sundance 2009 Tagged Articles at Cinematical

I'll keep this short: There's a horror flick coming out later this year called Grace. Lots of people (including me and Eric Snider) like it a lot, such as former Cinematical scribe (and mother of five) Kim Voynar, who went to the Sundance screening after I basically commanded her to. When I saw her later she was both grateful (for recommending it) and angry (for not seeing it with her). Then it hit Austin and earned even more fans -- and not just horror geeks, mind you, although they're the ones who seemed to dig it the most.

The flick is still shuffling through the festival circuit, but Anchor Bay will deliver the DVD before year's end, and it looks like my pals over at FEARnet have scored the first look at the "red-band" (R rated) trailer for Grace. Click right here to take a look at the rather impressive new promo clip, and then come back for some friendly advice. (Pause.) OK, back? Good: This movie is not suitable for pregnant women. Frankly you should spend three years in jail if you show Grace to a pregnant woman. Ten years if you make it a double feature with Inside.

(Warning: This one goes up to eleven...)

1. Moon -- Most were admittedly intrigued by the prospect of Sam Rockwell alone and yet potentially not on a lunar station going into the fest, and this seemed to be the first film to live up to its promise as a modest yet straight-up sci-fi endeavor (that just happened to have a Kevin Spacey-voiced robot, and just tell me you wouldn't want one of those waking you up and telling you to pay it forward all the friggin' time).

2. 500 Days of Summer -- I'd liked the vague stuff I'd been hearing about this one going into the fest as well -- namely, "Zooey Deschanel, Zooey Deschanel, Zooey Deschanel" -- and I certainly liked the teaser trailer that made its way out just hours before the film's formal premiere. Does it look like Fox Searchlight's particular brand of indie hipster quirk that's just begging to get too popular for its own good by about Labor Day? Sure, but if it's as adorable as it seems, that's a chance I'm willing to take, Zooey.

One of the more fascinating and gut-wrenching films at this year's festival, Sin Nombre managed to snag a couple of awards (Best Director and Best Cinematography in U.S. Dramatic Competition) before skipping town with a writer-director who's sure to become Hollywood's next great filmmaker. The film, while frequently heartbreaking to watch, also comes with its own unbelievable story. Focus Features became involved early on based solely on its script, and then proceeded to provide financing to a first-time feature director for a film that was entirely in Spanish and featured some main actors that had never been in a movie before. The good news for Focus is their gamble paid off, and Sin Nombre is easily one of the best films of 2009 so far.

Essentially a road trip thriller with a love story mixed in, Sin Nombre tracks the fate of three teenagers traveling through Mexico on their way toward the U.S. border. Sayla (Paulina Gaitan) is living a hard life in Honduras when her father and uncle decide it's time for the three of them to attempt to cross over into the United States and meet up with dad's "other family" in New Jersey -- full of brothers and sisters her pop fathered before he was caught and deported. But the journey is a tough one: First the trio must cross a river into Mexico, and then hop a train -- by riding on its roof -- for a three-week journey to the border. Before the train arrives, Sayla's father tells her that half the people traveling with them (100-200) will either die or be caught by border police and sent back home. Nevertheless, the promise of a better life on the other side is too appetizing to ignore.

There are documentaries, and there are comedies made to look like documentaries, and Paper Heart is both. Conceived by comedian Charlyne Yi and filmmaker Nicholas Jasenovec, it combines elements of reality and fiction in an amusing, meta-referential way, though one's enjoyment of it may ultimately come down to one's enjoyment of Yi as a performer.

It is set up as a documentary about Charlyne's search to determine whether true love really exists. She doesn't think it does -- or, at the very least, she thinks she's not capable of feeling it. (I can't imagine anything sadder than being unable to experience romantic love, but that's beside the point.) To investigate, Charlyne travels the country to interview biologists, old married couples, and Las Vegas wedding chapel officiators who dress as Elvis. Those segments are real, like you'd find in any documentary.

