Posted May 3rd 2008 11:02AM by Kim Voynar
Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden's Sugar, the follow-up to their critically acclaimed Half Nelson, has finally been picked up for distribution. Variety's Mike Jones reports the film has been acquired for theatrical distribution by Sony Pictures Classics, which seems like a good fit for the film. HBO Films, which financed the film, retains television rights.
Sugar, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year, felt at the time like a tough sell after Half Nelson; it still does. The film, which is subtitled, tells the tale of a young baseball star from the Dominican Republic who crashes after getting moved up to the big leagues. It's really very much a coming-of-age kind of tale about this young boy who grew up poor but talented, always believing baseball to be his one ticket out.
Continue reading 'Sugar' Finally Gets Picked Up
Posted Feb 11th 2008 9:32PM by Kim Voynar
One of my favorite films at Sundance this year was
Trouble the Water. The film, directed by Michael Moore producers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, was a collaboration with Kimberly Rivers Roberts and Scott Roberts, two residents of New Orleans who were trapped by floodwaters during Hurricane Katrina when the levees broke a few blocks from their home. Kim Roberts, who like many of New Orleans' poorer residents, didn't have the resources to evacuate when the hurricane hit, had just purchased a camcorder off the streets for $20 the week before the storm blew in, and she was able to capture some remarkable footage of the hurricane, the flood waters rising, and the aftermath as New Orleans residents tried to rebuild their lives.
I was disappointed that the film, which won the Grand Jury prize for documentary at Sundance, didn't get picked up during the fest. Word just came out this morning that
Trouble the Water has been acquired by Maximum Films International for international rights. It's great news that the filmmakers have a deal for rights outside North America, but I really want to see the film get picked up for North American distrib as well, and it's surprising that none of the independent distributors have picked it up yet. With the right marketing campaign backing it up,
Trouble the Water has "Oscar contender" written all over it. Where are THINKfilm or Magnolia? Come on guys, get on the ball here -- someone needs to pick this film up and get behind it, and get it out in North America as well.
Continue reading 'Trouble the Water' Sells International Rights
Posted Feb 3rd 2008 12:32PM by Kim Voynar
Anytime you see a film in the New Frontiers category at Sundance, it's a dicey proposition. The category tends to showcase a lot of edgier and experimental films that push the boundaries of filmmaking, and as a result, you never know for sure what you're going to get. Sometimes New Frontier films are intriguing, sometimes puzzling, and occasionally dumbfounding, but they're almost always interesting and a welcome break from the usual fest fare. Sometimes, I'll see a New Frontier film and not be wild about it at the time, but it will linger in my head and make me think long after the typical fest fare has come and gone. Such was the case with
Reversion, the second feature directorial effort by Mia Trachinger, whose first film,
Bunny, garnered her "Someone to Watch" and "Best Feature under $500,000" nominations at the Indie Spirit awards in 2001.
I caught a public screening of
Reversion at the Egyptian near the end of the fest. There were a good many walkouts (though I tend to expect that for New Frontier films, and consider it more a reflection of the diversity and edginess of the category than of the films themselves) but there were far more people who stuck around for the Q&A, and quite a pack who followed Trachinger out of the theater afterward to talk more about her film.
Continue reading Sundance Review: Reversion
Posted Feb 1st 2008 5:02PM by Kim Voynar
Every film festival, there are so many films from which to choose that I inevitably miss seeing something I really want to see, and this year at Sundance was no exception. One of the films I kept hearing positive buzz on, both from other critics and on the shuttles from fest-goers, was
Young@Heart.
The doc chronicles a chorus of senior citizens who, since 1982, have been entertaining audiences with their unique renditions of rock songs -- and this isn't your granny's music. These seniors learn and perform songs from The Clash's "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" to Sonic Youth, to James Brown.
Continue reading How to Feel 'Young @ Heart'
Posted Jan 31st 2008 7:02PM by Kim Voynar
Nerakhoon (The Betrayal), the feature directorial debut of cinematographer Ellen Kuras, took 23 years to make. The film, about a family caught in the tides of war, is as much a history lesson about a part of the Vietnam War that is little known as it is a story of how co-director Thavisouk Phrasavath came to America at the age of 14 with his mother and nine siblings after his homeland, Laos fell to the Communists.
Thavi's father, a former commander with the Royal Laotian army, was recruited by the CIA to work intelligence along the Ho Chi Minh trail during the Vietnam War, as a part of the United States goverment's clandestine operations from Laos during the war. When the United States withdrew from Laos, Pathet Lao gained power and Thavi's father was declared an enemy of the state and sent to a "re-education" camp. Thavi, then just 12, was repeatedly arrested because of who his father was, and finally, in fear for his life, left his family to swim across the Mekong River to a refugee camp in Thailand, where he was finally reunited with his mother and siblings two years later.
Continue reading Sundance Review: Nerakhoon (The Betrayal)
Posted Jan 31st 2008 5:02PM by Kim Voynar
When it comes to mockumentary type films, there are basically two kinds: good and bad; there's just not a lot of middle-ground with this particular type of filmmaking.
