Sundance: 'Lilting' and 'Happy Christmas'

Our last two Sundance movies! But for the roundup/index post in the morning, this is our final bit of coverage from Sundance 2014. Let's end with two movies featuring faces and topics I'm willing to bet you'll love: Ben Whishaw in a gay culture-barrier drama and Melanie Lynskey and Anna Kendrick in a dramedy about sister-in-laws.

Chang Pei Pei & Ben Whishaw in "Lilting"

LILTING
Remember Chang Pei Pei as Jade Fox in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon? She's just as pissed off in Lilting, but with good reason. Her only son Kai (Andrew Leung) has abandoned her by way of sudden death. This is not a Spoiler Alert: We see him in flashbacks but he's dead as the story begins. She's left grieving and alone... but for unexplained visits from her son's "best friend" (Ben Whishaw) though she can't fathom why he keeps dropping in since a) she hates him though she can't exactly say why and b) she doesn't technically know that her son was gay. Props to Pei Pei's performance that those two details are so willfully and obtusely fused together. She knows. By the very nature of its plot, particularly if you've lost someone you deeply loved way too early in life, Lilting is hugely moving; I was a wet-faced wreck. But while the film gets much thematic resonance from Chang's inability to adapt or communicate in her new homeland (she never learned the language and leaned on her son heavily), I did grow frustrated with the constant withholding. Ben keeps refusing to tell her the truth, even though he has every reason and backstory desire to do so. Lilting won the World Cinema Cinematography prize and, though its simple images have a kind of crystalline beauty, I can only assume this prize is for all the dreamy shots memorializing the peak beauty of Andrew Leung & Ben Whishaw lolling about shirtless and snug in bed. That peaceful aesthetic beauty amplifies the furiously unfathomable irreversible loss of love.

Grade: B
Distribution: Not at this point but LGBT films usually find their way eventually. It was much easier for LGBT to get traditional distribution years ago when gay people were loyal to the arthouses. (But that hasn't been the case in some time.)

The Cast of Happy Christmas © Larry Busacca/Getty Images

HAPPY CHRISTMAS
IMPORTANT NOTE: Chicago readers can see this later today at the Music Box Theater with Joe Swanberg in attendance doing a Q&A!
Happy Christmas is an intimate highly enjoyable and tighly focused dramedy about a husband and wife (Swanberg with Melanie Lynskey) with a newish baby (Jude Swanberg - too hilarious!) who are lending their basement to the husband's sister (Anna Kendrick) after her latest breakup. Leaving the theater afterwards I wondered how much better Swanberg's films might be with a little more time for second drafts or rehearsal. He keeps cranking them out and though they're all quality (I highly recommend All the Light in the Sky if you can find it) they don't quite crossover. But then I realized how uncharitable that was. Though Happy Christmas is perhaps too modest for greatness I must also quickly emphasize that it is wholly satisfying. Swanberg describes his impetus for making the movie as wanting to dramatize the process by which in-laws become siblings. That's a beautiful goal and a rare topic, too. Also rare: the opportunity to see great supporting actors like Lynskey dig into a large role and mix it up in zesty character-based comic scenes with Lena Dunham & Anna Kendrick. (Swanberg writes outlines but the actors fill in the details)

Lena Dunham & Anna Kendrick babysit Jude Swanberg in "Happy Christmas"

On a related in-house note, I wanted to give a shout out to a reader 'TB' who, in our recent post about Anna Kendrick and the Movie Musical, provocatively suggested the following:

that Anna Kendrick is emerging as the face of musicals is a fundamental sign that modern Hollywood doesn't understand what makes musicals work. She constantly positions herself as an actress above and outside her films, happily pointing to all of the places where it's not real. She's skittish around her own emotions. She has two feet FIRMLY planted in reality at all times. She's staunchly contemporary. It's not just that these are flaws, it's that these...directly work against what a musical needs to survive.

I thought that was an astute point even if I don't wholly agree that a very contemporary persona can't work within the movie musical, a more flexible genre than most will concede. But I am happy to report that there is a pretty great moment in a funny-touching scene in Happy Christmas with Lynskey wherein Kendrick totally embraces and uses this very quality described FOR her characterization, both playing it out and commenting on her own skittishness. I think she's really talented. And, as it turns out, self aware. 

Grade: B+
Distribution: Yes. It's Magnolia so a very limited release will happen eventually. No word yet on when. But if you're in Chicago,  GO SEE IT TODAY. It's fun and sweet and the ensemble is great. 