But in the process of making the documentary, Charlyne meets actor Michael Cera at a party, and they start tentatively dating. The documentary director (played by actor Jake Johnson), knowing a good thing when he sees one, insists on following Charlyne and Michael around. It's a no-brainer, really: She's making a movie about love, and in the meantime starts dating someone? Perfect!

Those segments are loosely scripted, of course; while Michael Cera and Charlyne Yi have been romantically linked, the film is not a real chronicle of their relationship. But the film plays it straight, shooting all the scenes, real and non-real, in the same way, as if they were part of the same documentary. Savvy viewers are meant to understand where the line is, but I wouldn't be surprised if some audience members come away thinking the whole thing was a straightforward documentary. A lot of people thought The Blair Witch Project was real, too.

The premise of Precious is so unsettling and bleak that no one would blame you if you didn't want to see it: It's the story of an obese 16-year-old illiterate Harlem girl who's pregnant (for the second time) by her own father, lives with her monstrously abusive mother, and has almost given up on life. But if you do see it, you'll find that it's compelling and artistic, punctuated with warm humor and masterful performances, and ultimately triumphant and hopeful.

The girl is named Claireece "Precious" Jones (she goes by Precious), and she's played with astonishing rawness by newcomer Gabourey Sidibe. Narrating the film, Precious tells us the grim facts. Beyond the ones already noted, she is still in junior high school (where she's dumbly in love with her kindly math teacher); her first child, born with Down syndrome, is technically in her mother's custody but is actually cared for by her grandmother; and her mother, Mary (Mo'Nique), is a welfare-absorbing harridan who abuses Precious in every possible way, hating her daughter for "stealing" her man. Precious did no such thing, of course -- she was raped by her father -- but Mary is not interested in details.

Precious is directed by her principal to an alternative school called Each One Teach One. Her class is populated by other girls who dropped out or were kicked out of public schools for various reasons; it's telling that even in such a motley group, Precious is still the most timid, the most withdrawn, and the most messed-up. The teacher, Ms. Rain (Paula Patton), is dedicated to her work, perhaps the first adult to ever take a genuine interest in helping Precious. The other students might be Precious' first friends, too.

The September Issue, directed by RJ Cutler (The War Room), offers the tantalizing promise of immediate inside pleasures with its synopsis alone, as it follows Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour and her editorial team in the assembly and shaping of 2007's edition of the title issue of Vogue magazine -- the largest issue of the year, the holy writ and testament for the upcoming year in fashion, the big brassy bloated bane of every postal carrier's existence. Immediately, we're promised glamour, high-stakes editorial crisis, the confluence of commerce and style, the manic business of modern magazine publishing. The good news is not only that The September Issue offers much more than those immediate inside pleasures -- although it does, commenting on celebrity culture, digital image-altering technology, power and privilege in the distraction-industrial complex and much more -- but that it delivers those immediate inside pleasures superbly along with the nitty-gritty, so we get to witness a mix of high fashion and near-fascism with Ms. Wintour as the iron fist inside the stylish hand-stitched calfskin glove -- velvet is so last year, darling.

Among the items on the prop list for Grace are: one (1) baby bottle filled with blood and one (1) dead baby. Now that you know that, a review might be superfluous -- you already know whether or not you want to see this movie.

If you are the sort of person who might enjoy an effed-up gore-fest about a woman who delivers an undead baby, you can rest assured that Grace lives up to its potential. It's at least as effed-up as you'd expect, and first-time writer/director Paul Solet (expanding on his 2006 short) proves himself adept both as a visual storyteller and as a guy who can make you crap your pants.

Jordan Ladd stars as Madeline Matheson, a young woman who has finally, after years of trying, conceived a child with her dull husband, Michael (Stephen Park). Madeline's intrusive mother-in-law, Vivian (Gabrielle Rose), knows exactly which doctors Madeline should go to, which birthing practices she should follow, and even what food she should be eating (Vivian disapproves of Madeline's vegan lifestyle). But Madeline favors the New Age-y philosophies of her old friend Patricia (Samantha Ferris), a midwife with a medical degree who does holistic childbirth -- plopping out babies in pools of water while a CD of pan-flute music plays, that sort of thing.

