Here's writer/director John Magary's (pictured here with Robert Redford and Vilmos Zsigmond) second dispatch from the Sundance Directors' Lab:
This is my first stab at blogging, okay? I’ve never been a self-starting chronicler, never had a personal essay phase, or a journal, or a sketchbook. I’m not wired that way. I don’t really know how to steal away time in bars or cafes, to reflect on my day in an endearingly scruffy little notebook—even a grocery list is a chore.
Long story short, I’m finishing up my second week here, and I have no notes. It’s blurs on top of blurs. Super-blurs, hyper-blurs, and where to go for some peace and quiet and that Alone Time with a hot cup of Sanka? Case in point, this is a Sunday, my “free day,” and here’s how it played out:
2:00-4:30, Screening of Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970), starring a swaggering and shirtless Robert Redford, presented by Nicky Katt. Nicky, whom you’ve seen in probably more movies than you realize and who’s something of a mad cinephile, is acting in Daniel Casey’s Lab project Poletown. He keeps referencing movies that I’ve never heard of, severely fraying my adequacy levels.
4:30-5:30, Filmmaker Meeting, wherein we Directing Fellows air out our laundry, talk about the Process, laugh, cry, what have you.
5:30-6:15, Adviser Reception, wherein we meet the new advisers. The advisers, as you can imagine, are tasked with making us better. Among them (again, no notes) this week, Robert Elswit, Fernando Leon de Aranoa, and Michael Almereyda. Talk about your solid bunches, whoa. Last week was Robert Redford, Vilmos Zsigmond, Ira Sachs, Joan Tewksbury, Thomas Carter, Suzy Elmiger, and Christine Lahti, so help was frighteningly abundant. Mr. Zsigmond screened Close Encounters. Ms. Tewksbury, Nashville. Gyula Gazdag, A Hungarian Fairy Tale, which is a more or less impossible-to-see gem. The screenings are mega-awesome-sweet, I won’t lie.
6:15-7ish, Screening of the week’s scenes, wherein we Directing Fellows watch our edits in a room full of crew, staff, actors, and advisers. It’s a sweaty-palm kinda thing. (More about the PUBLIC aspect below.)
7:00-8:00, eat at buffet, which always has fruit, which is neat.
8:00-10:30, watch adviser Fernando Leon de Aranoa’s Mondays in the Sun, a simple and keenly observed study of laid-off friends in northern Spain. Starring Javier Bardem, who’s surprisingly hilarious for a paunchy, laid-off Spaniard. I’m describing his character, not him, so cool your jets.
Yeah, eight and a half hours of activities, and it’s my free day. Some were optional, but still—it’s an exhausting embarrassment of riches here. And so I lie, in blankets, way beyond the witching hour, and I’ve gotta be up at 6:45 in the morning, to walk halfway down a mountain, eat something/anything, and edit for nine hours, and I want to paint a picture for ya.
Dear Reader, how do I compress it? What would you like to know? I see no comments after my first post, so maybe it’s moot. (Do I offend?) I also see the picture with me and Gyula—pronounced JOO-la, and he’s not a Bond villain, he’s great, he’s Hungarian and an amazing director and wise and kind and supportive—and notice my noontime physique, my shape rounding off like a soldier six months out of Iraq. It’s buffet eating here, and me no good at restraining so much at the buffet. Apologies to my girlfriend.
Speaking of war and wars, the Lab is joked about as a boot camp for filmmakers. It’s not hyperbole, really. There is a rigid, almost relentless dedication to fitness here. Even something as seemingly straightforward as editing—when all is said and done, two people banging away in a small dark room—can feel like one of those Zero-G machines they fling you through in Air Force training. The thing in Spies Like Us. That thing.
