Sundance Film Festival

THE RATING GAME

A year ago at Sundance Kirby Dick (Sick, Derrida, Twist of Faith) talked to me about his new documentary, promising that it would blow the lid off some very powerful forces within the film industry. He wouldn’t directly tell me what it was about, though. It was one of those “if I tell you I’ll have to kill you” things. Now, the film, This Film is Not Yet Rated, is headed for Sundance and then broadcast on IFC. And it’s about, yes, the MPAA. Over at Ain’t It Cool News Moriarty posts the press release detailing the film’s own twist […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 8, 2005
IT’S HARD OUT HERE FOR A PIMP

I don’t do much Monday-morning box-offiice opinion on this blog because too many others do it far better and far more obsessively than I’d ever be able to. That said, I’m pretty surprised that in its second week Hustle and Flow, which is our cover story this month in Filmmaker, fell out of the top ten with an estimated 50% drop to $4 million from its only okay opening of $8 million last weekend. Honestly, I had Hustle pegged as a crossover mainstream hit, and when I hung out a couple weeks ago with a studio exec friend, we made […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 1, 2005
SUNDANCE LAB PROJECTS ANNOUNCED

If you pick up the new issue of Filmmaker, you’ll notice by reading our cover articles on Miranda July and her first feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, the large role the Sundance Institute had in developing that film and supporting its production. July’s film was a Summer 2003 Sundance Lab project and it went to become a hit at the Sundance Film Festival and will open from IFC Films this June. And then there’s another Lab project I’m very interested in — David Jacobson’s Down in the Valley, which I thought was an amazing script and which […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 27, 2005
THOUGHTS ON SUNDANCE: MAKING CENTS OF THE SPECTACLE

In today’s world of accelerated web journalism, normally I’d think I’m past the Sundance shelf date filing these final thoughts a couple of days after I returned from Rotterdam. But, despite all the columnists and websites, I notice that Sundance wrap-ups are still occurring and that a number of premiere films have yet to receive any press out of the festival at all. Like many others, I weighted my own attendance towards the festival’s first half (blame Rotterdam again) and will try to catch up on a number of films I missed on tape back here in New York. For […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 6, 2005
WHERE’S THE LOVE FOR LUDLOW?

Love, Ludlow screenwriter and exec producer has created an honest and engaging blog detailing his experiences making the movie and going to Sundance. In today’s entry, he identifies a phenomenon — call it the “Package B” effect — that I had been sensing myself. Patterson writes: Apparently there’s a bit of grumbling from some of the smaller films shown at Sundance this year. Some feel there was a bit of “frontloading” to the schedule. This meant that the bigger films with bigger stars were shown in the first week of the festival, while the smaller one’s premiered near the end. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 4, 2005
AT SUNDANCE: RECURRING REFRAINS

Cinema is full of failed literary adaptations, attempts by famous directors to translate the work of their favorite novelists into images and screen action. Most of these films crash, however, by the sheer weight of their ambition. Tackling a writer’s best known book, they invariably disappoint his or her hardcore partisans when what’s particularly riveting about the work becomes less interesting when it’s visualized. Japanese director Jun Ichikawa avoided all of the Great Author-to-Film pitfalls with his Tony Takitani, an adaptation of a story by the great Haruki Murakami. Not so much a film as a celluloid ode to Murakami […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 27, 2005
AT SUNDANCE: SINGLE ROOM OCCUPANCIES

Saw back to back screenings in the Sundance “experimental” Frontier section to kick off my festival moviewatching this year. Frequently ignored by most industry, the Frontier section always contains a few real discoveries by filmmakers the fest tags as “experimental” but who will go on to make the mark in the indie scene. A few years ago J.T. Petty debuted his chillingly simple near-silent ghost story Soft for Digging in the section and last year Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation screened there as well. This year the Frontier “filmmaker to watch” may be Kyle Henry, whose Room is an excellently directed and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 27, 2005
AT SUNDANCE: “THEY MAY AS WELL SALUTE AL QAEDA…”

“They may as well salute Al Qaeda,” a guy sitting behind me at the 40 Shades of Blue press screening quite sincerely grumbled after seeing one of the “Independent” mini-trailers that precede all of the screenings here. These short films, which basically serve as cinematic headers for a credit roll of festival sponsors, occupy a strange place in the festival each year. They’re intended to be amusing but innocuous — little film tidbits to reinforce the idea that “You are at a Film Festival!” — but their sheer repetition invariably transforms them into gauche cinematic eyesores by festival’s end. This […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 23, 2005
DEEP INSIDE PARK CITY REAL ESTATE

The enterprising and publicity-savvy filmmaking duo of Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato have an entertaining Web site up for their Sundance entry Inside Deep Throat, a Brian Grazer-produced doc on the infamous porn film (number 50 on Filmmaker magazine’s “50 Most Important Independent Films” list almost a decade ago) that will hit theaters this spring. The directors post a blog on the site as well as some interesting links, the most fascinating of which is this link to local Park City paper The Park Record. Titled “Sundance documentary reveals local’s role in Deep Throat,” the article is a portrait of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 17, 2005
PARK CITY LANDSLIDE

A small addition to the world’s very strange weather woes of the moment, this news out of Park City. One and possibly two skiers have been trapped in a giant landslide in Park City, Utah near the Canyons Resort, just days before this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 14, 2005

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