Declare Your Independents — Vol. 28
GITS development assistant Wendy Cohen here, and welcome back to Declare Your Independents, our series highlighting the latest developments in the world of independent film!
This week…
TIFF: The 12 Films With The Most Oscar Potential at This Year’s Festival
Telluride Wrap: The Little Festival That Could
Box Office: Summer’s Winners and Losers
The Future of Film: THR’s Special Report
Scott and I encourage any of you who go to see an independent movie to post your reactions to the film in these posts. Good, bad, indifferent, whatever. If there’s a film you want to recommend, do it. Use your words to inspire readers to transport themselves into a local cinema.
INDIE SPOTLIGHT: MOVIES TO SEE IN THEATERS THIS WEEK
OPENING FRIDAY (9/5)
Set along the tumultuous Arizona-Mexico border, the film follows Miguel, a hardworking father and devoted husband who crosses the border illegally and is wrongfully accused of murdering the wife of a former sheriff. Miguel’s pregnant wife lands in the hands of corrupt Mexican “Coyote” smugglers as she tries to help her husband, while the ex-lawman investigates his wife’s death and unearths evidence that could destroy one family’s future.
Read an interview with Michael Berry, the film’s director and co-writer, here.
Identical twin brothers (both played by Blake Rayne) are separated at birth during the Great Depression. Their parents (Brian Geraghty, Amanda Crew) just cannot afford to give them both a life beyond poverty, so one is adopted by a loving family. Despite their very different upbringings, the boys’ shared passion for music causes their lives to unknowingly intersect as they experience a powerful and mysterious connection often felt by twins. One of the boys becomes the most famous rock ’n’ roll legend in the world, Drexel Hemsley, while Ryan Wade struggles to find balance between his love for music and trying to please his evangelist father (Ray Liotta) and his devoted mother (Ashley Judd) who have very different plans for his life in the ministry. Ryan is encouraged by his wife Jenny (Erin Cottrell) and lifelong friends Dino and Avi (Seth Green, Joe Pantoliano) to follow his musical dreams.
A strange singer with God-given talent drifts through his adopted city of Memphis with its canopy of ancient oak trees, streets of shattered windows, and aura of burning spirituality. Surrounded by beautiful women, legendary musicians, a stone-cold hustler, a righteous preacher, and a wolf pack of kids, the sweet, yet unstable, performer avoids the recording studio, driven by his own form of self-discovery. His journey quickly drags him from love and happiness right to the edge of another dimension.
Watch a 45-minute interview with writer/director Tim Sutton here.
Eve is a catastrophe-low on self-esteem but high on fantasy, especially when it comes to music. Over the course of one Glasgow summer, she meets two similarly rootless souls: posh Cass and fastidious James, and together they form a pop group. This film is a poignant coming-of-age story that doubles as a sublime indie-pop musical from one of indie pop’s biggest songwriters.
Watch SXSW’s interview with writer/director Stuart Murdoch here.
Levitated Mass: The Story of Michael Heizer’s Monolithic Sculpture
Levitated Mass is the story of a rock star; the artist behind the sensation; a $10 million, 22-city tour; and the international media storm that ensued — but not in the way you might expect. Prominently displayed outside the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, renowned and reclusive land artist Michael Heizers Levitated Mass gained worldwide recognition during its installation in 2012. Over the course of 10 nights, a 340-ton solid granite boulder crawled through Southern California neighborhoods on a 294-foot-long, 206-wheeled trailer, drawing hundreds of camera crews and cell phone shooters alike to document its journey. Tens of thousands of people came out to watch the megalith travel through their communities to its final resting place over a 456-foot-long negative space formed by a concrete slot. Levitated Mass is one of the only pieces of art in recent history to inspire such a reaction in pop culture, bringing together the art community, public officials, and the general population to debate the merits and pitfalls of a giant stone suspended above their heads.
In 1970s Beijing: two school friends, both with different backgrounds and families, lose touch, only to rekindle the romance in New York City, where they must decide between a present love or a future love.
Punk-rocker turned suburban mom, Kelly, is nostalgic for a life she can no longer have and uncertain of a future she doesn’t yet fit in. Seventeen-year-old Cal is frustrated at his lack of control over the hand he’s been dealt. When the two strike up an unlikely friendship, it’s the perfect spark needed to thrust them both back to life.
The story of the pitcher who threw a no-hitter while tripping on acid — known by fans and nonfans alike — has become emblematic of professional baseball’s excess in the 1970s. However, that pitcher, Dock Ellis, had a career and a life that transcended one use of LSD. During a time when the insular world of baseball was clashing with the world outside, Ellis was widely known as one of the most unabashedly black baseball players ever. Nearly suspended for wearing curlers in his hair and refusing to apologize for or moderate his aggressive behavior, Ellis used drugs to hide his crippling fear of failure.
