sundance

LAST TRAIN HOME (World Documentary Competition)

LAST TRAIN HOME (World Documentary Competition)

Anyone who has been paying attention to the remarkably fertile Chinese independent film scene this past decade knows that present-day China, given the sheer speed and scope of its transformations, is a wellspring of abundant contradictions, an endless source of stories and images for the observant filmmaker.

The title of Lixin Fan’s directorial debut refers to the annual exodus of China’s 130 million migrant workers from the cities to their mostly rural hometowns — this happens only once a year, for the Chinese New Year holidays. Fan evokes the mind-warping scale of this event — we see the anxious rush to secure tickets, thronged railways stations and trains — even as he zeroes in on the experiences of one family. The Zhangs left their young children and their farming village so they could work at a faraway garment factory. Now strangers to one another, parents and children (who were raised by their grandparents) struggle to communicate, and the gulf only widens when the teenage daughter decides to leave school and takes a job in the city.

Fashion from the Sundance Film Festival

Tilda Swinton at the Sundance Film Festival in City, Utah

Our fellow Full Frontal Fashion blogger, Lynn Yaeger, has been following the fashion, or lack thereof, at the Sundance Film Festival. Read her review of a few outfits in Park City and be sure to check out Full Frontal Fashion for all the latest in contemporary fashion.

READ LYNN’S POST HERE.

SECRETS OF THE TRIBE (World Documentary Competition)

SECRETS OF THE TRIBE (World Documentary Competition)

The Yanomami Indians are an Amazonian tribe who lived in total isolation from the modern world until a half century ago, when one anthropologist after another started showing up to observe, document, and eventually exploit what they saw (and, in some cases, fetishized) as a virginal society. Piecing together testimonials from key researchers in the field and from tribe members, Brazilian documentarian José Padilha (BUS 174, Sundance ’03) progressively complicates the picture. Underlying all the bitter accusations and recriminations are the starkly opposed views of cultural and scientific anthropologists (the latter emphasize the role of evolutionary biology) and the conflicting assumptions that these native others are either noble innocents or violent primitives.

LOVERS OF HATE: an embittered sadsack and his smug younger brother

LOVERS OF HATE

Rudy (Chris Doubek), the less-than-lovable protagonist of Bryan Poyser’s dramatic-competition entry LOVERS OF HATE, is an embittered sadsack who can barely tolerate the sight of his smug younger brother, Paul (filmmaker Alex Karpovsky, last seen in Andrew Bujalski’s BEESWAX). An author of children’s novels who has apparently borrowed some ideas for his monstrously successful books from Rudy’s childhood fantasies, Paul drops into Austin for a reading and catches Rudy at low ebb: he’s out of work and has just been thrown out of the house by his wife, Diana (Heather Kafka), whom Paul has always had a crush on.

2010 Sundance Award Winners!

Without any adieu the 2010 Sundance Film Festival Award Winners. Also, be sure to check out the rest of our coverage including exclusive interviews and news and gossip from this year’s Festival.

The Grand Jury Prize: Documentary was presented to RESTREPO, directed by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington. Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington’s year dug in with the Second Platoon in one of Afghanistan’s most strategically crucial valleys reveals extraordinary insight into the surreal combination of back breaking labor, deadly firefights, and camaraderie as the soldiers painfully push back the Taliban.

The Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic was presented to WINTER’S BONE, directed by Debra Granik; written by Debra Granik and Anne Rosellini. An unflinching Ozark Mountain girl hacks through dangerous social terrain as she hunts down her missing father while trying to keep her family intact.

The World Cinema Jury Prize: Documentary was presented to THE RED CHAPEL (Det Røde Kapel) directed by Mads Brügger. A journalist with no scruples, a self-proclaimed spastic, and a comedian travel to North Korea under the guise of a cultural exchange visit to challenge one of the world’s most notorious regimes. Denmark

The World Cinema Jury Prize: Dramatic was presented to ANIMAL KINGDOM, written and directed by David Michôd. After the death of his mother, a seventeen year-old boy is thrust precariously between an explosive criminal family and a detective who thinks he can save him.

FAMILY AFFAIR (U.S. Documentary Competition)

FAMILY AFFAIR (U.S. Documentary Competition)

It makes sense that Chico Colvard’s first-person documentary was picked up by OWN, Oprah Winfrey’s new cable network, given the surface parallels with last year’s Oprah-endorsed Sundance hit PRECIOUS. As a little boy, the filmmaker accidentally shot one of his sisters in the leg and, in so doing, blew the lid on a family secret. His father, an African American former GI who grew up in segregated Mississippi, had been sexually abusing his three sisters for years, unbeknownst to their mother, a German Jew. At first glance, FAMILY AFFAIR seems like yet another dysfunctional-family home movie, but it’s willing to ask some unexpectedly tough questions about abuse and its aftermath.

