Spirits were bright Wednesday night in West Hollywood when Fox Searchlight celebrated the season with their annual holiday party -- really, just an excuse to fete Oscar candidates Win Win, Tree of Life, Shame, Martha Marcy May Marlene, and The Descendants like debs at a coming out ball. Movieline caught up with Fox Searchlight's hopefuls at the early awards-season shindig.
This weekend on Twitter, most of our tweeting luminaries avoided addressing the obvious (Paranormal Activity 3) and instead talked about Martha Marcy May Marlene, The Three Musketeers, and -- my word -- Johnny English Reborn. To the tweet machine!
One of the biggest discoveries you'll make this year -- and one of this fall's class of neophyte Oscar contenders -- is 22-year-old Elizabeth Olsen. The younger sister of Mary-Kate and Ashley may have earned her first credits as a child actor in her siblings' tween franchise-building movies, but she launches her very serious film career this October in the Sundance award-winning Martha Marcy May Marlene, Sean Durkin's deeply observed drama-thriller about a shell-shocked young woman (Olsen) who reunites with her family after spending years under the influence of a sexually abusive cult.
The opening scene of Sean Durkin's debut feature Martha Marcy May Marlene suggests we're in for a big rusty bread pan's worth of rural miserablism, and even though we're not, the yeasty grayness of those early moments is clearly intentional: A group of women in drab dresses and droopy T-shirts go about preparing dinner in a house whose unfinished interior looks either new and hastily erected or ancient and about to fall apart -- it's hard to tell which. A young boy stomps about in a dusty, scrubby yard; a woman sits on the porch working on a crocheted afghan. When dinner's ready, a bunch of men sit down to eat; then they leave the table -- the man who appears to be the leader murmurs something appreciative about the meal -- and the women take their places. Then there's one lone shot of a ton of dirty dishes jumbled into and around the kitchen sink -- there's no question who's going to be scouring them clean. It's as if Amishtown had been taken over by a nicer version of the Manson family.
Three months after its Sundance debut, Zal Batmanglij's stunning drama Sound of My Voice has landed a distribution deal with Fox Searchlight. The studio previously nabbed rights to Sundance '11 pick-ups The Art of Getting By (AKA Homework), Martha Marcy May Marlene, and Another Earth -- the second of two sci-fi-tinged Sundance entries co-written and starring phenom Brit Marling. Read Movieline's Verge interview with the multi-talented Marling and get ready to want to follow her anywhere. [Deadline]
If you thought last year's Sundance bounty yielded a strong crop of Academy Award nominees, just wait 'til the 40+ films to get distribution out of Park City hit theaters and start campaigning for Oscar glory. Should breakout star Lizzie Olsen start composing her acceptance speech now? Which film will emerge the Winter's Bone of 2011? Movieline's panel of experts look back on Sundance and weigh in: Which Sundance films will make it to next year's Academy Awards?
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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