Sundance Lament

Tomorrow is the last day that Lars von Trier's Antichrist will be playing at The Music Box is Chicago. I really, really, really want to see it and am considering making a run down tomorrow night. To avert this situation, I e-mailed Sundance Cinemas last week asking if they were considering bringing it here and was told that it wasn't on their booking calendar. Whoever answered my inquiry was kind enough to pass along my request to the film buyer. (Or so I was told.) Since the person was so accommodating, I also asked that Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans be added to my wish list while also thanking them for booking Precious.

I thought it rather odd that Antichrist was not scheduled as von Trier isn't exactly a nobody. He co-founded the Dogme95 movement and has won the Grand Prix and Palme d'Or at Cannes. The first two installments of his "U.S. trilogy" - Dogville and Manderlay were shown here. Furthermore, Antichrist stars Willem Dafoe, a Cheesehead, and caused a shit storm at Cannes earlier this year with accusations of misogyny leveled at von Trier and some audience members finding themselves suffering from melancholia after leaving the theatre.

Antichrist is not an obscure film by an even more obscure director so, especially considering all the hoopla around it, why didn't the film buyer at Sundance jump at it? Is there something about Madison audiences that would lead him/her to think that we'd avoid it like the plague?

A similar situation exists for Herzog's treatment of Bad Lieutenant. Herzog is fairly well-known and the film stars Nicholas Cage. It opens at Sundance Kabuki in San Francisco tomorrow yet the film buyer for Sundance here in Madison didn't have it on the list.

I see the new Twilight movie is coming soon as is Fantastic Mr. Fox and Sherlock. And Lord help us all, Did You Hear About the Morgans?, directed and written by Marc Lawrence who you may remember as the writer for many episodes of Family Ties and the classic Miss Congeniality 2: Armed & Fabulous. This is a "quality selection from a major distributor"?

I fear that the films that I am looking forward to such as Antichrist, Bad Lieutenant, John Woo's Red Cliff, and Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus will pass Madison right by. (OK, Parnassus has a good chance of being picked up by even Point or Eastgate since Heath Ledger is in it.) Terrence Malik's Tree of Life - will that bypass us as well? A Town Called Panic was nominated for an Oscar but what are the chances of it being screened here?

(On a side note, did Jim Jarmusch's last film, The Limits of Control, play here in Madison?)

I had high hopes when Sundance opened that it would actually be an arthouse. Unfortunately it has turned out to really be just a high class multiplex.