Dark Night provokes, electrifies Sundance
PARK CITY, UTAH— Midway through Dark Night, the gun madness drama that electrified the Sundance Film Festival this past weekend, an angry young man named Robert tries on masks in a mirror.
One is a Batman mask. The other is a skull’s head death mask.
As Robert dons each one, he stares at the mirror, but he’s really staring at the camera. It’s a look that seems to say, “What are you going to do to stop me?”
That’s as close as this film gets to making a direct challenge to the audience, but it’s all that’s needed.
This third feature by Brooklyn filmmaker and teacher Tim Sutton is based on the July 20, 2012, movie theatre massacre in Aurora, Colo., during a midnight screening of the Batman film The Dark Knight Rises. A man named James Holmes fired multiple guns and tossed tear gas grenades into the audience, killing 12 people and wounding 70 others. He’s now serving 12 life sentences.
It was the worst such incident in U.S. history, but not the first and surely not the last.
Dark Night has no point of view and that’s what gives it such immense power. A killer could be anyone in our midst and we all could be a potential victim.
Sutton presents an average day in Anytown, USA, of citizens going about their business.
His actors are not famous; most of the characters aren’t given names, and the narrative is fractured and even surreal.
At least three of these people, one of them Robert (Robert Jumper), exhibit signs of anti-social behaviour that hint they might be the multiplex shooter.
The palpable sense of dread is pushed further into gloom by the bleak soundtrack tunes of Canadian musician Maica Armata, whom Sutton met on a trip to Montreal.
Dark Night doesn’t attempt to recreate the carnage, but that didn’t stop some audience members following the film’s Sunday world premiere from questioning Sutton’s motives.
One man asked Sutton what a film like this could possibly contribute to the “conversation” about gun violence.
“It’s not a gun-control movie,” answered Sutton. “This movie is not about answering questions.”
Another questioner wanted to know if the filmmaker has consid- ered whether Dark Night might inspire copycat killings.
A stricken look crossed Sutton’s face. He’s had that very thought and “it horrifies me,” he replied. Warrior posers As I tweeted early Monday, immediately following the midnight world premiere of Kevin Smith’s Yoga Hosers, this shambolic valentine to Canada is either “the best thing since maple bacon or 88 minutes of hockey stick to head.”
It all depends on your appreciation for Smith’s increasingly absurd sense of humour, which lately has been bringing this Sundance veteran and New Jersey native to Canada, the country he fell in love with during visits as a child.
Yoga Hosers is the second film in Smith’s planned True North Trilogy, which centres on very strange occurrences at a Winnipeg convenience store called Eh-2-Zed.
The shop is staffed by 16-year-old clerks played by Lily-Rose Depp, daughter of Johnny Depp, and her real-life friend Harley Quinn Smith, the daughter of writer/director Smith.
The two yoga-loving and rapsinging teens get caught up in an investigation led by Quebec police detective Guy Lapointe, played by a nearly unrecognizable but entirely game Johnny Depp. The Sundance program book succinctly describes the film as “an intoxicatingly silly pulp tale for the Instagram age.”
But Yoga Hosers does provide a closer look at the great chemistry between Lily-Rose and Harley. These two deserve a movie with more story and structure.
Smith said people have pointed out that Yoga Hosers bears some resemblance to Clerks, the 1994 film that launched Smith’s career after it premiered at Sundance.
Smith acknowledges the Clerks connection, but for him the link is to Bob and Doug McKenzie of SCTV.
“This is me trying to do Strange Brew with girls,” Smith said, and you don’t get more Canadian than that.