Sundance domestic acquisitions so far

Along with the strong current of film reviews, filmmaker interviews and trend stories, dispatches from the Sundance Film Festival these past eight days have included a steady stream of business news: Acquisitions. Which distributors have nabbed which films is a matter of interest to both industry players and fans hoping the movies they’ve read about and, in the case of Kickstarter projects, contributed to, enjoy an accessible theatrical life outside the festival circuit. Which of the event’s titles will make their way to an indie or art-house theatre near you?

Here is the list of Sundance films that have nabbed domestic distributors so far:

A24: A Most Violent Year
J.C. Chandor’s follow-up to his lauded (if Academy-snubbed) All is Lost, which stars Sundance Film Festival founder Robert Redford, A Most Violent Year continues the director’s streak of working with A-List actors, this time with Oscar Isaac (Inside Llewyn Davis) and Jessica Chastain. The film is set in 1981, statistically the most violent year on record for New York City, and follows an immigrant and his family as they try to turn the American dream into their material reality. Judging by the movie’s title, we’re guessing most, if not all, of their illusions will be lost by film’s end.

Obvious Child
Rom-com with an edge: Girl meets boy. Girl hooks up with boy. Girl becomes pregnant. Girl gets an abortion. Then Girl falls in love with boy. Not your traditional romantic arc – nor your traditional outcome for the “Oh, no, I’m pregnant!” scenario – but one which resonated with Sundance audiences nonetheless. Star and real-life comedian Jenny Slate’s performance as the funny, warm Girl in question is reportedly one of the festival’s breakout turns.

Laggies
Keira Knightley as 28-year-old Megan is becoming increasingly bored with her job, the same friends she’s had since high school, and her boyfriend. When the latter proposes, Megan bolts, meeting and befriending 16-year-old Annika (Chloe Grace Moretz) at whose home she impulsively decides to hide out for a while. Will the two help each other grow up? A great script by first-time screenwriter Andrea Siegel and performances by the two leading women helped Laggies score a relatively early acquisition deal.

Focus Features: Wish I Was Here
One of the festival’s most anticipated films, for a few reasons: Wish I Was Here marks Zach Braff’s return to auteur form, as writer, director and star, following the great Sundance success of his Garden State back in 2004. Here’s fundraising efforts have also earned a good deal  of press, as Braff, who’s been vocal about wanting to make movies that speak to and about his generation, chose to crowd-fund and secure backing through trendy Kickstarter. Reviews have been mixed, but Wish I Was Here does already have a loyal fan base in the Garden State contingent – not to mention in the many supporters who have a vested financial interest in the movie.

Sony Pictures Classics: Land Ho!
Two retirees embark on a road trip to Iceland, where they try to recapture their youth amid the party atmosphere of Reykjavik bars and nightclubs.

Whiplash
Adapted from Damien Chazelle’s short film of the same name, which won the Jury Award for Fiction at last year’s festival, and picking up roughly where that work left off, Whiplash has garnered some of the best reviews of the 2014 showcase. A young drummer must contend with a particularly demanding (to put it mildly) music teacher in this film whose intense drumming sequences aren’t to be missed.

IFC Films: God’s Pocket
Though John Slattery has helmed several episodes of “Mad Men,” God’s Pocket marks the actor’s first time directing a feature film. Fellow “Men” player Christina Hendricks stars, as does Philip Seymour Hoffman, Richard Jenkins, and John Turturro. A suspicious accident at a construction site in a blue-collar town has fatal consequences.

Lionsgate/Roadside: The Skeleton Twins
Funny people Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader take a turn for the dramatic in this dramedy about estranged twins whose independent near-death experiences on the same day bring them together.

Fox Searchlight: Calvary
Any film that puts Brendan Gleeson front-and-center is all right with us – and, apparently, with the folks at Fox Searchlight. Gleeson is a kindhearted priest who, while attending to his fragile adult daughter and administering to the moral needs of his parish, senses the interference of sinister forces.

I Origins
A molecular biologist’s (Michael Pitt) study of the human eye has unforeseen and resounding implications. Such a vague tagline points to a humdinger of a cerebral experience.

