During a Saturday afternoon female writer’s panel at Park City’s Egyptian theatre (“Power of Story: Serious Ladies“), Girls creator Lena Dunham demonstrated a dogged anti-Woody Allen tenacity by lobbing a fresh grenade over the months-old Dylan Farrow accusations. But she was a little sloppy about it. “Woody Allen is proof that people don’t think everything he says in his films is stuff that he does,” Dunham said, “because all he was doing was making out with 17-year olds for years and we didn’t say anything about it.” Allen had a relationship with a 17 year-old, played by Mariel Hemingway, in 1979’s Manhattan, but that was a one-off. Dunham added a stunningly cynical remark when she suggested that Allen falling for Soon-Yi Previn in ’91 (and then marrying her in ’97) was p.r. theatre meant to deflect moral criticism. “No one went that Woody Allen is making out with a 17-year old in Manhattan and I guess he’s a real perv,” Dunham said. “And then lo and behold…” Co-panelist Kristen Wiig completed the thought with a reportedly sarcastic “he fell in love.” That’s fairly venal. Also on the panel were Mindy Kaling (The Mindy Project) and Orange Is The New Black creator Jenji Kohan.
All along I’ve been saying — insisting — that among 2014’s Best Picture contenders, Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s Birdman is the only ecstatic, drop-dead brilliant contender. And all along a majority of the online know-it-alls (Gold Derby, Gurus of Gold, Steve Pond, Sasha Stone, Mark Harris, et. al.) have been saying the Best Picture Oscar will nonetheless go to Richard Linklater‘s Boyhood. And all along I’ve said that would be (a) a personal disappointment but (b) a fine, supportable decision because Boyhood is an inspired, spirit-lifting landmark of sorts — a stunt film with soul, finesse and an engaging scheme.
And then last night the roof fell in with chunks of sheetrock and ceiling styrofoam on the floor and all the Boyhood supporters stumbling around and rubbing plaster dust out of their eyes and going “what happened?” For Birdman won the Producers Guild of America’s Best Picture equivalent trophy, i.e., the Darryl F. Zanuck Award. Boom.
All across Oscarland and particularly among the prognosticators, wise guys are figuring ways to spin this so it seems as if they half-knew and half-expected this to happen all along. Hilarious.
Needless to add there is nothing but joy and elation up in Park City. If I wasn’t a sober guy I would have bought a bottle of champagne and guzzled it. For the first time since the triumph of Kathryn Bigelow‘s The Hurt Locker, which I had pushed from its first screening at the ’09 Toronto Film Festival, HE’s personal Best Picture pony appears to be surging and within reach of a big win.
Maybe. Don’t count your chickens. There could always be a backlash. (Sasha Stone tweet: “When Birdman becomes the frontrunner people will start to hate it too. Like clockwork.” Did she say “start” to hate it?) But this feels awfully good, I must say.
(l. to r.) Greta Gerwig, Noah Baumbach and Lola Kirke following Saturday evening’s screening of Mistress America.
(l. to. r.) D Train costars James Marsden, Kathyrn Hahn and Jack Black following last night’s screening at the Library.
James White star Christopher Abbott, director Josh Mond following Friday afternoon’s screening at the Library.
The American hinterland has spoken again this weekend about American Sniper. It will probably earn another $60 million this weekend on top of last weekend’s super-haul, and that means that Joe and Jane Bubba want Clint Eastwood‘s film to win the Best Picture Oscar. The Producers Guild Awards are unfolding as we speak, and they’re expected to give their Daryl F. Zanuck award to Boyhood…right? Just saying. Different realms.
Yesterday I caught four films over an 11-hour period, and I’ve got another three-and-a-half on the schedule today — a half-hour’s worth of Stevan Riley‘s Listen to Me, Marlon (2:30 pm, Prospector), Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck‘s Mississippi Grind (3:30 pm, Eccles), Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig‘s Mistress America (6:30 pm, Eccles) and then, possibly, most of Craig Zobel‘s Z For Zachariah (8:30 pm, Library). And if I want to be a serious madman I’ll catch an 11:30 pm screening of Patrick Brice‘s The Overnight at the Prospector.
