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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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This just in at Movieline HQ: "With the return in popularity of the moustache, the organizer of New England’s largest moustache pageant [...] is introducing the world's first known International Moustache Film Festival in 2012." And, with a whole $100 in prize money, so remunerative!
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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.
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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.
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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!”
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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.
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Coming to Sundance with new films in the Premieres section, both Stephen Frears and Spike Lee were navigating new terrain, a pair of established directors seeking distribution for their independent features. Frears' betting memoir/dramedy Lay the Favorite went first, premiering to dismal reviews Saturday night. Lee's Red Hook Summer, a hotly anticipated entry that brings him back to his Brooklyn wheelhouse after the underperforming WWII pic Miracle at St. Anna, followed Sunday, drawing mixed initial reactions from Twittering press.
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A quick update on the flurry of Sundance deal-making of recent days, with well-received documentaries and less acclaimed but star-driven (read: marketable) narratives sitting pretty with distribution agreements. Will this be, as pundits predicted, a high-volume buying year in Park City?
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The Daily Beast's Marlow Stern reports from Saturday night's hot ticket: "Aziz [Ansari], barely audible over the jabbering crowd and telling jokes skewering everything from the gay hookup app Grindr to the sanctity of marriage, is bombing terribly. He’s visibly annoyed. All of a sudden, Cuba Gooding Jr. bum-rushes the stage out of nowhere, snatches Aziz’s microphone, and yells, 'Everybody, shut the FUCK up! Have some respect for the black men onstage.' Aziz —who is Indian— looks baffled, and when Cuba exits, remarks, 'Y’all would be paying more attention if we were showing Boat Trip up here!' Aziz: 1, Cuba: 0." [Sundance Channel/Daily Beast]
Every so often festivals feature films that so offend the sensibilities of audience members that post-screening Q&As take an ugly turn, with upset viewers voicing their beefs, and loudly, straight to the filmmakers in attendance. This year that provocation came in the form of Craig Zobel's Compliance, a drama based on an outrageous real-life crime that drew immediate backlash from some in attendance. Is being this year's The Killer Inside Me/The Woman a buzz-building coup for the film?
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