One of my favorite Sundance Film Festival movies has gotten a name change and a May 31 release date, and you should see it for a lot of reasons, the primary one being 18-year-old Moises Arias’ breakout performance. He’s the kid dancing on the pipe in this teaser trailer for The Kings of Summer — previously Toy’s House — and he had me and a lot of other audience members laughing out loud at the Park City screening I saw in January.
Arias plays Biaggio, one of three kids who escape their homes and frustrating families for a makeshift house they build from scavenged materials in a secluded forest in their hometown. He’s not the star of Jordan Vogt-Roberts coming-of-age comedy — he’s actually the extremely odd classmate who invites himself along for the adventure — but he gets a lot of the best laughs. That has a lot to do with Arias’memorable face and his deer-in-the-headlights stare, which he uses to great advantage.
I hope we’re going to be seeing a lot more of this kid, who’s also playing Bonzo in one of the fall’s hotly anticipated films, Gavin Hood’s adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s Hugo Award-winning science-fiction novel, Ender’s Game.
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I missed Stoker at the Sundance Film Festival, where the buzz was decidedly mixed, but based on the first GIF posted the below the jump, Chan-wook Park’s thriller looks like it may be the second movie of that last year that stars Nicole Kidman and features a weird urination scene. Unlike The Paperboy, in which Kidman pees on the face of Zac Efron to treat him for a jellyfish sting, Mia Wasikowska appears to be the one shaking the dew off her lily, so to speak. That’s an educated guess, though because all that’s seen in the GIF are a pair of saddle shoes and a puddle.
Fox Searchlight is posting these clips — and correspondence depicting memorable lines from the movie — at letterstoindia.com, (Wasikowska plays India Stoker in the movie, and the website helps establish why, as the trailer shows, she’s going to be a barrel of fun by the time she’s an adult. Here are some of the more unusual GIFs from the site:
I don’t see any jellyfish there, do you? And here’s the devil-in-training making a snow angel on her bed:
And here, Wasikowska manages to even chew her food with smoldering malevolence:
Put those all together, read the postcards and letters on the site, and you won’t be surprised when you see young India is shouldering a sniper rifle in this trailer.
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Ashton Kutcher not only took on Steve Jobs’ persona as a tech magnate, he also adopted the late Apple founder’s alleged fruitarian diet in preparation for the role, which sent him to the hospital, the actor revealed following the premiere of jOBS at the Sundance Film Festival over the weekend.
[Related: SUNDANCE WINNERS: 'Fruitvale' & 'Blood Brother' WIN Top Prizes x 2]
Often considered a subset of veganism, fruitarianism is a diet that consists of fruit, nuts and seeds, solely without animal products, vegetables and grains. Motivations for fruitarianism range from ethical, health, religious and environmental or other reasons.
“First of all, the fruitarian diet can lead to, like, severe issues,” Kutcher told USA Today. “I went to the hospital like two days before we started shooting the movie. I was like doubled over in pain. My pancreas levels were completely out of whack. It was really terrifying…considering everything.” Jobs died of pancreatic cancer in October 2011.
Kutcher said he spent hundreds of hours going over tapes of Jobs hoping to master his mannerisms and hunched walk. The actor, who has a massive Twitter following, said he felt close to the late magnate in part because they share an affinity for the “tech space.”
“He’s a guy that failed and got back on the horse,” noted Kutcher. “I think we can all sort of relate to that in some place in our life where we are moving forward with something and we fall down. You have to have the guts to get back up and go again. I think I share that as well.”
jOBS opens with the period Steve Jobs founded Apple in a garage in Palo Alto, California up to when he launched the iPod in 2001.…
Full Story »Sebastián Silva’s Crystal Fairy was the first film I caught at the Sundance Film Festival, and by the time I left Park City, I still hadn’t seen a performance that measured up to Gaby Hoffmann’s stunning, ego-free portrayal of that movie’s title character. Hoffmann first appears onscreen dancing with goofy abandon and spouting New Agey talk that leave little doubt she will be the butt of the movie’s jokes for the next hour and a half. But then she steals the show by literally and emotionally stripping herself naked over the course of the film, revealing her character to be much more complex, damaged and vulnerable than those first scenes suggest.
At the film’s Sundance premiere, Silva said that his movie, which is based on a real-life encounter, is “about the birth of compassion in someone’s life.” Although it’s actor Michael Cera, in the lead male role, who undergoes that emotional transformation, Hoffmann plays the part of catalyst with such heartbreaking authenticity that I couldn’t help but take that roller-coaster ride, too.
Hoffmann’s performance is all the more remarkable when you consider that Crystal Fairy was almost entirely improvised and shot in 12 days in Chile while Silva was waiting for production to start on another movie he brought to Sundance, Magic Magic.
A New York native, Hoffmann, 31, has quite a bit of experience with iconoclastic personalities. She is the daughter of Warhol superstar Viva and grew up in Manhattan’s fabled Chelsea Hotel. In the interview below, she talks about the non-conformist surroundings of her childhood, filming Crystal Fairy while tripping on mescaline, and how her experience on the set reaffirmed her commitment to acting after 10 years of soul-searching, following performances in Field of Dreams, Full Story »
Sebastián Silva’s Crystal Fairy was the first film I caught at the Sundance Film Festival, and by the time I left Park City, I still hadn’t seen a performance that measured up to Gaby Hoffmann’s stunning, ego-free portrayal of that movie’s title character. Hoffmann first appears onscreen dancing with goofy abandon and spouting New Agey talk that leave little doubt she will be the butt of the movie’s jokes for the next hour and a half. But then she steals the show by literally and emotionally stripping herself naked over the course of the film, revealing her character to be much more complex, damaged and vulnerable than those first scenes suggest.
