I have come to the conclusion that the documentaries at Sundance are of higher caliber than the dramatic features. I have also come to the conclusion that anything that’s been through the Sundance script workshop sucks. We saw “Dopamine” last night. It’s about Rand(John Livingston), a computer animation specialist whose mother has Alzheimer’s, and whose father has therefore researched the neurological and hormonal causes of all emotions. Love, apparently, comes from a secretion of pheramones that releases dopamine in the other person. Who cares? Rand is developing an animated character, Koy Koy, that can feel emotions. When he falls in love, he decides also to develop a mate for Koy Koy even though it’s not in the business plan of the company he works for.I See what I mean? understand how difficult it is to write a film that explains the science of an emotion, and I applaud the writer for trying, but I am here to tell you that one also must develop characters and advance a logical plot to keep the audience’s interest.
The best part of the evening was going to a condo in Park City where, at a small private party, I met Paul Vachier, someone I’ve been reading on the noend list for years, and Russ Klein, another list member who has actually started a multimedia empire of gay pornography. He showed me a series of temporary tattoos, paper doll-like refrigerator magnets of nude men with various outfits to dress them in, a DVD movie called “The House of Morecock,” and a new magazine, “Xodus.” I found all this amazingly clever, and I wonder if it’s possible to develop such an empire outside the world of gay porn.
