May 12, 2006
They're Here: Sundance Institute Launches Week-Long BAM Residency
After a refreshing three-and-a-half month break, The Reeler returned to the Sundance beat Thursday night as the Sundance Institute at BAM series finally got underway in Brooklyn. It seems like only yesterday I was stalking a sort-of giddy Robert Redford over lunch, and now that he has returned with most of his entire Park City crew--including the Institute's executive director Ken Brecher, Sundance festival director Geoffrey Gilmore and director of programming John Cooper--to spotlight a few members of his organization's Class of '06, I feel as though I am one 20-inch snow drift away from being magically lifted back to the frigid tumult of the real deal.
Little Miss Sunshine directors Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton introduce their film and its young star, Abigail Breslin, Thursday at its BAM premiere (Photos: STV)
All right, fine--I am exaggerating. But at least the faces looked like Sundance, with the aforementioned staff commingling with New York-based alums Hilary Brougher, Paul Rachman, Ryan Fleck, Anna Boden, Josh Marston, Rose Rosenblatt, Marion Lipschutz and God only knows who else. A popular Patricia Clarkson made the rounds once or twice, while directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris fielded a virtually endless receiving line after the NYC premiere of their festival darling (and $10 million Fox Searchlight dice-roll) Little Miss Sunshine.
"We're very nervous about the New York audience taking this in," Dayton said during his introduction, looking out on a crowd guzzling sugar-rimmed lemon drops. "But thank God you've all been drinking." In the end, Sunshine drew the same steady stream of laughter it experienced during its Utah bow, and the filmmakers expressed their relief at the afterparty.
"It's kind of like this dream scenario of these two institutions which we've known for years, " Dayton told me. "And the idea that they'd come together and that our film could be part of the opening gala, is just, you know..." He shrugged. "Actually, standing here at the end of it all, I can say it was as good as we had hoped. Everything that you could have hoped might happen--a really fantastic, smart audience."
"I was nervous because Sundance is the warmest, most receptive audience you can hope for," Faris added. "And I was worried that this is New York, and it's a Thursday night and people are coming form work, and you don't know what kind of mood they're in. And also the little bit of talk that the film sold for a lot of money at Sundance. And I don't think that's a great introduction to the film. So I was worried that a more cynical crowd might not respond. But again, because it's a Sundance event--"
"At BAM," Dayton emphasized.
"At BAM," Faris said. "I mean, I wish we had something comparable in L.A. They draw great people with their program, and Sundance has connections with all kinds of great people here, and it's exciting that the festival is here."
The travel is certainly a hell of a lot easier, at least for folks like Brooklyn's own Jennie Livingston, whose documentary Through the Ice will screen in the series' shorts program. "BAM is a great place for these films to land," she said, also recalling the days when trailblazing films like her own Paris is Burning epitomized Sundance as both a world-class breeding ground and market for independent cinema. "It was a much smaller festival, but of course, it was very exciting. It went from a first film--this little documentary--to something where people knew what it was. And in a sense, I became a filmmaker. And I went back to Sundance for the first time this year with this short. Now, of course, the festival is much bigger, and in a sense, it suffers from its films' success because it's so overwhelming and big. On the other hand, I saw the most amazing assortment of films. I mean, I felt like so many of the films I saw were in the spirit of what I imagined Sundance should be about. Films like Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy, or the Al Gore film [An Inconvenient Truth]. Two opposite ends of the spectrum, but both films that when you see them, you say, 'These should be made.' "
Moreover, when I look at the Sundance at BAM program, I cannot help but think that these are the films that should be screening here. As I've said at least a hundred times, you cannot go wrong with So Yong Kim's In Between Days or Brougher's Stephanie Daley, the latter of which will be the focus of a discussion between Brougher and producer Ted Hope Saturday at 3 p.m. Goran Dukic will be in town to introduce his brilliant Wristcutters: A Love Story, while Byron Hurt's hip-hop doc Beyond Beats and Rhymes will unspool a series-high three times in addition to a special screening and discussion for area high school students. Carter Smith's Cannes-bound Bugcrush joins the ungodly Before Dawn in the shorts program, and all of you cine-pervs can run down with your trenchcoats and hand lotion on Saturday night to check out the art-porn anthology Destricted.
Additionally, BAM is hosting work from the Institute's other labs and programs throughout the week: Composers Raz Mesinai, Gyan Riley and Maya Beiser perform next weekend; the Sundance Theater Songbook opens up May 15; and Sunday, the festival offers a free reading of Tanya Hamilton's screenwriters lab work-in-progress, Discovering Stringbean and Marcus. The whole series closes out May 21 with kind of a do-it-yourself screening and panel discussion, "Four Independents That Turned the Tide"; viewers are invited to screen one of four films--Polyester, Gas Food Lodging, Spanking the Monkey or The Unbelievable Truth--before sitting in on a panel discussion with the four filmmakers behind each--John Waters, Allison Anders, David O. Russell and Hal Hartley, respectively.
"Where Sundance is a captured audience, here, we really looked to make sure that every film you walked into, you had a piece of Sundance," Cooper told The Reeler. "You felt it like it was the same kind of experience--you have a dialogue. And we did look at films that had more than one Sundance story behind it; they either went to the labs, or they're supported through the doc fund. There are many threads that run through the program. We could have programmed it ourselves and brought it here, but we decided that this was a place to partner with because they have theater, music and film, which is what we do. It was the perfect place. It didn't look like just the festival here--it looked like the whole institute."
See? I told you this place looked familiar.
Posted by stvanairsdale at 10:11 AM | TrackBack
January 29, 2006
Leave in Silence, Flee in Terror: Sundance 2006 Calls it a Festival
From the back seat of a car on the way to the Salt Lake City Airport, I am picking up the pieces of my severe Sundance Day 10 wall-smack and placing them in the only context my devastated mind will allow: It is over. Saturday's awards ceremony lasted a relatively quick 90 minutes, mostly painless with the exception of a world cinema juror falling off the stage and Alexander Payne's Barbarino haircut.
In Between Days filmmakers So Yong Kim (L) and Bradley Rust Gray, caught on a screen grab from the press steerage-class quarters "anterior room" during Saturday's Sundance Awards Show (Photo: STV)
In fact, several New York filmmakers (all covered over the last few weeks by The Reeler, not quite coincidentally) enjoyed an impressive showing in the final tallies, with Hilary Brougher claiming the festival's screenwriting prize for her Stephanie Daley; Dito Montiel taking home a directing and ensemble cast award for A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints ("I'm taking it back to New York for all of the kids," he told The Reeler after the awards, "But I'm still gonna keep it."); So Yong Kim winning the Independent Vision Award for her brilliant In Between Days ("Yeah, New Yorkers were great tonight," she told me, pumping her fist. "We rocked."); Carter Smith receiving the Shorts Jury Prize for Bugcrush; and, of course, Chris Quinn accepting both the Audience Award and Special Jury Prizes for his Sudanese Lost Boys documentary, God Grew Tired of Us. Along with dramatic competition winner Quinceanera, the two films were the first in festival history to win both top prizes in the same year.
Then Half Nelson got picked up by ThinkFilm, some asshole stole my scarf at last night's awards after-party and I decided that does it: I need a couple of days off. So congrats to all the New York filmmakers, crew and actors who crashed the Sundance party in 2006; after a month or eight of therapy, I should be ready to tackle the Class of 2007. Much sooner--say, Feb. 1--I will be back at Reeler HQ with an attempt to reclaim a working knowledge of what's happening around this city of ours. As always, thanks for reading, and I will catch you in a couple of days.
Posted by stvanairsdale at 04:29 PM | TrackBack
January 28, 2006
Sundance 2006: All Over But the Flying (and Maybe Some Hardware)
Well, that was fun. A four-film marathon closed out my Sundance viewing experience Friday, with Dito Montiel's uber-hyped A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints occupying The Reeler's closing-night slot. Festival staff outside the Library screening venue stopped handing out wait list placeholders around No. 200, and inside the theater itself, the Saints buzz bounced from seat to seat, aisle to aisle, wall to wall. Anyone who was not chatting about the film's sales potential was yammering about its front-running candidacy for a festival prize. All in all, even as the lights dimmed at 11:34 p.m., the Library may have been the only place in Park City where adrenaline seemed to have overtaken fatigue.
Of course, that has as much to do with the quality of Montiel's (above) quasi-coming-of-age film as the bloodrush associated with scoring a ticket to see it. Saints is a lightning bolt of a movie, brilliant in its kinetic vistas of Astoria, Queens, and smoldering aftermaths of violence and chaos. Granted, it is nothing you have not seen in one fashion or another before; Montiel leans unapologetically on the cinema of Scorsese, Lee, Cassavetes and (in one especially odd, derivative sequence) even P.T. Anderson. But in its hybrid of family drama and urban mystique, Saints inhabits a space wedged between total control and total inexperience. You know what you are watching, but nevertheless have no idea what is coming next.
No idea, that is, unless you know Montiel's life story, on which Saints is partly based and which The Reeler broached here a few weeks ago. In the post-screening Q&A, the filmmaker noted that finding that balance--as well as that between the past and present he breaks up with flashbacks--came down to a certain... well, flexibility. "Once we started filming, the script kind of went in the garbage can," Montiel said. "I'm not going to teach 15-year-olds how to curse, you know? So I'd just sort of go around and make sure the heart of the scenes would happen, and then it was like, 'Go crazy.' And they went crazy, and it just sort of worked in this weird way."
