sundance

Genre big and small permeates screens

Are we inside a genre revolution? Lately the amount of content hitting screens that features either a modest nod or full-fledged over-the-top bow to genre is simply overwhelming. ANOTHER EARTH is indie-drama-with-a-side-of-sci-fi. MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE is indie-drama-with-a-touch-of-thriller. WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN, the highly anticipated third feature from Lynn Ramsay, is indie-drama-experimental-fantasy. Yep, that’s right, on the surface it’s about raising a child who turns out to be a Columbine-like murderer, but in reality, I hear, it exists as a true art film. Lead actress Tilda Swinton said in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine that the film is “a fantasy that has as much to do with the practical business of bringing up a child as ROSEMARY’S BABY has to do with being pregnant.”

Friday movie trailer roundup

We Need to Talk About Kevin Bande-annonce by toutlecine

It’s pretty much the weekend, one of three remaining August weekends before we hit Labor Day and move into Fall, I might add, so it’s time to start wrapping up our summer movie to-see lists and look ahead at what’s coming next. Out of the latest batch of recently released trailers I noticed a trend towards parenting movies, and while these three films all involve adults raising children, they couldn’t be less alike.

I AM LOVE – Now in Theaters

I AM LOVE starts out with a set up Shakespeare would approve The Recchi family: Emma (Tilda Swinton), her husband and their three grown children as well as various other family members host a birthday dinner for the Recchi patriarch, Edoardo. During his toast, Edoardo announces that the successor to the Recchi textile factory is not only Tancredi, Emma’s husband, but also their eldest son Edoardo Jr. Aside from a slight raise of his eyebrows, Tancredi’s surprise is never expressed. Edoardo Jr. seems to have other things in mind his future (something about a construction contract in relation to the Tate Gallery) but this too is overlooked. In fact, the father-son feud that introduces the film is never brought up again and neither is the family business until it’s casually sold off after Edoardo’ s death.

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.

The Playground Of The Imagination: New Frontier On Main

Now in its second year, New Frontier on Main has become an essential stop in the Festival experience. Located in the bottom of a galleria, the basement space has been transformed into a dimly lit, mysterious world filled with quivering colored lights and drifting shadows.

Remembering Derek

A stark black-and-white photograph from 1992 shows a group of young filmmakers and critics (among them Tom Kalin, Isaac Julien, Todd Haynes, Sadie Benning, RubyRich and Derek Jarman) after a panel at the Sundance Film Festival entitled “Barbed Wire Kisses.” The photo marks not just a moment in history, but a moment when a history would begin. Later that year B. Ruby Rich would call this gathering the “New Queer Cinema” in an article for the British film magazine Sight and Sound, a term that would simultaneously serve as nostalgia for an artistic movement that never arrived and a promise of what independent cinema could become.