Dispatch from the Sundance Film Festival

This year the Sundance Film Festival continued with its virtual format and my brother, William, and I purchased tickets to three premieres. Below we discuss the Sundance movie slate and review When You’re Finished Saving the World, Cha Cha Real Smooth and Am I OK?.
This conversation has been edited & condensed.

THE FESTIVAL
Annie: Looking at the overall slate of films available for this Sundance season, what trends did you notice across movies?
William: There weren’t “it” movies this year. I think everything landed very similarly.
Annie: Looking at Twitter, it seemed like some people liked certain movies, other people liked different movies, and there weren’t one or two rising to the top of the conversation.
William: I was looking at the past award winners over the past 10 or so years and it’s a mixed bag a lot of times. Some years, I’ve never heard of any of them, and some years I know almost all of them. This year fell into the trend of hit-or-miss [movies]. It seemed like it was a good year for documentaries. If we’re talking about movies that will continue past Sundance, I think it’s going to be the documentaries.
Annie: Should we get into the movies? Should we start with the best or end with the best?
William: I think we should start in order of what we watched.
Annie: So the worst?
William: So the worst…

WHEN YOU FINISH SAVING THE WORLD
In his directorial debut, Jesse Eisenberg tells the story of Evelyn (Julianne Moore) and Ziggy (Finn Wolfhard), a mother and son who struggle to communicate because they’re too preoccupied with their own diverging interests.

Annie: I do think it’s important to preface your mental state when you watched this movie.
William: Wow… You can buy the premiere screening, which is a three hour window, or you can buy the second screening, which is a 24-hour window, we bought the second screening for all of them. It was a very busy first 20 hours of my window. So I woke up very early in the morning to catch it right before it expired. So I was really tired. I watched it in bed, half asleep, with my coffee in hand. So maybe that’s why I thought it was terrible. Sam was sleeping, and I kept thinking, if this is any good, I’m going to pause this and restart and we can watch it together. And there wasn’t any point where I thought, I should wake her up to see this.
Annie: I liked it a little better than you did, but as more time has passed… I’ve found out this is the best way for me to assess how good a movie is. If days have passed, if a week has passed, and I’m still thinking about it positively, then that’s the mark of a good movie. For this one… days have passed and I’ve just thought more about how it wasn’t good. What tripped me up was I thought the premise was interesting and what it was trying to communicate about parent-child relationships could have been interesting. At the end of the day, it wasn’t a well-crafted story. And it did one of the things where it abruptly ended…
William: We know you how you feel about that.
Annie: Everyone knows I hate that. If done badly! I think sometimes you can do it well. There’s no comparison… but I’m about to compare this to Lady Bird. The parent and the child both have to make tiny movements to reach out to each other here, and that happens in Lady Bird too, but it's way more well done. This is insulting to Lady Bird. Lady Bird also ends kind of abruptly but that ending was earned. This movie didn’t finish what it was saying.
William: I didn’t even care, I just wanted it to be over. Everyone was so unlikeable and sometimes I don’t mind that. I’ve watched plenty of things where everyone is unlikeable. But it didn’t give you any reason to care about them at all. … People universally didn’t think it was very good.
Annie: Yeah, it’s not just us!
William: Poor Emma Stone produced it. She should get her name off of that.
Annie: Emma Stone… vet your projects better! The dialogue was so weird.
William: Aggressively weird.
Annie: The kid in the movie is in high school, so you can make some excuses for him being ignorant and awful. But there was minimal examination of the mom's behavior and she was behaving crazy.
William: Please don’t see this movie. Don’t waste your time. The longer it’s been since I watched it, the more I’m hating on it.
Annie: I thought Finn Wolfhard did a good job.
William: That’s a generous compliment.
Annie: Justice for the dad in this movie.
William: This poor dad… really gets the short end of the stick. He’s just dealing with these two jerks. They didn’t go to his “celebration,” spoiler alert.
Annie: That was so sad.
William: He was so upset. “You both knew about it.”
Annie: And then they claimed that they each thought the other person was going, which again for the son you can maybe excuse, but for the wife to say that is ridiculous.

CHA CHA REAL SMOOTH
When describing the origins of Cha Cha Real Smooth, Cooper Raiff said he wanted to tell a coming of age story of a 12-year-old (David, played by Evan Assante), 22-year-old (Andrew, played by Cooper Raiff) and 32-year-old (Domino, played by Dakota Johnson).

