Sundance Film Festival

[Ambra Blu]

Asta nu ne intereseaza deloc?

[Mala Portugal]

Vrea si Chisu sa faca unul d'asta la noi... presimt ca o sa rad bine :roll:

[Alex Leo Serban]

eu zic sa se cheme "sungicu film festival" iar premiul sa fie lotca de aur :P

[Mala Portugal]

Indeed :lol:

[Dan Gerose]

Romanian Sundance my ass ! :oops: Chisu si o gasca de jmekeri au pus mana pe un fraier cu bani si il jumulesc fara scrupule ! :oops: L-au pus pe ala, pe motiv ca ii organizeaza festival, sa le plateasca o calatorie in jurul lumii, chipurile, ca sa imparta cu minuta lor, invitatii. De parca nu puteau sa le trimita prin posta sau, in cel mai rau caz, sa mearga la cateva festivaluri mai importante si sa imparta acolo invitatii. :evil:

[Mala Portugal]

Chisu si o gasca de jmekeri au pus mana pe un fraier cu bani si il jumulesc fara scrupule !
Dane cine-i fraierica ala?

[marx]

cine-i fraierica ala?
"Anonimul".

[MinRep]

Pornind de la o comparatie intre Festivalul Sundance si Premiile Academiei, gasim in "NY Times" un articol care face o analiza interesanta tendintelor din cinematograful contemporant, introducand un nou termen... delicios "midsize movies". Pentru ca site-ul http://www.nytimes.com necesita inregistrare pentru unele sectiuni, imi permit sa pun articolul aici, for further approach...




The Invasion of the Midsize Movie

By A. O. SCOTT
Published: January 21, 2005


This year's Oscar nominations will be announced on Tuesday, smack in the middle of the Sundance Film Festival, a coincidence of the calendar that might be taken to represent a larger convergence. For three-quarters of a century the Academy Awards have been Hollywood's annual official tribute to itself while Sundance, from its humble beginnings in the early 1980's, has flourished as the official alternative to Hollywood - an annual celebration of that elusive entity called independent film.

The antagonism between the two has always been a bit overstated. The label "independent" has, like "low fat" or "all-natural," never been subject to rigorous regulation, and while low-budget, idiosyncratic movies seem to offer filmgoers a ticket out of the mainstream, they have also been, for many filmmakers, a ticket in. This has been true for at least 15 years, but more recently a new synthesis has emerged. Independent film may be dead, as so many of its partisans continually proclaim, but if it is, it has been reincarnated in the shape of another much-mourned, perpetually misunderstood movie martyr, the studio system.

If you sift through the litter of critics' top 10 lists or browse the Web sites of various award-giving organizations - or, for that matter, if you peruse the advertisements that give this section of the newspaper its awards-season bulk - you might notice the predominance of a certain kind of movie. I don't mean a genre; "House of Flying Daggers," "A Very Long Engagement," "Sideways," "The Motorcycle Diaries" and "Hotel Rwanda," to take a few prominent examples, don't have much in common when it comes to their stories or their cinematic styles. But all of them originated within what are sometimes called the specialty divisions of the major studios, an awkward name that refers to subsidiary companies - Sony Pictures Classics and Paramount Classics, Warner Independent, Focus Features, Fox Searchlight - dedicated to distributing and, increasingly, to producing movies that tend to attract equally awkward descriptions. Art films? Indies? Director-driven projects? Prestige products? Oscar-bait? Serious movies for grown-up audiences?

All of the above - at least some of the time. But perhaps it's best to think of the output of these companies as middle-size movies. In 1968, during her brief tenure as chief film critic for The New York Times, Renata Adler published an essay called "Patience for the Transition to Little Films" in which she proposed that "the days of the single, grand film for everyone are nearly gone" and suggested that an audience seeking the traditional pleasures of moviegoing would be well advised to seek them out in smaller packages. The article may not stand up as prophecy - the next decade would bring "Love Story," the first two "Godfather" pictures, "Jaws" and "Star Wars" - but Ms. Adler did identify one of the cycles that govern both the movie industry and the public taste.

