» » SUNDANCE 2014: Updates, Film Reviews & Juicy Tid-Bits

SUNDANCE 2014: Updates, Film Reviews & Juicy Tid-Bits

UPDATED 21:50 PM

Kristen Stewart’s Guantanamo Bay Drama ‘Camp X-Ray’ Draws Warm Response, Standing-O

Sundance: Kristen Stewart’s Guantanamo Bay Drama ‘Camp X-Ray’ Draws Warm Response, Standing-O
“I think Kristen Stewart thrives in realistic material. She’s recognizable, human in Camp X-ray. Movie demanded it,” tweeted freelance film reporter and reviewer Matt Patches.
The film, written by first-time feature director Peter Sattler (above, left), follows Amy (Stewart), a solider who’s assigned to prison guard duty at Guantanamo Bay, where she befriends an inmate (played by “A Separation” star Payman Maadi, above right). Sattler has said that Stewart had a lot of input on the character and script, which was shot at a juvenile prison outside of Los Angeles

UPDATED 01/18/2014

Sundance Review: ‘God’s Pocket’ is an Unholy Mess

At its worst, God’s Pocket mumblingly mixes the grimy chest-flexing meathead masculinity of early Mamet and a series of ostensibly comedic bits that play like Weekend at Bernie’s as written by Bukowski. At its best, it is still at its worst.
God’s Pocket may not be the absolute worst American drama playing at Sundance – tone-deaf, vain, shapeless, indulgent and contemptuous – but I hope to God, and all of his articles of clothing, that I don’t find out what other film might be able to wrest that tarnished crown from it.

Sundance review: ‘God’s Pocket’

Alas, they come off as caricatures who are less authentic than the people in a Bruce Springsteen song.

Sundance Film Review: ‘God’s Pocket’

While Leon’s nameless mother (Hendricks) retreats into an inconsolable cocoon, her husband, a hard-drinking lowlife named Mickey Scarpato (Hoffman), barely musters so much as show of grief, though he does go about making the funeral arrangements in the booziest, most idiotic way imaginable.
A third central character emerges in the form of Richard Shelburn (Jenkins, source of the opening narration), a newspaper columnist famed for his beautifully observed stories about the people of God’s Pocket. For all his local celebrity, however, he’s long since gone to seed, hooking up with random jailbait and drinking constantly. (He’s also, like Mickey, one of those untrustworthy outsiders mentioned at the outset.) His latest assignment involves looking into rumors that Leon’s death was no accident, though Shelburn is more interested in taking Mickey’s wife out on a romantic picnic. Their moment of sexual ecstasy, juxtaposed with the climax of Mickey’s cadaverous hijinks, reps the film’s nadir.


UPDATED 01/18/2014 # 2




Maika (right).


UPDATED 01/18/2014 [12:30 PM]

‘Wetlands,’ About A Bodily Fluid-Obsessed German Teen, Is Sundance’s Raunchiest Film


Wetlands, based on the bestselling German erotic novel of the same name, is the Sundance Film Festival’s dirtiest—and weirdest—movie. (Warning: extremely graphic.)

Each year, one movie at Sundance pushes the boundaries of human decency. It incites walkouts by the dozen. Debates rage on in cafes and buses. At the 2007 fest, this honor went to Zoo, a documentary about a man who died of peritonitis after receiving consensual anal sex from a horse.

Two years ago, it was the psychological thriller Compliance, about a man posing as a cop who phones up a fast food joint and manipulates a pretty teen checkout clerk into being degraded and assaulted by her peers.

Wetlands (Feuchtgebiete) is the runaway favorite for 2014’s most notorious Sundance flick.

Directed by David Wnendt, and adapted from the bestselling German erotic novel of the same name by Charlotte Roche, the film opens with a teenage schoolgirl skateboarding down the street. “As long as I remember, I’ve had hemorrhoids,” she says in voiceover, in a cheeky nod to Goodfellas. She walks barefoot through a disgusting public restroom filled with brown water up to the ankles, enters a stall, applies a glob of zinc cream on her finger, and shoves it up her rear end.

Meet Helen.

The strange teen, played by Carla Juri, who’s a dead ringer for Greta Gerwig, has some major hygiene issues thanks to her germaphobe mother (Meret Becker), who advises her at the age of 8 that “a pussy gets sick way easier than a penis does,” so hygiene is of paramount importance. She’s also sadistic. In an episode straight out of a Roger Ailes biography, Helen’s mother convinces a very young Helen to jump off a rock wall outside their home and into her arms. She extends them outward. Helen jumps, and her mother backs away, letting her fall to the ground. “Don’t trust anybody, not even your parents,” she warns. “Better a scraped knee now than a broken heart later.” (Her divorced father, an emotionally distant lothario, isn’t much better.)

So Helen, naturally, rebels against her germ-averse, very Catholic mother and transforms herself into, as she says, “a living pussy-hygiene experiment.” She enjoys sitting on filthy public toilet seats and wiping her vagina around the rim in a circular motion, inserting vegetables—carrots, zucchinis, potatoes—into her vagina, and having her lady parts emit a “lightly bewitching odor” to attract the opposite sex. Then, when she has her prey in her clutches, she takes close-up shots of men’s orgasm faces with her cellphone while tugging them off, and then proceeds to walk all the way home with their semen on her hands. She becomes obsessed with bodily fluids, often inserting her fingers into various orifices before licking them clean.

But Helen isn’t the only oddball in town, and she soon finds a kindred spirit in Corinna, an equally adventurous young gal. Corinna becomes a pariah of sorts after word gets out that her first boyfriend, a heavy metal drummer, enjoys it when she takes dumps on his belly. Later in the film, the two girls swap bloody tampons, then wipe menstrual blood on each other’s face, proclaiming themselves “blood sisters.” At one point, one of Helen’s tampons gets stuck inside Corinna, so she removes it with a grill utensil, before handing the bloody tool back to her father, who subsequently uses them to flip steaks.

Helen fantasizes about reuniting her divorced parents, telling her mother she wishes to tie them in bed together ‘til death do they part.

One day, while shaving, she has an unfortunate accident, resulting in an anal fissure. She’s condemned to the proctological ward of a hospital. She wishes to have her parents meet her at the hospital at the same time, hoping that will reunite them. Confined to her hospital bed by the sinister Dr. Notz, Helen becomes lost in her own mind, fantasizing about various sexual and drug-fueled experiences that may or may not have happened (she isn’t the most reliable narrator). She imagines a plant sprouting out from her vagina, and has numerous dreams about Robin (Christoph Letkowski), her hot male nurse that she has a crush on. In one scene, while the two are eating pizza, she tells Robin a story of five men masturbating—and then ejaculating—onto a spinach pizza, which is then served to a house of unsuspecting girls whose father just happens to be a food chemist. We see the sperm flying in slow motion and splashing onto the pie as Strauss’s The Blue Danube plays.
“I would love to eat a pizza like that,” she says, testing Robin. “It would be like five men jizzing right into my mouth.” 