Snap! An infamous lensman gets his close-up

SMASH HIS CAMERS, directed by Leon Gast, Oscar-winning director of WHEN WE WERE KINGS

I suppose it’s a mark of where celebrity journalism and gossip are today that paparazzo Ron Galella is finally getting the star treatment.

For decades, Galella lurked in bushes and staked out buildings, hunkered down in taxis and emerged seemingly out of nowhere to get his shot of celebrities like Sinatra and Warhol, Sophia and Bianca, Michael Jackson, Elvis, and Sundance founder Robert Redford himself. Jackie O, whom he considered his “Mona Lisa,” took out a restraining order against him. Brando broke his jaw. Now, Leon Gast, the Oscar-winning director of WHEN WE WERE KINGS, has focused his own cameras on the infamous lensman in his new documentary, SMASH HIS CAMERA, currently showing at the Sundance Film Festival.

San Francisco in 1906

I, like many a gay in this great land of ours, spent some formative years in San Francisco. There I hobnobbed among the liberal elite and leather queens in equal measure. It truly is a diverse city. And also, as anyone who’s lived there will attest, San Francisco is a beautiful city. The hills. The [...]

Two strikingly ambitious films

NIGHT CATCHES US <

American indie movies specialize in character-driven intimacy. Most of the fiction films you see at the Sundance Film Festival in a given year, good or bad, are insular by design, focused on personal conflicts and private moods, sealed off from the outside world. It’s always a pleasant surprise then to encounter a dramatic movie here that grapples with larger historical forces, that blends the personal and the political. That’s precisely what THE IMPERIALISTS ARE STILL ALIVE! and NIGHT CATCHES US — two of this year’s most interesting dramatic-competition titles — set out to do. Neither is wholly successful — IMPERIALISTS indulges in a few too many art-film affectations; NIGHT is serious and somber, almost to a fault — but both are strikingly ambitious debuts (by women writer-directors, as it happens).

“Paparazzo superstar” or psycho stalker?

SMASH HIS CAMERA, directed by Leon Gast

One of two documentaries about paparazzi culture at the Sundance Film Festival this year — the other is Adrian Grenier’s TEENAGE PAPARAZZO — Leon Gast’s SMASH HIS CAMERA traces the colorful career of Ron Galella, “paparazzo superstar” (as he calls himself). Among the first and by far the most notorious of stalker photographers, Galella played a years-long cat-and-mouse game with Jackie Kennedy and earned a restraining order for his efforts. Once he got too close to Marlon Brando, who rewarded him with a fist in the face.

Now in his late 70s, Galella fondly revisits these old war stories in SMASH HIS CAMERA, which also follows the still-active photographer on a few excursions from suburban New Jersey to Manhattan high society. He worms his way up to Robert Redford at a charity event and hands him a copy of his new book (needless to say, this got plenty of laughs at Sundance). He barges onto the red carpet of the CHANGELING premiere to get a good look at Brangelina. Various experts — curators, photographers, lawyers, gossip writers — weigh in on the merits and ethics of Galella’s work (there’s widespread disagreement).

IMF Chief Proposes $100 Billion Annual Fund to Tackle Climate Change

The head of the International Monetary Fund today proposed to create a multi-billion dollar Green Fund that would provide the financing that countries need to cope with climate change and move to a low-carbon growth model.

FULL FRONTAL FASHION highlights

Tilda Swinton at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival Think of this as your FULL FRONTAL FASHION cliff notes. Check out a few of Lynn Yaeger’s favorite (and maybe not-so-favorite) looks from the wilds of Utah at the Sundance Film Festival. Could you pitch a no-hitter while tripping on LSD? Check out illustrator James Blagden’s hilarious [...]

Joan Rivers is about to enter the pantheon of gods in my addled mind

JOAN RIVERS: A PIECE OF WORK

Joan Rivers is about to enter the pantheon of gods in my addled mind that is only occupied so far by Cher and Barbra Streisand, aka The Survivors Club. So I finally saw JOAN RIVERS: A PIECE OF WORK last night at the Sundance Film Festival and it is perfection.

World Beard and Moustache Championships

In advance of the World Beard and Moustache Championships to be held in Norway next spring, the US Nationals to determine our representative will take place this year on June 5, 2010 in Bend, Oregon. The US ran the tables in last year’s world championship which was held in the town that raised me, Anchorage, [...]

Feds to Eliminate One-Quarter of Greenhouse Gas Emissions in 10 Years

President Barack Obama today announced that the federal government will reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 28 percent by 2020.

UTOPIA IN FOUR MOVEMENTS: a live documentary

UTOPIA IN FOUR MOVEMENTS.

Love it or hate it, AVATAR has revived for many audiences the old-fashioned notion of movies as a social experience. Billed as a “live documentary,” Sam Green’s UTOPIA IN FOUR MOVEMENTS does effectively the same thing, on a smaller scale but with bigger ideas. Performed twice at the Sundance Film Festival this week as part of the New Frontier section, this was a charmingly homespun cross between a “benshi” silent-film show and a PowerPoint presentation: Green stood before the audience, narrating and cuing still and moving images while three musicians performed a score by co-director Dave Cerf.

