences. “We never really questioned nuclear power,” Eric Epstein, who runs Three Mile Island Alert, tells the audience. “That decision was made for us…I believed my Dad, and my Dad believed the industry.” It’s unfortuante that the movie doesn’t acknowledge that some of Dr. Ernest Sternglass’s research has been repudiated, and he has been accused of exaggerating results in his studies on the impact of radiation exposure. But he does provide a compelling explanation for why so many people in the scientific community and outside of it were so eager to believe in the promise of atomic energy: “We felt guilty, and what did we believe? That the peaceful atom was going to atone for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

If you like seeing Aaron Paul make sad puppy addict eyes and need your fix until the return of Breaking Bad; still haven’t gotten your heart back from Mary Elizabeth Winstead after seeing Scott Pilgrim vs. The World; wish The Help would mainly serve to get Octavia Spencer better parts; or wonder what it would be like to hear Ron Swanson talk dirty to one of the Tammys, Smashed may be the movie for you. This slight addiction drama, which I saw at Sundance, feels unfortunately abbreviated, but it’s anchored by one hell of a performance by Winstead. And it’s honest and explicitly ugly about addiction without being grotesque, striking a difficult and effective balance.

I imagine it’s not news to any of you that the dude who portrays Jesse Pinkman can play an addict. But as Charlie, half of a married couple, both of whom are drunks, Paul tones thing down a bit. His alcoholism means he’s reckless—he’ll ride a bike drunk—and that his relationship to the universe is often blurred and softened. When he wakes up to find that his wife Kate has wet the bed in an alcoholic stupor, he jokes that his real job is to change their sheets. But Charlie is a music blogger, and apparently successful and functional enough in that occupation (plus, his parents helped buy the house he and Kate live in) that his drinking is never going to force a crisis.

That is not the case for Kate, whose alcoholism appears to be somewhat more severe than Charlie’s. She doesn’t just work outside of their house—she teaches elementary school, an environment that’s not particularly friendly to people with hangovers so bad they throw up in class. To avoid confessing that she’s a drunk, Kate lets her class and her coworkers think she’s pregnant, an impression that’s particularly dangerous giving that her principal (Megan Mullally) has never been able to conceive, and gets overinvested in the idea of Kate having a child.

As Kate stumbles towards recovery, stops drinking, and relapses, Winstead gives a remarkably un-vain performance. Bottom for her turns out to be not just the night she drunkenly decides to take a hit of crack and wakes up under a bridge, but relieving herself on the floor of a liquor store that refuses to sell her more wine. And the movie is blunt about exploring the link between Kate’s drinking and her sexual aggressiveness. In one disturbing scene, when Charlie falls asleep while he and Kate are having sex, she hits him while trying to keep him awake, and then continues to have even when he can’t be roused. When Kate relapses, she pushes herself on Charlie even when he’s trying both to get her to stop drinking and rejecting her advances. Stories about women assaulting men tend to be treated as if they’re non-existent or limited to police procedurals, and I appreciate that Smashed has the integrity to treat Kate’s behavior for the disturbing boundary-crossing that it is. Kate may not be a feminist ideal, but presenting her actions with honesty and nuance means the movie is a refreshing break with gender types in these sorts of stories.

I wish the movie had spent a bit more time showing Kate digging her way out of the enormous hole she’s dug for herself. We get to meet Jenny (Octavia Spencer), her sponsor, who tells us that “All I knew about taking care of myself was fucking people over…Maybe I’ve have replaced alcohol with chocolate chip cookies and nacho cheese…From now on I will enjoy my donuts. but I prefer them to hangovers” but it would be nice to see more of her life beyond her role as a mentor to Kate. And while I appreciate James Ponsoldt’s decision not show Kate in the cliche throes of detox, the movie could have spent more time watching her rebuild a sober life. Drinking isn’t like a breakup: leaving alcohol behind has required Kate to rebuild her entire life, and I’d have been curious to see more of her path to professional, emotional, and sexual health.

I’m a deeply committed Peter Dinklage fan, both because he’s a marvelous actor, and because I think his sex appeal and sense of humor and advocacy for folks of short stature offer a way forward for depictions of people in pop culture that go beyond the pathetic. So I was delighted to see The Surrogate, an affectionate sex comedy based on journalist Mark O’Brien’s article about his experience with the sex surrogate who helped him lose his virginity after a life largely spent confined to an iron lung after a childhood bout with polio. There’s a lot to like in the movie: John Hawkes, killing it in a lead role that will get him awards attention beyond his great performances in smaller projects like Deadwood; a lot of compassion and serious thinking about sex by able-bodied and disabled characters alike; William H. Macy as Mark’s friend and confessor Father Brendan. And when all of that comes in a movie that’s dedicated to seeing folks with disabilities as fully human, you’ve got a special and important movie, even if it’s one that hews to general romantic comedy conventions.

