Sundance Review: The 40 Year Old Version

by Murtada Elfadl

You love to see a star being born in a festival screening. Specially when that star is over 40, wrote and directed their own star vehicle after years of being ignored. It’s the ultimate artistic dream, to find inspiration from something very personal to you, yet have others respond to it. Remember the name Radha Blank because The 40 Year Old Version is only the beginning for her.

Blank plays a version of herself, a New York playwright nearing her 40th birthday and still struggling to find a place for herself and her art in the city...

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20:19 with "The Irishman" and "Marriage Story"

Time to play 20:19. We had intended to rank every Best Picture nominees by how intriguing their 20th minute and 19th second was until our DVD player (remember those?) decided to malfunction. Oops. So streaming it is with just two of 'em. Pretend you haven't seen either of these Best Picture nominees. What do you suppose these two movies are about based on these fleeting images?

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Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Will Ferrell go "Downhill"

Abe Fried-Tanzer reporting from Sundance

Any time a foreign film is truly successful, there seems to be almost instantaneous talks of either a remake or a TV series coming soon for American audiences. Parasite is considering the latter and last year at Sundance, After the Wedding was a hot ticket, adapted from the 2006 Danish film. There was some skepticism when it was announced that the uncomfortable Swedish comedy Force Majeure, nominated for a Golden Globe and well loved here at The Film Experience, was getting an American treatment, but surprise: this remake is worth the price of admission...

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"The Assistant" is complicit and so are we

Here's Ren Jender on a Sundance movie that moved straight into theaters this weekend...

Writer-director Kitty Green's The Assistant (now open in NYC and LA) is a Jeanne Dielman-like examination of a woman who is the newest assistant in Harvey Weinstein's office (though he's never named) in the time before the revelations of his rape and harassment of women came to light. The film delves into how serial sexual harassment makes the entire office (and of course the industry) complicit, even when individuals try to do the right thing. 

The title character Jane (Julia Garner) is not clueless and she doesn't lack a conscience...

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Film Bitch Awards: Screenplays, Score, and Sound

We started a week ago with a few appetizers but now the 20th (gulp) annual Film Bitch Awards are finally in full swing. Here are the new categories that are up

BEST ORIGINAL & ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Wouldn't it be neat if Marriage Story or Parasite could snag a surprise win from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood at the Oscars in Original Screnplay. All three are also nominated for the Film Bitch Award but we don't think Tarantino needs a third Oscar and for the first time since Kill Bill his visuals feel even more noteworthy than his writing anyway. Not that it's not a grand script. But the raw wound comedy and drama of Baumbach's reflection and Parasite's ingenious construction are right there for the honoring so we hope the Academy thinks it through.  We're happier about the other impending Oscar win for Adapted because Greta Gerwig takes Little Women apart and puts it back together again in such a personal and fresh 'life-of-an-artist' way. 

BOTH SCORE & SOUND CATEGORIES
Music and sound preferences are so hard to articulate so forgive the very short notes.

As a reminder, if you haven't voted on the "should wins" for those categories at the actual Oscars, do that on the charts please.