Today the major studios, most of them housed within multimedia conglomerates, are most heavily invested in building entertainment franchises that can generate huge profits around the world - movies whose budgets and revenue are counted in hundreds of millions of dollars and whose appeal must be calculated on a similarly wide scale. But the appetite of a significant portion of the domestic audience for other kinds of movies - and for movies from other countries - along with the desire of actors and directors to pursue challenging and artistically satisfying work, have combined to open up a fertile middle ground, which the specialty divisions have claimed as their own. This middle ground can be defined economically - the films in question are neither extravagant would-be blockbusters nor shoestring, seat-of-the-pants productions - and culturally. The public they seek is neither the global mass audience nor a coterie of cinephiles, but rather something - ideally something profitable, as well as Oscar-worthy - in between.


The 80's Revisited

The high-quality, middle-size movie is not a new phenomenon. Nor, for that matter, is the idea of carving out a niche within larger companies in which such movies can be nurtured. Film executives (and movie fans) whose memories stretch back to the 1980's remember the specialty-division boom in that decade, and the short-lived epiphany of the 1986 Oscars, when Geraldine Page won the best actress award for "The Trip to Bountiful" and William Hurt won best actor for "Kiss of the Spider Woman," both of them distributed by the long-defunct Island Pictures.

"Back in 1982, I was in charge of marketing for Columbia's specialty division," said Mark Urman, now the head of distribution at ThinkFilm, an independent distributor. "I turned around and every company had one, and then a few years later nobody had one. It was a trend, a cycle. Part of me thinks we're seeing that all over again."

Certainly, at this point, nearly every company has one, the newest being Warner Brothers, whose Warner Independent label released its first film, Richard Linklater's "Before Sunset," last summer. The other relative newcomers are Universal's Focus, which came into existence in 2002, and Fox Searchlight, which has existed in its current form for about five years.

Of the existing specialty divisions, Sony Pictures Classics, which started in 1991 and grew out of Orion Classics, is the oldest. And then, of course, there is Miramax, which has mutated since the 1980's from an independent distributor into Disney's specialty division and then into a quasi-major studio in its own right, and whose future is currently the subject of much speculation, as its founders, Harvey and Bob Weinstein, negotiate their separation from Disney. But whatever happens on that front, the current proliferation of studio art-house divisions may be a sign that we have entered the post-Miramax era.

"Miramax has ceded their place as the Microsoft of the business," said Mark Gill, president of Warner Independent, who worked at Miramax as head of marketing and went on to run the studio's Los Angeles office, "so more movies are getting made, there's more room for them, and more diversity."


Wide Variety, Common Approach

This diversity is clear enough from a glance at the range of movies these companies - which will inevitably take turns being labeled "the next Miramax -released in 2004. They included literary adaptations (Paramount Classics' "Enduring Love," Warner's "We Don't Live Here Anymore," Focus's "Vanity Fair"), costume dramas (Sony's "Being Julia" and "House of Flying Daggers") and offbeat coming-of-age stories ("Garden State" and "Napoleon Dynamite," both from Fox Searchlight).

[Longshot]

pe imdb.com exista un sundance coverage cat de cat cu un ghid, fotografii si date despre screeningurile premierelor si filmelor aflate in competitie.
eu unul sunt interesat de Ballad of Jack and Rose a lui Rebecca Miller, de Lonesome Jim, facut de Steve Buscemi si de The Jacket semnat John Maybury si care au sanse evidente, datorita distributiilor, sa o ia "mainstream".insa bineinteles ar fi de apreciat orice supriza gen Garden State.
pe de alta parte inca nu am apucat sa vad nici macar Primer so...

