01.30.07 5:53 AM CST
• Movies
• Robert DeSalvo
Playboy’s resident movie expert, Stephen Rebello, is taking in the flicks and the scene at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. Here is his final report from Park City:The big, long wind-down has hit Sundance. The most-anticipated films have already won (or lost) their places in the sun, the sleeper movies have emerged, and the i’s are being dotted and t’s crossed on this year’s record-breaking acquisition deals. And, of course, the big-time swag and gift bags have long since been doled out to the A-listers who really don’t need them anyway.
Speaking of swag, the best comment heard while waiting for a table at a Main Street restaurant: “Look, I’ve either got to buy a couple of more suitcases, like, right now or I’m going to have to FedEx back to Manhattan all the great swag shit I got yesterday.”
There have been all-over-the-map reactions to director Craig Brewer’s Hustle and Flow follow-up, Black Snake Moan. (Say the title and people say, “What’s the name of it again?” Maybe they should revise the old Hollywood tagline, “Don’t say it, see it!”) The hubbub is exactly what this movie, starring Samuel L. Jackson, Christina Ricci and Justin Timberlake, should generate. Your everyday movie doesn’t, after all, tend to feature such provocative taboo plotlines as this one does, what with the black, righteous former musician Jackson chaining lily white Daisy Duke-wearing Ricci to his living room radiator to save her from her powerful sexual urges. It’s a wildly offbeat movie that deserves a look.
A new Michael Douglas movie might seem an odd fit for indie-minded Sundance but The King of California (bought for distribution for a reported sum somewhere around $3 million) is a bit of a one-off. Douglas plays a former jazz musician and dreamer just out of a mental institution who convinces his estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) to hunt for Spanish doubloons buried under a suburban wasteland. Both actors are good in the flick and although I didn’t run into anyone who went nuts for it, many said they enjoyed its shaggy charms. On the other hand, one of the big faves of the festival seems to be the lighter-than-air Irish musical love story Once about a Dublin musician and the Czech immigrant mother. I’d heard that buyers seem cool on the movie’s commercial potential but virtually everybody I ran into fell for it—hard.
Thanks again to the good folks in the Sundance Press Office, especially to Brianna Smith and Patrick Hubley, but it’s time to head back to Los Angeles, having seen a lot of films and met a lot of cool colleagues from all over the world. And, yeah, I’ve definitely run out of ChapStick.
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