Sundance Report



From those intrepid Page Sixxies: "THAT DJ AM, Bijou Phillips and Steve Aoki will celebrate Sundance by spinning at the Heineken Green Room in Park City bar Village at the Lift on Jan. 22 ."

From Slashfilm: "Eighty-something minutes into a premiere screening at the Eccles Theater something unusual happened. The climax of Tommy O’Haver’s latest film An American Crime was about to reveal its most disturbing twist.

“'LIGHTS!!!! LIGHTS!!!!' People started screaming from the back of the theater.

"The audience jumped to it’s feet, someone screamed.

“'We need a doctor! Is anyone a doctor!'

"People were running around and the movie played on screen but not one person was still watching. The lights went up and the movie abruptly came to a stop.

"Today the buzz at the Sundance Film Festival will no doubt revolve around how An American Crime was so disturbing that someone fainted or went into shock (depending on who you talk to). But that’s not the truth. The truth is that the guy was a diabetic who passed out. "

From CalgarySun: "Watching Paris Hilton grope her boyfriend on the dancefloor enhances many things. An appreciation of independent cinema is not one of them. Yet that was the scene a year ago at Harry O’s, the downtown bar which, as predictably as snow in January, transforms itself into one of the hubs for the celebrity mecca the Sundance Film Festival has grown into — much to the famous chagrin of its founder Robert Redford.

"On Jan. 19, you needed only to wander quaint, historic Main Street to realize, even as the roster of films and themes change annually, the Sundance sideshow does not.

"Stars, both major and minor, emerge from swag houses, identified not so much by what they look like — actors are disarmingly small and even ordinary when strolling down a snowy sidewalk — but by the armloads of gift bags they, or their entourage, carry.

"(Last year, I found myself walking behind a certain unnamed Australian actor who was fearing snapshots of him with some of the free products were going to end up used in print ads.)

"You can also tell a celebrity, of course, by the company they keep — namely the dogged hordes of photographers.

"On Jan. 19, paparazzi were staked outside the Village at the Lift hoping to snap a frame of Justin Timberlake, Michael Douglas or Sienna Miller. All three have films premiering here and Timberlake is scheduled to perform at Harry O’s Jan. 20."

Tamara Jenkins' The Savages is getting big bizz. From Ray Pride at McIndie: "Note-perfect, Tamara Jenkins' The Savages puts an awful lot of American moviemaking to shame. Witty about neurosis and unblinking about mortality, her long-in-coming second feature is an unlikely fusion of the comedic precision of Annie Hall and the melancholy humanism The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, and I mean that in the most admiring and positive fashion. Line for line, The Savages has some of the most formidable comic dialogue I've been fortunate enough to hear in ages, and the screenplay is lovingly structured. I'll have more in a bit, but here's a sampling of Jenkins' ear for dialogue: 'We're not in therapy right now, we're in real liife'; 'I'm not leaving you alone, I'm hanging up'; and 'It's back to Krakow for Kasia. Your brother won't marry me, but when I make him eggs, he cries.' [Like many other behavioral niceties one could cite, Cara Seymour's limpid yet freighted delivery of that line is dead-on lovely.] A quick free-range free-association: The surreal, heartfelt final shot, in its own strange way, evokes the "We need the eggs" scene that closes Annie Hall."

God-DAMN it, we want to see that movie.