Helen’s infantilization at the hands of the Dr. Szell-like Notz, along with her hospital imprisonment and subsequent fantasies, recalls Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s celebrated short story, The Yellow Wallpaper. It’s a bizarre fable that seeks to shatter a number of female-related taboos, believing that women’s natural scents and fluids should be celebrated, not abhorred. Wetlands is beautifully lensed, and includes a number of eye-catching sequences, including a drug-fueled rampage throughout the city, as well as some nifty editing. Despite the various bodily secretions on display, the film looks spectacular.

Once Helen’s surgery is a success, she’s cleared to leave the hospital. But her parents haven’t reunited yet, so she conspires to stay in the hospital by ramming the pedal of her hospital bed up her rectum, which leads to emergency surgery. We learn later on that Helen is very mentally ill, stemming from a dramatic incident in her childhood (which is alluded to throughout the film via flashbacks).

Wetlands will be singled out by festivalgoers for its X-rated content, but it’s also, in a way, a wacky satire that sends up people’s—in particular men’s—fear of female sexuality, femininity, and cleanliness (its title, after all, is a reference to women’s genitals).

Others will see it as pornographic.

Roche’s tome split audiences along the same lines, but shot to No. 1 on the Amazon charts upon its 2008 release, selling half a million copies that March, according to The Economist, before going on to sell close to two million copies worldwide. Whether the film version will catch on in a similar fashion remains to be seen, but it will certainly raise some eyebrows up in the mountains this week.


UPDATED 01/19/2014

Wingard's THE GUEST is More Magnificent Midnight Madness

Soon David is kicking back beers with Spencer, teaching Luke how to stand up the jerks at school and connecting with Anna in ways only a hunky military veteran can connect with a cute 20-year-old girl.


Elizabeth Banks Talks Nude Shower Scene with Boyd Holbrook!

“I got to be naked in a shower with Boyd Holbrook, my director, and the DP. We had a lot of fun in the shower. It was a very small shower,” Elizabeth exclusively shared to JustJared.com‘s Jared Eng about her favorite scene to shoot in Little Accidents. “That was the on screen and off screen favorite for me.”


Sundance: Why Desiree Akhavan Could be the Next Lena Dunham

And like “Girls,” “Appropriate Behavior” offers a similarly candid depiction of sex. “I feel like a lot of scenes graze over sex and make it this silky smooth thing,” she said. “Even the best sex, there’s the mechanics of it. I didn’t want to gloss over it with anything cheesy. And I didn’t want it to be one-note. I wanted to show the messy gray matter that happens.”
“I didn’t want to be gratuitous,” Akhavan added, “but I also felt if I weren’t naked this wouldn’t be a real love scene. I have a real point of view when it comes to them and I wanted it to be just right.”

Sundance Review: 'Appropriate Behavior' a Coming-Out Tale of Deadpan Comedy and Melancholy

While Akhavan’s concise film will draw inevitable comparisons to “Girls” -- the Brooklyn setting, the unapologetic portrayal of sexual encounters, a narcissistic lead who resolutely flails around in life -- “Appropriate Behavior” has an impressively subdued quality all its own.

Appropriate Behavior: Sundance Review

Many of Shirin’s clumsy attempts to regain her footing solo or win back Maxine – a website sex hookup, a fizzled three-way, a disruptive visit to a gay rights discussion group, a lingerie shopping trip – are funny. But they don’t go far enough in terms of defining the character or any self-knowledge she has acquired. While her pit stops frequently suggest a bi-now/gay-later woman destined to shed that denial, the story’s soft resolution merely settles for a vaguely consolatory “she’ll-be-fine” shot as a cue to the standard closing blast of whimsical indie rock.





I Origins: Sundance Review

I Origins Sundance Film Still - H 2014
Pitt's Ian Gray is a biologist pursuing a PhD in eye evolution, with first-year med student Karen (Brit Marling) as his new lab assistant. While he supports Karen's ambition of researching non-seeing organisms with the idea of experimenting with mutating one species, like worms, to give them functioning eyes, the only eyes that really interest Ian at the moment are those of the mystery woman; his eye photos are all he has of her. Cleverly and with luck, he finds her and they embark on a wild, heady love affair. A smoky, offbeat beauty, Sofi (Astrid Berges-Frisbey) won't say much about her past, but her intuitive, impulsive and vibrant nature brings out the best in her analytical lover, even if they do disagree about his work; he's out to put the final nail in the coffin of any theories of intelligent design for the universe, while she believes "It's dangerous to play God."
Cahill charges the couple's interactions, sexual and otherwise, with lyrical, intoxicating images and cutting, so that when their relationship comes to a shocking end just short of the film's halfway point, the loss is devastatingly felt.

Sundance 2014: I ORIGINS Review

While attending a Halloween party, Ian meets a masked woman with gorgeously unique eyes. After a brief sexual encounter, Ian can’t stop thinking about her and decides to track her down. He eventually finds and falls in love with Sofi (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey), a reserved free spirit whose openness to the possibility of past lives and the existence of the afterlife runs up against Ian’s pragmatic approach to our place in the universe.


Sundance Review: ‘Wetlands’

David Wnendt’s adaptation of Charlotte Roche’s provocative and uber-popular novel cum feminist manifesto of the same name is an upbeat and visually playful sideshow of bodily horrors, the story of a young woman finding herself from the inside out. And Helen is most definitely a character who deserves to be found, a remarkable girl who exists completely outside the accepted boundaries of female sexuality and human hygiene. Made compulsively watchable by Carla Juri’s spirited, guileless performance – the effortlessness of her physical appeal crucially allowing the character to feel capable of owning the societal norms that she ignores – Helen is as curious as she is unique, glowing with the power to transform the perspectives of the people she meets. The film sees Helen in the same vaguely magical way as “The Blind Side” depicted Michael “Big Mike” Oher, but uses that quality to, um, slightly different ends.

