When I saw Michelange Quay’s Eat, For This is My Body at Sundance in 2008, I called it “the rare Sundance title that unquestionably bears the mark of an obstinately independent vision. It’s by turns exhilarating and totally confounding, and it’s certainly not always successful, but it is always a challenge.” The film, which went on to screen at New Directors, New Films and all over the world, comes back to New York tonight as part of a program at the French Institute hosted by none other than Jonathan Demme. How did that come about?
Variety reports that director Jay Roach, in partnership with Universal, is set to remake A Compelete History of My Sexual Failures, a crowd-pleasing personal documentary (in the loosest sense of the world) that premiered at Sundance in 2008. When I reviewed the film, my basic problems with it were that it felt too artificial, and too eager to prioritize laughs over truth. So it’s probably the perfect vehicle for the director behind the Austin Powers and Meet the Parents franchises, no?
This Hollywood Reporter story about Magnolia/Magnet’s acquistition of the Michael Rappaport psycho-pharma superhero comedy Special has a major inaccuracy: Gregg Goldstein says the film “premiered last month at Sundance,” but actually, it premiered two years ago at Sundance, where alongside Wristcutters: A Love Story, it was the subject of much “WTF? If THAT sold, why didn’t THIS sell?” buzz in the wake of the massive Little Miss Sunshine deal. The fan boy sites were, predictably, all over it, but it also earned glowing praise from internationalpublications, and from director Jason Reitman, who was at the festival with his own Thank You For Smoking.
So what made Magnolia suddenly interested now? Goldstein says it’s finally getting picked up because Rappaport has a TV show and co-star Josh Peck is expected to break out via a film that *did* premiere at Sundance 2008, The Wackness. I’d say the latter probably has more to do with it than the former, but then, I thought The War at Home had been canceled like five years ago. But I guess this means we can expect a Special release somewhere on the calendar near Peck’s other film, in order to capitalize on The Wackness‘ Sony Classics-footed publicity budget.
You can watch Special’s circa-Sundance 2006 trailer here.
In another installment of his series of Sundance interviews, Joe Swanberg goes shopping for, um, “fine art” with David and Nathan Zellner, stars and co-directors of Goliath. The Zellners talk about working together as brothers, navigating the insanity of Sundance, and why they qualify as “total sluts.”
Here’s a catalog of the coverage we produced during the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. We’ll add any future posts that deal with the festival in the coming days to this list.
Captain Abu Raed, the first film to come out of Jordan in over 50 years, tells the story of an airport janitor who befriends children by telling them he’s an airline pilot. In this interview writer/director Amin Matalqa and stars Nadim Sawalha and Rana Sultan talk about the range of styles that influenced the film and the serendipitous events that led to the casting of the two lead roles.
The festival is over, but we’ve still got a back-log of content to deliver. In this installment, I talk to Nathan and David Zellner. At last year’s festival their short about the mysteries of circumcision, Aftermath on Meadowlark Lane, got a lot of people talking. This year they return with Goliath, a feature about divorce, demotion, and a missing cat. For my money it has the best trailer of any film in the festival, check it out along with Chris’ thoughts here.
Baghead, which was acquired by Sony Classics towards the end of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, is getting a lot of praise for taking the elements of mumblecore–stripped down cinematography, unpolished performances, an extreme interest in the minutia of behavior at the expense of action–and ambitiously pairing them with the tropes of mainstream shlock horror. But Baghead is never convincing as a horror film, and I don’t think it needs to be, and I’m not sure it even wants to be. What it really is, is a comedy (of horrors?) about ego, which the Duplasses and their actors convince is scarier than any kind of contrived fright.
Four friends, all wannabe actors and all frustrated to different degrees by the film festival success of a pretentious cheeseball aquaintance, head to a house in the woods to hammer out a script for the project that will give them their big breaks. The gang includes Matt, a charismatic idea man; Chad, Matt’s schlubby”funny guy” friend; Catherine, Matt’s orange-tan cliche of a sometime girlfriend; and Michelle, the adorable younger woman who brings out the worst in the rest of the three.
