Wow, kudos to Jim for schooling Dave Letterman. Dave asked him about playing a gay man in I Love You Phillip Morris.
Asked Dave: "And, in terms of a leading man, a heterosexual playing a homosexual, do homosexuals say 'well, that shouldn't have been a homosexual' or do you worry about your image as a heterosexual leading man playing a homosexual?"
Replied Carrey: "Boy, we haven't grown at all, have we? We haven't grown at all.... We're still children in the schoolyard. Honestly. No offense Dave, for god's sakes, have you ever seen a gay man? Are there gay people in Indiana? Is it ok to be gay there, is what I'm asking. There's not a policy against gay people there or here?"
I saw the premiere of Philip Morris at Sundance, and it was hilariously funny, and I agree with Dave - this is the best that Jim Carrey has ever been. It comes out December 3rd.
500 Days of Summer got lots of buzz from its Sundance premiere, and for good reason. This is a delightful film, and the best film I have seen this entire summer. Yes, it's really that good, and I'll tell you upfront that I give this film 4 stars. I can't recommend it highly enough.
Right from the beginning, you get the idea that this is not ordinary film. We have a text disclaimer saying that no character is based on anyone living or dead. Flash to new screen "Except you Jenny Beckman." Flash again. "Bitch".
The film structure is unique. We start the film knowing that it is about a relationship that has broken up. It's 500 days of Summer, because Summer is the girl -- that's the girl, played by Zooey Deschanel. We bounce back and forth from the end, somewhere around day 480, to day 1, with a helpful counter to tell us where we are bouncing to next, as Tom remembers and examines his romance with Summer.
This is the tag line for the film:
Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Girl doesn't.
This is not a love story. This is a story about love.
Summer is upfront with Tom that she is just looking for fun, and not love. She doesn't believe in love, and is surprised that Tom does. "It's love, it's not Santa Claus," he replies.
The film uses animation and a fantastic soundtrack to show Tom's love for Summer, including a Hall and Oates song complete with Tom dancing in a crowded park with a bluebird like something from Disney's Enchanted. There are many sly movie references in this movie like an exact frame from The Graduate as Tom sees Summer naked on the bed just like Dustin Hoffman sees Mrs. Robinson.
Marc Webb has done a fantastic job with this film. You can tell he's had a history of directing music videos, and it's just wonderfully used in many moments. This is a movie that you're going to hear about at Oscar time. I think the writing is exceptional. We've seen romances so many times that are formula, and yes, I like those, too, but this was something new, and that's really hard when you're telling a love story.
I have never loved Zooey Deschanel like I did in this movie. She is luminous and the camera worships her showing her through the lens of Tom's adoration. But we don't truly get to know her, in the same way that Tom thinks he knows her, but doesn't really. Joseph Gordon-Levitt was a revelation to me. He's all grown up from his days as a child actor on TV, and I wasn't thinking about that at all -- for the first time. I hope he has a wonderful career, and will look forward to his future work. Interestingly, he is in this week's G. I. Joe as one of the villains, and I almost want to see it just to see that! (Plus Dr. Who's Christopher Eccleston.)
Special mention also goes to the little girl that plays Tom's younger sister. She has a couple of lines that had me literally bent over with laughter. I won't spoil the funniest one, but she sums it all up with this line that a girl who likes The Smiths isn't necessarily the one:
Just because she's likes the same bizzaro crap you do doesn't mean she's your soul mate.
With the release of this music video with music from the film, there was this interesting bit:
Deschanel and Gordon-Levitt say they hope to team up repeatedly and have aspirations of being a regular screen couple, like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers or Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.
They’re not a real couple, but they’re good at faking it.
“I think it’s great to have continuous collaborators,” Deschanel says. “It’s a shortcut that makes it so much more fun. The job is much easier when you can go to set and be like, ‘Ah, Joe!’”
Count me in as one who would love to see these two work again. They were just magic in this great film. Go and see it! 4 big stars. And don't miss the Cinemash Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel did from Sid & Nancy as a spin off from a line in the trailer below.
