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Shoreline-schoolteacher-turned-director Michael Hoffman thinks his new Michael Keaton movie, Game 6, contains a metaphor for the just-concluded Sundance Film Festival, to which he returned in 2005 after a long absence. Keaton plays a playwright whose ideals have just struck the iceberg of reality. "He's kind of on a downswing," Hoffman explained at his posh Park City, Utah, hotel, "and now he's written something about his childhood and his family, so it's the first thing he's ever written that he really cares about. Then he finds out his lead actor, who's gone to Borneo to do a commercial, has contracted a parasite that's affected his brain, so that he can't remember any lines. They're basically eating his play, eating his creation! It walks this line between realism and paranoid fantasy."

In the eyes of many movie idealists, Sundance is a paranoid fantasy come true, an art mecca devoured by a commercial mecca. Once the preserve of purists who decried Tinseltown philistines and revered long, slow movies about long, cold pioneer winters, now it's a place where $16 million deals are struck hot and fast while Paris Hilton dirty-dances with Pamela Anderson prior to picking up free underwear at Sundance's innumerable star-fucking freebie emporiums. It's the best way to expose brand names to the widest possible audience, whether the product is a gritty indie flick or a pricey brassiere. Even the sincere get seduced, says Hoffman: "I'm not doing much bewailing�I got this coat!"

He may get more than that. Current Oscar hopefuls Catalina Sandino Moreno and four of the documentary finalists went from nonentity to the top via Sundance, as did Sideways star Paul Giamatti in 2003's American Splendor. If the fest has seen bigger single hits back at the dawn of Soderbergh and Tarantino, it's been spawning more and more smaller ones lately, like last year's Napoleon Dynamite, Super Size Me, Garden State, Saw, Open Water, Control Room, and The Motorcycle Diaries.

Keaton, who's rather on a downswing in real life, could use some highbrow succ�s d'estime from his Sundance visit right now; so could Kevin Costner and Joan Allen in the melodrama Upside of Anger; Adrien Brody, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Keira Knightley in the amnesia thriller The Jacket; Pierce Brosnan in his madly popular, image-changing The Matador; Glenn Close (whose neck looked oddly older than her beautifully youthful face) in the chick flicks Nine Lives and Heights; and Daniel Day-Lewis (who now wears a Unabomber beard) in his wife Rebecca Miller's back-from-the-'60s drama The Ballad of Jack and Rose.

Sundance buzzsters predicted good things for Craig Lucas' adaptation of his own Hitchcockish play The Dying Gaul, with indie saints Patricia Clarkson and Peter Sarsgaard, and great things for the trendy L.A. ethnic-dance smash Rize, directed by David LaChapelle, who threw the week's happeningest party and then entertainingly got arrested for protesting the ejection of two starlets from the club where Paris and Pamela did their bump and grind.

In the Michael Moore era, even documentaries inspired hard-nosed horse-race speculation. I overheard two suits calculating, "Murderball [about paraplegic rugby players] will do $10�$20 million� if they do everything right!" Alas, The Fall of Fujimori, about the Chilean president whose exploitation of terrorism for democracy-crushing political gain startlingly parallels Bush's, won't do business. Place your bets instead on the heroic penguin-migration documentary and Winged Migration wanna-be The Emperor's Journey; urbanely ursine director Werner Herzog's grisly biopic Grizzly Man, incorporating a fanatic's own footage of his fatal attraction to Alaskan killer bears; and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room�and 10 times as much on Inside Deep Throat (reviewed next week), whose co-star Harry Reems now lives large as a Christian real-estate agent in Park City.

My own three favorites from Sundance 2005 may not blitz the cineplexes, but they show that the festival's indie heart can still beat true and strong despite the avalanche of bling and glitz. When release dates are set, don't miss Thumbsucker and Hustle & Flow, and trample your own dad to see The Squid and the Whale (which is all about dad trampling). They introduce skyrocketing new stars and send familiar faces to unheard-of new heights.

Thumbsucker has the gentle off-kilter charm of early Cameron Crowe, or of the late indie rocker Elliott Smith, who contributed to the soundtrack. Newcomer Lou Pucci plays the teen hero whose shaky sense of self keeps him from renouncing childish comforts. His rivalrous, self-doubting ex-jock dad (Vincent D'Onofrio) is peeved about his son's thumb habit, but once the kid discovers teacher Vince Vaughn's debate team, he's a changed man. Keanu Reeves redefines himself as the thumbsucker's hugely amusing New Age dentist, and Tilda Swinton is luminous as the hero's mom, a rehab nurse who treats a TV star who's more arrested than her son. Thumbsucker is fumbling and tentative, but this is its glory.

