Sundance »

If you can't make it to Park City, Utah, in January for the Sundance Film Festival, don't worry -- Sundance will come to you! Sort of! If you live in one of eight specific cities! Still, it's a good start, and a pretty nifty idea.

They're calling it Sundance Film Festival U.S.A., and it will work like this. On Jan. 28, while the festival is taking place in Utah, eight filmmakers from the fest will travel to theaters around the country to show their movies to local audiences, followed by the customary Q&A. For the local audiences, it will be a decent approximation of what a real Sundance screening is like, minus the insane crowds and absence of parking. Several of the chosen cities are even in snowy climes, so you won't have to miss out on that aspect of Sundance attendance. If you're lucky, for the full effect, maybe you'll even run into a journalist complaining about the weather.

The selected theaters are: Michigan Theater, Ann Arbor, Mich.; Coolidge Corner Theatre, Brookline, Mass.; BAM, Brooklyn, N.Y.; Music Box Theatre, Chicago; Downtown Independent, Los Angeles; Sundance Cinemas, Madison, Wisc.; Belcourt Theatre, Nashville; and Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, San Francisco. Tickets will be sold through the individual theaters. Each location will get a different film, and we won't know what those films are until after the festival announces its programming in December.

Dispatching filmmakers to appear with their movies live and in person is a cool innovation, and a good way to spread the Sundance vibe beyond the confines of Park City. But it makes me wonder if the next logical step is to simply beam the films via satellite to theaters around the country, the way they do with concerts and special events. As big as Sundance is getting, and as small as Park City is staying, I'm glad to see the festival expanding its reach any way it can.

You may have heard about Bobcat Goldthwait's current film, World's Greatest Dad, possibly from all the raving various people at Cinematical have done about it. It's an outrageously dark comedy -- but that should be no surprise if you've seen any of Bobcat's previous films, including Sleeping Dogs Lie, which I've chosen as AOL/SlashControl's free flick of the day.

Sleeping Dogs Lie premiered under its original title, Stay, at Sundance in 2006, where its perverse subject matter was taboo even by Sundance standards. It's about a young woman who has fallen in love with a guy she hopes to marry, but she's not sure whether she can ever tell him about a certain embarrassing moment in her sexual history. It involves a dog, that's all I'm sayin'. Finally she takes the plunge and tells her boyfriend, and that's when the squirm-inducing comedy really takes off.

Not surprisingly, Goldthwait had a hard time finding a distributor for the movie. The best it ever got was a two-week run on six screens, grossing $15,745 in the U.S., but another $622,000 internationally. (Apparently this sort of thing plays better in foreign countries. Make of that what you will.) It's obviously not for everyone, but if you like bawdy, clever, shocking comedy, it's worth watching. It will almost certainly make you feel better about whatever shameful secrets you have in your own past.

Watch Sleeping Dogs Lie at SlashControl.

Critics and celebs alike have raved about the Sundance darling Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire, Lee Daniels' hard-hitting account of a teenage girl's struggle with abuse growing up in Harlem. (Even comedienne Mo'Nique has commanded some serious awards season buzz for her performance as Precious' domineering, abusive mother.) But no endorsement can or will be quite as moving, or as disturbing, as the one Precious got from filmmaker Tyler Perry, for whom the film dredged up cathartic memories of his own childhood abuses.

Writing on his official website, Perry – who's created his own film niche with often comic tales of dysfunctional African American families – revealed that his own childhood growing up in New Orleans was filled with abuses to rival those in Precious, based on the experiences of teenage girls author Sapphire taught in New York.

By James Rocchi (repint from 2009 Sundance Film Festival)

The September Issue , directed by RJ Cutler (The War Room), offers the tantalizing promise of immediate inside pleasures with its synopsis alone, as it follows Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour and her editorial team in the assembly and shaping of 2007's edition of the title issue of Vogue magazine -- the largest issue of the year, the holy writ and testament for the upcoming year in fashion, the big brassy bloated bane of every postal carrier's existence. Immediately, we're promised glamour, high-stakes editorial crisis, the confluence of commerce and style, the manic business of modern magazine publishing.

The good news is not only that The September Issue offers much more than those immediate inside pleasures -- although it does, commenting on celebrity culture, digital image-altering technology, power and privilege in the distraction-industrial complex and much more -- but that it delivers those immediate inside pleasures superbly along with the nitty-gritty, so we get to witness a mix of high fashion and near-fascism with Ms. Wintour as the iron fist inside the stylish hand-stitched calfskin glove -- velvet is so last year, darling.

By Erik Davis (reprint from 2009 Sundance Film Festival) The film opens this weekend in Austin, Texas, and should it "expand" in October (like we've heard it will), then we'll probably reprint the review again! We liked the flick just that much.

It's Encyclopedia Brown meets Napoleon Dynamite with a pinch of Ace Ventura ... and it's hilarious.

The Derrick Comedy troupe arrived at Sundance with a snot full of sketch videos and a massive internet fanbase. Sure, these were a group of kids from NYU who struck a cord with the YouTube audience and never looked back -- but a series of short online comedy bits and random late night improv are one thing; opening a feature film at the Sundance Film Festival is a completely different ballgame. Thankfully, with Mystery Team, these boys hit one way out of the ballpark, producing not only the funniest comedy I've seen at the fest so far, but one that definitely has the potential to stand toe-to-toe with the finer comedies of 2008 and the most hyped of 2009.

