sundance

Music in the shadow of Sundance

The Sundance Film Festival has long had a secondary focus on music. This year’s official, Sundance-sanctioned performers will include Lou Reed, who has a documentary short, RED SHIRLEY, premiering in the festival. And there are also afternoon showcases at the Sundance ASCAP Music Café. The festival provides “an especially welcoming environment for musicians; the Sundance [...]

Busy at Sundance: Kyle Gallner

If you think things are going to be busy for you during the Sundance Film Festival, spare a thought for the actors who have more than one film premiering there. Take, for instance, Kyle Gallner, a 24-year-old actor who stars in both Kevin Smith’s horror film RED STATE and Elgin James’ in-competition LITTLE BIRDS. Gallner, best [...]

Vimeo of the Week: Arizona shooting: Memorial to Tucson victims

Arizona shooting: Memorial to Tucson victims from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

It’s been over a week now. Sarah Palin created a video to defend herself. Obama traveled to Tucson and delivered a poignant reading and moving tribute. And news channels and blogs continue to debate and cover the tone of political discourse in the US, gun control, and Giffords’ struggle for survival. But none of these news services or blogs have captured the Tucson tragedy as movingly as Dan Chung and Chris McGreal’s Arizona shooting: Memorial to Tucson victims.

Sundance Film Festival Deal Tracker

Of course we’ll be passing along news of acquisition deals at the Sundance Film Festival here on SUNfiltered. But if you’re an obsessive deal tracker, you might also want to bookmark Cinematical’s “Sundance 2011: Full List of All Distribution Deals.” The site promises to update the page throughout the festival with “links to the official [...]

Green games and “no child left inside”: an environmental education conndrum

Two days ago, Mashable published a fascinating post on gaming and social good, taking note of the rise of video games on multiple platforms that address a whole host of global challenges. While writer Melissa Jun Rowley touched on a range of issues and challenges, the idea of games as educational tools ran throughout the post. Organizations such as Games for Change, Institute of Play, and the Games for Learning Institute all touted the educational potential for video games, noting their ability to place players/learners to engage with complex, realistic systems, and to provide players with the opportunities to experiment with solutions to real world challenges.

The wisdom and wit of Snooki

Somehow in the post-holidays hangover, we missed the fact that Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi — a.k.a. the Jersey Shore star with a pouf — made her debut as a novelist earlier this month, with A Shore Thing. Yep, she’s the one who once admitted she’d only read two books, Twilight and Dear John. (Which might explain why Snooki’s novel contains both a Bella and an Edward — not exactly the most common names overheard on a Jersey boardwalk.) We’re too busy reading George Eliot right now to actually read her entire snook, as we like to call it, but we have been enjoying reading the following brief excerpts out loud while lounging around in our silk pajamas and feeding each other grapes. Just in case you were expecting Hemingway, the cover helpfully explains that the novel is about “a girl [named Gia] looking for love on the boardwalk (one full of big hair, dark tans, and fights galore).”

• “Gia danced around a little, shaking her peaches for show. She shook it hard. Too hard. In the middle of a shimmy, her stomach cramped. A fart slipped out. A loud one. And stinky.”
• “He had an okay body. Not fat at all. And naturally toned abs. She could pour a shot of tequila down his belly and slurp it out of his navel without getting splashed in the face.”

Mao impersonators

Wired features the photography of Tommaso Bonaventura who traveled to China to capture portraitures of Mao Zedong impersonators, many of whom freelance in “patriotic stage productions” and “work a lively circuit of banquets, holiday celebrations and weddings, at which they deliver famous Mao speeches in his dialect.” What’s interesting (to my western sensibility) is Wired’s [...]

‘Buzzy’ Sundance Film Festival Picks

More Sundance Film Festival picks! The buzz experts at E! Online have compiled a list of “the 15 buzziest films hitting the festival this year.” Their selections — most, if not all, of which feature bold-face names — are … 1) THE SON OF NO ONE 2) HERE 3) FLYPAPER 4) CEDAR RAPIDS 5) LIFE [...]

John Cooper: Festival Themes Emerge Organically

Lots of people will be picking through the films at the Sundance Film Festival in search of a common theme, but in an interview with Reuters, festival director John Cooper notes that those themes are not pre-selected by festival organizers, but rather emerge from the films organically, reflecting the concerns and curiosities of our time: [...]

NY Mag’s Sundance Film Festival Watch List

Which films are you most looking forward to seeing (or hearing about) at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, which kicks off today? Everyone has his or her own picks. New York magazine’s Vulture has just shared its “Ten Most Anticipated Films at Sundance” list with the world, noting, “Sundance is by far the most important [...]

Do bike lanes create more jobs than roads?

When the subject of infrastructure improvements as job creators come up, the examples are almost always the same: roads and bridges. No doubt we need improvements there… but a new study from the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst suggests that bike lanes may provide a bigger bang for the buck in terms of job creation.

Sundance Film Festival Trend: Homegrown Films

Here’s one to file under Sundance Film Festival 2011 trends, and frankly, it’s kind of a heart-warmer: A record number of films in the festival’s U.S. Dramatic Competition were nurtured in the Sundance Institute’s workshops for emerging filmmakers. As Brooks Barnes notes in Wednesday’s New York Times: A number of currents run through the 2011 [...]

Urbanized

Filmmaker Gary Hustwit is at it again. After having created two fantastic films, Helvetica and Objectified, he’s now busy at work on Urbanized. His newest film “a feature-length documentary about the design of cities which looks at the issues and strategies behind urban design, and features some of the world’s foremost architects, planners, policymakers, builders, [...]

CARLOS wins – and the Best Dressed from the Golden Globes!

We’re excited about Sundance Channel’s first ever Golden Globe win for CARLOS, taking home the honors in the best miniseries or motion picture made for television category. Our friends over on Full Frontal Fashion also put together the best looks from the night so check out their Golden Globes photo gallery. Also CARLOS is coming [...]

Sundance Film Festival Deals: PROJECT NIM, CORMAN’S WORLD

The Sundance Film Festival doesn’t officially kick off until tomorrow, but the deal-making action is already heating up. Two more films were snapped up on Tuesday, with A&E picking up Alex Stapleton’s CORMAN’S WORLD: EXPLOITS OF A HOLLYWOOD REBEL and HBO acquiring all domestic rights to James Marsh’s PROJECT NIM, which will premiere at the [...]

Sundance Film Festival 2011 – indie mecca or Hollywood extravaganza?

It must be January. Having packed the Golden Globes, the AFI luncheon, the Broadcast Critics Film Association awards, and a zillion other galas and parties into one weekend, it’s now on to the next thing: Sundance, which kicks off on Thursday, meaning Hollywood has exactly three days to get over their hangovers, charge a few more North Face puffy jackets to the AmEx, and figure out how, exactly, to fit in three movies, four dinners, and two after-parties into one Saturday night.

Mom’s emoticon cheat sheet

This is rather sweet example of shifts in communication in the modern era: One Redditor found this cheat sheet for emoticons on his parents’ computer.

Taxi cabs for the future

This is the year that New York City is suppose to announce the winner of its “Taxi of Tomorrow” competition. The New York Times’ blog Opinionator thinks the contest guidelines aren’t imaginative and challenging enough to truly produce a taxi cab for our future. So, “artist/inventor (and former R&D guy for Honda) Steven M. Johnson” [...]

EYES ON THE PRIZE

Why not spend the rest of your MLK week glued to the tube … for 14 hours? We hauled out episode one for ‘MLK movie night’ at my house and this seminal American Experience experience did not disappoint. (In 2010 the series finally became available on DVD – but it ain’t cheap. Hey, freedom costs money.) Episode one covers two historic events – the Montgomery bus boycott and the murder of Emmett Till. What’s striking here is the level of investment that this type of storytelling affords – while Rosa Parks and the bus strike certainly exist strongly in the American public consciousness, what’s missing and what EYES ON THE PRIZE provides is the time and space to really dwell inside these events, and boy oh boy the glorious footage! It’s amazing. Work-a-day beautiful black and white of all those Montgomery protesters walking to work (in gorgeous heels) day after day after day. Images of empty buses, a system nearly crippled by the absence of black riders, and of the evil Klan, its members pale, bespectacled and freaking creepy, whining and gesticulating.

See Inside Stefan Sagmeister’s World

Legendary designer Stefan Sagmeister and his team at Sagmeister Inc. recently relaunched their website. The homepage is now a bird’s eye view of their NY office courtesy of a fish eye camera mounted on the ceiling. It’s updated in real time, too, so whenever you visit sagmeister.com you can see what the designers are up to at that moment. Given that it’s the holidays and the end of the year, you can bet they’ll be at it pretty late.

Sundance: Here come the judges!

Here come the judges! With the Sundance Film Festival set to kick off on Thursday, the Sundance Institute has announced the members of the five juries who will decide which films will be taking home not only happy memories from this year’s festival, but awards as well. Actor/director Tim Blake Nelson, a Sundance Institute alum, [...]

Sundance Deals: Jeff Nichols’ TAKE SHELTER

Mere days before the Sundance Film Festival kicks off, later this week, Sony Pictures Classics has snagged the North American, Latin American, Australian and New Zealand rights to Jeff Nichols’ TAKE SHELTER, a psychological thriller starring Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain that will debut at Sundance in the U.S. Dramatic Competition. Deadline.com has the details [...]

Born This Way

Born This Way may be the name of Lady Gaga’s upcoming album, but it is also the name of my absolute favorite new blog. Collecting the images of gay people’s childhood, the site, in a humorous way, shows that many gay people have been gay, gay, gay, gay for, um, basically forever. According to the [...]

Loving hating Gwyneth

We always knew Gwyneth Paltrow was kind of annoying, but we didn’t realize it was “official” until we read the recent Time magazine review of her new movie “Country Strong,” which wasn’t so much a movie review as it was an account of how much people love to hate this privileged daughter of Hollywood elite [...]

Behind the book cover: An Object of Beauty

Designer Darren Booth shares on his blog some photos and his thought process that led to the (lovely) book cover for Steve Martin’s “An Object of Beauty.” In a world where designers all seem to work in their computer, it’s great to see someone working “old school” in their craft. As you can see from [...]