No Impact Man is coming out September 11, first in New York and then expanding over the coming weeks. We saw the premiere of this film at Sundance and it was much more entertaining that I was expecting. It's really about the relationship and their marriage as they go through this one year project of trying to have no impact on the environment. Watch the trailer below to get a flavor of what I mean of some of the funny moments as he tries to get his Starbucks addicted wife to go without not only coffee, but even electricity. Read my review and see pictures of the premiere here.
It's a wild ride, but I have to give respect to Jim Carrey for doing this film. What's truly wild is that it is based on a true story, and Steven Russell is still in prison.
The September Issue was the big Salt Lake City Gala event at Sundance. R. J. Cutler has made an amazing film. Even my husband liked it! Read my review from the Sundance premiere here.
I saw this film at Sundance, and Jack White attended our showing. This film is amazing. I can't wait to see it again in a theater with a LOUD sound system, as we saw it in a little library theater at Sundance. Read my review here and see pictures from our screening.
It Might Get Loud is scheduled for limited release in the US on August 14.
Monday was the last full day we spent at Sundance. We saw Peter Travis' Endgame starring William Hurt, first thing that morning. Peter Travis recently directed Vantage Point, and I didn't realize until I checked him on Imdb later, had directed one of my favorite British mini-series, "The Jury". Endgame tells the story of the last days of Apartheid in South Africa. Johnny Lee Miller plays a PR executive of a gold company who organizes secret talks in England between Mbeki and Willie Esterhusye, a philosophy professor played by William Hurt. It was a fascinating movie, and very well done. I wish there had been a little more insight into each man, maybe with a script by Peter Morgan who wrote The Queen and Frost/Nixon. The film will be shown on BBC4 next month, and I noted in the credits it was also produced by Masterpiece, so it may come to us on PBS soon. It's more suited to TV than the big screen.
We saw Adam next, and I've written about how great that film was in a separate post. As soon as Adam finished, my husband ran out to get in line for Brief Conversations with Hideous Men which was playing in the same Eccles Theater. We did not get as great seats, as you'll see from the pictures.
Brief Conversations with Hideous Men is based on a book of short stories by David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide last year. It's the directorial debut of John Krasinski (The Office) who also stars in the film, because an unnamed lead actor dropped out at the last minute. The device to show all the short stories is that a woman (Julianne Nicholson) is doing interviews for research at a university. John Krasinski obviously called in lots of favors as he got several good character actors to participate like Dominic Cooper, Joey Slotnick, Frankie Faison, Bobby Canavale, Will Arnett, Timothy Hutton and Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie. Not every interview works equally well, but most have quite the interesting twist to them. In the Q&A, John Krasinski told us that doing the airport scene from the book in college was what decided him to pursue acting as a career. The problem with the film is that it feels very academic, like something you'd see at a college. I'm not saying the actors didn't show talent, but the whole left me rather cold, and didn't flow as a story, but just a more disjointed set of short story vignettes. One reviewer said it belonged as an off-Broadway play instead of a movie. It wasn't my favorite film, and I had been looking forward to it because of Krasinski. The theater was packed with other fans, but I don't expect to see this movie at your local multi-plex anytime soon. It did have some laughs. You can see three clips from the film, here.
Since we couldn't score tickets to Adventureland, we made reservations for a nice dinner out on Main Street. Checking in at the hostess desk, I realized the John Cleese was sitting at the table near the front window. The way I was seated, I looked his direction all night. Then when I asked where the ladies' room was, I was told that it was in the basement. "There's a private party down there, but just walk all the way to the back." I walked right by Billy Bob Thorton who was sitting at the end of his table. That's Sundance!
The last movie we saw was 211: Anna. It's a documentary about the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya who was murdered in a contract killing. The 211 in the title is because she was the 211th journalist to be killed in Russia. Her reporting on Chechnya and the truth about the way the Russian government handled the terrorist situations at the school in Beslan and the Moscow theater crisis. She was an amazingly brave woman. She had been the victim of intentional poisoning on one of her trips to Chechnya, and nothing would stop her reporting the truth. It got her killed. There was lots of archive footage of Anna, including an interview after the poisoning. She was asked if she would go back to Chechnya, and she just said "Of course!"
