I’ve spent the morning combing the various Sundance line-up overviews, wherein reporters for a variety of publications digest the four competition line-ups announced yesterday in an attempt to find an overarching theme/predictive slant which they can then hand-deliver to their mainly mainstream audiences. One thing I’ve learned: such stories should never be read back-to-back.

“Sundance’s writers and directors are turning toward more uplifting narratives,” writes John Horn in the LA Times. Oh good! Oh, but wait — according to USA Today, “The comedies are dark, and the dramas are even darker at the annual showcase of low-budget moviemaking.” What am I supposed to believe?

But seriously, folks. One observation from Horn’s story is worth a ponder:

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Back when Billy the Kid hit theaters last December, I wrote an essay calling Jennifer Venditti’s non-fiction feature  “The Anti-Juno.” The films begged to be compared at the time, not just because they were both, as I wrote, “films about the inner lives and social stumbling blocks of precocious, ‘outsider’ teenagers,” but because they were actually opening in New York on the same day. Juno came riding in with the best indie cred that Fox Searchlight could buy, so it’s a no-brainer that the eventual Oscar winner would outshine the truly indie Billy on a short timeline. But on a long tail, Billy has a huge advantage, if only because, as Cullen Gallagher put it today at /Hammer to Nail, “Jennifer Venditti has managed the incredible feat of both finding and conveying cinematically a character who is absolutely singular and unique, and at the same time exists as an “everyman” who sums up our collective adolescence.” Honest to blog.

Billy, which I named as one of my favorite films of 2007, comes out on DVD today, in a special package including a commentary track by director Venditti with Ryan Gosling, and a liner notes essay by Miranda July. If you go to the film’s official website and click on the DVD flag on the bottom right, you can actually get 25 percent off your purchase.

A Cannes Director’s Fortnight and Karlovy Vary selection screening in TIFF’s non-fiction Reel to Reel program without fanfare, the Slovak hybrid doc Blind Loves is a lovely surprise. Music video director turned first time feature maker Juraj Lehotsky tracks four blind persons at various ages and life stages and, in a series of vignettes that blend observed fact with what appear to be staged recreations and dream-like fiction, offers an extremely intimate portrait of the navigation of personal relationships without sight.

The most in depth vignette centers on Peter, a middle aged piano teacher who sits with his ear to the TV “watching” skiing (he guesses the length of the jumps by counting the seconds between push off and landing) while his also-blind wife knits. At one point, Peter’s wife asks him to stand up so she can see how far her sweater-in-progress stretches over his “broad shoulders.” Peter sounds genuinely disappointed: “I thought I was slim.” This sly hint that Peter’s lifelong companion has a more intimate knowledge of his own body than he does is one of the more touching moments in a film filled with sneakily-presented touchstones of quiet devastation.
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“I’m on the street corner peddling doubt.” That’s how Bill Maher categorizes his personal attitude towards and mission against religion in Religulous, and that’s sort of how I feel about Maher’s professional schtick: I am aggressively, even evangelically, skeptical. I’ll stick around and watch his HBO show when I catch it whilst flipping channels, mostly because impressed by his ability to make the quick change from sub-Leno, pun-dependent one-liners to actually asking hard-hitting, legitimately provocative questions of his panelists. On Real Time, Maher uses (mostly bad) jokes to soften up both his guests and his audience for the serious discourse that inevitably follows, and even though much of Maher’s humor is unbelievably hokey and old-fashioned, there’s something admirable about the marriage he’s arranged between his desire to entertain and his compulsion to interrogate and lay blame.

Hopeful that his feature-length collaboration with Larry Charles would offer a similar balance writ large, I went in to Religulous with an open mind –– which is more than can be said of Maher. The comedian-turned-political pundit/committed agnostic, and star and producer of this non-fiction film, explains early in the picture that he thinks organized religion of any kind is “detrimental to the progress of humanity.” Writing off the contents of the bible and all historical narratives of faith as “fairy tales,” he says he’s on a journey in search of an explanation as to how otherwise rational adults can buy into this kiddie stuff. “It’s too easy,” he complains.

Unfortunately, this last line turns out to be auto-critique: as Maher and Charles hop from backwoods America to international holy hot spots and back again. Maher continually flips the script, here using serious questioning not as an end, but a means to immature, unenlightening mockery. It quickly becomes apparent that Maher’s journey is not about finding out what makes religious people tick, but about using the tics of mostly fringe religious people to prop up the thesis Maher came in with. Which is––in a nutshell, but totally without irony––that everyday religious practice will soon result in global apocalypse.

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When I first wrote about A Complete History of My Sexual Failures, based solely on the film’s Sundance catalog synopsis, I pegged it as “like Sherman’s March, but British, and 1/3 as long, and seemingly not at all concerned with vague parallels to 19th century history!” Having seen the film with an extremely enthusiastic press corps, I can confirm that Chris Waitt’s debut feature *is* a little like Sherman’s March, but the ancestral lineage of this undeniable crowd-pleaser is more complicated than I could have guessed. At its best, this heavily constructed slice of auto-videography is a lot like a Nick Broomfield remake of Four Eyed Monsters, except with a budget for car commercial cast-off source cues and an extremely problematic relationship with the kind of fearless personal honesty that Arin Crumley and Susan Buice have turned into a brand.

The hapless 30-something director, with his ever-present stubble, saggy ripped jeans and dishwater moptop, is a dead ringer for Kurt Cobain circa 1994 (I would have pegged this as “retro” affectation, if every other character on screen hadn’t made a derisive comment about the director/star’s lack of grooming acumen and style). Speaking directly to the camera from a home office resembling a teenager’s bedroom, Waitt explains that, as his girlfriend of three weeks has just dumped him, he’s decided to track down as many former flames as possible and interview each, in order to figure out what he’s been doing wrong and hopefully figure out how to find true love/avoid future dumpings.

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I’m a bit of a doc junkie, so I was pretty pleased to see that Kevin Kelly (co-founding editor of Wired) has put together reviews of 100 of his favorite documentary films. Better yet, the 56-page book is published in PDF format, so you can download it for $3 (at the Boing Boing Digital Emporium).

On his website, Kevin nicely sums up what I love about docs:

“The very best of these non-fiction films are as entertaining as the best of Hollywood blockbusters. In contrast to the fiction that most movies are, true films offer authentic plot twists, real characters, and truth stranger than fiction. They aim to both entertain and to inform–a powerful combo.”

I think this book will be a great tool to change the minds of people who aren’t quite sold on the idea of enjoying documentaries. And for those who have long loved docs, apparently there’s already been a film club launched around the 100 films reviewed in the book. I’m not sure who organized it, or where, but it sounds like a good idea for Spout doc fans.

I’ll be back with more after I have a chance to look at the book.