Watch Sundance’s interview with Jeffrey Radice, the film’s director, here.
Wetlands explores the adventures of Helen Memel, an eccentric girl who has strange attitudes towards hygiene and sexuality and longs for the reunion of her divorced parents.
April, 1975. During the chaotic final days of the Vietnam War, as the North Vietnamese Army closed in on Saigon, South Vietnamese resistance crumbled. City after city and village after village fell to the North while the few U.S. diplomats and military operatives still in the country contemplate withdrawal. With the lives of thousands of South Vietnamese hanging in the balance, those in control faced an impossible decision — who would go and who would be left behind to face brutality, imprisonment, or even death.
Watch an interview with Rory Kennedy, the film’s director, here.
NOW IN THEATERS
The wife of a corrupt real estate developer is kidnapped by two common criminals, who intend to extort him with inside information about his crooked business and off-shore accounts. But the husband decides he’d actually rather not pay the ransom to get back his wife, setting off an unbelievable sequence of double crosses and plot twists that could only come from the mind of Elmore Leonard.
Watch TIFF’s interview with the film’s writer/director Daniel Schechter and the cast here.
Errol Flynn, the swashbuckling Hollywood star and notorious ladies’ man, flouted convention all his life, but never more brazenly than in his last years when, swimming in vodka and unwilling to face his mortality, he undertook a liaison with an aspiring actress, Beverly Aadland. The two had a high-flying affair that spanned the globe and was enabled by the girl’s fame-obsessed mother, Florence. It all came crashing to an end in October 1959, when events forced the relationship into the open, sparking an avalanche of publicity castigating Beverly and her mother — which only fed Florence’s need to stay in the spotlight.
Watch another TIFF interview with the film’s directors and co-writers — Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland — and cast here.
More than two decades after catapulting to stardom, aging actress Robin Wright (playing a version of herself) decides to preserve her digital likeness for a future Hollywood. Her alias will be controlled by Miramount Studios, and will star in any film they want with no restrictions. In return she receives compensation so she can care for her ailing son, and her digitized character will stay forever young. Twenty years later under the creative vision of the studio’s head animator, Wright’s digital double rises to immortal stardom. With her contract expiring, she is invited to take part in “The Congress” convention as she makes her comeback straight into the world of future fantasy cinema.
Watch an interview with writer/director Ari Folman and star Robin Wright here.
A committed gay couple find their fledgling marriage challenged by a series of unexpected developments in this compassionate drama from writer/director Ira Sachs (Married Life, Keep the Lights On). Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina) have been together for nearly 40 years. When gay marriage becomes legal in New York, the happy couple decide that it’s finally time to tie the knot, and declare their love for one another in front of family and friends. Although the ceremony is everything Ben and George ever could have hoped for, the happy couple’s newlywed bliss is sadly short-lived when the diocese receives word of the wedding, and George is fired from his job as a music teacher at a local Catholic school. As a result, the pair are no longer able to afford the rent on the New York City apartment they’ve shared for two decades. In order to remain in the city while searching for a job, George moves in with his sympathetic neighbors, a pair of gay policemen (Manny Perez and Cheyenne Jackson). Meanwhile, Ben attempts to make the best of the situation by moving in with his nephew’s family in Brooklyn. Now, as the big event that should have brought Ben and George closer together leads only to loneliness and frustration, everyone involved finds their once-comfortable lives in a hopeless state of flux. Marisa Tomei, Darren E. Burrows, and Charlie Tahan co-star.
Watch an interview with the film’s director and co-writer Ira Sachs here.
Ethan (Mark Duplass) and Sophie (Elisabeth Moss) are a married couple on the brink of separation. At the urging of their therapist, they escape to a beautiful vacation house for a weekend getaway in an attempt to salvage what’s left of their relationship. What starts off as a relaxing and tranquil retreat soon spirals into a dizzyingly bizarre experience that forces the couple to reflect upon the complexities of their troubled partnership. Over the course of a few days, Ethan and Sophie work diligently to rediscover their better selves and embrace the unexpected as everything they once thought was real becomes more and more surreal.
Watch an interview with Justin Lader, the film’s writer, here.
Michael Winterbottom’s largely improvised 2010 film, The Trip, took comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon — or semifictionalized versions thereof — on a restaurant tour around northern England. In this witty and incisive follow-up, Winterbottom reunites the pair for a new culinary road trip, retracing the steps of the Romantic poets’ grand tour of Italy and indulging in some sparkling banter and impersonation-offs. Rewhetting our palates from the earlier film, the characters enjoy mouthwatering meals in gorgeous settings from Liguria to Capri while riffing on subjects as varied as Batman’s vocal register, the artistic merits of “Jagged Little Pill,” and, of course, the virtue of sequels.
Watch Sundance’s Q&A with the film’s director and cast here.