Part of what’s fresh about The Surrogate is the movie’s efforts to actually get us inside Mark’s head for the minor irritations as well as the traumas. “Scratch with your mind,” he tells himself during a long night in his iron lung. “Scratch with your mind.” When his iron lung is disabled during a blackout and he drops the stick he needs to call for help, his reaction is muted and practical, rather than panicked, even though he lands in the hospital. When he meets Susan (Deadwood coworker Robin Weigert), who is working as a volunteer in the hospital, she asks him, “Are you religious?” “Yes,” he tells her, with humor rather than bitterness. “I would find it absolutely intolerable not to be able to blame someone for all of this.” Mark’s disability has neither canonized him or crushed him.

When it comes to sex, the movie is quietly resolute on the question of whether people with disabilities can have fulfilling sexual lives or can be sexually desirable. Mark decides to see a sex therapist and then a sex surrogate when his reporting for another piece introduces him to Carmen, a woman in a wheelchair who tells him how good her sex life is (in somewhat hilarious detail). He gets a sign-off from Father Brendan, the new priest at his Catholic church, explaining “this isn’t exactly a confession. I haven’t done the deed. I’m hoping to get a quote in advance.” Once the process is underway, The Surrogate has respect for Mark’s stress, good intentions, and utter lack of experience—even in scenes where he’s experiencing premature ejaculation or behaving awkwardly with Cheryl (Helen Hunt), the surrogate he agrees to work with. Good sex, the movie argues, is a matter of practice for everyone, whether they’re able-bodied or not. When Mark’s caregiver Vera explains to the clerk at the hotel where Mark and Cheryl that the two are working on simultaneous orgasms, the clerk, who has full use of all of his limbs if somewhat attenuated social skills, has no idea what she’s talking about.

There’s no question that The Surrogate follows some predictable arcs. But it’s an illustration of the fact that those dramatic forms can still be powerful if they’re used to frame different kinds of stories about different kinds of people. And with its careful attention to what actually constitutes good lovemaking, The Surrogate is a rebuke to in-heat movie love scenes everywhere. Actually talking about sex is, it seems, still a radical act.

Sundance is an overwhelming event, and I heard from some veterans of the festival that this was a somewhat difficult year to encapsulate, despite Robert Redford’s call to watch serious movies for serious times. But most of the best movies I saw at Sundance had a certain joy to them, even when discussing difficult ideas or events, and the very best had a marvelous sense of humor. I haven’t published full reviews of all of these movies yet, though I’ll catch up in coming days, so bookmark this page if you want a guide to the best independent movies that will be coming to theaters this year.

DOCUMENTARIES

Under African Skies: It says a lot about how wonderful I thought the music-making part of this story about Paul Simon’s Graceland, and his return to South Africa decades later, that I’m willing to forgive its less-than-stellar work on the cultural boycott of South Africa. It’s a debate about the responsibility artists owe politics that’s too heavily weighted in one direction. But the video footage of the recording sessions is amazing, as are the interviews with South African musicians about everything from what it was like to have this strange Paul Simon dude show up and want to work with them to what it was like to be able to go to Central Park without a pass.

The Invisible War: There’s nothing particularly stylistically innovative about Kirby Dick’s documentary about the epidemic of rape in the U.S. military. But the movie falls with the force of a sledgehammer, exposing as ineffective and dishonest the brass in the armed forces responsible for keeping women and men safe, and making it clear that an epidemic of sexual assault is hurting both men and women, and driving out of the armed forces exactly the people the Pentagon should most want to keep there.

The Atomic States of America: Based on Kelly McMaster’s memoir of growing up in a town on Long Island polluted by atomic runoff, the movie is the story of an agency captured by powerful interests and backed up by powerful presumptions of authority, and the ordinary citizens who have fought back against the industry they believe is poisoning their communities. I’d have been curious to hear more about how citizens in other countries that are more dependent on atomic energy than we are, but it’s amazing looking into our past romance of the peaceful atom—and thinking about what it means for our uncertain energy future.

Love Free or Die: Bishop Gene Robinson’s story has been told before, and the first openly gay Anglican bishop is hardly a retiring figure. But Macky Alston’s wonderful documentary isn’t just about him. It’s about the difficult process of organizing within the Anglican church, which shut Robinson out of the Lambeth Conference, to make it a more welcoming and affirming institution for the gay people who have kept faith with it. And the movie argues that a gay rights movement without the faith community is leaving power and influence on the table, and risks making gay people choose between love and faith.

The Queen of Versailles: Tons of ink and miles of film have been devoted to chronicling American excess in a recession age. But it’s hard to imagine that anything will do better than this story about David and Jackie Siegel, who built an empire selling time-shares to people who couldn’t afford them and then pushed themselves to the brink of financial ruin by building what would have been the largest house in America. Whether it’s expertly breaking down the housing crisis’ role in the crash or chronicling the horrifying wastefulness of the Siegel’s consumer spending, The Queen of Versailles is funny, biting, and utterly American.

FICTION
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