Sundance LGBT Greats: "Love is Strange" & "Appropriate Behavior"

Sundance coverage continues with Nathaniel on two terrific new LGBT films. (This article was previously published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad)

Alfred Molina & John Lithgow get hitched in Love is Strange's opening scene

I'm popping in, once again, from the snowy mountains of Park City, Utah, where I've been attending the 30th annual Sundance Film Festival. It kicked off the day of the Oscar nominations a week ago and in my golden-statue-mania I keep imagining it would have felt more festive had it coincided with Robert Redford's first Oscar nomination in 19 years for All is Lost. But it was not meant to be. Still Redford's legacy lives on in the most celebrated American film festival. Two of the best films at Sundance 2014 are LGBT films. Hopefully they'll both hit theaters or on demand or however we're watching movies next, and very soon.

APPROPRIATE BEHAVIOR is the perfect Iranian bisexual hipster coming-out comedy that you didn't know you needed or even wanted. But it's really good and really funny. The absurdly talented Desiree Akhavan (who some of you may know from the lesbian web series The Slope) wrote, directed and stars in the film as Shirin. She's a sharp-tongued bisexual twentysomething who is reeling from a breakup with Maxine (Rebecca Henderson) her activist vanilla girlfriend, and acting out sexually in Brooklyn.  

More on Appropriate and the possible awards hopeful Love is Strange

Click to read more ...

Sundance: Putting the T in LGBT Cinema

From the Sundance Film Festival here is Glenn on three great new editions to LGBT cinema.

One of my goals for my first trip to Sundance was to see as much LGBT cinema as possible. This year has proven to be particularly strong in this arena with films like Ira Sachs’ recently acquired Love is Strange and Desiree Akhavan’s ought-to-be acquired Appropriate Behaviour covering the “l”, the "g" and the “b” of that acronym and are soon to be reviewed by Nathaniel. I, however, found myself catching three very strong titles that deal with transgender men and women, which took me especially by surprise. Like Gun Hill Road, Xavier Dolan’s Laurence Anyways, Orange is the New Black and, yes, even Dallas Buyers Club, cinema visibility of trans issues are becoming more and more common and, in the case all three films below, feature actual transgender or gender neutral personalities. This, dear readers, is what we call a winner.

Please note that people who identify as gender variant or without gender go by the pronoun “they”.

A Canadian docu-musical, an Australian coming-of-age drama, and a Robert Reford production after the jump.

Click to read more ...

Linking

The Stir Laura Linney had a baby despite none of us knowing she was pregnant
The Wire Joe Reid plans to see all 58 Oscar nominated movies from 2013 
LA Times George Clooney pretends to be pissed about Tina Fey's Golden Globes joke 
Gawker loves the idea of Detroit getting a bronze Robocop statue. It needs a hero! 

Film School Rejects as I predicted Margot Robbie is wracking up the roles in the wake of Wolf of Wall St
Interview Magazine Kanye West interviewed by Steve McQueen. Expect quotables 

tv
/Film what's going on with Nicolas Winding Refn's Barbarella TV series? 
previouslytv "your crotch is not that interesting" on HBO's Looking 
Vulture on the new and improved Lady Edith on Downton Abbey 
Coming Soon Jason Isaacs is joining the Rosemary's Baby tv miniseries as Roman Castavet (good part!) ... and word is that Zoe Saldana may get the famous pixie cut for it

Looking premiered and I missed it. But more when i catch up with it

a chain reaction
NY Times has a piece about why it might be better for the cinema if there were less movies each year. It's an interesting article that I mostly agree with though I wholeheartedly wish that Manohla hadn't felt the need to diss Iron Man 3 which is hardly the best example of junk blockbusters out there -- at least it was trying something vaguely new, making a Tony Stark movie rather than an Iron Man movie essentially. But let's not get distracted. Her piece was provocative asking for curation over consumption for programmers and money people. 
The New Yorker disagrees, arguing that we only get the great discoveries because so many indie films are made. You can't predict which new artists will actually deliver. 
The Front Row takes this as an opportunity to talk about what the purpose of film criticism is in the internet era and then
Mark Harris comments, too
...all of which gives us plenty to think about. 

Post-Globe Thoughts / Linkings

My apartment gets too much sunlight and I have no window blankets. So I can't see the TV during the day so I can't rewatch the Globes so I can't blog more about them until tonight and then who knows if any of us will be in the mood when I can't so maybe I won't and I just don't know anymore. The tragedy of it all!

