Amber Tamblyn stars in the emotional drama Stephanie Daley.

The contradictions of Sundance — corporate vs. independent, inspiring vs. ingratiating, the indulgence of artists vs. the polemics of activists — were all on full view last night at the awards ceremony at Park City's Racquet Club. And even though the celebrity hosts and a TV-ready set were gone this year, moments of absurdity and irony were generously sprinkled throughout.

It's easy enough to ignore the relentless reminders of corporate sponsorship at each festival screening, and at the awards the same was true. Still, the fact that corporate largesse is largely antithetical to the rationale for independent movies is a sore point. Every once in awhile the omnipresence of logos gets to be a tad oppressive. That said, I'm happy to announce that the usual array of speeches by automobile and media executives was blissfully absent.

But then, when the winner of both the Audience Award and Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary, Christopher Quinn for God Grew Tired of Us, thanks Brad Pitt and Nicole Kidman and a long list of heavy hitters for, presumably, sponsoring his movie about Sudanese civil war survivors, the bizarre reality of Sundance comes screaming through. Just how independent are these filmmakers, anyway?

How strange is it, on the inspiring-vs.-ingratiating scale, that the Audience Awards coincided with both Grand Jury Prize winners, God Grew Tired of Us and, in the dramatic competition, Quinceanera? I was delighted by the latter decision. The movie, about Latinos and gentrifying gays in Echo Park, is smart and affecting and observant and thoroughly unpretentious. But the fact that a jury of professional peers would completely ignore some of the most accomplished films in the category, such as Half Nelson, is more than a little disconcerting. That said jury could give a Directing Award and Special Jury Prize to the ensemble of actors in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, which dazzles intermittently, and fail to recognize performances of remarkable depth by Ryan Gosling (in Half Nelson), Maggie Gyllenhaal (in Sherrybaby), Amber Tamblyn and Tilda Swinton (in Stephanie Daley), Rory Cochrane (in Right at Your Door), and Paul Giamatti (in The Hawk Is Dying) is difficult to fathom. Indeed, the movies in the dramatic competition, often a festival weak point, were outstanding this year, including Bobcat Goldthwait's upstart comedy Stay and the whimsical fable Wristcutters: A Love Story. It's the jury that got small.

At Sundance this year, Paul Giamatti starred in both The Hawk Is Dying and The Illusionist. Photo by Jennifer Cooper.

The smallness could be comforting and homey at times. I'll never forget seeing respected D.P. Nancy Schreiber point out that the lighting at the podium is distracting while presenting the cinematography award to Right at Your Door. Equally as memorable are the weird juxtapositions: jazzy, rockin' music playing while a slide-show of images of devastating injustice and suffering from the world cinema competition movies whizzes by on the screen. Dig it!

Yet there are other moments that sum up the clarity of purpose that the festival can ultimately claim, moments that supersede the moral fuzziness I've cataloged above. There was the sweet, taciturn humility of James Longley, director of the multi-award-winning documentary Iraq in Fragments (directing, editing, cinematography), as he shlepped up to the stage three times. There was the emotional award presentation by Terrence Howard, a Sundance winner last year for Hustle & Flow, who was blown away by the abundance of talent he witnessed as a juror.

Many of the winners in the world cinema categories were no-shows, leaving others to read their thank-yous (some of them beautifully composed) in their stead. Could they not afford to remain at the festival until Sunday or did they just not care? Either explanation is believable. Sundance is still the preeminent American festival, and the American competitions are where the action is. And even though the successive inches of snow that fell from morning to night made getting around Park City slippery on Saturday, I was glad I stayed to the end.

Winona Ryder inThe Darwin Awards. At the film's Sundance premiere, Ryder spoke warmly and articulately about castmate Chris Penn, who was found dead on Tuesday.

Thursday, January 26, 2006, 9:16pm
by Howard Karren

This has been a year of bummers at Sundance. That isn't unusual — there's always a bounty of despair at the festival, with human folly documented and fictionalized in a multitude of ways. But this was the year that Chris Penn died.

That would be sad in and of itself, but Penn had a small role in a film premiering at Sundance, The Darwin Awards, so the feeling of loss and regret were particularly acute here in Park City. And, adding layers of irony to the rituals of celebrity death, the movie is actually about people dying. It even ends with Jim Carroll famously moaning about his late friends as the credits roll. The cause of Penn's death was not known when The Darwin Awards premiered at the Eccles Center on Wednesday night, while in contrast, the deaths in the movie were all elaborately detailed. And it's a comedy, no less: a tribute to the eponymous website and book series that herald the cleansing of the gene pool by the elimination of a few poor fools who have died in an exceptionally stupid or unlucky way. Or at least that's the idea.

Despite its cool ensemble (David Arquette, Ty Burrell, Josh Charles, John Doe, Nora Dunn, Judah Friedlander, Lukas Haas, Juliette Lewis, Julianna Margulies, Tim Blake Nelson, Alessandro Nivola, Max Perlich, D.B. Sweeney, Robin Tunney, Wilmer Valderrama, and even the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the band Metallica have bit parts), The Darwin Awards is fairly lame. Its stars, Winona Ryder and Joseph Fiennes, playing an insurance claim investigator and ex-police detective, respectively, have little chemistry. The movie is an extra-sad swan song for Penn, because he's onscreen for only a couple of brief scenes, and they're not worth remembering.

