Austin360 blogs > Austin Movie Blog > Archives > 2012 > January > 27 > Entry
High-profile picks at Sundance
Stephen Jannise, the film program director for the Austin Film Festival, is attending the Sundance Film Festival and is filing reports. Here’s the latest, from Friday, 01/27.
Over the course of 10 days at Sundance, certain films with great word of mouth become hot tickets, making it very difficult to get into the additional screenings for those films. This is particularly the case with two films, “Beasts of the Southern Wild” and “The Surrogate,” which generated a great deal of chatter on the streets of Park City after their initial screenings. Don’t worry if you can’t see these films at Sundance, though; both have been bought by Fox Searchlight and will be coming to a city near you later this year.
Other films are more of a slow build, like Richard Bates Jr.’s “Excision,” which has been picking up buzz as the week goes on. Anyone who has seen the TV series “Nip/Tuck” or the new “90210” will recognize lead AnnaLynne McCord, who plays a seductive vixen in both shows.
In “Excision,” she has moved as far away from those roles as she possibly could, playing a nerdy, acne-ridden, semi-sociopathic high school student struggling with strange sexual desires and her overwhelming mother. To my surprise, she carries this role off with great aplomb, creating a unique character who never ceases to fascinate. While Traci Lords is equally surprising in the role of the mother, and John Waters and Malcolm McDowell lend their famous personas to the project for a few moments, no one can steal this movie from McCord, who proves here that she is more than just another pretty face.
I also had the great pleasure of seeing the new film from Austinites David and Nathan Zellner, “KID-THING.” While the film won’t be for everyone, as, I think, the brothers would be the first to admit, I thoroughly enjoyed the film’s portrait of childhood mischief from the perspective of the child.
As the filmmakers said in a Q&A following the film, they felt that films about childhood are too often told from an adult perspective, whether it’s the adults surrounding the child or an adult looking back on childhood. Here, the Zellners stay focused on young Annie, played with anger and heart by newcomer Sidney Aguirre.
At times hilarious, nostalgic, and disturbing, the film seems to be about a child trapped in her own fantasy world with no responsible adults around to pull her out of it. Of course, the filmmakers ultimately give each viewer the opportunity to construct a different interpretation of this thoughtful, beautifully shot piece, which is one of the hallmarks of good filmmaking.
A few films have yet to screen, including tonight’s big premieres “Predisposed,” starring Jesse Eisenberg, Melissa Leo and Tracy Morgan, and “The Words,” which stars Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Irons and Dennis Quaid and was bought by CBS Films before it even played in front of an audience. Stay tuned for a report on these films and on the big winners at Saturday night’s Awards Ceremony.
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