In my introductory post this year from the Sundance Film Festival — the first Sundance to be presided over by newly appointed festival director John Cooper, pictured at left — I said that the real test, the only test, for the Cooper era wouldn’t be the festival’s novel display of bells and whistles: the NEXT section (which bracketed and highlighted eight films made on very low budgets — just like dozens and dozens of past films shown at previous Sundance festivals), or the freshly trumpeted, take-back-the-megaplex, this is the new rebel spirit of indie film signifiers. (Rebellion, as a word, was long ago co-opted by those who aren’t for it.) I said that what mattered would be whether there was fresh creative DNA in the programming itself.

On that score, Cooper and his team came through, triumphantly. The programming this year was bold, sharp, tasteful, and demanding. It did a first-rate job of separating the wheat from the chaff — and leaving the chaff out of the festival. I can’t tell you how many times, over the years, I have sat through a movie at Sundance that was inept and awful in every way (it might be an unwatchable kitsch comedy like D.E.B.S., or the aptly named Sleepwalking, a road movie that managed the singular feat of standing still), only to spend half the film wondering how this particular waste of time ended up in the middle of the world’s premiere independent film festival, at the expense of a submission that must surely have been more worthy.

This year, I never had that experience, or anything close to it. Every movie I saw, even a half-baked novelty that didn’t really work, like Holy Rollers, with Jesse Eisenberg as a Hasid who becomes a drug runner, justified its presence. I also think it’s encouraging that no single film dominated the buzz-sphere. There was a roundedness and vivacity to the spectrum of movies on display, which is one reason just about everyone I talked to believed that the festival had such a vital year. Here are a few of my random thoughts and observations on Sundance 2010:

For Young Filmmakers, Marriage is the New Dating. By its nature (brash, cheap, hungry for adventure), independent filmmaking is mostly a province of the young, which is why indie movies about romantic relationships have often been mumbly twentysomething comedies about hooking up and dating. This year, however, there was an abundance of films that focused on the promises and perils of marriage: Blue Valentine and The Kids Are All Right, and even text-generation comedies like Douchebag and The Freebie. Which makes me think that a whole generation — of indie filmmakers, or maybe just of Americans, period — are growing up faster than they used to. READ FULL STORY »