Sundance Journal
Life in a Day: Sundance gets down to business, and it's Like Crazy
A scene from "Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times" directed by AndrewRossi
Newspapers on the press in "Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times"
A scene from "Like Crazy," directed by Drake Doremus
From "Like Crazy" at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival
After a weekend of non-stop partying, glitz, and glamour, the work week brings a subtle shift in tone to the Sundance Film Festival as the Hollywood crowd thins out and the real wheeling and dealing begins. Investors are much more optimistic this year with an abundance of deals inked in the first four days.
Though 2010 was an anemic year for movie deals, the community is ecstatic over the 14 Oscar nominations Sundance films received. The Kids Are All Right and Winter’s Bone each garnered four nominations (including a nod to Annette Bening for best actress in All Right) and documentaries Exit Through the Gift Shop, Gasland, Restrepo and Waste Land dominated, claiming four of the five nominations in the category.
Among this year's crop of movies, Like Crazy was acquired by Paramount Pictures in a robust bidding war. It's the story of a long-distance relationship between Anna and Jacob who meet at an Los Angeles college but are separated by Anna’s visa issues. Themes of the poignancy and urgency of first love evolve to a more adult and, in this case, cynical love. Stellar performances by Anton Yelchin (Star Trek, Terminator Salvation) and British up-and-comer Felicity Jones make it an enjoyable viewing experience.
Although formulaic, I found myself thinking later about the ending. As director Drake Doremus said, “Does the couple make it or not? That is up to you to project.”
Another movie getting a lot of buzz, Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times follows reporters who focus on trends in technology as part of the paper’s newly created Media Desk and how they affect the newspaper industry. Andrew Ross (Le Cirque: A Table in Heaven) presents a fascinating backdrop of how free online content and the rise of aggregator sites like the Daily Beast, Gawker and Huffington Post have drastically impacted the financial stability of the newspaper industry.
Fans of the New York Times will enjoy putting faces with the names they read every day. The film also includes industry experts, reporters from other publications (Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame) and noted journalism professors. But the title promises more than the movie delivers. Perhaps 90 minutes is not enough time to cover a year in a business where things are changing by the minute. Participant Media and Magnolia acquired the film for an August release.
Life in a Day is a YouTube documentary experiment in which the site asked its users to submit a one minute video of their day on July 24, 2010 with the goal of capturing an entire day on our planet. Director Kevin McDonald and producer Ridley Scott reduced 80,000 entries to a series of emotional and ordinary vignettes — none lasting more than a minute — that illustrate the cycle of life and ultimately how connected we are. National Geographic acquired the film.
Jon Foy’s documentary, Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles, explores the mystery surrounding hundreds of tiles carrying a cryptic message that were embedded in city streets from the East Coast to St. Louis, and in South America, beginning in the early 1980s. I found myself asking “Who cares?” as artist Justin Duerr went from one paranoid, outer space theory and nut case theorist to the next. As he exclaimed at one point, “Another dead end!" I thought to myself, “Your dead end is not as bad as the dead end I am experiencing as a trapped movie goer.” No word if it has been picked up for wider distribution.
