ReportWire

Tag: Tamra Davis

  • Celebrating the Power of Film and the Best of Humanity at Park City’s Last Sundance

    [ad_1]

    The Friend’s House Is Here was covertly filmed in the streets of Tehran amidst violent government crackdowns against citizens. Courtesy of Sundance Institute

    There is a scene about halfway through first-time writer-director Stephanie Ahn’s romantic drama Bedford Park—which premiered in the U.S. Dramatic Competition in last week’s Sundance Film Festival—where the lead characters are stuck in New Jersey traffic, fiddling with the radio. “Keep it here,” says reluctant passenger Eli (South Korean actor Son Suk-ku) when he hears Bill Conti’s Rocky theme Gonna Fly Now. While Eli—whose cauliflower ears speak to his high school wrestling days and whose furtive and combative manner suggests he has never stopped fighting—bobs his head and shakes his fists, Irene (a devastating Moon Choi), an on-leave physical therapist in an emotional free fall, stares ahead, saying nothing, her eyes silently filling with tears.

    Sitting in a Press & Industry screening at the Holiday Village Theaters in Park City, so did mine. Of course, it had much to do with the authenticity and masterfully observational patience of Ahn’s film. But the film served as a powerful metaphor for the festival itself, which was also uniting a bunch of broken people around their shared and largely nostalgic love of movies. A dense cloud of wistfulness threatened to overtake the festival every time audiences watched Robert Redford, its late founder and spiritual guide, reflect on the power of storytelling in gauzy footage projected onscreen.

    While Bedford Park was my favorite film I saw at the festival, it didn’t pick up one of the big awards. (Beth de Araújo’s Channing Tatum–starring drama about an 8-year-old crime witness Josephine swept both the Jury and Audience awards, while Bedford Park received a Special Jury Award for Debut Feature.)

    What Ahn’s film brought home instead was something even more valuable: a distribution deal. Sony Pictures Classics—whose co-presidents and founders Michael Barker and Tom Bernard were battling for good movies and ethical distribution against the indie movie dark lord Harvey Weinstein back in Sundance’s buy-happy ’90s heyday—made the film its second acquisition of the festival behind director Josef Kubota Wladyka’s crowd-pleasing Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! It was an anachronistically bullish stand by the 34-year-old specialty arm in what has been a largely bearish acquisition market.

    The relatively quiet marketplace, Redford’s passing and the immutability of 2026 being the end of the festival’s Utah run (Main Street’s iconic Egyptian Theater being unavailable for festival programming felt like a don’t-let-the-door-hit-you statement from both city and state) combined to give this outing a bit of a Dance of Death feeling. Respite from this sense of gloom came from the most unlikely of places: documentaries on seemingly depressing topics.

    A man with a close-cropped haircut holds two telephone receivers to his ears, smiling slightly while seated on a patterned couch.A man with a close-cropped haircut holds two telephone receivers to his ears, smiling slightly while seated on a patterned couch.
    Joybubbles in his living room. Photo by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

    Joybubbles, the effervescent directorial debut from longtime archival producer Rachael J. Morrison, tells the story of Joe Engrassia, a man who copes with his blindness and the cruelty he experiences as a result of his visual impairment through his relationship with that great relic of the 20th Century: the telephone. As a child, he found comfort in its steady tone when his parents fought; as a young man, he learned to manipulate its system to make calls across the world with his pitch-perfect whistling; as an adult, he entertains strangers through a prerecorded “fun line,” telling jokes and stories from his life. In one scene, Morrison captures a caller recollecting taking Joe—who late in life legally changed his name to Joybubbles to reflect his commitment to living life as a child—to Penny Marshall’s 1988 movie Big, and describing it to him in the back of the theater; the moment moved me as deeply as the Rocky interlude from Bedford Park.

    The setup of Sam Green’s The Oldest Person in the World seems high concept: a globe-spanning chronicle of the various holders of that dubious Guinness World Record title over the course of a decade. But in the hands of Green, a Sundance vet who has premiered a dozen films at the festival dating back to 1997, what would be rote instead blossoms into a consistently surprising, deeply personal and strangely exhilarating exploration of what it means to be alive.