Until then, I devour uneaten party snacks and commence with the linkings...

first a few non-Globes items
EW really thoughtful piece on Armond White and why he was just expelled from the NYFCC 
Critic Wire "Should film critics give out awards?" Of course they should. Awards are just another form of evaluation and needn't be thoughtless. They just shouldn't do it badly, ot to "predict" the Oscar race.
THR Tang Wei falls for a money scam. I hope they find the culprits but the greater crime is the career momentum the Chinese government stole from her post Lust Caution. Can we prosecute that, instead?
Dark Horizons Joseph Gordon-Levitt on the upcoming Sandman adaptation 
The Playlist Martin Scorsese on the campaign trail with Wong Kar Wai for The Grandmaster. I still have no firm read on whether or not that is making it into Best Foreign Film 

today's must read 
W Mag John Waters on staying famous once you've achieved celebrity. It's a pretty great read. Consider this bit:

If you’re really lucky, you might survive a disaster, and that’s a sure way to get your Wikipedia page updated if it’s been dormant for too long. My friend Pauline jokes that if she were in an airplane crash with me and she was the only one to die, the headline would read: air disaster! john waters lives. one dead. 

okay back to the globes
Vanity Fair Bobby Finger's imaginary Globe conversations are super. I love Streep's world domination plot (although hasn't she kind of already accomplished that?)
NY Daily News ok, I need to understand whether or not Nicholas Hoult and Jennifer Lawrence are together. Or are they like Friend with Benefits. Make up your minds!
Variety inside the after parties. Fun(nish) photos of the rich and famous at play
Zimbio more after party pics
TFE I looked back on my Globe predix and was shocked to realize that I did REALLY well (though I generally suck at Globe winner predictions) only missing stuff the mainstream media doesn't care about (but I do) like foreign, screenplay, & both music prizes among the film awards! I even somehow correctly predicted that 12 Years a Slave would only win Best Picture. I guessed HORRIBLY with the TV awards but I've never claimed to know any better there

drawing by Liza Donnellytoday's must see
Liza Donnelly took live-blogging in a fresh direction by live-sketching the Golden Globes. Damn fabulous. 

On That Woody Allen Cecil B DeMille Thing...
Ronan Farrow twitter's favorite fusion of political pundit/celebrity spawn/hot guy, wasn't pleased. Lots of people joined in the Globe-shaming. But really, now. It's so easy to judge from afar but if we are going to deny artists prizes for their work based on their moral character, actual crimes, alleged crimes, grudges people hold against them and the like would we have any prizes at all? I'm not even exaggerating. Prizes for the arts should be about the arts always, and not about someone's character. There's no prize for "Most Nice" or "Best Person" and even if there was, wouldn't showpeople be terrible judges of it? (Including Mia Farrow who is willing to testify on Roman Polanski's behalf but Woody Allen honors are beyond the pale?)
Salon has some issues with it, too, although calling out the Globes for their lack of regular honors to women is relatively speaking, misleading, since they're SO MUCH BETTER ABOUT IT than the Oscars ever have been and only a few sites (like, um, this one you're on right now) take AMPAS to task for it.
Shawn Levy did a post earlier this summer that's especially relevant now, detailing how strong Woody's Oscar history is in terms of directing actors. It's not just strong but it's varied which he gets absolutely no credit for as the article amply illustrates.

Exit Image
Jason at MNPP dubs this Globe after party pic "The Picture That Broke The Internet" and then hedges with a "this could finally be the one to do it" but either way, yes! I mean, at least it broke tumblr. I haven't been on today but I'm quite sure it's dead.

If you somehow squeezed in Tom Hiddleston for a three-way, all the breakings, everywhere.

This awesome image unfortunately reminds that it was a very BRO evening at the Globes with lots of frathouse like back patting going on. This was probably best exemplified by Michael Douglas and Jared Leto's tone deaf acceptance speeches for gay roles (ouch, you really wanna play it like that?) though I think it's unfortunate that McConaughey is getting roped into that conversation because his speech was not offensive and people are stretching ungenerously when they go there, the Leo for Wolf win after that 'supermodel's vagina welcome' (Fey & Poehler, you delight), and a million photos of handsome powerful rich (mostly) white straight guys pointing at the camera, with smug smiles on their faces (lampooned by Melissa McCarthy as Matt Damon on stage in point of fact).

And so on and so on...

Dude.