Congratulations to the Winners at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival

Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic – Beasts of the Southern Wild

Grand Jury Prize: Documentary – The House I Live In

Directing Award: Dramatic – Middle of Nowhere

Directing Award: U.S. Documentary – The Queen of Versailles

Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award – Safety Not Guaranteed

Excellence in Editing Award: U.S Documentary – Detropia

Excellence in Cinematography Award: U.S Dramatic – Beasts of the Southern Wild

Excellence in Cinematography Award: U.S. Documentary – Chasing Ice

Special Jury Prize: Dramatic – Ensemble Cast: The Surrogate

Special Jury Prize: Dramatic – Film Producing: Smashed

Special Jury Prizes: U.S. Documentary – Love Free or Die; Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

Audience Award: U.S. Dramatic – The Surrogate

Audience Award: U.S. Documentary – The Invisible War

World Cinema Audience Award: Dramatic – Valley of Saints

World Cinema Audience Award: Documentary – Searching for Sugar Man

Best of Next Audience Award: Sleepwalk with Me

World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic – Violeta Went to Heaven

World Cinema Directing Award: Dramatic – Teddy Bear

World Cinema Screenwriting Award: Dramatic – Young & Wild

World Cinema Cinematography Award: Dramatic – My Brother the Devil

World Cinema Special Jury Prize: Dramatic – Can

World Cinema Jury Prize: Documentary – The Law in These Parts

World Cinema Directing Award: Documentary – 5 Broken Cameras

World Cinema Excellence in Editing Award: Documentary – Indie Game: The Movie

World Cinema Cinematography Award: Documentary – Putin’s Kiss

World Cinema Special Jury Prize: Documentary – Searching for Sugar Man

Alfred P. Sloan Awards – Robot and Frank; Valley of Saints

Still from The Other Dream Team

I cannot recommend The Other Dream Team highly enough. It is one of the more multi-faceted documentaries I’ve seen in recent memory, weaving together the formation of the 1992 Lithuanian Olympic basketball team, the personal histories of its players, and the sport’s legacy as the country fought for its independence from Russia. The Grateful Dead factor into the events, making the story even more unique; giving it Hoop Dreams appeal is the presence of Jonas Valanciunas, Lithuania native and recent first round NBA draft pick.

The work is also reminiscent of “30 for 30″, and director Marius Markevicius has a couple vets from that ESPN series on his crew. As of this writing, it’s been reported that six studios are chasing distribution rights, while others are — wait for it — vying for the option to remake the documentary into a feature. Hopefully, like Young@Heart, the documentary will find success and the remake will never make it past the development stage.

Room 237 is billed as a “subjective documentary” on hidden meanings in the film version of The Shining. It’s definitely a crowd pleaser for people who think the world will end this year, or those who have played Dark Side of the Moon while watching The Wizard of Oz. Interviewees offer up a series of insights that blur the line between credibility and fanaticism, but director Rodney Ascher, who also edited his work, knows how to respect his cast while entertaining his audience. The notion that Stanley Kubrick created the film as a way of dealing with his feelings about the Holocaust and American imperialism are viable, while some people take what can only be continuity errors to another level of our obsessive search for meaning. More than anything, the documentary is a testament to Ascher’s editing skills, as he recontextualizes footage from Kubrick’s oeuvre with a deft hand. I’m unsure if his work will be picked up for theatrical release, but I think a long shelf life awaits.

LCD Soundsystem leader James Murphy has always come across like a fantastic man on record and in interviews, so imagine how crush-worthy he is in Shut Up and Play the Hits, in which he reflects on his music career to date as LCDSS’s final show approaches. Exuding the kind of cool that comes from humble self-consciousness, Murphy’s answers to writer Chuck Klosterman‘s guiding questions touch on his love of art and community as he illuminates some of the feelings behind his decision to end LCD at a creative zenith. The footage from the Madison Square Garden show is emotional, and you will probably tear up for the 1,000th time during a live rendition of “All My Friends”.

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I had to exit the V/H/S screening about 30 minutes into the feature, not wanting to be the second case of someone passing out during the horror anthology. Ti West is the best known of the directors, but he’s in fit company with David Bruckner, Glenn McQuaid, and others. The premise finds a group of violent guys hired by an unknown person to retrieve a videotape from someone’s property. They are the kind of people you hope meet a horrific fate, and by the end of the first segment, it’s pretty much a given that will happen in time. I hope the demon who looks like a wicked version of River from “Firefly”/Serenity factors into the overall narrative, because gross males need to be disposed of properly. Like her, I am a delicate creature; shaky-cam and hyper-editing are no good for my flora. Perhaps I will have to watch this one segment at a time. There was applause after the first chapter, something I’m sure never occurred once during The Devil Inside‘s opening weekend.

