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Festivals

Sundance: Wrapping the Fest

My Sundance pace finally caught up with me, knocking me pretty much flat for a couple days, but here’s the last bit of my Sundance coverage this year. For me, this year was what my great-grandma would have called a “fair to middlin’” sort of Sundance. In other words, there were plenty of films that…

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Why Were So Many Sundance Movies This Year About Splitting The Sheets?

Why Were So Many Sundance Movies This Year About Splitting The Sheets?

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Sundance Docs Roundup: Detropia, Queen of Versailles, and Ethel

Detropia Sundance vets Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing were back this year with Detropia, a look at a city that’s gone from being the fastest growing city in the US to one of the most rapidly declining. Detropia has a palpable opinion about its subject matter (Ewing grew up just outside Detroit), and the filmmaker’s…

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Sundance Review: Safety Not Guaranteed

One of the biggest surprises of this year’s Sundance is just how terrific Safety Not Guaranteed, Colin Trevorrow’s film based on a real Craigslist ad seeking a companion for time travel, turned out to be. The film’s quirky premise, which sends three magazine employees to investigate whether the man who placed the ad really thinks…

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Sundance Review: Goats

There’s a good deal to like in Goats, a coming-of-age tale adapted by Mark Jude Poirier off his own 2001, semi-autobiographical novel, and helmed by first-time feature director Christopher Neil (nephew of Francis Ford Coppola, cousin of Sophia Coppola). The film focuses on Ellis Whitman (Graham Phillips), a 14-year-old kid, wise and responsible beyond his…

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Sundance Review: For Ellen

So Yong Kim (In Between Days, Treeless Mountain) is back at Sundance this year with For Ellen, a quiet, meticulously paced character study about Joby (Paul Dano), a would-be rock star , who takes a road trip back to the small midwest town where his soon-to-be ex and young daughter live so that he can…

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Sundance Review: Compliance

Craig Zobel, who was last at Sundance in 2007 with Great World of Sound, a sharply directed and acted film about a record producing company scam, is back at Sundance this year with a film about a different sort of scam, Compliance, an equally sharp examination of what happens when Sandra, a fast food restaurant…

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Sundance Review: The Pact

The Pact, directed by Nicholas McCarthy, played here at Sundance as a short film last year, and came back this year as a full-blown feature. Now I’m not much of a horror chick, though I do occasionally enjoy a good scare. For me (and, I’d have to say, a sizable percentage of the public screening…

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Sundance Review: The First Time

The First Time , in spite of its title, isn’t at all the kind of raunchy teen sex comedy about a guy desperately trying to lose his virginity, and his friends trying to help him get laid that you might expect it to be. It’s a sweet, funny story about these two young people, Dave…

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Sundance Review: NOBODY WALKS

NEW YORKERS IN LOS ANGELES with Italian filmmaking on the brain: that would be director Ry Russo-Young and her co-writer Lena Dunham, with Nobody Walks, a tactile, tensile minor-key successor to Pasolini’s Teorema. Martine (Olivia Thirlby) is a 23-year-old New York photographer with an upcoming one-woman show and she’s come to stay with a Silver…

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Sundance Review: The House I Live In

This film started out a little slow for me, and it also does two things I’m generally not fond of in documentary films: it uses a great deal of voiceover, and the director integrates himself heavily into the story. But wait, bear with me, because if you stick with this film, it pays off very…

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Sundance Review: Beasts of the Southern Wild

Beasts of the Southern Wild, directed by Behn Zeitlin and made by Court 13, the New Orleans-based filmmaking collective of which he’s a part, is a fabulous piece of cinematic storytelling. The story itself is fascinating, intricate, and completely unique: The protagonist is Hushpuppy, a six-year-old girl who lives a free and wild existence in…

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The Sundance Institute Issues the following statement About Bingham Ray

The Sundance Institute Issues the following statement: Sundance Institute has learned that Bingham Ray, beloved friend of independent film, and Executive Director of the San Francisco Film Society, has been hospitalized while in Utah for the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. We have reached out to Bingham and his family and San Francisco Film Society to…

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Sundance Review: Celeste and Jesse Forever