What was astonishing to me, was the average Russian citizens who were interviewed for the film who just shrugged at another journalist being murdered for reporting that painted Putin in a bad light. It was a sort of "what do you expect?" kind of attitude. The article from the Guardian today reported that the men accused of her murder had been acquitted. You don't appreciate what we have in our country with the free press until you see something like this.
I couldn't find a clip from 211: Anna, but found a clip from another film that shows Anna speaking about her fears in the first part:
We were walking home to our hotel after 1:00 in the morning after the documentary. In the parking lot of the hotel, we were passed by a tall man. After he passed us, my husband and I looked at each other, "That was Liam Neeson!" We went into the lobby and saw some of our friends, and told them who we just saw. A man with them we hadn't noticed said, "Let me guess, it was Liam Neeson." Our friends had been having beers with Liam and his co-star James Nesbitt after seeing Five Minutes of Heaven. What an end to a Sundance day!
You can see the rest of my pictures from Sundance here on Flickr.
I'm still playing catchup from my Sundance Trip, and I'm finally to Monday, our last full day at the festival. We saw four movies that day, and I want to highlight Adam in its own post because it was probably the movie I enjoyed the most at Sundance. I was certainly looking forward to it the most, and pestered my husband about how we had to get there early to get a good place in the ticket line. We even had a strategy and split up when they opened the doors so that we might have a better chance to get seats in front of the podium. At the Eccles theater, the front left section is reserved for the cast and crew of the movie, but the first three rows are free. If you see all the reserved signs, you might just turn back, but I ran up front and scored seats in the third row right in front, perfect for the Q&A. Hugh Dancy and Rose Byrne were seated four rows directly behind me during the screening! I was close enough to see the tears in director Max Mayer's eyes when the audience rose in a spontaneous standing ovation after the film. No other film we saw at Sundance had that kind of audience reaction.
Adam is a very sweet romance with a twist - the main character has Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism. Adam can mostly take care of himself, but he has problems in social situations and can't read the social cues that the rest of us can. He wants to connect, but it is very difficult for him. Max Mayer, the first time feature director, introduced the film by talking about how making a romantic movie is hard in modern times. What can keep the couple apart?
Rose Byrne plays Beth, a young woman who moves into a new apartment in New York. She's attracted to the cute guy in the apartment downstairs, but he's a little odd. He doesn't seem to notice when she's laden down with groceries, and he seems to avoid eye contact. After a very awkward exchange when he asks if she was sexually excited when they were at the park, he admits to her that he has Asperger's. She doesn't give up on him, and a touching romance develops. There's a side plot where Beth's father, played by Peter Gallagher of The O.C. is on trial for embezzlement. Amy Irving plays Beth's mother, and it was great to see her acting again. Frankie Faison plays Adam's friend.
Hugh Dancy is just excellent in this film. Dancy's Adam is sweet but not too sappy. "Aspies", as Adam calls them, can be very high functioning, but you can just see how lonely Adam is. He wants so badly to reach out to Beth, and he just doesn't know how. Beth and Adam's story seems very honest and real to me. One audience member got very emotional during the Q&A. Her grandson has Asperger's and she felt the movie was very true to what it's like, and she started crying she was so grateful for the way this was made.
Hugh Dancy has always been an emotional actor, and I think his portrayal of Adam is some of his best work ever. There was even buzz in some of the online reviews I read of this film speculating that he might get nominated for an Oscar next year. Fox Searchlight picked up the film right away, and hopefully it should get a fall release. This movie should work very well with mainstream audiences. Three and a half stars. Loved it.
The September Issue, R J Cutler's documentary about Vogue and Anna Wintour has been picked up by Roadside Attractions, who released Super Size Me. It should be in theaters in September of 2009.
"Because R.J. turns the process of assembling a high-profile magazine into a kind of suspense thriller, we think this film is such a great bet for theatrical," said Roadside co-president Howard Cohen. "Fashion lovers all want to know what the legendary Anna Wintour is really like."
Sunday morning, we drove out to Sundance Ranch, 45 minutes from Park City, for a screening of Reporter. It is just gorgeous up there in the mountains. Reporter was very moving, and we were fortunate to have an extensive Q&A with the director Eric Metzgar and producer, Steve Cantor. Read my review of Reporter here.