Sundance: Explicit 'Wetlands' Pushes Sex Boundaries (Even for Sundance) 

Amid the banter about star-studded premieres and hot-topic documentaries, one question seemed to pop up repeatedly in conversations on Main Street during the first weekend of the Sundance Film Festival: "Have you seen Wetlands?"
Wnendt already is generating heat as a director, with agents and managers lining up to meet him after the screening. Carla Juri, the beautiful actress who plays the lead character, also is generating heat in the representation community.
Juri, who stood on the stage with Wnendt and others after the screening, said she didn’t know about the book or its controversy (some labeled it thinly veiled porn even as it sold more than 1.5 million copies in Germany). And when the adaptation was being cast, one critic said that whoever stars in the movie will be disgraced. That only encouraged Juri to take the role, she said.
“I saw her as what she is, just a human being,” Juri said of the character. The actress, who was 27 when she played the 18-year old, also said the nudity didn’t bother her since she disconnected herself from the character. “It wasn’t me. I never felt it was me that was doing it. It made it easier.”
Whether this movie gets a North American release in any fashion is unclear but clearly its talent are poised for a rise.


Three completely different movies at Sundance

The Foxy Merkins was a quirky, lesbian hooker buddy movie.  Funny and sweet at times, painful at others. No “L” word type scenes her, the only nudity was played for (uncomfortable) humor.


COLD IN JULY

What is going on here? That’s what most people will be saying to themselves through the majority of Jim Mickle’s truly undefinable Cold in July, based on the novella by Joe Lansdale, starring Michael C. Hall, Sam Shepard, Vinessa Shaw, and Don Johnson. If you’re not willing to take the genre-jumping ride, Cold in July will be jarring. If video stores still existed, they’d have to get multiple copies and put them in multiple categories.

Roger's Prediction
There is some T-and-A by newcomer [1] [2] - naked in a video? In the Lansdale book, Ann (here played by nudity dodger ) is nude stepping out of the shower.

Cold in July: Sundance Review

Shaw is given nothing much to play and comes across almost abrasively as Richard’s petulant wife, showing little concern for any psychological damage he may have suffered. But it’s perhaps fitting that women have no place in a movie that evolves into a glowering study in violent masculinity.


UPDATED 01/20/2014


Morgan Saylor's Jamie Marks Is Dead: Sundance Review

Cameron Monaghan plays Adam, an athletic redhead who is introverted compared to his loud, nerd-taunting fellow jocks. When one of those nerds, a classmate he barely knew named Jamie Marks (Noah Silver) is found dead and near-naked beside a river, Adam feels an inexplicable kinship with the boy. Visiting the site of Jamie's death he meets Gracie (Morgan Saylor), the loner who found the body. Surprisingly forward, Gracie invites Adam to come over some time and check out her rock collection.
Strange things happen after the pair's first kiss under the sea-blue lights of Gracie's bedroom.
Darren Lew's photography, all sickly greens and blues, suggests the nearness between Adam's living world and whatever limbo Jamie inhabits. But recurring bedroom scenes with Gracie, who always makes the first move but finds Adam a willing participant, demonstrate that he isn't nearly ready to abandon the corporeal plane.

Roger's Take
Couple of make out/sex scenes with Morgan? Not sure if there is any nudity involved.


The Voices: Sundance Review

This thriller-horror-comedy hybrid is among the more eccentric films screening at Sundance this year and stars an excellent Ryan Reynolds as a damaged man-child in a small industrial town in the Midwest who accidentally kills his date for the night (Gemma Arterton) and then asks his pets what he should do -- and of course, they talk back, literally. Oscar nominees Anna Kendrick and Jacki Weaver co-star in this wild and occasionally hilarious genre crossbreed that seems tailor-made for fantastic film festivals and midnight slots, though a small distributor with large cojones could try and capitalize on the film’s star power and zany premise and aim for a modest commercial release before making a killing on VOD.
Reynolds is Jerry, a handsome but apparently rather shy and maladroit man who has just started working at a bathtub factory (decked out in industrial grays and retro pinks courtesy of ace production designer Udo Kramer). Trying to fit in, Jerry accepts to be part of the organizing committee of the factory barbeque, and during the preparations falls head over heels for the Brit chick from accounting, Fiona (Arterton, Strawberry Fields from Quantum of Solace). His shrink (Weaver) thinks this is all marvelous but does underline Jerry needs to take his medication or she’ll have to "tell the authorities."
A freak collision with a deer that subsequently and quite literally begs Jerry to put it out of its misery sends Fiona running into the woods in her underwear (she was soaked to the bone), with Jerry in hot pursuit with a knife in hand (that he just used to slit the deer’s throat).

The image of a half-naked girl pursued by a man armed with a knife is a familiar one but screenwriter Michael R. Perry (Paranormal Activity 2) has done a deft job of taking well-known genre tropes and turning them slightly on their heads, with Satrapi gleefully following suit.



Anna Kendrick on a moment she's surprised didn't make it into "Happy Christmas. " #sundance


Aubrey Plaza's Life After Beth: Sundance Review

After confronting his shock, Zach's in bliss. Beth's memory loss has even wiped out the fact that she'd wanted to break up just before she died. He's getting to do things over, and it's beautiful. So what if she doesn't notice that she still has a gory snakebite wound, or if she develops something of a rash after they sneak out to have sex?
Especially once they're venturing away from home, Beth gets stranger and stranger. Plaza seems to have a lot of fun in her herky-jerky progression from miraculously-returned angel to full-bore zombie monster, though there's nothing winky about the performance. (Which isn't to say there aren't plenty of jokes about it.) 


Sundance 2014 Review: Blind

Blind Ellen Dorit Peterson Henrik Rafaelson

“A sexy, funny and thrilling trip through the human imagination.”
Ever the professional, however, here I try: Ellen Dorit Peterson plays Ingrid, a woman who lost her sight and has begun to lose her ability to visualize her surroundings. She’s refuses to leave her apartment, but her husband Morten (Henrik Rafaelson) is free to venture wherever he chooses, and in his desperation to connect with someone - anyone - now that his wife is stuck in geographic and psychological seclusion, winds up having an extramarital affair with Nina (Vera Vitali), a single mother stalked by another man with an addiction to pornography.
The events that occur inside her apartment aren’t much more reliable. Since she doesn’t even know what it looks like, the size and shape of the flat sometimes varies, and the probably mundane tasks her husband performs around her are equally subject to her paranoid interpretation. Is he writing an e-mail or livechatting with a lover? Does he touch himself while Ingrid undresses or has he stopped thinking about her sexually? Did he really go to work, or has he been watching Ingrid in secret all day…?
It’s a dangerous affectation for a film to embrace (unfortunate memories of the John Candy vehicle Delirious are unavoidable), but by the time Eskil Vogt and his protagonist really begin to play with the possibilities, the comic situations Ingrid concocts and the little tragic possibilities she toys with become easily recognizable as a significant expression of a woman with a unique point of view and an avid, poignant imagination, writing the story of her life and the lives of those around her with a reckless disregard for exactitude, and an open willingness to make up it as she goes along. But all the little jokes and obvious falsehoods represented Ingrid’s genuine fears and fantasies, presented with humor and eroticism and suspense by a storyteller who lacks confidence, perhaps, in her storytelling but with something important to say about a cast of memorable, fully realized characters, or perhaps only to Ingrid herself.
Blind exists as a nebulous construction, ever shifting but ultimately centered around a lovely and funny love-quadrangle with curious characters and consistent insight. The film's curious blend of the sensual and the cerebral manages to engage even when you begin to lack confidence about whether anything is actually happening at all. It’s all real because Ingrid wills it so, because Eski Vogt films it with an impressive clarity that Ingrid herself lacks, and because a good therapist would have a field day with the protagonist's every little assumption and consenting lie.
But by the time I've told someone all that, they've already had to rush off to their next screening. Pity. Well, I hope they're seeing Blind. It's a sexy, funny and thrilling trip through the human imagination, and possibly the best cinematic interpretation ever of a chaotic but promising first draft, writ large in front of our eyes by a creative storyteller and the creative storyteller telling her story.

