At the end of yesterday's well-received screening of Catfish -- easily the most buzzed-about documentary at this year's Sundance Film Festival -- one man raised his hand for the Q&A.
"This may be a minority opinion," he said. "I think you guys did a great job, but I don't think it's a documentary."
A murmur went through the crowd and the filmmakers became angry and defensive, but more on that later. In the meantime: Brother, I'm right there with you. There's something fishy about Catfish, and I'm not just talking about the title.
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After the premiere of Louis C.K.: Hilarious on Tuesday night, the comedian mentioned he was working on the most offensive joke he's ever written. "I like to take audiences to a bad place, then make them happy they went there," he explained. "I just haven't figured out the second part of the equation yet. The 'happy they went there' part." Still, the audience demanded to hear it, so Louis ended the evening with the (very offensive!) bit-in-development. WARNING: It contains profanity and disturbing, violent subject matter! Please don't click 'continued'! It is very offensive!
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Joel Schumacher's Chace Crawford starrer Twelve just got picked up in advance of its closing night screening at Sundance. The distributor will be Hannover House (???), a company that has previously released titles like Blonde and Blonder, Teen Yoga, and Zombie Farm. The deal was made for $2 million, but I wouldn't get too excited just yet, PC. [Variety]
By the time Movieline's Sundance HQ clears out tomorrow, your editors will likely have seen a combined total of more than 50 selections from this year's festival. Among those, maybe half to two-thirds will make it to movie theaters. And among those maybe an even smaller fraction will be worth catching up with when they hit your town. Of course, we might disgree on which titles those are, but beyond the peerless Animal Kingdom, the solid The Company Men and horrifying Buried, read on for a lightning-round of underdogs I can only hope land soon on movie screens outside Park City.
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Buried, the Sundance breakout starring Ryan Reynolds and snapped up by Lionsgate for somewhere in the $3-$4 million range, has been quite the Sundance conversation piece. I haven't seen it, but here's what a friend texted me after his screening: "Holy f**k. Most disturbing film I have EVER seen. I am sick to my stomach. I am in shock that I reacted so strongly to a film. My heart was literally pounding and I could barely breath during some scenes." But did he like it? "Loved it." OK then! In honor of this claustrophobe's worst nightmare, Movieline would now like to revisit eight other great "buried alive" moments from the catacombs of pop culture history. WARNING: Graphic violence and some spoilers follow.
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In May of 2002, handsome football player Pat Tillman turned down the fame and fortune of the NFL to enlist in the Army and fight in Afghanistan. "We might want to keep an eye on him," then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wrote to a colleague, and indeed, when Tillman was killed almost two years later, the administration advanced the narrative that Tillman had been shot while bravely defending his troops from the Taliban.
Only, that's not what happened. Tillman had actually been killed by his own troops in a case of friendly fire, and the Army's cover-up was so outrageous (Tillman's body armor, uniform and vest were burned) and all-encompassing (as leaked memos from the highest levels of government would show), that Amir Bar-Lev's Sundance documentary The Tillman Story can't help but compel. Movieline spoke to Bar-Lev this week about the film's deleted moments, the influence of the Greatful Dead on his style, and his outrage that a key conspirator is an important part of President Obama's administration.
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Spencer Susser's Hesher, an f'd up fairy tale about a shirtless nihilist who encroaches upon the lives of a grieving family, has sold to Newmarket for $7 million. The movie has gotten mixed reactions -- our own Stu's was lukewarm, while I found it appealing and quite moving (I actually cried in parts, particularly some later scenes involving grandma Piper Laurie). It definitely has cult-status potential. Deadline says that Newmarket committed after seeing the reaction of a paying audience in Salt Lake City, outside of the supportive Sundance bubble. [Deadline]
Last night, the Movieline gang caught the Sundance press screening of Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right, in which the Laurel Canyon writer/director takes another stab at chronicling the lives of the upwardly mobile free-spirits dotting the L.A. landscape. This time around, we're getting to know the Allgoods (nudge, nudge), a family of two lesbian moms -- Annette Bening as a physician and literal pants-wearer, Julianne Moore as a flakier aspiring landscaper -- and their two teenaged kids, conceived back in the '90s using sperm from an anonymous donor. The plot kicks in when son Laser (Josh Hutcherson, who we profiled in The Verge last summer) attempts to find his real dad; he turns out to be Mark Ruffalo, a motorcycle-driving restaurateur living in the area, who just happens to be growing a little weary of his freewheeling bachelor lifestyle. It sounds pat, but Cholodenko's light touch with her actors and skillful ear for the rhythms and thought-patterns of her favored demographic take it all to the next level.
On the next page, Kyle and I discuss our initial reactions to The Kids Are All Right.
