In a warped way, it’s now comforting to see our childhood heroes be every bit as deranged and disappointed as we are, as adults, with the real world. Like The Venture Brothers’ sense of a future gone horribly mundane, DERRICK Comedy’s debut feature Mystery Team turns childhood dreams into a darkly funny hypothetical: what if you never bothered to move past them?

Premiering earlier this year at Sundance, Team focuses on the titular trio who, originally their town’s plucky mascots, forgot to grow out of their adorable roles of Jason the Boy Genius (DC Pierson), Duncan the Strongest Kid on the Block (Dominic Dierkes) and Charlie the Master of Disguise (Donald Glover). Of course their achievements never get past childish levels –– the genius can only recite quirky facts, the strongest kid can’t lift a dumbbell and the Master of Disguise relies on silly mustaches and sombreros to pass as a gentleman or a plumber. Annoyed that they’re not taken as “seriously” as they once were, the chocolate milk-drinking group find a silver lining when a little girl asks them to solve the mystery of who killed her parents.

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To loosely paraphrase Journey: the Sundance movie deals never end, they go on and on and on and on. As Magnolia announces (via indieWIRE) that they’ve picked up Sundance Narrative Competition title Arlen Faber (starring Jeff Daniels, Lauren Graham and Olivia Thirlby) the biggest deal of the festival is getting infinitely more complicated. We’ve added Faber to our Sundance 2009 deal chart, and have also ammended the purchase price of Humpday. We’ll hold off on ammending the Push entry to reflect Harvey Weinstein’s claims, at least for now.

Screen Daily reports that Roadside Attractions has picked up RJ Cutler’s VOGUE documentary The September Issue, for a planned September release. Here’s our review of the film from Sundance. We’ve added that news, plus info on the sales of Push, Cold Souls and more to our deals chart.

6. I predict the death of mumblecore movies by 2011. Independent films will once again boast strong scripts and, as such, will reach a broader audience. This is probably as good a time as any to reiterate to critics who invoke the name of John Cassavetes in their reviews of so-called mumblecore fare: John’s only improvised film was Shadows. Suck it.

Indie film distribution stalwart-turned-director Jeff Lipsky has written a two-part, ten item list of reasons he’s “bullish on the state of indie” film for Ted Hope’s blog Truly Free Film. There’s no denying that Lipsky has seniority in this realm, even if the introduction to the piece, presumably written by Hope, strains credibility by refering toLipsky’s recent Sundance premiere Once More With Feeling as a “hit” (John Anderson’s declaration that the film “would be a natural for cable, if the execution weren’t so distractingly strange” was one of the kinder notices). But much of Lipsky’s numbered so-called optimism comes off as cranky old man-ism.

Whether he’s celebrating setbacks in digital projection via questionable cause-and-effect logic (”Fewer digital screens…will mean fewer bad digital movies”), dismissing “download, PPV, and VOD numbers” as “paltry” without offering examples or comparisons, or making broad generalizations about the production methods of emerging filmmakers, as in the quote above (we’ll presume critics of Andrew Bujalski, Barry Jenkins, and any other “mumblecore”-associated writer/director who works off a screenplay are excused from “sucking it”), the whole post is anti new-technology, anti-experimentation, pro-traditionalism. It’s as if Lipsky’s ultimate reason to be bullish is something along the lines of, “all this shit you crazy kids keep throwing at the wall ain’t sticking, and that makes me feel good personally.”

Variety reports that Lionsgate has signed a deal to acquire Sundance Grand Jury and Audience Award winner Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire, directed by Lee Daniel and featuring a tour de force supporting performance from Mo’Nique. According to the bare-bones news blurb, “Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry will support Lionsgate’s distribution through their respective motion picture companies.”

This news brings two thoughts immediately to mind: 1) the old conception of Lionsgate as a slash-horror factory is even more out of date this afternoon than it was this morning; and 2) Being that Lionsgate were rumored to be zeroing in on Push at least hours if not days before it won multiple awards on the final night of Sundance, if they were waiting for Oprah and Perry to pledge assistance before making the deal final and/or public, then maybe there’s something to the whispers (largely drowned out by media coverage of those awards, but still prevalent on the ground in Park City) that just because rich white people (ie: critics, Sundance audiences and jury members) take an interest in an art film about poor black people, that doesn’t guarantee an easy path to selling the film to actual black people.

The fine details of racial demographics may or may not be the major factor here,  but it’s certain that this is a time for safe bets, and it doesn’t get much safer than aligning an unknown quantity indie with name brands.

In any case, check out our Sundance review and interview with Mo’Nique.