I will focus, I must. Let’s talk about the public aspect, which takes some getting used to. I was talking with another Fellow, a commercial director named Frank Budgen, who’s brought a darkly comic adaptation called Shockheaded Peter to the Lab—of the Fellows, he’s worked on the most massive scales, piling up extras in Rio, animating clay bunnies in the middle of Manhattan, a city-wide water balloon fight in Buenos Aires, that kind of thing. Even considering the broad, high-budget, million-choices-a-minute experience, he was taken aback by how very open we have to be here. Everyone, from Lab head Michelle Satter down to the boom ops, seems to have read all the scripts, and there’s always some kind of audience, their eyeballs blinking in the cartoon dark. I’ll be digging down in a bag of Lays and four people will come up to tell me that they like Antoinette, who’s not a relative or friend, but a character I’ve written.
Support borders on the maniacal, in a good way. Shy ones are plucked out like errant hairs. There is a pungent, we’re-all-here-to-try-stuff-out-even-if-we-look-like-idiots vibe, and at first, cynic that I am, it all felt a bit…humiliating…
But the sunny smiles and the mountain air and the wise eyes of Gyula (there’s a title: The Wise Eyes of Gyula) have somehow beaten me into a glassy-eyed, productive spirit.
I’m not sure I’ve created anything good yet, and the Fear’s still there, but at least I’ve cast off those thoughts of stealing a jeep and peeling out, Zero-G, into the Utah wilderness.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 6/13/2008 09:11:00 AM
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Sunday, January 27, 2008
MUSTACHES & PISTACHIOS
Any festival you go to there's going to be one film that most people don't get and just spend their time discussing why they didn't like it and question why it was ever made. Chusy (Anthony Haney-Jardine)'s Anywhere, USA has become that film at Sundance '08... but I'm in the minority. I thought it was one of the most fun viewing experiences I had there. Now, I won't say that I got what Chusy's three-part so-called autobiography was about because I don't know if there's anything to get. All I know is he has a bizarre imagination, gets great performances from amateur or non-actors and the man loves mustaches.
Guided by a smooth talking narrator, we enter Chusy's America with stunning shots of empty rooms that will shortly be inhabited with strange characters. Chapter one is PENANCE, here we come to a trailer park where at 2:00 in the afternoon Gene (Mike Ellis) walks into his trailer for his weekly beating by his wife, Tammy (Mary Griffin). It's simple really, Gene overreacted and now Tammy gets to beat him with a tennis racket every Tuesday. What did he do? Well, he and his redneck R/C racing midget friend Ricky (Brian Fox) overreacted when they found a pistachio nut in between the couch cushions and came to the conclusion that Tammy was having an affair with an Arab man. Seeing the pistachio is the nut of the Middle East. What follows can only be described as plain weird. LOSS is the title of the second chapter. In it, Chusy's daughter Perla Haney-Jardine (the only professional actor in the film) plays a seven year old girl who realizes there's no tooth fairy and goes through a painful incident to realize there really isn't one. Then there's the third and final chapter: IGNORANCE. And it's just that. At times bordering on inappropriate, without giving it away all I can say is a man (Ralph Brierley) who has reached to the heights of the financially elite, thanks in part to his well crafted beard, becomes bored one day and while chewing on a steak comes to a realization.
Many of the characters are interconnected in the stories and some of the gags find their way into the others bringing a Pulp Fiction-like quality to the film. The biggest knock on the movie though is its running time (123 min.). The viewer with extreme patients (like yours truly) is the one who will make it through, though the PENANCE story has constant laughs, the film kind of hits a roadblock at LOSS and takes a while to start up again.
But the performances, cinematography, trippy score and just the flat out strange stories are worth taking the ride. I wouldn't be surprised if the film gains a cult following on the regional fest circuit.
# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 1/27/2008 12:51:00 AM
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Saturday, January 26, 2008
SUNDANCE ANNOUNCES WINNERS
Below is the complete list of Sundance 2008 Winners:
Grand Jury Prize: Documentary Trouble The Water -- directed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal
Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic Frozen River -- directed by Courtney Hunt
World Cinema Jury Prize: Documentary Man on Wire -- directed by James Marsh
World Cinema Jury Prize: Dramatic King of Ping Pong (Ping Pongkingen) -- directed by Jens Jonsson
Audience Award: Documentary Fields of Fuel -- directed by Josh Tickell
Audience Award: Dramatic The Wackness -- directed by Jonathan Levine
World Cinema Audience Award: Documentary Man on Wire -- directed by James Marsh
World Cinema Audience Award: Dramatic Captain Abu Raed -- directed by Amin Matalqa
Directing Award: Documentary Nanette Burstein for American Teen
Directing Award: Dramatic Lance Hammer for Ballast
World Cinema Directing Award: Documentary Nino Kirtadze for Durakovo: Village of Fools (Durakovo: Le Village Des Fous)
World Cinema Directing Award: Dramatic Anna Melikyan for Mermaid (Rusalka)
World Cinema Screenwriting Award Samuel Benchetrit for I Always Wanted To Be A Gangster (J'ai Toujours Reve D'Etre Un Gangster)
World Cinema Documentary Editing Award Irena Dol for The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins
Excellence in Cinematography Award: Documentary Phillip Hunt and Steven Sebring for Patti Smith: Dream of Life
Excellence in Cinematography Award: Dramatic Lol Crawley for Ballast
World Cinema Cinematography Award: Documentary al Massad for Recycle
World Cinema Cinematography Award: Dramatic Askild Vik Edvardsen for King of King Pong (Ping Pongkingen)
Documentary Editing Award Joe Bini for Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired
Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award Alex Rivera and David Riker for Sleep Dealer
Special Jury Prizes
World Cinema Special Jury Prize: Dramatic Blue Eyelids (Parpados Azules) -- directed by Ernesto Contreas
Special Jury Prize: Documentary Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo -- directed by Lisa F. Jackson
Special Jury Prize: Dramatic, The Spirit of Independence Anywhere, U.S.A. -- directed by Chusy Haney-Jardine
Special Jury Prize: Dramatic, Work by an Ensemble Cast Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston, Kelly MacDonald and Brad Henke for Choke
Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking My Olympic Summer -- directed by Daniel Robin Sikumi (On the Ice) -- directed by Andrew Okpeaha MacLean
Jury Prize in International Short Filmmaking Soft -- directed by Simon Ellis
Shorts Jury Honorable Mentions in Short Filmmaking Aquarium -- directed by Rob Meyer August 15th -- directed by Xuan Jiang La Corona (The Crown) -- directed by Amanda Micheli and Isabel Vega Oiran Lyrics -- directed by Ryosuke Ogawa Spider -- directed by Nash Edgerton Suspension -- directed by Nicolas Provost W. -- directed by The Vikings
# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 1/26/2008 11:39:00 PM
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SUNDANCE ANNOUNCES SLOAN AND NHK AWARD WINNERS
In addition to the competition, juried and audience prizes conferred during the festival, several Sundance co-sponsored special-category prizes are also awarded.
During a Jan. 26 invitation-only reception at the Sundance House in Park City, the $20,000 Alfred P. Sloan Prize was awarded to writer-director Alex Rivera for his debut feature, Sleep Dealer. The film is described in festival programming notes as a “fascinating and prescient work of science fiction.”
The prize, provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, recognizes a feature film depicting science or technology as a thematic focus, or a scientist, engineer or mathematician as a major character. Previous recipients have included Mark Decena’s Dopamine, Primer by Shane Carruth and Chen Shi-zheng’s Dark Matter.
A committee of five film and science professionals selected Sleep Dealer for “its visionary and humane tale of a young man grappling with a technological future in which neural implants, telerobotics and ubiquitous computing serve a global economy rife with fundamental challenges and opportunities, and for its powerful and original storytelling and direction.”
Rivera had previously workshopped the film at the 2000 and 2001 Sundance Institute Feature Film Program Labs, and is a prior recipient of the Sundance/NHK award and an Annenberg Feature Film Fellowship. Acknowledging the ongoing support of Institute programs, Rivera noted that “Sundance has been at the side of this project for seven years.” Sleep Dealer debuted in the Dramatic Competition at this year’s festival.