Some scenes' histrionics will no doubt be trimmed when--not if--the film gets its distribution deal. Saints lives and dies by its emotional ebbs and tides, which currently leave too little to the imagination--especially as young Dito (Shia LaBeouf) wrangles with his father's (Chazz Palminteri) desperate clinging. As present-day Dito, Robert Downey Jr. returns to Astoria for a series of tight-lipped interludes with old friends Nerf (Scott Michael Campbell), Antonio (Eric Roberts) and his ex, Laurie, whom Rosario Dawson imbues with a completely unexpected, heartbreaking honesty. Montiel said the film and its cast came together after Downey's early producing commitment--not that his attachment as a star totally reassured the director. "It terrified me to have him play the role because we didn't really have any idea if it was going to work," Montiel said in his usual mile-a-minute, hand-waving style. "I was never even really much of a fan of his, you know? I know him, and I love him in this movie, but I never saw Chaplin or all the movies that people go nuts for. I'd always be like, 'Oh. Breakfast Club.' And he'd be like, 'I wasn't in the fucking Breakfast Club.' "
Earlier in the day, I had the chance to catch Wristcutters: A Love Story at the Eccles Theatre. All 1,270 seats were filled to watch Goran Dukic's quirky tale of a young suicide (Patrick Fugit) who travels the afterlife (which looks an awful lot like the Mojave Desert) with two acquaintances in search of his lost love, who also killed herself. The resulting story features Tom Waits as a sort of God figure and a final scene that non-verbally says more about love in 60 seconds than Jeff Lipsky's offensive Flannel Pajamas conveys with two hours of dialogue. MCN's David Poland noted that Wristcutters is likely this year's Garden State or Napoleon Dynamite, a fairly appropriate analogy that might overlook the film's more inaccessible tendencies; the metaphysics of suicide (and Dukic's shrewd indictment of cults, cowards and its other, less idealized practitioners) and a muscular sense of irony do hijack the narrative from time to time. And though the film is also in the running for an audience or scriptwriting award, Wristcutters seems a more likely lock for DVD cult-classicdom than any sort of Earth-shattering theatrical surge.
Same goes for Ramin Bahrani's Man Push Cart, another New York indie that netted a domestic distribution deal with Films Psilos yesterday just before its early-evening screening at the Library. I had spoken with Bahrani about his film before heading to Sundance, but had been looking forward to seeing it since reading rave reviews following last year's Venice Film Festival. That Bahrani, actor Ahmad Razvi (both pictured at right) and Man's tight crew had reached the ultimate goal of their multi-year journey last night was some of the best news I had heard all day; that I finally discovered for myself that it deserves every accolade it received just added to the overall excitement. Unless Saints or Half Nelson wins big tonight and leaves town with a Fox Searchlight logo in front of its titles, Man Push Cart might actually be the New York story of this year's Sundance Film Festival.
And by "New York story," I mean a story genuinely about New York--about being in the city and making a life here for better or worse. Bahrani related the story to Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus, but he reflected the hero's urban ordeal humorously as well. "Some of the horror parts, like where he's dragging the cart and he falls?" Bahrani said following the screening. "That's not scripted. The guy was about to get run over. Not only was he about to get run over by a taxi, but we made him run after the cart. We had no budget--we had no rights for that thing. (Cinematographer) Michael Simmonds always said we'd like to have a crew that's small enough that when the actors walk past us they don't realize it's the crew. The good thing about shooting from across the street is that magic stuff starts to happen. Like when he's selling pornos to that guy in the (delivery gate)? And that other guy says I get pornos really cheap in the Bronx? That guy has no idea we're filming. But now we know he can get two pornos for less on Fordham Road."
In his first-ever film role, Razvi labors in moving, prolonged silence as the tormented push-cart vendor Ahmad. "I was very nervous, but I had confidence in myself," Razvi said during the Q&A. "Ramin had a lot of confidence in me. In the beginning I was acting too much--I was doing Hollywood and Bollywood style--and he was like, 'Hey, calm down. This isn't a Brando movie.' I finally calmed down, and he helped me to be more silent and still and to give the same expression as if I would be speaking about it. ... There were a lot of things that were somewhat similar to my life and made me feel a little more about it, but in the beginning it was too much, and I had to slow it down."
Filmmaker Alan Berliner shuns the Sundance spotlight following a screening of his new documentary Wide Awake (Photos: STV)
Over at the Holiday Village, New York documentarian Alan Berliner accelerated his own self-referentiality with his latest film, Wide Awake. Not like that is anything new; the guy made his name with two decades of personal documentary filmmaking. But you really have to be into Alan Berliner to get the most out of Wide Awake, which deals with the director's perceptions of sleep and, more specifically, his lifelong battle with insomnia. Berliner's musings run from clever to cloying; his family interviews and too-cute archival orgy of sleep-related clips overwhelms his more revealing subjection to the science of how we sleep.
As a successfully converted early riser (the time of this post notwithstanding; the Western time zones always fuck me up), I lacked a certain sympathy for Berliner that I probably would have felt when I used to slam my head on the wall while attempting to write at 3 a.m. But I like Wide Awake in theory, especially in the terms Berliner used to describe it in his introduction. "My film is sort of like a Trojan Horse," he said. "You read something saying it's about insomnia, and that's why I guess you're here. Now that I've got you here, let me tell you that it's about insomnia, but it's also about a lot of other stuff, and that's the point. The film's about sleep and sleeplessness, of course, but it's also not about those things. I can't tell you all the things it's about, because I hope it's about more things than I'm even aware of or that I want it to be. But certainly, it's about how sleep functions in our lives in ways that we understand and ways we don't understand. It's about love and family and responsibility and filmmaking and choices that we make in life and contradiction, and somehow, an idea about making a film about insomnia led me to all that stuff.
"And to give the film a chance and stay with it, I hope the Trojan Horse concept works for you as the film kind of opens up, and all the weird things I just illustrated sort of march out and touch you with a warm shot of recognition. That, for me, is what this kind of personal filmmaking is all about."
Berliner also invoked cinema as a way of representing sleeplessness--a device in whose service the filmmaker utilizes those overbearing sound and clip montages as well as frequent digressions about his work habits. He obsessively bestows the gift of sleep on his infant son as though breaking a long cycle of abuse. He is either in front of his camera or speaking from behind it for virtually the entire film, which, like I said, can be a little Berliner overload if you do not buy his premise or predicament. But the film is both engaging and informative enough for viewers to overlook its self-indulgences; just try to avoid confusing it with Haskell Wexler's own pro-sleep documentary, Who Needs Sleep?, which somewhat brilliantly precedes Berliner's film alphabetically among this year's Sundance titles.
Even more genius is to see the films featured during a week when 45,000 people travel to Utah and get no sleep at all. Later, guys, we promise--especially if it turns out tonight's awards are anything worth writing about. Stay tuned.
Posted by stvanairsdale at 06:49 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 27, 2006
Neverending Story: Another Thursday at Sundance
I should have more to show for Thursday, I know, but this place is totally starting to depress me. There's just too much space and fewer and fewer people want to be here and my ghetto Internet hook-up at Reeler HQ West makes posting about as pleasurable an experience as circumcision. The parties become insufferable; the oily Hollywood douchebags scurry through the snow like rats. And when Jeff Lipsky's ham-fisted Flannel Pajamas turned out to be the only New York feature I could catch all day, my spirit crashed somewhat violently and I wound up having to watch two hours of C-Span just to help flush the immediate memory.
Commonly referred to as a contemporary stab at Scenes From a Marriage, Flannel Pajamas yields none of that film's insight or intensity. Lipsky (above) showcases a relationship from first date to last goodbye, but showcasing is all you get; the drama surrounding lovers Stuart (Justin Kirk) and Nicole (Julianne Nicholson) features tenderness and turmoil as clinical as integers on a number line. The film's raves--and there are plenty, including Roger Ebert's breathless outpouring of praise earlier this week--attribute an unblinking honesty to the couple's rise and fall, but there is nothing remotely honest about the events accelerating Stuart and Nicole's demise. With few exceptions (a powerful, long take of Nicholson standing self-consciously naked at a window overlooking Manhattan, for example), everything that happens in this film happens verbally; as opposed to real unraveling marriages, nobody shuts up long enough to convey any sense of alienation. Think of Liv Ullman's expressive close-ups in Scenes, or the space Bergman uses to convey Johan and Maria's fragmentation in that film. In the end, the viewer discovers, an indestructible love--not each other--is their burden.
Not so in Pajamas. From the lovers to their friends to their families and beyond, it is the individuals who dissolve this relationship. There eventually is no love, which does not automatically imply a dishonest portrayal (Pajamas is its own film, after all), but the execution leaves such an inauthentic, forced chronology that even the romance cranks along like a machine. For something that purports to be so real, the characters speak with an over-the-top, almost allegorical self-awareness that mirrors Lipsky's own clumsy direction. Worse yet, especially in light of the Bergman influence, Lipsky gives you no one to loathe. Stuart's younger brother's mad, tragic genius excuses his impetuousness, and the viewer cannot hold Nicole's mother's anti-Semitism against her because of its roots in some early stage of Alzheimer's disease. Infidelity is implied fleetingly, but we are denied even the implication's consequences for Stuart and Nicole. Nothing about this film is honest or complex or challenging. It is simply a bloodless, obvious Saturday-morning cartoon version of a landmark.
