Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Sundance 2015: Results, Entertainment and The Witch
He may not be your bag, but it’s tough to deny that Andrew Bujalski is one of the most distinctive American independent filmmakers working today. So distinctive that even when he sets his sights on the pseudo-pedestrian genre of the romantic comedy, he finds a way to completely reconfigure the shape of its central love triangle. In Results, Trevor (Guy Pearce) is an Australian in Austin who owns the Power 4 Life fitness studio, living and breathing his own advertising mantras about self-improvement. The recently divorced, suddenly rich Danny (Kevin Corrigan, brilliant) is new in town and eager to buy […]
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Sundance 2015: Unexpected and H.
There are two worthwhile concepts that skirt the heavily sketched plot of Kris Swanberg’s Unexpected: working motherhood and the white savior. Unfortunately, both are dropped just as soon as they are addressed in this saccharine tale of an unlikely, intergenerational friendship between two pregnant women. Sam Abbott, who has the great fortune of being played by the appealing Cobie Smulders, is a science teacher at an inner city Chicago high school that’s set to close at the end of the semester. Unexpectedly pregnant (requisite peeing, WebMD scenes and all), Sam marries her boyfriend John (Anders Holm) at City Hall to the chagrin of her overbearing — […]
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Sundance 2015, Dispatch 4: Experimenter, Station to Station and Listen to Me Marlon
It’s been far too long since Michael Almereyda’s last feature, 2009’s dreamy diary film Paradise; his 2015 return with not one but two features (the Ethan Hawke-starring Cymbeline adaptation Anarchy is set for release later this year) is overdue and very welcome. Experimenter, a pared-down biopic of social psychologist Stanley Milgram, ostensibly exists to hit the career highlights, but it’s far from standard issue. As in his career (the writer said with all the authority conferred by a quickly read Wiki), the film begins with, and is dominated by, Milgram’s obedience to authority experiments. The “teacher” sits on one side of a […]
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Rotterdam at 44, Volume #2: Yanks in Holland, Suicidal Poets & the limits of J-Horror
The program of American narratives assembled in Rotterdam by Ralph McKay and Inge De Leeuw includes a smattering of world premieres and, for the first time in a while, no films making their international debuts after bows at Sundance. (The latter likely due to the first-time collision of dates between the two festivals.) There is a consistency to the loose narratives in a lot of the work. We get by turns somber and cluttered ensemble pieces with light running times, generously adorned with micro-indie actors whose faces will be familiar to the ever-shrinking flotilla of scenesters who follow such films, […]
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Sundance 2015, Dispatch 3: The Wolfpack, Western and Dreamcatcher
I stopped taking notes after a while during The Wolfpack; I was feeling a bit too disturbed to keep at it and it seemed somewhat besides the point. Crystal Moselle’s first feature follows the Angulo brothers: six siblings, born to father Oscar, who for something like 15 years never left their LES apartment, save sporadic supervised summer walks. Oscar named them all Hare Krishna style — Govinda, Bhagavan, etc. — and amassed a collection of some 5,000 films, their sole meaningful connection to the outside world. They were homeschooled and lived in a state of fear — Oscar’s past/present (?) […]
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“My First Feature Film Since My Children were Born”: How to Dance in Ohio | Director Alexandra Shiva
What fear — whether it’s personal, or one related to the development, financing, production or distribution of your film — did you have to confront and conquer in the making of your movie? How to Dance in Ohio is my first feature film since my children were born, so I originally set out to make it in NYC where I live with my family. Then my research led me to Columbus, Ohio and to this incredible community and story that I could not possibly pass up telling. I would say that the largest sacrifice I made in the making of this film […]
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“You Can Make Films with No Money, No Support, No Talent”: Chorus | Director Francois Delisle
What fear — whether it’s personal, or one related to the development, financing, production or distribution of your film — did you have to confront and conquer in the making of your movie? What’s the fear of not ending up with the film you really wanted to make compared with the fear of losing your freedom to express yourself? Chorus was made instinctively, with no constraints and with a great deal of freedom. Freedom that was built up and acquired over years, over many films and through good times and bad. I’ve often made mistakes, I’ve surrounded myself with the wrong people, […]
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Sundance 2015, Dispatch 2: Tangerine, Z For Zachariah and Pervert Park
Sin-Dee (Kiki Kitana Rodriguez) sits on one side of a donut shop booth, her best friend Alexandra (Mya Taylor) on the other. The camera’s on the table, restricted to shot-countershot looking up, with large windows setting both in sharp urban relief against different halves of a large L.A. intersection. With rapid cutting back and forth reminiscent of the dashboard cams in Kiarostami’s 10, Tangerine‘s opening is both intimate and epic, and it’s exciting to see all this space so clearly laid out behind the two. There’s a micro story being established and simultaneously the introduction of a landscape to be explored: an instant […]
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“There is Good Fear and Bad Fear”: The Hallow | Director Corin Hardy
What fear — whether it’s personal, or one related to the development, financing, production or distribution of your film — did you have to confront and conquer in the making of your movie? Fear presented itself in so many guises throughout the making of my film, to me and I’m sure to everyone on the crew — mainly, I believe, as a result of pressure and communication and miscommunication. I guess I realised that to help everyone, myself included, to conquer “the fear” and instead concentrate on doing the best, most efficient work (and hopefully enjoy it along the way), I had to […]
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Sundance 2015: The Bronze, The Summer of Sangaile and Finders Keepers
If you’re feeling generous, you might pat the programmers on the back for trying their luck with a raunchy comedy like The Bronze in one of the opening night slots of the Sundance Film Festival. But if you’re feeling frank, you may just go ahead and call this overlong Olympic satire from first time director Bryan Buckley for what it is: a solid, third tier effort. Co-writer Melissa Rauch stars as Hope Ann Gregory, some kind of Kerri Strug has-been who spends her days snorting pills and masturbating in her father’s basement to a languishing VHS tape of her bronze victory decades prior. When she […]