Inspired by Encyclopedia Brown, the Mystery Team are comprised of three kid detectives who run around with big magnifying glasses and several cheap, cliched disguises solving neighborhood whodunits, like who stuck their fingers in Mrs. What's-Her-Name's freshly-baked pie. Only problem is they're 18-year-old high school virgins who should've grown out of this detective phase back when they were seven. The entire community laughs at them, except for Jordy, the half-brain-dead doofus (aka the Mystery Team's "inside informant") who works at the 24-hour hole in the wall. However, when a tiny neighborhood girl asks the Mystery Team to find out who killed her parents, the guys that spend their days solving lame schoolyard pranks are forced to take their game up one giant, life-threatening notch.

By Scott Weinberg (reprint from Sundance Film Festival 2009)

The latest film from Downfall director Oliver Hirschbiegel is a simple, straightforward, and very sincere story that covers some rather fascinating issues: The cyclical nature of violence, the difficulties inherent in forgiveness, and the importance of being able to defeat tragedy and go on to live a happy life. If it sounds like a dark and slightly depressing story to hear, well that's the good news. For all its stark honesty and confrontational emotions, the messages found in Five Minutes of Heaven are refreshingly humane and hopeful.

We open in mid-'70s Belfast, and a very young Alistair Little is about to commit a heinous act. Fueled by streetwise fury and a need to prove himself, Alistair assassinates another young man, leaving his little brother as the horrified witness to the act. Poor Joe Griffen has just began a cycle of tragedy that would defeat most people: Dead brother, accusing mother, heartbroken father ... one act of horrible violence leads to a ripple effect that virtually destroys Joe's life.

By Scott Weinberg (reprint from Sundance Film Festival 2009)

You hear it in lots of (usually sad) movies, and I'd say it's probably one of the truest things ever spoken: "There's nothing more tragic than having to bury your own child." But, just for the sake of argument, let's pretend -- for just a second -- that (in one specific case) it wouldn't be the end of the world. As a matter of fact, let's further pretend that the death of a child could somehow lead to several wonderful and life-changing results.

Sick, I know, but that's one of the ideas that runs through the twisted-yet-amusing dark comedy World's Greatest Dad. Written and directed by the consistently unpredictable Bob Goldthwait (he also gave us the similarly strange Shakes the Clown and Stay), and anchored by an unexpectedly strong Robin Williams performance, World's Greatest Dad is indeed about a high school poetry teacher who finds his life blossoming after his son accidentally commits suicide.

By James Rocchi (reprint from Sundance 2009)

It's inevitable Cold Souls -- with its pseudo-scientific commercialized metaphysics and actor's angst -- will be compared to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich; it's the first post-Charlie Kaufman film, where the writer-director's weird, wooly aesthetic becomes a genre unto itself. Starring Paul Giamatti as, in a blatant piece of typecasting, actor Paul Giamatti, Cold Souls begins with Giamatti rehearsing the title role in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, and it's obviously taking its toll as he plunges into sad-sack Russian angst and anomie. Giamatti's agent tips him to an article in The New Yorker, profiling a new service called "Soul Storage," wherein melancholy Manhattanites are having their souls extracted by Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn) and held in escrow so they can live less complicated lives. Giamatti, wondering if having less soul would help him better play the part and get through the day, goes to Flintstein's office to get the details: "Your soul can be stored here ... or if you'd prefer to avoid the sales tax, it can be shipped to our storage facility in New Jersey. ..."

And again, you get the Kaufman vibe from writer-director Sophie Barthes; the dry humor, the everyday acceptance of the ludicrous, the ludicrous nature of the everyday. But while the comparisons to Eternal Sunshine and Being John Malkovich are inevitable, they're also not quite right. Eternal Sunshine was about the messy business of loving another; Cold Souls, with the equally messy proposition of living with one's self. Being John Malkovitch riffed comedy out of celebrity and stardom; Cold Souls examines sub-lebrity and acting. Cold Souls is a beautifully shot film, and it also becomes more than a little bit moving, as Giamatti struggles with a question we've all asked ourselves: Is it possible to remove the burden of our soul without taking away the benefit of it? Is it the very weight we struggle under that makes us strong?

I'll keep this short: There's a horror flick coming out later this year called Grace. Lots of people (including me and Eric Snider) like it a lot, such as former Cinematical scribe (and mother of five) Kim Voynar, who went to the Sundance screening after I basically commanded her to. When I saw her later she was both grateful (for recommending it) and angry (for not seeing it with her). Then it hit Austin and earned even more fans -- and not just horror geeks, mind you, although they're the ones who seemed to dig it the most.

The flick is still shuffling through the festival circuit, but Anchor Bay will deliver the DVD before year's end, and it looks like my pals over at FEARnet have scored the first look at the "red-band" (R rated) trailer for Grace. Click right here to take a look at the rather impressive new promo clip, and then come back for some friendly advice. (Pause.) OK, back? Good: This movie is not suitable for pregnant women. Frankly you should spend three years in jail if you show Grace to a pregnant woman. Ten years if you make it a double feature with Inside.

Embedded above is the trailer for Armando Iannucci's political spin farce, In the Loop, which James and others had been talking up since Sundance. I suppose that's a fitting response, for them to talk about a movie that's all about talk, as the trailer capably demonstrates (well, a commenter or two on Funny or Die still demand to know what the movie's really about). I myself was initially skeptical of anything dealing with labyrinthine political dealings, but I've been assured that that isn't really the point of it all -- and I've gotta say, the phrase "difficult-difficult-lemon-difficult" still tickles me so.

IFC will release this in select theaters and (thankfully, for us non-NY/LAers) on-demand come July 24th. That's enough time for me to catch up on original series "The Thick of It," though I've been told that familiarity with it wouldn't be necessary. At least, that's what I think they said...