Sundance Film Review: ‘The Guest’

“Downton Abbey’s” Stevens knocks a showy, 100% ‘Murrican role out of the park. There’s never any doubt that his David is one bat-crazy lethal weapon, as well as one sexy MF. (He convincingly shuts down Anna’s hostility, albeit briefly, by simply stepping half-naked from the shower.) Other performances as familiar character types are also fine-tuned; the production package is Wingard’s slickest yet.


UPDATED 01/21/2014

William H. Macy’s Directorial Debut ‘Rudderless’ Is a Tale of Two Half Notes [Sundance '14 Review]

There is a lot to like about Rudderless. It uses an accessible story to teach audiences about loss, death and truth.  The music is catchy and moving, Billy Crudup channels his inner Russell Hammond again, and the supporting cast – including Selena Gomez, Lawrence Fishburne and Felicity Huffman, all give the film gravitas. However, Macy misses the mark ever so slightly with the tonal shift, making an almost great movie simply good.

Roger's Take
There should be brief nudity (nope, nothing from Selena) but it's also possible Macy will excise the scene for mainstream release?


Sundance Film Review: R100

Witty dialogue, running gags and directorial winks make the whole thing fun at times (especially when ultimate dominatrix Lindsay Kay Hayward appears), but overall R100 is kind of a pain in the ass to watch. If you’re into extremely campy, intentionally aggravating films and love Quentin Tarantino, you’ll probably like it, though.


Jonathan Timothy Stoner ·
My first film at Sundance was the premiere of Gregg Araki's new film, White Bird In A Blizzard. Talented cast led by the always wonderful Shailene Woodley - she has a great career ahead of her! But the story/storytelling was weak, the tone was wildly inconsistent and I struggled to find one fully developed character I could buy into or truly care about. Great late 80s early 90s soundtrack though! Right up there with Donnie Darko in the music department. #sundance

‘White Bird in a Blizzard’ Review

White Bird in a Blizzard review
‘White Bird in a Blizzard’ attempts to explore deep familial troubles and the nature of secret-keeping, but it’s so thinly and shallowly written that those attempts at profundity simply prove laughable. The film is crammed with exposition, as characters frequently spout hammy lines that only serve as an inelegant means of information delivery, and when that’s not quite enough, Woodley is saddled with laughably metaphor-laden voiceover work and frequent trips to a terrible therapist (Angela Bassett) to air out her issues and tell stories about her young life. It should come as little surprise that the film’s biggest revelation is delivered by way of voiceover and flashback. Nothing actually seems to happen within the actual timeline of the film, and the result is confusing, frustrating, and just plain lazy.
Woodley is unquestionably the best thing about the film, but even a talent like her falters by the film’s end, simply because the script and direction don’t require anything new from her, and even Woodley can’t make rinse-and-repeat crying and looking mad compelling after a certain mark. Elsewhere, Green is gloriously, unnervingly over the top, and if anyone is in the mood for rebooting ‘Mommie Dearest’ within the next few years, she should be the top pick for the starring role, as she’s essentially aping it here (without a wire hanger in sight). Christopher Meloni appears to be asleep for most of the film.

Sundance Review: 'White Bird in a Blizzard,' Starring Shailene Woodley, an Impressive if Flawed Suburban Tragedy

Based on Laura Kasischke’s novel of the same title, “White Bird” centers on teen Kat (Shailene Woodley), living a life of angst and parental disappointment in late 1980s suburbia. When her unpredictable mother (Eva Green, giving off a major Bette Davis vibe) seemingly vanishes into thin air one day, and her doormat father (Christopher Meloni) is sent into a tailspin of despondency, Kat holds it together as best she can. She begins an affair with the middle-aged, macho detective assigned to her mother’s case, while halfheartedly attempting to stay in a relationship with her dopey boyfriend (Shiloh Fernandez), who seems to have lost sexual interest in her anyway.
Because of the film’s enigmatic plot premise, Araki gets to go creepy (working with DP Sandra Valde-Hansen), with scenes that submerge into Kat’s dream life, where she wanders in a white-out blizzard while catching glimpses of her mother, a naked Ice Queen in poses alternately angelic and morbidly terrifying.

Sundance Film Review: ‘White Bird in a Blizzard’

Eva Green goes deliciously unhinged in Gregg Araki's latest. With the exception of Tim Burton, few American directors have maintained a stronger auteurial hold on their careers than Araki, who seizes on “White Bird” as a chance to explore familiar issues of body image, sexual awakening and extreme family dysfunction with his trademark mix of uneasy seduce-and-repel tactics. It’s naughty, campy and wildly uneven — “a film by Gregg Araki,” in other words, with all the commercial limitations that implies.17-year-old Kat (Woodley) wrestles with her transformation from awkward butterball to brink-of-legal seductress. With scalpel drawn, Araki is effectively dissecting the mind of the suburban American teen, and yet, instead of doing so in a sterile white laboratory, he conducts his grisly coming-of-age experiments on a series of lipstick-hued sitcom sets (rendered inexplicably dark by “Kaboom” d.p. Sandra Valde-Hansen).
In the opening scene, Kat comes home from school to find her mother, Eve (Eva Green, deliciously unhinged), suffering a nervous breakdown on her bed.
Sexually unfulfilled in a loveless marriage (to a miscast Christopher Meloni), Eve sees herself in Kat, not just envying her emerging good looks, but even going to so far as to openly compete with her daughter.
For some reason — insecurity, perhaps, considering her best friends are played by social outcasts Mark Indelicato and Gabourey Sidibe — Kat has opted to give her virginity to the lughead next door, a chisel-chested Neanderthal named Phil (Shiloh Fernandez, not nearly as hot as Araki thinks he is). Kat could do much better, but hasn’t quite realized the extent of her newfound powers — which explains her bewilderment as she studies her own unfamiliar body before the bathroom mirror. (A fat-suited flashback might have helped, since Woodley herself was never the ugly duckling the film asks us to believe.)
Sexually, she’s ready to become a woman, while mentally, she can’t quite wrap her head around the sordid family secrets, even as the pic’s last-minute twist explains pretty much everything to those in the audience.


