Sundance Film Festival

Sundance 2014 Review: What We Do In The Shadows

This is one of the festival’s most pleasant surprises because it’s gotten to the point where certain horror tropes are dead or dying: recent zombie movies have been more shambling than exciting; vampires in general have become anemic and fangless (shout-out to the Twilight series, driving nails into the rhetorical coffin).

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Sundance 2014 Review: War Story

The death of Lee’s friend has perhaps made her see the wages of war as a price higher than she ever thought she’d pay to be in the thick of it. She’s captured so many losses, so many tragedies, through the lens of her camera, but she has no idea how to capture and cope with her own. The film’s final moments elegantly underscore the truth about the death of those we love and how we grieve the impact of losing them: It hurts, it will always hurt, when you lose someone you love, and even more so when you feel yourself responsible. But life moves on, wars continue to happen, the world spins around its axis just like it did before you lost this person you cared about.

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Picturing Sundance 2014: 21 Images

Sleep is good. Seeing movies is better. Writing solid, thoughtful reviews instead of instant reactions longer than a well-wrought tweet: even better. A few quick descriptions and some more glimpses of 10 days at Sundance.

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Sundance 2014 Review: Imperial Dreams

Bambi’s story is something we in our cozy middle class lives maybe prefer not to think about too hard when we ponder the abstract idea of projects and prison terms. The real plight of poverty is the disparity of opportunity, and the way in which we blame those born into an urban war zone for growing up in a way that enables them to survive in it. It’s nature versus nurture: How do we expect a kid with the potential to do something amazing with his life to navigate his way there with no support system save for the friends and relatives who have him working the corner and holding a gun in his hand from childhood?

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Picturing Sundance 2014 x 13 (Plus 140-Character Grasps For Instantaneous Truth)

If you go to parties, you miss movies. If you go to movie after movie after movie, you don’t have time to write, let alone think. But! Thank the Movie Godz for Twitter and for photographs.

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Sundance 2014 Review: Obvious Child

I laughed a lot while watching Obvious Child. Not everyone will, to be honest. If fart jokes and sex jokes, abundant cursing, peeing in public and pooping in front of your best friend while awaiting the results of a pregnancy test are things that you can’t handle, this might not be the film for you. If you can get past those things to the core of this film, though, you might just find the places where the story resonates for you, too. It certainly did for me.

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Sundance 2014 Review: Boyhood

A little after 1 AM on Monday, January 20, 2014, in a 1,296-seat high school auditorium in Park City, Utah, a piece of cinema history was made: the lights came up on the world premiere of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, a film in production for more than a decade.

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Sundance 2014 Review: I Origins

Cahill’s fully-realized premise comes into view as Ian and Karen discover something astonishing about the nature of the human iris. There are some really interesting grand narrative implications here, suggesting a life of rigorous science is blind to some of the more arcane secrets of the universe.

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Sundance 2014 Review: Hellion

It all sounds simple enough from a story standpoint, but Candler manages to interweave layers of complexity into these characters that elevate this tale beyond the surface level. These people feel real and honest in every respect; they could be you or me or anyone we know who’s drowning in grief and can’t see the way back to the surface to breathe again without every moment smacking you with what’s been taken in the blink of an eye, the crash of a metal, the stop of a heart beating.

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Sundance 2014 Reviews: Overnighters, Whiplash

Even in these scenes of heartwarming fraternity, there’s always this nagging feeling that Reinke’s generosity is perhaps misguided and downright bizarre, as if there’s something unhealthy or otherwise unspoken that drives his desire to help these men.

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Sony Gets A Whiplash… Internationally Only

Sony Gets Whiplash At Sundance… International Only; Territories That Love Jazz?

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Redford On Oscar Oversight

Redford On Oscar Oversight

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14 Must-See Films at Sundance ‘14

What sounds good?

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Sundance Lifeguard Poolside With Screen Media And Focus World

Sundance Lifeguard Poolside With Screen Media And Focus World

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Drake Doremus’ Sundance Breathe In Goes To Cohen

Drake Doremus’ Sundance Breathe In Goes To Cohen

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Shelton Sundancer Touchy Feely Grows On Magnolia

Shelton Sundancer Touchy Feely Grows On Magnolia

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It’s In A World, Only Roadside Lives In It In The U. S.

It’s In A World, Only Roadside Lives In It In The U. S.

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Ford Foundation’s JustFilms Head Bagwell Leaves After An Oscar Nominee And Eight Productions At Sundance

Ford Foundation’s JustFilms Head Bagwell Leaves After An Oscar Nominee And Eight Productions At Sundance

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Oscilloscope Takes On Life After Tiller

Oscilloscope Takes On Life After Tiller

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Oscilloscope Hot For A Teacher

Oscilloscope Hot For A Teacher

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Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon