sundance

THE FIGHTER

Technically speaking, THE FIGHTER, the character director David O. Russell named his film after, is Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), an aging boxer badly managed by his mother, Alice, and sporadically coached by his crack addict, ex-boxer brother Dicky (Christian Bale), but given what actually gets the most screen time an alternate title could be “watch Christian Bale act like a drug addict for two hours.”

Brit Marling’s Low-Budget Success Story

Brit Marling (Photo credit: Yvan Rodic / Face Hunter)

An economics major and an internship at Goldman Sachs as the path to Sundance? For Brit Marling, who stars and co-wrote not one but two films premiering here (ANOTHER EARTH and SOUND OF MY VOICE), and who’s been tagged as one of this year’s “It” girls

Just a few summers ago, the blonde, ethereal actress was studying economics at Georgetown University, which led to a summer on Wall Street. This led to disillusionment, which led to dropping out of school and moving to Cuba. Which led to making a documentary (BOXERS AND BALLERINAS) with a friend from school. Which led to going back to school, graduating, and moving to LA. Which led to more disillusionment.

“The things I would go read for, as a young, unknown actor, were pretty awful,” Marling said yesterday, curled up on a sofa, wearing a clingy floral dress and leather boots. “And people keep telling you, ‘Just do this stuff,’ this, like, horror film where you’re the girl in the bikini running from the man with the axe.”

The Oscars are coming! Here’s some advice!

On February 27, the annual Academy Awards telecast will attempt to make millions of people interested in movies they didn’t care enough to see in the first place.

They’ll do so with glitz, celebrity drop-ins, gushy tributes, high fashion, and the wonderful sight of four people being devastated in each category.

As an inveterate Oscar watcher despite it all, I have some handy ideas for pepping up the show and grabbing way higher ratings than they ever imagined.

Here goes, for free:

*Serve booze. The Golden Globes are always more fun than the Oscars because the guests are flat-out drunk and not that self-conscious about the evening’s high-pressure antics. The Oscars should serve tray upon tray of ratings-making cocktails. It’s a recipe for absolute hilarity!

David O. Russell: From Ticket Taker to Oscar Nominee

David O. Russell, who began his movie career as a Sundance Film Festival ticket taker in 1991, woke up today to find that his film THE FIGHTER had nabbed seven Academy Award nominations, including best picture and, for him, best director. It was a triumph for the filmmaker, who has experienced career ups and downs [...]

Sundance Source: Where it all began

After stopping by the Sundance Channel HQ, take a short drive to the place where it all began, Sundance Resort. The resort was started by Robert Redford in 1969 and is the birthplace of all things Sundance. It’s a great place to take in a film, have an amazing meal, listen to Live Music in [...]

THE SON OF NO ONE Gets Harsh Reception

Despite an all-star cast featuring Al Pacino, Channing Tatum, Ray Liotta, Juliette Binoche and Katie Holmes and solid advance buzz, Dito Montiel’s THE SON OF NO ONE has been dubbed the 2011 Sundance Film Festival’s “first bomb.” At a screening for press and industry members on Monday, the crime drama, which is scheduled to close [...]

Minnesota students address climate change, environmental justice in hip hop video

How do you get a group of urban high school students interested and involved in issues like climate change and environmental justice? Connecting it to the music they love is a good bet… and we’ve already seen how hip hop’s worked as a tool for engaging target audiences on topics ranging from local, healthy food to the damage created by plastic shopping bags.

Kevin Smith: Indie King or God Complex?

Kevin Smith protests the Westboro Baptist Church.

First there was the hype, then there was the letdown, and now, a day after Kevin Smith screened his latest film, RED STATE at Sundance, there is the residual anger. On Sunday, the CLERKS writer-director stunned audiences and film buyers alike by announcing that he was not, as promised, going to auction off the distribution rights to RED STATE, a movie he touted as a “horror movie” inspired by Westboro Baptist Church leader Fred Phelps.

Instead, Smith bought the rights himself, for twenty bucks, and said that in an act of anti-studio-system protest, he’d sell his own film, starting things off with a 15-city tour this summer. Smith’s disingenuousness was made all the worse by the overload of characteristic Smith hype that preceded RED STATE’s screening. (The protest/counter-protest outside the Eccles Theater being just one piece of his elaborate fabric.) Not helping matters is that the film, though loved by certain Smith die-hards, is generally considered a disappointment.

Smells Like Teen Spirit casting call

From the Internet Archives: the casting call for Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” music video. I like how inclusive it is (“…preppy, punk, nerd, jock…”).

Naked News: Sleeping dogs, defining monogamy, and DIY vaginas

• Letting a dog sleep in bed with you may be hazardous to your health.
• A survey shows that young couples can’t agree on whether or not they agreed to monogamy — and that those who can agree often cheat anyway.
• Some men may be allergic to their own semen. (And others are just prudish about kissing their partner after receiving a blowjob.)
• Meat, consumerism, and masculinity: examining the startling drop in Japanese sex drive.

AMC Covers the Sundance Film Festival

As you prowl around looking for Sundance Film Festival news, in between dashes from screening to screening in Park City or from blog to blog on your couch, permit us to point you to some of the nifty festival coverage on our sibling site AMC. AMC News will be blogging from the festival and will [...]

A Happy ANOTHER HAPPY DAY Story

A meet-cute Sundance Film Festival story has the gossip press sighing: Ashton Kutcher reportedly surprised wife Demi Moore by showing up at a bash for Sam Levinson’s generally well-received ANOTHER HAPPY DAY, in which Moore stars with Ellen Barkin and Kate Bosworth. (The film debuted Sunday night in the festival’s U.S. Dramatic Competition.) According to [...]

