tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-101670492010-02-11T09:12:15.871-07:00<b>Movie Reviews &amp; Other Observations<br> from Park City, Utah</b><br> 2009 Sundance Film Festival <br><br> <a href="http://www.summitpacificinc.com/sundance/">Home</a><br><br><br> <b> <a href="http://www.summitpacificinc.com/form-movie-reviews.html">Submit a Movie Review</a></b>DPnoreply@blogger.comBlogger107125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-19958332527914145592009-01-30T15:02:00.002-07:002009-01-30T15:05:35.676-07:00

2009 Sundance Film Festival ★ ★ ★ ★Immediately after watching Taking Chance I was struck by a singular thought: I do not recall having ever seen a movie with a simpler plot, other than a few experimental or distinctly non-commercial efforts. The story line consists almost entirely of a United States Marine Corps officer, played by Kevin Bacon, escorting the body of a Marine soldier, Chance

Billnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-90781068626517985942009-01-29T10:35:00.001-07:002009-01-29T10:38:20.618-07:00

2009 Sundance Film Festival ★ ★You won’t find traditional romantic comedies at Sundance. But quirky romantic comedies were in this year. And how much quirkier can you get than Adam, where the male lead (Hugh Dancy) has Asperger’s Syndrome (like a mild, high-functional form of autism) and the female lead (Rose Byrne) is a hot and seemingly normal babe? And that’s the movie—Adam is very nice but

Billnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-48137106312363704962009-01-25T23:21:00.002-07:002009-01-29T22:27:48.570-07:00

2009 Sundance Film Festival ★ ★ ★ ★I’m not surprised that Push won both the Grand Jury and Audience Award at Sundance this year. Director Lee Daniels (Shadowboxer) has created a very powerful film that manages to entertain while evoking a broad spectrum of emotions, from anger and heartbreaking pity to optimism, joy and hope.Clareece “Precious” Jones is a fat 16-year-old illiterate black girl

Billnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-72460476820404765112009-01-25T14:50:00.001-07:002009-01-25T14:53:07.909-07:00

2009 Sundance Film Festival ★ ★ ★I like a documentary that makes me angry. I appreciate the experience of discovering an injustice that kindles inside me the passionate flames of outrage and the urge to take action. And if you’re a documentary filmmaker looking for an easy mark these days, try Big Oil.Crude is about a 13-year-old lawsuit by 30,000 indigenous Ecuadorans against Chevron, one of

Billnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-45406030166804916112009-01-22T11:58:00.005-07:002009-08-12T15:55:20.173-06:00

2009 Sundance Film Festival ★ ★ ★ ★One of the often overlooked pleasures of Sundance is taking a flyer on an unknown and unpublicized movie and entering with no expectations. That’s how I stumbled into The Cove, a documentary about the dolphin market, which is centered in Japan. Funded by internet billionaire Jim Clark (Netscape, Web MD) and helmed by veteran National Geographic photographer

Billnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-5725801688812637722009-01-22T07:46:00.004-07:002009-01-27T16:13:59.602-07:00

2009 Sundance Film Festival ★ ★Anyone that has seen a movie by Mark and Michael Polish should come to expect something unusual. Their latest film, Manure, delivers in spades (yeah, that was a pun). Actually, this movie might best be seen under the influence of drugs. Being straight and sober, I’m not sure I appreciated it. Or understood it. Or perhaps I fell asleep and dreamt this.Starring

Billnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-72623891991237298052009-01-21T11:45:00.003-07:002009-01-22T07:42:58.214-07:00

2009 Sundance Film Festival ★Steven Soderbergh gave a Sundance audience a sneak preview of his nearly-completed movie The Girlfriend Experience. For the uninitiated, a “girlfriend experience” is a service provided by prostitutes, and includes kissing and other considerations. So as you might guess, this film is about a female escort—a high-priced New York call girl. To his credit, Soderbergh

Billnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-35176840493318803032009-01-21T01:21:00.002-07:002009-01-21T01:23:48.331-07:00