But as Lipsky noted when we talked a few weeks ago, Pajamas might be part exorcism as well. "Is it based on a true story?," Lipsky said during yesterday's post-screening Q&A. "The impetus for me to write this script was my own marriage in the late '80s/early '90s. I was involved in a mixed marriage--Irish Catholic wife and me, Jewish--and it was, to this day, still the most important relationship of my life. It lasted about as long as it did in the film. And it's not that I wanted to tell my story or tell her story, but I thought that if I used that as a foundation ... I thought I could create really interesting characters to support what I think are some of the most major themes that anybody in any country endures or encounters or goes though in their lives. I think that we have a story about two people who fall in love each other at two completely different times. I think they have two different reasons for getting married, and I think they both learn a great deal from the marriage."
That same didacticism confronts the audience throughout the film--all two hours of it, virtually shouting, "Relate! Relate! Relate!" But neither Stuart nor Nicole are relatable. They are annoying, humorless bourgeoisie lifers for whom you have neither sympathy nor antipathy. You just want them and their director to leave you alone.
Before Dawn director Bálint Kenyeres on the short circuit, flanked by NYC filmmakers Fellipe Gamarano Barbosa (left) and Madeleine Olnek (Photos: STV)
So after a trip to the festival headquarters, where I encountered another interlude of benign press office stonewalling (this time about Saturday's awards ceremony), I returned home for a sandwich and that C-Span lobotomy. I eventually summoned the motivation to check out Sundance's Shorts Program V, featuring Madeleine Olnek's Hold Up and Fellipe Gamarano Barbosa's La Muerte es Pequena--neither of which disappointed. Overall, it was a remarkably strong set; both funny (Hold Up, One Sung Hero) and poetic (Aruba, The Beginning of the End) while clearing room for the most profound film I have seen at the festival so far: Bálint Kenyeres's Before Dawn, a 12-minute, one-take wonder illustrating the breakdown of a human-smuggling operation in rural Hungary.
As dazzling in its logistics as in its blue-hued beauty, Kenyeres told the audience he had about 40 minutes of "magic hour" light each day for shooting--20 minutes at dawn and 20 minutes at dusk. He finished the film in four tries. The result is a masterpiece that recalls the climactic house-burning sequence at the end of Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice; about seven minutes in, you can barely believe what you are seeing, and you fall in love with the cinema all over again. I do not know what is with all these great shorts about human trafficking; I also remember the best film I saw at last year's New York Film Festival being Cary Fukunaga's tragic Victoria Para Chino (which also appeared in Sundance earlier in 2005). Anyway, you can (and must) view Before Dawn and dozens of Sundance's other shorts here on the festival's Web site.
Now I guess I should try to restore some faith in the feature-going process, assuming I can get into Wristcutters: A Love Story in the next hour or so. Wish me luck; with two days left, I need it big time.
Posted by stvanairsdale at 10:15 AM | TrackBack
January 25, 2006
Good 'God' and a Defense of 'Daley'
The Reeler had a fairly successful viewing tandem today, skipping from a packed screening of Christopher Quinn's documentary God Grew Tired of Us to an almost-packed screening of Hilary Brougher's drama Stephanie Daley. Both filmmakers came to Sundance from New York with films in competition and in search of distribution; audience and industry expectations surrounding their films seem to have only heightened as the festival inches to its conclusion.
God Grew Tired in partcular has earned some of this year's most consistent acclaim, with all of its screenings so far leaving stranded wait listers by the dozens. I barely snuck in to the Holiday Village this morning, but I was grateful to check out Quinn's four-years-in-the-making doc about the struggles of African refugees known as the Lost Boys of Sudan. Quinn follows three of the Lost Boys as they join a government program that relocates them to new lives in Pittsburgh and Syracuse. Of course, their lives are new in only a proscribed cultural sense; a permanent and painful displacement impels them to add second and third jobs as a means of supporting the refugees left behind in a bleak Kenyan camp.
Following the screening, Quinn acknowledged that recent years' tumult in Rwanda and Sierra Leone inspired him to tell a story about the ongoing strife afflicting parts of Africa. Yet in bringing the Lost Boys to screen--and two of them, Daniel Abul Pach and Panther Bior (pictured above with Quinn), to Sundance--God Grew Tired skillfully reveals voices that eschew politics for a more dignified, humane commonness.
"When something happened to you, it will also happen to others," Abul Pach told the audience in the Q&A. "The reason we're letting people know is for the next generation to come. Number one is to survive in this world. The problems are not finished. In years to come, there might be problems, and this can help other people--not us. In this next generation to come, it will help people to survive. This is a difficult world to live (in), but the best way to do it is to know what this world is for and how to survive in it. ...
"I feel it," he continued. "When I look at it, I cry. I don’t want to watch it. At the time, when it was happening to me, I didn't know how I managed it. The way I was represented is that when something hurts you, in the beginning, you don't feel it. That it harms you. But after a while, you feel the pain. That's how I feel about it, you know. It's very tough. But I realize that God helps people through people, and that's why these people came and found us in the camps."
And now the film is moving beyond Sundance, with foreign distribution in place, three screenings this week for Salt Lake City high school students and another major screening Thursday night for 700 of the Salt Lake region's Sudanese community. The doc features some formidable star power as well, including narration by Nicole Kidman and co-producers like Brad Pitt and Dermot Mulroney. It is a wonder the film has not been picked up for the U.S. yet, but with continually sold-out screenings and its status at or near the top of the competition totem pole, do not expect Quinn to return to Brooklyn without a deal.
Brougher Hour: Stephanie Daley filmmaker Hilary Brougher has a word with her audience (Photos: STV)
Hilary Brougher, however, might not be so lucky. Do not blame her, though; Brougher's Stephanie Daley (profiled on The Reeler Jan. 17) is a dark, quiet drama whose challenging material has been alternately misread as pretentious, half-baked or both by festival critics. And before you slap my own judgement around for liking so much of what I've seen here, keep in mind that there is just not enough time in 10 days at Sundance to write at length about everything that I thought sucked (and I have seen some bad movies, from the Copeland-umentary Everyone Stares: The Police Inside Out to the documentary musical Songbirds to the Crook Brothers' painfully disappointing Salvage, for which I harbored some of my highest hopes of the festival). Instead, I am way more interested in phenomena like Stephanie Daley, a flawed but honorable chronicle of a teenaged girl (Amber Tamblyn, playing the title role) accused of killing her baby and the psychologist (Tilda Swinton) who gauges her competency to stand trial.
I had heard mixed things at best about this film, but for the life of me, I cannot figure out what is so objectionable. The performances are solid, Brougher's script and direction are both confident without being showy, the story mostly makes sense (although an infidelity issue between Swinton and husband Timothy Hutton seems to pile on a little more drama than necessary) and David Morrison's high-def cinematography looks great. So now, when I overhear this shit about a "hysterical" movie not suitable for the Lifetime Network, I feel my brain whirring with not only disagreement, but also irritation. There are critics out there dismissing Stephanie Daley as a bad women's film, as though the intensity of the movie's mother-daughter dynamic frustrates its quest for legitimacy (or at least for a wide, receptive audience). In comparison, the overwrought father-son dynamic that burdens portions of James Ponsoldt's Off the Black has been perceived as a simple dramatic weakness. Critics have allowed it to sputter and stall in the context of the film, not in some abstract social climate.
Look: Realistically speaking, Tilda Swinton-Amber Tamblyn is not box-office catnip, and buyers and critics all know that. But that is not the point of the Sundance Film Festival; or maybe it is, and we should just face it and start calling it the Sundance Market in 2007. At risk of added stridency, I am fairly ashamed to even consider the salability of films like Stephanie Daley or the sublime In Between Days in the same intellectual breath that judges their aesthetic merits. That said, when did that proximity become an impediment to determining these films' values in either case? I mean, Stephanie Daley works--not brilliantly, but it works. And in winnowing down its market before considering how it can either be improved or just simply enjoyed, the festival-buzz apparatus seems to have backfired somewhat destructively.
None of this is to say that Stephanie Daley's critics all come equipped with Y chromosomes, or that the film does not have its basis in Brougher's own experience with pregnancy and motherhood. "It's not that it changed the story," Brougher said in the post-screening chat. "I think it changed the way the story felt. I don’t think I could have written this after having my kids. I would have wanted to immediately disassociate and forget about all of that fear once my kids were here safe. On the other side of that, having my kids here safe, it's been a period of tremendous blessings and joy for me."
Brougher added that she intended to scope out the "shadow and gray" of what it meant to be her title character, but also revisited the idea of fear, which seems universal enough. "It began with an interest in the idea of how you get the feeling that Stephanie has onscreen--of denial and lying. 'Maybe I'm not. Oh no, I'm not. Maybe I am.' That sort of highly sensitized looking for signs and meaning. How do you get all of that onscreen? It began with Stephanie; as I started working on her, I was looking around at dear friends who were going through pregnancy and thought, 'Wow, there's a lot of really interesting stuff going on.' A lot that's very hard to talk about, but is very profound: Coming up against the unknown, that which you can't control, loss and gaining and changing of self that happens when you're pregnant. I thought it was really interesting to see the adolescent experience of it--the frightened adolescent experience and the frightened grown-up experience--to see how they bounce off of each other."
