Day: January 22, 2011

My mind is blown by The King’s Speech having won the Producers Guild of America Best Picture of 2010 award. What happened to The Social Network? I don’t have an explanation, but I suspect it was due to some kind of involuntary generational reflex or voting spasm. It makes no real aesthetic sense but they did it anyway. Here are a couple of guesses why.

One, the PGA voters skew older and defaulted to the old emotional-tear-ducts-mean-best-picture equation that people like Nicole Sperling have been talking about. Or two, the PGA voters decided to enliven the Best Picture race for perverse reasons — i.e., because they were bored with “The Social Network has it in the bag” scenario, and because they could.

The PGA has definitely shaken things up, that’s for sure. It’s a revolt, is what it is. It’s the old getting onto the young and saying “no…no! Our most highly honored film can’t be about kids talking about computer codes….no! We need that old-time 1993 emotion!” That or it’s some kind of freak vote, like something got into the L.A. water system. All I know is that it’s starting to look like a real horse race again, and that’s fine from an Oscar-covering perspective. But if The King’s Speech wins in the end, it’ll be Shakespeare in Love-defeats-Saving Private Ryan all over again.

I also think it’s safe to assume that EW‘s Dave Karger was popping the champagne tonight. And well he should have. Tonight’s vote was a triumph of Kargerism, which is to say a fulfillment of what Karger and other King’s Speech allies (Poland, Thompson, Howell, etc.) have been saying all along.

Ian Palmer‘s Knuckle is a thoughtful, well-assembled, vaguely sickening doc about four (or is it five?) working-class Irish clans expressing their loathing for each other by staging bare-knuckle mano e mano fist fights over a period of 12 years, or roughly ’97 to ’09. It’s sad and repellent, and yet you’re gripped with anticipation every time a new fight is about to begin. What is that?

There’s no real reason for these medieval-style bouts other than the clansmen being unable or unwilling to transcend this handed-down tradition, which goes back a couple of decades. Or their bestial instincts or economic frustration…whatever. The point is that these beefy, tattooed, very Irish-looking guys are stuck in this grudge-bout cycle like an ox stranded in a mud sinkhole.

Fight Club was a very cool, understandable art film — it was about renouncing passive, corporate-controlled attitudes and lifestyles. Knuckle is just anthropology. There’s nothing to do after seeing it except shake your head and go “I get it, okay, that’s their ritual….but on the other hand, too effin’ bad.”

Today’s screening slate starts with Ian Palmer‘s Knuckle at 1:30 pm, and then Bill Haney‘s The Last Mountain (a doc) at 5 pm, Jesse Peretz‘s My Idiot Brother at 6:15 pm, and finally Lee Tamahori’s The Devil’s Double at 9:30 pm.

My biggest “miss” so far, or so I’m told, is Sean Durkin‘s Martha Marcy May Marlene, a psychological thriller with, I’m hearing, a very srong performance by Elizabeth Olsen. (It screened last night against Win Win and you know the rest.) I was hearing “you should see it/definitely catch it” yesterday afternoon, but shit happens. My next shot is a Library screening on Monday night.

Lucy Olsen, Sarah Paulson in . Martha Marcy May Marlene

Marshall Fine writes that “it brings together two sisters, Martha (Olsen) and Lucy (Sarah Paulson) who haven’t seen each other in the more than two years since Martha seemingly disappeared. Martha calls her older sister out of the blue to come get her and spends the next week or so quietly unraveling at the Connecticut lake home of Lucy and her long-suffering husband, Ted (Hugh Dancy).

“Though she refuses to discuss where she’s been with Lucy, we see it in flashbacks: held in thrall by the charismatic leader (John Hawkes) of a cult on a farm in the Catskills. Writer-director Durkin never spells out the details of the cult – aside from each female member being drugged and raped by the leader as a kind of initiation. Yet each flashback shows how, slowly but surely, this group of young women – and men – are casually brainwashed into doing as they are told, until Martha finally escapes on her own.

