Ahoy, squirts! Quint here, reporting from the lobby of the Yarrow Hotel, where most of the press screenings for Sundance are held in these big conference rooms that have been converted into theaters, with not uncomfortable chairs arranged stadium seat style and an erected projector booth at the back, equipped with 35mm and all kinds of high-end video projectors. I've gone over TEETH and DELIRIOUS, which I saw this morning. I also saw SLIPSTREAM tonight, but I need a little time to digest that one, so these are my last two movies. I was supposed to see NIGHT BUFFALO, starring Diego Luna, but I got totally shot down trying to get into the midnight screening tonight. It's okay... 5 movies and a good night's sleep is all good. I'm a little over an hour away from seeing GRACE IS GONE, starring John Cusack, so I'm going to use that time to write up the remaining uncovered film of the day. AN AMERICAN CRIME I chose to see this film because of a few specific factors. The two leads, for starters. You have Ellen Page (HARD CANDY) and the always fantastic Catherine Keener. It was also based on a real life crime story from the 1960s. So, a period crime thriller starring Catherine Keener as a crazy lady who tortures a little girl? How could I turn that down? I have no knowledge of the original Indiana case, but the film has a text at the beginning that tells me everything during the trial is taken directly from the court transcripts. It's a really good idea for the filmmakers to stress that this is a real crime that happened because as the film unfolds you can lose your suspension of disbelief easily. The story has a fighting mother and father who work with a traveling circus. The constant moving is causing lots of grief in the family. The two girls (high school and junior high aged) can't ever make any friends, the stress a wedge driving the mother and father apart. So, they do an incredibly farfetched thing and decide to leave their two daughters with a woman they just met in church as they continue on with the circus, trying to fix their marriage. This woman (Keener) has 6 children already, but the money offered, $20 per week, is much needed and what's 2 more, right? However this lady has some serious mental problems. She's been self-medicating and of course that isn't helping her swings. Her fractured state of mind completely shatters when given the slightest reason these two new additions might be considered a threat to her family. We also come to find that the kids themselves share a little of their mother's insanity, to varying degrees. The punishment becomes full on torture at a certain point. This one is a bit difficult to break down. It's incredibly well acted, it's well shot, the production value is high. It looks great and the story is interesting, but the pacing is extremely deliberate, which I think really hurts the film. The direction is also very by the book and I think there could have been more life to the film if they shot it a little more imaginatively. There's also a tacked on, bizarre weird ending/not ending. "Ha, fooled ya'!" that just feels out of place. If you find yourself with the option of seeing this film, it is worth catching just for Catherine Keener's nuanced and scarily real performance and Ellen Page's portrayal of a suffering innocent. If you have nothing better to do, definitely give this one a watch. SONGBIRD I forgot to bring up this short film that played before TEETH. It's a small story of a meek housewife, an oafish brute of a husband and her one escape from the misery of her life, a little bird hidden away in a cage in the back of the room. Of course, the husband is a miserable bastard and hates seeing his wife love anything, so some bad things happen prompting her take back control of her life. Of course, playing before the dick-biting vagina movie, there is a bizarre and horrific slant to this. It gets pretty gruesome, which is good. The filmmakers also decided to play the whole short with no dialog. Visually they just barely sped the film up and cut frames, giving everything a jerky, unnatural rhythm that could have been extremely grating if not handled just right. They also exaggerate the sound effects, so there's a comedic element as well. When the big bastard of a husband chugs his beer (in jerky, silent movie type speed) the sound effects are both disgusting and hilarious. I was really impressed with this short, so if you happen to come across it online or at a festival, give it a watch. GRACE IS GONE John Cusack is a frumpy man, awkward in his own skin and around his children. His wife is enlisted and off in Iraq, so it's just him and his two daughters. Before the first reel is over he gets the news that his wife was killed and the rest of the movie is him wrestling with this and avoiding telling his two little girls (8 and 12). The movie is basically National Lampoon's Vacation except the depressing widower and blissfully ignorant children version. In all seriousness, the movie was pretty great. Instead of facing the painful reality and telling his girls the bad news, Cusack's character instead just packs them up and drives them to an amusement park in Florida. School and work be damned, he's going to give his girls one last happy memory before unloading the news. If he can even figure out a way to do so. On the way there are a lot of colorful characters, including a liberal Uncle who argues politics with Cusack (the only real time politics are brought up directly). As the miles tick by, Cusack and his girls grow closer. It's a really sweet movie and more than that it's entertaining. The sentimentality is there, but it never goes overboard. Cusack is great, of course. He really makes this character his own, giving him a withdrawn, subtle personality that he conveys mostly through his posture and eyes, behind his huge glasses. The girls come off as very real. They aren't plagued with that child actors syndrome where they read their lines with a smile. Or you get the other kind, like Dakota Fanning, who are creepy... grown ups in children's bodies. It's actually not very often you get a child actor that feels like a real little girl or boy. Abigail Breslin did it in LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE. The weird thing is after this movie Rav and I went to eat at this Pizza & Noodle place off of Main Street and just a block and those awful stairs from our condo. As we were eating, Harvey Weinstein wandered in and stood around us for a minute or two, obviously looking for someone. Today it is reported that GRACE IS GONE was picked up after a late night bidding war at "an eatery." Sundance is so bizarre... So, you can see this one from the Weinstein Co. sometime this year. It's well worth the viewing. -Quint quint@aintitcool.com
