JR There were a lot of strange movies, a quirky bunch that got lots of buzz — Junebug, The Squid and the Whale, Thumbsucker, and The Chumscrubber — all more or less having to do with precocious, idiosyncratic young adults. This one actor, Lou Pucci, who won the festival's Special Jury Prize for acting, was in two of them: Thumbsucker and Chumscrubber. Try saying that five times fast.
GK Thumbsucker, Chumscrubber. Uma, Oprah. The Squid and the Whale was probably my favorite film at the fest. Its writer-director, Life Aquatic cowriter Noah Baumbach, won the writing and directing prizes. Jeff Daniels (in one of his best performances ever) and Laura Linney (she's good too) play divorcing Brooklynites. Best of all, Billy Baldwin plays a tennis pro who refers to everybody as ''my brother,'' which is almost as good as ''maayne.''
JR I'm still trying to figure out what Chumscrubber means. While I ponder that, tell me what else you saw, my brother.
GK Two thrillers tossed my stomach like salad spinners. Hard Candy is about a man (Phantom of the Opera's Patrick Wilson) and a teenaged girl (breakout Ellen Page) who meet on the Internet. Next thing you know, she's threatening to chop off his testicles and displaying her prowess at knot-tying. It's unremittingly intense. Almost as good was Wolf Creek, an Australian horror movie that features a very, very large knife — earning it comparisons to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Studios picked up both these movies, so we'll see them in theaters this year.
JR Since I'm a scaredy-cat, I went to see a bunch of documentaries. And I loved pretty much all of them. That nutty old German Werner Herzog came back this year with a fabulous doc called Grizzly Man, about Tim Treadwell, who studied Alaskan bears for years until he was tragically mauled to death. Think Never Cry Wolf with an even sadder ending. Other great ones included Shakespeare Behind Bars, about Kentucky prison inmates who put on a production of The Tempest (trust me: you ain't seen nothing until you've seen a guy named Bulldog play a sprite); New York Doll, about Arthur ''Killer'' Kane, the bassist for that seminal '70s rock band who later converted to Mormonism; and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, which charts the rise and fall of the disgraced energy company.
GK Gilbert Gottfried and Full House's Bob Saget, if you can believe it, are the standout comics of The Aristocrats, a documentary codirected by magician Penn Jillette about the dirtiest joke ever told. (THINKfilm bought it for a million bucks, and it'll probably be the first movie rated NC-17 just for nasty language.) Almost 100 comics appear, and a lot of them tell the joke, but Saget and Gottfried are the ones who go for broke. This is the host of America's Funniest Home Videos as you've never seen him before.
JR Hey now, watch it: Saget totally killed on AFHV. But he's damn funny here, too. There was one other movie that we were all too happy to endure the cold and snow and unreliable shuttle busses to see.
GK You speak of the penguin movie. The surprise hit of the festival was a French flick called The Emperor's Journey, an astonishing nature doc about emperor penguins. It contains the most fearsome seal in film history, which charges at the camera (and the cuddly penguins) with fangs bared. When they tire of walking upright, they flop on their bellies and row themselves across the ice, which is lovable. Plus, there are adorable baby penguins! Though one gets eaten by a hawk and another freezes to death.
JR Maaayne! The Emperor's Journey may have been set in the South Pole, and I may have seen it at snowy Sundance, but it warmed my heart.
