Arizona-based film journalist Henry Cabot Beck informs that last weekend in Pheonix “a sign was posted on each of the box-office windows of the AMC chain theaters warning people that they might get sick watching Cloverfield. When I asked the ticket seller, he told me there had been some upchucking and retching and like that. Next thing will be barf bags handed out with the tickets. William Castle would have made a mint with a gimmick like this.”
I’ve almost never felt queasy from jiggly, hand-held photography (I eat films like Dancer in the Dark for breakfast), although I’ll admit that Cloverfield has more than its share. Yesterday, however, I saw the King Kong of hand-held nausea jiggle movies — Tia Lessin and Carl Deal‘s Trouble The Water, a doc about the Katrina disaster.
Half of it was shot by Lessin and Deal in the usual fashion and is no big challenge, but the other half is shakycam footage of Katrina’s devastation shot by one of the film’s main subjects, Kimberly Rivers. (The other is her husband Scott.) The footage is so scattered and whip-panny that I was starting to think about bolting less than ten minutes in. Show Trouble The Water to those Cloverfield sufferers in Pheonix and they’d spew in their seat.

Patti Smith: Dream of Life director Steven Sebring and legendary poet-rocker Patti Smith following this evening’s screening of the film (rich, layered, beautiful) at the Holiday Cinemas. Smith and her band will be performing a concert tomorrow evening at 6 pm.

Tipsters have been telling me to see Jonathan Levine‘s The Wackness, which I managed to catch this morning at 9:30. It’s a quirky coming-of-age dramedy about a Jewish teenaged pot dealer (Josh Peck) falling for the lah-dee-dah step-daughter (Olivia Thirlby) of his marginally unhinged therapist (Ben Kingsley) whom he simultaneously develops a close friendship with. It was wildly cheered after this morning’s Eccles screening, but I was yes and no about it.

The story, which director-writer Levine apparently based on his own adolescent wanderings, is well told but the basic points seem familiar as hell in numerous ways, and the visually murky, sepia-like photography starts to feel almost claustrophobic after a while. Petra Korner‘s widescreen images aren’t Gordon Willis-y as much as flat-out funereal. I was sitting there going “good God, does everything have to look this fucking dreary? With all this grayish-green shadow slime covering everyone and everything?”
I don’t like Peck that much either. He’s a good spirited actor with a mashed-in face and jutting jaw that makes him resemble a genetically deficient Eric Bogosian, but there’s something low-lifey about the guy. For his part in the film he’s wearing one of those greasy, part-in-the-middle homie haircuts that kids had about 10 or 15 years ago, and he talks with a vaguely retarded-sounding “street” patois. It feels like a tremendous effort for Peck to speak a correctly-composed sentence and pronounce the words correctly…yo! He looks and talks like an alien. (Calorically challenged until a couple of years ago, Peck played the obnoxious porker who was killed in ’04’s Mean Creek.)
And I get riled at movies with characters who constantly medicate with cigarettes, joints, booze, lines of coke. Can any major character in this film get through five minutes straight without adding a stimulant to their system? Irritating as hell. I wanted to throw something at the screen after a while.
But Kingsley’s pot-smoking therapist is gloriously skewed in this thing. He’s almost enough of a reason alone to see it. But that damn cinematography, man…it was really bringing me down. Then you add in Peck’s weird and all those fucking cigarettes and doobies that everyone keeps sucking into their lungs and before you know it you’re thinking about hitting a health club just to flush the experience out of your system.

First-time filmmaker Lance Hammer‘s Ballast, which I’ll try to catch at the Monday noon Eccles screening, has gotten more “you need to see this” buzz than any other Sundance film thus far. Consider this excerpt from Robert Koehler‘s 1.19.08 Variety review.

