Anne Sewitsky‘s Happy Happy, set in a remote Norweigan village, is about an affair between an unfulfilled wife (Agnes Kittelsen) who works as a middle school teacher, and a married Dane (Henrik Rafaelsen) who, along with his wife, has recently become a neighbor. “Affairs never stay secret for long,” writes Marshall Fine, “but Sewitsky has other layers to reveal about this story that deepen the laughs and, ultimately, also bring a note of melancholy to the comedy.”
A publicist asked for a quote about Paddy Considine‘s Tyrannosaur, which I saw late this afternoon. I haven’t written a review, but here’s what I gave her: “The most original adult love story I’ve seen in ages. Easily the biggest shock of the Sundance Film Festival so far. I didn’t see this one coming — it’s a much stronger and more focused film than I expected from a smallish British drama about an older working-class guy with a temper problem. It curiously touches.
Tyrannosaur costars Peter Mullan, Olivia Colman, Eddie Marsan.
Tyrannosaur director-writer Paddy Considine during filming with Olivia Colman.
Tyrannosaur is a drama that deals almost nothing but surprise cards — a tough story of discipline, redemption and wounded love. Cheers to director-writer Considine for making something genuine and extra-unique. He’s not just an actor who’s branched into directing with a special facility for coaxing good performances — he’s a world-class director who knows from shaping, cutting, timing, holding back and making it all come together.”
I didn’t mention the actors — Peter Mullan, Olivia Colman, Eddie Marsan — but their performances simultaneously stand alone and reach in and grab hold. In fact each and every performance (and I mean right down to the dogs) is aces.
The beast of the title is Joseph (Mullan), an alcoholic, widowed, violence-prone rage monster who lives alone in Leeds. He all but melts when he encounters Hannah (Colman), a kind and trusting shop merchant who shows Joseph a little tenderness. Hannah talks the Christian talk but is just as close to alcohol, which she’s turned to as a sanctuary from her ghastly marriage to a homely, ultra-possessive monster of another sort (Marsan) who brings violence and subjugation to Hannah on a constant basis.
Once Mullan and Colman have formed a kind of friendship, the inevitable final conflict with Marsan awaits. One naturally expects (and in facts savors, if truth be told) some sort of howling, knock-down, face-gashing fight between Mullan and Marsan, but…well, I’ll leave it there but it’s more than a bit of a surprise what happens.
I was so taken with Tyrannosaur in the screening’s immediate wake that I shared my reactions with a young freelancer I’d spoken with in the cattle tent. He’d just seen it as well, and basically went “meh.” My mouth almost fell open. “You think what we just saw is just okay?,” I thought but didn’t say. Jeezus Christ. It takes all sorts and sensibilities to make a world.
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.
MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann announced tonight his sudden departure from (and the total collapsing of) Countdown. Shocker. TheWrap is reporting that the underlying motive may have been to create a “new media empire.” But the suddenness of the departure indicates some kind of dispute with MSNBC’s Phil Griffin.
Olbermann is a brilliant and perceptive analyst, naturally funny and quippy, has a nose that is highly attuned and has never missed the subtlest bullshit-dealing trick, and is an excellent if not glorious world-class hater for (almost) all things right, fiendish, regressive, hee-haw, stupid, Fox/, Tea Party, corporate, Palin, Bachmann, etc. May God love and embrace him for this in this life and the next. Re-surfacing is a fait accompli, of course. I’ll follow the guy anywhere.
From AOL News: “Olbermann’s peripatetic career landed him at MSNBC eight years ago — his second prime-time stint on the network — with a humorous show counting down the day’s top stories. That changed on Aug. 30, 2006, when Olbermann aired the first of a series of densely-worded and blistering ‘special comments,’ this time expressing anger at then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld‘s criticism of opponents to the war in Iraq.
“More anti-Bush administration commentary followed. Olbermann dropped any pretense of journalistic objectivity, and he became a hero to liberals battered by the popularity of Fox News Channel and its conservative commentators. Olbermann openly feuded with Fox, often naming personalities like Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck one of his ‘worst persons in the world’ for some of their statements.
“Countdown became MSNBC’s most popular show. Instantly, a network that had often floundered in seeking a direction molded itself after Olbermann. Opinion was in, and MSNBC’s prime-time lineup was filled out with Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell, who both had been subs for Olbermann when he was away.
“During his moment on his final Countdown Olbermann “thanked several people, including the late Tim Russert, but pointedly not MSNBC honcho Phil Griffin or NBC News president Steve Capus.”
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