Dear Sundance Diary: Times Are Grim, But the Hype is Here

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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Today in Brilliant Pairings: Rise of the Planet of the Apes + Project Nim

Over at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles, tonight's double feature is a particularly inspired pairing of simian cinema from 2011: the cautionary thriller Rise of the Planet of the Apes and the equally harrowing doc Project Nim. What lessons can be taken from this matching of monkey movies?
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Project Nim Opens Sundance, Proves Life Stranger Than Fiction

It says something that out of four feature-length films opening the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, the hottest ticket in town wasn't the celebrity doc (Sing Your Song) or the buddy cop thriller starring two famous-for-an-indie-movie stars (The Guard). Instead, Thursday's big premiere was Project Nim -- or, as it was referred to around Park City, "the monkey movie" -- a documentary by returning Grand Jury Prize/Audience Award winner James Marsh, whose first and last Sundance debut (Man on Wire) went on to win an Oscar.

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