The 82nd Academy Awards were a referendum on what Oscar voters value, versus what moviegoers are willing to pay for.
The headline will be Kathryn Bigelow's stunning, groundbreaking achievement as the first woman to win Best Picture. But considering the Academy's concerted effort to expand the audience for this year's awards by opening up the Best Picture category to 10 nominees, maybe this broken record is more significant: The Hurt Locker is the lowest grossing movie in decades (possibly ever, if adjusted for inflation) to win Best Picture. 
Director Kathryn Bigelow accepts her Oscar for The Hurt Locker
Two nights before the Oscars, I attended the Independent Spirit Awards, a less formal ceremony designed to honor lesser-known films, thereby bolstering the independent film community in the face of the Academy's total indifference to non-studio film. As the old joke goes, those who win at the Spirits are doomed to lose the same weekend at the Oscars. This year, it didn't quite go that way: winners at both events included Jeff Bridges, Mo'Nique and, maybe most surprisingly, Precious screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher. 
The Hurt Locker
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The day before the Sundance Film Festival. I blogged about five films I was looking forward to at the festival. As so often happens at film festival overloaded with premieres, most of the films I was excited to see failed to live up to my expectations, while a number of titles for which I had zero expectations ended up making a much better impression. After the jump, check out the five films that I left Sundance unable to shut up about.
At its bursting public screening on Thursday night, Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman's social networking-gone-wrong documentary Catfish was described by Sundance programmer Kim Yutani as "a film you really cannot talk to another person in depth about unless both parties have seen the film."
I won't be the asshole and spoil Catfish's twists here, but the publicity strategy of protecting the film's "secret" is frustrating. It gives the impression that the major thing going for Catfish is the element of surprise, when in fact, the craft of this film is uncommonly impressive. You could remove the mystery quotient altogether and Catfish would remain the rare ultra-low-budget personal hybrid documentary with an extraordinary visual logic, and an even more extraordinary sense of compassion for its subjects. Even--especially--when its subjects take a turn for the superweird.
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It sure is fun to watch decently-written comic dialogue performed by movie stars.
That was the thought that popped into my head about ten minutes in to The Kids Are Alright, the Lisa Cholodenko film that touched off a bidding war here and was eventually purchased by Focus Features. It was the same thought that popped into my head about five minutes into It's Complicated, Nancy Meyers' latest romcom for ladies "of a certain age" to love, and for film critics to poop on. Between Hollywood's tentpole mania and the fall of most of the studio-dependent labels willing and able to make a film like this, we're all so starved for the pleasures of an old-fashioned, glossy grown-up movie that here at Sundance, Kids was greeted like a revelation. But even if we're all okay with base competency being something to celebrate, Cholodenko's film is less worthy of such accolades than the latest trifle from the much-despised Meyers. It's less entertaining. It's less accurate as a portrait of adult sexuality. It's less honest. It's less than.
By Karina Longworth in
Festivals, Interviews
Thursday, Jan. 28 2010 @ 9:49AM
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In 1991, college freshman Robin Hessman traveled to what was then called Leningrad, to spend a semester abroad in a country that had fascinated her since childhood. She ended up living in Russia for the bulk of the 90s, eventually produced the country's version of Sesame Street. Her Sundance competition documentary My Perestroika chronicles not her own experience as an expat during the barely-post Cold War era, but the experience of five thirtysomething Russians who attended Soviet school together, and are now living very different lives in a post-Communist world for which they had no preparation.
The great hallmark of Hessman's film is its intimacy; her subjects, ranging from husband and wife school teachers to a punk-turned-subway busker to an international businessman, casually tell their own stories over vodka and home movies, with no top-down narration or intervention. I interviewed Hessman here at Sundance, and following the form of the film, below the jump she tells her own story of coming to make a film about the "Russian Pepsi generation."
Tags: documentary, interview, my perestroika, putin, robin hessman, russia, russian censorship, soviet, ussr
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Before this festival actually began, Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine was pegged as one of the "hot" acquisition titles of 2010. And then, as so often happens here, the film screened, and the proverbial word on the street changed. Valentine slipped from the center to the margin of the general sales conversation, not because it disappointed--in fact, it's probably the most passionately loved film of the festival amongst the cadre of journalists and indie industry persons with whom I spend my evenings drinking--but even those who love it admit that there's no confusing Blue Valentine with an easy sell, and in fact, there may be no way to sell the film at all at a lower altitude. The initial buzz must have come from an ignorant extrapolation of what little was known about the movie. Blue Valentine may be a flashback-heavy, tear-jerking romance starring Ryan Gosling, but it's sure as shit not The Notebook.