“Olsen (younger sister of the Olsen twins) gives a performance of surprising range and depth – and it’s not hard to see Durkin messing with the audience by making Lucy and Ted’s upscale yuppie existence feel almost as constricted and confining as that of the cult, at times. It’s a haunting film that occasionally gets confusing, [such as]when the timeline between past and present is muddled. Still, that contributes to a sense of dread that permeates the film in ways that are hard to deny.”

This was literally the view from my seat during yesterday’s Margin Call P & I screening at the Holiday Cinemas. If you sat normally, I mean. The architect actually designed this intentionally. After 90 minutes my aching butt and my legs couldn’t take the strain of leaning forward so I left my seat and stretched out on the steps, hoping against hope that one of the Sundance volunteers wouldn’t spot me and come up and say, “I’m sorry, sir, but Park City fire regulations don’t allow,” etc.

I took this while waiting inside the tent ouside the Holiday Cinemas to get into yesterday morning’s screening of Margin Call. That’s Variety’s Justin Chang on the phone. Tons of journalists were waiting and waiting, and very few got in. Chang and I were rescued at the last minute by a friendly publicist who escorted us in, although the balcony seats we got were behind an unusually high safety barrier which required sitting on the edge of our seats and leaning forward.

The 20somethings who hang out in packs in front of Tatou and Harry O’s each and every night during Sundance are, of course, party gah-gahs looking to catch a film or two but are mainly looking to get loaded, go Seth Rogen-crazy and maybe get lucky. Okay, “lucky”-ness can be life-transforming — I get that. I don’t care really, but I happened to walk by here last night and it hit me, “Wow…ground zero…I’ll bet most of these guys liked The Green Hornet.”

Tom McCarthy‘s Win Win (Fox Searchlight, 3.18), which screened last night at the Eccles, isn’t quite as good as Little Miss Sunshine — it’s an 8.5 to Sunshine‘s 9 — but it’s a wise, perceptive and affecting little family-relations flick that works just fine. If only more films labelled “family-friendly” were as good as this. McCarthy is always grade-A, and this is more from the same well. Win Win is warm but not sappy, smartly written, very well acted and agreeable all the way.

Win Win star Paul Giamatti, director-screenwriter-producer Tom McCarthy at last night’s after-party at Park City’s High West Distillery.

But it needs to be clarified that it’s not a “wrestling movie,” as Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson has tweeted, as much as a film about parenting, nurturing, values and community.

Paul Giamatti is a financially struggling small-town attorney and family man with a wife (played by the always first-rate Amy Ryan) and two daughters. He coaches the high-school’s wrestling team on the side. During a court hearing about the welfare of an aging, dementia-aflicted client (Burt Young), Giamatti offers to be Young’s arm’s-length caretaker because of an extra $1500 monthly that comes with the job. This is presented as an ethical failing of some kind, but financial motives or fallbacks are always a factor in taking care of an elderly person.

And then Young’s grandson (Alex Shaffer, a high-school wrestling star found in a talent search) shows up on the doorstep of Young’s home. The kid has run away from his Ohio home, but more particularly from his youngish drug-addict mom (Melanie Lynskey) and her atrocious parenting.

Giamatti and Ryan take Shaffer in for a brief period until he’s able to catch a bus home, but everything changes when Giamatti discovers that Shaffer is a world-class wrestler. He winds up enrolling in the local high school and joining the team, of course, and everything’s looking great until the wicked witch — i.e., Lynskey — shows up looking to take Shaffer back home and trying to snag the $1500 gig in taking care of Young, her dad.

Alex Shaffer, Paul Giamatti,

GIamatti delivers another one of his dependably solid half-Gloomy Gus/half-wise man performances. But for my money Ryan is the most enjoyably on-target. She’s so solid, so real. And Shaffer definitely holds his own.

“There’s something about him,” Giamatti told USA Today‘s Claudia Puig last night. “The movie hinges on him. He’s so likeable. If he hadn’t been likeable, the movie would never have worked. And he’s really smart, but tries to hide it.”

Costars include Jeffrey Tambor, Bobby Cannavale and Margo Martindale. McCarthy wrote the screenplay, based on the story by himself and Joe Tiboni. Michael London (Sideways) produced with McCarthy, Mary Jane Skalski and Lisa Maria Falcone.