SLAMDANCE DISPATCH #1

Slamdance officially got underway last night with the underwhelming Real Time, which despite containing the best dramatic performance of Randy Quaid’s career, left something to be desired in the originality category. Randall Cole’s debut feature, produced in part by Canadian mega producer Robert Lantos (along with his son Ari), hits the typical genre beats in its brisk tale of an Australian hitman sent to kill a dead beat gambler who owes his bosses $68,000, only to give the man an hour and a half to come to terms with his impending doom. That his mark is played by Jay Baruchel in a twitchy, largely unlikable performance makes the humanity this brutal killer extends to him a bit of a stretch for the audience, who can easily picture why Hamilton, Ontario might not be that worse off without this guy. Shot smoothly on Super 16mm, the pic looks very good and has some genuinely interesting passages, but we’ve seen this ‘old mentor sacrifices himself for the wayword son’ bit before and as the film ventures further from plausibility and deeper into contrived, undermotivated genre territory, it looses its way.

The real find of day one of screenings was Shorts Block 2, coined the “sex block” by Slamdance shorts programmer Paul Sbrizzi, which included the magnificent shorts At Night, Small Apartment and Las Historias Mas Sexy Del Mundo! No. 2, an expert pastiche on the aesthetics of late 60s European porn. At Night, from directors Philip Aceto and Max Landes, riffs in Lynch territory on an unhappy couple watching a Psychoesque murder scene that sparks a series of escalating, unarticulated desires within them. Nearly without words, built for maximum glide, a marvel of precise camera placement, tracking shots and sound design, the film is starkly beautiful and deeply unsettling.

Small Apartment, from director Andrew Betzer, feels like a campanion piece to Daniel Malloy’s Dad, a short which played Sundance last year. Both films deal, in fairly naturalistic terms, with the sexual malaise of a lonely individual who lives in close proximity to a more fuffilled couple. In Malloy’s film, it’s a thirtysomething driven to the brink by his parents sexual hijinks which he flits away watching porn; In Betzer’s picture, its a father, sharing an apartment with his son, who films his son having sex with his girlfriend. After a brief, wordless lunch with the couple, they leave and he masturbates to the tape, only to stop, blinking at tears. The film, despite what I just described, is deeply funny and quite moving, shot by DP Sean Williams with some of the low-fi immediacy he brought to Ronnie Bronstein’s Frownland, a favorite on these pages.