Wednesday, Jan. 27 2010 @ 9:18AM
In today's print edition of the Village Voice (and tomorrow's edition of the LA Weekly), you'll find a story I wrote on Daddy Long Legs, the second feature by filmmaking brothers Josh and Benny Safdie, which premieres at Sundance this week and is now available for rental on cable VOD. The film, starring Ronald Bronstein (the director of Frownland) and Frey and Sage Ranaldo (sons of Sonic Youth guitarist Lee), is based on the Safdie brothers' own childhood memories of their father, who at one point kidnapped the boys and moved them from Manhattan to Queens. In a crazy alternative marketing move for the indie film, a Daddy producer landed the brothers a spot on CNN's Campbell Brown show talking about familial kidnapping. Watch that above, and find out how you can watch the film on your cable system here.
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Mark Duplass is the Big Man on Campus of Sundance 2010. The actor (Hannah Takes the Stairs, The League on FX) and director (he collaborated with brother Jay on features The Puffy Chair and Baghead, as well as countless shorts) produced three narrative features premiering here, including NEXT titles Bass Ackwards and The Freebie (directed by Duplass' League co-star and wife, Katie Aselton) and Lovers of Hate, a triumph of uncomfortable comedy competing for the US Dramatic jury prize.
All of which pales in significance to Cyrus, the Mark and Jay's third full length-directorial effort, and a powerful symbol of Sundance as a festival at a crossroads. Produced and soon to be distributed by Fox Searchlight (the studio that brought you Little Miss Sunshine and Juno), Cyrus' very existence validates both Sundance for "discovering" the Duplasses and supporting their work for nearly a decade, as well as the mumblecore style that the brothers' films helped to popularize. In pushing the usual Duplass style into the realm of the male bonding/battle comedy most often associated with Judd Apatow, Cyrus feels like a scientific experiment: what happens when a cinema developed within economic limitations is given the new limitation of guaranteed dissemination into the mainstream?
Tuesday, Jan. 26 2010 @ 5:36PM
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Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg have made a name for themselves making documentaries (The Trials of Daryl Hunt, The Devil Came on Horseback, The End of America) that could be considered works of activism, in which charismatic victims of and witnesses to injustice offer evidence intended to raise not just the viewer's consciousness, but their ire. The pair thus did not seem like the obvious choice to tell the story of Joan Molinsky Rosenberg, the nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn better known as foul-mouthed comedienne/plastic surgery addict Joan Rivers.
Amazingly, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work might be best understood as one of a piece with Stern and Sundberg's activist work. If the entertainment industry ain't exactly Darfur, it still hasn't been an easy road for Rivers, whose boundary-breaking comic creativity will likely be listed low in her obituary, to make room for discussion of her obsession with reinvention. Stern and Sundberg sympathize with the star's plight, and provide an excellent platform for her gut-busting politically incorrect comedy to speak for itself.
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"Jail fucking bait!" exclaims record producer Kim Fowley (Michael Shannon) upon learning his new find, blonde bad girl Cherrie Currie (Dakota Fanning), is only 15. "Jack fucking pot!"
This line got a huge laugh at last night's Sundance premiere of rock biopic Runaways. It sums up a certain kind of Hollywood thinking, and is simultaneously a fine example of why this crowd-pleaser would never be produced by a major studio (it will be released by Apparition, Bob Berney's newish indie distributor).
Underage girls are big business -- this is why Fanning and Stewart, both involved with the Twilight franchise, are considered bankable names -- but at the same time, media made for the teen girl market almost never acknowledges the uglier truth of their budding desires. The first image in Runaways is of a splatter of red menstrual blood on pavement, and from there on out, writer/director Floria Sigismondi concentrates on the power, beauty and tragedy of the teen girl libido unleashed. Runaways tells us that fifteen year old girls want to do nothing but get fucked up and fuck, and have a completely rational hatred for everyone except for the few people they desperately want to get fucked up with and fuck. Not only that, but the film has an uncommon interest in the commodity value of teen sexuality, and the gray area between empowerment and exploitation.