Review: 'Jamie Marks is Dead' is a very unexpected supernatural drama

Unfortunately, the one weak link is Saylor. Gracie is an eccentric teenager, but Saylor plays her pretty one-note throughout the entire picture. Besides the fact that Adam's pickings in his small town may be slim, why would he be infatuated with her? Saylor doesn't give enough color to Gracie to justify their mutual attraction.
The most impressive part about "Jamie Marks" is how it blurs lines between sexuality, love and friendship in an increasingly supernatural context. Does Adam fall for Jamie? Is he really bi? Is he really gay? That inevitable discussion may be the one thing Smith and his collaborators can really hang their hats on.
As for its chances of being acquired, "Jamie Marks" is somewhat of a tough sell. The leads are really not bankable enough on their own and is it really supernatural enough to sell as a horror film? Probably not. The film's best prospects are likely on the art house circuit and VOD.



UPDATED 01/22/2014

White Bird in a Blizzard: Sundance Review

White Bird In A Blizzard Sundance Film Still - H 2014
Woodley has by far the biggest challenge here, both emotionally and physically, and her characterization is a mixed bag, one compromised by lack of insight in the script and some clumsy staging. She has several nude scenes, which will be fine by her young male fans, and her sensitivity comes through intermittently depending upon the credibility of the circumstances.
Green walks a fine line between composure and lunacy, although the director pushes her to one or two over-the-top moments. The combination of Meloni’s physical stature and his character’s meekness creates weird vibes.


Sundance ’14: Blind

In a post-Heisenberg world, we have grown accustomed to the notion perception influences reality, but what does that mean to you if you happen to be blind?  For one woman who recently lost her sight, the world has become drastically smaller. Yet, she will still exert a strange influence over it in Eskil Vogt’s Blind (nsfw trailer here), which screens during the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.Frankly, it is almost as hard for viewers to parse fantasy from reality in Blind as it is for the characters. Ostensive reality is a malleable, ever changing proposition that often involves nudity.


UPDATED 01/23/2014

Little Accidents: Review

Elizabeth Banks finds a complex poignancy (not evident in her earlier work) in motel trysts with Amos, whose testimony risks putting her husband in prison.

Sundance Film Review: ‘Little Accidents’

Caught up somewhere in the middle of all this is Amos, who enters into an affair with the distraught Diana (who cozies up to him at a community Bible study), perhaps because she’s really into him, perhaps because she’s trying to prevent him from testifying against her husband, or perhaps because the screenplay needs for this to happen in order to fulfill its thesis that all of us make bad decisions and that the truth will eventually set us free.

Elizabeth Banks searches for some hands-on healing in 'Little Accidents' -- VIDEO



‘Nymphomaniac,’ Lars von Trier’s Icy Orgy of Sex and Self-Loathing, Bows At Sundance

The latest from Danish provocateur Lars von Trier is Nymphomaniac, a sordid sex odyssey about a nymphomaniac woman starring Charlotte Gainsbourg and Shia LaBeouf, the first part of which screened in secret at Sundance. [Warning: Some Spoilers]

When Joe is 15 (and played by Stacy Martin at that age), she loses her virginity to a slightly older biker, Jerome (Shia LaBeouf). “If I asked you to take my virginity, would that be a problem?” she asks him. And, eight pumps later—three in the front and five in the back—it’s over. “3+5 … those are the numbers in the Fibonacci sequence!” interrupts Seligman (more on his unintentionally hilarious philosophizing later). While most would be turned off to sex by such an unremarkable first encounter, it whets Joe’s appetite. She becomes insatiable.

In one episode, Joe and her pal, B (Sophie Kennedy Clark), dress in what they call “fuck me” clothes—short leather skirts, tight tops—board a train, and see who can have sex with the most people during the trip. The winner gets a bag of candy. After taking several men to the bathroom for quickies, with Joe wearing a blank expression on her face during the trysts, she finds herself losing six to 10. But B is willing to give Joe five points if she successfully seduces a married man in the first class cabin. She performs oral sex on him—which we see, in close-up—and wins the prize.

Some years later, Joe is a bona fide nympho. Sex, for her, is empowering, and she enjoys the sway she has over men. With every new sexual partner, she tells him they were the first to bring her to orgasm. Here, we’re treated to a montage of close-ups of dozens of different, mostly ugly-looking penises of various shapes and sizes—presumably ones Joe has encountered. Joe, B, and her pals form a coven of sorts that’s dedicated to having as many random sexual encounters as possible—and never more than once with the same person. They chant, “Mea maxima vulva!”

With no skills per se and no college education, Joe applies to be a secretary at a firm whose boss just happens to be Jerome. He’s been infatuated with her all this time, but she rebuffs his advances, instead choosing to have meaningless sex with all the nerds in the office.

“The secret to great sex is love,” B warns Joe. And before long, she thinks she’s in love with him. But it’s too late. Jerome is MIA.

So, Joe goes back to her nympho ways. She has so many sexual partners—about eight different men a day—that she has to devise a scheduling system to keep them in check.

The best episode of the first half of Nymphomaniac involves one of these partners—a middle-aged man who’s under the impression that Joe loves him (she obviously doesn’t), and leaves his wife and three young boys to be with Joe. When his wife, played by a fantastic Uma Thurman, and the three children show up at the apartment, all hell breaks loose. She, along with her children, demand a tour of the apartment, including what she calls “the whoring bed,” saying, “Come children, let’s see daddy’s favorite place!” Thurman is brilliant here and the sequence is even more powerful when you consider how close it hits home for her.

Let’s talk about the sex. There is lots of it, but it’s displayed in such an icy, detached style that’s far from titillating. We see the actors—Martin, LaBeouf, others—engage in many, many acts of unsimulated sex (i.e. full penetration). Von Trier, of course, is no stranger to showing real intercourse on film. His groundbreaking 1998 dogme-95 film Idioterne showed his actors engaging in actual sex. But in Nymphomaniac, the effect was achieved through CGI trickery. For example, in one scene, you see LaBeouf’s character penetrating a woman. The scene is shot from below while LaBeouf is standing and the woman is straddling him, so you see his shaft entering her while the actor’s face appears through the leftover space.