Pucci has a future, but nothing like Terrence Howard's, who co-stars in George C. Wolfe's black-nostalgia vehicle, Lackawanna Blues, and soars to casting directors' A-list as an ambitious pimp in the rap-to-riches flick Hustle & Flow, the festival's biggest hit. The story is formulaic, and it demands plenty in the way of suspension of disbelief (you'll be enlightened to learn that pimps are feminists who regard their best hos as brothers). Howard's mournful, moral, yearning face ignites the screen and never cools down. The rest of the cast is up to his game. If you think you hate rap movies, you'll probably still like this one�it's not quite all the way to 8 Mile, but it's a 6 Mile, easy

The most impressive debut at Sundance was Wes Anderson prot�g� Noah Baumbach's wickedly, heartbreakingly funny divorce drama, The Squid and the Whale. It's an exhilarating evisceration of Baumbach's real-life father, Jonathan, a brilliant literary critic and fiction writer who taught at the UW in the 1970s and split with Baumbach's mom, the more brilliant Village Voice critic and fiction writer Georgia Brown, in Brooklyn's Park Slope in the mid-1980s. As a character assassin's portrait of Baumbach senior, Jeff Daniels has never been better. If anything is known, he knows it�and lets you know you don't, even if you know better than he does (especially if you're his rising-star wife, deftly played by Laura Linney). He's so competitive he can't let his prepubescent son (played by Kevin Kline's talented real-life son Owen) win at Ping-Pong; and he causes his brittle, worshipful, Noah-esque teen son (also-talented Jesse Eisenberg) to go around bad-mouthing Dickens novels he's not yet read and belittling angelic girlfriends right out of bed.

Some Sundancers made rote comparisons with Woody Allen, but they're being blind and lazy�Baumbach (who previously created 1995's Kicking and Screaming) is his own man. His style with camera and keyboard is jumpy and distinctive, and way more coherent than producer Anderson's. The film's sole weak spot, despite Linney's characteristic genius, is the vaguely drawn mom role. She's too simply the good guy, even though she sleeps around chronically and dumps dad for a tennis-pro mensch (winningly, grinningly limned by Billy Baldwin). A friend of the family tells me that Baumbach simply hasn't worked through his mom worship the way he's analytically overcome his now emphatically no-longer-extant dad worship. No matter: This amazingly bad (yet magnetically fascinating) dad is enough to make Whale a time-capsule keeper.

The dad character keeps giving everybody unsolicited advice about their writing. I asked Baumbach whether his dad gave him any notes on his script. "I wouldn't show it to him," he said. And how does his dad feel about his devastating portrait? "I think my father probably thinks of it the way Erin Brockovich thought of Erin Brockovich�as a sort of tribute." This I doubt. But the film is one hell of a tribute to his son.

Buzz Fever
The annual Sundance bug has infected this writer, too.

by Tim Appelo

"SEX! SEX!" bayed one tipsy young dish among the hundreds on Main Street in Park City, Utah, as Sundance Film Festivalgoers poured out of parties under the silver screen�like light of a full moon. She was apparently addressing no one in particular and the festival at large, and that's about right: Short of the Oscars, there is no sexier event in filmdom. People who duck one another's calls all year in Hollywood cram lemminglike together into screenings and restaurants with menus marked way up for the week, catching the erotic scent of fame from stars passing on the sidewalk�Naomi Watts, James Woods, Jared Leto, and Michael Keaton are among my early sightings�and raving about movies that they'd never watch back home. Here, they whip out their checkbooks and scribble huge sums�and that's just for the sushi before the frenzied 4 a.m. seven-or-eight-figure distribution deal. At Sundance (which continues through Sunday, Jan. 30), everybody catches the buzz.

Four days into the fest, buzz kings include the pimp-turned-rapper flick Hustle and Flow, which earned producer John Singleton $9 million on his $3.5 mil investment; The Matador, a comedy starring Pierce Brosnan as a sleazebag hit man; Inside Deep Throat (which opens Feb. 11 in Seattle), Brian Grazer's scrappily independent, full-frontal-nude documentary about the impact of Linda Lovelace's fellatio epic on America; and, at a lower register, Mike Mills' adaptation of Walter Kirn's novel Thumbsucker.

But buzz is a fickle mistress: Word of mouth on one of Seattle's two big flicks, Police Beat, is as furiously divergent as opinions on the Bush administration.

Though everyone at Sundance seems to concur on the Bushies: The usually bland-spoken Robert Redford bashed Bush in his festival opening speech and proposed moviemakers as part of the antidote to tyranny. "Artists are the first ones to rise up," he claimed. Sundance turns 21 this year, which Redford calls "the age of dissent."

Everybody I talked to dissented in fragmented ways on the movies I've seen so far�which don't yet include any of the buzz flicks above. But all agreed about the lines, which were way crazier than 2004's. "We came all the way from New Zealand and waited for three hours in the cold," kvetched one couple at the thronged Entertainment Weekly party, "and we still couldn't get into The Matador." Even a sub-million-dollar, 20-day-shoot indie like Brick, a Dashiell Hammett noir set in a high school, inspired huge queues, which I hurdled thanks to a kindly publicist. But I was warned at the door: "If you have to go to the bathroom, you won't be permitted back in."

To me, Brick was worth the urinary tsuris. Though it begins like Bugsy Malone meets River's Edge, a gimmicky flick with kids as drug gangsters uttering arch, artificial hard-boiled dialogue and contemplating a classmate dead in a drainage ditch, the complicated plot grows on you, and actually resolves itself. When did you last see a movie that got better as it went on?