UPDATE: indieWIRE is pegging the value of the deal at $5.5 million, making it the biggest of Sundance 2009.

Typically at SpoutBlog, we rarely state the obvious when it comes to a mediocre movie, trying to instead direct our gaze toward a gem that deserves some advocacy. Unless, of course, there’s a danger that said movie is going to overshadow the much earned good buzz around a great film. Such is the case with 500 Days of Summer starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. It’s a movie I walked out of at Sundance 2009, not because it sucked, but because it was lukewarm. I figured I’d never write, “It was so-so” for a review, so I left. But in the past week it has, surprisingly, garnered ovations that threaten to eclipse so many excellent films coming out of that festival.

Case in point, it’s number one in Coming Soon’s Best of the Fest:

Clearly the biggest crowd-pleaser at this year’s festival was this romantic comedy from first-time director Marc Webb and screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael Webber, which covers a year and a half in the relationship between Tom Hanson (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer Bishl (Zooey Deschanel), the latter a flighty woman who breaks the former’s heart. While some of the ground covered is stuff we’ve seen before, the film is told in an innovative and clever narrative style, jumping around in time from the height of their developing love affair to the months that follow their break-up. Gordon-Levitt creates an infinitely likeable character that both guys and women can relate to, much like John Cusack in his heyday…. What could easily be seen as a “…Say Anything” for the younger generation, the film’s Sundance premiere received a standing ovation from the audience, and one can expect that when it opens in July, it will be another Searchlight hit in the vein of Garden State and Once.

Of course, I can’t write a “review” of a movie I didn’t fully watch. I can, however, write a review of my decision to walk out a half hour into it. In fact, I’ll use the above blurb to record what was going through my mind in the half hour before I left.

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The five-day post-festival grace period is up, so it’s time for us to put down our pencils and put a close to our coverage of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. We had a smaller team on the ground this year so our coverage may not have been completely comprehensive, but hopefully quality stepped up where quantity slacked off. A full guide to our reviews, interviews, and assorted miscellany after the jump.

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Duncan Jones‘ Moon divided critics at Sundance, which is maybe not much of a surprise. A slow, introspective homage to classic sci-fi with one actor (Sam Rockwell in a perfectly modulated dual role), two locations (inside a moon space station, and just outside it), and minimalist special effects, Moon challeneges the viewer to confront what they think they know about space movies and lonely-man-in-existential-crisis movies equally. Audiences that get it seem to really get it, and hopefully Sony Classics, who are scheduled to release the film in June, won’t push the genre elements over the intellectual elements –– or vice versa –– when the victory of the film is the merging of the two. As I put it in my review, Moon “feels more casual and accessible than any cinematic exploration of the Lacanian mirror stage has a right to be.”

Whilst at Sundance, I got a few minutes alone with Rockwell and Jones, and we chatted about their mutual love of early-80s sci-fi, the technology and technique behind the dual performance, and the real life potential of Moon’s alternative energy fantasy. Beware: there’s a possible spoiler immediately after the jump.

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…And the Oscar for most sorrowful face goes to… Mickey Rourke! Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler grabbed our heart, slammed it to the mat, and showered it with tears. But does Mickey Rourke’s resurrection have what it takes to beat Sean Penn’s transformation in Milk?

Karina gives an update about IFC’s Festival Direct, a way to be among the first to see new indie films even if you can’t spring for a festival pass. Also, an odd run-in with Steven Soderbergh, who may or may not have a bone to pick with our intrepid blogger.

We debate which is the most absurd piece of Che merchandise sent in by listeners, and respond to feedback about usefulness of subjecting terrible, exploitative horror movies to the rigors of film criticism.

(Subscribe to FilmCouch–Spout’s weekly movie podcast–in the iTunes store or to our RSS feed and an episode will download each Friday)

0:00 - Intro

2:05 - Absurd Che merchandise

9:42 - Listener response regarding horror and film criticism

15:30 - The Wrestler

35:58 - Karina on IFC, Che

filmcouch-106

Variety’s Todd McCarthy received mixed reviews for his Sundance 2009 wrap-up piece, in which he lumped together the festival’s two biggest narrative hits, Push and An Education, as part of a trend of films espousing values “emblematic” of “the start of the Obama age.” I’m not sure our recently elected president has much to do with the themes of films that no doubt were conceived years before he clinched the nomination (especially these two films, both of which were based on long pre-existing texts), but I did notice that this year’s crop of Sundance titles seemed more interested in reflecting the times than some of their solipsistic Amerindie ancestors. I saw more films at this festival that tried, earnestly or satirically, to grapple with the state of the union’s troubled-but-hopeful psyche, than I’ve seen in any single ten day stretch in my professional life.

