Sundance 2002. 120-odd films, none had a must-see aura

The only buzz on Sundance coming into this year's festival was that there was no buzz. Out of the 120-odd films in the lineup, none had a must-see aura and, after the banner year in 2001, no one was realistically expecting a repeat this time around.

But as always, you never know until you see for yourself. As illustrated by the staggering number of sales that has taken place over the past week, some very good and accomplished pictures have debuted here, quite a few with legitimate shots at finding niche audiences at the least. If no watershed entry has emerged by which this year's event will be singularly remembered, any number of films has proved worth seeing for one reason or another, which is what justifies any film festival.

It's been a great year for actors. In an era when so many thesps turn to working behind the camera, John Malkovich has made a particularly impressive directorial debut with ``The Dancer Upstairs,'' which is anchored by another fantastic performance from Javier Bardem. A fictionalized version of the search for the leader of Peru's revolutionary Shining Path movement, the film exerts a strong, unsettling pull and shrewdly balances its political, personal and philosophical dimensions. Furthermore, it's a real movie, not a theatrical-style piece or a performance-centric effort, suggesting a strong second potential career for Malkovich.

By contrast, the dynamite young actor Philip Seymour Hoffman is the be all, end all of ``Love Liza,'' director Todd Louiso and writer Gordy Hoffman's grim study of a man driven to inhaling gasoline fumes as an escape from his despair after his wife's suicide (the scenarist is the star's brother). If one were designing the ideal face and physique for screen stardom, one would hardly select Hoffman's physical characteristics: his squinty little eyes, foreshortened nose, pulpy face, dirty blond hair and pudgy body hardly fit the usual prescription for a leading man. Having repeatedly shown his range and skill in many supporting roles, he carries the entire picture here in a tour de force in which he seems to be onscreen, often in close-up, at every moment.

Another seemingly unlikely candidate for movie prominence is America Ferrara, who plays the leading role in Patricia Cardoso's big audience-pleaser ``Real Women Have Curves.'' Overweight and completely unglamorous, Ferrara looks like dozens of other women you might see on any given day in a big city and never particularly notice. But in the movie she all but pops off the screen, displaying a vitality and radiance that enormously energizes this predictable but engagingly rendered tale of a teenage Latina trying to break free from the traditional expectations imposed by her mother.

Kyra Sedgwick, Parker Posey and Fairuza Balk have never been better than they are in Rebecca Miller's stylistically and psychologically astute ``Personal Velocity,'' in which the actresses play women in their 30s, 20s and teens, respectively, working through crises in their lives. Glamorpuss Jennifer Aniston plays a woman stuck in an unhappy marriage in a dreary Texas town in Miguel Arteta's ``The Good Girl'' and plays her well; Maggie Gyllenhaal traverses a tremendous distance from timid mental patient to confident sexual player in Steven Shainberg's ``Secretary''; and newcomer Aaron Stanford excels as an intellectually and sexually precocious 15-year-old in Gary Winick's ``Tadpole.''

Latter film, no matter how entertaining and popular it is, has a problem in common with several other pictures here: It was shot on digital video and looks like hell. Over the last couple of years, we've seen huge strides in the visual quality of video-lensed features and the achievable excellence of tape-to-film transfers, but ``Tadpole,'' which looks as though it was badly shot to begin with, was shown in one of the worst transfers I've ever seen, something Miramax will have to attend to now that it has acquired the film.

``Personal Velocity,'' another production from the DV-oriented InDigEnt company, makes better use of the digital format and was presented in projected video, although it too looks shabby in a number of exterior shots. But at least two other DV-shot pictures are inexcusably amateurish: Anthony Jaswinski's competition entry ``Killing Time'' and Jay Lee's ``Noon Blue Apples,'' in the American Spectrum. These two Gotham-based pictures graphically illustrate the down side of the digital revolution: In the celluloid-only era, these two films would never have been made.

But I don't blame the filmmakers so much as Sundance for having allowed their work to slip through the selection process and make it to the big show. Something is clearly amiss when ``Killing Time,'' an alleged ``road movie'' set entirely in Manhattan, can make it into the competition and Karen Moncrieff's beautifully and delicately rendered ``Blue Car'' is left with runner-up status in American Spectrum.

The best time I had all week was provided by Bill Weber and David Weissman's exuberant documentary ``The Cockettes,'' a look at the outlandish drug-drag-glitter performance artists of the hippie era that captures the anarchic, free-wheeling spirit of San Francisco in the late '60s-early '70s better than any film I've ever seen.

The most vivid sequence of the week, however, came courtesy of Gene B. Rhee's 17-minute short ``The Quest for Length,'' in which young actor Roger Fan (excellent in Justin Lin's ``Better Luck Tomorrow'') makes a mostly comic search for the best way to increase his penis size. After amusing visits to therapists, a sex paraphernalia shop and the like, Roger looks in on an actual penis enlargement operation, which is abruptly shown in all its gruesome detail. This scene, in which doctors are seen treating human ``meat'' like sushi, had the audience groaning and screaming, so unprepared was it for what was onscreen. Such is the vaunted ``diversity'' of Sundance.