In the introductory remarks at Eccles, festival honcho Geoff Gilmore and Darwin Awards director Finn Taylor (Dream With the Fishes, Cherish) eulogized Penn in a few unenlightening sentences. In the Q & A session afterward, however, Ryder spoke at length about her friend. She aptly noted that Penn was a great supporting actor, and despite the movie industry's increasing lack of respect for such roles. He had, she said, an 'immense gratitude.' She pointed out some of the parts he's played in movies over the years, from Footloose to At Close Range, and how she hoped that his most poignant work would be his legacy &mdash that he was not just Sean Penn's younger brother. Ryder was right on target there: Chris Penn had indeed had a colorful career for a man of only 40 (or 43, the dates are unclear) years. In my estimation, his standout performances were in Abel Ferrara's The Funeral and in Robert Altman's Short Cuts. And thanks to the unusually articulate Ryder, Penn's posthumous presence at a festival celebrating filmmakers was a lot less awkward.

Despair at the festival typically comes with a dollop of redemption — See: Forgiven, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, The Hawk Is Dying, In Between Days, Sherrybaby, Steel City, and Stephanie Daley in the Dramatic Competition. Yet the riveting Right at Your Door offers none at all, and the brilliant Half Nelson ends with little more than a clean shave. My bet for the audience favorite at the awards on Saturday is the charming Quinceañera, which ends with the triumph of heroic misfits. That's the kind of uplift only a doomed Darwinian fool could resist. So maybe, just maybe, this Sundance festival won't be a bummer after all, the loss of Chris Penn notwithstanding. One can only hope.

Tipper and Al Gore at the Premiere editorial party at Sundance on Monday. The Gores were in town to support An Inconvenient Truth, which focuses on the almost-President's environmental crusade in recent years. Photo by Jennifer Cooper.

Wednesday, January 25, 2006, 3:37pm
by Ann Donahue

It was inevitable that Al Gore would get a standing ovation at crunchy granola Sundance for the global warming documentary he stars in, An Inconvenient Truth. What was surprising was the palpable grief ofthe lefty bleeding heart audience (yes, dear reader, this reporter included) that the documentary premieres now - six years after the debacle of the 2000 election. Truth is part Discovery Channel special, part biography of the former vice president. It shows the Al Gore you heard about in the campaign but never saw: funny, engaging, and smart but not overbearing like your best college professor. What would have happened if the general public got to know this man?

The audience at the Tuesday premiere was stacked with his supporters. Even some of the Sundance volunteers who manned the doors wore homemade "Al, I voted for you" stickers. The first person up in the post-screening question-and-answer session apologized for "only voting" for Gore instead of volunteering for his campaign; the second audience member to take the floor addressed him as "Mr. President." In return, Gore shifted the attention away from himself and towards the Davis Guggenheim documentary and the environmental issues it covers. "What we're really facing is a planetary emergency," he says. "We don't have time to play politics and usual."

The case he lays out is quite compelling - using an enormous amount of scientific research, he outlines an appalling increase in global warming, in particular over the past 30 years. In my lifetime we've seen the years with the hottest average temperature on record, the most devastating hurricane season ever, erratic weather patterns around the world which have changed human and animal migration. All of this entered the transom of my mind at some point or another, but when Gore puts it all out there on the table in the course of a 100 minute movie, it's a powerful work. "We have, in this country, kind of a category five denial of thie crisis," Gore says. "My fondest hope for this movie... is that it will be able to get this message out on a wholesale basis."

It wasn't a hard sell to get Gore on board the documentary, he says the morning after the premiere in a suite at the Park City Marriott. "I wanted to make sure the science would be in the foreground," he says. "What they've done is to find a way to make it funny and engaging and engrossing." Director Davis Guggenheim paired with Hollywood environmental hellraiser Laurie David (wife of Curb Your Enthusiasm and Seinfeld impresario Larry David) and Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2 producer Lawrence Bender to film Gore's presentation — which he estimates he's done over a thousand times — to a live audience on a soundstage in Hollywood. Jeff Skoll's activist film company Participant Productions, provided the backing. In six months of shooting, Guggenheim and his team followed Gore around the world as he lectured on global warming, and interspersed th presentations with reflections on Gore's life. Gore says the film is entertaining several offers from distributors - some of which were made within the first 15 minutes of the premiere on Tuesday night. Guggenheim is aiming for a wide release in April. Gore has committed himself to marketing the film - "I'll sell it door to door if I have to," he says.

I never thought I'd say this, but maybe it's for the best that Gore didn't win - at least for the best for him personally, if not for the country as a whole. Free of the political games and restraints that Washington D.C. imposes, Gore has been reborn as something of the Carl Sagan of the environmental movement — telegenic, methodical but not scripted, educational but not pedantic. It's a change, he says, for the better. "I am a recovering politician," Gore quips. I'm on about step nine."

(Click on the page numbers below to read entries from earlier in the festival.)