[Longshot]

tipu care face coverage-u pe imdb.com zice ca the dying gaul, cu peter sarsgaard (care mi-a atras atentia cu kinsey si garden state) e demential.
bag citat :

If I get to see a better film in 2005 than The Dying Gaul it's going to be one great year for movies.
Written and directed by Craig Lucas, The Dying Gaul reminds you why you get excited about moves. It has stellar lead performances by Peter Saarsgard (in particular), Patricia Clarkson and Campbell Scott, as they play out a devastating and involving story.
Saarsgard is Robert. He's written a screenplay called "The Dying Gaul" that big-shot movie producer Jeffrey (Scott) wants to make into a film. Jeffrey is married to Elaine (Patricia Clarkson) who finds in Robert a simple, honest person not mired by the Hollywood scene. But when she discovers that Robert and Jeffrey are having an affair she takes actions with momentous, karmic consequences.
I won't say any more, and if you read others and they start to tell you more stop reading there as well. The Dying Gaul is a movie that is so well-executed that it elicits gasps from the audience (okay, me). The three leads are nearly perfect, the story is compact (with some requirement of suspension of disbelief), the score is great, the cinematography is gorgeous; it is, in short, one helluva movie, a ten out of ten.

desi tipu e american tre sa recunosc ca a reusit sa ma entuziasmeze.

[radu83]

s-au anuntat castigatorii pentru editia 2005 a festivalului si se pare ca avem si noi oamenii nostri pe acolo.

in continuare, un extras din comunicatul oficial de presa:
"The Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Award was created to honor and support emerging filmmakers with their next screenplays – one each from the United States, Europe and Latin America – who possess the originality, talent and vision to be celebrated as we look to the future of international cinema. The winning filmmakers and projects are: Catalin Mitulescu, HOW I SPENT THE END OF THE WORLD from Europe; Rodrigo Moreno, THE MINDER from Latin America; Richard Press, VIRTUAL LOVE from the United States; and Mipo Oh, YOMOYAMA BLUES from Japan."

stie cineva mai multe despre proiectul viitor al lui Catalin Mitulescu?
In afara de Trafic, Bucuresti-Wien, si 17 minute intarziere, ce a mai facut?

[Longshot]

premiile :

AMERICAN

Grand Jury Prize, Dramatic -- "Forty Shades of Blue"
Grand Jury Prize, Documentary -- "Why We Fight"
Audience Award, Dramatic -- "Hustle & Flow"
Audience Award, Documentary -- "Murderball"
Directing Award, Dramatic -- "The Squid and the Whale"
Directing Award, Documentary -- "The Devil and Daniel Johnston"
Excellence in Cinematography Award, Dramatic -- "Hustle & Flow"
Excellence in Cinematography Award, Documentary -- "The Education of Shelby Knox"
Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award -- "The Squid and the Whale"
Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision, Dramatic -- "Me You and Everyone We Know" and "Brick
Special Jury Prize for Acting, Dramatic -- Amy Adams ("Junebug") and Lou Pucci ("Thumbsucker")
Special Jury Prize, Documentary -- "After Innocence"
Special Jury Prize for Editing, Documentary -- "Murderball"

WORLD CINEMA

Grand Jury Prize, Dramatic -- "The Hero"
Grand Jury Prize, Documentary -- "Shape of the Moon"
Audience Award, Dramatic -- "Brothers"
Audience Award, Documentary -- "Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire"
Special Jury Prize, Dramatic -- "Live-in Maid"
Special Jury Prize, Documentary -- "The Liberace of Baghdad"
Special Jury Prize, Documentary -- "Wall"

SHORT FILM

Jury Prize, American -- "Family Portrait"
Jury Prize, World Cinema -- "Wasp"
Special Recognition -- "Bullets in the Hood: A Bed-Stuy Story"
Honorable Mention -- "One Weekend a Month," "Small Town Secrets," "Ryan," "Tama Tu" and "Victoria Para Chino"

SPECIAL RECOGNITION

Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize -- "Grizzly Man"

Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Awards -- Catalin Mitulescu ("How I Spent the End of the World"), Rodrigo Moreno ("The Minder"), Richard Press ("Virtual Love"), Mipo Oh ("Yomoyama Blues")

[Mala Portugal]

premiile :


Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Awards -- Catalin Mitulescu ("How I Spent the End of the World"),
Sa fie intr-un ceas/film bun

[West]

Uitati-va asta seara (22.30) la Taking Movies pe BBC World. In emisiunea de saptamana trecuta au zis ca azi vor dedica emisiunea festivalului Sundance.

P.S. : Emisiunea se da si in reluare.

[radu83]

asa au si facut...

http://www.bbcworld.com/content/template_talkingmovies.asp?pageid=665