ICM Partners: Infinitely Polar Bear
Infinitely Polar Bear is that rare breed of buzzy film that manages to secure distribution before the festival even opens. ICM Partners scooped up Bear the day before Sundance began, as did The Solution Entertainment Group, which will handle the film’s international rights. Mark Ruffalo stars as a bipolar father of two who is forced to look after his children on his own after his wife leaves to pursue her MBA.

Magnolia & Paramount: Happy Christmas
The Lena Dunham Movie does not in fact revolve around Lena Dunham, but rather about Anna Kendrick, who plays Dunham’s friend.  The confusion is understandable, however, as Kendrick also happens to play the latest cinematic variation on the arrested-adolescent character Dunham has made so popular on her HBO series “Girls.” Kendrick is an “irresponsible twentysomething” who moves in with her older brother (Joe Swanberg, who also wrote and directed), his novelist wife (Melanie Lynskey) and their toddler son. Kendrick’s wild ways both jeopardize her relationship with her brother and help enliven the increasingly domestic world of her sister-in-law.

CNN Films & Lionsgate: Dinosaur 13
Paleontologist Peter Larson may have helped uncover the nearly intact fossilized skeleton of a 65-million-year-old TRex he and his partners subsequently christened “Sue,” but that’s only the beginning of the excitement in Dinosaur 13. The documentary follows Larson as he fights for the rights to Sue’s remains, with fellow paleontologists, museums, and Native American tribes all attempting to claim the fossil for themselves.

Pivot and Univision: Cesar’s Last Fast
As the title suggests, Fast chronicles Cesar Chavez’s last act of peaceful protest, a 36-day hunger strike Chavez hoped would draw attention to the plight of farm workers harmfully effected by the use of pesticides. The doc features contemporary footage of the iconic leader enduring his water-only diet.

Well Go USA: Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead
The sequel to 2009’s Nazi zombie horror flick, Dead Snow. What more can we say – or rather, do you need?

Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley cast in 'The Imitation Game'

Anyone who grew up in the era of The History Channel's old-school, World War II-heavy programming must remember the Enigma, the coding machine that made appearances in a number of the channel's documentaries. The Enigma was a complex typewriter that transmitted coded messages without ever repeating a letter. The British mathematician Alan Turing was key in figuring out the meaning of oft-repeated phrases, like "Heil Hitler!" Even then, it took other breaks, like having Enigma materials seized on a German U-Boat, to help the Allies decode the messages and turn the tide of the war. The Imitation Game, a modestly-budgeted indie, is tackling Turing's life. Post-war, it had a sad end. He was prosecuted in the U.K. for being gay and forced to take female hormones as a form of chemical castration. He committed suicide not long after, in his 40s. This isn't the first time Turing's story has been dramatized. BBC showed "Breaking the Code," a TV movie about Turing, in 1996.

Benedict Cumberbatch, the star of BBC's "Sherlock" and the villain in Star Trek Into Darkness, will play Turing. Keira Knightley, continuing her passion for period work, will play Turning's close companion, a woman who came from a conservative background but supported him through his physical and mental trials. Graham Moore, who wrote the script for the still-gestating adaptation of the nonfiction bestseller The Devil in the White City, will adapt the screenplay from the biography Alan Turning: The Enigma. Morten Tyldum, the director of Headhunters, will helm.

The Hollywood Reporter writes that the budget will be $15 million, which sounds like a sweet spot for a historical, socially aware indie that will try to catch fire with specialty audiences. The project sounds winning because it will combine the thrills of cryptography and wartime spying with a personal story that's particularly tragic to modern sensibilities. I doubt even socially conservative people against gay marriage would support prosecution and chemical castration for being gay. Cumberbatch has one project in pre-production in his schedule, Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak, while Knightley's projects listed on IMDB are all in post-production, so I suspect the project will shoot sometime this year.

May-December casting in 'Seeking a Friend at the End of the World'

By Sarah Sluis

I remember the furor that surrounded the romantic comedy Six Days, Seven Nights, which paired up Harrison Ford with a star 27 years younger, Anne Heche. Now it appears another May-December romance is in the process of being cast. Steve Carell and Keira Knightley, 22 years his junior, appear to be starring opposite each other in Seeking a Friend at the End of the World, a dark romantic comedy that unfolds four weeks before an asteroid is set to destroy Earth. Writer Lorene Scafaria (Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist), a member of the Hollywood "fempire" that includes Diablo Cody, will make her directorial debut with the movie.