If you were hoping for Celeste and Jesse Forever, one of the most buzzed about titles going into Sundance this year, to be this year’s Like Crazy, you’re in luck. Beautifully written by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones (the writing debut for both actors), deftly directed by Lee Toland Krieger (The Vicious Kind), and effortlessly…

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Sundance Preview: Documentary Premieres

Yes, the Paradise Lost films followed this story for years, and you could argue that they’ve said much of what there is to say about the West Memphis Three. But Amy Berg, who previously made the outstanding, Oscar-nominated doc Deliver Us From Evil (which was on my top ten list in 2006) is sure to have a compelling take on the topic that will make West of Memphis one of the docs to catch at Sundance this year.

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Sundance Preview: Premieres

I know, I know, another bride-themed movie. I hear you. But because Kirsten Dunst is in this, I have hope that Bachelorette will skew more toward Bridesmaids than Bride Wars. Fingers crossed.

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Sundance Preview: World Documentary Competition

Moved into boxing training centers, these boys and girls undergo a rigorous regimen that grooms them to be China’s next Olympic heroes but also prepares them for life outside the ring. As these young boxers develop, the allure of turning professional for personal gain and glory competes with the main philosophy behind their training—to represent their country. Interconnected with their story is that of their charismatic coach, Qi Moxiang, who—now in his late thirties and determined to win back lost honor—trains for a significant fight.

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Sundance Preview: World Dramatic Competition

With the World competitions, I often don’t know a lot about the directors, so I have to pretty much go by what looks interesting from the catalog descriptions. It can be a bit of a crapshoot, since those descriptions tend to make every film at the fest sound like the Next Big Thing, but hey,…

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Sundance Preview: US Documentary Competition

Also, a lawsuit’s been filed against the Sundance Institute for screening this film, to which the Institute basically said, “Screw you, rich people!” Which makes it automatically the most “must see” doc at a fest since Errol Morris’ Tabloid — which got WAY more interesting when Joyce McKinney started crashing fest screenings with her clone dog. If there’s a cloned pet somewhere in this story, it will be practically perfect.

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Sundance Preview: US Dramatic Competition

Back in 2008, Zeitlin made a critically lauded short film, Glory at Sea, which played at SXSW. A couple hours before his film was set to screen, Zeitlin was critically injured in a car wreck, shattering his hip and breaking his pelvis. Less than a year later, Zeitlin’s script for Beasts of the Southern Wild was accepted by the Sundance Institute, where it went through the Screenwriters Lab, the Director’s Lab, the Producer’s Lab, AND won the NHK Filmmaker Award.

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Quote Unquotesee all »

“I was never let down by the hot dogs, bought from Chicago’s irreplaceable Vienna Beef, which were split down the middle, griddled and laid in a toasted potato bun with or without the classic Chicago garnishes. Better yet is the Bird Dog, a smoked chicken and apple bratwurst from Usinger’s of Milwaukee How the burger could change lives I never divined, but on occasion it was magnificent, as beefy and flavorful as the outer quarter-inch of a Peter Luger porterhouse. More often, though, the meat was cooked to the color of wet newsprint, inside and out, and salted so meekly that eating it was as satisfying as hearing a friend talk about a burger his cousin ate.”
Critical Eating: NYTimes Resto Critic Pete Wells Makes A Mouthful Of Shake Shack

“There is an innocence – an almost monastic purity – about Adam Ant’s enduring devotion to pop; after coming off antidepressants a few years ago, he began performing live again, playing modest venues, often unannounced, and later this year he will release a new album. I find myself hoping his audiences are respectful, and kind. Though still beautiful, he has to wear hats and bandanas to disguise the fact that he is now bald. He was always very conscious of his own beauty – “I think to be a pop star you need sex, subversion, style and humour” – and the hair loss seems gratuitously cruel. “Yeah,” he admits with quiet sadness. “It was pretty awful. But – I dunno – you’ve just got to do what you can. It’s part of the job, really. Just gotta get up, have a shave, and get on with it, really.”
~ Adam Ant On A Life In And Out Of Punk And Pop

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