“That was excruciating,” exhaled director Kieran Darcy-Smith as the lights came up on the Sundance opening night premiere of his first feature, the Australian dramatic thriller Wish You Were Here. The theater buzzed with appreciation, sure enough, and the film’s emotional blows strike as sharply thanks to strong performances by Joel Edgerton and Felicity Price. But movies like these almost always prompt that irksome question: Are we all at risk of suffering a case of the film festival goggles?
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No matter how many gifting suites, D-list "celebrities" and/or head-splitting parties the malevolent forces of modern commerce may stuff into the wintry idyll of Park City over the next week, we'll always have the movies. And as usual, "we" also means studios and distributors with money to burn and release slates to fill. Let the Sundance bidding wars begin!
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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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When marriage stops being a given, realistic romantic comedies are born. In Save the Date, sisters Beth (Alison Brie) and Sarah (Lizzy Caplan) are on different relationship paths – one toward marriage, another away from it. Michael Mohan’s film reflects the attitudes of a generation who suffered through their parents’ divorces. Playing Andrew, Beth’s fiance, Martin Starr can identify all too well with that premise by looking at his circle of friends: He’s hit that time in life when everyone’s hearing or tuning out wedding bells.
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Now that Golden Globe winner Octavia Spencer's sitting pretty with her Best Supporting Actress trophy, the L.A. Times breaks out a choice quote from an October visit to the set of her Sundance 2012 pic Smashed: "You do a movie like [The Help] to get a movie like this," she said of her new film, which sees her go from spitting retorts and baking special pies as The Help's Minny to helping Mary Elizabeth Winstead battle alcoholism. "It’s nice... to play roles when I'm not just a sassy black woman." Hear, hear. Now let's get Spencer the Oscar, already. [LAT]
Don't let singer-songwriter Johnny Nash anywhere near the new trailer for the Ewan McGregor movie The Perfect Sense, because it's a Contagion-style disaster film where everyone loses their senses one by one until they can't see, hear, smell, taste or -- I guess -- touch anything. It's a little hokey and a little hilarious, but with Eva Green (the best Bond girl of all time, period) in tow, there may be some genuine hope for this one. If only I could see or hear it!
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We're all gagging on Oscar bait at the moment, so free yourself (and your esophagus) with a glimpse at the film's playing in four Sundance out-of-competition sections, including Spotlight, Park City at Midnight, Next <=> and New Frontier. Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie, the tantalizing, all black UK version of Wuthering Heights, and that amazingly harsh Indonesian film The Raid are all set up for their Utah debuts. Check out the full roster after the jump.
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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.
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I Melt With You, Mark Pellington's dark -- and I mean way dark -- meditation on midlife crises and male bonding, proved to be decidedly difficult stuff for many critics Sundance Film Festival debut last January. Back then I wrote in favor of giving its existential punk romanticism a chance to make its case (especially if you're a fan of folks like Jeremy Piven, who turns in a great face-melting performance). You'll finally get your chance to weigh in on the IMWY debate this fall as the film makes its way to VOD and limited theatrical release; get in the spirit with three new stills that highlight the trajectory of Thomas Jane, Rob Lowe, Christian McKay, and Piven's bromantic weekend of horrors.
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Among this year's crop of true indie success stories -- this summer's Another Earth and Attack the Block among them -- is Bellflower, a film described as "a love story with apocalyptic stakes." Sweet and inventive -- then brutal and utterly devastating -- the debut feature from writer-director-star Evan Glodell was borne of over three years of sacrifice and dedication, DIY in spirit and in practice (as Glodell's homemade flamethrowers, groundbreaking camera rigs, and the tricked out car dubbed Medusa attest). So how did this $17,000 micro-budgeted labor of love (and pain) wind up with a distribution deal and some of the buzziest word-of-mouth of the season?
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As a wise man (Okay, Elvis) once said, only fools rush in. But then we've all been foolish once or twice, haven't we? So prepare your heartstrings for the familiar aching that will ensue as you watch the dreamy first trailer for Like Crazy, Drake Doremus's Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winner about two college kids (Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones) who fall for each other right before graduation and then discover that love, and life, gets a lot more complex when your soul mate is half a world away.
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Last January, when director Lucky McKee debuted his latest horror pic, The Woman (about a family man who traps and imprisons a feral lady he finds in the woods) at the Sundance Film Festival, he got quite the audience reaction; one moviegoer fainted during the film's brutal denouement, and another stood up at the post-film Q&A to berate McKee over the film's value. Today, we've got the first trailer for the controversial pic; watch it and decide -- does The Woman appear to be a work of "art" or "bullshit"?
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First time writer-director Evan Glodell spent years obsessing over his feature debut Bellflower, a raw tale of love, betrayal, and apocalyptic-level emotional tumult set among a group of near-nihilistic twenty-somethings in Southern California. (Part of that obsession? Custom-building the badass, fire-breathing Mother Medusa muscle car, which figures into the film.) After the jump, see a new exclusive image from Bellflower and find out how you can see it in Los Angeles before it opens on Aug. 5.
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Movie producers routinely say they're about artistic integrity, but Metalwork Pictures' Andrew Levitas finds himself in the unique position of actually being an artist himself, having come up through the New York City art scene as a heralded painter, sculptor, and photographer. So when he speaks of box office potential as being almost incidental to a film as work of art, he's the rare producer who actually sounds genuinely unconcerned with financial returns.
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Writer-director Andrew Okpeaha MacLean makes his feature debut with the L.A. Film Fest entry On the Ice, a character tale about two Alaskan teenagers wrestling with guilt after the accidental murder of a friend. With its isolated setting, cast of non-actors, and rollercoaster ride of a Sundance premiere, the indie drama isn't the easiest sell for mainstream America, but it's a film that deserves to find an audience -- a window into a generation of Alaskan teens balancing native culture with hip-hop, at a unique crossroads between community traditions and the volatile influence of urban culture.
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