On top of which I’m moving this morning from the somewhat larger suite #121 at the Park Regency to the somewhat smaller #124, which should take about an hour. A tight clock. Oh, to wander through the Sundance Film Festival solely on whims and instinct with no need to file…stop dreaming.
For me the smartest, most engaging and fully realized film I saw yesterday was Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon‘s Best of Enemies, a wise and propulsive capturing of a kind of clash-of-the-titans TV debates between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal during the 1968 Democratic and Republican conventions.
But running a close second was Andrew Mogel and Jarrad Paul‘s The D Train, by far the darkest and nerviest laugher I’ve seen in ages. It begins as a not-too-funny situation comedy about a neurotic, high-strung suburban family man (Jack Black) who goes to great fraudulent lengths to travel to Los Angeles to lure a former high-school classmate who’s now a more-or-less-failed Hollywood actor (James Marsden) to a 20th anniversary high-school reunion.
What I didn’t expect to see was a detour into Brokeback Mountain territory by way of a Lars von Trier film. But at the same time, as I mentioned during the post-screening q & a, The D Train follows the classic structure known as “the Three Ds” — desire, deception and discovery.
“A hysterical screwball fantasia that openly steals from Lubitsch, Hawks, Capra and Sturges, and wants to be caught with its fingers in the till. The result is a highly-sexed Jenga-pile of silliness, to which Bogdanovich can’t resist adding block after teetering block.” — from Robbie Collin‘s Telegraph review of Peter Bogdanovich‘s She’s Funny That Way, filed at the 2014 Venice Film Festival.
I might want to wedge in a Sunday afternoon Library screening of Ariel Kleiman‘s Partisan, an allegedly “sinister” melodrama about an enigmatic drifter (Vincent Cassel) who “becomes an unlikely mentor to a young boy” who’s starting to think for himself and see past some of the bullshit. Kleiman directs from a script he co-wrote with Sarah Cyngler. Winners and losers surface at every Sundance Film Festival. No predicting — you just have to roll with the punches. But at least up here you’re dealing with new material and live situations and the coolest people on the planet as opposed to calculating fickle Oscar odds and dealing with the January doldrums back in L.A.
I was intending to see Ken Kwapis‘ A Walk in the Woods this morning, but I hesitated when I realized it will have only one public screening in Park City and no press & industry screenings at all (limited availability always indicates trouble) and particularly after costar Robert Redford said during yesterday’s opening press conference that showing the film during the festival “wasn’t my idea but John Cooper‘s.” Would Redford have said that if he had any serious affection for the film?
So instead I’ll be catching an 11:45 am Library screening of Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon‘s Best of Enemies, a doc about the notorious television debates between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal during the 1968 Democratic and Republican conventions. This will be followed by a 2:30 pm screening of Josh Mond‘s James White (also at the Library). This will be quickly followed by a 5:30 pm MARC screening of Rupert Goold‘s True Story, the Jonah Hill-James Franco fact-based psychodrama. The final film of the day will be Andrew Mogel and Jarrad Paul‘s The D Train, about a Zelig-like guy (Jack Black) enduring the agonies of a 20th anniversary high-school reunion.
For whatever perverse reason Sundance programmers will occasionally select a mostly dreadful, all-but-unendurable film to play in the Premieres section. The common consensus is that Bryan Buckley‘s The Bronze is one of these films. I can’t speak from authority because I left around the 15-minute mark, but I could smell trouble even before it began.
Standing before the Eccles crowd and delivering his opening remarks, Buckley, 51, was affecting a look of a ski-slope party animal with a bright red parka and long blonde hair worn in a shaggy Iggy Pop or Chris Hemsworth-in-Rush style, and right away I was muttering, “No good can come of this….not from this guy.”
