All these wonderful things

The Monday Brief: Wrapping Sundance, Our Oscar Predictions and Can THE COVE Break the DGA Curse?

Holy cow, it's February already?  That means we are 1/120 of the way through the twenty-teens.

More the the point, with the wrap of Sundance yesterday, we now have a sense of where the year is heading and some of the films we'll still be talking about next year at this time.  Think about it, by this point last year we already had our first looks at Oscar shortlisters THE COVE, FOOD INC., THE BEACHES OF AGNÈS, BURMA VJ, VALENTINO and EVERY LITTLE STEP (the above a mix of Sundance and Toronto '08 titles).  Which films from this year's Sundance will we be still talking about in early 2011?

A word of caution to folks celebrating RESTREPO's grand jury win at Sundance - only 3 films in the past decade won the Sundance Documentary Grand Jury Prize and went on to be nominated for an Oscar.  Can you name them? (answer a little later in our broadcast)

If you were hearing the buzz out of IDFA (and from certain quarters it was deafening), one can't help but be surprised that Lixin Fan's LAST TRAIN HOME failed to pick up a single award in the World Cinema Documentary competition.  The jury for that strand (which included filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal, PBS correspondent Jeffrey Brown and Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival director Asako Fujioka) seemed to value films that made them laugh - aside from editing winner A FILM UNFINISHED and special jury prize recipient ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE), they heaped prizes on three films (THE RED CHAPEL, HIS & HERS and SPACE TOURISTS) that were notable for their use of humor.

The Monday Brief: Sundance Full Throttle, The Cove on the Fast Track and STF Ups It's Staff by 50%

It's Monday morning in Park City (and the rest of the United States) as folks are getting their first solid glimpses of the docu-class of 2010.

We've rounded up the critical reaction to opening night doc RESTREPO, big buzz title CATFISH, world cinema title THE RED CHAPEL and two US competition docs from Oscar winners - Davis Guggenheim's WAITING FOR SUPERMAN and Leon Gast's SMASH HIS CAMERA.  We'll have more critics surveys of this year's doc class as the week continues.

In other Sundance coverage, the NY Times profiles Participant Media's Diane Weyermann (the company has four documentaries at Sundance this year).  They also describe what happened when Bill Gates showed up at a screening of competition doc A SMALL ACT.  Last week, Movieline's S.T. Vanairsdale reported on the opening day press conference where Robert Redford talked about the departure of Geoff Gilmore and said, "We were beginning to flatline".  Anne Thompson digs further into Redford v. Gilmore.  And remember when we asked back in November "what does it say, exactly, that John Cooper's first year at the helm begins with the declaration that Sundance needed a rebirth and a re-charge?".

Meanwhile, away from Park City, life continues.  THE COVE, which before Christmas looked to be locked in a tight Oscar race with FOOD, INC., now seems to be pulling away.  A string of critics prizes, three Cinema Eye Honors (including Outstanding Feature) and a win Sunday night at the Producers Guild - along with the sense that FOOD, INC. just isn't trying that hard - seem to suggest that Louie Psihoyos' film is on the fast track for the Academy Award.  Anything can happen, of course - we don't even know who the five nominees are going to be.  But unless there's some kind of huge momentum shift when the nominees are announced (to Agnes Varda per chance?), more and more industry folks now seem resigned to a COVE win.

Our own thoughts on this year's Cinema Eye Honors, along with links to others' coverage is here.  More coverage since then by Tom Roston on the POV Blog, Hammer to Nail's Michael Tully, nominations committee member Tom Hall, IFC's Alison Willmore, Movieline's Airsdale and About.com's Jennifer Merin.  Further, POV Intern Alice Rhee writes about playing Mad Libs with Albert Maysles and being inspired to tell her own stories and Bob Alexander of Cinema Eye founding sponsor Indiepix posts his welcome remarks from the ceremony.

You can find pictures from this year's ceremony and afterparty along with this year's winners at the Cinema Eye wesbite.  [Kudos again to Cinema Eye's amazing 2010 design team - Ben Chlapek and Ryan Nelson.]

With Sundance having cleared its first weekend of premieres, some spring festivals are now locking in their schedules, ready to soon announce their own fest line-ups.  Columbia, Missouri's True/False Film Festival has announced six titles for this year's festival, including Laura Poitras' THE OATH, Lixin Fan's LAST TRAIN HOME, Juan Carlos Rulfo and Carlos Hagerman's THOSE WHO REMAIN, Kaspar Astrup Schröder's THE INVENTION OF DR. NAKAMATS, Don Hahn's WAKING SLEEPING BEAUTY and Marshall Curry's RACING DREAMS.

And finally, much congratulations to our friends and colleagues Thom Powers and Raphaela Neihausen, who welcomed their son Bez Powers Neihausen on Saturday.  There are photos and a (humorous, not-at-all-graphic) blow-by-blow of the arrival on the Stranger Than Fiction blog, where Thom notes that mother and father decided to forgo having the event documented on camera.  Here's a raised glass to the growing familia.

Grey Gardens Tops Chlotrudis List of 100 Best Documentaries of All Time

The Maysles Brothers' classic documentary Grey Gardens topped the list of the 100 Best Docs of All Time, as compiled by Boston's Chlotrudis Society For Independent Film.  As explained on the Chlotrudis site:

To create this list, members were asked to come up with their Top 10-20 documentaries of all time.  For our purposes, documentaries included concert films, and films made for televsion. After receiving all of the lists, numerical values were assigned to each of the rankings, and each movie was given  a point  total.  The number of lists a movie  appears on is also a factor.

Much has been said about the rise of documentaries in the last 5 years or so, and our resulting list certainly speaks to that. In the Top 100, nearly half (49) were made post 2000, with 23 made during the 90's, 12 during the 80's, 9 during the 70's, 4 during the  60's, and one each during the 50's and the 20's.

The highest charting film from 2006 on the list is Kirby Dick's This Film Is Not Yet Rated, which came in at #14.  The oldest film on the list - Dziga Vertov's masterpiece The Man With a Movie Camera (1929) - came in second.  Errol Morris had more films on the list than any other filmmaker, starting with The Fog of War at #19.

Here's the Chlotrudis Top 20:

1. Grey Gardens
2. The Man With a Movie Camera
3. Stop Making Sense
4. Tarnation
5. The Up Series
6. The Gleaners & I
7. Titicut Follies
8. Spellbound
9. Double Dare
10. Grizzly Man
11. Crumb
12. Born Into Brothels
13. DiG!
14. This Film Is Not Yet Rated
15. In the Realms of the Unreal
16. Bowling for Columbine
17. Hoop Dreams
18. Capturing the Friedmans
19. The Fog of War
20. Murderball

The full list of one hundred is available on the Chlotrudis site.

As with all lists, part of the fun is appreciating some surprises (such as the high ranking of Jonathan Caouette's groundbreaking Tarnation) while shaking your head at some others (Hoop Dreams is not even in the top 15?)  But all in all, I think it's a pretty fine list [and I'd say that even if my own Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns) did not come in at #28, which is very nice and a great honor, but, seriously folks, ahead of Gimme Shelter?  Come on, that's not right.], particularly as you get a bit further down in the rankings and the Chlotrudis folks remind you of a few films to add to your Netflix queue.