After a slow several minutes of exposition and mood-setting, Solet kicks things into action with a series of crises that put Madeline's pregnancy at risk. An emergency-room stand-off between Patricia and the old family doctor that Vivian selected (Malcolm Stewart) is tense and unsettling, but that's only the beginning of Madeline's troubles. Eventually she gives birth to a stillborn baby girl -- except that the infant only stays dead for a few moments before reawakening. And I believe you know the tendencies of humans in horror movies who are brought back from the dead.

Our Cinematical compatriots attending this year's Sundance Film Festival won't get their first look at Marc Webb's 500 Days of Summer until later this evening at the earliest, but in the meantime, Trailer Addict has offered up our first look at what may or may not be the musical reminiscence of a fractured relationship between Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Tom and Zooey Deschanel's Summer.

It's a peculiar trailer for what I'm sure is a peculiar movie, but I like what (admittedly little) we're seeing and hope that we only get verification from Park City that this project is indeed something unique and charming, and not merely quirky, a four-letter film festival word if ever I've heard one.

Fox Searchlight had distribution of the film going into the fest, and they're already eyeing a limited roll-out starting in, yes, the summer -- on July 24th, to be exact. If they manage to turn this into the type of sleeper success that they crank out time and time again, let's hope that the film deserves it.

"You haul 16 tons, and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
St. Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go;
I owe my soul to the company store. ..."

-- "Sixteen Tons," Merle Travis

Know thyself. -- Solon of Athens

Moon, the directorial debut of Duncan Jones, opens with a bright, breezy bit of corporate propaganda explaining how, in the film's near-future, clean energy is provided by fusion fueled by hydrogen wrenched from lunar mineral deposits on the dark side of the Moon. Sam Rockwell is Sam Bell, who runs a fuel-harvesting station, aided only by the base's A.I., GERTY (given voice by Kevin Spacey). Sam is nearing the end of his three-year contract, and it's been a lonely stint; he's got only two weeks left, but he's on the thin edge. The communications satellite is down, so Sam can't talk to Earth -- his bosses, his wife -- directly; for all of the high-tech trappings and whiz-bang science of his work, Sam's a hard rock miner. And that's always been dangerous work.

Moon evokes many things -- the nature of the human experience, the nature of employee-management relations, how the odds are fairly good that the future will be exactly like today, but more so. With all of its far-flung inventions, impeccable visual design and Clint Mansell's eerie score, Moon boils down to a single man having a long conversation in isolation, telling himself a few lies and opening his own eyes to a few truths; Rockwell, playing the only person for tens of thousands of miles, has no one else to act against, and much of his plight has to be conveyed through special effects that gave him little or nothing to work with on-set.

This morning, I got up and picked up my press pass at the Headquarters Marriott with a friend of mine, a fellow member of the press; after, we had a sit-down breakfast. And we talked -- about movies, sure, but about apartments and life and buffet etiquette and mutual friends and mutual enemies and their life in New York and my life in California. I laughed; I had a good time, a real conversation with someone I don't get to see often enough. And when it was done, I thought, Well, that was the last time you get to do that for the next ten days.

Because after that I had to double-check my interviews and double-check my screening times and cross-reference the schedule I'd made back in L.A. with the one here in Park City and call PR firms and then go back to the Marriot to pick up the hard ticket I needed for a public screening -- the public screening's on Sunday, but since I knew I had the time to go over there and I knew the PR person was there, better safe than sorry -- and do some writing before getting over to the Eccles for the opening night film Mary and Max and then heading over to the opening night party to shoot TV stand-ups with The Travel Channel and then head back here to write a wrap-up of the first day of Sundance.