PARK CITY CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK #2: BEATS, RHYMES, ODDBALLS

By Brandon Harris

After its first weekend has drawn to a close, the 2011 Sundance Film Festival has seen a flurry of buying activity from movies both expected to sell for significant amounts (Jesse Peretz’s My Idiot Brother, which went to the Weinstein Company for $7 million) and movies no one expected to go for as much as they did (Drake Doremus‘ Like Crazy, which without a significant movie star in it went for $4 million to Paramount). While I haven’t seen either film, they both seem to have both their admirers and detractors. In a U.S. Dramatic Competition heavy on formally ambitious movies about marginalized communities, perhaps Like Crazy, a story of puppy-dog first love, seems like an easy sell. So to is Terri, Azazel Jacobs‘ follow-up to his much loved Sundance 2008 hit Momma’s Man. Written by Patrick DeWitt, Terri is clearly less personal than Jacobs’ previous picture, which was set largely in his parents’ Tribeca loft, a location that doubled as a kind of living museum of the golden age of New American Cinema. Parents — or, rather, the lack thereof — figure prominently here too; Terri‘s title character is a massively overweight, melancholy teenager (Jacob Wysocki) living with his sickly uncle in a central California town. He occasionally tortures rats and strikes up a series of relationships, the most important of which is with his school’s oddball assistant principal (a terrific John C. Reilly) as he navigates the seemingly unending difficulties of an obese late childhood. While less formally ambitious than Jacobs’ early work and less touching than his most recent, Terri is nonetheless humble, funny and wise, and it contains the most honest depiction of the horrors of those first, awkward baby steps into teenage sexual contact that I’ve yet come across.

Also in the U.S. Dramatic Competition, Andrew Okpeaha Maclean’s feature debut On the Ice doesn’t quite live up to the promise of his great short film Sikumi, which won Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize for short films in 2008. The story … Read the rest

“CEDAR RAPIDS” | director, Miguel Arteta

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 23, 9:45 pm -- Eccles Theatre]

The biggest and most exciting surprise about making Cedar Rapids was how beautifully our well-known cast blended in with our lesser-known cast. The film is about the unlikely friendship between four insurance agents at an annual convention. Three of the actors are well-known to the public — Ed Helms, John C. Reilly and Anne Heche — and the fourth is an amazing character actor from New York, Isiah Whitlock Jr. Although Isiah is known for his great performance as Senator Clay Davis in the TV series The Wire and his theater work with David Mamet, he was the surprise factor for our audience. We needed to make people really believe that these were regular insurance folks form the Midwest. I had hoped that Isiah’s presence would ground the familiarity of Ed, John and Anne and allow the audience to accept the premise of this tiny convention in Cedar Rapids more easily. One can hope for such chemistry, and you cast with your best hunch that an intangible magic will coalesce the ensemble of your cast, but it does not always happen and rarely as wonderfully as it did here! The four became a motley crew that had a joyous jolt of energy beyond the sum of all the parts. They felt like real people meeting and falling in love with each other for the first time. You simply believe them together. On the set, Isiah thrilled Ed, John and Anne each day. He brought something to the table that felt so real and fresh, we all were superenergized by it. In turn, he was so thrilled to be acting with such charismatic actors and to be one among these great leads, that his excitement had a contagious, escalating effect for the whole cast and crew. When such vitality results form the chemistry of your cast, it’s truly a dream come true. I can’t wait for the world to see them together on screen.

Sam Fuller, the great B-movie director, once told me to make sure you cast “on hunch.” He … Read the rest

“TERRI” DIRECTOR AZAZEL JACOBS

Azazel Jacobs’ profile has grown steadily since he made his striking, black-and-white debut feature, Nobody Needs to Know, in 2003. He followed it in 2005 with the delightfully quirky and inventive The GoodTimesKid, a film which found a devoted audience on the film festival circuit and was eventually released theatrically in 2007. Jacobs’ third feature, Momma’s Man, a poignant tale of adult regression into childhood, had its world premiere at Sundance. It became one of the hits of the 2008 festival, and played in theaters later that year to universal acclaim.

