New York Times media reporter and blogger David Carr, aka The Carpetbagger, ran into Seattle director Lynn Shelton over the weekend at Sundance. And though he hadn't actually, you know, seen the her new movie Humpday, he was thoroughly smitten with Shelton and her scrappy band of indie stars and crew. Soon thereafter, the movie signed a distribution deal (reports Carr), which is a major coup for any Seattle filmmaker. Shelton's last feature, My Effortless Brilliance, played SIFF last year to less than steller notices. Let's hope Humpday plays SIFF this year, and goes on to full national arthouse distribution (i.e., the major cities, then Netflix).

SW contributor and critic Scott Foundas is in Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival. He begins by reporting the following:

"Will everyone be wearing black?" a friend asked over dinner the other night when the subject arose of my imminent departure for the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. "I'm so glad I'm not going to Sundance," confided one longtime film publicist at this week's Los Angeles Film Critics awards dinner, as if she had escaped sentencing to a leper colony. Indeed, this year, it feels like a funereal pall has descended on Park City, Utah before the curtain has even risen on January's annual powwow of independent filmmakers, distributors and deep-pocketed passholders hoping to catch a glimpse of Jennifer Aniston as she tries not to slip on the ice. When the festival does kick off tomorrow evening, with the world premiere of Oscar-winning animator Adam Elliot's debut feature, Mary and Max (featuring a clay-mated Philip Seymour Hoffman as an obese Jewish man with Asperger's syndrome), it will do so at the center of a perfect storm of indie-film bad voodoo.

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Soderbergh with Del Toro (Photo: Teresa Isasi/IFC Films)

Our colleague Scott Foundas sat down recently with the director of Che (review here), which opens Friday, Jan. 16 at the Varsity.

Steven Soderbergh tends to travel light -- even when he has a movie camera tucked away inside his suitcase. That's how the filmmaker set off on a recent Japanese press tour where, in between interviews, he used a lightweight high-definition video camera known as the Red One to steal some Tokyo exteriors for his upcoming movie The Informant, a darkly comic thriller based on New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald's nonfiction best-seller.

Although The Informant stars Matt Damon and will be released later this year by Warner Bros., Soderbergh's moviemaking M.O. has changed little in the 20 years since his first dramatic feature, Sex, Lies and Videotape, won him the audience award at Sundance (then called the United States Film Festival), the Palme d'Or at Cannes and an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay--all before his 28th birthday.
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(IFC Films)

Steven Soderbergh's four-hour epic treatment of Che Guevara (played by Benicio Del Toro) opens Friday at the Varsity. (Our review here.) Among the credited screenwriters is Peter Buchman, once a playwright here in town associated with the old Annex Theatre during the '90s. After a script collaboration with part-time local screenwriter Chris McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects), Buchman left town and began getting work in Hollywood, including Jurassic Park III. (Also Eragon, ugh.)

His stage productions here included Airsick (1995) and Zero G (1997). Neither of which, unfortunately, featured dinosaurs or Catalina Sandino Moreno (pictured above with Del Toro).

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As previously reported, local director Lynn Shelton got her new feature Humpday into Sundance, which begins January 15 in Utah. That's great news, but movies always cost more to make than originally envisioned. So, naturally, there's to be a fundraiser/send-off party tomorrow night (the last one, originally scheduled for Dec. 20, was snowed out).

There will be music, refreshments, and a rough-cut screening of the film. Also, potential investors take note: For a very modest financial contribution, you could be an associate producer on the flick. Details as follows:
Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., 267-5380, www.nwfilmforum.org. $5. 11 p.m. Sat. Jan. 10.

Remember last year's Golden Globe ceremony?  Don't strain too hard - it didn't exist.  The Writers Guild strike, and the Actors Guild's reluctance to cross the picket line, forced the Hollywood Foreign Press Association to reduce their usual glamor-fest to a press conference announcing the winners.   Not a backless gown or drunken George Clooney in sight.

 

As a film awards season junkie, I heart the Golden Globes for one simple reason:  booze.  That isn't sparkling cider in those flutes.  Encouraging natural born narcissists to souse up before stumbling onto a stage to slur into a microphone while holding an awkward, top-heavy trophy is entertainment at its finest.   No wonder they forget who to thank - some of them forget where they are.  In 1998, Christine Lahti was in the bathroom when she was announced the winner for Chicago Hope.  OK, so it's not Hedonism III, but it's bacchanal compared to the super-serious Academy Awards.

 

Some Oscar aficionados see the Globes as an Oscar indicator of sorts.  Truth be told, the HFPA fancies themselves free-thinkers, so a Globe win isn't a straight shot to Oscar glory.  Their Best Picture winners haven't matched the Oscar winner since 2003.  Every year there seems to be at least one or two oddball nominees; last year's Best Picture nod for the tepid Denzel Washington vehicle The Great Debaters springs to mind.  There doesn't seem to be a lot of method to their madness.  Still, a win can't hurt your Oscar chances.  And they do pour a mean Manhattan.

 

Who's going to win on Sunday?  My best guesses...

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You can read J. Hoberman's new review of The Wrestler here. Meanwhile, our colleague Scott Foundas recently sat down to talk with Mickey Rourke, who's won plaudits for his comeback role, along with plenty of Oscar talk. Here's their conversation:

"I hated the '90s. The '90s fuckin' sucked," says professional wrestler Randy "The Ram" Robinson early on in The Wrestler--and he should know. Over the hill and past his prime--his steroidal body a palimpsest of battle scars, his graying hair dyed a Nordic blond--Robinson hasn't seen the inside of a major arena in the better part of 20 years. Nowadays, he gets top billing by scraping bottom, trading blows with other used-to-bes and might-have-beens in school gymnasiums and banquet halls, earning a cut of the door that's barely enough to cover his trailer-park rent.

As it happens, the '90s weren't much kinder to the actor playing Robinson: Mickey Rourke. By the end of that misbegotten decade, the onetime Hollywood A-lister was living in a $500-a-month studio apartment and subsisting on a meager income generated by the sale of his motorcycle collection, plus whatever acting jobs he could scrounge up from the few producers in town who weren't afraid to hire him. His flirtation with a boxing career had come to an end. His tabloid-catnip marriage to model Carré Otis had hit the skids. There were reports of arrests, of plastic surgeries gone awry, and of the actor walking off the set after a producer refused to allow his pet Chihuahua to appear with him in a scene.

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Keith Fenimore, a pal of mine who now works for Howard Stern, has long had what I think is a brilliant idea to stage an awards show devoted to character actors (i.e., non-movie stars who are in just about every flick you've ever seen but whose names you don't know). The Character Actor Awards is what Fenimore has titled his idea, and he's still trying to get the requisite backing to pull it off.

Anyhow, I thought of Keith and his idea last night as I was watching the actors' commentary on Tropic Thunder, which has garnered Golden Globe supporting actor noms for Tom Cruise (undeserved and overhyped, in my opinion) and Robert Downey Jr. (who should win, in my opinion). Downey plays an Australian actor who has a pigmentation operation in order to authentically portray a black Vietnam soldier in the movie with the movie, and employs a Dolemite-era dialect throughout.

The performance is risky and brilliant by itself, but on the DVD commentary, Downey does the unexpected: he doesn't drop character, thus staying true to his character, a method maniac who says he never drops character until after the DVD commentary is in the can. Downey's improvised riffs are funnier on the commentary than they are in the movie -- and they're very funny in the movie. For this he should receive some sort of award -- only there aren't any awards acknowledging the genius of special features on DVD. Keith: Maybe if you combined this concept with the Character Actor Awards, you'd have a truly irresistible package.

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