Paranormal Activity, which showed at Slamdance, the wild and crazy drunk cousin to the Sundance Film Festival, falls squarely into the "good" camp -- particularly if your definition of "good" includes "will scare the pants off you" and "I had to sleep with the lights on after watching it."
The central idea of the film is that it purports to show actual footage of, well, paranormal activity, in the home of the two protagonists, Katie and Micah, who are living their normal lives until weird things begin happening in their home. Katie, who believes she's been haunted by an invisible, malevolent being since childhood, fears it's followed her to her new home. Micah isn't quite convinced there's anything unexplainable going on, but he purchases a video camera to record their room at night, in an attempt to capture on film any paranormal activity and try to make sense of it. When the camera actually does capture some weird happenings, Micah is at first rather excited by what they have on film; as things escalate, through, both Katie and Micah fear that the entity haunting Katie could turn violent -- or even deadly.
Continue reading Slamdance Review: Paranormal Activity
Posted Jan 30th 2008 5:02PM by Kim Voynar
Dysfunctional families and indie films go together like peanut butter and chocolate, and
Birds of America, directed by playwright Craig Lucas, has dysfunction in abundance. Morrie (Matthew Perry), who raised his younger siblings Jay (Ben Foster) and Ida (Ginnifer Goodwin) after their father's death, now lives in the family home with his wife, Betty (Lauren Graham). Morrie is a college prof desperately seeking tenure, and the person who is most in a position to make that happen for Morrie is his friend Paul (Gary Wilmes), who lives right next door with his wife, Laura (Hilary Swank), in their perfect house, with their perfectly maintained flower bed, with their perfectly adorable infant.
Morrie is one of those guys who carries the weight of the world on his shoulders, and he represses his emotions so tightly that the stress of it all has manifested itself in a case of constipation so extreme he has a home office set-up in his bathroom so he can work while trying to ... work all that out. Betty, meanwhile, wants desperately to have a perfect life and a child like Laura, but Morrie won't consider parenthood until he makes tenure. Since their whole future happiness is dependent upon whether Paul recommends Morrie for tenure, both Morrie and Betty go overboard in trying not to offend Paul and Laura -- even to the extent of not complaining that Laura's dog does his business in Morrie and Betty's yard. Unlike Morrie, the dog does not have a constipation issue, so they are constantly cleaning up after it.
Continue reading Sundance Review: Birds of America
Posted Jan 29th 2008 8:32PM by Kim Voynar
For those of us who were at Sundance until the very end, 2008 will be remembered as the Year of That Blizzard. James Rocchi and I finally made it home safely today after getting stuck in Park City when the highway was shut down from 22" of new snow and winds up to 60MPH.
If you've never been in a blizzard, it's kind of cool if you're safe indoors, and incredibly scary if you're not. Our good friends over at indieWIRE made the drive through the storm and got through just before the shutdown. Eugene Hernandez (always on the ball, even in an emergency) shot video of the indieWIRE crew's harrowing drive through the blizzard.
Check out the video right here to see why James and I, much as we wanted to get home, ended up being glad to be stuck at the Yarrow. Yeesh.
Posted Jan 29th 2008 9:02AM by Kim Voynar
It's not a bad idea for an indie film: Two sisters, still dealing as adults with the aftermath of their mother's suicide when they were children, are stuck in dead-end jobs. Then one of them gets the idea to stop cleaning rich people's houses for a living, and to start a business cleaning up crime scenes instead. That's the basic idea behind Christine Jeffs'
Sunshine Cleaning, starring Amy Adams, Emily Blunt and Alan Arkin.
Adams plays Rose, head cheerleader back in the glory days of high school, now stuck raising her son Oscar (Jason Spevack) alone. Rose cleans houses for a living, a job she's not crazy about, and she's having an affair with her high school boyfriend, Mac (Steve Zahn), who likes Rose enough to have sex on the side, but not enough to leave his wife for her. Her sister Norah (Blunt) lives with their father Joe (Arkin), who's always got a scheme going for finally getting rich. When Oscar keeps getting in trouble in school, Rose decides she needs to make more money so she can put him in private school, and cleaning houses for a living isn't going to get her there.
Continue reading Sundance Review: Sunshine Cleaning
Posted Jan 28th 2008 10:32PM by Kim Voynar
Had a busy last couple days here at Sundance. I caught four films on Friday: Alan Ball's
Towelhead,
American Teen (my fave doc of the fest),
Good Dick and
Sunshine Cleaning. Yesterday I saw Mia Trachinger's
Reversion, an interesting science fiction-inspired flick about mutants who don't operate within linear time, and today I wrapped up my Sundance screenings with two award winners,
Trouble the Water and
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired.
Last night the Yarrow Bar was hopping, so even though I was feeling like I was coming down with the nasty virus that's swept through the Sundance folks like crazy, I moseyed down to the bar to check out the scene for a while. It was like a Who's Who of Sundance there last night: Quentin Tarantino was on hand once again, resplendent in black tux pants and a gray shirt and being incredibly nice to all the fans who kept asking for photos with him.
