Sundance Day 2

We saw two movies on the second day of the festival, and they were very redeeming after our bad movie watching day previously. 

Manhunt
Documentary Category

Synopsis from Sundance Website-

On May 2, 2011, Osama bin Laden, America’s public enemy number one, was killed by Navy SEALs in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The raid, a watershed moment that gripped most of the world, lasted a mere 40 minutes. But the hunt for bin Laden took two decades.

The search began with a team of mostly female CIA analysts, known in intelligence circles as the Sisterhood. These women were trying to take down bin Laden before most of us even knew his name. Piecing together scraps of intelligence, they uncovered a secret terrorist organization, Al Qaeda, and warned Washington of this new impending threat. Their warnings were repeatedly ignored…until the 9/11 attacks, when all the rules changed.

MANHUNT unfolds like a thriller. Renowned filmmaker Greg Barker garners unfettered access to the inner circle of a clandestine war on terror and creates a riveting tale of espionage and the moral choices of war.

This was produced by HBO, so look for this to come out at their channel eventually. I would highly suggest this movie. Sometimes the confusing foreign names and places become a cluster, but this is beautifully pieced together so that it's easily understood. It was also neat watching this after watching Zero Dark Thirty because you are able to see some of the real life people behind the movie. 

After the movie had ended, the director and two ex-CIA members came up for a Q&A, and it was extremely interesting. One of the CIA members was a higher up in the counter-terrorism group who worked in the field in the Middle East for years while the other was an analyst who worked on tracking terrorists from CIA HQ. They both had some interesting perspectives on the thing, and let's just say that the counter terrorism guy has some different ideas on enhanced interrogations techniques than what you might see on CNN.

Afternoon Delight 

US Dramatic Category

Synopsis from Sundance Website-

Rachel is a quick-witted and lovable, yet tightly coiled, thirtysomething steeped in the creative class of Los Angeles’s bohemian, affluent Silver Lake neighborhood. Everything looks just right—chic modernist home, successful husband, adorable child, and a hipster wardrobe. So why is she going out of her gourd with ennui? Plagued by purposelessness, Rachel visits a strip club to spice up her marriage and ends up meeting McKenna, a stripper whom she becomes obsessed with saving. She decides to adopt McKenna as her live-in nanny, and this bold move unleashes unimagined and colorful waves of change into her life and community. It becomes clear that Rachel is feverishly, desperately trying to save her own sense of who she is.

In a perfect storm of hilarious writing, performance, and direction, first-timer Jill Soloway pinpoints the ambivalence of privileged, educated women seduced by an idealized vision of marriage and motherhood, yet deadened by the stultifying realities of preschool auctions, lackluster sex lives, and careers that have gone kaput. Afternoon Delight compassionately revels in the existential trials of a Peter Pan generation battling too many choices, resisting adulthood, and distractedly tapping their iPhones instead of tuning in to what matters.

This has not yet been picked up by a studio, but I definitely hope it gets picked up. Some of the parts were pretty raunchy, but overall, it was a hilarious and thought provoking movie. The dynamic between the down-on-her luck stripper and the upper middle class women in this movie was very interesting and hilarious at times. The interaction with some of these women's husbands got even more interesting and tense at times...and for all you "Glee" fans, Jane Lynch was hilarious as a therapist who tends to share too many personal experiences with her patients.