He’s certainly no stranger to the world of entertainment, but Grammy-winning musician Common only recently began channeling his energies into acting. (His first film: Joe Carnahan’s Smokin’ Aces). And yet, relative newbie status be damned! The hip-hop veteran, currently seen on AMC's Hell on Wheels, sat down last week with Movieline to discuss his Sundance pic LUV, a Baltimore-set family/gangster tale from director Sheldon Candis, and his goals for future greatness: “God willing, I’ll become one of the great actors of our day.”
more »
As the 2012 Sundance Film Festival drew to a close with a flurry of sales, Movieline posed THE question to a panel of critics and bloggers: What was the best film of this year’s festival? While many of Sundance’s high profile offerings came and went with a whimper, a few notable titles rose to the top of Movieline’s poll; fest darling and Grand Jury Prize winner Beasts of the Southern Wild earned wild praise among our pundits, for example, but so too did some of this year’s more controversial entries. Hit the jump to see which top films the critics picked.
more »
Park City did indeed turn out to be a robust marketplace this year, with buyers snapping up over two dozen features and docs out of Sundance 2012. Ranging from genre pleasers to indie charmers to potential future Oscar picks and beyond – and veering from critical fest duds to overwhelming crowd favorites – the class of Sundance ’12 is an intriguingly mixed-but-mostly-promising bag of films that will be dotting the cinematic landscape in the year or so to come. Here’s an updated comprehensive look at what sold and which films you should be looking forward to.
more »
Critic faves Beasts of the Southern Wild and The House I Live In took top Grand Jury Prize honors tonight at the Sundance Film Festival, where the John Hawkes Oscar hopeful The Surrogate and Kirby Dick's The Invisible War nabbed this year's audience awards. Also earning Sundance 2012 kudos were the music doc Searching for Sugar Man, Mike Birbiglia's Sleepwalk With Me, and the Aubrey Plaza starrer Safety Not Guaranteed.
more »
"I'm trying to work in studio movies, but they won't hire me. I get feedback from my agent saying, 'She's too much of an indie queen.' And then on the other side, my name doesn't get the financing to do a movie over $1 million. And I'm called 'the indie queen.' So it's really a challenging path because I know so much about the indie side of the business. Because I grew up in it. It's like I'm back in junior high here at Sundance. There's John Cooper and Trevor Groth and we all grew up together, you know? But it's different times. And this stuff gets projected onto me. People are like, 'You're here every year, you do so many indie movies.' And I'm like, 'No, I did Broken English five years ago.'" [indieWIRE]
It may be a relatively quiet Sundance year – even Pixar’s Lee Unkrich, in town for the festival, Tweeted his dismay at the “mixed bag” of movies – but films are selling. Granted, they’re mostly the ones with name actors and mostly okay-to-decent reviews (with a few exceptions), but buyers continue to be getting busy in the snow. The latest batch of pick-ups (Olsens and robots and scares, oh my!) after the jump.
more »
It says something about how far Ice-T has come since his gangsta rap days that his directorial debut, the hip-hop documentary Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap, premiered at Sundance to a house packed with hip-hop heads and white older moviegoers who likely know Ice better from Law & Order: SVU than “New Jack Hustler.” And it says something about the film itself, which explores the historical landscape of hip-hop in intimate detail with over 40 of Ice-T’s fellow rappers, that even the L&O-watching grandmas in the audience were bopping their heads the whole way through.
more »
Movieline caught up with Will Forte this week in Park City, where he was at Sundance to support Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim’s absurdist midnight offering Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie. In the film, Forte plays the uptight, moustachioed owner of a sword store in a mall that bumbling filmmakers Tim and Eric have taken over following the epic failure of their brush with Hollywood. Forte compared the more restricted sensibilities of his gig on Saturday Night Live to working within the madcap, surrealist stylings of the cult duo.