Continue reading Live from Sundance: So Long, Park City
Posted Jan 28th 2008 7:31PM by Kim Voynar
Well, James Rocchi and I were supposed to be on our way to the airport, but instead we just rechecked into the Yarrow, thanks to blizzard conditions here in Park City closing the highway to the airport. I'm probably the person from our Sundance team who most loves seeing and playing in the snow here in Park City, but at this point I'm just ready to go home and not see snow for another year. The storm has been raging all day, with strong winds blowing the snow around and making conditions so bad that we actually ate lunch at the hotel rather than walking in the storm. Even the snowplows were having a hard time getting through.
We're going to hole up in the hotel and get some writing done tonight, and maybe have a drink by the fire at the Yarrow Bar. I expect the bar won't be quite as hopping tonight as it was during Sundance, when Tarantino and various other filmmakers were here hanging out -- Sundance is gone, and a convention of surgical pathologists has taken over the hotel. You never know, though, those pathologists might be wild and crazy.
Hopefully the weather will clear by tonight and our 6AM shuttle will be able to get us to the airport and get us home.\ More reviews and interviews are forthcoming; in the meantime, some pics of the blizzard after the jump ...
Continue reading Live from Sundance: Stranded by the Blizzard
Posted Jan 28th 2008 2:05PM by Kim Voynar
The most powerful documentary I've seen at Sundance is
Trouble the Water, a take on Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath unlike anything I've seen. Combining footage shot by longtime Michael Moore collaborators Carl Deal and Tia Lessin with amateur video footage shot from the eye of the hurricane by New Orleans resident Kimberly Rivers Roberts (who received director of photography credit) the film shows the impact of Hurricane Katrina and what happened to the city's poorest residents both during and after the storm.
Roberts, who bought a camcorder off the street for $20 a week before the storm hit, intending to use it only to shoot family gatherings, captured the residents of the 9th Ward, one of the hardest-hit areas of New Orleans, as those who could got out and those who couldn't battened down the hatches in preparation for the storm. Roberts and her husband Scott were among those who were unable to evacuate the city because they had no transportation and no money to go anywhere. The mayor of New Orleans ordered the city evacuated, but there was no public transportation organized to get out those people who didn't have the means to do so on their own.
Continue reading Sundance Review: Trouble the Water
Posted Jan 27th 2008 8:37PM by Kim Voynar
Two years ago,
An Inconvenient Truth was surprisingly well-received at the Sundance Film Festival. This year another environmental doc,
Fields of Fuel, turned out to be a huge hit with audiences, winning the audience award last night for documentary. Directed by environmental activist Josh Tickell,
Fields of Fuel is a film about biodiesel -- fuel made from organic products. It can be made from corn or soybeans, but can also be made from agricultural product less impactful on the environment, like switch grass and algae.
Tickell lays out the case for biodiesel as the fastest and most sustainable means to reduce our country's dependence on oil: Henry Ford and Rudolf Diesel both designed their engines to operate on vegetable oil, but the increasing dominance of the oil barons, in particular John D. Rockefeller, says Tickell, killed biodiesel before it had a chance to get off the ground, laying the framework for the oil dependence that drives everything from home heating to how we get around.
Continue reading Sundance Review: Fields of Fuel
Posted Jan 26th 2008 9:17PM by Kim Voynar
James is at the awards ceremony, and I'm back here at Cinematical headquarters liveblogging the results. The theme, James tells me, is apparently "cowboy," because William H. Macy is in a cowboy getup.
7:20: Macy is apparently doing a "wildly obscure
monologue incorporating the titles of all the Sundance films. Macy: "That, my friends, is The Complete History of my Sexual Failures, and the end of my comedic monologue."
7:23: Tony Hale: "nothing says Sundance and independent film like people dancing in covered wagons."
Awards after the jump ...
Continue reading Sundance Awards: And the Winners Are ...
Posted Jan 26th 2008 5:02PM by Kim Voynar
One of the more controversial films at Sundance,
Savage Grace dramatizes the real-life story of Barbara and Tony Baekeland, a bizarrely intertwined high-society mother and son whose Oedipal relationship ended in tragedy. Screenwriter Howard A. Rodman, who adapted the script from the book by Natalie Robins and Stephen M.L. Aronson, plucks five key periods in Barbara and Tony's lives from the wealth of source material to sketch out the broad strokes of the path that led to Tony stabbing his mother to death with a kitchen knife in their London penthouse in 1972.
Barbara married above her class to Brooks Baekeland, heir to a sizeable family fortune generated by his grandfather, who invented Bakelite plastic, one of the first artificial manufacturing materials, and a consumer product whose possibilities made it both far-reaching and wildly lucrative. The Baekeland's wealth allowed them to move in high society and to live around the globe. The film focuses on Barbara (Julianne Moore), who was known in their social circle for her outbursts of temper, bouts of depression, and risque sexual encounters. Barbara's relationship with her son Tony (Eddie Redmayne) was tumultuous and crossed boundaries, ultimately resulting in Barbara seducing her son into an sexual relationship, which ultimately led to Tony's breakdown and murder of his mother.
Continue reading Sundance Review: Savage Grace
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