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Beats, Rhymes and Life was one of the best documentaries to emerge from last year’s festival, and it fared well in theaters, too. Ice-T‘s Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap does not seem destined to mirror that success. As co-director and interviewer, the guy who wrote “Cop Killer” and espoused the pimp lifestyle sure does conduct a series of stale interviews.

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Also somewhat zzz is Bones Brigade: An Autobiography, a documentary on the pioneering skateboard crew that included Tony Hawk and Steve Caballero. Of course the 1980s footage is ace and might inspire you to pull out your old Independent Truck Company t-shirt, but director Stacy Peralta made a classic with Dogtown and Z-Boys, and Bones doesn’t achieve the same level of greatness by default.

Still from Compliance

Compliance has earned wildly mixed reviews here at Sundance, and I feel it’s successful for that reason alone, even though it’s a filthy piece of work.

The drama puts the employees of a fast food restaurant through an incredible scenario orchestrated by a prank caller. Posing as a police officer, he contacts the store manager and makes her an unwitting ally in a plot against a pretty cashier, whom he accuses of stealing money from a customer’s purse. The manager quarantines the young woman, and for the remaining duration of the film she is subjected to a series of dehumanizing acts illustrate how some bend to the will of others without true resistance.

I think writer-director Craig Zobel slips up by placing value judgments on his characters, especially in the film’s coda. And the lurid camerawork is as sleazy as the true events that inform Zobel’s work. This is especially questionable and perhaps short-sighted filmmaking from a guy who has worked with David Gordon Green from George Washington through Undertow.

Still from The Imposter

More successful is The Imposter, an immersive missing person documentary that reveals one person’s fraud and one family’s potential crime and cover up.

13-year-old Nicholas Barclay vanished from his San Antonio neighborhood in 1994. Some three years later, a young man in Spain materialized, claiming to be Nicholas. We’re introduced to this man, Frédéric Bourdin, at the beginning of The Imposter, and he guides us through how he duped authorities on both sides of the Atlantic and was accepted by the Barclay family as being Nicholas.

Keep in mind that Nicholas was a blonde haired, blue-eyed boy with a small frame at the time of his disappearance, and Frédéric, who was in his early 20s when he posed as the boy, was a Frenchman who bleached his dark hair the day he was reunited with his would-be sister and had three small tattoos inked on him according to Nicholas’ missing person report.

Wait, a tattooed 13-year-old boy?

That’s when I felt a greater sense of curiosity and suspicion about the Barclay family history, and director Bart Layton does a fantastic job at balancing Frédéric’s amoral deception with a sense of Nicholas’ true fate; he even lassos in a private eye who provides bits of welcome comic relief as he takes up the case against the Barclays.

A&E IndieFilms is behind the work, which plays like a superior TV documentary. That’s a polite way of saying I’m surprised this was programmed at a top-ranking film festival, but it is definitely worth seeing as Nicholas’ case remains open.

Still from How to Survive a Plague

In recent years, with the queer-rights movement trained on the issue of marriage equality, and as sectors of the HIV+ population have achieved and maintained undetectable status, the AIDS/ARC timeline has blurred for some of us. What first shook me back into consciousness in David France‘s documentary How to Survive a Plague was the footage from the first ACT UP event, which went down on Wall Street in March, 1987. Those wavy videotaped moments reminded me that the response to the AIDS epidemic was started by a few and embraced by many. This was a time when Mark Harrington and Peter Staley became community leaders and people who had never been politically involved, such as chemist Iris Long, emerged to help put together a plan of action for treatment.

By keeping the focus on the key players in the fight against AIDS in New York City, director France has created a historical document that resonates with today’s Occupy movement, and beautifully frames the period where a group of people educated themselves, fought against the status quo, and made inroads with the FDA, pharmaceutical companies, the National Institute for Health, the media, and the White House.

Plague benefits from the hours of archival footage, from the early community meetings through ACT UP’s split into two separate, sometimes combative organizations. What captivated me was this dissolution, where a few of ACT UP’s founding members created the Treatment Action Group in order to concentrate on research for AIDS treatments and co-infections, being labeled elitists by ACT UP in the process. Leave it to writer/activist Larry Kramer to find the true definition of the community’s collective anger by announcing that they were in the midst of a plague and their internal combustion must produce positive results.

