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Big names head to laid-back Utah for the Sundance Film Festival
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It’s always cold, there’s never any parking and
there’s no such thing as “a quick bite” at the
Sundance Film Festival. But Ashton Kutcher, Isabella Rossellini,
Jane Fonda, Julianne Moore, Hilary Swank, Ben Affleck and others
are headed to Park City, Utah, for Thursday’s opening.
The premier showcase for new independent films, Sundance is a
laid-back, mufflers-and-mittens affair, despite the bold-face
names.
Moore is there with “Marie and Bruce,” a dark comedy
about the breakdown of a marriage. Swank’s suffragette movie,
“Iron Jawed Angels,” will get its premiere and Nicole
Kidman’s “Dogville” receives a special
screening.
It’s Ashton Kutcher’s first time at the
festival.
In a departure from the demands of dating Demi Moore and making
movies like “Dude, Where’s My Car?,” Kutcher
stars in and executive-produces “The Butterfly Effect,”
about a guy who is able to go back in time to right the wrongs of
his youth.
“I’ve never been to Sundance before,” Kutcher
said. “I always told myself I’m not going to go till I
have a movie there. I didn’t want to be there and be the guy
hanging out.” Now, he says, it’s his chance “to
be a part of a really cool thing.”
If “independent” means unpredictable, creative and
completely off the wall, then Guy Maddin’s “The Saddest
Music in the World” fits the bill.
Set in Winnipeg during the Depression, and shot as if it were
found film from someone’s attic, “Saddest Music”
asks which country’s music can wrench the heart most
effectively? Winners of preliminary rounds get tossed into a vat of
beer; suds beget suds.
Tossing those winners into the drink is Isabella Rossellini as a
scheming amputee who regains happiness by screwing on a pair of
hollow glass legs filled with sloshing brew.
“Isabella `got it’ right away,” said Maddin by
phone from Winnipeg. “She even cut her own hair on the
airplane on the way up here. She must have smuggled some dull
children’s shears onboard. She arrived a month early in a big
parka and this self-administered coiffure.”
There were numerous puzzled walkouts during an advance screening
of “Saddest Music,” which means Maddin must be on the
right track – the movie is delirious and nightmarish fun, as
well as social commentary.
“I’ve always felt more independent than the
independents, because of where I am. Half the time, I get the
feeling other independents wouldn’t even be sympathetic to
me,” he says.
“Anyway, it’s my first time at Sundance –
we’ll be a bunch of galoots peeing in the hot tub.”
Sundance has been known mostly as a boys’ club, but women
are making inroads, especially in the documentary competition.
Two examples:
“In the Company of Women” has such Sundance regulars
as Parker Posey making wry observations about the state of the
festival. “Until the Violence Stops” looks at how Eve
Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues” has morphed into
a worldwide movement for social change.
Jane Fonda, another Sundance neophyte (she went last year to
support a movie made by her son), will be on hand to support
“Until the Violence Stops,” in which she appears
briefly.
Seeing Ensler’s original work Off-Broadway “had a
huge impact on me,” Fonda said. “I don’t think I
ever laughed or cried as hard in a theater.”
“I cry a lot,” Ensler said, “because there is
so much suffering in the world.
“But I also hear enormous stories of resistance and
incredible transformation. It’s both disturbing and
inspiring.”
Fonda hopes that the documentary will help women break their
silence about abuse and violence, and even about “our
willingness to set aside who we really are in order to please a
man.
The festival opens with “Riding Giants,” an
exhaustive history of surfing from Stacy Peralta, who made the
popular skateboarding documentary “Dogtown and
Z-Boys.”
Jami Bernard
New York Daily News (KRT)