Annie: Let’s move on to the best movie. I love this movie so much. Talk about a movie I haven’t stopped thinking about!
William: I know. I was thinking about it at work the other day and almost started crying.
Annie: This movie was so beautiful.
William: When I was browsing the catalogue of movie options and I saw that Cooper Raiff’s second movie was going to be at Sundance, it was an immediate, “I’m seeing that one.” I love his first movie [S**thouse], but, holy cow, did this live up to expectations. It’s all I’ve been thinking about ever since. I want to rewatch it.
Annie: Me too.
William: Need we say more?
Annie: As someone who hasn’t seen his first movie [yet], I was completely blown away. I didn’t realize how young he was to have written, directed and starred in this movie and to have done all three parts so well in his mid-20s. He wrote a movie that handled everyone’s perspective in a really beautiful way. It had so much wisdom behind how it handled interactions and showed these life moments. It had really funny moments smashed up against really emotional moments that made me cry… It was just a real movie watching experience, I loved it.
William: It was so good. Just so good. I don’t even know how to articulate it.
Annie: The whole cast was great. Dakota Johnson… amazing. Leslie Mann… always a winner. Vanessa Burghardt was really, really great. And Evan Assante.
William: Only downside, the main character’s name was Domino. It really messed me up. It was a distraction.
Annie: No explanation! Not a nickname. Even the hamster had a more normal name. They did a great job of examining Cooper Raiff and Dakota Johnson as leads in the movie. Even though Cooper Raiff was the primary lead, we really saw Dakota Johnson’s character’s arc and it was woven in, in a nice way. It was a great way to handle a secondary lead female character, whose motivations could have been brushed aside in a lesser movie.
William: Every character was fleshed out. It was so funny, so honest, so good.
Annie: I cried three times!
William: And it got picked up by Apple! It was the biggest acquisition check of the festival. I think Cooper Raiff is just great. Get used to his name! I just loved it so much, it’s all I think about. You can’t believe these are written lines, you just feel like everyone is really speaking. And that’s when a movie or play or TV show is so good, when you’re watching it thinking “How did someone write this dialogue?"
Annie: It was the opposite of, not to bring it up again, When You Finish Saving the World, where I was so aware that this was dialogue that had been written. Cha Cha Real Smooth was the opposite.

AM I OK?
This directorial debut from Tig Notaro and Stpehanie Allynne tells the story of best friends Lucy (Dakota Johnson), who is coming to terms with her sexuality, and Jane (Sonoya Mizuno), who is preparing for an impending move to London.

William: Am I OK? was good. It just wasn’t as good as Cha Cha Real Smooth.
Annie: If we had watched Am I OK? before Cha Cha… I might have enjoyed Am I OK? more. But following Cha Cha Real Smooth, any movie was going to be underwhelming.
William: We watched it the following day.
Annie: Cha Cha Real Smooth, still running in my mind. Dakota Johnson in both movies, making it all the more distracting.
William: Am I OK? was really good. It was really funny. It just fell a little flat for me.
Annie: Similarly, I’m struggling to think of exactly why I didn’t think it was great. It was good. Something about the way the story was told, it didn’t 100 percent click together for me. I think there were some pieces missing in terms of building the momentum to where the characters got in the story. I thought the script was good, it was well directed, the cast was great.
William: I agree. At times, I was confused at what it was about, and I think it changed what it was about a couple of times. It was still good though! I would watch the next Tig Notaro and Stephanie Allynne movie, because I think for their first shot, it was really, really solid.
Annie: You know what I think part of it is? Dakota Johnson’s character, part of her problem that she was to fix in the movie, is she’s being very passive in her life. And I think that’s hard to show in an interesting way on screen. Had this been a book, I think it’s easier to do that with narration and more insight into the character’s head, and it doesn’t translate as well on screen. Also, the way they showed the character’s text message on screen was infuriating because all of the texts ended in a period. And they are supposed to be 32 years old. Please remove the periods!
William: They might remove them [in the next edit]. There is a lot of texting, which I do like. They showed the texts really well, because a lot of movies mess it up.
Annie: And I thought the messages made sense, it was exactly how you’d text with a friend! But just take out the periods.

THE AWARDS
William: The U.S. Dramatic Competition movie winner was Nanny, and that was the first I was hearing of this movie. I was following Sundance pretty closely on Twitter, so I think it kind of caught people by surprise. Cha Cha Real Smooth won the audience award for U.S. Dramatic Competition, which I expected and was very excited about. The Festival Favorite Award went to a documentary called Navalny. If we’re comparing to last year, CODA won a lot of [the awards] and this seemed like it was a spreading of the wealth across the board, which speaks to the fact that there wasn’t an “it” movie of the festival. It was all people showing their love for different things.
Annie: And if you haven’t watched CODA yet, go watch CODA.
William: CODA and Cha Cha Real Smooth will both be on Apple TV plus. And Ted Lasso. Get over there!