“A rock-ribbed sense of committed, personal cinema and a core belief in people being able to pull themselves out of misery supports Ballast, an extraordinary debut by editor-writer-director Lance Hammer. Though his name would be better suited to sign high-octane action movies, Hammer quickly establishes himself with the only film he’s ever made as a humanist artist working confidently and quietly with the cinema’s most basic and expressive tools.
“Following a Mississippi Delta family shattered by suicide and violence, pic runs a course from wrenching death to possible uplift that seems real every second, but will prove a challenge to potential distribs even while winning over fests worldwide.
“A rare case of a Sundance competition film also in the running at Berlin, such a one-two punch suggests a notable work, but also perhaps creates inflated expectations, even though unknowns are involved on both sides of the camera. Hammer’s achievement is to create a thoroughly engrossing experience that attends to everyday life’s small (and in a few cases, significant) moments, and is certain to command high respect as a film that operates by its principles and engages audiences’ best human responses.”

Scrounging around for tickets at last night’s What Just Happened? screening at the Eccles felt vaguely humiliating. No, it was vaguely humiliating. The film, a mildly perverse inside-Hollywood drama directed by Barry Levinson and starring Robert De Niro, Bruce Willis, Stanley Tucci, Michael Wincott, Robin Wright Penn and Catherine Keener, didn’t feel like a big audience score from where I was sitting. It’s an in and out thing — sometimes amusing, sometimes okay, nothing really “knockout.”
I’ll get into it later today. I have to leave for a 9:30 Eccles screening of The Wackness. More feeling like a beggar in Calcutta….can;t wait! “Tickets? Tickets for a columnist?” I would have gone to the Sleep Dealer screening this morning but the humiliation experience at the Racquet Club tends to be even more mortifying than what one tends to go through at the Eccles. Between last night’s Eccles scrounge-around and getting the boot at the Library yesterday afternoon, yesterday was bad. I hate this festival sometimes. Not often, but now and then.

I got thrown out a screening of Nanette Burstein‘s American Teen at the Library after seeing about 15 minutes’ worth. The heave-ho happened about 80 minutes ago. I had a ticket and everything, but because I got there late (due to my own laziness plus misplaced faith in the Park City transit system) there were no seats at all, and the woman running the Sundance volunteers insisted over the mike that no one could stand in the back. You’re in a seat or you’re out, she said.
Those are the Park City fire regulations, yes, although we’ve all stood in the back or sat on the floor before. I did this plenty of times in the ’90s.
The issue for me wasn’t that the woman insisting on following orders. The issue was that she seemed to be in the grip of one of those pinched Nurse Ratched personalities. The issue was that she had a menacing expression that might have prevented Chinese troops from crossing the 49th Parallel. The issue was that one of her volunteer colleagues kindly offered me a chair to sit on against the back wall, and then this butch boss came along and escorted me outside.
The issue, also, honestly, was that I didn’t give that much of a shit in the end because Burstein’s film didn’t seem all that interesting or original. I was saying to myself less than five minutes in, “This is nothing new. I’ve seen this shit dozens of times. I know it backwards and forwards. Something else has to happen. Someone’s going to die in a car accident, get cancer…something. This is too familiar.
I was also saying, “Oh, no…is that volunteer looking at me? Look at the screen and ignore her. You belong here, you were invited…think positively! Oh, shit, here she comes…”
Slickly designed (I saw a couple of cool CG animation sequences) and scored with lots of punch, American Teen is a study of four seniors at a small Indiana high school. I couldn’t believe the film was about the same old stereotypes as we’ve seen in I don’t know how many teen dramas, including Election. A basketball hero jock, a goodie-goodie blonde cheerleader type, a nerdish male musician with bad skin who’s into video games, and a nerdy female who plays rhythm guitar. Good heavens!
Don’t we all know this story? And especially how it’s going to turn out? The nerds are probably going to turn into cool adults and lead interesting lives, and the jocks and the cheerleaders, suffering under the ancient Chinese curse that says “may you peak in high school,” are going to put on weight, lead ordinary lives, have “work” done when they hit 45, possibly become alcoholic, have kids who may wind up ignoring them when they leave the house, and so on.
Unless the reviews are over the moon, I think it might be a good idea to shine American Teen and wait for the HBO airing or a screener or whatever.