    A glossy, cartoonish glass pitcher with a smiling face sits onstage under bright colored lights, surrounded by a crowd of onlookers at a tech conference.A glossy, cartoonish glass pitcher with a smiling face sits onstage under bright colored lights, surrounded by a crowd of onlookers at a tech conference.
    Ghost in the Machine delivers a thought-provoking takedown of Techno-Fascism. Courtesy of Sundance Institute

    Ghost in the Machine, Valerie Vatach’s exploration of the eugenicist roots and colonial and anti-environmental reality of the A.I. arms race, had the exact opposite effect. It tells the tale of a society that has lost its moral and humanitarian bearing at the behest of techno-oligarchs, amalgamating our own labor to keep us divided. The film’s denouement—showing ways we as a society can still fight back—was the only unconvincing part of Vatach’s film essay.

    Meanwhile, the miles-deep societal pessimism of Ghost in the Machine was being tragically echoed by real events. Indeed, the most shocking and vital clip of the weekend was the footage of the Minneapolis murder of protester and ICU nurse Alex Pretti at the hands of federal agents that festivalgoers watched on their phones in stunned silence while waiting in lines. A day earlier, U.S. Congressman Max Frost was physically assaulted at the festival in an attack that was both politically and racially motivated.

    It all made for a tense mood for one of the more anxious events of the festival: that Sunday’s premiere of Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, from Alex Gibney, another longtime Sundance veteran. Culled from footage shot by Rachel Eliza Griffiths (Rushdie’s wife) of the novelist’s recovery from the 2022 attack on his life and adapted from his memoir of that event, the film was most effective when Gibney recounted the since-rescinded 1989 fatwa against Rushdie, an example of, as the author told the theater audience, “how violence unleashed by an irresponsible leader can spread out of control.” (Security measures for the event included a full pat-down, metal detectors, and bomb-sniffing dogs.)

    As trenchant as it felt in that moment, Knife was also an example of a documentary where the subject may have been a bit too in control of the final product; in addition to providing the footage, Griffiths served as executive producer and Gibney was her and Rushdie’s handpicked director.

    American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez, which premiered in the U.S. Documentary Competition and took home the Audience Award, also drifted toward hagiography. But in telling the story of Valdez, the Chicano arts trailblazer who founded El Teatro Campesino to inform and entertain newly unionized farmworkers, the film powerfully demonstrates how politically and socially engaged arts serve both as a morale booster and a clarion call in the fight against oppression.

    Nowhere was this idea better expressed than in my second favorite fiction film in the festival: The Friend’s House Is Here. Directed by the New York–based husband and wife team of Hossein Keshavarz and Maryam Ataei and covertly filmed in the streets of Tehran amidst violent government crackdowns against citizens, House is at its heart a joyful “hangout” movie about two close but very different friends pushing the limits of their creative expression in current-day Iran. The film—whose cast includes Iranian Instagram star Hana Mana, theater actor Mahshad Bahraminejad, and a troupe of actors from a local improvisational theater company—rightfully took home the Special Jury Award for its ensemble cast.

    A young girl and a man recline in sunlit beach chairs beside dry grass and driftwood, both with their eyes closed in quiet rest.A young girl and a man recline in sunlit beach chairs beside dry grass and driftwood, both with their eyes closed in quiet rest.
    Maria Petrova in Myrsini Aristidou’s Hold Onto Me. Courtesy of Sundance Institute

    Aside from The Friend’s House Is Here crew, the best performances in Sundance films were given by children. This includes Maria Petrova as a dour 11-year-old beach rat reconnecting with her estranged conman father in Myrsini Aristidou’s Hold Onto Me, which won the World Cinema-Dramatic Audience Award. Mason Reeves’ complex and nervy turn as an 8-year-old who witnesses a rape in Golden Gate Park during an early morning run with her fitness-obsessed dad (Channing Tatum) is by far the best thing about Josephine, writer-director Beth de Araújo’s multiple award winner; the film’s narrative and emotional force are deeply undercut by the abject cluelessness shown by the child’s parents, played by Channing Tatum and Eternals stunner Gemma Chan.

