Take that, Hollywood Reporter! After an early trade article labeled it "Sundance's first bomb," Dito Montiel's police drama Son of No One, which stars Katie Holmes, Al Pacino and Tracy Morgan, has sold to Anchor Bay for somewhere around $2 million. Now we'll all get to see more than three seconds of Tracy Morgan's dramatic acting chops. [Deadline]
Kevin Smith made waves in Park City by buying his own controversial horror pic, Red State, and announcing his impending retirement from directing, but buzz continued to build around his next (and allegedly final) film, Hit Somebody. The 1970s-set hockey pic, named after a Warren Zevon song, will reunite Red State cast members Michael Parks, Nicholas Braun, Michael Angarano, and Kyle Gallner, the recent Verge interviewee who also starred in the Sundance entry Little Birds. Movieline caught up with Gallner to ask: How did Smith recruit him for a second go-round?
If you've seen No Strings Attached you're already hip to the fact that Lake Bell's motor-mouthed scene stealer is one of the film's true highlights. The funny actress -- who was at Sundance with her well-received short film Worst Enemy -- displays some of those same fast-talking chops in the latest edition of Movieline's Sundance video interview series. Ahead, watch the charming Bell discuss her awkward-but-hilarious directorial debut, why she hopes it will become her calling card, and how Hollywood is no longer a boys' club.
If you thought last year's Sundance bounty yielded a strong crop of Academy Award nominees, just wait 'til the 40+ films to get distribution out of Park City hit theaters and start campaigning for Oscar glory. Should breakout star Lizzie Olsen start composing her acceptance speech now? Which film will emerge the Winter's Bone of 2011? Movieline's panel of experts look back on Sundance and weigh in: Which Sundance films will make it to next year's Academy Awards?
As with every year at Sundance, the festival hangover descends quickly and lingers for days, weeks, even months afterward. (Don't believe me? Ask Jennifer Lawrence.) For the team at Movieline, meanwhile, this means an embarrassment of interview riches and other chatter in which we'll be rolling for a while to come. I mean, Miranda July stopped by! Let's hear from her.
As the Sundance Film Festival winds down and everyone remembers what how hard it is to breathe so far above sea level, the 2011 the Sundance Film Festival Awards were doled out last night by co-hosts Tim Blake Nelson and John Cooper, both attired as snowflakes (Franco & Hathaway, take note!). Like Crazy, the story of young long-distance love starring Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones, took the Grand Jury Prize as well as an acting prize for Jones, while to.get.her nabbed the Audience Award. Check out the full list of winners below! [Deadline]
The midnight movie crowd at Sundance hooted for the grindhouse pic Hobo with a Shotgun, but it downright fell in love with the charming horror-musical short that played in front of it in a brilliant stroke of spot-on programming. The twists in Jerome Sable and Eli Batalion's 12-minute short The Legend of Beaver Dam are best left unspoiled, but suffice to say it involves a campfire tale, screaming children, plenty of gore, and a metal rock sing-off between a nerdy kid hero and a bloodthirsty killer. Sable and Batalion are supposedly working on a feature along the lines of Beaver Dam, so take a peek at this teaser and keep an eye out for more from these two. [StumpySam.com]
Considering he's been making movies for almost sixty years, you might find it a bit surprising that director/producer Roger Corman thinks this is the best time for indie filmmakers to express themselves creatively. Getting those expressions distributed, though, is another matter entirely. Ahead, watch Movieline's Alonso Duralde chat with Corman and director Alex Stapleton about her documentary Corman's World, independent films, and which Sundance entry the legendary director loves on the title alone. (Hints: Hobo. Shotgun.)
Tired of those run-of-the-mill biopics and staid Iraq war dramas that avoid sensationalism out of respect for their subjects? Want a peek into the orgiastic, debauched, ultra-violent underbelly of Saddam Hussein's Iraq? Director Lee Tamahori brought all that and more to an unsuspecting audience -- and conjured his own comparisons to David Fincher's The Social Network, naturally -- with The Devil's Double, the guiltiest thrill of Sundance 2011.
There's something hilarious about eavesdropping on an argument between strangers, but if you learn enough about the people involved, you stop laughing and maybe start feeling sorry for those people. And that's the arc of Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure, which explores the 1990s underground comedy phenomenon and explores the all-too-human side of it.
So you might have heard director Gregg Araki's latest, Kaboom, is somewhat... forward with its sexuality. This isn't exactly a new development for the indie bad boy, who has long approached his films' subject matter -- from The Living End to The Doom Generation to Mysterious Skin -- with a frankness as tender as it can be shocking. Movieline's Alonso Duralde caught up with Araki at Sundance, where the filmmaker and his cast (including, pictured from right to left, Juno Temple, Thomas Dekker, Chris Zylka and Haley Bennett) elaborated on the process of exploring and nailing down Kaboom's funny, trippy and, yes, horny dynamics.
Although it wasn't quite as universally panned as Dito Montiel's Son of No One, and no one lost it and shouted at the filmmakers in a post-screening rant, Mark Pellington's dark bromantic thriller I Melt with You was the most controversially-received film at this year's Sundance Film Festival to land a distribution deal. (Read Movieline's assessment of the film and its disastrous first screening.) Hours after it was announced that Magnolia Pictures would release the polarizing film, Movieline caught up with Pellington and screenwriter Glenn Porter to discuss how they've been processing the negative reviews, how the deal with Magnolia went down, and what kind of tweaks will be made to the film before its theatrical release.
2011 marks the 20th anniversary of the landmark Sundance Film Festival when Todd Haynes' Poison took the Dramatic Jury Prize and Jennie Livingston's Paris is Burning won the Documentary Jury Prize, a moment that film historians look at as the birth of what critic B. Ruby Rich would call the New Queer Cinema. And Sundance renewed its queer bona fides this year with several films that have received immediate acclaim.
The idea of Paul Rudd playing a bearded, long-haired stoner whose sweet idiocy gets in the way of his good intentions guarantees lots of laughs in Jesse Peretz's My Idiot Brother. Yet while the screenplay delivers lots of funny lines and situations, there's a sour aftertaste of misogyny and borderline-homophobia that made me leave the theater not completely sold on the project. (And yes, I know it was co-written by a women -- Peretz's sister Evgenia, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.)
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