There's a chance, however, that the romance could have some kind of quirk that will make it work, or that it won't really be a romance in the sense we expect. The title IS Seeking a Friend at the End of the World, after all. Then there's the plot description. To paraphrase IMDB, the plot centers on Carell's mission to track down his high school sweetheart after his wife abandons him in the wake of the asteroid frenzy. Knightley plays a neighbor who just comes along for the ride, throwing a wrench in the proceedings. But that "wrench" could be l-o-v-e. I don't really see a romance between the two as believable. Carell is the everyman, and his love interests have overwhelmingly been age-appropriate, attractive choices (Catherine Keener in 40-Year-Old Virgin, Tina Fey in Date Night, Julianne Moore and Marisa Tomei in the upcoming Crazy, Stupid, Love). Knightley, too, was attached to Orlando Bloom in Pirates of the Caribbean and even after that odd scene involving a beach fire and Johnny Depp consuming copious amounts of rum, a romance between her and Depp was ruled out.

But I will give the movie this. After reading this rather apocalyptic excerpt from the script, I certainly don't see how even a genius screenwriter could turn this into a romantic comedy...unless you count gallows humor. The May-December romance may end up being the easier thing to pull off.

Despite these oddities, the script has a green light and the Mandate Pictures production (the people that believed in a teen pregnancy comedy called Juno) will begin filming in May.

Movies to look forward to: 'Never Let Me Go' & 'Somewhere'

By Sarah Sluis

Focus and Fox Searchlight, those dependable distributors of specialty fare, recently released trailers for Somewhere (trailer) and Never Let Me Go (trailer). Both of the trailers are moody and exciting and fabulous, and I can only hope the movies match up to the previews.

Never Let Me Go (Fox Searchlight) stars Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan, and Andrew Garfield (The

Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus) as '70s boarding school students with an unusual purpose. In a kind of parallel Britain, they are clones that are educated and then donate four organs before "completing." The movie is based on an acclaimed book (that I couldn't get through) by Kazuo Ishiguro, who was born in Nagasaki a decade after the A-bomb went off (read a great review of the book here).

What sets this world apart from other dystopias is the characters' belief in the system. They don't question what they've been instructed to do, even though they want to live longer than they've been told they will. In the trailer, they seem to be under the impression that if they find true love, they will be given a few more years to live. It's been said that the British love to form a queue, and this adherence to the rules even when the audience clearly sees evidence to the contrary is maddening, creepy, and sad. The director, Mark Romanek, last directed the dark movie One Hour Photo. The trailer offers a first look at the cinematography and costuming in the film. It's odd to see a futuristic movie set in '70s Britian, and the hairstyles sported by Knightley and Mulligan are priceless--who knows, maybe they'll even inspire a trend. The movie will be out October 1st.

The trailer for director Sofia Coppola's Somewhere (Focus) follows the formula of her trailer for Marie

Antoinette--great indie music, decadent locales, and people walking down halls while crazy things are happening. Coppola's movies make really good trailers, but they don't always match

up to the preview highlights. I still remember the excited feeling I got watching

the trailer for her Marie Antoinette (with the great New Order

song "Blue Monday"), but the movie didn't have the same effect on me.

This trailer starts out with music by Phoenix before shifting to the lower-key song "I'll Try Anything Once" by The Strokes. Elle Fanning looks great in the role of a movie star's abandoned daughter, enough to quiet my thoughts of sibling nepotism (she's the younger sister of Dakota). The movie star is played by Stephen Dorff, who has two decades of movie credits without a role that I remember him in. It's great casting--a suitable blank face with movie star looks, and not someone that the audience would have any recollection of from the tabloids. Coppola has been criticized for her lonely-people-in-glamorous-locales theme, but who cares? Audiences like seeing what it's like from a higher perch. The trailer also reveals her fantastic eye for details and looks. She can tell so much by showing father and daughter getting into a car together wearing matching sunglasses, or playing the swimming pool game tea party. Likely pursuing an awards campaign, Fox Searchlight has the movie aimed for a December 22nd release.