N.Y. Times guy David Carr considers the very sad Sundance legacy of the late Adrienne Shelly, whose last directed film, Waitress, will have its premiere at the festival fairly soon. “Because Shelly had such a clear idea of what she wanted and was not shy about making it happen,” he writes, “her absence [at Sundance] as the film makes the rounds is all the more acute.”
When did those Sundance-is-losing-its-soul pieces first start to happen? The mid ’90s? A bit later? When did the Sundance-has-been-totally- corrupted-vulgarized-and-putrified stories start happening? Around 2000 or ’01? Question is, as far as Sundance tear-down articles go, where does this John Anderson 1.19 Guardian piece fit in?
The usual we’re-Sundance-and-we’re-proud-of- what-we-stand for themes were sounded by Robert Redford and festival program director Geoff Gilmore at the opening-day Sundance Film Festival press conference, which ended about 90 minutes ago. I don’t know if anyone was knocked flat by theser statements, but it was good to hear the Sundance fundamentals restated in a clear and concise fashion.
We’re about movies and not parties or ambush marketing, Redford said. We’re living in a very exciting, expansive and inclusive time, they both said. And I recall one of them saying that the line between narrative features and documentaries is blurring, and that’s good, and the more this happens the better for everyone. (I agree.)
I recorded the whole thing, but I’ll tell you right now that Redford spoke a little too softly and wasn’t adequately miked, so don’t expect much from the first five or six minutes. In fact, the whole recording is on the insufficient side. The clearest thing of all is me asking Redford and Gilmore a question; I was sitting right next to the Olympus recorder so duhhhh.
Chicago 10 director Brett Morgen joined them about halfway through the conference to talk about the genesis of his film, why he thinks a revisiting of the Chicago ’68 riots is relevant today, or at least why it should be, and to what extent his film is “political” (scary word, that) and why he decided that the first thing to get right was to make the film entertaining.
I was writing at a table in a sports bar last night, and there was a group of five sitting nearby — four guys and a lady — who couldn’t stop laughing uproariously. Every time they burst out laughing it felt like someone had exploded an aural fart grenade….”hah-hah-hah-hahhhh!” After a while I got out my watch and started timing their frequency — no lie, the boisterous noise happened about once every 75 or 80 seconds.
Everybody explodes in laughter from time to time — it’s wonderful when this happens. But people who do it repeatedly and oppressively in a crowded room are, no offense, animals. They’re the equivalent of a guy who sits down at a communal breakfast table (which I’m sitting at right now at the Star hotel) and loudly slurps down a bowl of Raisin Bran.
“Many inside and out of the Academy feel Little Miss Sunshine is virtually a lock for a Best Picture nomination come Tuesday,” writes Hollywood Wiretap‘s Pete Hammond. The odds, in other words, are “looking very good right now for LMS to fill the ‘small’ movie slot in Oscar’s top five. [And] people are wondering if there isn’t a sea change in the Academy; a new way of thinking and the possibility that this Little picture, which was the first serious contender out of the gate last summer and the first to send DVD screeners, could just be the last one standing around 9 pm or so on February 25th. In the kind of currently wide-open Oscar landscape we have, this scenario seems as plausible as any.”
Nikki Finke nails Brad Grey for being a credit hog maneuverer at the Golden Globes. To approximately quote Jack Nicholson’s character in The Departed, “Nobody gives you anything — you have to take it.”
An Associated Press story on CNN.com this morning says “it’s rare for the Sundance Film Festival to start with a documentary..and [yet] organizers say this year’s opening night film, Chicago 10, represents just the sort of bold gambit the United States’ top independent-cinema venue likes to see in its movies.” Well, okay…but Brett Morgen‘s film, to go by the various descriptions, isn’t the kind of thing Sundance programmers usually pick for the opening-night attraction. Not to my recollection, at least.
Sundance programmers have always chosen to begin the festival with a film with a thoughtful but moderate pulse — every major film festival (Cannes, Toronto) tends to do this. Totally par for the course. This makes me concerned, of course, that Morgen’s film may be thoughtfully moderate…let’s hope not.
Chicago 10 “is a film that I think at one level is really basically about risk-taking, about people who want to change the world, so in that sense, it’s inspiring,” Sundance director Geoffrey Gilmore told AP. “It speaks to what goes into the struggle for social change, which is not unlike what goes into the personal vision of independent film.”
I happened to come upon a thumbnail this morning of the infamous 12.12.05 Time cover that started all the trouble for Steven Spielberg‘s Munich — a cover that basically said, “Old media has come down from Mt. Sinai and lo, here is the film of the year, a film of our time…a masterful, heart-palpitating Oscar-worthy drama by a legendary filmmaker who has spoken to Time and Time only.”
With Sundance ’07 already being labelled as “ehh” by some of the buyers, it’s good to recall a crusty old Park City truism: in doubt or despair, go to the docs, go to World Cinema, go to Slamdance and buttonhole Variety‘s Robert Koehler.
The death of Art Buchwald, the hotshot political columnist who peaked in the ’60s and’70s, was announced yesterday by his son. Buchwald’s humor was never, as I recall, terribly savage or incendiary — he worked and played within the established boundaries — but in his better moments he displayed a delicious wit.
Rich guys who can’t wait for the June ’07 debut of the iPhone may have already heard that South Korea’s LG Electronics Co. is launching a Prada phone, a $780 mobile device that offers a buttonless touch-screen interface that’s a lot like the iPhone’s — and which will be in stores in Europe next month.