I was right. Written by Melissa Rauch (The Big Bang Theory) and her husband Winston, pic is about Hope (Rauch), a former Olympic gymnast who won a bronze medal in ’04 and is still coasting on that modest memory, ten years on, as she resides with her dad (Gary Cole) — the very embodiment of a self-entitled, delusional loser. Buckley had told the crowd they would be detesting Hope almost immediately, so the name of the game was “how hateful is this bitch going to be?”
I decided within minutes — seconds, really — that my life would not be significantly diminished if I never found out. The easy-lay types were laughing but half-heartedly. An aura of uncertainty and then discomfort began to permeate the room. I grabbed the cowboy hat and bolted. I emerged from the Eccles a free man, elated and renewed and striding purposefully down Kearns Boulevard as I sucked in the frigid night air.
Prior to the start of last night’s screening of The Bronze. If you look closely you’ll spot a guy with a very worried expression sitting right in the middle, in the first row of the second section.
Liz Garbus‘ What Happened, Miss Simone? is a sad, absorbing, expertly assembled doc about the legendary Nina Simone (1933-2003), one of the greatest genius-level jazz-soul singers of the 20th Century as well as a classically trained pianist extraordinaire. Garbus is obviously a huge Simone fan, and she makes her case for — draws you into — this flawed, impassioned artist with skill and flair. Pic opened the 2015 Sundance Film Festival on Thursday night at the Eccles.
So Garbus’ film has the expertise and the feeling and the spirit. No one who sees it will leave feeling under-nourished. But I also found What Happened, Miss Simone? irksome because of several biographical facts that Garbus inexplicably leaves out. (Her birth year, the cause of her death, her first marriage, a shooting incident, etc.) I also found Simone herself a bit of a hurdle. Her lack of respect and reverence for her extraordinary singing gifts as well as a general indifference to the basics of maintaining a healthy career is perplexing and even alienating. Maybe it’s me but it’s hard to warm up to, much less feel a kinship with, haughty aloofness, a hair-trigger temperament and self-destructive behavior.
But oh, those pipes, that phrasing, that style…that magnificent, touched-by-God aura.
I just happened upon this beautiful photo this morning on Twitter. I had an emotional reaction that’s stayed with me all day. I had to a chance to watch a digitally remastered Apocalypse Now inside the beautiful Werner Herzog Cinema at last September’s Telluride Film Festival, but I went to see Wild instead because that was the hotter film at the moment. I’m really sorry I did that.
“My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It’s what it was really like. It was crazy. We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.” — Francis Ford Coppola speaking at a press conference during the 1979 Cannes Film Festival.
The 2015 Sundance Film Festival opening-day press conference was the exercise it’s always been — an attempt to define what the climate is and what’s changing, and an attempt by journalist to goad Robert Redford into giving them a tasty quote or two. The aging Sundance Kid was asked virtually all of the questions and obliged with his usual honesty. Festival director John Cooper and executive director Keri Putnam added their two cents from time to time. It was an okay discussion and frank as far as it went, but the answers at these conferences are always influenced by diplomatic sidestepping or at least a tendency to sand off the edges. Incidentally: I was struck by a bland, vaguely grotesque mini-mall across the street from the Egyptian theatre, where the conference took place. Bit by little bit Park City, which had a vaguely historic aura 20 years ago, is losing those remnants of the old mining town that it used to have. A kind of cultural blight is spreading. Shallow entrepreneurs catering to the rich and the tasteless are coming in and rebuilding it to fit their bullshit sensibilities.
(l. to .r) Salt Lake Tribune‘s Sean Means (moderator), Sundance Film Festival director John Cooper, exec director Keri Putnam, founder and costar Captain America costar Robert Redford during this afternoon’s press conference.
The ugliest addition to Main Street in many years — big and sprawling and exuding not a hint of personality or charm — a form of nouveau riche arrogance by way of architectural blight.
The Riverhorse Cafe used to be a pleasant gray — now it’s been repainted a dark gray with a touch of forest green. It almost feels funereal. No accounting for taste.
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