    Not all of the films at this year’s festival were engaged with our fraught political moment. Longtime Sundance mainstay Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex (the programmers’ fixation on inviting old hands felt like a combination of sentimentality and branding) was born of the kind of sassy, candy-colored provocations the director helped pioneer in the 90s in its telling of Cooper Hoffman’s art intern embarking on a Dom/Sub relationship with his boss, played with preening relish by Olivia Wilde.

    A man on the left and a woman on the right gaze into each other's eyesA man on the left and a woman on the right gaze into each other's eyes
    Cooper Hoffman and Olivia Wilde in Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Lacey Terrell

    Along with her Sex costar Charli XCX, whose premiere of her mockumentary The Moment created the closest thing the 2026 fest had to a media scrum, Wilde became the celebrity face of the festival. The bidding war to acquire The Invite—the middle-age sex comedy she directed and stars in alongside Seth Rogen, Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz—was eventually won by A24 and provided one of the few pieces of red meat that kept the trade reporters engaged.

    Otherwise, the festival overall seemed much more focused on its past than its present or even its future. (That said, Colorado Governor Jared Polis showing up to premieres in his trademark cowboy hat—in anticipation of Sundance’s move next year to Boulder—did feel like the ultimate Rocky Mountain flex.)

    In addition to its reliance on programming new films by filmmakers who had movies in previous festivals, this year’s festival also featured special screenings of films from its illustrious past, among them Barbara Kopple’s American Dream, Lynn Shelton’s Humpday, and James Wan’s Saw. Still, the festival’s most potent dose of uncut nostalgia was Tamra Davis’ The Best Summer. A stitched-together chronicle of a 1994 Australian indie rock festival that featured the Beastie Boys, Bikini Kill, Pavement, Foo Fighters and Sonic Youth, Davis’ film felt like the ultimate in Gen X hipster home movies.

    But did all of this chronic looking backwards sap the festival of its vitality? Maybe a little. But despite the sentimentality that covered Park City more heartily than the snow, films like The Friend’s House Is Here reminded us how remarkable good films can be at discovering and celebrating humanity, even as Ghost in the Machine showed us that the moment to do something about it may have passed.

    More from Sundance

    Celebrating the Power of Film and the Best of Humanity at Park City’s Last Sundance

    [ad_2]

    Oliver Jones

    Source link

  • Crossroads and Britney Spears As Unwilling Method Actor

    Crossroads and Britney Spears As Unwilling Method Actor

    [ad_1]

    Of all the films Britney Spears could have “gone all Method” for, a “frothy” (but actually fundamentally deep) teen road movie called Crossroads probably wouldn’t have seemed worth it to most “serious” actors. Or even “serious” moviegoers. And Spears would likely tell you that her sudden “morphing” into Lucy Wagner on and off the set had nothing to do with acting, so much as “what acting did to [her] mind.” As Spears retells it in The Woman in Me, “I think I started Method acting—only I didn’t know how to break out of my character. I really became this other person. Some people do Method acting, but they’re usually aware of the fact that they’re doing it. But I didn’t have any separation at all.” 

    Spears’ unwitting (and unwilling) commitment to the “character” (not so far off from herself if the dancing to Madonna in her underwear scene is an indication), however, was not very appreciated by critics. Most of whom panned the project as shallow, insipid teen girl bullshit that served as a thinly-veiled puff piece for Spears. They even went so far as to deride her positive messaging about a girl finding her voice amid a world of oppressive patriarchal figures, with one female critic insisting, “…the film’s mealy-mouthed messages about feminine empowerment will almost certainly fall on deaf ears, since even eleven-year-olds know Spears’ power resides largely in her taut torso.” Indeed, Crossroads was lumped together with the badness of another film starring a pop star around the same time: Glitter. But at least Brit’s movie had the benefit of being released several months after 9/11, instead of just ten days later (with its soundtrack also being released on 9/11). And yes, both movies are, to this day, often shown as a campy double bill. But that’s not really fair to Crossroads. Because Spears’ performance does offer an emotional intelligence that Carey’s simply does not (despite her having “lived the tale” of a sob story childhood and subsequent breaking into the music business with the help of a possessive producer…in this case, Timothy Walker [Terrence Howard], before the plot becomes more A Star Is Born when another producer, Julian “Dice” Black [Max Beesley], enters the picture). And while, like Carey’s film project, there are similarities between Spears and the lead character (including an oppressive father steering the course of her life and keeping her from doing normal “teen girl things” or how Lucy spells “dryer” as “drier”), the difference is that one can see Spears isn’t relying on their similarities as her sole crutch for playing this part. 