As in his Oscar-nominated THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND (Sundance 2003, co-directed with Bill Siegel) Green sifts through the ruins of extinguished idealism. UTOPIA IN FOUR MOVEMENTS is as much a story of failure as it is one of hope.

A flurry of deals in Sundance’s final days

Until Thursday, Sundance Film Festival watchers from afar could have been forgiven for concluding that the increased emphasis on art, rather than on commerce, in the festival offerings this year may have worked all too well. Many of the films making their debuts were wowing critics, but the money people appeared to be unimpressed, or at least not impressed enough to open their wallets. Or at least opening them too often.

Rachel Whiteread at the Hammer

Didn’t I just say that people are crazy about artist’s notebooks? We had Tim Burton‘s teenage napkin scrawls at MoMA and the New York Academy of Art’s behind-the-scenes journal exhibition and now, with a fresh approach to the idea is “Rachel Whiteread Drawings” at LA’s Hammer Museum. Whiteread’s sculptures focus on the space that structures and physical objects don’t inhabit and most often take the form of architectural casts, as with “House,” a cast of the inside of an entire Victorian house. “House” won her the Turner Prize in 1993, and she is still the only woman to whom the prize has been awarded.

Australia bans small breasts, ejaculation from adult entertainment.

Australia: a land where prostitution is (mostly) legal, cursing on TV is par for the course…and a byzantine structure of censorship renders most XXX material illegal to own, sell, or both. Newly added to the list of banned acts: small breasts and female ejaculation.

Why small breasts? Well, the ban is specifically focused on women who’s breasts give them the appearance of being underage (unlike America, Australia frowns on “barely legal” porn, as well as anything meant to make adult actresses look like they’re youthful or underage). Of course, declaring that one very common body type is unwelcome in erotic material does have more than a few unpleasant implications, as Jezebel outlines.

Will Mormons a see gay-marriage doc?

In his review of 8: THE MORMON PROPOSITION, a documentary about the Mormon Church’s campaign to pass Prop. 8, the ballot initiative outlawing gay marriage in California, Variety’s Peter Debruge writes that the film is “mostly preaching to the converted.”

“Although controversy could spur interest, the pic hasn’t been as incendiary as one might expect playing just north of LDS HQ at the Sundance Film Festival,” Debruge asserts.

He may have spoken too soon.

Punk saviors? Crazed cars? Spotting Sundance trends

What are the top trends emerging from the Sundance Film Festival this year? That really depends on whom you ask.

Los Angeles Times Film critic Betsy Sharkey thinks it’s punk saviors. “If there is a collective vision emerging out of the films in the Sundance dramatic competition it is this: The punks will save you,” she writes, citing WELCOME TO THE RILEYS, the debut film of director Jake Scott (son of Ridley); actor Mark Ruffalo’s directing debut SYMPATHY FOR DELICIOUS, in which he also stars; and Spencer Susser’s HESHER.

ABBAWORLD!

I sometimes wonder, “why am I American?” In the political landscape of today others may feel this same way. But, really, how could I come from the land that has shunned the greatest artists of our time? I’m talking about ABBA. Every other civilized nation of taste (Sweden, England) eat, sleep, breathe the perfect pop prince and princesses. Their lack of respect in the USA makes me want to protest. Scream from the rafters. Pick fights with all you Bruce Springsteen and Kanye West loving Americans. How could you not get it?

Well, there is a place for people like me to escape. Recently opened in London is ABBAWORLD, the first, and only, ABBA theme park in the world.

Green tech finds (1/29/10)

A bit of a weird, carnivorous motif running through this week’s green tech finds… check out the fly-eating clock, and nuclear wasted-eating material modeled on Venus fly traps…

• How green is the iPad? Apple has the spotlight this week with the launch of its new tablet computer. MNN and The Daily Green take a look at its green features.
  
  
• The Fly-Catching Clock: If common items like clocks and coffee tables could also catch pest (from flies to mice), and digest them into biofuel, would you find that revolutionary… or gross? British designers Jimmy Loizeau and James Auger created some designs along these lines to get people thinking about “using living things as fuel.”
  
  

Gold

The Boston Globe’s Big Picture recently had a collection of photographs around the theme of gold, a metal which has reached “record highs recently, climbing over 135% in value in the past year alone.” I was amazed by this particular recent photo of the largest solid gold brick in the world! Valued currently at $7.8 [...]

Yucca Mountain’s Dead. Next? Expert Panel Examines Nuclear Waste Options

The U.S. Department of Energy announced today the formation of a blue ribbon commission to evaluate policy options for a safe, long-term solution to America’ growing piles of spent fuel from commercial nuclear power plants and high-level radioactive waste from U.S. defense programs.