Slouching towards Park City, 1/13.

Sylviane Gold profiles Martin McDonagh, whose In Bruges opens Sundance on Thursday: "The hit-man-on-the-lam scenario may be shopworn, and so are the odd-couple and fish-out-of-water devices. But fans of Mr McDonagh's theater work, set mostly in the Irish countryside from which his parents had emigrated, know that he creates stock situations only to subvert them. 'It's the anarchist in me,' he said. Don't expect anything familiar."

Last year, "the sellers made out like bandits, clocking astronomical sales of $53 million on 20 titles," writes Variety's Anne Thompson. "Given paltry box office grosses of $34 million on the 14 titles that did get released, you'd think that buyers would face this year's annual mating dance in 2008 with some trepidation. Certainly the price for documentaries, horror pics and dour Iraq downers will likely drop. But history may repeat itself."

And from her blog, she points to Lauren AE Schuker's overview of this year's offerings in the Wall Street Journal.

"Come Thursday, about 45,000 parka-wearing people will flock to this tiny, former mining town nestled in the Wasatch mountains," writes Monica Corcoran in the Los Angeles Times. "But according to the visitors bureau, there are only 23,000 "pillows" for all those well-coiffed heads. And these lopsided lodging logistics cause more confusion and headaches than the altitude sickness."

IndieWIRE carries on interviewing directors with films at the festival.

Back in the New York Times, Jennifer V Hughes meets the makers of The Linguists, screening in the noncompetitive Spectrum: Documentary Spotlight. The film "tells the story of [Gregory DS] Anderson, the director of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, and K David Harrison, a linguist at Swarthmore College, and their quest to document ancestral languages like Chulym in Siberia and Sora in India."

At the AV Club, Amelie Gillette offers some advice on how to "Sundance-ify Your Movie."

Posted by dwhudson at January 13, 2008 1:55 PM