2009 Sundance Film Festival ★ ★I wish I would have enjoyed Once More with Feeling more than I did. It’s a light-hearted story (I like light-hearted). It’s got an unusual premise: a mid-life crisis brought on by karaoke (unusual is good). And the ending was surprisingly … satisfactory (I could have imagined many worse alternatives). But the script is flat, the movie dull and the characters

Billnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-49961143338907783232009-01-19T10:42:00.002-07:002009-01-22T07:46:42.013-07:00

2009 Sundance Film Festival ★ ★ ★ ★What a delightful film. From the opening screen, which offers a very funny disclaimer, it is clear that 500 Days of Summer dares to be different. And as the opening sequence clearly states, it is not a love story. Except that’s only a technicality. It really is. Sort of.Writers Scott Neustadter and Michael Webber, along with director Marc Webber, have put

Billnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-953891614427208972009-01-19T10:27:00.002-07:002009-01-19T10:46:08.453-07:00

2009 Sundance Film Festival★ ★ ★Anyone that has ever lost a child has plumbed the depths of grief. And while numerous movies have tried to depict that paralyzing depression, most fall well short of the mark. (I recall In the Bedroom from Sundance 2001, starring Sissy Spacek, Tom Wilkinson and Marissa Tomei—it was good, but couldn’t fully expose the raw nerve laid bare with the passing of a

Billnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-18419919409007834312009-01-19T10:24:00.003-07:002009-01-22T07:49:10.453-07:00

2009 Sundance Film Festival ★ ★ ★In 1975, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier staged their third and final battle in the capital of the Philippines. Ali, in his infamous promoting of himself and ticket sales, dubbed it “The Thriller in Manilla.” They had split their first two fights, and by this time Ali was considered the heavy favorite, with many (including Ali’s camp) believing Frazier was washed

Billnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-5665815236863452202009-01-18T17:02:00.002-07:002009-01-22T07:50:34.438-07:00

2009 Sundance Film Festival★ ★ ★The last great film noir was A Touch of Evil, made 51 years ago. But the genre has never lost its allure and every now and then a filmmaker attempts a neo-noir, some succeeding famously (Chinatown, Body Heat) but most lacking the soul of the classic noirs from the 40’s and 50’s. In The Missing Person, director Noah Buschel tries valiantly to recreate the original

Billnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-28773364949519942962009-01-16T12:48:00.002-07:002009-01-16T12:51:05.433-07:00

A Guest Review - Sent to us from Philip Arlington:'Good Night', directed by Geetika Narang wins half the battle with the first shot of the film itelf. On the strains of a soft song playing in the background, we see a hand that stretches into the camera and stubs a cigarette out into a transparent glass ashtray. It's an ingenious shot and it has us hooked for things to come. The story is about a

DPnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-25447910055264531502008-12-29T09:02:00.002-07:002008-12-29T09:56:18.149-07:00

Casual moviegoers usually pay a price for foreign films which are immersed in distant cultures. We sometimes have to put on our film student hats, enduring a less than enthralling night at the movies in exchange for a broader world view. Slumdog Millionaire is a surprising exception, even more entertaining than it is educational. Slumdog opens with a young lower-class Hindi, Jamal, in the midst

Billnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-37147003127732974362008-08-13T00:16:00.003-06:002008-08-14T06:53:11.041-06:00

Mongol has been out in film festivals for some time and saw limited release last year, even picking up an Academy Award nom (Best Foreign Film), but just recently found its way to my local arthouse theatre. The movie tells the story of a young Genghis Khan, the great 12-century Mongolian warlord. Admittedly, this is history with an asterisk. Most of the story is based on The Secret History of

Billnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-65337370278613685362008-06-30T22:34:00.003-06:002008-06-30T22:39:02.884-06:00

Ever since I saw the trailer a few months ago, I have wanted to see the documentary Young at Heart. So the other night we headed to our local arthouse theater The Broadway and were treated to one of the more entertaining documentaries I have ever seen. Young at Heart is a geriatric rock 'n roll singing group out of Northampton, Massachusetts which you've got to see (and hear) to believe. Really.

Billnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-18452418478020210622008-02-08T09:38:00.000-07:002008-02-08T09:40:18.842-07:00

DPnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-27811888771700403812008-01-30T01:08:00.001-07:002010-02-11T09:12:16.034-07:00

The two questions I’m always asked after Sundance: 1. What did you see that you liked? ★ ★ ★ ★ The Visitor ★ ★ ★ ★ Diminished Capacity ★ ★ ★ ★ Transsiberian ★ ★ ★ ★ A Raisin in the Sun ★ ★ ★ ★ Birds of America ★ ★ ★ Made in America ★ ★ ★ The Merry Gentleman ★ ★ ★ The Deal ★ ★ ★ U2 3D ★ ★ ★ Henry Poole is Here ★ ★ ★ The Yellow Handkerchief ★ ★ ★ Red ★ ★ ★ CSNY Déjà Vu ★ ★ ★ Baghead ★ ★ The Last

Billnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-46406484538236508562008-01-29T14:55:00.000-07:002008-01-29T15:05:24.501-07:00

2008 Sundance Film Festival★ ★ ★When I saw that Stacy Peralta had another documentary at this year’s Sundance, I put it at the top of my list. Both Riding Giants (surfing) and Dogtown and Z-Boys (skateboarding) were extraordinary peeks into unique and fascinating American cultures. Made in America shifts it's focus to another less romantic section of Southern California, and promised a more

Billnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-87769696928532608412008-01-29T09:30:00.000-07:002008-01-29T09:57:22.826-07:00

2008 Sundance Film Festival★I think Pretty Bird is meant as a symbol of the dotcom era, or at least of dreamy-eyed entrepreneurs with a love for money, an endless supply of chutzpah, and not much else. But if the business plan for their new technology company is filled with holes, it is positively bulletproof when compared to Paul Schneider’s script. This is a film that didn’t just struggle to

Billnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-17475482081711705292008-01-29T00:36:00.000-07:002008-01-29T08:47:04.121-07:00

2008 Sundance Film Festival★ ★ ★Ten reasons why I like this movie:1. IMDB lists 14 movies named “Red” in the past 30 years and this is the only one I’ve seen. 2. Production was bifurcated—shot by two different directors. But you could never tell, a credit more to the final director, Trygve Allister Diesen, than initial director Lucky McKee.3. The Carmen Sandiego Factor: The movie is set in

Billnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-9679591180085412622008-01-28T00:08:00.001-07:002009-05-06T12:55:10.024-06:00

2008 Sundance Film Festival★ ★ Terrorism movies are the war movies of our generation. But the big difference is that the prospect of terrorism is lurking around all of us, whereas war is something most of us only expect to experience vicariously. So movies about terrorism can be unsettling, because the threat is so very real. That’s the spirit of Incendiary, by director Sharon McGuire (

Billnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-40455981199274739702008-01-27T00:12:00.000-07:002008-01-28T15:49:31.629-07:00

2008 Sundance Film Festival★ ★ ★In 2006, rock ‘n roll icons Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young played a “Freedom of Speech” tour to protest the war in Iraq. The band that wrote Ohio, one of the most famous protest songs of the Vietnam era, decided that the country needed a wake-up call, some of the same spirit of protest and activism that once shook national policy and changed our nation forever.

Billnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-76542523973112310062008-01-26T17:19:00.000-07:002008-01-28T15:47:12.389-07:00

2008 Sundance Film Festival★In 1972, socialite Barbara Daly Baekeland, former Hollywood model and wife of plastics heir Leo Baekland, was murdered in her London home in a well-publicized and shocking story that captured the public’s ever-morbid interest and fascination. The popular book, Savage Grace, was published in 1986, which was the basis for the screenplay and the movie. It’s the tragic

Billnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10167049.post-81323312103503007072008-01-26T11:46:00.000-07:002008-01-28T15:44:15.549-07:00

2008 Sundance Film Festival★ ★ ★ ★ (out of four)I’m getting a little tired of movies about dysfunctional families, even at this year’s Sundance. But Birds of America manages to break the mold and feel fresh and alive from the outset, delivering a warm, funny, zany, tender and compassionate film that left the audience smiling and content.Morrie (Matthew Perry) is an uptight university professor

Billnoreply@blogger.com0