Sundance: A Bleak Character Study Triple Feature

Michael C here to look at a trio of dark films that premiered at Sundance. What would Sundance be without some downbeat character studies? Every festival gets its share of films charting the process by which self-destructive people make a shambles of their lives. Some of them are utterly engrossing and have the audience hanging on the protagonist's every move. Many of them are a chore, dragging the audience through fifty variations of misery to no clear purpose. The type of film where you tip your hat to the artistry and to the gumption it took to get it made, while silently resolving that you never need subject yourself to that again.

(I Smile Back, James White and Patrick Wilson in Zipper after the jump)

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Sundance: Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

Michael C here with some thoughts on the newly minted Sundance award winner

Trying to pull off the tone of the disease movie is a tricky proposition. Not only is there the risk of crossing into a bullying sappiness that all but demands the viewer fill a quota of tear-filled buckets, there is also the opposite risk, where the film's insistence that it doesn't want your tears becomes its own kind of pandering, a persistent nudging that we should be moved by the characters' bravery. 

The most impressive thing about Alfonso Gomez-Rejon's Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is how well it walks that line. It isn't afraid of tears, but it makes the journey to the emotional climax count as much as the destination, building towards subtler, wiser epiphanies than the "life can be painful" for which a lesser film would settle. [More...]

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Sundance: Jonah Hill Tries To Pry the "True Story" Out of James Franco

Michael C. here at Sundance

Most of the buzz around Rupert Goold's True Story is  going to focus on comedic compadres James Franco and Jonah Hill facing off in a pair of hefty dramatic roles. The fact that they are the biggest names attached means they are probably going to take the heat for the fact that the film comes up short of its potential, but I'm inclined to pin the blame on the screenplay. The stars came to play, but they can only go so far with a material that never digs deep enough into these characters to make their battle of wits jolt to life.

Once you get past the novelty factor, the casting of Franco and Hill reflects back on their familiar personas in interesting ways. Franco, an actor who is priceless in the right role and lost at sea in the wrong one, is used well in a role that capitalizes on his enigmatic quality. Like the public that can't quite pin down the real Franco, Hill's Michael Finkel spends the film trying to get a read on Franco's Christian Longo, a man accused of killing his wife and three children with no apparent motive. Soon after the bodies of his wife and one his daughters are discovered dumped in a river after being stuffed into suitcases, Longo is picked up in Mexico using Finkel's name as an alias. When Finkel confronts him about the identity theft he sees the potential for a great story but whenever he gets close to the truth Longo shuts down and clams up... 

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'The Stanford Prison Experiment' ...Of Future Stardom

Nathaniel again, down to my final two Sundance movies. (Michael stayed longer so he has more coming)

The Outsiders. School Ties. Go. Mean Girls. Dazed and Confused... These are movies people often marvelled at after the fact for capturing multiple future stars in the same ensemble before the title of "star" sat completely well on them. Certain movies function like abnormally prescient time capsules in that way and, who knows, perhaps The Stanford Prison Experiment will one day be among them?

"Guard" terrorizes "Prisoners" in THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT

It's not that the faces are complete nobodies exactly but, apart from Billy Crudup, as the possibly awful Dr. Philip Zimbardo who is behind the psychological experiment in situational behavior, most of them are lesser known. Or, if they're already rising stars, they don't exactly have that signature role or household name factor just yet.

The Standford Prison Experiment was a famous study from the 1970s in which a psychology professor and his team took a simple ad out in the paper for students to participate in a "psychological study of prison life" for 1 to 2 weeks for $15 a day. Students signed up thinking it was easy money but easy it was not...

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Sundance: Lily Tomlin's "Grandma" is a Sharp-Tongued Joy

Nathaniel reporting from Sundance. Or, rather, from Manhattan, while still thinking of Sundance and possibly my favorite film from that trip...

The first chapter of Grandma, an ornery new female-driven comedy, is called “Endings” a counterintuitive opening title, perhaps, but appropriate. Elle Reid (Lily Tomlin) doesn’t have much taste for beginnings. A year and half before our story begins, this "writer-in-residence," who had a brief period of reknown as a feminist poet,  lost her life partner of nearly 40 years to cancer. She’s still bitter about it. We know that her new girlfriend of four months Olivia will soon be shown the door because she's played by Judy Greer who is contractually obliged to never have more than 3 scenes in a movie. [More...]

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