Sundance Originals Archive for January, 2011

DP/30 @ Sundance: Catechism Cataclysm, actors Steve Little & Robert Longstreet

By DP30 - Saturday, January 22nd, 2011
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DP/30 @ Sundance: We Were Here David Weissman

By DP30 - Saturday, January 22nd, 2011

This look back at the AIDS epidemic through the eyes of a handful of people who lived through it is one of Sundance’s most powerful doc premieres.

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Sundance Review: Martha Marcy May Marlene

By Kim Voynar - Saturday, January 22nd, 2011

Martha Marcy May Marlene explores the aftermath of a young girl’s involvement with a cult living on an isolated farm in the Catskills. The thoughtful script by writer/director Sean Durkin is a character study crafted as a deliberately paced psychological thriller, with Elizabeth Olsen (younger sister of Mary-Kate and Ashley, and an accomplished theatrical actress…

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Sundance Day 2: World-Premiering THE INTERRUPTERS

By Ray Pride - Saturday, January 22nd, 2011

Until a magnificent movie in the middle of the evening, the highlight of a woozy first day of Sundance was the sight of Jeff Dowd, “The Dude,” pouring a sleeve of Emergen-C into his Sundance 11 Nalgene water bottle and advising his friends, “Zinc’s better.” A day late and sleep-deprived from the get-go, I had…

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DP/30 @ Sundance: The Lie, writer/director/actor Joshua Leonard, actor Jess Weixler

By David Poland - Saturday, January 22nd, 2011
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Sundance Review: Project Nim

By Kim Voynar - Saturday, January 22nd, 2011

With Man on Wire, director James Marsh took a story that necessitated being pieced together with reflective interviews and archival footage of past events and wove it all together into a cohesive whole that resonated powerfully as it told the history of Phillipe Petit, a daredevil who pulled off a number of dangerous and unbelievable…

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Sundance Review: Kaboom

By Kim Voynar - Friday, January 21st, 2011

I’ll say this up front: Gregg Araki’s Kaboom is not for everyone. If, however, you enjoy completely crazy, immensely creative tales (and I mean crazy in the best Donnie Darko sense), and you’re neither homophobic nor averse to graphic sexual scenes (both hetero and homo), and you’re willing to forgive a few plot twists that,…

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On Predicting Sundance Bests

By Ray Pride - Friday, January 21st, 2011

Predicting film festival bests isn’t my game. But I am hopeful for surprises like a couple years back when, toward the end of Sundance, Robert Koehler is urgently telling me to run, don’t think, go directly to an end-of-festival presser for Man On Wire. (Thank you, Bob.) I’d gotten the same pleasure from being at…

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Sundance Review: Silent House

By Kim Voynar - Friday, January 21st, 2011

I admit to being a bit paranoid about big spooky houses and things that go bump in the night. I can’t imagine that I would ever choose to live in a big, rambling old house so isolated from civilization that my cell phone wouldn’t work in an emergency. That’s just asking for trouble. And if…

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Sundance Day 1: The Bear Went Up The Mountain…

By Ray Pride - Friday, January 21st, 2011

A shuttle filled with Sundance-bound travelers. IPhones bing, tinggg, jing, bongggg. (Withstanding the text of time.) The sound-swarm is like a Brian Eno app on an iPad, like Bloom or Trope. It’s not until halfway up into the mountains, as the gray sky cracks blue over a crest up ahead, higher up, that a biz…

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Sundance Dispatch: Good News, Bad News

By Kim Voynar - Friday, January 21st, 2011

The good news was, I flew Southwest, where Bags Fly Free!(tm) So I was able to bring two bags. Major bonus, because that meant I could bring more boots! And a stash of food cheaper than it would cost me at The Market Formerly Known As Albertsons. The bad news was, my flight was delayed…

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Sundance Preview

By Kim Voynar - Thursday, January 20th, 2011

The independent film world is already descending upon beautiful Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival. The shuttles will be crowded, Main Street will be packed with film buffs, talent, people who are there to socialize and score some free swag, and probably Banksy will not show up this year to adorn Park City…

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Review: ATTENBERG, dir. Athina Rachel Tsangari

By Ray Pride - Thursday, January 20th, 2011

Athina Rachel Tsangari’s weird and beautiful ATTENBERG—all-caps because the filmmaker says it “looks better”; it also looks more like Greek letterforms that way—is a moving marvel from modern Greece, with some of the most deliciously startling moments of any movie I saw in 2010. Tsangari, co-founder of Austin’s Cinematexas International Short Film Festival, debuted the…

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Live@Sundance Opening Presser… from a café in Chicago

By Ray Pride - Thursday, January 20th, 2011

The first Sundance I’ve attended where I couldn’t make it to opening day, and I’m missing the tradition of the opening presser, where Robert Redford offers his opening invocation of the ideals of Sundance. (All’s missing is thin air and the murmuring of cynical scribes seated nearby.) The work of the Sundance Institute gets described…

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Sundance past with 2011 to come

By Ray Pride - Sunday, January 16th, 2011
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Trailering James-Kotlowitz’s THE INTERRUPTERS

By Ray Pride - Thursday, January 13th, 2011

Caution: Language, Violence. Alex Kotlowitz’s New York Times piece that inspired the film is here.

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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