Sundance Ranch is a gorgeous ski resort, and they have one screening room there that screens films during the festival. During the summer, Sundance Ranch is where the Sundance Institute Labs are held. Aspiring young directors, screenwriters, film composers, and producers, come to Sundance Ranch and for a few intense weeks work on 4-6 scenes from their movie with small groups of their peers and creative advisors. The process is very intense, and real actors from LA are brought out to work out scenes from the movies with the young filmmakers. They rehearse the scenes, shoot them, and edit them under the mentorship of already accomplished directors, editors, and cinematographers. Money from the film festival goes towards supporting these labs. The Sundance Ranch buildings are covered with photographs from the labs, and you can see famous directors helping then young, but now famous filmmakers. It's also a kick seeing some of the actors who helped out at the labs years ago and later became famous, like James Gandolfini, for example.
We had an opportunity to hear Owen Glieberman, a film reviewer from Entertainment Weekly, speak, and he told us that his favorite film of the year is The Wrestler, but he thinks Slumdog Millionaire will win the Best Picture Oscar.
We then went to the premiere screening of I Love You Phillip Morris starring Jim Carrey, Ewan McGregor and Rodrigo Santoro (300).
I Love You, Phillip Morris is based on a true story of a gay romance between two men who meet in prison. Jim Carrey plays Steven Russell, a former cop who was married and had a daughter. He finally comes out as gay, vows to "never lie again" and becomes a con man. One of the funniest lines has Jim Carrey in Miami with his lover played by Rodrigo Santoro and his voice over is "This gay lifestyle is so expensive!" He turns to scamming and having multiple credit cards under different names to keep him and his lover in Rolexes.
After he's caught he tries to escape in several amusing ways. He meets Ewan McGregor's sweet Phillip Morris in prison, and it's love at first sight. Once they are both out of prison, Steven tells Phillip that he won't lie anymore, but cons his way into a CFO job where he embezzles his way to matching his and his Mercedes convertibles.
I don't have any problem with a gay romance film, and I do admire Jim Carrey for taking this risk. The man who rakes it in doing films like Liar, Liar doesn't have to do films like this, and he's trying to stretch. I thought Carrey was great as this incredible con man escape artist. The film is very in your face about their relationship, and the kissing and so on. That didn't bother me at all, and it was one of the more romantic films we saw at Sundance. If they film goes to wider release, they might want to skip one scene. Ewan McGregor and Jim Carrey are lying down in a boat, and Ewan gets up and spits over the side. I hope I would react with the same "Ewww" for a heterosexual romance depicted this way. That got more than a few gasps in our audience.
In the Q&A, Jim was asked how kissing Ewan was. Jim smiled and said "It was the highlight of my life. Just look at him!" Ewan McGregor talked about how weird it was to play a real contemporary person. He got to meet Phillip Morris in Arkansas and spend a couple days with him. The real Phillip Morris appears in one court room scene at the end of the movie. The real Steven Russell has a life sentence in prison in Texas. Jim Carrey said that he'd heard that Russell was getting a big kick out of a movie being made about him, but that he'll never be able to see it.
It's a very funny, and surprisingly touching film. You can't believe all these things happened, but it's a true story! Check out the trailer to see how crazy it is -- Steven Russell is a sociopath, but he really does love Phillip Morris. Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor as gay prison lovers may be a difficult sell to the Ace Ventura crowd who would probably have a heart attack at some of the scenes!
By Saturday morning, I was wondering where the celebrities were at Sundance. It had been a much lower wattage festival compared to the previous year, and we had heard of sponsors canceling or scaling back. My husband and I saw three movies on Saturday, starting with Brooklyn's Finest, which I'll tell you right out was not the finest movie I saw at the festival. What a big disappointment. The film is directed by Antoine Fuqua who directed the excellent Training Day, and the not so excellent King Arthur. Brooklyn's Finest has three different barely intersecting stories of three cops: Richard Gere is a suicidal beat cop about to retire, Ethan Hawke is a cop desperate to move out of his mold ridden house to save his sick pregnant wife, and Don Cheadle plays an undercover cop conflicted about his gangster friend played by Wesley Snipes. The script was written by a first time screenwriter, who entered a screenwriting contest to win a car. He didn't win, but somehow came to the attention of Fuqua. The film was shot right in the projects in Brooklyn, and evidently was the first film to do so.