“We shot the actors pretending to have sex and then had the body doubles, who really did have sex, and in post we will digital-impose the two,” producer Louise Vesth said at Cannes. “So above the waist it will be the star and below the waist it will be the doubles.”

Cue jokes about LaBeouf plagiarizing his sex moves.

Lars Von Trier's 'Nymphomaniac' spice up Sundance

The film’s “dirty parts” are mostly quick shots of unknown European actors having sex with a younger version of Gainsbourg’s character (Stacy Martin). In the film’s one extended — and graphic — sex scene, Shia LaBeouf appears fully nude. Reports of LaBeouf’s beef pretty much broke the Internet last year — and the screening lived up to the hype. Indeed, there’s one very graphic scene of him having full-on, porno-style sex. And yes, we can see it’s him.
How did all this go over? The Sundance audience alternately laughed, groaned and sometimes even seemed engaged by the movie, due in U.S. arthouses in March. More boring than shocking, the film is like a 1970s European art-skin flick with X-rated shots inserted.


Sundance 2014, The Sleepwalker

Roger said...
Both girls are cute, Jim. Any T-and-A?
Jim Breitingersaid...
Yes.


UPDATED 01/24/2014



Sundance: Gregg Araki On His 'White Bird,' Working With Shailene Woodley and Eva Green, and His Favorite Movies of 2013

"I said 'actually I’m working on this movie right now that she would be really good for,'" Araki said. "And he was like 'Oh my god send it to me.'  I sent and she just loved it and was so excited. And luckily we just sort of hit it off and got together, you know, before all the Shai-mania hit. So it was great."
While it might be Woodley's movie, Eva Green sure does a good job trying to steal it.
"You’ve never see Eva Green like this before," Araki gushed. "It will blow your mind. The funny thing about Eva Green is—it’s weird—because she’s playing 40ish for this movie and Eva is only 32 when we made this movie. And Shiloh is like 27 and he plays Shai's  teenage boyfriend. I don’t want to give it away, but there’s a weird flirtation between the Shiloh and Eva in the movie. And in real life they are four years apart. But in the movie, so creepy. Because Eva is literally like so insanely amazing.  I mean the thing about the movie is that you see the mother when she is young and beautiful and that is what Eva Green looks like and then you see her when she is a little older and living this miserable life and feeling super trapped. And Eva just became this other person and it was the craziest thing. To see it on set was insane."
"Shai and I talked discussed she’s sort of like this late "Heathers" or "Beetlejuice" era Winona Ryder so so she has dark hair and she’s sort of alienated.  The pretty alienated girl. So I wanted the music to reflect that world. The movie has the craziest soundtrack of any of my movies ever. "
Roger
Araki sems to be alluding Shai had a great deal of (creative) control during productions. I'm more than impressed with Ms. Woodley. She, Jenn Lawrence and millennial generation are certainly coming up with the goods when it really matters. The likes of Maggie Grace, MEW and even Alex DD...all those actresses in their late 20's should be worried. These girls are quite assertive and self-assured and more than willing to take on racy roles if it helps them propel to the forefront of burgeoning pool of newbies.
"I'll get naked for you but I want to be in charge of all aspects of the production involving my character" - Shailene. 
Fair trade off.

Shia LaBeouf and Shailene Woodley’s Sexed-Up Sundance 
Most people attending the wintry Sundance Film Festival wear several layers of clothing, but not former child stars: Inevitably, you can count on them to spend Sundance disrobing onscreen. Whether it’s Daniel Radcliffe taking it all off in last year’s Sundance entry Kill Your Darlings or Kristen Stewart going topless at Cannes the previous summer for On the Road, a sexed-up film festival indie is now a nearly mandatory rite of passage for A-listers on the verge of adulthood, and this year in Park City, two more young stars joined the club: Shia LaBeouf and Shailene Woodley, the former attempting to put his Transformersfame behind him with a key role in Lars von Trier’s sexually explicitNymphomaniac, the latter already subverting her PG-13 lead in the upcomingDivergent franchise with an assertive, unclothed turn in Gregg Araki’s White Bird in a Blizzard.
LaBeouf isn’t here at Sundance, and at first, nobody expected Nymphomaniacto be, either: A smattering of selected press and filmmakers were invited to a secret festival screening last night, and it turned out to be the first installment of Von Trier’s two-part sex epic. (Pity the poor director sitting next to me who expected the mystery film to be Wes Anderson’s more genteel The Grand Budapest Hotel; he’d brought his parents to the screening, then had to watch them flinch through uncut cock montages and lines like “I discovered my cunt at age 2.”) The film is recounted in flashback by Joe, the titular nymphomaniac, who first hooks up with LaBeouf’s character Jerome when she’s a sexually curious teenager. Ready for action, Joe shows up to Jerome’s flat as the older boy is working on his moped, and she fixes him with a whopper of an opening line: "If I asked you to take my virginity, would that be a problem?" Turns out, it isn't.
The dirty deed is swiftly done. "He shoved his cock inside of me and humped me three times," Joe says in voice-over as we watch Jerome deliver those three thrusts onscreen. Then Jerome flips Joe over, humps her five more times in an additional orifice, and a mere fifteen seconds after their assignation first began, Jerome rises from the bed and goes back to work on his moped. Joe is humiliated by how few thrusts it took to dispense with her precious virginity; I couldn't help but think that the total number was still about six more thrusts than the MPAA would ever conceivably allow in a wide-release movie.
In any case, this scene is mere foreplay for a much more explicit encounter with Jerome later in Part 1, where little seems to be simulated. For several minutes, we watch LaBeouf and his scene partner Stacy Martin go at it; there’s so much screen time lavished on the encounter that you may be moved to critique LaBeouf’s make-out style (which involves some very aggressive tongue action) as well as his aptitude at nipple-licking (also pretty tongue-dependent) and cunnilingus (ditto). Eventually, it’s time for the moment of penetration, and while Von Trier has claimed to use special effects to enhance some of the sex scenes, I’m pretty sure that LaBeouf performed that bit for real. (And if he didn’t, it’s a better special effect than anything I saw recently in the CG-soaked trailer for Maleficent.)
Nothing in White Bird in a Blizzard is that explicit, but Araki still has a good wink at the notion of a former child star gone rogue: In the scene where Woodley’s character loses it to the hunky neighbor next door (Shiloh Fernandez), she eagerly sweeps a dozen stuffed animals off her bed before removing her top. Woodley is playing Kat, a 17-year-old feeling adrift after the sudden disappearance of her mom (Eva Green). With only her ineffectual father (Christopher Meloni) left to support her and few leads on her missing mother, Kat asserts herself in the one aspect of her life she feels she has control over, her sexuality. "Can we stop talking and fuck?" she asks her suddenly celibate boyfriend, moaning later to her best friends, "If I don't see a dick soon, I'm gonna explode."
Woodley spent years on the ABC Family show The Secret Life of the American Teenager, and most other actresses with a comparable résumé to dispel would bite down hard on those lines, all the better to show off a new adult attitude. Woodley, miraculously, makes them sound natural; she’s not trying to telegraph a career change with all that sex talk, she’s merely playing the character as real as possible. (Which makes Woodley a delicious foil to the arch Eva Green, who’s so campy as Kat’s mother that she’s like a drag queen who just beamed in from the planet Kim Cattrall.) Unlike the title character in Nymphomaniac, there’s no shame in Kat’s game; when she seduces the fortysomething detective working her mom’s case, then brags to her friends about his “cock and balls and hairy chest,” there’s nothing punitive in Araki’s handling of the plot turn — Kat was just a horny teenager, like most.
Though they’re following in the bare footsteps of many former child stars before them, LaBeouf and Woodley do have something different going for them: These provocative roles feel less like a repudiation of their past work and more like an outgrowth of their current public personas. LaBeouf has been so controversial in recent years — from his "plagiarism" scandal to his bar brawls to that nude music video he made for Sigur Ros — that his role in Nymphomaniacreps a natural next step in that direction, while Woodley is so unaffected onscreen and so candid about her hippie proclivities in the press that it would actually seem more unusual if she ducked those White Bird nude scenes; instead, they’re as unabashed as she is. Sex isn’t a stunt with these two — it’s a way to reach a naked state of performance after they’ve spent most of their careers exerting themselves opposite green-screen robots and Molly Ringwald. When the industry places so many expectations on you from such a young age, sometimes you’ve just got to take it all off.