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Sundance's Park City at Midnight section is always among the most discussed group of films every year the festival, and in 2010, the Sarah Polley-Adrien Brody sci-fi-horror freakout Splice is arguably the most discussed of its peers. Director Vincenzo Natali's film features Polley and Brody as Elsa and Clive, a couple who share a bed, a laboratory and a passion for cutting-edge genetic engineering. Confronted by front-office pressures that threaten to squelch their research, the pair goes for broke with a human-animal hybrid that not only thrives, but also acquires an independence that turns against its ersatz parents in decidedly unpredictable, horrific and shocking ways. Both a single-minded, cutthroat scientist and a doting maternal presence, Elsa represents a fairly radical departure for the 31-year-old Canadian star -- one she spoke to Movieline about before the film's recent Sundance premiere.
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One of the most buzzed-about movies at Sundance is Lisa Cholodenko's Annette Bening/Julianne Moore/Mark Ruffalo starrer The Kids Are All Right, and it just sold to Focus for a shade under $5 million. (Movieline hears that the film's budget was $6 million -- and that reps for the film were hoping to exceed that -- but that the film's crowd-pleasing nature and potential awards prospects helped seal the smaller deal). We're all seeing it tonight, so you can expect our reaction tomorrow. [Deadline]
The long history of the Weinsteins at Sundance added an unusual footnote this morning when an interview session at a Park City art gallery resulted in broken $1,200 sculpture. The sculpture in question -- a heavy, smooth, swooping piece of basalt entitled "Rising Phoenix" -- took a tumble and split clean in half prior to interviews for the Weinsteins' film Nowhere Boy, premiering tonight at at the festival. According to one Movieline source, the Weinstein Company picked up the tab quickly after hustling the press junket to a hotel across Main Street. Or... did they?
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After six days slogging through a snowy Sundance, a special kind of exhaustion sets in -- but the brilliant, taboo-busting mind of comedian Louis C.K. was the perfect prescription to shake me out of my stupor. In his first concert film, Hilarious (an ironically boastful title referring to a bit on how the language of hyperbole has lost all of its significance), Louis performs a 90-minute set covering everything from life as a newly divorced dad to our spoiled generation to a -- yes, hilarious -- recounting of a verbal confrontation with his 3-year-old daughter. Comedy Central paid the $200,000 it cost to make the film for the broadcast rights, but hopefully you'll have an opportunity to enjoy it uncut and with an audience. I honestly can't remember the last time I experienced such a long run of sustained, belly-clutching laughter.
Movieline had the honor of being the first to talk to Louis after the screening, still on a high from the raucous response. We covered everything from his grueling training regimen to his favorite comedy topic (gay sex) to his new show, Louie, on FX later this year. And oh yeah -- we got him to open up about Dane Cook and that whole plagiarism brouhaha from a few years back.
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ODDSAC, a 53-minute experimental film scored by psychedelic indie favorites Animal Collective, is a cortex-punishing experience. Like the demonic product of the unholy union of Stan Brakhage, Matthew Barney and an Elvira and the Party Monsters pinball machine, this "visual album," as the band and director Danny Perez refer to it, seeks to provide a visual palette to accompany the band's hard-to-describe signature sound -- a potent mixed-bag of atonal chords and crunches glossed with surf rock harmonizing. But be warned: If your familiarity with the band is limited to the more accessible stuff on Merriweather Post Pavillion, ODDSAC's jarring, horror-tinged soundtrack might put you off. For his part, Perez manages to concoct a bizarre and eclectic visual soup that frequently returns to the great outdoors: it opens with dark figures spinning hypnotic fireballs in an open field, then introduces us to a velvet-cloaked figure literally washing his balls in a stream (one of the film's many D&D-nerd-inspired images), and later offers a marshmallow roast gone horribly, horribly wrong.
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At this point, I think its fair to declare The Fence, 12th and Delaware, and Secrets of the Tribe the long-term winners of the Sundance poster wars. They're simply everywhere, despite the best efforts of a French chanteuse to play spoiler. Still, that didn't deter one industrious dog marketer from plying his trade yesterday -- and Movieline caught him in the act!
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One of the more intriguing, entertaining documentaries of this year's Sundance Film Festival, Smash His Camera tracks the life's work of self-described "paparazzo superstar" Ron Galella. Perhaps best known for relentlessly hunting Jackie Kennedy Onassis and her family (until a judge issued a restraining order that stands against Galella to this day) and once incurring a Marlon Brando knuckle sandwich that knocked out five of his teeth, Galella was also a dedicated tracker of Sundance founder Robert Redford. The film features a certain level of détente between Galella and Redford -- enough so that the shutterbug actually gets close enough to hand Redford his latest book -- but it definitely wasn't always that way. Click through for Redford's somewhat lengthy, wholly fascinating story about the lengths Galella used to go to to get his shot -- and the lengths Redford went to to dodge him. Also: Galella's exclusive response to Movieline!
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