At the film’s Sundance premiere, Silva said that his movie, which is based on a real-life encounter, is “about the birth of compassion in someone’s life.” Although it’s actor Michael Cera, in the lead male role, who undergoes that emotional transformation, Hoffmann plays the part of catalyst with such heartbreaking authenticity that I couldn’t help but take that roller-coaster ride, too.
Hoffmann’s performance is all the more remarkable when you consider that Crystal Fairy was almost entirely improvised and shot in 12 days in Chile while Silva was waiting for production to start on another movie he brought to Sundance, Magic Magic.
A New York native, Hoffmann, 31, has quite a bit of experience with iconoclastic personalities. She is the daughter of Warhol superstar Viva and grew up in Manhattan’s fabled Chelsea Hotel. In the interview below, she talks about the non-conformist surroundings of her childhood, filming Crystal Fairy while tripping on mescaline, and how her experience on the set reaffirmed her commitment to acting after 10 years of soul-searching, following performances in Field of Dreams, Full Story »
The Sundance Film Festival is continues through the weekend. In the lead-up to the awards Saturday, M.L. continues its series profiling this year’s filmmakers. Beginning last week Movieline posted details about this year’s U.S. and World Competition and NEXT films and filmmakers in their own words. In today’s round Dawn Porter (Gideon’s Army), Zhao Qi (Fallen City), Shaka King (Newlyweeds), Daniel Hoesl (Soldate Jeannette) and Jacek Borcuch (Lasting preview their films.
[Related: WATCH: Get To Know 5 Sundance Film Festival Filmmakers (And Their Films) AND SUNDANCE: Directors Tease 'Dirty Wars,' 'Fire In The Blood,' 'God Loves Uganda,' 'A Teacher,' 'Narco Cultura']
Gideon’s Army by Director Dawn Porter [U.S. Documentary Competition]
Synopsis:
In 1963, the landmark Supreme Court decision Gideon v. Wainwright guaranteed all defendants facing imprisonment the right to a lawyer. Now, every year millions of Americans facing trial rely on fewer than 15,000 public defenders, and the country’s justice system hangs in the balance. Gideon’s Army confronts this crisis head-on, tracking a group of young southern public defenders hell-bent on protecting the sanctity of human liberty.
Taut, visceral filmmaking plunges us into the unbelievably demanding lives of three fledgling public defenders in Georgia and Mississippi. Not only are they juggling hundreds of cases independently, but their offices don’t have adequate resources, and their salaries barely cover personal expenses—including six-figure law-school debts.
As all three lawyers harness ingenuity, perseverance, and adrenaline to fight for their indigent clients, we wonder: How long can they keep working in a constant state of emergency? Will they find the moral support to sustain this higher calling? And if not, what happens to our democracy? [Courtesy of Sundance Film Festival]
Responses by Director Dawn Porter
The Gideon’s Army quick pitch:
…
Shia LaBeouf appears to be going full-tilt method acting of late. First, the actor said last summer that he was going “all the way” in Danish director Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, and at the Sundance Film Festival, currently underway, he said he dropped acid while working on The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman.
[Related: Shia LaBeouf Ready To Perform Sex 'For Real' In Lars Von Trier's Nymphomaniac?]
LaBeouf said at the festival that he took the hallucinogen, not because he “wanted to be on drugs,” but to relate to his character.
The Sundance debut revolves around a young man (LaBeouf) who travels to Romania after the death of his mother (Melissa Leo) and falls for a dangerous young woman, played by Evan Rachel Wood. During one sequence in the film, LaBeouf’s character takes L.S.D.
“I’d never done acid before. I remember sending Evan tapes. I remember trying to conjure this and sending tapes. And Evan being like, ‘That’s good, but that’s not but, that is,” he told MTV News. “You reach out to friends and gauge where you’re at. I was sending tapes around and I’d get 50 percents from people and that just starts creeping me out. I was getting really nervous toward the end. Not ’cause I wanted to be on drugs — I’m not trying to mess with the set or anything like that. It’s really just fear that propels people.”
The trip apparently took place last August. He told USA Today at the time he dropped acid for The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman in order to “immerse himself in the character.”
“What I know of acting, Sean Penn actually strapped up to that [electric] chair in Dead Man Walking,” he told the paper. “These are the guys I look up to.”
[Source: Huffington Post]
Chalk this up as being barely a surprise. A study recently found that, of the 250 top-grossing Hollywood films, only 9% of the directors were women in 2012. And that is actually an increase from 4% in 2011. The study comes out as indie producers announced the launch of a new production company at the Sundance Film Festival: Tangerine Entertainment, which will focus on female directors and “strong roles for women.”
The study, by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, said that women made up 18% of all directors, executive producers, writers, cinematographers and editors, BBC reports.
The study found that women either gravitated or were more welcomed in documentary, drama and animated film genres. The organization, which has surveyed the industry for over a decade, said that female producers have comprised about 25% of the total over the past two years, while female writers rose from a low of 10% in 2006 to 15% today. About 20 – 21% of editors have been female over the past decade and cinematographers have been about 2 – 4% female.
The independent realm has been kinder to women filmmakers, according to a study by the Sundance Institute. Of 820 narrative and documentaries screened over the past decade at the Sundance Film Festival, women represented just under 30% of the total.
Hoping to narrow the gap, Tangerine Entertainment, launched by veteran indie producers Anne Hubbell and Amy Hobby, will work with female directors in all genres. Its aim is to increase “the presence of smart, complex women both behind and in front of the camera. Tangerine will create commercially viable, character-driven content and a strong brand known for superior quality without high costs.”
“Raising awareness for and cultivating community around…
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