Sundance: Lena Dunham Returns with ‘Sharp Stick’

By Abe Friedtanzer

Director Lena Dunham attends the Q&A at the virtual premiere of Sharp Stick, an official selection of the Premieres section at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. © 2022 Sundance Institute.

It’s been twelve years since Lena Dunham broke through with her second feature film, Tiny Furniture, and just under five years since her Emmy-winning HBO series Girls came to an end. While she’s had a few small film roles since (including Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood) and worked behind the scenes on a trio of series (Genera+ion, Industry, and Camping) she has mostly been out of the media spotlight. Her latest feature, Sharp Stick, absolutely puts her back there. It's an interesting experience, to say the least…

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Sundance: 'Cha Cha Real Smooth' is Frustrating, But Lands On Its Feet

by Eurocheese

Cooper Raiff wrote and directed Cha Cha Real Smooth, in which he stars as Andrew, a conflicted often frustrating man. The first scenes show Andrew in romantic situations at different ages (preteen and just after college), letting the audience know two things about him: he speaks without a filter when it comes to his emotions, and he falls head over heels when he is drawn to someone. When he isn’t romantically entangled, he stays with his loving mother (Leslie Mann) and her boyfriend (Brad Garrett), who he taunts at every opportunity. (At one point, Andrew asks the boyfriend if his purpose on earth is to make things weird… which someone should have been asking him instead!) 

Andrew’s outspoken nature is an excuse to be casually cruel at times though people find him charming. The script relies too heavily on this “charm,” including when he attends a bar mitzvah with his brother and meets Domino (Dakota Johnson) and her daughter Lola (Vanessa Burghardt). It’s clear he feels a spark with Domino right off the bat. The feeling is mutual though he makes remarks that would have most people running away from him... 

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Podcast: West Side Story, The Tender Bar, Don't Look Up... and Faye Dunaway?

Nick and Nathaniel reunion finale (part 3 of 3). Dear readers we hope you've enjoyed this epic talk between your host here and the long lost Nick Davis. Here's the final part in which we talk more 2021 movies plus a discussion of Gena Rowlands and Faye Dunaway due to the new class Nick is teaching.

 

78 minutes
00:01 Lana Wachowski going full meta in Matrix Resurrections
10:15 Nick's trouble with Leos Carax's Annette  (with some Pola X history)
17:50 Tony Kushner's reworking of West Side Story and its redux performances. Plus a bit of In the Heights thrown in for reasons Nathaniel objects to
32:00 France's Petite Maman  and Austria's Great Freedom 
39:30 Adam McKay's Don't Look Up and its limitations as well as the harsh critical response
47:00 An extremely odd double feature: Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch and George Clooney's The Tender Bar 
          BIG ACTRESSEXUAL FINISH
1:01:06 Nick is teaching a class called "Female Performance in Modern Hollywood" so we discuss our favourite Faye Dunaway and Gena Rowlands performances (with very brief asides to several other post-Method actresses)

You can listen to the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher or Spotify or download the attachment below. If you missed our previous recent discussion covering a full dozen 2021 movies, that's here. 

West Side Tender Bar with Faye

Sundance: Don't Tell #MeToo This Babysitter's Dead

 by Jason Adams

Have you checked on a straight person today? I don't think the straights are doing okay, at least not judging by Babysitter, a Hashtag Me Too themed Quebecois comedy premiering this weekend at Sundance. Dubbed "screwball surrealism" by the filmmakers, which includes leading actress Monia Chokri (who you should recognize from her work with Xavier Dolan) in the director's chair, this movie plays like somebody stuffed a classic French farce into a blender, right down to the wee-wee maid's uniform. It is a lot, too much, and not enough all at once. Tres exhausting!

It all begins with a drunken boys night out at a boxing match. Or at least I think it does...

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Sundance: The quandaries of 'Framing Agnes'

by Cláudio Alves

In the running time discourse, I'm firmly in the pro-long films camp, believing that a short duration is in no way indicative of cinematic discipline. Even so, it's easy to understand where people like Nathaniel come from. Everyone has seen some messy movie and came out thinking it could have been stronger if a dozen or so minutes had stayed on the cutting room floor. That being said, the reverse can happen when a project has great potential but kneecaps itself by being too brief, unable to develop its ideas. Chase Joynt's Framing Agnes is one such effort, full of fascinating information and captivating thoughts, not to mention good intentions. Unfortunately, at 75 minutes, this documentary flies by without time to explore any of its ideas with adequate depth…

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