Tuesday, January 22, 2013 at 7:33PM 
So please stop telling me that Richard Linklater's Before Midnight, which gives us a third precious day in the lives of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) & Celine (Julie Delpy), is perfect. It's like dangling a morsel of deliciousness outside my cage.
Monday, January 21, 2013 at 6:24PM "Sex. Sex. Sex." That's a far more accurate and truer statement than the clichéd "Sex Sells" isn't it? Sex often emphatically doesn't sell. Sometimes it severely limits your market penetration... excuse me, saturation. So "Sex Sells" is an overstatement with lots of conditional clauses. But "Sex. Sex. Sex." that's just true, unequivocally! I'm not saying this because of this Kill Your Darlings trio's photo op I've just posted...
Daniel, Dane, and their Director John
...even though yes, director John Krokidas is totally 100% sexable based on this photographic evidence. (Tangent: Dane DeHaan turns 27 next month. Is he going to look like he's 30 when he's 60?).
I began this post with "Sex. Sex. Sex." because that's all I keep reading about from Sundance. Yesterday we covered the Cougar Island sexcapades of Two Mothers but apparently Sundance just keeps presenting the world with future MPAA challenges. Quoth Carpetbagger:
“I’ve seen five movies today, and it has been nonstop,” said a senior executive at a major Hollywood studio on Saturday night. “I’m no prude, but it’s a little much.”
NSFW James Franco, Amanda Seyfried, and Gay blah blah blah after the jump...
Saturday, January 19, 2013 at 11:00AM It'll be tough this year to follow the happenings from afar at Sundance without accidentally reading anything about Richard Linklater's Before Midnight, which reunites Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) for a third go round, but I shall try! In truth though Sundance, like TIFF and other A list festivals is nearly impossible to follow in general -- even if you're there! The "Opening Night" Film badge is kind of an annual myth -- this year that was May in the Summer from Amreeka director Cherien Dabis which drew mixed reviews -- as there are always multiple films playing at any big festival.
Celebrity Tweet:
Allison Janney wut wut! #touchyfeely @joshpais twitter.com/EllenPage/stat…
— Ellen Page (@EllenPage) January 19, 2013
I couldn't not share from the cuteness. That's Ellen Page and Juno mamma Alison Janney reunited for Lynn Shelton's Touchy Feely (Josh Pais, pictured is alo in the cast). Shelton's follow up to Your Sister's Sister also stars Rosemarie DeWitt in the lead role of a massage therapist.
While we're on the subject of Juno, here's a strange trivia note about Sundance '13: Michael Cera has made not one but TWO unrelated pictures with the Chilean director Sebastián Silva (most famous for the wonderful dark comedy The Maid) and they're both showing at Sundance. The first is Crystal Fairy which is about a boorish American (Michael Cera) travelling in Chile and 'creating chaos at every turn' as he and his friends seek a shamanistic hallucinogen called the San Pedro Cactus. More after the jump...
Monday, October 22, 2012 at 9:00AM David here with another report from the 56th BFI London Film Festival. Craig and I had a discussion about Australia’s entry for the Foreign film Oscar, Cate Shortland’s Lore.
David: A story about the children of Nazis struggling across a Germany occupied by Allied forces is several thousand miles away from what you’d imagine director Cate Shortland’s wheelhouse is. But Lore’s focus on the burgeoning sexuality and voyage to adulthood of a teenage girl is strikingly similar to Shortland’s debut Somersault - so much so that lead actress Saskia Rosendahl often reminded me of Abbie Cornish in her often abrupt movement and slightly displaced screen presence. That might be how I’d describe Lore itself - it never feels truly present or powerful. Instead it filters the story through meaningful objects and eerie poetic interludes, and while this is a method of storytelling I’m certainly not averse to, it didn’t work for me in this case.
Craig: I wasn't totally sold on Lore either, all things considered.
Australia, LFF, London, Lore, Oscars (12), Saskia Rosendahl, film festivals Saturday, October 20, 2012 at 10:30AM David here reporting on three homegrown participants in the 56th BFI London Film Festival.
Steve Oram & Alice Lowe in 'Sightseers'A distinctly British melding of comedy and horror grew from the roots of Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead, and it’s telling that Wright has an executive producer credit on Sightseers, director Ben Wheatley’s follow-up to his terrifying, schizoid Kill List, which made it to US theatres earlier this year. Sightseers proves similarly unclassifiable, but the black magic horror of Kill List is replaced by a crunching absurdity. Co-writers Steve Oram and Alice Lowe star as Chris and Tina, a young couple who leave behind Tina’s demanding, cruel but dependent mother and set out on a sightseeing tour around England that quickly becomes a killing spree after Chris reverses over a tourist he witnessed littering. Justifications for the killings range from a rambler’s “smug complacency” to Tina’s sexual jealousy, removing any kind of social agenda from Oram and Lowe’s anarchic, cruelly witty script. Instead they parody usual clichés – Tina is still affected by the loss of her dog, who meets an unfortunate end by knitting needle in flashback – and affectionately mock bullshit social rhetoric. There’s a guilty pleasure in our enjoyment of the escalating brutality of the situation and how the pair’s romantic entanglement evolves through this. Despite their obvious issues, Chris and Tina are genuinely entertaining people to spend time with, and the surreal, morbid flourishes of humour combine with dark flares of blood to make for a generic hybrid that has been deftly melded together. Sightseers is worth making tracks to see. (A-)