Festival Update 2011 with Elizabeth Olsen, Sarah Paulson, John Hawkes, and Sean Durken

Director Sean Durken’s goal to create films about women who have faced challenges results in Elizabeth Olsen’s break out performance. Want to see more? Check out clips from the festival here. Be sure to satisfy all your festival needs with the latest buzz, top stories, and celebrity interviews from Sundance Channel’s coverage of the 2011 [...]

Festivals SUNcovered: Brita FilterForGood Party at Sundance Channel HQ

Sundance Film Festival teams up with Brita and Nalgene for the third annual FilterForGood campaign. Check out the party to promote reduced bottle waste, hosted by Sundance Channel HQ. Want to see more? Check out clips from the festival here. Be sure to satisfy all your festival needs with the latest buzz, top stories, and [...]

A Flurry of Sundance Film Festival Deals

More deals closed Monday at the Sundance Film Festival. Among them: Andrew Rossi’s PAGE ONE: A YEAR INSIDE THE NEW YORK TIMES: Magnolia Pictures and Participant Media have partnered to purchase the U.S. rights to the film, a documentary that takes viewers behind the scenes at the venerable broadsheet, with a theatrical release planned for this [...]

NPR: Why Can’t We Walk Straight?

A Mystery: Why Can’t We Walk Straight? from NPR on Vimeo. Watch this wonderfully animated short film from NPR that explores the puzzle of the “profound inability in humans to stick to a straight line when blindfolded or when there is no fixed point.” This is true for swimming as well. It’s a really interesting [...]

Sundance Film Festival Deals: HOMEWORK, MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE

Fox Searchlight Pictures has snapped up two Sundance Film Festival films in rapid succession. On Sunday night, Fox Searchlight presidents Stephen Gilula and Nancy Utley announced that the company had acquired “most worldwide rights” to first-time filmmaker Gavin Wiesen’s HOMEWORK, a coming-of-age story starring Freddie Highmore, Emma Roberts, Michael Angarano, Elizabeth Reaser, Rita Wilson, Sam [...]

Biggest Sundance sale makes Emily Mortimer feel good

So far the biggest movie deal at Sundance is the $6 million Harvey Weinstein paid for Jesse Peretz’s comedy MY IDIOT BROTHER. The deal happened hours after the film premiered, and the filmmakers and cast have been swooning around the festival every since, understandably pleased.

“It feels so good, and it’s not something that I’m used to at all,” Emily Mortimer, who stars in the film, said on Monday afternoon, sitting in a media lounge swarming with publicists in skinny jeans and tall boots, who could periodically be heard cooing over the starlets waltzing in and out. (“Ooh, she looks so cute,” whispered one upon sighting Zooey Deschanel, who also stars in MY IDIOT BROTHER).

Making space for food

Shitake logs on racks in the Mittagong mushroom tunnel. Photos by Nicola Twilley.

Last week GOOD Magazine began “Food for Thinkers,” a mini online festival/multi-site conversation about the way we think about food today. “Put another way, I want to know what happens when a music blogger thinks about food. What does a space archaeologist or an architect want to read and say about food? What kinds of things interest a science writer in food, and why?”

Sundance Film Festival: Chaz Bono Gets Standing O

“I was living life as a man trapped in a female shell,” Chaz Bono says in Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey’s documentary chronicling his gender reassignment, BECOMING CHAZ, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Sunday. “Now for the first time I’m living in my body.” Bono, who was greeted by a standing ovation [...]

Kevin Smith Makes Waves With RED STATE

Kevin Smith’s RED STATE, which opened at the Sundance Film Festival on Sunday night amidst protests by the inflammatory Christian fundamentalist group that inspired it (and counter-protests, in which Smith himself participated), is “cleverly contrarian enough to get a rise out of almost any audience,” Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy writes in one of the [...]

I LOVE YOU PHILLIP MORRIS? CHAMELEON STREET!

I’m just not sure I get it. I watched a friend’s screener of I LOVE YOU PHILLIP MORRIS and was, frankly, mystified. Is “based on a true story,” or, as this movie states, “this is true,” really a satisfactory replacement for dramatic structure? Cuz this movie has, um, none. Other than Jim Carrey sort of bouncing around from scene to scene chewing up the scenery, taking us from one con to the next. Yes, there’s lots of gay sex. Yes, that’s great. Yes, that’s admirable to go there to such an explicit place with the actors and the story and yes yes yes. But ya gotta deliver dramatically, and not just ride it on out on a plateful of Carrey front teeth smiling that totally intense grin. Now that we are headed in to the Sundance Film Festival, I’m reminded of another Sundance film (MORRIS was there in 2009) that really took on the issues of passing – CHAMELEON STREET, winner of the 1990 Grand Jury Prize. A Sundance press release described it as “one of the first films to examine how mellifluously race, class, and role-playing morph into the social fabric of America.”

Festival Photos: Zooey Dechanel, Elizabeth Banks, Paul Rudd, and More!

Be sure to check out our new studio albums including exclusive photos with Directors and Artists from HOMEWORK, WIN WIN, ANIMALS DISTRACT ME, and the Sundance Channel original BRICK CITY. Be sure to satisfy all your festival needs with the latest buzz, top stories, and celebrity interviews from Sundance Channel’s coverage of the 2011 Sundance [...]

I can has gay wedding

We usually hate anything that anthropomorphizes cuddly animals in some inanely cute way, like with tuxedos or having them work at a desk  or some shit like that (you know, the kind of stuff your mom forwards to you and her entire address book, NOT bcc’d). But we can’t resist this particular case, since it [...]

New York Sleeps

Exhibiting currently at London’s Wapping Project Bankside is Christopher Thomas’ photo series of iconic landmarks in New York City devoid of people. The artist spent a few years on this project, which required a lot of early mornings while using a custom-made large format camera.