Swinton, whose short answer for why she joined the film was, "I wanted to see it," also elaborated with her typically eloquent candor. "I think it just occurred to me how rare it was for anybody to make any work--particularly for the cinema--about how terrifying it is having babies," she said. "Just that really. That idea. ... It's completely terrifying, and that's part of the deal. In my experience, there's a strange conspiracy of silence amongst women about how terrifying it is."
Pregnancy's terror notwithstanding, Stephanie Daley makes sense to me, and there is a pretty wicked cynicism at play if Brougher's specific attempt to verbalize and/or visualize her themes attracts the pretentiousness card by default. That is the impression I get, anyway. Maybe it is the Sundance rookie in me, but shouldn't we try a little harder instead of inhaling six screenings a day? Or at least know better?
Posted by stvanairsdale at 08:20 PM | TrackBack
Breaking: IFC Films Picks Up 'Wordplay'
Breaking news from the Sundance trenches: Sources at Cinetic Media and IFC Films have confirmed that the distributor has picked up domestic distribution rights for Patrick Creadon's crossword documentary Wordplay. Not terribly shocking considering the sight of IFC reps at the film's premiere bolting for a cell signal and a quiet space the minute the screening ended, but exciting nonetheless.
Details are not presently being disclosed, but an IFC spokesperson told The Reeler a few minutes ago that Wordplay is set for a 2006 release. As always, more information is forthcoming, so drop by a little later for specifics and official comment from IFC Films.
Posted by stvanairsdale at 02:35 PM | TrackBack
Picturehouse: Come For the Pizza, Stay For the Seven-Figure Distribution Deal
Tuesday was a relatively slow day in Park City, with some parties scattered here and there and most of the festival's premieres winding down. There were the swamped Kodak and Sundance Channel gatherings that everyone was talking about, but The Reeler wound up checking into the Picturehouse event on Main Street to sniff out any Earth-shattering deals. Flannel Pajamas filmmaker Jeff Lipsky was a conspicuous early attendee, and (at right) Everyone Stares hack/ex-Police drummer Stewart Copeland chatted up Picturehouse chief Bob Berney around the one-hour point.
But it was not until the entire Half Nelson contingent walked through the door that most guests' eyebrows spiked. A little asking around yielded no confirmation of a deal or even that the parties were negotiating, but Berney's a fan, and Ryan Fleck's film has stoked enough festival buzz to be off the market by the weekend. Or perhaps the gang was just in the neighborhood and heard the beer and pizza hors d'oeurves a Zoom were really good. Really, it could have been anything.
Anyway, I will try to have an update for you this afternoon following today's God Grew Tired of Us/Stephanie Daley double feature; stay tuned, and maybe start a dollar-per-square office pool for the date and time Half Nelson sells if you feel so inclined. Consider preparing one for Wordplay and Off the Black while you are at it.
Posted by stvanairsdale at 05:16 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 24, 2006
Reeler Rates at 'Rated' Fête
For a while there, I really did think the coolest thing that I was going to hear on Monday would be the voice of the outraged publicist who shrieked into a cell phone: "Eight Touaregs? That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Someone needs to remind him he's Justin Timberlake." But then I wandered over to the party IFC and Netflix hosted for Kirby Dick's documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated, where I finally had the opportunity to meet oft-discussed IFC TV boss Evan Shapiro (far left in the photo, with Dick, Rated producer Eddie Schmidt and Netflix CCO Ted Sarandos) in person. And when Shapiro introduced me to a friend as his "favorite blogger," well, you know. It is all downhill from here.
Favorite blogger or not, Shapiro was a true gentleman, and the party was a nice chance to catch up with some of IFC's New York contingent at the base of Main Street. Rated executive producer Alison Palmer Bourke and I toasted the film with my red wine and her Airborne, and IFC News stud Matt Singer recalled the great time he has had at Sundance despite not having seen any films. Efforts to organize a jailbreak on Singer's behalf failed when publicists staged the event's only photo op in the middle of our plot. Alas, Singer and crew will return to NYC Wednesday, well before the hotly anticipated 9:30 premiere of Rated.
With any luck, I should have a little more about the film and its late-night after-party Thursday. Wait a second--luck has nothing to do with it. I am Evan Shapiro's favorite blogger! Maybe I'll even wind up in that cool "reserved" section at the front of the Eccles. It is not like I am asking for eight Touaregs or anything.
Posted by stvanairsdale at 04:12 PM | TrackBack
Zwigoff, Clowes, Malkovich Declassify 'Confidential'
"Wow," Terry Zwigoff muttered from the stage at the Eccles Theater. "World premiere." I am sure that in his heart, however, the rumpled filmmaker was overjoyed to be introducing his latest, Art School Confidential, which has had some mixed-reaction press screenings around New York but played just fine in its Sundance opening Monday night.
Reuniting Zwigoff with his Ghost World collaborator Daniel Clowes, Confidential veers into the story of a idealistic art school freshman whose ambition collides with competition, love, a serial killer and other harsh, um, realities of the art world. And while I've never been a big fan of Zwigoff's previous narrative work, which always seemed kind of sterile and hammy, Confidential turns a bit of a corner with Clowes's semi-autobiographical script and a nicely balanced lead performance by Max Minghella. The climactic turn-for-the-worse is still vintage Zwigoff, as are the squirming interludes of unqualified cruelty and clinking one-liners. Nevertheless, Confidential works in the context of this fucked-up, ego-ravaged community (modeled after Brooklyn's Pratt Institute) where even the good guys can--and often do--lose their souls.
"Believe it or not those characters were not at all stereotypes," Clowes said in the post-screening Q&A. "Those are actually people I went to art school with." Their absurdity--like that of Minghella's sensitive, unraveling young Jerome--and questionable talent underscores the limitations preventing them from art careers. As one character explains early in Confidential, to be a great artist, you must be a great artist, and even that is no guarantee of success. "To me, it was about that sort of a following," Clowes added. "What you really want to do is what you love, but your own art mixes with commerce and other students influence each other and corrupt each other on both sides of the equation. So I thought (the story) would be more interesting conceptually in that regard."
As Jerome's frustrated professor, John Malkovich (above) makes one of his less eccentric, purely Malkovich-y turns in recent years. Audiences accustomed to seeing him in positions of quiet control instead have him lacking influence among his peers and gallery owners, as much a guiding hand to his worst students as he is a sycophant to his most talented. His character's cynicism is far more complex than the garden-variety misanthropy that threads Zwigoff's previous work (and even parts of Confidential); his failures here exist mostly as well-intended failures.
So, you know--if you like Zwigoff, you should probably like this just fine. If you do not like Zwigoff, expect a late-summer DVD release. But do try and see it, if only for the nude modeling at the beginning. You will thank me later. Or not so much. But still.
Posted by stvanairsdale at 02:56 PM | TrackBack
Monday Night Live: Beastie Boys Party Overruns Sundance
Last things first, at least vis a vis Monday at Sundance. While an underachieving movie-viewing day left me with a single film under my belt (Art School Confidential, but more on that later), a few trips around town culminated in the Sundance party to end all Sundance parties: The Gen Art/MySpace.com event, during which the Beastie Boys played a full set for about 1,000 partygoers at the Park City Mountain Resort.
Picture if you will: The Beastie Boys tearing it up Monday night on the mountain (Photos: STV)
Not like they just showed up in Utah for a one-off or anything. The Beasties' Adam Yauch (aka rapper MCA, aka director Nathaniel Hornblower) is the man behind Awesome: I Fuckin' Shot That!, the trio's Sundance-entry concert film comprising video footage shot by audience members at a 2004 show at Madison Square Garden. Awesome enjoyed a pair of sold-out festival screenings Saturday and Sunday, and Monday's party resulted in another capacity turnout to celebrate both the film and all the Gen Art goodness (and genuine balls-out fun) we concertgoers could stand.
As you can see to the right, I dusted off my most dramatic dance moves just for this event, wowing the crowd and earning just enough tip money to pay my cab fare back down the mountain. OK, fine--that is not me. Rather, it is festival director Geoff Gilmore, letting the independent spirit move him as never before. OK, fine--that is not Geoff Gilmore. It is Michel Gondry, all stoked and shit at having pawned off his festival entry The Science of Sleep to Warner Independent. OK, fine--that is not Michel Gondry. It is gossip-tard Roger Friedman, whom the publicists forced to break dance for his party wristband. OK, fine--it is not Roger Friedman. It is just some dude who got wasted on free Stella Artois and jumped from the third floor landing. I told you this was a fucking party.
I shall return later today with additional, foggy Monday remembrances and maybe one or two Tuesday news flashes, assuming I can keep up. You know how that goes. The big buzz around Reeler HQ West is Korea's The Peter Pan Formula and the Crook Brothers' Salvage, both of which unspool late Tuesday. I vow to make the most of the time inbetween; I have been away from you sweet kids far, far too long.
Posted by stvanairsdale at 05:36 AM | TrackBack
January 23, 2006
Why? Why Do They Hate Us?