The day before, the Sundance Institute and NHK, Japan’s largest broadcaster, presented the winners of the 2008 Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Awards, selected from a group of 12 finalists.
The four winners were Alejandro Fernandez Almendras (Chile) for Huacho, Braden King (USA) with Here, Radu Jude (Romania) -- The Happiest Girl in the World -- and Aiko Nagatsu (Japan) for Apoptosis. Nagatsu noted that “there are not any awards like this in Japan, so I’m inspired very much.”
The annual award was created in 1996 to honor visionary directors from four global regions (Europe, Latin America, the United States, and Japan) and support the development and production of their winning narrative feature scripts.
Each director receives a $10,000 cash award and a guarantee from NHK to purchase the Japanese television broadcast rights for their projects, as well as ongoing staff support from the Sundance Institute Feature Film Program with seeking financing and distribution of their films.
Though documentaries are always what I'm most excited about when I go to festivals, none at Sundance really jumped out at me this year... except one.
Brit filmmaker Chris Waitt came to Park City with a delicious doc that's so funny and superbly structured it's hard to believe that it's non-fiction, but he insists that it's all real.
In A Complete History of My Sexual Failures Waitt has recently been dumped, and having never been good with women he takes the moment of emptiness to examine why his life has been full of failed relationships by deciding to look up his old flames and ask them what went wrong.
Armed with a boom mic, huge headphones and a tattered wardrobe, Waitt sits down with his exes (many of them very reluctant to do the interviews) to get the brutal truth about what was wrong with him. Some hated his tardiness to everything, some hated his self-absorption, one was so turned off by him that she stopped dated white people completely and one hated him so much that she would not be filmed for the interview and would only reply to his questions via a computer that would generate automated responses.
But the film isn't just watching Waitt (who also has a puppet show in the works at MTV) crash and burn, during his journey of inadequacy he decides to use the Internet to score some dates. On one where he gets the girl back to his flat a new problem is revealed as Waitt can't close the deal. This begins a sub plot that brings Waitt to a hypnotist, abusing Viagra and a trip to a sado-masochist in a scene that's filled with so much full-frontal hilarity it's hard to imagine how the scene will work once the ratings board gets its hands on it.
With a mix of Borat and Michael Moore, A History of My Sexual Failures can certainly find an audience.
# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 1/25/2008 07:30:00 PM
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DUTCH TREATS
I've still got most of my Sundance commentary to get up and I'm on my way to the International Film Festival Rotterdam, where I'll try to file some short reports on the fest and the concurrent Cinemart, which is a great financing conference that plans, this year, to begin a dialogue about how it can be reshaped for the future. (Full disclosure: I'm on the CineMart's Advisory Board.)
From the festival's Tiger Daily:
Eschewing conference and panel formats and instead deploying the tried and tested device of brainstorming towards a consensus, IFFR management and industry experts will sit down this weekend to thrash out how future CineMarts will be shaped. Or to quote the event’s remit: ‘how can CineMart position itself in a world in which the way cinema is produced, distributed and watched changes all the time, and in which digital opportunities offer filmmakers new ways of getting their films made and seen?’
‘This discussion of our future marks the beginning of the new-style CineMart’ comments CineMart head Marit van den Elshout. ‘But our future shape will not be determined in one festival, or one year. I think that it’s important to keep the discussion open. We always try to look at our own festival in a critical way, and that’s why I hope that this discussion will throw up some interesting stuff for us.’
Van den Elshout confirmed that CineMart is looking to install a ‘New Style’ section that will dovetail with the existing project-based format; one that will embrace and encourage, ‘daring new business models, using innovative platforms of distribution and marketing to reach audiences. There is no blueprint for filmmakers to say what the rules are if they want to self-distribute their film,’ she stresses. ‘Or to attract an audience through the internet and then get some revenues back. So I had the idea of incorporating this small digital section within CineMart.’
