Also in Tuesday afternoon's round up of news briefs, Magnolia Pictures and Strand Releasing each pick up a 2012 Tribeca Film Festival title, while Monique Gabriela Curnen and Kathy Baker join an indie thriller. Marina Abramovic nabs a French festival prize, Mark Cuban gives his two cents at a producers conference over the weekend and what to do about those pesky website responses… The British have an answer.
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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.”
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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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Park City was eerily peaceful early this morning with nobody around and last night’s dusting of snow on the ground. Soon enough – by this afternoon, or this evening, or certainly tonight – that will all change as filmmakers, press and industry folks roll in and the dreaded promoters (“leveragers,” Sundance founder Robert Redford called them in his inaugural address today) pimp out this snowy mountain town like a toddler in a tiara. Appropriately, Redford pointed to the current hardships for filmmakers, and the world at large. “Times are hard and grim,” he acknowledged, later offering optimism. “Independent film is healthy. That doesn’t mean it’s easy.”
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