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.

• 50 Cent announced a new production company, Cheetah Vision, which currently has eight scripts in development, including the company’s inaugural movie, The Dance, starring Nicolas Cage. 50 Cent will also see his directorial debut, Before I Self Destruct, released this year for free as a supplement to his latest album.
• Despite the fact that the presidential inauguration typically occurs during Sundance, this year the festival took a more noticeable pause to watch Barack Obama sworn in yesterday. Sundance Institute’s Michelle Satterberg on the event: “I think we just didn’t care about it [before]. But this is different.”
• Steven Soderbergh hosted a “secret screening” of his latest, The Girlfriend Experience. Check out Karina’s review here.
• As Sony Classics and Lionsgate make their first festival buys, Summit is reportedly interested in I Love You Phillip Morris. Meanwhile, at Slamdance, North American rights to The Ante have gone to Panorama Entertainment. Other Sundance titles likely to sell soon, according to Anne Thompson: Shana Feste’sThe Greatest; Bobcat Goldthwait’s World’s Greatest Dad;  the Ashton Kutcher-produced Spread; and the Anna Wintour doc The September Issue.
• Thompson also looks at the movie-related internet companies at this year’s fest. And on a similar subject, LouisGray.com asks,”Could Sundance do for Qik what SXSW did for Twitter?”
• According to E!, the whole “subdued” thing hasn’t actually affected the swag.
• Regarding the minor trend in Sci-Fi films this year, Moon star Sam Rockwell says, “I think in-camera effects are coming back full-throttle. I think people are getting a little sick of the glossiness of CGI and want to see old-school effects like they used to.” Hallelujah to that.
• Another trend this year: romantic comedy. Or, is it more like romantic “dramedy”?

Initially, The September Issue comes off as something like the Teen Vogue segments of The Hills (though her royal highness Anna Wintour is swapped in for cut-rate LA imitation Lisa Love, the MTV reality show’s masterful manner of spinning diegetic commentary out of eye rolls taken out of context is left intact), genetically blended into an alternate universe version of The Office. Except in this office, the workers actually work, and in fact are terrified not to because their boss is Michael Scott’s polar opposite: impatient, undemonstrative, and absolutely incapable of taking no for an answer.

As a portrait of Wintour the person, RJ Cutler’s documentary does little to dig under the surface of Wintour’s iconic, impassive under bangs image. But as a meditation on art vs commerce, emotion vs rationality, and the role of fantasy merchants in the recently-burst economic bubble, The September Issue is both cerebral and accessible. If it’s not as provocative as it could be, it’s definitely entertaining.

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I’ve scoured the various Sundance schedules and picked out the 13 films that I’m most looking forward to over the course of the ten days in Park City. Note that this list does not include films that I’ve already seen, either at other festivals or through other means. It didn’t seem fair to mix up films I haven’t seen with those I have kind of an inside scoop on, and anyway, you’ll hear about those films soon enough — this is purely a catalog of my own current anticipations.

1 & 2: Moon and The Clone Returns Home

It’s the Philosophical Astronaut Double Feature! First, Sam Rockwell stars in Moon (the feature debut of Duncan Jones, AKA Zowie Bowie, David’s son) as a contract in a space pod, alone save for his trusty robot, who is nudged by the monotony (or, moonotony) of life in space towards an existential crisis. Then, there’s Clone, a Japanese feature executive produced by Wim Wenders, about a cloned astronaut who “flees the lab in search of his childhood home [and] finds his own lifeless body in a space suit. Mistaking it for his brother, he continues his journey carrying the body on his back.” Seriously, go read the Sundance catalogue description — it’s maybe the most evocative festival guide copy I’ve ever read. Clone is in the World Dramatic competition, Moon is a Premiere.

3. Humpday

A bromance directed by a broad. Lynn Shelton’s follow-up to My Effortless Brilliance (and her return to Park City after taking the Grand Prize at Slamdance in 2006 for her first feature, We Go Way Back) stars Mark Duplass (The Puffy Chair) and Joshua Leonard (The Blair Witch Project) as two college buddies who reunite as thirtysomethings and end up entering an amateur porn contest. Defintiely the domestic Narrative Competition feature that’s come up most in conversation with friends and colleagues since the lineup was announced.

4. The September Issue

RJ Cutler’s portrait of editor Anna Wintour spans the nine months of work that go into the creation of fashion’s annual bible, the September issue of VOGUE. I’m bit of a sucker for fashion documentaries, but even if you’re not, one hopes Cutler (producer of The War Room, director of A Perfect Candidate) will apply lessons learned in the deep end of politics to the politics of the superficial.

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