Sundance-ing With the Pseudo-Stars

February 05, 2007

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As I mentioned in a previous blog, I was sent Utah a few weeks back to cover the Sundance Film Festival this year for Hollywood Life magazine. It had its moments and I saw some terrific movies -- like the excoriating Iraq documentary No End In Sight -- but I think my favorite summation of the whole Sundance experience came from my friend Derek Hartley, a radio host of Sirius, who observed, “Sundance is where C-list stars go when they want to feel like A-list stars.” One only need witness Tara Reid get mobbed like the Beatles in a swag house to see he’s right on the money.

Some other random musings on the fest:

LANCE AND REICHEN were apparently in Park City but I never laid eyes on them. This rankles me because I feel like these kooky kids are, historically speaking, the First (same sex) Couple of the blogging era and I’m the only person I know who didn’t have some sort of sighting or run-in with one or both of them in the last year--and now they’re supposedly Splitsville for good! I never witnessed a text messaging hissy fit in P-town. I never saw either of them hitting on a bartender while the other went to the bathroom. I never saw any kind of swag-related meltdown. Nothing. And I really feel cheated. I hope they get back together, just so I can have my moment. I’m not asking for a three-way, I just want to witness a furtive gesture or a stolen kiss. Something.

I managed to catch a short film about Anita Bryant called I Just Wanted To Be Somebody that I found really enlightening and oddly poignant. It was basically a ten-minute encapsulation of her career, the stand she took against gay people and the price she paid for it. It concluded with a personal letter from the filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt basically thanking Bryant for putting a face on homophobia and giving the GLBT community a reason to come together like never before -- and they had a product to boycott, too: Florida Orange Juice. By the end of the short, when we learn about the nosedive her career took, her bankruptcies etc, I actually sort of felt sorry for Anita in a way. She was a former Miss Whatever for whom everything sort of went her way -- she didn’t know from hardship and she sure know who she was fucking with when she came out against the gays. She got hers, it seems, and then some. Now, someone needs to make a feature-length Anita Bryant biopic.

There weren’t that many gay flicks at Sundance. I enjoyed Save Me, the story of two guys (Chad Allen, Robert Gant) who fall in love in an ex-gay program. Judith Light plays the head of the program and her performance is so urgent and deeply felt, I was sort of pulling for her to succeed and make them not gay anymore. You’ll have to see for yourself whether she does when the film comes to a theater or festival near you.

Another cool film I saw was A Very British Gangster, a documentary about Dominic Noonan, who is like the Tony Soprano of Manchester, England. Halfway through, we learn, in very matter of fact way, that Dominic’s, in fact, gay. It’s not raised much as an issue but it’s interesting to add that to the mix of traits of this charming but fearsome character. Hopefully, this doc will get shown in the states at some point, on BBC America or something.

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