A Brokeback Sundance

A Brokeback Sundance Snow! Stars! Swag! Gay parties! And, oh yeah, movies. Once upon a time, the Sundance Film Festival, tucked away in snowy Park City, Utah, was all about movies -- raw, low-budget movies with no star egos and studio suits to screw with the independent spirit of untried young filmmakers.

That is so over.

The sorry lack of unique films and the surfeit of swag-trolling stars -- Paris Hilton, go home! -- combined to cast a pall over Sundance 2006. On the bright side, the fest went courageously gay. While mainstream America clustered around Oscar favorite Brokeback Mountain as if it were the first gay love story ever filmed, Sundance waved its queer flag high. The Queer Lounge, next to the Sundance box office on Heber Avenue, featured its annual "Homos Away From Home" party and had plenty to celebrate. Quinceanera, the Dramatic prize winner, deals with gay gentrification in Los Angeles' Echo Park and a Latino teen (Jesse Garcia) who loses his virginity in a three-way with two gay WASP gentrificators. All Aboard documents a cruise organized by Rosie O'Donnell for gay and lesbian families, including an ugly protest from the religious right when the ship docks in Nassau. Small Town Gay Bar tracks two saloons in Mississippi that offer solace to patrons in the face of rampant homophobia in the Deep South. Little Miss Sunshine features 40-Year-Old Virgin star Steve Carell as a gay Proust scholar who tries to off himself when a hunky grad student leaves him for another prof. Puccini for Beginners focuses on a lesbian (Elizabeth Reaser) who takes up with a straight woman (Gretchen Mol) and -- yikes! -- a man (Justin Kirk). In the terrific documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated, director Kirby Dick hires two lesbian detectives to crack the secrecy of the movie-ratings board. In Wordplay, a mind-teasing peek at a crossword-puzzle competition, one of the finalists is gay and proud. During the crime drama Alpha Dog, the audience booed at the scene when Harry Dean Stanton tells Bruce Willis, "I think your son is half a fuckin' faggot."

What do you know: a film festival that features a full range of gay characters fully integrated into all layers of society. Just like the real world.

Sadly, the rest of the fest played out like a fantasy. Make that a nightmare. Stars were everywhere: partying, grabbing freebies and stealing photo ops from the newcomers who really need the exposure. Case in point: Quinceanera, the winner of the Jury and the Audience awards for best feature, is a lyrical and emotionally rigorous piece of work from Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer, who together wrote and directed it. And Christopher Quinn's God Grew Tired of Us, the winner of the Jury and Audience awards for best documentary, offers a riveting account of three Sudanese "lost boys" adrift in America. The double wins by both films are unprecedented in Sundance's twenty-five-year history.

Big deal, huh? But you'd hardly know it from the media, who'd rather focus on star shine. There's been a call for festival founder Robert Redford to drive the swag-mongers from his cinema temple. One snag: Redford doesn't own Utah. Promoters can set up shop wherever they want.

Still, Mr. Sundance can and needs to do something about the plague of star infestation. Jennifer Aniston gives her best screen performance in Friends With Money, but what is she doing promoting it at a festival devoted to emerging talent? And Justin Timberlake deserves to take bows for his surprisingly strong turn as a reluctant kidnapper in Alpha Dog. But his movie, like Aniston's, has been pre-sold and set for release. Don't buy the argument that both films premiered at Sundance out of fest competition. It's the fight for media attention that counts. What are the odds of the spotlight swinging from Aniston to Emily Rios, the gifted but unknown star of Quinceanera? Stop with this premiere star-fucking. Give Sundance back to the filmmakers and let the stars whore themselves on ET and Access Hollywood.

Did Sundance 2006 do anything right? Though the films in the Dramatic competition were substantially below par, there were a few diamonds strewn among the coal and ash. Here's the breakdown:

The Good . . .

Little Miss Sunshine, directed by music-video vets Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris from a script by Michael Arndt, had fest snobs holding their noses at the stink of commerciality. The nutso comedy sold for $10.5 million -- a Sundance record -- so it had to be bad. Actually, it's heartfelt and hilarious. A dysfunctional family, led by Dad (a career-best Greg Kinnear), Mom (Toni Collette) and their depressed son (Paul Dano), heads off to California in a van so seven-year-old daughter Olive (the irresistible Abigail Breslin) can enter the Little Miss Sunshine contest. Along for the ride is Mom's gay suicidal brother (Carell, on a roll) and Dad's heroin-snorting pop (Alan Arkin). The road is twisted, and so are the laughs. This one is a winner.

