Hey everyone! I am writing this having finished the 2021 virtual edition of the Sundance Film Festival. I definitely missed my normal festival experience but there were some good parts of being at home. I got to connect with all of my online friends watching movies and the experience wasn’t as grueling as the live format can be.

I want to express my gratitude to the festival organizers for putting together a wonderful event that ran pretty seamlessly. I was honestly expecting there to be more problems than there were. I also had better luck with my movies this year than last year so that was nice.

This morning I had a blast going on Austin Burke’s channel to talk about the festival and more (we went on some very interesting tangents about how we create our reviews and dealing with toxity).

But I have a few more reviews to share with you from the end of the festival. Here we go:

The World to Come

This film tells the story of 2 lonely pioneer women who become friends and then fall in love on the American East Coast frontier. It stars Vanessa Kirby, Katherine Waterston, Christopher Abbott and Casey Affleck. I have mixed feelings on this film. On one hand it is beautiful to look at with music by Daniel Blumberg.

I also thought the 2 leads had nice chemistry and Casey Affleck does a really good job playing a husband trying to do the right thing in a difficult situation. However, certain details were distracting. It might sound nitpicky but their hair was so unrealistic, all loose and flowing. It looked like it had been worked on at a salon with a curling iron instead of a prairie hairstyle. The whole film had a cheesy harlequin feel about it instead of a gritty realistic look I think they were going for. The narration added to this corny feel.

I’m on the fence about it but I give it a mild recommendation

6 out of 10

Smile Worthy

Amy Tan: An Unintended Memoir

I think this is probably the best out of all of the celebrity bio-docs at Sundance and I enjoyed all of them. Writer Amy Tan let’s us get really close into her family, writing and personal life. She is particularly frank about her Mother and their strained relationship. At one point her Mother even tried to kill her in a group suicide delusion. I honestly don’t know how you can forgive someone for something like that but she did. It made me want to revisit The Joy Luck Club both book and movie now that I know more about the author (as well as her other books).

If you have any interest in writing, movies, immigrant experiences or people you’ll like this film. I also really enjoyed the animated sequences throughout.

8 out of 10

Smile Worthy

Users

My last film at Sundance is a documentary called Users and it is not a great note to end the festival on. It’s the kind of pretentious groan-worthy films unfortunately the festival is known for. The movie is supposedly a poetic treatise about man and nature. In reality what it is consists of pretty images of the Earth along with images of children. Honestly it makes something like Ghost Story or Tree of Life feel plot-heavy.

Some may want to say I didn’t get what the movie was saying but I got it. I just didn’t care about it. It’s a message of man vs machine we’ve heard literally since the beginning of film. It’s pretty but that’s about it. To think this beat Misha and the Wolves for best documentary is outrageous.

2 out of 10

Frown Worthy

So there it is my final log from the festival. I hope you have enjoyed my review. Did any of you get to see the festival? I would love to hear your reviews for what you saw! What movies in February would you like to see me give reviews for?