I'm trying something new here; a little video podcasting from Sundance after my 8:30 a.m. screening of "American Teen," a documentary about a year in the life of four kids at an Indiana high school and easily the best movie I've seen here yet. Bear with me while I work the kinks out of the presentation; next time I won't point the camera into the sun and I'll try to avoid close-ups of the chin that ate Pittsburgh.
Speaking of that city, I subsequently caught "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh," an adaptation of Michael Chabon's first novel by adapter/director Rawson Marshall Thurber ("Dodgeball"). Since Chabon's literary voice -- wordy, scintillating, outrageously entertaining -- is the chief asset of his writing, I'm hard-pressed to understand what filming his work, and thereby stripping out that literary voice, can bring to the table. And it's true that this "Mysteries" is in many ways a too-familiar coming-of-age saga, redolent of everything from "The Graduate" to "Garden State." In fact, Peter Sarsgaard shows up in this one too, as a charismatic, ambisexual rebel-boy who lures hero Jon Foster into an emotional three-way with Sienna Miller. If this were "Jules & Jim," Sarsgaard would have the Jeanne Moreau role.
Still, it's quite watchable, and a mobster supplot involving Nick Nolte as Foster's kingpin dad is a hoot -- Nolte's doing Tony Soprano without any of the neuroses. This makes two Chabon adaptations to have made it to the big screen, and "Wonder Boys" is still the better one by a good fraction. I eagerly await "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay," due (supposedly) in 2009.