Whether you are a survivor of that time period or a member of the generation that followed, How to Survive a Plague is a radical and inspiring document of a social movement that has not lost its power, influence and hope over the last 35 years.

I credit Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim for helping make cable TV a destination for gonzo, unstable comedy. “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” served up 12-minute bits of peerless schtick that undoubtedly inspired plenty of amateurs who have since found immortality on Funny or Die or YouTube. So it’s a bummer to assert that their feature-length film, Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie, is a semi-baked story idea stretched into a painfully long run time where even their support staff (Zach Galifianakis, John C. Reilly, Will Ferrell) don’t deliver gold, or in this case, diamonds (you’ll see, but it’s not important). It’s the sort of bore where, if you were sitting next to me, I’d understand if you started to check your phone for texts, or even status updates.

The shambling plot follows Tim and Eric after they make a F-grade movie that cost a billion dollars loaned to them by the mobster-like Schlaaang Corportation. In order to pay back their debt, they skip town, refashion themselves as a public relations duo, and accept an open invite to renovate the Swallow Valley Mall, trading Robert Loggia‘s death threats for Will Ferrell’s winking promise of financial redemption in the process. As they ready the mall for a grand re-opening, squatters are evicted, ghosts are unmasked in the yogurt shop, Tim takes custody of the son of a vendor who specializes in selling used toilet paper, and Eric spends a night getting “Shrimed” in a bathtub, then discovers Tim passed out in the adult toy store with Katie, a balloon vendor and the object of Eric’s lust. (How dare you defile Miss Geist.)

Before the screening, I surveyed several film writers, and they all said the movie will satisfy fans, and the sudden appearances of Reilly or Galifianakis make up for the draggy bits, though I disagree with both claims. Suspiciously absent or tuned down are many of T&E’s trademarks — the faux commercials, cable-access style graphics, special effects, and looping edits that helped solidify their small but devoted following. The most disengaging part of the movie is the ending, which proves that surrealist comedy writers still fall prey to typical three act structure and its typical failures. Conversely, the funniest moment is at the very beginning, where a barrage of Schlaaang vanity cards introduce the feature.

When you soften the edges of a cult TV program in order to appeal to a wider audience, purists will grumble. I’ll be interested to see what the reaction to the movie is once it’s on VOD and in theaters. Obviously there’s a huge difference between being a fan who sees this for free and one who shells out for a viewing, be it at home or otherwise. If I had paid to see this film, it would have overwritten the last major TV-to-movie letdown, Strangers with Candy: The Movie.

After igniting the fire under potential Oscar nominees (Margin Call, Buck), serving as the debutante ball for Elizabeth Olsen, and exhibiting two of the worst-performing movies of the year relative to their marquee values (I Melt with You and The Greatest Movie Ever Sold), Sundance returns with a roster that tempts me to look for trends and themes as the independent film community gathers for its winter formal.

The main thing I see before really seeing anything? From bridesmaids to political matriarchs, female-powered films are in focus, with a number of women directors present this year. Here’s a sampling:

Bachelorette: Kirsten Dunst and two girlfriends accept the request to be bridesmaids for a woman they used to haze back in high school. I’m happy to see someone remembered that Kirsten D. is a great comedienne when she has the right material, and I’m looking forward to her revisiting her mean-girl past alongside Isla Fisher and Lizzy Caplan. Writer-director Leslye Headland (from the why-did-you-cancel-this-FX show “Terriers”) here is backed by Will Ferrell and a team of savvy producers, so this project is primed for a potential big sale if it’s actual-real funny.

Ethel: Last year, HBO Documentary Films bravely unveiled Reagan; this year, the network exhibits a portrait of Ethel Kennedy that’s directed by her daughter, Rory. Unlike the Reagan documentary, look for this particular Kennedy to remain in the news after the festival.

Two assumedly broke girls start a phone-sex business in For a Good Time, Call…. Ari Graynor is one of the operators, and the actress has Olsen Potential this year with this comedy and a supporting role in Celeste and Jesse Forever, which I’m referring to as Rashida Jones‘s Albert Nobbs since she wrote and stars in her passion project.

About Face: Jerry Hall, Carmen Dell’Orefice, and other world-class supermodels discuss their careers and the aging process. And you can bet they won’t forget to smile with their eyes. I could watch a fashion documentary with each new day, and it’s about time someone revisited the legends.