Even better, I saw this concern with The State of Things seep into films as disparate as the tacky, raunchy Rachel Dratch/Amy Poehler comedy Spring Breakdown, and Deborah Stratman’s extremely classy, short feature-length experimental documentary feature O’er the Land –– two films which, on paper, couldn’t be more different, and yet are both heavily invested in notions of fin de siècle Americana and the peculiar ways in which Americans take advantage of our bottomless freedom. Dense, sometimes silent, always visually complex, and presented with neither binding narration nor immediately evident narrative, Land is probably the purest cinema experience I had at Sundance this year. I’d like to give Stratman’s film another look before writing about it in more depth, but as I expect it to show up in at least one upcoming festival, I’ll have a shot. Bizarrely, it’s the studio-produced comedy that I may not soon have another chance to consider, or even see.

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(With Sundance wrapped and an intimidating backlog of films to write about, I’ll be publishing a number of brief capsule reviews over the next few days. If a specific title piques your interest and you’d like to see a more substantial review, let me know in the comments.)

The MIssing Person is a present-day film noir starring Oscar nominee Michael Shannon as a private detective hired to find a man who worked in the Twin Towers. The third feature by writer/director Noah Buschel, Shannon stars as John Rosow, a hard-drinking private detective hired by an unseen lawyer to take a train from Chicago to Los Angeles to follow a mysterious man who’s heading West with a young Mexican child in tow. Along the way, Rosow phone-flirts with the lawyer’s tough-girl secretary (Amy Ryan), gets waylaid by a sexy decoy (Margaret Colin), and befriends a cabbie (John Ventimiglia) who, like him, grew up in New York but had to get away. It eventually emerges the detective and his prey are running from similar things.

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Critics had every reason to object when Billy Bob Thornton remade The Bad News Bears a few years back. After all, Walter Matthau had already defined the role of foul-mouthed Coach Buttermaker, a cranky alcoholic who oversees a team of misfit little leaguers, in the perfectly serviceable 1976 original. Now we get yet another variation on the formula, this time starring Sam Rockwell as the last man you’d want coaching a varsity girls basketball team, in The Winning Season.

Strange that this second film from Grace Is Gone writer-director James C. Strouse could be so different from his debut (in which John Cusack played an emasculated widower who refuses to cope with the death of his wife in Iraq), and yet so similar to an entire subcategory of the underdog sports comedy. Some would argue that the girls basketball angle sets The Winning Season apart, but what little originality the film has going for it is the element it shares with the largely unseen (and widely unloved) Grace Is Gone –– namely, its observant yet underplayed attention to a fragile father figure.

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This year’s Sundance featured firsthand accounts of human rights violations in Darfur (Reporter), Tibet (Tibet in Song) and Burma (Burma VJ), so what does it say about me that the documentary that reduced me to a burbling mess was The Cove, a white-knuckle critique of dolphin killing in Japan? The truth is, it may actually reveal less about me than it does the tactics by which the films position their respective causes for audiences — one of the many subjects director Eric Daniel Metzgar contemplates with Reporter.

In his philosophically introspective doc, Metzgar accompanies New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof on his ventures through Africa, deconstructing the methods he uses to convey the atrocities he witnesses there back to his readers in the West (a heavy burden, considering that his writing has the power — or the potential, at least — to influence world leaders). It was Kristof, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, who helped alert the world to the fact that there was a genocide occurring in Darfur.

Metzgar approaches Kristof’s reporting with a healthy skepticism, just as all moviegoers would be advised to handle agenda-driven docs (he explains why victims can be unreliable, causes can obscure logical reasoning and so on). Incorporating himself in the process from the very beginning, Metzgar quotes Kristof’s mission as “to make you care about what’s just over the hill,” raising red flags as the journalist seeks out worst-case atrocities to write about everywhere he goes. In a Congolese camp, Kristof passes over horror stories deemed not depressing enough before training his attention on a withered 41-year-old woman, Yohanita, who was raped by soldiers, saw her fields pillaged and now teeters on the brink of death.

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indieWIRE polled a number of critics and bloggers (including yours truly) on their favorite films and performances at this year’s Sundance, and the results are in: the pros think the jury and the audience got it right in selecting Push: Based on the novel by Sapphire as the best narrative feature at the festival. I didn’t see that film (Paul did the review, and Eric Kohn interviewed Mo’Nique for us), and in general my ballot included a few films that didn’t make the consensus cut; I’ve pasted it after the jump if you want to take a look-see.

indieWIRE also posted some anonymous comments from participants, including one which I think I mostly agree with in sentiment, but which still irks me a bit:

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