To love grindhouse cinema is to forgive the limitations of low budgets, bad actors, and cheesy premises milked for their lowest common denominator thrills; to intentionally make grindhouse cinema is to welcome the laser scrutiny of the film geekerati, a much greater artistic gamble. Miss the mark with that audience and you get a box-office nightmare -- just ask Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. But hit the B-movie sweet spot just right, as Jason Eisener mostly does in his gleefully gory Hobo with a Shotgun, and you could find yourself living the dream.
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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]
Forget Lizzie Olsen; the breakout star of Sundance 2011 is clearly 67-year-old Rutger Hauer, who's taken Park City by storm with his star turn in Jason Eisener's grindhouse homage Hobo with a Shotgun. To celebrate the gory, tongue-in-cheek vigilante tale about -- yes -- a homeless hero with a shotgun, the Hobo folks hosted a thematically relevant Bloody Mary hour this morning where Hauer walked in wielding his titular firearm and regaled Movieline with six important revelations/life lessons:
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Do tongue-twisting, pretentious-sounding, or generic movie titles turn you off of a film even before you see it? Precious, renamed from the unwieldy Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire after its 2009 Sundance debut, we're looking at you. But every year yields a new batch of mildly nondescript-to-annoying-to-hard-to-remember film titles, and Sundance 2011 seems inundated with them, from movies from Win Win to Like Crazy to Martha Marcy May Marlene (which I dare you to remember correctly). And so, Movieline put it to our panel of critics and bloggers: Which of this year's Sundance movie titles would you rename if you could?
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"Let's tear this place apart!" So instructed director Jason Eisener before Friday's midnight premiere of Hobo with a Shotgun, the unabashedly campy Canadian-American grindhouse flick about a homeless drifter who cleans up the streets of a depraved urban metropolis with only a pawn shop shotgun and plenty of gloriously insane death-dealing catchphrases in his arsenal. And while it may have disappointed Eisener and Co. that an actual riot didn't erupt before or after their film, they must have been pleased that Hobo played exactly right to just the genre-loving crowd it was made for.
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