Day: January 25, 2010

I got up around 7:30, wrote most of the morning and then saw two Sundance films this afternoon — Jay and Mark Duplass‘s Cyrus, an exceptionally well acted mother-son-boyfriend relationship dramedy, and Adam Green‘s Frozen, the Open Water-on-a-ski-lift movie in which the predators are frigid cold and wolves. I don’t know what’s wrong, but I can’t make myself write about them. The engine won’t turn over. Tomorrow morning, I suppose.

Tonight I’m seeing Derek Cianfrance‘s Blue Valentine and Dan Klores‘ Reggie Miller vs. the New York Knicks.

Vanity Fair.com’s Julian Sanction has assembled a list of indie-film tropes and the Sundance movies that employ them. Car crashes, dead children, prominent cigarette smoking, slovenly beards indicating despair, deadbeats, dead parents, dead pets, etc.

It’s awfully nice to be named as one of the top 50 movie blogs, except that 50 is an awfully large number. I’d rather be on a list of the top 20, say — that would matter a bit more.

Four days ago The Gothamist‘s John Del Signore posted an interview with A Serious Man costar Fred Melamed — i,.e., the bulky balding bearded guy who plays Sy Abelman. I adore Melamed’s performance in this film, but then I love every aspect of this under-loved Coen brothers’ masterpiece.

“It’s funny, people always talk about the ending,” Malamed says. “They say they’re unsatisfied by the ending, they didn’t like it — friends of mine, people I respect. To me, the ending of the movie sends you back into the movie. The endings of some movies ease you out of the movie and back to your normal life. You say, ‘That was an interesting movie, now I’m going to have my dinner or whatever.’ But somehow this movie stays in some part of your brain, at least it did for me, and you really wind up thinking about it a lot.”

In his 1.25 Movieline review of Michael Winterbottom‘s The Killer Inside Me, Seth Abramovitch describes the brutal scene in which Jessica Alba is beaten to a pulp by Casey Affleck‘s Lou.

“After making love [to Alba] and discussing their plans to reconvene a few weeks down the line, Lou pulls on a pair of black gloves, then begins to punch Alba in the face, at full force, repeatedly. The camera does not turn away, and as he takes a good dozen shots at her head, her features begin to distort at each impact with his closed fist. As she lies on the floor, unconscious, unrecognizable and barely breathing, he asks if she can hear him. He tells her he loves her, and that’s he’s sorry. He then [delivers] several more punches.”

The backers of this film are anticipating that Joe Popcorn will want to pay to see this? The deal as I understand it is that if Eli Roth is directing it’s totally deplorable torture porn, but if Michael Winterbottom is directing it’s a Sundance entry and a film that upscale cineastes might want to see.

Remember Cary Grant‘s irritation in Bringing Up Baby when Katharine Hepburn told her mother that his name is “Mr. Bone”? In that light, Winter’s Bone, Debra Granik‘s dramatic competition entry, is arguably the strangest-sounding and most unintriguing title among all the films showing at Sundance 2010. (The other contender for this prize is Restrepo, Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington‘s doc about an Iraq War veteran.)

But MSN’s James Rocchi assures that Granik’s film ranks very high on his list and that I should make every effort. My next and only remaining shot at seeing it will be at the Racquet Club on Tuesday at 8:30 am. Granik’s last film was the memorable Down to the Bone (which included a break-out performance by Vera Farmiga), so she obviously has a thing about that word.

In the wake of last night’s surprise Hurt Locker win at the Producer’s Guild awards, The Wrap‘s Steve Pond has written that he “can easily see a scenario in which Avatar will lose the Best Picture Oscar, probably to The Hurt Locker.” And The Winner Is columnist Scott Feinberg has also assessed the meaning of Sunday’s apparent game-changer.

Aaron Johnson gave a decent performance as John Lennon in Nowhere Boy, but my dislike of that film instilled a collateral animus toward the guy. Perhaps I can get past this with the help of Matthew Vaughn‘s Kick-Ass (Lionsgate, 4.16).

I’ve always felt that the late Jean Simmons peaked with her luminous performances as Julie Maragon in The Big Country (’58), Sister Sharon Falconer in Elmer Gantry (’60) and Varinia in Spartacus (ditto). To some her British accent suggested a prudish nature, but her scenes with Kirk Douglas in Spartacus had a potent erotic current.

Simmons was married to Stewart Granger and director Richard Brooks. She was treated for an alcohol problem in the ’80s, and she apparently smoked for several years. She died on 1.22 at age 80 — she was born on 1.29.29 — from lung cancer. Classy lady, beautiful eyes.

Echoing comments I heard last night at a Killer Inside Me after-party at Zoom, Screen International‘s David D’Arcy has written that Michael Winterbottom‘s “staggeringly violent” adaptation of Jim Thompson’s 1952 novel “reaches a new extreme in the cinematic depiction of a psychopathic murderer. It is hard to watch — and for some will be impossible — regardless of any psychological logic behind its many killings.

Kate Hudson, Casey Affleck in Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me.

“Audiences up to their ears in serial killers may enter this film thinking they already know them all. Winterbottom will prove them wrong.

“Distributors everywhere will be shy of this film, despite Winterbottom’s established reputation. Anyone releasing it will be dogged by its violence, especially towards women. Theatrical response should be similar to Antichrist, another film whose violence is at the extreme of what is watchable. He adds that “audiences [may] attack the film on grounds of misogyny.”

I decided not to attend last night’s Killer Inside Me screening at the Eccles in order to retire to the close-to-freezing Yarrow hotel lobby in order to write my Runaways review.

Retired Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates has written about attending Sundance, mainly due to an interest in seeing Davis Guggenheim ‘s Waiting For Superman. He calls Redford’s Ordinary People his “all-time favorite,” and adds that he “really like[s]” every movie Redford has directed. (Including The Legend of Bagger Vance, a.k.a. Bag of Gas?) He also mentions that The Great Gatsby is among his favorite Redford performances. Gates’ writing is bland, to put it kindly.