The News: New Yorkers Cash In at Sundance
(L-R) Misty Upham and Melissa Leo in Frozen River, the latest Sundance acquisition from New York (Photo: Sundance Film Festival)By S.T. VanAirsdale
Some of today's movie news of note from around New York:
--It's not just the temperatures in Park City that settled below freezing this week: The market at the Sundance Film Festival is the coldest it's been in years. I'll leave it to the experts (or at least to people who are there; SpoutBlog has a chart of what's sold thus far) to determine why, but proportionately speaking, anyhow, New York filmmakers have fared predictably well: Courtney Hunt's drama Frozen River went to Sony Classics overnight, and both the Chuck Palahniuk adaptation Choke and Nanette Burstein's doc American Teen made high-profile sales to Fox Searchlight and Paramount Vantage, respectively. You can read The Reeler's pre-Sundance interviews with Hunt and Burstein here and here; we are not cool enough for Clark Gregg's publicist, but join me on the high road anyway as I point you to his brief interview with the Sundance Channel.
--Reviewing Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden's Sugar for IFC, Alison Willmore levies a compliment or a criticism, I can't decide: "The rare missteps in Sugar ... come as a bit of a relief, a reminder that they're not yet Brooklyn's secular answer to the Dardennes." Certainly, this news will relieve no one more than it will Fleck and Boden.
--David Edelstein may not have started the Juno backlash with his latest entry at The Projectionist, but he is now its unofficial godfather: "Diablo Cody might be one doodle that can’t be undid." Ouch.
-- Reeler contributor Vadim Rizov went to a packed Anthology Film Archives last Friday to check out Apitchatpong Weerasethakul's (a/k/a Joe) experimental shorts with the man himself in attendance. Apparently they were good, but did I miss the part where Joe speaks? Did anyone take notes? Pictures? Must I do everything around here? Come on, Tisch Film Review, get it together.
Posted at January 24, 2008 10:28 AM
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Comments (5)
Tisch? Getting it together?
Stu, you're overdue for a stand-up gig at Comix.
Posted by jlichman | January 24, 2008 11:43 AM
No, *I* missed the part where Joe speaks — his English was tentative, slow and I just wanted to get the hell out and back to the bars. Nor did I have any idea that I'd be blogging/writing about it; I certainly wasn't getting paid to.
Although if I'm really the only one who did, that's really, really sad.
Posted by vadim | January 24, 2008 11:50 AM
Very cool, Vadim. Posterity will now show that you wanted to get "back to the bars" while one of the world's most visionary young filmmakers was mixing it up downtown. I guess I should have made that my eighth event of the day after all.
More importantly: Were you getting paid to drink? I hope it was worth it.
Posted by STV | January 24, 2008 12:12 PM
wait, what? we can be paid to drink now?
fuck, i never should've left being unemployed.
Posted by jlichman | January 24, 2008 1:14 PM
Just to clarify, the TFR website is not really meant to be - or be taken as - a film journalism site. The format is bloggier than that, and we're more interested in commentary/opinion pieces than hard journalism. I only point this out because I think it clarifies the context from which Vadim's piece was produced. Plus, there are far too many good sites already that do film journalism better than we could hope to compete with - like this one right here, or many of the sites Greencine links to regularly.
Posted by Zach Wigon | January 24, 2008 11:36 PM