The fools…the mad fools. I’m fuming, weeping, sputtering. The thought of all of those over 40, not-very-well-educated women voting for Hillary Clinton (she’s just won the Nevada primary, beating Barack Obama 50 to 45) because of gender allegiance and (don’t tell me this isn’t a factor) race. Yeesh.
No mind to the fact that she’s chilly and menacing, or the fact that she inspires loathing like few other politicians in U.S. history (especially among males), or that the threat of Tracy Flick in the Oval Office will, if Clinton wins the Democratic nomination, prompt tens of millions of Democrats and left-leaning indies to at least consider voting Republican. She’s yesterday, she’s divisive, she’s poison…and her female supporters are behind her the way the O.J. jury in the crminal trial refused to find him guilty.
I just got a letter from “Hillary” via the Clinton team: “Dear Jeffrey, Have you heard? We just won the Democratic caucuses in Nevada. You have done so much to make winning moments like this possible. Thank you!” You’re welcome!

Update: Buck Guilt Update: Seven or eight people shared various muted enthusiasms about The Great Buck Howard yesterday afternoon. No one hated it; one guy (a major critic) was very pleased. There was general agreement about a rich, near-great performance by John Malkovich as a second-tier illusionist. An okay, somewhat less stellar performance from Colin Hanks, I heard from two or three viewers. Mixed-positive.

Yesterday: Two slivers of information about The Great Buck Howard, the Tom Hanks-produced, Sean McGinly-directed relationship drama that will screen at 3:30 this afternoon at the Eccles theatre. I don’t have it in for this film, but you hear these things and you go, “Hmmm….maybe later.”
One, a buyer told me this morning he’s heard it’s not too hot. Not bad, mind you, but not good enough to be called essential viewing. Two, a critic friend told me the talent did interviews in Salt Lake City yesterday rather than up here, which sounded a wee bit lame. (They had two gala screenings in Salt Lake City last night, and doing interviews in SLC, the critic said, “saved them a trip up the mountain.”

Three or four anecdotes/observations stand out in Michael Ceiply‘s 1.19 N.Y. Times piece about Writers Guild president Patric Verrone and his lieutenant David Young, and altogether they indicate that as far as these two and the WGA strike siutation is concerned, particularly in the wake of the just-announced Directors Guild deal, the name of the game is “move it or lose it.”

WGA president Patric Verrone

Verrone and Young are described as as currently “stuck deliberating a question that may bode ill for both: Is their writers√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢ rebellion over?” They are called an “odd couple, not invested in the clubby ways of show business.” Their outsider status is analogized to that of David Putnam, the British producer who ran Columbia for a while before pissing off the big wheels and getting whacked as a result. The piece says they may be sent “quickly back [into] the shadows if they fail at what has usually been an insiders√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢ game.”
In other words, they’re being seen as weakened if not on the ropes. Is there another way of reading this article?

When I came out of last night’s Holiday Village screening of Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, who do I see jabbering on his cell phone over in the corner but Harvey Weinstein? I waved; he waved back. A few minutes later he was standing outside in the cold air, coatless and still jabbering away, when I left for the Bottle Shock screening at the Library.

Entertainment Weekly critic Owen Gleiberman, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired director Marina Zenovich at Friday night’s after-party at the MIcrosoft House.

Just before this morning’s 9 am screening of Perros Come Perros, a brilliant if viciously brutal Columbian crime flick, an IFC guy told me he heard that the Polanski film had been bought late Friday evening. I toldl him that the film’s director, Marina Zenovich, hadn’t mentioned a buy when we spoke last night around 11 pm, but then she’s not in sales.
A little more than an hour later — 10 am Sundance time — the news broke that the Weinstein Co. had picked up all international rights for a figure in the low six digits. Domestic rights are still in play. Variety‘s Anne Thompson wrote this morning that the Weinstein Co. and Focus Features are among the bidders.