Sunday afternoon’s debate kicks off with a presentation of three innovative projects by Dutch and international digital filmmakers. These are Mini Movies by Femke Wolting and Bruno Felix (Submarine, the Netherlands), Jeremy Nathan’s Clam (DV8, South Africa) and Illuminated by Josh Store (Illuminated Productions, USA). The afternoon think tank sessions will assess the future focus of the IFFR and CineMart – the basic steps a filmmaker can/should follow in deploying net-based methods to ply their trade, and how national and European funding bodies can accommodate filmmakers within these new business models.
‘It’s not as if we want to re-shape CineMart completely, to throw away the old and start something new,’ Van den Elshout stresses. ‘The core of CineMart is still going to be the projects. Even though they are traditionally-financed, narrative, art-house cinema projects, we still have 800 people coming for them. But I think it’s important to bend things a bit. The good thing about being around for so long is that you can fine tune yourself every year, and that’s why I think CineMart is working so well.’
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/25/2008 06:16:00 PM
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CONSIDERING ALL THINGS JAMIE STUART
While Jamie Stuart has been here at Sundance shooting the goings on, NPR has been shooting him for a short video segment that's now up on their website. We have no idea what Jamie will turn in this year, although we do know that it won't be all shot in the Albertson's parking lot.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/25/2008 02:20:00 PM
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Thursday, January 24, 2008
FOR LOVE OF THE GAME
Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden return to Sundance with another intimate portrait, this time looking at baseball, particularly a Dominican player and how the game not only can change his life but his family's as well if he plays to his potential.
Outside of documentaries, independent filmmakers rarely focus on sports, but you can tell Fleck and Boden are baseball fans, and being a baseball addict myself (three weeks till spring training!) it's fun to see a sports film that isn't sensationalized for widespread appeal. Their film Sugar shows the harsh reality of trying to get into professional sports and is the most realistic narrative film about baseball that I can ever remember seeing.
The film begins in the Dominican Republic at the Kansas City Knights' facility (Films love to use Knights as a team name. The team Robert Redford's Roy Hobbs played for in The Natural was named the New York Knights.) where on the mound young right-hander Miguel Santos (Algenis Perez Soto) throws fire as he mows down batter after batter. Nicknamed Sugar for his love of the sweets and the ladies, he finds himself the envy of his small village and on the cusp of going to the States to show his talents to the big club. After a scout shows him how to throw a knuckle curve -- a devastating off-speed pitch that adds to his fastball -- he's called up to spring training with the professional squad in Phoenix.
Though players of Dominican decent are the vast majority in today's game, we see it's still a huge adjustment for them to play for a big league team (though in the Dominican Sugar and the other players take English language classes to learn much-needed phrases like "I've got it," "line drive," "fly ball" and "home run") and dealing with temptations they've never encountered before -- like the hotel minibar.
Sugar wins over the Knights coaches and is put on the club's Single A minor league team in Iowa. There in the farmland horizon where you're lucky to find a Spanish station let alone someone speaking it, Sugar shows if he has what it takes to make it in the pros and give his family back home much-needed financial stability.
Boden and Fleck continue the style they used in Half Nelson and Gowanus -- handheld, intimate camerawork and a limited score -- to capture Sugar's journey which is part fish-out-of-water, part rags-to-riches, but always intriguing and at times heart wrenching to watch, whether you're a baseball fan or not.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/24/2008 12:05:00 AM
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Wednesday, January 23, 2008
FROZEN RIVER TO SONY PICTURES CLASSICS
Sharon Swart and Mike Jones in Variety are reporting that Courtney Hunt's Frozen River, a character-based thriller starring Melissa Leo which was the first film I saw at Sundance and one of the best, has sold to Sony PIctures Classics for a low-to-mid six-figure sum. I'll try to get some further thoughts about this film up on the blog before the end of the festival.
In this clip, Susanna Ruiz points out value in the massive volume of media content on the Internet, even as most of it is "crap." The crap serves both as a repository of content to be reinterpreted and placed in new contexts (the "remix culture") and as its own art to be judged by many groups of individuals, rather than by a select group of gatekeepers.