I had lots of problems with this film. It is relentlessly dark, and I remember laughing at least a few times during Training Day. I didn't like Ethan Hawke's character, and thought he was stupid. His choices didn't make sense once his friend found out what he was planning to do. We're supposed to suspend disbelief and accept that Richard Gere's character can only get a Latina prostitute to have sex with him, even though he looks like Richard Gere with no paunch. (For the record, I respect Richard Gere for trying to stretch a bit beyond Nights at Rodanthe, but it was a stretch.) Don Cheadle's character I liked the most, and he and Ellen Barkin had a few explosive scenes. The ending of the movie was just awful, and I was left very disappointed.
Only Antoine Fuqua and the screenwriter attended our screening as it was in the morning. They got complaints from the audience over the violence and dark portrayal of the police, but they just replied that that would be a different film, and not the one they made. We heard that the film was picked up but, as a "work in progress." The first thing they can do is change the ending.
After walking around Main Street for a bit, we saw the awesome documentary It Might Get Loud, directed by Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth). Before the screening, we heard rumblings from the back of the theater. Jack White of The White Stripes had come to the screening! Davis Guggenheim was greeted as somewhat of a rock star director himself.
Davis Guggenheim introduced the film saying that it is a documentary about the electric guitar with three of the best artists of the electric guitar: Jimmy Page, The Edge of U2 and Jack White. Why these three? "Jimmy Hendrix wasn't available." Instead of the usual rock documentary about the rise of the band and the descent into drugs and so on, this film takes a different approach. He brought all three guitarists together in Nashville where they jammed and talked together for two days. He also interviewed each separately and they described how they got their first guitar, their start in music and how they write songs. It was fascinating, totally fun, and one of the best films we saw at the festival.
Jack White was convinced to come up for the Q&A, but unfortunately, he didn't bring his guitar. The film was just awesome, and I really learned a lot. I did not know Jimmy Page's history as a studio musician, and how he just couldn't take playing Muzak one more day! It Might Get Loud will be out in theaters probably in August of this year. Watch for it as it's not to be missed!
The last film we saw on Saturday, was Taking Chance starring Kevin Bacon. Kevin Bacon came for the Q&A at our screening, and I was able to tell the director Ross Katz how glad I was that I saw his excellent film. I didn't want to see another movie about Iraq, but I'm so glad I saw this one. Read my review here.
You can see all my pictures from Sundance 2009 here on Flickr.
We saw 12 movies in 5 days at Sundance this year. My husband says he's done for the whole year. Now that I've posted all my photos on Flickr, I'll go through the whole list of movies and give you a few thoughts on each.
We flew in on Thursday, and saw the opening film of the festival, Mary and Max, an animated film by the same team that won an Oscar for their animated short Harvie Krumpet. Mary and Max is the story of two improbable pen pals, or pen friends, a little girl in Australia (Toni Collette) and a slightly off older Jewish man in New York (voiced by Phillip Seymour Hoffman). Adam Elliot, the writer director introduced the film and told us he wrote the story about pen friends because of his own pen friend that he's had for many years, and never met. The movie is in the claymation animation technique used in Wallace and Gromit. It took them a whole day to do 5 seconds of film, and the whole film took 5 years. I really wish the director hadn't mentioned that all the water in the film is sexual lubricant. I couldn't stop thinking of that looking at every fishbowl, toilet flush and rain drop!
The film is quite odd, and I'm not really sure what audience it is aimed at. I'm not going to take my kids to a movie where the character Max says, after talking about his job in a condom factory, "By the way, I've never used a condom." I also have major issues with the ending. It was an interesting choice to open the festival and the first animated film to do so, but no contest to the excellent In Bruges that opened the festival last year. None of the voice talent were there at the premiere, and that was a contrast to all the stars we saw last year at In Bruges.