Jacobs, the son of experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs, grew up in New York City and is now based in Los Angeles, and his first three features were all set in one or the other of those two cities. With Terri, his fourth film, he moves into new territory as he tells a touching tale of a obese, socially withdrawn teenager (Jacob Wysocki) in a small California town who develops a surprising friendship with his high school headmaster (John C. Reilly). Jacobs, who seemingly never repeats himself as a filmmaker, has made a more polished and commercial kind of indie film that nevertheless still bears the sensitivity, emotional insight and deft directorial touch that is the mark of his work.

In the build-up to Terri’s premiere at Sundance, Filmmaker chatted with Jacobs about his latest film.

Can you tell me about your working relationship with Patrick Dewitt. How did you first meet him? What drew you to him as a writer? What was it like collaborating with him?

I met Patrick through his wife, also a writer, Leslie Napoles. He was a bartender at the time, and more and more I liked going to his work just for the conversation. At some point, he gave me a manuscript of what would become his first novel, Ablutions, about his experiences as a bartender. It was the kind of writing I love most; playful, truthful, individual. I did not see a way I could bring anything new to a film that took place in a bar, but … Read the rest

THE DUPLASS BROTHERS TALK STUDIOS AND SNUGGLING

Alica Van Couvering’s interview with Mark and Jay Duplass in the current issue of Filmmaker was conducted at the Sundance Film Festival, where their latest film, Cyrus, premiered. Starring John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei and Jonah Hill, the film is a comedy/drama about mid-life romance and the borderline aggro-child that stands in its way. Alicia’s interview was filmed by Zak Forsman, Kevin Shah and the Sabi Pictures team, and here’s an edit of their conversation. See more videos on our YouTube channel. The film opens Friday, June 18.

… Read the rest

JAKE KASDAN, “WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY”

By Nick Dawson

JENNA FISCHER AND JOHN C. REILLY IN DIRECTOR JAKE KASDAN’S WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY. COURTESY COLUMBIA PICTURES.

Our perception of a director hinges heavily on the most recent film they’ve made. Jake Kasdan’s last movie, The TV Set, was a smart, sardonic satire of the process of creating a hit series that drew on Kasdan’s own bitter experiences in network television. Though Kasdan had enjoyed working for Judd Apatow on Freaks and Geeks (1999) and Undeclared (2001) — directing episodes for these in between making his first and second features, Zero Effect (1997) and Orange County (2002) — the less positive times he had spent on other shows had given him ample fodder for his film. Kasdan’s razor-sharp analysis of the brutal entertainment business could also be traced to the many years he had spent watching the intricacies of Hollywood life growing up on the sets of the films of his father, director Lawrence Kasdan. However, the dry, observational humorist that emerges as the writer-director of The TV Set is only one side of Jake Kasdan, as his new film seems to come from an entirely different place, an entirely different person, almost.

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is the tale of fictional rock ‘n’ roll icon Dewey Cox, whose need to make music stems from a deep-seated childhood guilt — he cut his brother in half with a machete. Co-written by Kasdan and Apatow, the film relentlessly pokes fun at clichéd music biopics and their shortcomings, and features John C. Reilly playing the eponymous lead from the age of, yes, 14 years old onwards. Where The TV Set was sly and subtle, Walk Hard is shamelessly broad and often laugh-out-loud funny. Highlights include a meeting in India between Cox and the Beatles (Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Justin Long and Jason Schwartzman as John, Paul, George and Ringo respectively), and an “anatomical” gag which has no right to be funny, but is in fact hilarious.

Filmmaker spoke to Kasdan about his wide-ranging work, the comic potential of the name “Cox,” and the current WGA strike.… Read the rest