Moderator Wendy Levy follows with mention of curation. She says, "we're trying to get away from YouTube and more into spaces where we find trusted guides." I don't think getting away from YouTube is exactly how I'd put it, but rather that there is a need to serve both the curation and aggregation functions.
I am reminded of discussions I had this week with friends at YouTube and Wholphin DVD.
YouTube, like the rest of Google, has indicated that it will never create content, and its curation of content is even limited to featuring a few videos on the front page and in the different sections (Film and Animation, Pets & Animals, etc.). The value that audiences and content creators find in YouTube is mainly transactional: easy and fast posting, searching and viewing of (and advertising on) videos. YouTube is a platform, which has been expensive to create, but is vastly scalable and essential to many.
On the other end, there is Wholphin, a DVD magazine of short films, published quaterly by McSweeney's. The Wholphin team, consisting of only two people, travel to film festivals and solicit submissions to see hundreds, if not thousands of short films. They meet many filmmakers personally and pay all of them for the rights to license their films. It is a painstaking process that is most certainly not scalable without sacrificing quality, but the start-up capital costs are comparatively low. The delivery of the resulting DVD - published only four times a year, in high-end packaging, graphic design by Dave Eggers, with a booklet of "liner notes" - reflects the desired audience experience, completely the opposite of YouTube.
These two models complement, rather than compete with each other, and neither can be dismissed. I'm looking forward to exploring ways in which the two can work more tightly together.
# posted by Brian Chirls @ 1/23/2008 01:47:00 PM
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SUNDANCE INTERVIEW: PERLA HANEY-JARDINE
I met with Perla Haney-Jardine (Kill Bill: Vol. 2, Dark Water) at the party for her new film Anywhere, USA. Among a cast of new actors, along with first-time director/writer dad Chusey Haney-Jardine and first-time producer/writer mom Jennifer MacDonald, Perla was one of the most experienced hands on set. We discussed what it was like to work on a family film, as well as her Sundance experience and the film's prospects for distribution.
# posted by Brian Chirls @ 1/23/2008 12:30:00 AM
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Tuesday, January 22, 2008
SUNDANCE BUSINESS AT THE MIDPOINT
It happened maybe a day later than last year, but the acquisitions floodgates have opened a bit at the Sundance Film Festival. But it wasn't the typical first-weekend films that enthused distributors. In Variety, Ann Thompson is reporting that Focus Features has bought Andrew Fleming's Hamlet 2, which debuted at the unsexy time of Monday at 5:30 in a deal she pegs at over $10 million for worldwide rights. The film stars Steve Coogan as an English teacher who writes a sequel to Shakespeare's play in other to rescue the school's theater department. Perhaps more significantly, the film is directed by an established director, Andrew Fleming (whose Dick is one my favorite underrated comedies) and scripted by South Park writer/producer Pam Brady. The deal is Focus's first film festival acquisition in quite a while, and it comes on the day that the company's Atonement received a Best Picture Oscar nom.
Thompson and Sharon Swart have two other announcements: Fox Searchlight has bought Clark Gregg's debut feature Choke for a reported $5 million (for the world minus a few territories) and Overture Films, whose first release, Mad Money, debuted this past weekend, has picked up U.S. rights to Mark Pellington's Henry Poole is Here, which stars Luke Wilson and Radha Mitchell, for a reported $3.5 million
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/22/2008 03:23:00 PM
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Sunday, January 20, 2008
SUNDANCE REVIEW: THE GREAT BUCK HOWARD
Sean McGinly’s debut feature The Great Buck Howard is a curious, small-scale relationship comedy/drama about an over-the-hill entertainer and his young, directionless-in-life assistant. Colin Hanks stars as the assistant, Troy, who signs up for the gig after impulsively bolting law school and the career track his dad, played by Hanks’s real-life dad Tom, is pushing him towards. A wiggy John Malkovich is the entertainer – specifically, a mentalist, whose claim to fame is having appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson 61 times (but never in the last ten years of the show, he ruefully admits as one point). Hanks gives a relaxed, low-key performance, but it’s hard for an audience to invest much in his underdeveloped character. Malkovich goes the opposite way, energetically turning his “Buck Howard” into a show-biz cartoon, a caricature of an impossible-to-please has-been who travels with his show through the flyover states while the larger entertainment culture passes him by. Emily Blunt adds a much-needed spark as a seen-it-all celebrity publicist. The Great Buck Howard’s slender storyline deals with Howard attempting to stage a comeback by staging a new “effect” – a mass hypnosis – in Akron that will attract the attention of the new round of Vegas and late-night-talk bookers.