    In fact, what she relied on for the role appears to be something far closer to the divine. Laugh as movie critics might at such an assessment. But when Spears writes, “This is embarrassing to say, but it’s like a cloud or something came over me and I just became this girl named Lucy,” there’s no arguing that something more mystical was involved. Even if that “mysticism” related to her mind’s power. Spears continued, “When the camera came on, I was her, and then I couldn’t tell the difference between when the camera was on and when it wasn’t. I know that seems stupid, but it’s the truth. I took it that seriously. I took it seriously to the point where Justin [Timberlake] said, ‘Why are you walking like that? Who are you?’” Yet another small anecdote that makes Justin come across like kind of an asshole for basically making fun of her uncontrollable commitment to the part in a movie that found room for her to show support for Justin’s goddamn boy band. All simply by placing “Bye Bye Bye” at the center of a light-heartedly contentious scene over what music her and her friends want to listen to while their driver/Lucy’s budding love interest, Ben Kimble (Anson Mount), keeps trying to change the station back to his “angsty rock” music (this, by the way, was the crux of warring musical identities in the late 90s and early 00s). 

    And though detractors would also argue that Spears does little to stretch her acting abilities in a role that finds her character auditioning for a record contract, the character biography Spears herself took pains to write in Britney Spears’ Crossroads Diary wouldn’t have been so thorough in spelling out the differences if she didn’t feel intrinsically separate from this person. Specifically, she states, “I play Lucy, an only child who lives with her dad, Pete, in a small town in Georgia. Lucy’s parents got divorced when she was much younger, and her mom lives out in Arizona. They don’t communicate. Lucy is the kind of girl who doesn’t make waves. She’s spent her whole life following the path her dad has laid out for her. She’s smart and gets good grades: she’s planning to be a doctor. But she really loves to sing and to write. She’s a poet and is kind of obsessive about her journal.” While it can be pointed out that, in many regards, Spears, too, was a girl who didn’t make waves, always listening to “the adults” and doing what she was told despite being the true agent of her success (Spears herself admits in The Woman in Me, “I was committed to not rocking the boat, and to not complaining even when something upset me”), Lucy is more overtly obedient and, yes, virginal. In fact, that’s the word one of her ex-friends, Kit (Zoe Saldana), hurls at her as an insult in the hallway of the school. In contrast to Spears, who played with that persona of being virginal via more sexually-tinged irony, Lucy is someone who wants her first time to be special, even though her high school lab partner, Henry (Justin Long), desperately wants her to keep her word that they’ll lose their virginity to one another so as not to go off to college all “naive.” 

    Lucy’s naïveté is also something that sets her apart from Spears, who, by age twenty in 2001 (the year the movie was being made and the Britney album was released), was already plenty worldly—and about to get even more so in the wake of Justin’s imminent portrayal of her as a “harlot” to his “golden boy” in the 2002 song (and video), “Cry Me A River.” The Diane Sawyer interview of 2003 would turn that worldliness into all-out jadedness. That all of this happened after Crossroads seemed cruelly poetic in that the film is about a teenage girl coming to terms with the terrifying responsibilities and potential landmines of womanhood. But what Spears endured was above and beyond the conventional horrors of becoming a woman. Lucy was lucky that, as a civilian (at least in the story we get to see before she potentially lands a record deal), she would never have to know what it was to be scrutinized not just over her body, but over every minute detail of her personal life. Besides, Lucy’s sartorial style isn’t exactly in keeping with Spears’, who also commented on that in Britney Spears’ Crossroads Diary by saying, “[My assistant,] Fe calls [Lucy’s clothes] ‘casual frumpy’—jeans, sneakers, cotton button-down shirt under a sweatshirt. Accessorized with a yellow canvas pocketbook and a bucket cap. They’re the opposite of what I usually wear.” To be sure, even when Spears’ was “off-duty,” she was always fond of low-rise, midriff-baring ensembles. 

