Newsletter: Indie Focus: The movies (and the snow) keep on keepin’ on at Sundance
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen, and welcome to another special mid-week Sundance edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
Sundance this year has felt particularly eventful, overlapping with the inauguration, worldwide women’s protest and the Oscar nominations. (Our critics Kenneth Turan and Justin Chang weighed in from Park City on the Oscar noms.)
For all of the L.A. Times Sundance coverage, go to latimes.com/sundance. Sporting their finest winter looks are writers Chang, Amy Kaufman, Turan, Jen Yamato and Steve Zeitchik (and I), along with photographers Jay Clendenin and Kent Nishimura and videographer Myung Chun.
There are not one but two separate photo galleries from our L.A. Times (the newspaper, not the Sundance movie) photo studio.
We also have video interviews with folks, including America Ferrera, Laura Dern and Woody Harrelson, Annie Clark and Roxanne Benjamin, Diplo and O’Shea Jackson and plenty more.
One of the most talked-about movies this year at the festival has been “The Big Sick,” directed by Michael Showalter, starring Kumail Nanjiani and Zoe Kazan and written by Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon. The film was picked up by Amazon for a reported $12 million.
Chang called the film an “effortlessly funny and charming romance that subtly deepens into a moving portrait of cross-cultural, cross-generational bonds … To judge by how few interracial romances we see on American screens, you’d think they were harder to pull off in the movies than they are in real life. Showalter’s movie is too deft and savvy to present itself as the solution to anything, but ‘The Big Sick’ is still a big step in the right direction.”
And Zeitchik also wrote about the film. As Nanjiani told him, “It was about trying to make a movie like ‘Tootsie’ or ‘Broadcast News’ — a movie where the dramatic scenes are really dramatic and the comedic scenes are really funny. Most dramatic comedies now try too much to walk a line, they’re only a little funny and only a little dramatic.
I spoke to Nanjiani and Gordon for a video about bringing their real-life relationship to the screen.
Chang also wrote about another of the festival’s buzziest films, “Mudbound,” which he called “an ambitious, superbly acted epic of racial discord.”
Yamato spoke to Chelsea Handler following the Women’s March in Park City last weekend and also wrote about actress Shailene Woodley’s spontaneous protest of one of the festival’s sponsors over their investment in the DAPL project.
Kaufman met with veteran newsman Tom Brokaw to discuss the documentary “Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman,” and the conversation inevitably turned to the new president.
“One of the things I learned early on is that at this stage in a new administration, it’s very hard to know for certain what’s gonna happen,” Brokaw said. “So I developed something called the UFO theory: the Unforeseen Will Occur.”
Meanwhile, Turan talked to Andrew Smith and Alex Smith, brothers who made the film “Walking Out.”
He also looked at two docs, Marina Zenovich’s “Water & Power: A California Heist” and Rory Kennedy’s “Take Every Wave: The Life of Laird Hamilton,” for the relationship to California and environmentalism.
Zeitchik talked to Kristen Stewart about her directing debut with the short “Come Swim.” And Amy also spoke to Stewart for this video.
“Dude, it’s totally about personal relationships,” Stewart said of the inspiration for her short. “Full-on heartbreak. I think it started in my mind as opaque. But in the end, it’s clear.”
I talked to Marti Noxon about making her feature film directing debut with “To the Bone,” based in part on her own experiences with eating disorders.
While Noxon said she didn’t want the film to be “the definitive eating disorder movie,” she does hope it has an impact.
“I really wanted to use the movie as a vehicle to show people, this is a disease,” Noxon said. “If I can turn that lens on that one thing, maybe we can start talking about looking closer at everybody.”
I was also at the premiere of “Lemon,” the sweet, oddball debut feature from director Janicza Bravo. Introducing the film, she said, “Thank you to everyone who said yes to me. Thank you to everyone who said no, you jerks.”
And we will have one more dispatch from Park City before Team LAT packs up its snow-weather gear for another year.
Email me if you have questions, comments or suggestions, and follow me on Twitter @IndieFocus.
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