This Sunday marked the conclusion of the Sundance Film Festival, the biggest event of the year for American independent film. Long seen as a festival showcasing up-and-coming directors like Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, P.T. Anderson and many others, the festival has recently become a launching point for commercially popular films. Little Miss Sunshine and Napoleon Dynamite were both sold to distributors during the festival and were classified as successful before ever reaching the masses. Yet the festival has displayed more than quirky comedies with broad-based appeal; diversity of genre, topic and production value can be considered a major tenet of the event. Indeed, Sundance director and Penn alum Geoffrey Gilmore pointed out that last year's festival featured Zoo, a documentary about bestiality.
Sundance 2008 opened with In Bruges, set for a February release. It received a positive critical response and looks to be one of the few good movies released in the beginning-of-the-year doldrums, since these first few months tend to be the time when studios unload their worst movies. Starring Colin Farrell, it follows two hitmen holed up in Belgium. Other notable films at Sundance included Morgan Spurlock's (Super Size Me) documentary Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden, which generated lots of buzz prior to the showing when rumors started to circulate that he had in fact found Bin Laden (he didn't). The documentary is apparently a bit na've in its analysis of foreign policy, but entertaining nonetheless. What Just Happened stars Robert De Niro and has gotten good feedback about its humorous portrayal of the film industry. Hamlet 2 could be this year's Napoleon or Sunshine with its $10 million price tag from Focus Features. Using offbeat characters, the flick tells the story of a high school drama teacher who stages an unusual sequel to Hamlet.
Interestingly, Fox Searchlight (the distributor that released Napoleon Dynamite, Little Miss Sunshine and Once) only purchased one film this year. Its choice, Choke, is a dark comedy and adaptation of the novel by Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club. Given Fox's previous record, you'd do well to watch out for this trachea-grabbing movie.
