This year’s Sundance is a peculiar beast. While it’s a solid slate of films at this year’s fest (the best in a while, which bodes well for 2011), there’s no one outstanding OHMIGOD flick. No Winter’s Bone, no Precious, no Little Miss Sunshine. Instead the audience raves and critical accolades are spread over several films: a year with the New York Times in Page One, sci-fi drama Another Earth, Formula One doc Senna. Of course, we’re only halfway through the fest, so it’s always possible, albeit unlikely, that a front-runner could still emerge.

As to what I’ve been up to over the last day, I caught the end of a performance by the Low Anthem, the Rhode Island band of multi-instrumentalists I fell in love with after seeing them at the Croc last year. They played several songs from their upcoming release Smart Flesh (out next month), and yes, they even broke out the bow and saw.

---

Photo by micro-scope, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

Meanwhile in movies, Canada’s newly Oscar-nominated Incendies is a visually stunning meditation on the legacy of anger and hatred over generations. When twentysomething Montreal twins Simon and Jeanne open their mother’s will, they find that they must fulfill her dying wish: to deliver two letters, one to the father they thought was dead, and the other to the brother they never knew existed. The twins set off to Lebanon, and in their journey they discover their mother’s life story and the shocking family secrets contained therein. With strong performances from the cast and dynamic sound design, writer-director Denis Villeneuve has adapted Wajdi Mouawad’s play Scorched into something all his own. Incendies is a slow-burner that lingers long after the film ends.

---

This morning started off with Reagan, Eugene Jarecki’s (Why We Fight) surprisingly disappointing portrait of the former President, both the mythical figure and the contradictions inherent to the man. While Jarecki is thorough as always and makes excellent use of archival footage, he unfortunately tries to do too much, and in covering Reagan’s entire life, he gives short shrift to Iran-Contra (among other topics) that could be a film in and of itself. The pre-Presidential portion of the film, especially Reagan’s time as the head of the actors’ union and his six years as a GE spokesman-cum-man of the people are the most eye-opening, but Jarecki pulls too many punches for Reagan be an effective doc of either the man or the President.

But definitely the worst film I’ve seen at the fest this year is Lord Bryon. The title character is a pseudo-philosophical layabout who loves the ladies. Why they love this lumpy lazy-eyed pothead back is beyond me. Throw in a bunch of “quirky” friends and acquaintances and you’ve got the sad sack version of Napoleon Dynamite. Add some “experimental” filmmaking and–voila!–a fat man rolling around on the ground superimposed upon a televangelist shouting about “the abomination of desolation” for several minutes of my precious life. WOOF.