Dallas Blog

PARK CITY, Utah -- As the 2008 Sundance Film Festival drew to a close with a bizarrely country-and-western-themed awards ceremony hosted by William H. Macy, a jury headed by Quentin Tarantino awarded the Grand Jury Prize of this year's U.S. Dramatic Competition to Courtney Hunt's upstate New York border-crossing thriller Frozen River, while the coveted Dramatic Audience Award went to Jonathan Levine's marijuana-haze coming-of-age story The Wackness. Taking to the stage, an ebullient Levine remarked, “I just accepted an award from William H. Macy in a cowboy hat. That is fucking weird.”

In the festival's U.S. Documentary Competition (whose jury members included Why We Fight director Eugene Jarecki), the Grand Jury Prize went to co-directors Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's post-Katrina Trouble the Water, with the Audience Award going to Josh Tickell's oil-consumption cautionary tale, Fields of Fuel.

Once a relatively brief, low-key affair, the Sundance awards show has, in recent years, grown to Oscar-like proportions, with some two-dozen prizes doled out to films from four separate competition sections -- a distinctly American, everyone's-a-winner mentality that means if your film screens in the festival, there's a better than one-in-three chance you 'll win something.

PARK CITY, Utah -- Three-quarters of the way through Sundance 2008, the good news is that the festival lineup has turned out to be one of the strongest in the eight years I've been coming to Park City. The bad news -- for the makers of those films and for those of you wondering when you might have a chance to see them for yourselves -- is that sales activity remains stuck in a veritable deep freeze.

While the last 48 hours have produced at least one of those Sundance Cinderella stories in which a movie (in this case, the Steve Coogan-as-a-high-school-teacher comedy Hamlet 2) sells for an astronomical sum ($10 million) following an all-night bidding war, there have been far greater reports of small, critically lauded films (such as the upstate New York immigrant-smuggling drama Frozen River) selling for modest, mid-six-figure prices, and hotly buzzed-about titles from the festival's opening days (including Sunshine Cleaning and The Great Buck Howard) remaining in distribution limbo as the festival heads into its final weekend. (Henry Poole is Here, directed by Mark Pellington and starring Luke Wilson and Radha Mitchell, is also off the table after a $3.5-million U.S. pick-up courtesy Overture Films.)

PARK CITY, Utah -- So much for all that pre-Sundance talk about how the writers' strike was going to spark a fire sale at the fest. So far, not even the biggest titles have been sold -- not the Tom Hanks-produced The Great Buck Howard, not the Robert De Niro-Sean Penn-starring What Just Happened?, not the Amy Adams-Emily Blunt dramedy Sunshine Cleaning. Why not? Said one acquisitions VP at a major indie distributor before this morning's Sunshine Cleaning screening, "We're in 'reset' mode." That means no longer are distributors willing to fork over multi-millions for tweener pics (too small for the multiplex, too large for the art house) likely to make pennies on the dollar at the box office. (Like, oh, Chumscrubber, Tadpole and, most infamously, Happy, Texas.) "And," says the exec, echoing the sentiment of other distributors to whom we've spoken in recent days, "nothing's been ... great."

Which is where commerce finally meets art at Sundance, where founder Robert Redford bemoaned how his baby's become a "market" during his opening-day remarks on Thursday. Because, thus far, no buzzed-about film's yet to emerge from the festival -- no Garden State, no Napoleon Dynamite, no Little Miss Sunshine, no instant smash hit going for record figures. There are small favorites emerging -- among them such titles as Ballast and Frozen River, but they're too small, grim and gritty to generate much heat in these sub-freezing temps, much less in the air-conditioned theaters off the mountain.

Titles that entered the fest with high expectations, chief among them the adaptation of Michael Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, are just terrible enough to consider booking an earlier flight home. Michel Gondry's high-profile VHS homage Be Kind Rewind, being released next month, was sweet but undeniably slight and unbearably sloppy; Jack Black's the last guy you want to see in a movie that looks half-assed improvised. And even the good stuff's merely so-so: The high-school documentary American Teen, from The Kid Stays in the Picture director Nanette Burstein, plays like The Hills set in Warsaw, Indiana; it's an entertaining but ultimately why-come compendium of every single cliché to populate a senior-year blowout, from the timid band geek to the head-cheerleader hellion to the artsy girl who wants to make movies, poor thing.

So let's talk instead about A Complete History of My Sexual Failures. Also after the jump: my interview with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, at last.

PARK CITY, Utah -- Snow was promised all day, eight to 12 inches by mid-Monday morning, but so far, not even a flurry. The same could be said of the acquisitions at the Sundance Film Festival, where only a handful of offerings have been picked up by major distributors, among them the doc Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which masterfully rehashes the sordid details of the director's sexual assault on 13-year-old Samantha Geimer in 1977. HBO has the U.S. distribution rights; Weinstein Co., the international rights. Expect it to play theatrically in the fall, when once more the director of Rosemary's Baby and The Pianist will polarize audiences -- half of whom think him a misunderstood genius, half of whom believe him an unrepentant troll.

