Sundance: 'Dear White People' Aims To Provoke

 Our Sundance Film Festival coverage continues with Michael Cusumano on breakthrough talent winner "Dear White People"  

At the fictional Ivy League University of Westchester Samantha White (Tessa Thompson) hosts a radio show called ‘Dear White People’ in which she delivers a series of confrontational, button-pushing edicts directed at the school’s majority white population. For example:

Dear White People, the minimum requirement of black friends needed to not seem racist has been raised to two. Sorry, your weed man Tyrone doesn’t count.” 

It’s sharp material, and Justin Simien’s Dear White People would have done well to apply the same biting insight to the rest of the film. [more...]

Click to read more ...

We Can't Wait #10: Big Eyes

[Editor's Note: We Can't Wait is a Team Experience series, in which we highlight our top 14 most anticipated films of 2014. Here's Julien Kojfer on "Big Eyes"]

Big Eyes
A drama centered on 50’s painter Margaret Keane, whose husband claimed credit for her works after she achieved phenomenal success.

Talent
Tim Burton is directing a starry cast including Amy Adams, Christoph Waltz, Jason Schwartzman, Krysten Ritter, Terence Stamp and Danny Husto. 

Why We Can't Wait
Sure, the perpetually disheveled auteur famously lost his mojo at the turn of the century, when his unique style suddenly froze into a soulless brand of manufactured gothic whimsy, and his name sadly became synonymous with lazy adaptations, predictably misshapen aesthetics, and the obligatory casting of Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter in cadaverous makeup and improbable wigs.

Which is precisely why no one who’s ever loved Burton could fail to be excited by Big Eyes, because it doesn’t sound like anything he’s made since the 90’s. An adult drama free of fantasy elements with a female protagonist, starring actors resolutely out of his comfort zone - one a five-time Oscar nominee who’s at the very peak of her career, the other a two-time Oscar winner badly in need of stretching his (considerable?) talents. With no Depp or Bonham Carter, to boot? Count me in. And if you’re still worried that this might turn out to be Tim Burton’s Lovely Bones, consider this: the original script is the work of Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who wrote such idiosyncratic biopics as The People vs. Larry Flynt, Man on the Moon, and what many of us consider to be Tim Burton’s greatest film: Ed Wood.

But We Do Have To Wait
A marital drama set in the 1950’s art world, starring Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz? Sounds like classic Oscar material to me, so that means we’ll probably have to wait till the end of the year.

Previously: #11 The Last 5 Years | #12 Gone Girl | #13 Can a Song Save Your Life |  #14 Veronica Mars | Introduction

Sundance: Blind, a Playful Stunner From Norway

From the Sundance Film Festival here's Nathaniel on "Blind" which won the World Cinema screenwriting prize...

Excuse me while I leap forward 11 months and give Blind the  gold medal for "Best Opening Scene" of 2014. This highly original Norwegian film begins with a visualization exercize. Ingrid (Ellen Dorrit Petersen), a married blind woman, is detailing her recent loss of sight. She's trying to remember what things looked like and has been warned that with no new visual stimuli from the optic nerves, her memoires of sight will fade. She'd like to keep the images for as long as she possibly can. She visualizes a tree, her apartment, a park, a dog. It's a German Shepherd to be precise - a morbidly funny choice given their status as the original seeing eye dogs.

Once the dog is visualized in a park, the background vanishes leaving only the panting dog on a blank canvas, as if it's posing in a photographer's studio. Ingrid visualizations a shopping center she likes and just before this intriguing prologue ends we see the dog again, barking forcefully in a window. But we don't hear it. Ingrid and director Eskil Vogt have unexpectedly robbed us of one of our other senses to close out this playful series of images. [more...]

Click to read more ...

Cuarón Takes DGA

In non-surprising awards news Alfonso Cuarón has won the Directors Guild of America prize for his long-in-the-making sci-fi epic Gravity. Though I've long been predicting him to win the Oscar, the Best Picture race still seems competitive. It's insane that 12 Years a Slave, a magnificent film and a historically significant drama in several ways, isn't steamrolling but it isn't. My guess is that even if Gravity sweeps the craft categories, Best Picture will be a nail biter down to the last envelope opening. The most famous 'dominated the Oscars but still lost Best Picture' year is, of course, 1972. Cabaret won 8 Oscars but The Godfather beat it in two of the top 8 categories Adapted Screenplay & the big kahuna Best Picture. The end result: they were both winners. Cabaret took home a lot of Oscars and has the impressive distinction of being the biggest winner among all Best Picture losers. (There are some who think that 2002 was heading toward a similar outcome had The Pianist had another month to gain momentum on Chicago) 

Will we see another split year? No predominantly black film has ever won Best Picture which is depressing and bad news for 12 Years a Slave but no sci-fi film has won either which isn't exactly points in Gravity's favor. 12 Years has to convince voters who are resisting it to see the picture (if you ask me, AMPAS voters who won't watch all the Best Picture nominees each year before voting really ought to have their memberships revoked) and it needs to find a second wind with the media who have a predictable way of turning on frontrunners each year. I fear a Brokeback Mountain situation where the less evolved voters just won't give a seminal work its due because of the subject matter. Am I too pessimistic?

Gravity has the potentially easier task in that it only needs to convince voters that it isn't lightweight and that it won't age poorly (I'm not convinced on the latter). And, since it hasn't truly been the frontrunner at any point, it doesn't have much backlash to conquer. I'm leaning toward predicting Gravity to just (nearly) sweep the whole thing.

Sundance Prize Winners

The Sundance prizes were handed out tonight and the top winners will be screening on Sunday the last day of the festival. =Glenn, Michael and I have a handful more reviews for you including a couple of these winners. But it figures that not one of the three of us caught the unquestionable champ, Whiplash starring Miles Teller as a drummer and JK Simmons as his military father, which took home both the juried top prize and the audience award for dramatic feature. You may recall that last year Fruitvale Station won both of those prizes too... but it wasn't able to convert that early rush of promise into Oscar nominations. The year before that those top prizes were split between Beasts of the Southern Wild (jury) and The Sessions (audience) which both went on to Oscar nods. The year before that Like Crazy (jury) and Circumstance (audience). Etcetera. Sundance is hit and miss in terms of its top films going on to further awards glory. Any guesses as to how Whiplash will fare further down the road? 

Full list of winners is after the jump.

Click to read more ...