On Friday, we saw two films. The first was No Impact Man, a documentary about Colin Beavan and his wife Michelle Conlin and their experiment over the course of a year to have no impact on the environment while living in an apartment in New York City with a toddler. Colin Beavan's blog, No Impact Man chronicled each step and phase, from starting to only eat locally within 250 miles of their house all the way to turning off their electricity and powering his laptop with a solar panel! His goal was to write a book about the experience, and that book will come out sometime in 2009. Some friends of theirs offered to film a documentary about the whole year. The movie is really about Colin's relationship with his wife, and how they negotiate each phase of his plan and struggle with it. His wife is a Prada loving, Starbucks addicted writer for Business Week, and she really was the audience's entry into this film. Just watching her face as she says, "No electricity. Hmmmm." They said in the Q&A that a year of no TV made them better parents and a closer family.
Colin stated that he didn't expect everyone to be able to follow what their family did, but to think about how we are impacting the environment with our choices. My husband gave me a look when I said I'd been thinking about a worm compost box for our kitchen scraps. After watching the Beavan's fly infestation from theirs, I said, not in the house, maybe the garage.
Friday night we went in to Salt Lake City for the gala night showing of The September Issue. The documentary follows Anna Wintour and her editors at Vogue as they put together the most important issue of the year, the September issue. It was like the real life Devil Wears Prada. I was most interested in Vogue's creative director, Grace Coddington, who started at Vogue the same day as Anna Wintour, 30 years ago. The movie shows the tension between these old friends and rivals and the creative process and decisions that go into the magazine. It was really fascinating. Even my husband was more interested in the film than he thought he would be. You get some insight into the icy Anna Wintour and how her father was a famous newspaper publisher in England and her brother the political editor of The Guardian. She is the most powerful woman in fashion, and says of her family that they "are amused" by her career. I caught up with R J Culter, the director at the party after the screening, and was glad to be able to tell him in person how much I enjoyed his film. I think it's likely to come to theaters later this year.
Here's a cool little clip from the Sundance Channel about director R J Cutler and the making of the film:
This morning was strange. I was dozing through my alarm clock blasting NPR and my husband said, "Listen to this! It's that guy from the movie!" Rebel leader Laurent Nkunda had been arrested near the Congo Rwanda border. A week ago that name would have had no meaning for me, and I would have had no interest in that region. I was pyschically numbed hearing about stories from Africa. But Sunday at Sundance Ranch, I saw the documentary Reporter about the New York Times Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof. It was an excellent film and very moving.
The documentary is mostly about a trip that Kristof took to Rwanda and Congo with two young people. He felt that he was getting desensitized to these tragic stories, and held a contest to bring a young person with him to Africa. A young medical student and a teacher came with him and blogged about their experiences on the NY Times website. During the trip, they had a terrifying visit with Nkunda at his base in the jungle. The strange thing is that Nkunda was so charming, even though thousands of people have been killed or raped because of his men. It was like Last King of Scotland and Whitaker's portrayal of Idi Amin. That same charm of the sociopath. Nkunda even had grace said before their meal, and called himself a pastor. It was surreal, and you were afraid as Kristof dared to ask him questions like "Why do you think people call you a war lord?" And what do you do when a war lord invites you to stay for dinner?
Nicholas Kristof almost single handedly brought the genocide in Darfur to our attention. Mia Farrow became involved in the Darfur crisis because of Kristof's columns. He tries to tell the story of one individual in his columns to make you care about what is happening in these far away places. Kristof in the film talked about the research that shows if you are shown a picture of one African suffering child you will be more likely to donate more than if you are shown a picture with 2 children. It only decreases the more suffering children you see in the picture. Humans are wired to become psychically numb when the numbers become statistics. Kristof tries to break through that in his columns, and so does Eric Daniel Metzgar, the director of this documentary. After the screening, the producer and director even handed out buttons that were the red circle and line through the words "Psychic Numbing".
Metzgar filmed this himself in Congo following Kristof on his journey. He edited the film, as well. It is amazingly brave film making, and a film I urge everyone to see. Ben Affleck is an executive producer, and the film will be seen on HBO later this summer, I believe.
My husband and I attended Sundance as part of a package, and one of the films they picked for us was Taking Chance with Kevin Bacon. I read the description, and frankly I wasn't looking forward to it because I just didn't want to see another movie about the Iraq war. This film ended up being the film that moved me the most out of all 12 films we saw at the festival. This is a movie that everyone should see.