UPDATED 01/25/2014

‘Nymphomaniac’ Tops the Copious Sex on Screen at Sundance 2014

Getting it on never feels as honest as in the fringe films that play the fest.
BY MATT PATCHES
Without Hollywood looming over their decisions and censoring in the name of chastity, independent filmmakers have a blank canvas to explore any topic, including the entire spectrum of sexuality. This makes the Sundance Film Festival a no holds barred arena of the raunchy and romantic — getting it on never feels as honest as in the fringe films that play the fest. Sundance 2013 hit new heights in the sex department, offering Joseph Gordon-Levitt's porn addiction dramedy, Daniel Radcliffe's gay sex scene, a biopic of Linda Lovelace, and a documentary on bondage, just to name a few. 2014 was a little more tempered, though eventually met the bar set by last year thanks to the last minute addition of the much-buzzed Nymphomaniac. Here's a glimpse at some of the best sex you could find at Sundance this year.

Frank

Here's a daring move: Frank stars Michael Fassbender — Hollywood's favorite Irish import — as a musician who dons an oversized cartoon mask. Meaning, we rarely see Fassbender, whose character is the ringleader of an equally eccentric alt-rock band. The quirky conceit doesn't allow for much steamy Fassbending or even romancing. But while the title character stews in his own existence from under his paper mache dome, his bandmates (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal andAbout Time's Domhnall Gleeson) find an opportunity to, uh, connect in a hot tub. This is after Gyllenhaal rocks out on the theremin, which is even hotter than actual sex.

White Bird in a Blizzard

Based on the book by Laura Kasischke, White Bird in a Blizzard will be heralded by the Mr. Skins of the world for gifting us samples of emerging it-girl Shailene Woodley in the flesh. Despite her upcoming YA entries Divergent and The Fault in Our Stars, Woodley boldly embraces the sexually-charged nature of White Bird, stripping down and engaging with men as her vicious mother (Eva Green) lashes out in jealousy. Director Gregg Araki is no stranger to coitus and alternative forms of connection — his college sexcapade Kaboom is a must-see — so while there's a mystery element to White Bird, the meat is Woodley's self-discovery and carnal journey.

Obvious Child

Ex-SNL star, Jenny Slate, arrived to Sundance with what could easily be called a “Girls knock-off.” But that's the simpleton assessment. Obvious Child is a movie about dating, sex, throwing caution to the wind, and the never-not-gut-wrenching abortion experience. The dour situation is turned on its head by Slate, whose dirty, brazen, and poignant comedic talents are on full display. The impetus of Slate's emotional roller coaster ride is a tipsy one-night stand with Max (Jake Lacy). The hook-up is joyous — set to the Paul Simon song that lends its name to the film — which makes the aftermath all the more difficult.

The Skeleton Twins

Saturday Night Live alumni Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig star in this Sundance-y drama that mixes the duo's brand of humor with explorations of suicide, marital friction, and taboo relationships. Hader's performance is a real standout, a gay actor wannabe who winds up in his hometown to find himself drawn to a former flame (who also happened to be his high school English teacher). Though their physical romance is portrayed off-screen, Wiig has her own sexual voyage; Despite being married to Lance (played by the hilarious Luke Wilson), she finds herself screwing other men — including her hunky scuba instructor — at every opportunity. Wiig is known for her wacky, unglamorous characters, but in Skeleton Twins she glows with lust. Her raunchy bathroom sex is ultimately frowned upon, but who can blame her for getting it on with Boyd Holbrook?

I Origins

According to this movie (which did a little research, according to its science-minded director), each individual on the planet has a unique eye that can be broken down into patterns, like a fingerprint. But what if someone from the past was a duplicate of your eye? In I Origins, it means reincarnation might be real. To make the heady, sci-fi concept emotionally, writer/director Mike Cahill weaves in a love story between a scientist (Michael Pitt) and a model with the most stunning eyes of all time (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey). To say more enters spoiler territory, but there's no better way to prove a particular relationship to be the best thing ever than throw in a sensuous, all-too-perfect sex scene with two beautiful people. I Origins delivers.

Laggies

Keira Knightley is not known for being the funniest actress working today, but with the help of Lynn Shelton (Touchy Feely, Your Sister's Sister), she makes a case for being an undermined talent. In Laggies, she plays a wayward 20something who retreats to a life of partying, sleepovers, and dependency after befriending a high school student, Annika (Chloe Grace Moretz). The new big sister/little sister-esque friendship sours when Knightley's Megan decides to sleep with Annika's Dad (Sam Rockwell). While their hook-up is clumsy and impassioned (and kinda hot), it's overshadowed by the fact that she hooked up with a dad. And she's engaged. Drama. Sexy drama. Sexy funny drama.

