by Steven Rosen

Sundance’s final day – Sunday – is always a nice time to catch up on screenings of award winners. You can observe the audience response and take time between screenings to reflect on the festival in general. Here are some observations from my Sunday at Sundance:

1) There will be a lot of second-guessing of the choice for the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize, Ira Sachs’ low-key character study “Forty Shades of Blue.” At a not-sold-out Eccles Theatre screening, the response was polite but unenthusiastic. One young man who went outside to the lobby about a half hour after the film started asked a festival volunteer, “When does this get interesting?” Personally, I thought the acting by Rip Torn (as a legendary, hot-tempered Memphis record producer modeled on Sam Phillips) and Dina Korzun (as his much-younger Russian common-law wife) was fabulous, as was the milieu and the deep-soul music. For Torn, it's a performance as good as his turn as a country-music singer in "Payday." But the third character in the film’s romantic triangle (Darren Burrows as Torn’s adult son) was kind of mopey and dull.

2) Noah Baumbach’s “The Squid and the Whale,” a look at a dysfunctional but highly literate New York family, was better-received at its Eccles screening (it won awards for direction and screenwriting) than “Blue.” But the somewhat abrupt ending of the 81-minute film caught people by surprise. Is this the rare movie that’s too short?

3) Whatever fate awaits the Documentary Grand Jury Prize winner, Eugene Jarecki’s “Why We Fight,” the director himself seems ready to become as passionate a public spokesman on the social responsibilities of film as, well, Robert Redford, himself. His movie, which seeks to examine the corrosive impact of the military-industrial complex on American democracy, was met with prolonged applause at its sold-out Sunday screening at Eccles. Afterward, Jarecki answered questions about his film’s purpose with such eloquence that I can see him on a public-speaking tour now. Or maybe on the stump as a political candidate.

4) The introduction of juried awards for World Documentary and Dramatic films really did increase the name-recognition of the fest’s international films. But it came at a price – it made the Saturday-night awards ceremony interminable. This presentation really needs to be rethought; it now goes on much too long. It might also help if the various juries try to halt the creeping growth of special prizes – there were nine.

5) Finally, if the festival bus service gets any slower, or the various routes between movie venues any longer, maybe they should start screening films on the buses next year.

(My review of films in this year’s festival will appear later this week at ReallyGoodFilms.com.)