Stu at Defamertakes a look at this year’s Oscar nominees that debuted at last year’s Sundance and predicts that An Educationwill receive Academy Awards recognition one year from now.
And one of this year’s Oscar nominees almost wasn’t a Sundance selection: AJ Schnack samples froman IDA interview with Geoffrey Gilmore in which Man on Wire is said to have nearly been rejected.
The Envelope points out three Oscar nominees who are at Sundace this week: Josh Brolin, Melissa Leo and Michael Shannon, the latter of whom stars in The Missing Person.
Four directors/projects have been named winners of this year’s Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Awards.
Anne Thompson’s summary of this year’s fest notices it was a “time of transition for both Sundance and the industry,” while also quoting manager Michael Sugar, who believes it was a return to the past: “This year’s fest started to recapture the intended spirit. It seemed back to being about the filmmakers.” Also at Variety, Todd McCarthy’s summary notes that An Education and Sin Nombre were the two emblematic films of the fest, and both fit in with the start of the Obama age.
Manohla Dargis’ NY Times summary concentrates heavily on the presence of Sundance hero Steven Soderbergh, whose latest film she didn’t care for.
After reading Anne Thompson’s post on the dismal reception given to the youth-baiting rethink of At The Movies starring Ben Lyons and Ben Mankiewicz, I decided I had better watch The Two Bens’ first episode online to see what all the griping is about. It actually starts off rather well: Mankiewicz is totally qualified for this job, although it’s a bit of a wonder he was even hired, what with his TCM-honed, “I am going to explain this very slowly because my viewers may be aged” manner of speaking. But then he tosses it to Lyons, who says something completely incoherent about Burn After Reading being “almost like an exercise in drama,” and then they cut back Mankiewicz, who struggles to croak out, “Yeah, that’s an interesting point,” whilst swallowing his own testicles. At that point, I stopped.
Interestingly, another thing that I wasn’t able to force myself to watch all the way through this week also had to do with the sorry contemporary incarnation of the former gold standard for televised movie reviews.
We all freaked out when famously blog-hostile reporters Peter Bart and Patrick Goldstein recently got on their knees and started their own blogs, but really, the weird part was that these guys were so insistently anti-blog to begin with. They’re both big on railing against critics, and their alleged impotence when it comes to influencing the audience (to reject industry product); they both act like for a professional critic to offer an assessment on a Hollywood film is to somehow throw handcuffs on the potential ticket buyer’s ability to exercise free will (to consume industry product). Well, what are blogs, if not a space where the audience shrugs off those and other types of handcuffs in order to trade notes on their consumptive desires and experiences? You’d think they’d be an industry booster’s dream.
All of that’s a long lead up to the fact that I don’t know exactly how to parse this blog post by Goldstein, in which he once again beats the “who needs critics?” drum, and uses his blog to annoint Hollywood producer Avi Lerner as the “out of touch” review slinger’s populist replacement:
The worm turns and squirms in Frownland, an aptly named film made on the cheap in and around New York. An up-close, painfully intimate portrait of a hapless, manipulative schlub, a Loser with a capital L, the film offers for our horror and our empathy a creature whose very existence is a rebuke to the stultifying uniformity (the niceness, the neatness) of what now often passes for American independent cinema. Written and directed by Ronald Bronstein, making his feature-film debut, this is personal cinema at its most uncompromising and fierce.
The first paragraph of Manohla Dargis’ rave review of in the New York Times. Read the full thing here.
At once playfully ecstatic objects and cultural time pieces, avant-garde classics and foundation texts for queer cinema, the nearly two dozen Warhol films I’ve seen (out of some 160 nonscreen-test titles) enliven and excite. They also underscore just how calcified much of cinema is, including work made under the generally meaningless rubric of independence. To watch most commercially produced movies is to watch the same endlessly recycled three acts and cautiously modified visual tics again and again. The names change from product to product, country to country, but little else. To watch a Warhol film is to rediscover cinema’s plasticity, boundlessness, mystery and possibility.
That’s an excerpt from a long Manohla Dargis essay that appeared in the New York Times this weekend, in advance of the November 11 opening of a 33-title retrospective of Andy Warhol’s films at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. Whether or not you plan on attending the retrospective, the Dargis essay is a must read. Above that, you’ll find a fair illustration of what she’s talking about: a clip from Warhol’s Vinyl (1965).
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Stu at Defamer 
We all freaked out when famously blog-hostile reporters 
