​After eight days in Park City, I'm back in Los Angeles; the festival continues through the weekend, with the awards announced Saturday night. Here are some notes on films I didn't get a chance to write about at length. Keep an eye out for my wrap-up of the festival in next week's print edition.

2 Days in New York
Actress/director Julie Delpy's (of Before Sunset/Sunrise fame) self-proclaimed "sequel" to her 2007 film 2 Days in Paris has Delpy's character split up from the earlier movie's boyfriend, played by Adam Goldberg, and now living with Mingus, a journalist (who Delpy's character meets while working at the Village Voice) played by Chris Rock.  More >>

​A mash-up of cinema and journalism, document and performance; a concert film sandwiched between a mission statement and a staged punctuation to a career:  the LCD Soundsystem documentary Shut up and Play the Hits offers more basic narrative satisfaction than many of the fiction films shown here using documentary aesthetics in the name of realism.

Structured around the hyper-self-conscious New York post-punk dance act's supposed final live show ever -- an epic affair that packed Madison Square Garden last April -- the film weaves together highlights of the show itself (including maybe half a dozen full performances chosen from the 29-song set); excerpts from an in-depth interview conducted by Chuck Klosterman a week before the show; and verite footage of the day after the show, documenting LCD singer/figurehead Murphy's first day as a "retiree," from the moment he wakes up in the previous night's white dress shirt, to a celebration dinner with the band and friends.
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​The theme of the 2012 New Frontier -- the Sundance section devoted to installation work, experimental film and video and art utilizing/ exploring emergent technology -- is "Future Normal." At a preview of the lineup held for press, programmer Shari Frilot defined that branded theme as reflective of an attempt to analyze the role of film in an age when "screen culture is evolving," to the point where "media technology integration really sustains humanity."

It's fitting the first piece visitors to the New Frontier gallery encounter, and by far the highlight of the whole exhibit, uses the trendiest technology of the moment to synopsize the past.
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​Broken social and economic systems, and the broken lives and homes they leave in their wake, have been a big theme at Sundance this year. Across documentaries and fiction features, broached directly and indirectly, it seems the new American dream is a longing for the old normal; accumulation or advancement is the stuff of fantasy when it's a back-breaking struggle just to maintain the status quo.

On Tuesday I caught up with two of the festival's most talked about films. Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wild -- which sold to Fox Searchlight after what was reportedly a heated, weekend-long bidding war -- and Craig Zobel's Compliance are both movies about food chains, and the urgency of holding on for dear life to whatever it is you've got. But while Compliance coldly assesses how easily humanity, compassion and community can slip away when everyone's trying to hold on to what's theirs, Beasts of the Southern Wild is the inverse: it's a movie about a community for whom holding on to what's theirs is a communal effort, encompassing humans and animals, physical and metaphysical.

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Photo by Michael Rauner, courtesy of San Francisco Film Society

​Jaw dropping news came down around noon Park City time Monday, when Sundance issued a press release confirming that Bingham Ray -- indie film legend, co-founder of seminal 90s indie distribution outlet October Films and current executive director of the San Francisco Film Society -- had died. Ray, who was only 57, had been attending the film festival Saturday when he reportedly suffered a stroke, and had been hospitalized in Salt Lake City ever since. Reports circulating over the weekend listed his condition as "stable," making today's news even more shocking.

Over the past 25 years, Ray has been as instrumental as anyone in founding and fostering the independent film marketplace, of which Sundance has been a key flagship. More >>

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With Monday marking the midway point of my stay in Park City, here's a notebook dump on a few films I haven't had a chance to write about at length. More >>

​The first image in Detropia, the excellent new documentary about the decline of Detroit from filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady Jesus Camp, is of a conductor raising his baton to lead an orchestra. It's a clue that what we're about to see is a city symphony film, in the tradition of Man With a Movie Camera -- a poetic collage of real people moving through their lives, interacting with their environments.

In this case, that environment is a Detroit which, as the rest of the country is shocked into austerity by the financial crisis, is still reeling from the cost-cutting of the Big Three automakers, who have moved most manufacturing jobs to Mexico or China. As the jobs have disappeared from Detroit, so have the people: at the start of the film, we learn that one family moves out of the city every twenty minutes, and 10,000 abandoned homes are slated for demolition. The city is, as its unpopular mayor puts it, "broke," so he announces a plan to "consolidate" the community, asking people who live in outlying, underpopulated areas to move downtown so that the city can better provide them services. But moving costs money, and the city isn't offering a financial incentive.

What the mayor's plan ignores -- and the film powerfully brings into focus -- is that many of those who haven't left Detroit are bound to their neighborhoods not just by financial constraints, but by an emotional connection to their city and its history. One of the film's most colorful characters is Crystal Starr, a 20-something local blogger who stalks through abandoned buildings with a flashlight in one hand and a Flip cam in the other. She's motivated, she says, by "the memory of this place when it was banging."  More >>

​The most divisive dramatic competition entry yet to screen at Sundance, Simon Killer is the second feature directed by Antonio Campos, director of Afterschool and producer of last year's Sundance hit Martha Marcy May Marlene. Like Martha Marcy, Simon is built around an attractive, enigmatic young person whose ostensible recent trauma -- in this case, the titular recent college grad, played by Brady Corbet, comes to Paris in an effort to recover from a rough break-up  -- both muddles their vision, and complicates the film's view of their behavior. They are character studies which willfully obfuscate the truth about their main characters, psychological thrillers only offering misleading glimpses into psyches.

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Mads Brugger is sort of the VICE magazine version of Sasha Baron Cohen, as financed by Lars Von Trier. His last film was The Red Chapel, an exercise in hidden camera comedy with unusual socio-political stakes, which I put on my Top 10 for 2010.

In Chapel, Danish journalist Brugger posed as the director of an experimental theater troupe made up of two Danish-Korean comedians, one of them severely developmentally disabled, on a "cultural exchange" trip to Pyongyang. Unbeknown to their North Korean hosts, the whole thing was a front, an excuse to smuggle cameras into a closed state.

That Brugger and his crew pulled it off with no evident consequences is, some would say, a testament to Brugger's genius, both as a performer and as a conductor of contexts for those performances. Others have suggested the fact that he's still alive and working is a red flag that his "documentaries" are fully faked.

If Chapel was the document of a fiction created for the purpose of capturing a kind of truth filmable under no other means, his hilarious, troubling new film The Ambassador (like Chapel, produced by Von Trier's Zentropa) is the same, but on a much grander scale, in a much more visibly dangerous setting, and with an even trickier relationship to absolute truth. More >>

​Queen of Versailles, the latest film from documentarian and photographer Lauren Greenfield (Thin), follows David and Jackie Siegel, the 70-something Westgate timeshare mogul and his 40-something trophy wife who were in the middle of building the largest single-family home in America when the financial crisis hit, throwing Siegel's sub-prime mortgage-based timeshare business into a tailspin.

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