No doubt at this very moment distributors are hashing over the fine print of contracts shortly to be signed and announced with grand fanfare -- for festival buzz-bin product that'll make pennies on the dollar in The Real World (The Wackness, feh) and for the handful of charmers (among them Sunshine Cleaners) likely to land in the warm embrace of the mall multiplex. And then there's plenty of in-between product, chief among them The Great Buck Howard, starring John Malkovich as a mentalist peddling his antiquated gags on the has-been circuit (Bakersfield, Akron -- he loves those towns!).

Perhaps no film at Sundance is more anxiously awaited than Morgan Spurlock's Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?, in the hands of Weinstein Co. For whatever reason, folks have been speculating for months that perhaps the Super Size Me director found bin Laden; Spurlock has brilliantly dodged the question since he showed up at South by Southwest in Austin last March sporting a bin Laden beard. (As though Spurlock's finding bin Laden would have remained a secret till its Monday-night debut in Utah. Spurlock's a terrific filmmaker, but the guy's still best known for eating pounds of fast food.)

If nothing else, the movie's being promoted brilliantly: What you see above is a milk carton (filled with M&Ms) handed out last night before the screening of Michael Keaton's directorial debut The Merry Gentleman. If you could read the text, you'd notice that bin Laden apparently answers to "Benny" and was last seen in Aghanistan in 2001. Which should tell you something. --Robert Wilonsky

As the sender and recipients of this particular e-mail are fine folks well-regarded in the movie bidness (I know, right?), we'll leave their names off this missive. But for those who witness Sundance from the warm sidelines or for those ass-deep in freshly fallen snow, these few words sum up the film festival better than anything else I've ever read.

I get up there Saturday night. I imagine that the corporate boys have more demands on their schedules, like a screening of a super high priority available title that will turn out to be somewhat disappointing but will nevertheless provoke a crazy bidding war followed by a gloating yet optimistic press release by the winning company who then immediately second-guesses its acquisition and schedules multiple test screenings only to find out nobody really wants to see their movie. I’m pretty free and would love to hang out.

As of Friday, I'd seen at least one movie that fit that poetic description perfectly: The Wackness, otherwise known as the movie in which Mary-Kate Olsen makes out with Sir Ben Kingsley ... and, yes, gross.

PARK CITY, Utah -- The Sundance Film Festival hadn't even officially begun Thursday when word circulated through the 4-below Park City climes that the Directors Guild of America had reached a tentative, three-year deal with the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers -- or NAMBLA, as David LettermanJon Stewart called 'em a few days back. So, of course, talk turned immediately to the Writers Guild of America and whether it too could come to an agreement with the AMPTP or remain on strike. General consensus? The DGA deal likely won't end the WGA strike any time soon. Said one high-profile producer who'd probably prefer to remain anonymous, "I'll take the over on the WGA settling this quickly. Likely another month, at least."

Which means plenty to ordinary folk, much less the motion-picture bizzers buzzing around the snow-capped mountains getting more snow-capped by the second. When a bartender at the Texas Stadium Skybox Bar at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport yesterday found out one of her customers was headed to Sundance, she said -- pleaded, actually -- "Oh, please, tell the writers to get back to work already." (Big Lost fan, that girl.) Most likely, figure some acquisitions execs and producers to whom I spoke yesterday, the WGA would love to drag this out till at least the Academy Awards ceremony next month, which could go cloudy because of stars refusing to cross the picket line. "Because then," says one producer, "everyone in the world will give a shit." At which point someone pointed out the shooting of President Reagan on March 30, 1981, delayed the Oscar broadcast that year by a single day. The show will always go on.

Welcome to the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Circumvent the Writers' Strike. But seriously, folks: As Park City, Utah's famed independent-film trading post opens for seasonal business tomorrow amidst a WGA intifada that calls to mind the title of one of last year's Sundance prizewinners -- No End in Sight -- the conventional wisdom is that it's going to be a seller's market, with Hollywood distributors seeking out new product like squirrels stockpiling nuts for the long, cold winter.

That's good news for the scrappy young filmmakers who come to Sundance hoping for a meal ticket (to perhaps start paying back their investors and deferred-salary cast and crew), as well as for the increasing number of reporters who seem unable to view the festival in anything other than business terms -- the ones for whom a film's artistic merit is directly proportional to the number of zeroes it earns on a check bearing Harvey Weinstein's signature.

As for which of Sundance's more than 100 new feature films -- most of them world or North American premieres -- will generate the lion's share of "Ohmigod, it's the next Sex, Lies and Videotape/Reservoir Dogs/Little Miss Sunshine" chatter over the next 10 days, it's anybody's guess. It’s a safe bet, though, that buyers will cast their eyes with particular scrutiny on the festival's glitzy Premieres section, where one can find slightly bigger-budget, more overtly commercial offerings than in the more prestigious competition sections.