I’ve been through not-so-hot Sundance Film Festivals before, and even the bad ones had their occasional pleasures and surprises. It’s a little bit early to be asking if “this is the worst Sundance ever?” and then saying “yes, maybe”…like David Poland did yesterday. “We’re two days into the festival and the buyers are ready to go home,” he wrote. Let them go home already! There’ll be more room at industry screenings if they leave, right? Am I disappointed I haven’t seen something deeper, stronger, funnier, punchier? Yeah, I am, but there are five days to go, for Chrissake. Give it a rest.

I despise romantic comedies as a rule, but Zoe Cassevetes‘ Broken English is an exception, perhaps because it doesn’t try to be “funny” as much as sardonic and bitterly truthful about what a slog it is out there for no-longer-young women who are “looking for love,” or at least for a relationship that allows for the possibility of something nourishing and genuine.

For what it is and as far as it goes, English is very bright and absorbing, and it contains the most affecting and vulnerable performance of Parker Posey‘s 38-year life. She may seem to be doing the same thing here that she’s done in many films before; the difference is that there’s a bit more sadness in her features, a hint of a crack in her voice at times, and a greater willingness to show her buried child. Her performance is further enhanced by Cassevetes’ tip-top script.
After last night’s 7:30 screening I asked Toronto Globe & Mail critic Liam Lacey what he thought. “Not bad but thin,” he basically replied. I said, “Okay, yes, but the slightness is very smart. I mean, c’mon…have you ever seen a movie about a woman in her 30s looking for the right guy to fall in love with that satisfied your heavy-osity criteria?” He laughed.
The film gets rolling and digs in when Nora (Posey), a Manhattan hotel worker, meets Julian (Melvil Poupaud), a 30ish Parisian who seems soulful and sincere enough. The chemistry seems right, but then he takes off. Should Nora let it go and move on, or fly to Paris and see what happens next? In the hands of another director and with a lesser actress as Nora, a vehicle like Broken English might have been unwatchable. I mean, I usually hate shit like this. I wish that more romantic comedies were this smart and easy to sit through.
Drea de Mateo, Gena Rowlands and especially Justin Theroux provide tasty supporting performances. Theroux, playing a typically egoistic actor, is hilarious. He delivers his lines with just the right jaded aroma, never too broad or buffoony.

James C. Strouse‘s Grace is Gone, which I saw last night at 10 pm, is the best film I’ve seen so far at Sundance ’07. It’s a plain and pared down thing, emotionally subtle but very specific and often moving, familiar and understated with a Midwestern voice of its own — a family film about a very American, very here-and-now tragedy.

It definitely stands a chance of being remembered at year’s end, certainly for John Cusack‘s deeply touching performance (a major step forward given his career-long inhabiting of hip sardonic wise guys) and possibly in the Best Picture, Direction and Screenplay categories at the ’08 Spirit Awards, and perhaps beyond that. 2007 has barely begun, but Grace has the kind of quiet poignance and gravitas that lingers.
I heard last night that the Paramount Vantage team was circling, but the Hollywood Reporter guys have just broken the news that the Weinstein Co. has picked it up.
Grace is Gone is a rare Sundance film in that it bridges a red state-blue state sensibility. It is basically antiwar (and clearly anti-Bush), but at the same time non-judgmental in its portrait of a patriotic dad (Cusack) who’s barely coping with the news of his wife having just been killed, and particularly how to break the news to his two daughters (one of whom is played by Shelan O’Keefe).
Grace is humanistic and character-driven, but, as Sundance programmer John Cooper has written, the fact that it “can be construed as pro-military guarantees its greatest impact.” It’s a curious case — a movie made by anti-war blues that exudes heartfelt respect and compassion for the patriotic reds. I’m putting it a bit bluntly, but that’s the basic deal.

Grace is Gone director-writer James C. Strouse

There’s a shiftless-brother-of-Cusack character (Alessandro Nivola) who espouses antiwar views, but the film is apolitical in its focus on family grief and confusion. It’s obviously frowning at Cusack’s blind loyalty to the Bush cabal’s handling of the war but it doesn’t get into argumentative particulars or windy rhetoric. I can imagine this film playing in rural Republican/Bubba territory sometime later this year, and mainstream conservative guys and their wives and children coming out of the theatre and going, “Yeah…good film…solemn, truthful.”
Cusack’s Stanley Phillips goes into a kind of stunned tailspin when he hears news that his soldier wife, Grace, has been killed in Iraq. The extent of his meltdown is evident when he decides to hide the news from his daughters, deciding instead to take them on a road trip from their home in Minnesota to a Disney World-type amusement park in Florida.
He obviously needs to spill it sooner or later, but he puts it off and puts it off. His older daughter, 12, senses right away that something’s up but she doesn’t force or confront. Eventually her younger sister also starts to detect a certain vibe in the air. The movie is about the drip-drip-drip of truth seeping in, scene by scene, line by line. It takes its time getting there, but it never bores or drags.