Taking Chance is based on the true story of Lt. Col. Mike Strobl, who volunteered to escort the body of Marine Chance Phelps who died in Iraq. You'd think this would be the most depressing film, but seeing all the kindnesses along the way was so heartwarming. The military have not allowed any pictures of the flag draped coffins, and the public has no idea all the care each fallen soldier is given, and how they are escorted every step of the way home to their families. At least I didn't know, and I was very glad to learn about it.
You don't see the Chance Phelp's face until the very end when they show home video of him. That's when I really lost it. I had been tearing up before, but I started sobbing then. It was cathartic. I feel like I have been numbed by all the reports from Iraq: another roadside bomb, the casualty totals, a constant drip, drip of bad news that ceased to catch my attention. This film made me face the human cost. The director Ross Katz said that he wanted Chance Phelps to be like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier -- he is every life lost over there.
We got to talk to Lt. Col. Strobl (maroon sweater on right) after the film, and he told us how it came to be that HBO approached him about making the film. He had to write a report when he returned from his escort duty. He thought some of his fellow Marines might be interested in what it was like, so he emailed it to 8 friends. They then emailed it to 10 of their friends and it became a viral sensation on the internet. He realized how far it had gone when people started sending it back to him! Someone at HBO saw the email story, and approached him about making a film out of the story.
Kevin Bacon just has that carriage of a Marine. This is the third one he's played, including his role in the recent Frost/Nixon. He's not given much dialog and he's just fantastic, as he usually is. We were lucky that he came to the Q&A at our screening. Ross Katz has been a producer on films like Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette, and Taking Chance is his directorial debut, and he co-wrote the screenplay with Mike Strobl. HBO will air this film starting Feb. 21st. Trust me. You need to see this film. Three and a half stars and a very strong recommendation. I went up and thanked the director and Mike Strobl for making this film as it's a true tribute to Chance Phelps and every other fallen soldier.
Overall, I've not been super excited by the films I've seen at Sundance, until yesterday when we saw two excellent films.
After Antione Fuqua's (Training Day) Brooklyn's Finest in the morning, which was relentlessly dark, it was a breath of fresh air to see the documentary It Might Get Loud. The documentary is directed by Davis Guggenheim, who also directed An Inconvenient Truth. It Might Get Loud is an ode to the electric guitar and three masters of it: Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, The Edge of U2 and Jack White of The White Stripes. There was a stir right before the film, and Jack White came in for the screening. This documentary brings all three together for two days and they talk and jam together. The film also explores each musician's life -- how they got into music, buying their first guitar, and how they write songs. It was just awesome. It will be out in theaters probably in August of this year. Watch for it as it's not to be missed!
I'll tell you about Taking Chance in my next post, but I've got to run to another screening. Taking Chance may be the best film I've seen here, and certainly the most moving.
Can't embed this unfortunately, but if you want a taste of how this Sundance film festival is different than those in the past, watch the NY Times Carbetbagger.
This was all filmed on Thursday, and we did see more people in town on Saturday when we walked around Main Street. But still, it feels different than last year, more toned down, and fewer stars that I've seen.
Robert Redford opened the 25th Sundance Film Festival with a celebration of the changes coming next week in our country. The beret's a nice look.
Mary and Max, a claymation animated film from Australia, was the opening film of the festival. The star wattage was way down from last year, which had Colin Farrell's In Bruges as the first film. The only recognizable star we saw was Kevin Sorbo (Hercules, Hercules!) a couple rows back from us. None of the voice actors came to the showing of the film (Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Toni Colette and Eric Bana).
We'll see what tomorrow brings. We got most of the films I wanted for Monday except for Kristen Stewart's new film Adventureland, which was sold out.
I'm headed to Park City, Utah tomorrow and the 25th Sundance Film Festival. I hope to be able to post while I'm there, some via cellphone. We're scheduled to see Mary and Max, which opens the festival, No Impact Man, I Love You Phillip Morris, The September Issue, Taking Chance, The Reporter and have requests in for more.
Park City will be warmer than the weather I'm leaving in Chicago!
I love movies and the Oscars are my Super Bowl. I am also a news and political junkie. This blog is eclectic, as I come across all sort of interesting things as I web surf. I post news about upcoming films and my own movie reviews.
.jpg)
