Still 700 Miles from Sundance
Sundance Film Festival: Lance Hammer’s Ballast
I’ve heard good things from various websites about Lance Hammer’s directorial debut Ballast. Karina at SpoutBlog gives it an especially nice write-up. Two twin brothers attempt suicide. One succeeds. The survivor ends up forming a tentative family of sorts with his brother’s 12-year-old son and the boy’s mother. Karina calls it “a slow, score-free and sometimes actually silent character study, offering the chance to spend some time watching real-ish people floating in and out of a crisis point, demanding that we engage by refusing to pander for that engagement.”
At Cinematical, Scott Weinberg enjoyed Barry Levinson’s What Just Happened? more than Jeff Wells did. He liked the large cast (including Robert De Niro, Stanley Tucci, Michael Wincott, Catherine Keener, Bruce Willis and Robin Wright Penn) and he got some chuckles out of this jab at Hollywood, but finds the satire “a fairly toothless affair,” suggesting it’s all been done before.
Weinberg also liked Carlos Brooks’ Quid Pro Quo with Nick Stahl as a paraplegic reporter investigating the strange phenomenon of people who actually want to be handicapped, going so far as offering to pay doctors to remove perfectly healthy limbs. When mysterious Vera Farmiga offers him an exclusive, sparks fly. “Worth seeing for the two leads alone, Quid Pro Quo has some pretty insightful things to say about the nature of being ‘disabled,’ and it does so with a good deal of humor, style, and understanding.”
Meanwhile, IndieWIRE takes a look at Slamdance, the stripped down alternative to Sundance, singling out Paranormal Activity a film about a couple investigating something supernatural haunting their home.
Back at the main festival, IndieWIRE’s Steve Ramos reviews Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer, calling it “humanist science fiction with a political manifesto at its core.” For successfully combining science fiction and human stories, he says “Sleep Dealer belong in the footsteps of Darren Aronofsky and Andrei Tarkovsky.” High praise indeed.
Ramos also raves about Courtney Hunt’s melodrama Frozen River about a working class single mom raising her two sons. He singles out star Melissa Leo (Homocide: Life on the Streets and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada) for praise, calling it the “performance of a lifetime” and the film itself “independent moviemaking at its best.”
Filed under: Film Festivals
Related Posts: - 700 Miles from Sundance: Weekend Update
- Picking the Peanuts out of Sundance
- Sundance: Jeffrey Wells is Over
- Sundance: A New American Realism?
- Australia: Another Look
ok you know i’m curious about quid pro quo.ah yes…sorry. you know that would be my pick from the things refed in your column.
http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0804,foundas,78906,20.html
Im curious about Quid Pro Quo too Glimmer. It looks odd. I like odd.
Looks like Foundas has a different take on The Wackness than the guy I quoted the other day. I’ve heard in a couple of other places that it was good too.
At the very least it has Ben Kingsley, so at least there is that.
Foundas and others should love Quid Pro Quo since it seems to be directed like a laser beam on people’s fascination with disabled people. Or could it turn out to be so thoroughly enmeshed in its subject matter as to be called “disability porn,” too?
Sleep Dealer is one of those few films where the tiny little synopsis alone has me excited or at the very least interested.
I just gave The Fountain another spin and liked it considerably more the second time out. I still think it has a few problems, but I feel like I understand what Aronofsky was trying to do with it. It’d be on my Top Ten of 2006 now, I think. In truth, I always *liked* it but some of the hyperbole surrounding it kind of turned me off and compelled me to look at what I preceived to be some of its flaws. Now, far away from all the hype, it somehow feels more alive than it did back when I saw it about fourteen months ago.
Oh, and this has everything to do with Sleep Dealer because of the Aronofsky comparison by Ramos.
Wow, that’s a coincidence. I was just moving up the Bluray for The Fountain in my queue (so many movies in my queue are unavailable right now) and I was thinking some space from all the hatred might make it a good movie to revisit. Your second viewing gives me hope Alexander. I initially liked it and then cooled a bit after reading review after review of pure hatred for it.
Give it another try, joel. It’s one of those films that works at least a little bit better the second go around. Jackman’s performance hit me a bit harder this time, too.
Cool coincidence!
I liked The Fountain a lot, but then quickly felt embarrassed as one critic after another dismantled it for being sentimental sci-fi slop.
Mayhap I need to check it out again as well.
I’m also curious about Sleep Dealer. The Tarkovsky/Aronofsky line got me.
As we’ve seen this year, critics can’t always be trusted to get it right on a movie out of the gate. To be fair though, the negatives for Zodiac and Assassination of Jesse James typically didn’t hit nearly the same level of utter hostility and bile that The Fountain accumulated.