Cusack, who produced along with four or five others, is an adamant anti-Iraq War leftie, and good for that. He feels, obviously, for those military people who’ve been killed so far, and believes that their tragedies shouldn’t be hidden. Cusack has been quoted as saying that the Bush administration’s policy of banning media coverage of America’s war dead as their remains are returned is “one of the most shameful, disgraceful, cowardly political acts that I’ve seen in my lifetime.”
The elegance of Grace is Gone, by contrast, is that it doesn’t “say” anything, but there’s no mistaking what it’s saying.

Shocker! The Producers Guild — not exactly a recent harbinger of Best Picture Oscar wins, but a significant indicator of industry sentiment — has given Little Miss Sunshine its Best Picture award. I didn’t see it coming, I thought they’d give it to The Departed…. amazing! Obviously the Dreamgirls Golden Globes momentum has been stopped in its tracks, Babel is back to maybe-but-who-knows? status, and it’s a wide-open race for the Best Picture Oscar. There is no joy in Mudville (and you know where & what that is) this evening. Dreamgirls could still take it; so could Babel or The Departed. Nobody knows…but none of them have a commanding headwind.

Mike Russell has another comic-strip interview up — this one with Guillermo del Toro explaining the fascist symbolism of his Pan’s Labyrinth monsters, a.k.a., “Fascist Monsters of Filmland.”

“Sasha, you’re right about it being a long night. I’m already heading down to the Century Plaza. We’re going to start drinking in our hotel room at about 4 before heading down to the cocktail hour at 6. The group I’m with is all about The Departed but we’re realizing Dreamgirls is a very big possibility. In the last two hours I spoke with two other PGA members who said they voted for Sunshine. I’m baffled as to how this thing is going to turn out tonight.” — industry guy discussing tonight’s Producer’s Guild Awards on Oscarwatch.com.

The Society of Online Awards Prognosticators (SOAP) winners have been announced, and as I am a member, it’s very gratifying to bestow the Best Picture award on Children of Men, and the Best Director award on its creator, Alfonso Cuaron. I would take the time to paste in and format the other winners, but I should have left and begun my Saturday Sundance expedition two hours ago. If the winners were listed on someone’s site, I would naturally link to them/it.

The Hollywood Reporter team — Nicole Sperling, Gregg Goldstein, Anne Thompson — reported last night that Dan Klores‘ documentary Crazy Love will probably be distributed by Magnolia Pictures.

“Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton jumped into the 2008 presidential race yesterday,” per N.Y. Times reporters Patrick Healy and Jeff Zeleny, “immediately squaring off against Senator Barack Obama and the rest of the Democratic field in what is effectively the party’s first primary, the competition for campaign donations.
‘I’m in,’ Mrs. Clinton said in an e-mail message to supporters early yesterday. ‘And I’m in to win.'” No, not correct. The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan‘s opinion of Clinton aside, she’s a smart egg and a fairly savvy operator, but she’s a polarizing figure, she’s carrying all kinds of ’90s baggage, the Bubbas and the rabid right despise her to no end, and if she gets the nomination she will lose.

L.A. Weekly‘s Scott Foundas has written partly about the trials of indie filmmaker Gary Walkow, whose late ’80s Grand Jury prize-winner The Trouble With Dick has been more or less remade as Crashing, Walkow’s “fourth independent feature and the first-ever sequel to a Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner,” Foundas notes.

Crashing director Gary Walkow; Park City’s main street around 1991

“Now, exactly 20 years after his first Park City premiere, Walkow is readying himself for another. Only when the curtain goes up on Crashing, it will be at Slamdance, the 13-year-old alterna-festival that offered Crashing a slot after Sundance gave it a pass.”
The piece is also partly about how the Sundance Film Festival of two decades ago “was a very different animal from the one now stalking the streets of Park City. As Walkow remembers it, ‘The hospitality suite for the festival was contained in the Moose Lodge, on the second floor of some building. They had a coffee urn and some rolls and stuff. It was that small. Saundra Saperstein, who was one of the festival publicists, also sold all the T-shirts and paraphernalia.
“‘When I came back in ’96 with Notes From Underground, it was completely different. Look, Main Street basically doubled in length. In how many cities does Main Street become twice as long in the course of 10 years?'”

Our choices now in entertainment are “staggering,” Magnolia Pictures president Eamonn Bowles tells N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis, adding that “something needs to be extremely compelling to get people motivated to leave the house.”