A loyal reader outside the Racquet Club Theatre, Sunday afternoon.
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The Reeler's Sundance Sunday: Brunch, Films and Phair
The bad news about blogging Sundance is that you cannot blog Sundance. I mean, you probably can, but covering the festival in even the slightest depth requires a time and mobility that defies you to lug a computer around, let alone scratch together a series of entries of any real substance.
But the good news is that if your life is crazy enough that you cannot find those spare moments to blog, you are, in all likelihood, acquiring some fairly decent stories to tell eventually. To wit: This morning, I flailed at the New York Times Sunday Crossword Puzzle with its editor, Will Shortz (right), hanging out about 10 feet away. As you read here Saturday, Shortz is the principal subject of Patrick Creadon's brilliant crossword doc Wordplay and something of an institution among puzzle solvers nationwide. But at the film's Sunday brunch event at 350 Main, he was more honorary ringleader than evil word genius. I would have asked Shortz for an extra clue or four (EX: 104 down, four letters, clue: "Gunks"), but my virtually empty grid made it seem kind of pointless.
So instead we talked about the movie. "Yeah, it's just great," Shortz told me. "I've seen it four times now, and every time, my heart still races at the end, and I'm sweating, and I know what's going to happen. I was there!" As far as being one of Sundance '06's unlikeliest stars, Shortz deferred to the puzzle itself and said he was just happy to be able to support it. When I asked if he thought he would continue promoting Wordplay on the road after the film receives distribution (and it will receive distribution), Shortz shrugged. "It was hard for me to get the time to be out here for this," he said. "I've got a full-time job and the (American Crossword Puzzle) Tournament coming up in March. But I'm going to do what I can."
At least Shortz was making the most of his time at Sundance, providing not only the inspiration for Wordplay but also more than a dozen of his puzzle books in a contest during brunch. Naturally, I lost, but the editor of the Park Record snapped a picture of me with the crossword guru that she promised to e-mail, so we'll see if that brief photographic instant yields some kind of vocab karma for me in the future. God knows I need it.
Half Nelson, Full House: Director Ryan Fleck (with mic) joins partner Anna Boden and partial cast and crew following their film's Racquet Club premiere (Photos: STV)
Speaking of the future, Ryan Fleck's Half Nelson is The King Shit among the dramatic competition films I have seen thus far. Yep--all three of them. Anyway, I was blessed to catch yesterday's premiere out at the Racquet Club, where Fleck and co-writer/producer Anna Boden joined a huge chunk of their cast (including 16-year-old Shareeka Epps, the star of Half Nelson's Jury Prize-winning short predecessor, Gowanus, Brooklyn) and crew for a post-screening Q&A. As we recently discovered, Fleck and Boden are exemplars of modesty, and their urge to let the film speak for itself did not shift too dramatically from last week to this week. And while I will have more about the actual film film tomorrow, today we have Fleck sourcing out the root of his and Boden's story.
"Four years ago," Fleck said, "Anna and I were just really frustrated with what was happening in the country, and we decided that we wanted to do something about it. So we were going to take up arms and start a revolution, but that seemed pretty dangerous. So we decided to write a script about a guy who is also frustrated and who decided to teach as a way to change the world. But that sounded really boring; nobody wanted to see that movie because we've seen that before? So we made him a drug addict. And we'd written the feature first, so we made the short, which is more about Shareeka's character and her process of seeing her teacher in this situation. That's basically the difference in the short. That and an hour and 20 minutes' difference."
I stuck around at the Racquet Club for another hour after Half Nelson, waiting for the premiere of So Yong Kim's feature debut In Between Days. Kim, a New Paltz resident who co-wrote the film with her partner Bradley Rust Gray, brings a thoroughly minimalist eye to her story of a Korean teenage girl (Jiseon Kim) who endures an encroaching isolation from her family, her crush (Taegu Andy Kang) and Western society as a whole.
In portraying her character Aimie's devastating loneliness against the film's frigid, anonymous urban landscape, newcomer Jiseon Kim (left) dominates Days from its first frame to its last. A non-professional whom the director discovered working at a cafeteria in New Jersey, Kim bolts from lost to found to virtually disappeared as the story unfolds. Her unrequited love is not so much a rebuke as much as it is a denial; losing her best male friend (indeed, her only friend) to sort of an Americanized analogue crystallizes her alienation pretty much forever.
In the end, when Kim's mildly aghast face reflects the choice she must make between her past and some abstract future, the viewer suddenly realizes how invested he or she is in young Aimie's decision. And even as she explained to the Sundance audience that she was initially put off by how "stupid" and "embarrassing" her character was, she clearly got the part. She understood it and inhabited it. In Between Days might wind up one of the festival's tougher sells, but anyone with eyes or a heart will latch onto Jiseon Kim. Her performance is guaranteed to be one of this year's most transcendent.
Then there was the party. No, no, no--not the All-Star Composers Jam Session Folk-Hack-Jerk-Off-A-Thon (right), but the Barclay Butera/Hollywood Life/Insert Sponsor Here party at a grossly overrun Gateway Center. This is the one honoring Sundance's "must-see dramas" like Flannel Pajamas, Steel City, The Proposition and others, except that producers from a few of those films were walking around muttering complaints like "Fucking bullshit" or "God, total clusterfuck" under their breath to me as they struggled to get their guests (and, in at least two cases, themselves) past the nylon stanchion.
Liz Phair (right): Now available for film festivals, weddings, bar mitzvahs, corporate retreats...
In the end, The Reeler penetrated the handstamp armada, where folks like Nick Cave, Tim Hutton, Murderball co-director Dana Adam Shapiro and--for a mintue or so--Nick Nolte braved the crowd gathered to hear headliner Liz Phair crank out some ditties with her shaggy underage boyfriend harmonic acoustic accompanist. I knew none of the songs, but the drunkest people in the room pretended to, so we inherited Phair's rock show sing-along vibe mostly intact. After Phair's set, however, the cool people wound up in an even more congested VIP are across the corridor, leaving my colleague Ray Pride and I stranded in the quickly restored Queer Lounge. The lipstick lesbians stopped kissing soon enough, however, and the next bus out of Main Street was our bus home.
And to think it all started innocently with a crossword puzzle and brunch. This place will corrupt anyone. Anyone!
Posted by stvanairsdale at 05:40 AM | TrackBack
January 22, 2006
A Good 'Listener': Stettner Premieres Mystery with Collette, Maupin
This first weekend at Sundance is totally nuts, with anticipation levels surpassed only by the sheer volume of people squeezing into theaters and wait lines to catch dozens on dozens of premieres. Take Saturday night's Eccles Theater showing of The Night Listener, with about 1,300 filmgoers packed in for Patrick Stettner's tale of a late-night New York radio show host ensnared in a phone relationship with a mysterious young fan. Star Robin Williams was a no-show (Stettner passed along Williams's "crazy love" from the actor's location shoot in Canada), but co-star Toni Collette and writers Armistead Maupin and Terry Anderson made the trip and greeted their audience following the screening.
Toni Collette and Listeners (L-R) Patrick Stettner, Terry Anderson and Armistead Maupin (Photo: STV)
As the caretaker of Williams's ill phone friend--a 14-year-old who styles a gripping, soon-to-be-published abuse memoir of increasingly questionable veracity--Collette disappears into blindness, loneliness, clinginess and a general devastation that is as creepy as any of the dark revelations Williams discovers in his quest to track young Pete down. "The story was just so unbelievably intense," Collette said when asked how she prepared. "I think basically this woman is very needy and wants love, and I think it's a very basic need to take it to the nth degree. I feel sorry for her. And I don't know how I prepared for it."
Stettner jumped to the podium. "She's Toni Collette," he said. "She can do anything."
There you have it. I, on the other hand, am fairly limited in what I can disclose without giving the story away, although I can safely say that Lisa Rinzler's cinematography triumphs mightily in a gorgeous duel with underexposure, yielding a dark, saturated color palette you might have expected had Gordon Willis shot a Hitchcock film. And on a semi-related note for those of you Maupin fans reading from Park City, the ever-engaging storyteller will be signing books Monday morning at Dolly's Bookstore on Main Street. The fun starts at 11 a.m., and here is hoping your wait line moves a little more fluidly than those at the theaters. It is about time you got a break.
Posted by stvanairsdale at 12:44 PM | TrackBack
January 21, 2006
Creadon's Sundance Bow 'Wordplay' Revels in Hard Times
If you think the cult surrounding Will Shortz--the estimable editor of the New York Times Crossword Puzzle--is a mostly NYC phenomenon, filmmaker Patrick Creadon has news for you. Actually, he has a whole documentary: Wordplay, a brilliant crossword opus which premiered this morning to a packed house at Sundance's Prospector Square Theatre.
Wordplay director Patrick Creadon, enjoying his first screening of his first-ever Sundance Film Festival (Photo: STV)
In profiling Shortz--from his college degree in "enigmatology" (AKA puzzle-making) to his colorful fan mail--Creadon uses the editor as a hub to survey the impact and influence of the Times Crossword. When he is not checking in with a handful of competitive puzzlers around the country as they prepare for the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, the director hobnobs with the likes of Bill Clinton, a trash-talking Jon Stewart, the Indigo Girls (who only semi-joke about their inclusion in one Times Crossword as the "highlight of our careers") and a very, very philosophical Ken Burns among others.
