GreenCine Daily: Park City, 1/20.

January 20, 2007

Park City, 1/20.

"[I]ndie movies are getting as predictable as Hollywood's," writes Time's Richard Corliss. "Sundance movies have devolved into a genre.... The program is heavy with earnest studies of emotional accommodation. This isn't a supple form, and now it's become formula - creaky and calcified through endless repetition. What's saddest is that the ersatz indie drove out the previously dominant alternative to Hollywood: the foreign film."

"The effect of the Sundance endorsement is what nobody really wants to talk about," notes John Anderson in the Guardian. "Although many films do benefit from exposure at the festival - Half Nelson and Little Miss Sunshine, both mentioned as possible Oscar contenders this year, came out of last year's event - distributors and sales reps, in moments of candour, will say that selling a film perceived as a Sundance film can be tough. Even filmmakers admit it."

Eric D Snider's keeping a Sundance diary at Hollywood Bitchslap.

For the Toronto Star, Geoff Pevere offers "a highly impressionistic, sight-unseen selection of some of the things at Sundance 2007 that look promising or that are boasting big buzz appeal." Via Movie City News, which has a pretty hopping "Sundance 07" section.

There's now enough in the Los Angeles Times special Sundance section to make it worth mentioning. Fresh:

Robin Abcarian's backgrounder on Girl 27.

John Horn's talk with Anthony Hopkins about Slipstream.
And Kenneth Turan's talk with Sarah Polley about Away With Her.

In case you haven't heard, David M Halbfinger explains why Hounddog "has already won attention far out of proportion to its budget of less than $4 million." Dakota Fanning, "for her part, says she is mystified by the outcry. Anyone who sees the film, she said on Monday in her first interview on the subject, would understand that the rape scene wasn't the point of the movie."

Related: Robin Abcarian's backgrounder in the LAT: "'I have to say I have started to feel very sorry for these people who are out to silence this,' said [Deborah] Kampmeier, who wrote, produced and directed the film. 'These are really wounded people, just like the characters in the film.'"

Back in the New York Times: "All films arrive at Sundance with a back story, but none have the poignancy of Waitress," writes David Carr, who talks with first-time producer Michael Roiff, the film's star, Keri Russell , and friends of director Adrienne Shelly, murdered in November.