Speaking (again) of Elizabeth Olsen, she brings a new pair of films to Sundance 2012: she co-stars in Liberal Arts, Josh Radnor‘s return to the festival, and Red Lights alongside Robert De Niro and Sigourney Weaver. I’m looking forward to both, but more for their respective directors. Radnor, who made gentle waves with Happythankyoumoreplease, earned my interest as he refused to hand over a final print to its initial distributor and found a bit of success elsewhere; Red Lights is the new project from Buried‘s Rodrigo Cortés, and while perhaps the best thing about Buried was its poster, I like gimmicky thrillers, especially as a festival palette cleanser given all the films that remind me of how horrible the world can be.

Kid-Thing: My eye is on this one due to reports of young star Sidney Aguirre‘s naturalistic performance as a tomboy who encounters a woman in a dire circumstance. It screens in the festival’s NEXT program, always a mixed bag.

Nadezhda Markina stars as the titular Elena, a family drama and Cannes winner from Andrei Zvyagintsev, director of one of my all-time favorites, The Return. Zvyagintsev has earned lazy and annoying comparisons to Andrei Tarkovsky, though he possesses a voice all his own, and reportedly his new project slowly nods toward the noir genre of old.

The number of female directors at this year’s festival could earn its own post, but hopefully some of these films will emerge for their individual merit instead. At the top of the heap, in name only, is Wuthering Heights, Andrea Arnold‘s follow up to Fish Tank. Julie Delpy‘s 2 Days in New York catches up with her character (from 2 Days in Paris) after she has ditched Adam Goldberg and finds her living in Manhattan with two children and boyfriend Chris Rock. Jennifer Baichwal, whose Manufactured Landscapes was excellent, has adapted writer Margaret Atwood‘s analysis of indebtedness in Payback. That’s What She Said has a gritty NYC look and what could be a(nother) bonkers performance from Anne Heche. Katie Aselton helms and co-stars in Black Rock, a thriller screening in the Park City at Night program that literally has the Duplass seal of approval. Gypsy Davy and Putin’s Kiss are potential winners, too.

And the two films screening as this year’s Sundance Collection? Daughters of the Dust. And Reality Bites. Wino Forever!
]]> http://new.blog.imdb.net/2012/01/17/emerging-female-directors-stars-storylines/feed/ 4 http://new.blog.imdb.net/2011/09/18/tiff-2011-and-the-winners-are/ http://new.blog.imdb.net/2011/09/18/tiff-2011-and-the-winners-are/#comments Sun, 18 Sep 2011 18:37:50 +0000 arno http://new.blog.imdb.net/?p=3828 Feature Films – People’s Choice Award: Where Do We Go Now?, directed by Nadine Labaki

Documentaries – People’s Choice Award: The Island President, directed by Jon Shenk

Midnight Madness – People’s Choice Award: The Raid, directed by Gareth Evans

Discovery Section – FIPRESCI Prize: Avalon, directed by Axel Petersen

Special Presentations Section – FIPRESCI Prize: The First Man, directed by Gianna Amelio

Best Canadian Feature Film: Monsieur Lazare, directed by Philippe Falardeau

Best Canadian First Feature Film: Edwin Boyd, directed by Nathan Morlando

Best Canadian Short Film: Doubles with Slight Pepper, directed by Ian Harnarine

Violet & Daisy: What a departure for Precious screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher in his directorial debut. Fletcher and his crew sure know how to craft great looking sets and action sequences, but the story of two teenage assassins, played by Saoirse Ronan and Alexis Bledel, is (yawn) Tarantinoesque. It so relies on his speech patterns and joke set-ups, the story’s derivative nature is rather shocking; you’d swear it’s suddenly 1993. Ronan and Bledel make the best of it with their blue-eyed exchanges keeping the pace up, and James Gandolfini, as the hit who seems to anticipate death, bakes the girls cookies and is twice as mysterious as both killers put together. The film does offer an unpopular ending that is sure to make it a tough sell, and, aside from the aesthetic, it’s the best thing V&D has going for it. I do look forward to Fletcher’s next move as a director; I just hope it’s more original.

Habibi: Susan Youssef‘s romantic drama brings to mind all of the premieres I’ve seen at festivals that might have been great if they had ripened just a bit more before facing the public. Set in the Gaza strip, the story is centered on two lovers kept apart by cultural and political factors. Layla (Maisa Abd Elhadi) has abandoned her studies and returned home to an increasingly worried and conservative family; Qays (Kais Nashif) is a poet who lives in the refugee camps (so you know he’s doomed). Youssef uses the language of poetry to illustrate Qays’ hopeless desire to marry Layla and move to Holland, increasing the level of despair as the literal and figurative roadblocks hem them in. Feeling like a documentary for most of its runtime, the surrealist ending feels a bit like a cheat.