"The idea was always really to learn more about Will Shortz, to find out who he is and how he does what he does," Creadon told the crowd following the screening. "We kind of thought that the film was just going to be about the New York Times Crossword, but as we got to know more about Will--he's devoted his entire life to this, he has this annual tournament that he runs, he's on NPR every Sunday--we knew we had to tell those stories too. And then we also really thought it would be fun to sort of find out more about the puzzle throught the eyes of people who are fans of the puzzle."
And while Wordplay will inevitably be construed by cynics as a feature-length Times commercial, Creadon sustains a tension that makes its climactic crossword sequence feel like one of Murderball's wheelchair rugby clashes. Moreover, his diversion into the construction and editing of crosswords is classically rich, inventive documentary fodder. Creadon never condescends to his subjects, even as they hold forth on matters like the power of the letter Q ("I'd just like to say for the record that I don't go around generally talking about my favorite and least favorite letters of the alphabet," former tournament champ Trip Payne announed after the film). He allows the perfect amount of breathing room and context for the film to grab its viewers, even as he could probably trim one or two interview segments to shape a leaner, stronger narrative.
Either way, the film made me smile, which is no small feat considering the high ratio of crap I've been seeing over the last few days (Police fans will be disappointed to know that the movement to ceremonially burn the Sundance print of Stewart Copeland's documentary/home movie Everybody Stares gathers steam every hour). The Reeler will return to the Wordplay beat Sunday morning when Shortz, Creadon and the film's gaggle of puzzle solvers gather for breakfast and a stab at the Sunday Times Crossword. Knowing my own puzzle luck, I hope they bring along plenty of erasers.
Posted by stvanairsdale at 06:52 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
January 20, 2006
Ponsoldt, Nolte and Co. Paint the Eccles 'Black'
After all that nuts-and-bolts talk this week about finishing his film on time, Brooklynite James Ponsoldt's feature debut Off the Black enjoyed its world premiere this afternoon at Sundance. After a turbulent period waiting for admission outside the Eccles Theater--with none other than Reeler MVP Roger Friedman stomping through the cold, loudly asking anyone who would listen "where are the fucking tickets"--everybody found a seat and settled in for Ponsoldt's story of a lonely high school baseball umpire's who befriends a troubled young pitcher.
Black magicians (L-R) Nick Nolte, Timothy Hutton, Trevor Morgan (over Hutton's shoulder), Rosemarie DeWitt, Sonia Feigelson and filmmaker James Ponsoldt onstage at the Eccles (Photo: STV)
Shot in upstate New York, Black features a sublime lead performance from Nick Nolte, whose fearless tear through umpire Ray Cook's slow, alcoholic disintegration will no doubt condemn him to at least a few more months of "playing against type" jokes. In reality, Nolte offers his least self-conscious work in years. Opposite Trevor Morgan, Nolte loses himself in a swamp of good intentions and suffers an outgrown paternal despair that recalls his filial anguish in Paul Schrader's Affliction. His line-straddling between humanity and sociopathy--especially in Black's second act--ties with Tim Orr's typically gorgeous lens work as the film's most rewarding commodity.
And after he joined Ponsoldt and about 90 percent of Black's other cast and crew onstage for a post-screening discussion, Nolte credited the young filmmaker with writing the type of meaty, natural part he had been looking for. And he discredited any reservations about working with a rookie like Ponsoldt. "I don't put much stock in that 'first-time director' thing," Nolte told the crowd. "Usually, when you meet these people--the 'first-time directors'--they're not first-time directors. They've done shorts, they've done film, they've been shooting and shooting. They just haven't done a major feature. And usually they come with such passion and such great ideas because they've thought it through so well. ... I've worked with many, and it's always been a good experience."
For his part, Ponsoldt shared the backstory behind writing Off the Black. Part of his inspiration had come from a trip to see the Atlanta Braves in spring training, but he noted a more striking influence stemming from a long-lost school chum in his hometwon of Athens, Ga. "When we got to hgh school," Ponsoldt said, "he ran into some trouble with drugs and he dropped out of school. When I went off to college, I remember coming home for Christmas break and I ran into his father at a grocery store. His father was a high school baseball umpire. And his father was so excited to see me; he was asking me how life was up north, was I making short films, all these such things. And nowhere in the conversation did we talk about his son, who was addicted to crack cocaine. And later on I felt awful--like a complete coward--for not asking this guy about this son.
"The guy kept being an umpire. I thought about how he would go to games every day for other people's children, and no one would know really his own private life and love and pain. And it sort of inspired me to start writing."
Which he said he did in while locked away in a cabin near Asheville, N.C., finishing the script in about one week. And now look at him, putting the Eccles back in Ecclesiastes: Maybe the race is always to the swift.
Posted by stvanairsdale at 10:36 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Redford, Sundance Press on For Opening Day
Traveling from New York to Park City may have taken 14 hours, and establishing a functioning Internet connection may have taken 24 hours, but through it all, you have to have known you could not get rid of me that easily.
And so begins the 2006 Sundance Film Festival--breathtakingly immense, ball-shrinkingly cold and exploding today with more than three dozen screenings across eight area venues. Then there are the parties, panels, performances, celebrity jurors (Terrence Howard, making his triumphant return a year after Hustle & Flow) and, of course, an opening day press conference with festival godfather Robert Redford, holding forth on Sundance's evolution as its namesake institute celebrates its 25th anniversary.
Geoffrey Gilmore and Robert Redford wistfully recall the old days as shared by Friends With Money filmmaker Nicole Holofcener (Photo: STV)
"Your perception of the festival depends on where you sit," said Redford, meaning philosophically and not in a 25-degree bus shelter across the steeet from the Library Theater. "If you get away from the main heart of the programming, which is basically programming for new voices in film and new filmmakers, it's about discovery. It's about discovering the filmmakers by creating the opportunity for them. That's our focus. So we program this thing as a festival, which means we don't program it according to partiality. We don't make that choice. I wouldn't want that on my shoulders anyway."
Redford's remarks--touting the growth of international and documentary cinema in particular--followed an introduction by festival director Geoffrey Gilmore, who managed to score the day's Sundance-keyword-quota of "work" and "independent" within seconds of sitting down. The pair was joined onstage by Nicole Holofcener, the Sundance alum from way back whose latest film, Friends With Money, opened the festival Thursday night. She led the gathering on a nostalgia trip to the early '90s, when she emerged from the institute's writing and directing labs with her clever, assured debut feature, Walking and Talking.
"I was born at Sundance," Holofcener said. "I have a really bad memory, but I remember panicking because I forgot how to talk to actors. Or I realized I never knew how to talk to actors. And I had these actors looking at me--one liked to rehearse, one didn't like to rehearse. One was in a bad mood, one was insecure. And there I was, and I think that they sometimes thought I was supposed to know what I was doing, and I kept telling them, 'No, I was told this was for practice. I was told it's OK if I don't know what I'm doing.' "
It was at that point that Holofcener said she leaned on her Sundance advisors for the luxury of advice. "I've got to just do it my way and not the way I think it might sound 'intelligent' or sound like a director," she said she learned. "It'll sound like me, and in a way that will get them to do what I want on film. I think that was the most valuable thing in the directing labs, I think--being able to run to these people that I respected and have have them look at me like, 'You can do this.' And they're not my Mom."
Ah, Sundance. Selective, independent and nurturing. No wonder we put up with all of this fucking snow.
Posted by stvanairsdale at 06:46 AM | TrackBack
January 18, 2006
From NYC to Sundance: Carter Smith, 'Bugcrush'
[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]
"The moment I read the short story the very first time, it was like being hit by a bus," Carter Smith said, waiting in a Dallas airport for a changeover flight to Salt Lake City. "I was like, 'This is the film that I can make better than anybody else. This is the film I have to make.' It just sort of clobbered me over the head."
Indeed, Smith made Bugcrush, an adaptation of Scott Treleaven's story about the "sinister" fallout from a relationship between two high-school boys. An in-demand fashion photographer by day, Smith had directed only a few commercials and small TV projects before diving into his 35-minute film debut last May.
Sundance, however, was not among Smith's immediate goals for the short. "Really, I wasn't thinking about anything other than getting it made," he told me. "As we were sort of going along in the finishing process--editing through the summer--it sort of presented itself and it became prtety obvious that the Sundance deadline would be tight--a complete stretch to get it done by then, but it almost fit with our timetable."
Smith cut post-production so close that he was still burning Bugcrush's rough cut to DVD 30 mintues before Federal Express's last New York pick-up to make the festival's submission deadline. He had, however, color timed and sound mixed what he sent--a work-in-progress impressive enough for Sundance shorts programmer Roberta Munroe to eventually send an e-mail asking Smith how it was coming along.
"I was sort of ecstatic that someone had even watched it," Smith said of Munroe's note. He called her back to assure her that Bugcrush was still on track and would not be too much shorter or longer than the relatively epic short she and fellow programmer Mike Plante had just watched. "You know," Smith continued, "The rough cut might be great, but all the doubt and indecision that can happen in the finishing stages can get the better of you, and you can completely fuck it up in the time between the rough cut and the final cut."
In the end, Smith not only did not fuck it up, but he was invited to participate in the Screenwriters Lab leading up to Sundance. The ebullient filmmaker said the 2006 event is his first "full-on festival experience anywhere ever."