more »
Days after the polarizing Red Hook Summer hit Sundance, co-writer/co-producer James McBride unleashed a passionate missive comparing the black artists' experience to cultural servitude: "You get to drive the well-meaning boss to and fro, you love that boss, your lives are stitched together, but only when the boss decides your story intersects with his or her life is your story valid. Because you’re a kind of cultural maid. You serve up the music, the life, the pain, the spirituality. You clean house. Take the kids to school. You serve the eggs and pour the coffee. And for your efforts the white folks thank you. They pay you a little. They ask about your kids. Then they jump into the swimming pool and you go home to your life on the outside, whatever it is. And if lucky you get to be the wise old black sage that drops pearls of wisdom, the wise old poet or bluesman who says ‘I been buked and scorned,’ and you heal the white folks, when in fact you can’t heal anybody." [40Acres.com]
Ben Lewin’s The Surrogate emerged as the undisputed hit of Sundance 2012, landing the biggest sale thus far (a $6 million sale to Fox Searchlight) with the unlikeliest of subjects: A paralyzed man’s quest to lose his virginity, based on the life and writings of Bay Area poet Mark O’Brien. Thanks to Lewin’s sensitive and honest script and an impressive turn by indie favorite John Hawkes -- who shines with wit and grace in a physically demanding performance as O’Brien, who has no use of his limbs due to polio but begins to explore his sexuality with the help of a hands-on sex therapist (Helen Hunt) – The Surrogate earned consecutive standing ovations and got critics buzzing with the possibilities for next year’s Academy Awards.
more »
Our Sundance bidding-war preview may have foreseen only part of the fervor around the John Hawkes/Helen Hunt drama The Surrogate, but how's this for compensation: As predicted, the Richard Gere/Susan Sarandon Wall Street thriller Arbitrage went to Roadside Attractions (with its partners at Lionsgate) for just over $2 million. Bam! That's not it for deals, either: Get the updated roster of Sundance pics -– and see which offerings earned raves, and which didn’t -- after the jump.
more »
As Sundance 2012 passed the halfway point, the celebs and hangers-on and people watchers started filtering out of Park City, leaving the sidewalks actually walkable and the shuttles downright spacious. I prepare to go home tomorrow, with many more interviews and reports to come, but the glorious peacefulness has me misty-eyed about the week that was; here's a quick rundown of highlights from the first week of the fest -- the movies I loved, the events that transpired, and yes, the time I met with Ice-T and Coco to talk hip-hop while they munched on pancakes.
more »
In his new Brooklyn-set drama Red Hook Summer, director/co-writer Spike Lee tackles the complex topics of religion and redemption within the modern African American experience, as filtered through the eyes of a spoiled Atlanta teenager (Jules Brown) forced to spend one hot, explosive summer with his preacher grandfather in the projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn. It’s a richly conceived portrait of the Brooklyn neighborhood as microcosm for the black community at large, very much a Lee joint through and through. But, as the filmmaker reminded audiences this week at Sundance, where he railed against the Hollywood system, “it’s not a sequel to Do the Right Thing!”
more »
As sort of presumed, the John Hawkes/Helen Hunt-starring, man-in-an-iron-lung-virginity-losing, awards-ready indie drama The Surrogate made an impressive market showing Monday following its Sundance premiere, selling for $6 million -- more than twice the figure noted in last week's festival bidding-war preview -- to Fox Searchlight. Not bad! The studio also has all but closed a deal on director Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wild; drop back by for more coverage of each from Sundance and, for The Surrogate in particular, from next year's awards season. Ahem. [Deadline]
If you've grown tired of the gimmickry and diminishing quality of "found footage" horror, Sundance's Midnight program just delivered the cure: V/H/S, an anthology film comprised of shorts by six up-and-coming horror/indie filmmakers, each working within the parameter that their story be told via found media. The Devil Inside this ain't; V/H/S is fresh and pulse-quickening to the end, one of the best discoveries of this year's fest.
more »