One of the film’s problems is its failure to come up with engaging ways to turn the relationship between Howard and Troy into anything resembling a real story. Troy is Howard’s assistant and tour manager, but, in terms of dramatic action, he’s given nothing to do that affects Howard’s act in any way. We expect him to get drawn into both Howard’s life and the methodology of his effects, but he is never much more than a bemused observer of this show-biz “fossil” he’s randomly hooked up with. The film’s dramatic heavy lifting is handled, unfortunately, by a cloying voiceover in which Troy contextualizes the whole tale as a necessary pit stop on his way to accumulating the life experience he needs to become… a TV writer. As for the comedy, most of it revolves around Howard's eccentricities -- his penchant for playing "What the World Needs Now" mid-show and his professed love for Star Trek's George Takei -- and supporting turns by Steve Zahn and Debra Monk as the well-meaning bumpkins who host Howard during his Akron stay.
In the last few years, there have been a few movies set within the world of magic and illusion. The best of these, like Neil Burger’s The Illusionist, makes the craft of the film’s magician character integral to the story. The Great Buck Howard deals with magic’s sister art of mentalism, which, due to the work of performers like Derren Brown, is experiencing something of a revival these days. Howard’s character seems clearly based on The Amazing Kreskin, who was a regular on TV in the ‘70s, and the film tips its hat to today’s magic scene by casting Ricky Jay as Howard’s manager and, in a brief cameo, David Blaine as himself. But The Great Buck Howard doesn’t have any insights into the art, and, considering that mentalism deals with issues of psychology, personality and influence, the film’s inability to use this subject matter to create more dramatic situations for its characters is pretty disappointing.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/20/2008 10:43:00 PM
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SUNDANCE ANNOUNCES CREATIVE PRODUCING INITIATIVE
At a lunch here at the Kimball Art Center at the base of Main Street, the Sundance Institute announced their new "Creative Producing Initiative" today. "To work effectively with filmmakers, producers need an opportunity to develop their own skills and voices. The Creative Producing Initiative is designed to develop a producer's creative instincts in the scripting and editing stages and to evolve their communication and problem-solving skills at all stages of realizing a project," said Michelle Satter, Director, Sundance Institute Feature Film Program. Producer Paul Mezey (Sugar, Maria Full of Grace) gave the keynote speech, and he pledged his support as a mentor to the to-be-selected candidate.
Along with this new program is a Sundance Creative Producing Lab, which will take place in July. The deadline for applying to the Creative Producing Initiative is March 1, 2008, and guidelines are up on the Sundance website.
I'm going to meditate on his tip number three -- "Don't Get All Stress Out Over the Parties" -- rather than stewing over the invites I didn't get.
From Zobel:
If you haven't heard, the nightly parties at Sundance are real hard to get into. Even the fancy/rich/important have to stand in line sometimes. (For, like, two minutes. But still.) Let me go ahead and tell you what you are missing. A chocolate fondue fountain that has white chocolate on one side and dark chocolate on the other. Big whoop. You'll have more fun getting your friends and bringing a bottle of Jack back to the condo's hot tub. (Oh, yeah, all condos seem to have hot tubs up there, by the way.) Actually, it's cold in Park City... what you ought to do is go to the grocery and get some mulling spices, and make your pals some hot mulled wine to drink in the hot tub. This will give you the bonus of being able to say the words "mulling" and "mulled" a lot, which is fun. I feel woozy and dehydrated just thinking about it.