Quinceanera uses the Hispanic tradition of celebrating a girl's fifteenth birthday to tell a funny and touching tale of the culture clash between Mexicans and Anglos in present-day Los Angeles. Cheers to Chalo Gonzalez -- a veteran of a handful of Sam Peckinpah movies, including The Wild Bunch -- for giving the girl's uprooted uncle a core of compassion and sly wit. His was the best performance I saw at Sundance.

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints is writer-director Dito Montiel's film memoir about growing up in Queens, New York, in the 1980s with the hoods and junkies he called friends and the parents, beautifully portrayed by Chazz Palminteri and Dianne Wiest, he left behind. Shia La Boeuf plays the young Dito, and Robert Downey Jr. is the man he became. But keep your eyes on newcomer Channing Tatum as Dito's loose-cannon friend Antonio. Shirtless and oozing physical and sexual threat, Tatum stalks his turf like Brando in Streetcar. Even when Montiel's script goes off the rails -- like almost every other script in the 2006 Dramatic competition -- the actors pull you in.

Wristcutters: A Love Story posits a limbo where those who kill themselves go to live the same desolate lives they left behind. But no smiling. It's a comedy, bleak as hell but buoyed by the unique vision of writer-director Goran Dukic. Patrick Fugit and a lively Shannon Sossamon play the suicides who find love in the land of the dead.

The Science of Sleep, written and directed by Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), outdoes Wristcutters in the bizarre department. Gael Garcia Bernal, as playful as a puppy, portrays an artist who can't tell dreams from reality. You won't know where you are, either. But Gondry's visual exuberance is impossible to resist.

Iraq in Fragments, from James Longley, is up there with God Grew Tired of Us for most eye-opening documentary. And don't discount Davis Guggenheim's An Inconvenient Truth. The film is basically a lecture from Al Gore about global warming. But the former VP delivers the message with disarming humor and the ardor of a true activist.

Wordplay, from Patrick Creadon, uses New York Times crossword-puzzle editor Will Shortz to get at the national mania for putting the right words in the right boxes. This brain bender is so suspenseful your palms will be sweating. And the interviews with inveterate puzzle solvers, such as Jon Stewart, Ken Burns, Bob Dole and Bill Clinton, will have you howling.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated reveals the movie-ratings system -- and those who do its business in secret -- for the sham it is. Kirby Dick's indispensable doc shows the hypocrisy of rating sex scenes. Straight sex: Sharon Stone's attempt to swallow Michael Douglas whole in Basic Instinct gets a free pass with an R rating. Gay sex: Kevin Bacon's futile attempt to bugger Colin Firth in Where the Truth Lies gets an NC-17. Look how far we haven't come.

the Blah . . .

Sherrybaby, written and directed by Laurie Collyer, has the cliched contours of a TV movie: Junkie mom gets out of prison and tries to go straight and claim her little girl. It's Maggie Gyllenhaal, pure sizzle as Sherry, who pins you to your seat.

Come Early Morning represents the debut of actress Joey Lauren Adams as a writer and director. Her film, about a small-town Southern gal (Ashley Judd) whose messed-up daddy messes her up with men, is achingly familiar. But Judd is a shining talent. She grabs you.

Half Nelson, directed by Ryan Fleck, is another example of actors redeeming trite material. Ryan Gosling is galvanic as a high school teacher on drugs, and Shareeka Epps matches him as the student who tries to hold him together.

. . . and the Ugly

The Darwin Awards is named for the prize won by people who kill themselves in stupid ways. Writer-director Finn Taylor certainly does damage to his career with this frenzied fiasco. Joseph Fiennes and Winona Ryder are appallingly mismatched as insurance investigators. Saddest of all is the presence of Chris Penn, a gifted actor who died in January and doesn't deserve this train wreck as his swan song. Stephanie Daley, from writer-director Hilary Brougher, won the festival's screenwriting award, which underscores the sorry state of this year's contenders. The turgid tale of a teen (Amber Tamblyn) accused of killing the baby she gave birth to in a bathroom stall heaps on more manipulation when she is examined by a forensic psychologist (Tilda Swinton) who is -- get this -- pregnant again after a miscarriage. Fine acting by Tamblyn and Swinton can't save this twaddle.

At Sundance '06, I saw it happen in films as diverse as Forgiven, The Hawk Is Dying, Right at Your Door and Somebodies: clumsy scripts hobbling actors who are willing and able to fly. Even in a fest infamous for celebs feeding at the freebie trough, it's not a pretty picture.