    And then there was Lucy’s inherent knowledge of all things automotive thanks to her dad (Dan Aykroyd) being a mechanic. As Spears is sure to call out in her diary, “Me? Let’s just say that on a recent road escapade with Felicia, it took the two of us twenty minutes to figure out how to put gas in the car!” So yes, there are many nuanced differences between the two women, ones that ultimately overtook Spears’ own spirit for quite some time. 

    It was, apparently, CVS that cured her. Or rather, buying some makeup there with a friend. As Spears recalls, “After the movie wrapped, one of my girlfriends from a club in LA came to visit me. We went to CVS. I swear to God, I walked into the store, and as I talked to her while we shopped, I finally came back to myself. When I came outside again I was cured of the spell that movie had cast. It was so strange. My little spirit showed back up in my body. That trip to buy makeup with my friend was like waving some magic wand.” Undeniably, this is what would be called a symptom of psychosis. Schizophrenia even. And yes, Spears’ tendency to bisect her personality as a defense mechanism came into play early on here. With her portrayal of Lucy, Spears tapped into that precarious split between thinking, memory, personality and perception. As such, Spears put it best when she said, “All I can say is it’s a good thing Lucy was a sweet girl writing poems about how she was ‘not a girl, not yet a woman,’ and not a serial killer. I ended up walking differently, carrying myself differently, talking differently. I was someone else for months while I filmed Crossroads.”

    This was something she seemed to notice and give voice to even at the time of filming, with one entry in her diary noting, “I’m doing another one of those really hard scenes. I’m crying and talking to Anson (Ben). It’s very emotional. I couldn’t pick my spirits up afterward.” The scene in question happens after Lucy’s mother (played by Kim Cattrall, though, at the time, there were rumors Madonna would do it—as if!) tells her that she never wanted her in the first place—that her father “made her” have a baby. Meanwhile she appears perfectly happy with her new set of children in Tucson. Spears describes getting into character for the emotionalism of that scene, explaining, “How did I do it? I remembered things that made me sad, but mostly I just put myself in Lucy’s place. I thought about how I’d feel if my mom didn’t love me, and I just hurt for her. Feeling the way Lucy would feel brought on the tears.” Tragically enough, it can presently be argued that maybe Lynne Spears really didn’t love Britney all that much to allow what happened to her with the conservatorship. Not just allow it, but help conspire to make it happen. 

    While Lynne made plenty of appearances on the set, it was, as usual, Spears’ assistant, Felicia, who was the most ever-present. It was she who prompted Spears to write, “She told me that she can see me getting more confident about acting. It’s true, I’m less worried about all this movie stuff—sometimes I even feel like an old pro!” That seemed to be true enough when, soon after Crossroads, she auditioned for the role of Allie in The Notebook. It came down to her and Rachel McAdams, with the latter obviously winning out. A result Spears was pleased with, commenting, “…I’m glad I didn’t do it. If I had, instead of working on my album In the Zone I’d have been acting like a 1940s heiress night and day. “Although Spears was briefly hoping to make a “proper go” of becoming a singer/actress, in The Woman in Me, she concludes of that profession, “I hope I never get close to that occupational hazard again. Living that way, being half yourself and half a fictional character, is messed up. After a while you don’t know what’s real anymore.”

    Funnily enough, Spears could just as easily be describing the bifurcation between her stage persona and her real self or, during her early Instagram days when the conservatorship was still not being questioned, her social media self and her real self. Thus, the great search for “the real Britney” has been a decades-long one.

    As for Crossroads and what she sacrificed emotionally for it, it obviously still means something to Spears. Not only because she goes into such detail about it in her memoir, but because it was the only attempt at promoting the book Spears offered up: rereleasing Crossroads in theaters (in addition to a special edition of the soundtrack…with NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye” still noticeably missing). Once again, however, it went unappreciated. Audiences just can’t seem to appropriately embrace or honor Spears’ uncontrollable Method acting abilities. 

    [ad_2]

    Genna Rivieccio

    Source link