Nymphomaniac, Volume 1

Lars von Trier's highly-anticipated sex epic made a surprise appearance at Sundance 2014, where it played to cackling crowds who ate up its unexpectedly wry wit. The movie has garnered attention for its arty, unsimulated approach to on-screen sex, from posters featuring the cast's “O faces” to trailers that juxtapose oral sex with hunting leopards, Nymphomaniac, Volume 1 was always going to be wild, but no one could have expected on Trier's finished film to be so... tame. Nymphomaniac is sex-filled, but not sexy. As an older version of herself recounts her sexual history to a bystander, Joe (Stacy Martin) floats from man to man in search of orgasmic pleasure. She recalls her first time with clinical precision — three humps in missionary style, five humps doggy. We see every encounter plain as day — including a shot of Shia LaBeouf thrusting with the assistance of a penis stand-in — but purposefully mundane. Pornography has more genuine passion than the sex in von Trier's film, his way of showing us how vacant Joe is as an emotional person. She hungers for sex, but can't even feel it.
Only half of the 5-hour film was shown (it's being split into two volumes for its American release) and a trailer for Volume 2 teases a crazier set of encounters. A montage of close-up penises in the first film makes it clear that Joe needs more than the human phallus can provide. It appears she'll take drastic measures in Part II.
Image via Flickr

UPDATED 01/26/2014

A Filmmaker’s Mom Reviews ‘Nymphomaniac’


Sundance Festival Award Winners

The culmination of the Sundance Film Festival is the Awards Ceremony. The competition juries, comprised of individuals from the worldwide film community with original and diverse points of view, select films from both the documentary and dramatic categories to receive a range of awards. Decided by Festivalgoers’ ballots, Audience Awards are bestowed upon films in each of the Festival’s four competition categories. Click here for a description of award categories.
U. S. Grand Jury Prize: DramaticWhiplash
U. S. Grand Jury Prize: DocumentaryRich Hill
World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: DramaticTo Kill a Man
World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: DocumentaryReturn to Homs
Audience Award: U. S. Dramatic presented by AcuraWhiplash
Audience Award: U.S. Documentary presented by AcuraAlive Inside: A Story of Music & Memory
Audience Award: World Cinema DramaticDifret
Audience Award: World Cinema: DocumentaryThe Green Prince
Audience Award: Best of NEXTImperial Dreams
Directing Award: U. S. DramaticFishing Without Nets / Cutter Hodierne
Directing Award: U. S. DocumentaryThe Case Against 8 / Ben Cotner & Ryan White
Directing Award: World Cinema Dramatic52 Tuesdays / Sophie Hyde
Directing Award: World Cinema Documentary20,000 Days on Earth / Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard
Cinematography Award: U. S. DramaticLow Down / Christopher Blauvelt
Cinematography Award: U. S. DocumentaryE-TEAM / Ross Kauffman & Rachel Beth Anderson
Cinematography Award: World Cinema DramaticLilting / Ula Pontikos
Cinematography Award: World Cinema DocumentaryHappiness / Thomas Balmès & Nina Bernfeld
U. S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Breakthrough TalentDear White People / Justin Simien
U. S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Musical ScoreKumiko, the Treasure Hunter / The Octopus Project
U. S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Intuitive FilmmakingThe Overnighters
U. S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Use of AnimationWatchers of the Sky
World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award for Ensemble PerformanceGod Help the Girl
World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Cinematic BraveryWe Come as Friends
Editing Award: U. S. DocumentaryWatchers of the Sky
Editing Award: World Cinema Documentary20,000 Days on Earth
Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award: U.S. DramaticThe Skeleton Twins / Craig Johnson & Mark Heyman
Screenwriting Award: World Cinema DramaticBlind / Eskil Vogt
Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film PrizeI Origins
Short Film Grand Jury PrizeOf God and Dogs
Short Film Jury Award: US FictionGregory Go Boom
Short Film Jury Award: International FictionThe Cut
Short Film Jury Award: Non-fictionI Think This is the Closest to How the Footage Looked
Short Film Jury Award: AnimationYearbook
Short Film Special Jury Award for Unique VisionRat Pack Rat
Short Film Special Jury Award for Non-FictionLove. Love. Love.
Short Film Special Jury Award for Direction and Ensemble ActingBurger
Short Film Audience Award, Presented by YouTubeChapel Perilous
Watch the full Awards Ceremony
Read the 2014 Sundance Festival Awards Press Release
For a full list of historical awards, click here


UPDATED 01/29/2014

Sundance Nudity Report - 2014

Wed, Jan 29, 2014 @ 11:15am by Skin Central (Comment!)
The Sundance Film Festival- or Skindance as we call it- has wrapped up in Utah, and we have all the nudity reports in from our intrepid Skin Skouts!
Carla JuriThe real shocker this year proved to be the freaky German flick Wetlands (2014) which features graphic nude interludes and plenty of- as our Deutsch friends would say- the shizer. The film’s star Carla Juri makes her outrageous nude debut indulging in filthy paraphilias, switching bloody tampons with her pals, eating splooge pizza, and masturbating with various vegetables. All of this spread out over 18, that’s right 18, nude scenes.
See the trailer for Wetlands here
WoodleyFor the more faint of hard-on, another film getting big buzz is Gregg Araki's adaptation of the novel White Bird in a Blizzard (2014), starring Shailene Woodley and the ever luscious Eva Green. Sadly, there’s no nudity from Eva, but Shailene is fresh off her nude debut in The Spectacular Now (2013) and gamely strips down again to give you Woodley with three boob-baring scenes.
See the trailer for White Bird in a Blizzard here
MerkinsThere’s also a number of wholesome nude scenes showing up in the indie lineup, like the absurdist lesbian comedy The Foxy Merkins (2013) where Lisa Haas shows her avocados as a down-on-her-luck prostitute.
SleepwalkerThe Norwegian drama The Sleepwalker (2014) is a psychological horror flick with Stephanie Ellis and Gitte Witt playing increasingly competitive sisters. Fortunately they both go breasts out so you can judge the mam-ily resemblance yourself.
The GuestThere’s also mumblecore director Adam Wingard’s latest offering The Guest (2014), which has a welcome visit from a topless Tabatha Shaun.
AppropriateAppropriate Behavior (2014) has Desiree Akhavan exploring her sexuality in several boob-baring escapades.
A GirlThe Iranian vampire romance A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2013) has neo-noir knockers in the bath from Sheila Vand.
HendricksAnd in the most disappointing release of the festival, Christina Hendricks co-stars in John Slattery’s directorial debut, God’s Pocket (2014), but only shows off her compelling cleavage. Don’t worry though, Sophia Takal is there to ease the pain with her T-and-A.



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