The only one of the four who seems really committed to the careerist angle of the endeavor is Matt, with the other three seemingly going along solely as the means to advance their respective romantic agendas. Chad loves Michelle, who loves (or, at least, lusts for) Matt, who tells Chad everything is over between he and Catherine but is still clearly susceptible to her late-night advances. As each “friend”s real, purely selfish intentions become apparent, trust breaks down and each member of the quarter becomes (not unreasonably) paranoid that another is out to get them.
Add to My Profile | More VideosWith the 2008 Sundance Film Festival now but a memory, Joe and Ronnie return to the site of their first video dispatch and sum up their week in Park City. This is the last of their Sundance video dispatches, but if you’re worried about going through Joe and Ronnie withdrawl, don’t be: Butterknife premieres here on Spout tomorrow. Visit the Butterknife page, mark your calendars, tell your friends, etc etc.
Previous Sundance video coverage from Joe and Ronnie:
Sundance doesn’t technically end until Sunday, but I’m already half-way home from Park City, where the general sense last night seemed to be that the bulk of the buyers weren’t exactly in a hurry to close deals before closing night. But as our deal chart shows, Sony Classics managed to sneak in two quick, six-figure buys at the end of the week, first nabbing the contentious Frozen River, then closing the pick up of the Duplass Brothers’ mumble-horror comedy Baghead late last night. Check out the full chart here.
Sundance documentary The Linguists follows two scientists traveling the globe to document obscure languages before they’re lost. In this interview the directors and subjects talk about an encounter with Yiddish tombstones defiled by the Nazis that precipitated the idea for the film, and the work of giving people pride in their native tongue.
After writing and directing the Oscar-nominated short 7:35 in the Morning in 2003, Nacho Vigalondo decided to make a feature film using one of his favorite sci-fi tropes, time travel. The film features a seemly normal man who is forced to take desperate measures to undo his own time travel mishaps. In this interview, Vigalondo talks about sci-fi influences, not giving a shit about what the future looks like, and the forthcoming United Artists’ remake of the film.
Azazel Jacobs wrote and directed Momma’s Man, the tale of a grown man who decides to move back in with his parents. Not only did he decide to film the movie in his parents’ apartment, he chose to cast his actual parents in the role, his mother Flo and his father, the famous experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs. In this interview Azazel and star Matt Boren reflect on living with their parents during production, and a chance encounter with the films of John Casavettes that turned a budding experimental filmmaker on to the power of narrative.
When a filmmaker casts his own parents as parents in a film, which he shoots in his childhood home, about an adult and his relationship to his parents upon returning to his childhood home, you’d expect (or maybe fear) that the result would be meta-personal to the point of solipsism. But what’s really surprising about Azazel Jacob’s Momma’s Man, which stars his experimental filmmaker father Ken Jacobs and mother Flo Jacobs and was shot in the Manhattan loft in which the family has lived for decades, is that it feels completely universal. The story of a 30-something husband and father of a newborn who extends a stay at his parents’ ramshackle New York apartment indefinitely, it’s an incredible portrait of the final phase of coming of age, transitioning from being parented to parenting.
First telling both his parents and his wife back home that the airline is giving him the runaround about rescheduling a canceled return flight, then tailoring his excuses for each discreet party as he needs to buy time in increments, Mikey (Matt Boren) takes advantage of his parents’ bemused hospitality to carve out a winter vacation. He spends his days visiting with old friends (including a recent parolee with unexpected musical passions) and trying to make new ones, his nights combing through boxes of old notebooks, love letters and comic books. In a lofted bed just feet from his sleeping parents, Mikey pulls out a guitar and plays a love song he apparently wrote in high school. Overhearing the lyrics, “Fuck fuck fuck you/I hope you die too,” his parents exchange a worried glance; maybe there’s more to this visit than they’ve been led to believe.
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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Variety reports that director Jay Roach, in partnership with Universal, is set to remake A Compelete History of My Sexual Failures, a crowd-pleasing personal documentary (in the loosest sense of the world) that premiered at Sundance in 2008. When I reviewed the film, my basic problems with it were that it felt too artificial, and too eager to prioritize laughs over truth. So it’s probably the perfect vehicle for the director behind the Austin Powers and Meet the Parents franchises, no?
indieWIRE has the full list
Sundance doesn’t technically end until Sunday, but I’m already half-way home from Park City, where the general sense last night seemed to be that the bulk of the buyers weren’t exactly in a hurry to close deals before closing night. But as 