"I'm a total newbie," he said. "I've been here or there to a screening, but I've never actually gone to a destination for a film festival to be there the whole time. This is definitely a first, and I guess don't really know what to expect. I've been picking the brains of everyone I can."
Posted by stvanairsdale at 08:08 AM | TrackBack
From NYC to Sundance: Fellipe Gamarano Barbosa, 'La Muerte es Pequeña'
[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]
Fellipe Gamarano Barbosa does things the hard way. At least, that is sort of how it sounds while talking to him about his sexy, intense Sundance short La Muerte es Pequeña. For starters, the native Brazilian adapted his source material--a Sergio Sant'Anna short story--from Portuguese to Spanish, and then cast Latino actors for whom neither tongue was their first language.
"Basically, I had no real reason to do this in Spanish other than the fact that I wanted to set a very specific tone," Gamarano Barbosa told The Reeler. "What drew me to the story was the tone it was trying to hit, which was a sort of melodrama. The actors are acting; they don't hide the fact that they're acting."
At least the guy knows what he wants and how to get it, a trait that likely played no small role in his 17-minute, $300 student exercise earning one of 73 coveted spots in this year's shorts program. The story addresses the strange and sudden coupling of a man and woman viewing the same vacant apartment. She is just out of a relationship with a younger man, he is a paranoid journalist who observes her devastation up close. "It's like a dance between those two," Gamarano Barbosa said, "very much like Last Tango in Paris with a warm, almost Almodovar kind of touch. That was totally where I was coming from."
After shooting Muerte, Gamarano Barbosa won a James Bridges Fellowship at Columbia's film school in recognition of his strong work with actors. The award provided him a chunk of money he used to shoot his thesis film in South America, but on his way out of New York, he decided on a whim to submit Muerte to Sundance. He said he had no intention of actually being admitted, and he shot in such a remote location outside Brazil that he did not receive the festival's e-mailed acceptance note until he returned to Rio de Janeiro--the day before the line-ups were announced.
Having snuck in at the last minute, Gamarano Barbosa started planning. He printed a set of business cards ("I've never made them before in my life, so I think that's already some kind of accomplishment.") and prepared a feature treatment with Muerte's co-writer Ken Kristensen, just in case. But amid all the other little things, Gamarano Barbosa is more or less determined to relish the experience. "This is the first festival I am attending with a film that I made," he said. "I'm going to have a blast there. That's all I can tell you."
Posted by stvanairsdale at 07:22 AM | TrackBack
From NYC to Sundance: James Ponsoldt and Scott Macaulay, 'Off the Black'
[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]
Off the Black was almost done. Almost. What its veteran producer Scott Macaulay sort of shruggingly referred to it as a "photo finish," its writer-director James Ponsoldt laughed off a little more nervously.
"I think we were probably in the last batch of films to submit to Sundance," Ponsoldt said last weekend. "We shot really late. So we were doing the sound mix this past week at Sound One, and we finished that late Friday, and we're doing our Dolby imprint Monday. We saw our first answer print Friday, and then we're going to have the second print Tuesday or Wednesday. We're doing titles as we speak; I think those are probably going to be done Tuesday. And our first screening is Friday."
And then there were all "the weird things about emulsion." Nevertheless, the irrepresible Ponsoldt--a first-time feature director whose shorts have screened in dozens of festivals around the world--was virtually counting down the days to Off the Black's Eccles Theatre premiere. And why not? The Brooklyn resident will travel to Sundance with one of the festival's most anticipated titles, starring Nick Nolte as a lonely, washed-up high school baseball umpire who strikes up a bizarre relationship with a young pitcher (Trevor Morgan) he catches vandalizing his house.
"It was fantastic," Ponsoldt said of working with Nolte. "Obviously, a lot of people have an idea of what Nick Nolte is like as a personality, but he's such a sweet guy. If he has an ego, I didn't notice it. He was kind and awesome to everybody on set, and he really committed himself to do it."
But, dude--Nick Nolte. On your first feature. "He read it and said he wanted to meet me," Ponsoldt said. "So I went out to L.A. to meet him. I guess he wanted just make sure I wasn't a fucking idiot or a jerk or whatever, because once he said he would do it, from that point on, he was willing to do anything, and he was the easiest actor to work with."
As a world premiere, Off the Black naturally travels to Sundance without a distribution deal in place. Macaulay has plenty of experience with the feeding frenzy that can result from this, but he and co-producer Robin O'Hara are not letting the extra work and pressure overwhelm them. "We're excited about Sundance because we think it's the perfect festival to launch this film," he said. "And at the same time, as a producer, you sort of have to take the long view on everything."
Ponsoldt is equally philosophical. "I had somebody once tell me that when you're making features, there are two distinct parts," he said. "The making of the film, and the selling of the film. And don't corrupt the former with the latter, or you'll probably compromise anything that's meaningful to you. So I guess the big difference is the selling part of it."
Not that he is preoccupying himself too much with that before the titles are even done, or with so many other movies finding their ways to his schedule--especially some of those by his film school colleagues from Columbia.
"I don't think Sundance is the ideal place to see films you want to see, especially if you have a film there," he said. "It's kind of a gross mob scene. I don't really like going to parties. But I'm going to be there for pretty much the whole festival, and what I'm resolute in doing is seeing my friends' films. ... I just want to see the films that sound wonderful."
Posted by stvanairsdale at 07:14 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 17, 2006
From NYC to Sundance: Dito Montiel, 'A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints'
[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]
If and when you run into model/boxer/punk/memoirist/New Yorker/first-time filmmaker Dito Montiel around Park City, then here is my advice to you: Just let him do the talking. Especially about the teeming, steaming city portrayed in his high-profile Sundance breakthrough, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints.
"The biggest thing was, I'm from Astoria, Queens, and I definitely wanted to make (Saints) here, because, you know, it would just be fun," Montiel told The Reeler. "The idea of trying to make the movie anywhere else and fake it is impossible. I see movies (shot) in Canada all the time, and it takes about five minutes before it feels like Westworld--something feels sterile, you know? You know what I mean? It's too clean, something's not right, and then it's like that's what it is. It's not New York. So it was really important to make it in New York, and particularly in Astoria, Queens, because that's where the story takes place.
"As far as it being a story about New York, I never felt like that," he continued. "I just happened to be in New York and it was nice to make it here because I knew the street names. I never wanted it to be this 'yo Vinny' New York movie. It was just about some kids who, I'm sure, if you're from Ames, Iowa, you knew in your version of it. I read the oneliner things about the film, where it's quintessential New York movie. I certainly didn't set out to do that. I love New York, but to me it's not a New York story. It's just a story about a bunch of kids and they live in New York. That was a really important for me to stay away from that sort of thing."
I could (and probably should) go on all day with Montiel, whose spellbinding intensity fueled the coming-of-age memoir on which Saints is based, which in turn earned him the high-profile fan club that encouraged his screen adaptation. He had exactly zero filmmaking experience, but that represented something of a plus for admirers like Robert Downey Jr., Trudie Styler (aka Mrs. Sting), Chazz Palminteri and others.
Montiel wound up at the 2004 Sundance Screenwriters and Filmmakers Labs, where he developed Saints from its wiry, kinetic source into its wiry, kinetic script. It was the latest facet of many that shaped its author's renaissance-man reputation: from a kid expelled from high school for fighting to an amateur boxing career; from a male model to a punk rocker who famously scored a $1 million record deal for his hardcore band Gutterboy; from running with Allen Ginsberg to directing Rosario Dawson; from so on to so forth.
It was all mildly unbelievable and, for Montiel, totally fucking insane. "I was just talking to my friend Jake (Pushinski), who's editing with me," Montiel said. "He's never edited a film before, ever. He learned Avid while we were making the movie. The luck of it was that I had producers with guts--Trudie Styler and Robert Downey. But the guts to literally let someone..." He takes a breath. "I'm not saying this for press or because it sounds good, but I had no idea what I was doing. For real."
In addition to writing and directing, Moniel also played casting director for the kids who populate his film. "My goal, really, was to get a bunch of kids off the street," he told me. "I did five auditions. I put fliers up at Coney Island and did an open call there. I put fliers up in Astoria, Queens, and did an open call in a music rehearsal studio. I just literally walked the streets of New York to find kids that just looked interesting and had something special, and the movie's full of them--kids roaming around past their bedtimes."
But for better or worse, what catches eyes at Sundance are the names: An A-lister here, an Oscar-winner (Dianne Wiest) there. Montiel said he was initially against casting stars, but he eventually acquiesced once he knew he had found the "right famous people." "Life gets a little easier when you have them around," he acknowledged. "It was going to get made regardless, but two things were a blessing--one, that they were famous enough to make me care, and two, they were good enough to make me better."
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From NYC to Sundance: Hilary Brougher, 'Stephanie Daley'
[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]
I remember reading about Hilary Brougher's drama Stephanie Daley last summer in The Times; I think it was something about a growing number of indie productions shooting upstate. Starring Amber Tamblyn as the title character--a young woman accused of killing her baby--and Tilda Swinton as the psychologist who evaluates her competency to stand trial, the film had indie cred to spare and Sundance written all over it.