Another polarizing picture was Happy Endings, a perverse comedy wherein Lisa Kudrow gives up the child she conceives with her gay stepbrother, which mixes her up with a blackmailer film student and a slinky gold digger (Maggie Gyllenhaal), who's knocked up by the millionaire dad (Tom Arnold) of her gay boyfriend. "We've had a very busy year threatening the sanctity of marriage," quipped writer- director Don Roos, dedicating the film to his boyfriend. "So many families to destroy, so little time!" At the film's party, I learned that the stars did not know the director's little stratagem in blocking the film: He arranged to have a physical obstacle�a countertop, a couch�between Arnold and his gay son in every scene until they reconcile over the son's sexual identity. It's a nice touch, and maybe if Arnold had known about it, he would've been too self-conscious to give the startlingly good performance he turns in.

At the Film Seattle party, the debate roiled around several questions: Will Police Beat sell, despite a sketchy plot? Who will replace outgoing Seattle film czar Donna James, and what will it mean that the office is now devoted to music as well as film? Will indie celeb director Guy Maddin (see Cowards Bend the Knee, p. 67) make the Northwest Film Forum a magnet for big stars and bigger money? And what will become of Soapdish director Michael Hoffman's new Seattle-funded movie, Game 6, a paranoid Don DeLillo tale starring Michael Keaton and Robert Downey Jr. (now speaking to Hoffman again after an EW article of mine made him hate Hoffman for years)?

tappelo@seattleweekly.com

SUNDANCE WINNERS 2005

On January 29th, 2005, the Sundance Film Festival announced the winners of the Independent Feature Film Competition at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah:

American Documentary Grand Jury Prize
WHY WE FIGHT, directed by Eugene Jarecki and produced by Eugene Jarecki and Susannah Shipman.
American Dramatic Grand Jury Prize
FORTY SHADES OF BLUE, directed by Ira Sachs and produced by Margot Bridger, Mary Bing, Jawal Nga, Donald Rosenfeld, and Ira Sachs.
World Cinema Documentary Grand Jury Prize
SHAPE OF THE MOON, directed by Leonard Retel Helmrich (Netherlands).
World Cinema Dramatic Grand Jury Prize
THE HERO, directed by Zeze Gamboa (Angola/Portugal/France).
American Documentary Audience Award
MURDERBALL, directed by Henry-Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shaprio.
American Dramatic Audience Award
HUSTLE AND FLOW, directed by Craig Brewer.
World Cinema Documentary Audience Award
SHAKE HANDS WITH THE DEVIL: THE JOURNEY OF ROMEO DALLIARE, directed by Peter Raymont (Canada).
World Cinema Dramatic Audience Award
BROTHERS, directed by Susanne Bier (Denmark).
American Documentary Directing Award
Jeff Feuerzeig for THE DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSTON
American Dramatic Directing Award
Noah Baumbach for THE SQUID AND THE WHALE
American Excellence in Cinematography Award (Documentary)
Gary Griffin for THE EDUCATION OF SHELBY KNOX
American Excellence in Cinematography Award (Dramatic)
Amelia Vincent for HUSTLE AND FLOW
Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award
Noah Baumbach for THE SQUID AND THE WHALE
Alfred P. Sloane Feature Film Award
Werner Herzog for GRIZZLY MAN
Special Jury Prize for Editing (Documentary)
MURDERBALL, edited by Geoffrey Richman and Conor O'Neill
Special Jury Prize (Documentary)
AFTER INNOCENCE, directed by Jessica Sanders.
Special Jury Prizes for Outstanding Performance (Dramatic)
Awarded to Amy Adams for her work in JUNEBUG, and to Lou Pucci for his work in THUMBSUCKER.
Special Jury Prizes for Originality of Vision (Dramatic)
Awarded to Miranda July, who wrote, directed and acted in ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW, and to Rian Johnson, who directed BRICK.
Special Jury Prize (World Cinema Documentary)
Awarded to both THE LIBERACE OF BAGHDAD (UK), directed by Sean McAllister, and WALL (France/Israel), directed by Simone Bitton.
Special Jury Prize (World Cinema Dramatic)
Awarded to LIVE-IN MAID (Argentina/Spain), directed by Jorge Gaggero.
Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking
FAMILY PORTRAIT, directed by Patricia Riggen.
Jury Prize in International Short Filmmaking
WASP (UK), directed by Andrea Arnold.
Special Recognition in Short Filmmaking
BULLETS IN THE HOOD: A BED-STUY STORY, directed by Terrence Fischer and Daniel Howard
Honorable Mentions in Short Filmmaking
ONE WEEKEND A MONTH, directed by Eric Escobar
RYAN (Canada), directed by Chris Landreth
SMALL TOWN SECRETS, directed by Katherine Leggett
TAMA TU (New Zealand), directed by Taika Waititi
VICTORIA PARA CHINO, directed by Cary Fukunaga