At least that was my impression at the time, and evidently, Brougher thought so, too--even if the clock was against her. "We were really hopeful we could make the festival," she told me over the weekend. "It was kind of a mad dash because we shot in the summer, we did winter pickups and we submitted with a rough cut. And we just finished sound mixing like a day ago."
Brougher chuckled, then laughed as though absorbing the absurdity of it all. Of course, deadlines are hardly an unusual challenge facing premieres like Stephanie Daley. But less than a week before her Sundance debut (her previous film, The Sticky Fingers of Time, screened at the 1997 Venice and Toronto Film Festivals), Brougher's attitude seems to defy the fatigue and stress standards commonly accompanying those deadlines. Her initial relief and happiness at cracking the competition line-up gave way to an even more concentrated resolution.
"Somewhere after relief, it’s a sense a panic," she said. "And then you just kind of do what you have to do. I'm a big believer in efficiency. This happened for a reason--I really think the film came into its own and happened just the way it should. I think the the lack of time itself sort of offset with a really positive momentum and excitement that keeps you going, just from the energy. You find yourself saying, 'I have to do this, I have a reason to do this and we can do this."
Expressing her "hope in the marketplace," Brougher also plans to avoid the distribution pressures likely to follow Stephanie Daley's festival run. Instead, she said, she views Sundance as her just-finished film's unofficial wrap party. "In my heart, I really just want to enjoy some of these people I've worked with before we all disperse," Brougher told me. "That's what I'm thankful to focus on. I know that there's going to be lot going on, and it's going to be very new for me and not like anything I know. But I'm not going to worry about it. So far the film's been a lot of fun and the center of a lot of growth, so I'm just going to try and have a good time and stay positive and be near the people that I love and trust."
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From NYC to Sundance: Jeffrey and Joshua Crook, 'Salvage'
[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]
Full disclosure: I was in an awful horror-film rut when I interviewed Jeffrey Crook, one-half of the Crook Brothers team that made what sounds like it could be 2006's most terrifying Sundance entry, Salvage. The story of a woman (Lauren Currie Lewis, right) who suffers a brutal murder only to relive the incident again and again (and, naturally, to try solving the mystery of why it happens), Salvage is the horror film I am counting on to wash Hostel's and Wolf Creek's bad tastes out of my mouth.
Like the Crooks need that tiny, added pressure with their movie a week away from its world premiere in Sundance's Midnight program. But so far, so good, to hear Jeffrey Crook tell it.
"What I see missing in things is that there's no mystery," Crook said, patiently reacting to my anti-Hostel broadside. "There's none of that supernatural side in a lot of the slasher type stuff. Ours is sort of a mystery wrapped in a horror shell, and there are a lot of kind of supernatural hints at things that are going on. I think the overall feel of it is a little more mysterious than just thing where somebody's getting chased around for the entire movie with a chainsaw. And our approach to it was that we wanted to have scary stuff--we wanted to have her going down dark staircases and into basements and creeping around and things like that, because that stuff just wotks as scary scenes. But we also wanted to drop all these creepy hints. The Ring was so successful because it's just mysterious. You don't know what the hell's going on through it, you know?"
Sure, I know, and it actually pisses me off even more that I have to wait another days before I can check it out. But that is not the Crooks' problem. In fact, it does not sound like the Brooklyn natives and current Sunnyside residents have many problems at all when it comes to Salvage. Shot in the small town of Marietta, Ohio, where Joshua Crook attended college and met his future wife, the film is the brothers' fourth film in as many years. It follows the the buzz-packing tradition of their previous indies, which landed distribution with Artisan, Lionsgate and most recently, in the case of their dark comendy The Fittest, won best picture at the 2004 Valley Film Festival.
Of course, this is Sundance, and while Crook tells me he is thrilled to be making his first trip, he adds that he and Joshua have no idea what to expect. "It's kind of overwhelming for us in that it gets you so much attention you didn't otherwise have," he told The Reeler. "We've been in guerilla filmmaker land out here for years. It really gets you connected to a lot of people in the industry and bumps you up another level. We're sort of taking other people's advice on what we should do."
But with a film this promising--and producer's rep like Washington Square's Christopher Pizzo and (as of last week) the Gersh Agency on their sides--it is likely some solid advice. Well, a lot better than Hostel, anyway.
Posted by stvanairsdale at 10:40 AM | TrackBack
From NYC to Sundance: Christian Ryan, 'Sólo Dios Sabe'
[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]
As far as scenic routes to Sundance go, Sólo Dios Sabe executive producer Christian Ryan followed one of the more unconventional ones. A former management consultant and high school physics teacher, Ryan had dabbled in writing and producing when he received a telephone call from an old business school friend in San Francisco.
"We hadn't been in touch," Ryan explained. "But he called me up and said, 'Hey, a script just crossed my desk.' He works in private wealth management, and that world of high net- wealth money management kind of intersects with the independent film world. That's people with money, and independent filmmakers are always looking FOR money. There's some connection there--not always a natural fit, but sometimes."
The script was Carlos Bolado and Diane Weipert's Sólo Dios Sabe, and for Ryan, the fit was pretty much perfect. The film was already in an advanced stage of development, with Diego Luna and Alice Braga cast as the story's star-crossed lovers and the screenplay on its ninth draft, but the funding had yet to be locked down. Bolado, an internationally acclaimed filmmaker with an Oscar-nominated documentary and Mexican Ariel award-winning feature to his credit, flew from San Francisco to New York in 2003 to meet with Ryan.
The neophyte producer leveled with the director right away. "I said, 'Hey, you know, I don’t have experience in independent film that I can bring to the project,' " Ryan told The Reeler. "But I know how to run Excel, and I can make PowerPoint presentations if we need those. I don't know anything about cameras or anything like that, but I'm totally happy to learn."
That was enough for Bolado and fellow producers Sara Silveira and Yissel Ibarra. Ryan made his first trip to Sundance in 2004, relentlessly networking and familiarizing himself with the festival dynamics. Sólo Dios Sabe, meanwhile, took shape as a genuinely international production. The filmmakers took advantage of incentives in Mexico and Brazil (indeed, Ryan informed me, Sólo Dios Sabe is the first-ever co-production between the two countries), while Ryan scrambled to keep up with conference calls that often comprised participants in four time zones.
"The sort of things I've been helping to do are raising money and negotiating deals we've cut along the way," Ryan said. "Basically, after talking to other people who've had the title of executive producer, I think that on any independent film it means any and all things. It's pitching in on almost every aspect of the film down to, as one of the other producers and I put it, sometimes mopping up the coffee."
But it primarily means that when Ryan attends his third Sundance Film Festival this week, he will officially be there as a New York filmmaker. "It's kind of funny that here I am in New York involved with this thing," he said. "I guess it sort of points out the international nature of independent film now or something. And hopefully, it becomes a launching pad."
Posted by stvanairsdale at 08:35 AM | TrackBack
From NYC to Sundance: Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, 'Half Nelson'
[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]
Ryan Fleck's Half Nelson (right) had just begun production last summer when pedigree and background made it a fairly tough film not to see coming at this year's festival. In an intriguingly cosmic (if not necessarily new) style of adaptation, Fleck and creative partner Anna Boden attended the Sundance Screenwriters Lab to flesh out their 2004 jury prize-winning short Gowanus, Brooklyn into a feature-length screenplay. Except that the feature was written well before the short, and Gowanus was an adaptation of that. Got it? Great.
Anyway, now that the concept has come full-circle, with their story of an unlikely friendship between a junior-high school student and her drug-addicted teacher expanded as a feature with Ryan Gosling, Anthony Mackie and Gowanus's young star Shareeka Epps (reprising her role as Drey), it makes sense that the filmmakers' closure would sort of interlace with the festival's. Pretty much everybody wants to see how this thing is going to end.
Of course, anticipation is just one part of the features game played in Park City. "It's definitely different," Boden said. "We've been to Sundance with two shorts (Gowanus and 2002's Struggle) now, but I imagine it's going to be a really different experience there. There are different expectations when you have a pretty good deal of someone else's money at stake. There is a lot more pressure to find a distributor for the film. It was just really fun having a short there, and we just saw lots of really good movies and met other filmmakers. There was very little pressure."
Fleck agreed. "We have a publicist for the first time," he said, "which is a strange thing, but great because we would never know how to arrange any of this stuff on our own. It's a new kind of experience."
Half Nelson is even a risky project, to some degree, if only because its celebrated bloodline confers a higher level of expectations than most feature debuts contend with. I asked the filmmakers about the advantage--or possible disadvantage--of reimagining a story that audiences so took to heart in 2004.
"I don't think it's an advantage," Fleck told me. "I think the only thing that could be perceived as an advantage is that anybody who saw and liked the short will go see this. I think in terms of getting people into the theaters--whether it's a distributor or general audience or press or whoever--not a lot of people saw the short, but anyone who did and liked it, they'll go see it again and I think they'll like this. It's just different enough to make you think you're not watching the same thing. But you know the characters in some way, and hopefully liked the characters in the short. I think in that sense it's an advantage.
"But in terms of selling the film, or winning any prizes?" he asked. "I really can't see any kind of advantage to having a short. I don't think the jurors are going to be aware of that. You still have to make a good movie to impress distributors. I don't think it matters."
Posted by stvanairsdale at 08:27 AM | Comments (1) |