Eddie Redmayne from Savage Grace sporting the ubiquitous Sundance scarf.
Photo: Getty Images.
Direct from Out features editor Bill Keith, who has barely slept since escaping the snowy slopes of Park City, Utah, here are the top five things you should know from the Sundance Film Festival:
> Pre-parties are totally the new after-party. Apparently the new trend is to have big, splashy events (some of them in yurts!) for movies that haven't even been made yet. Not that we don't love a little anticipatory build-up, but there's only so much we can write about your film when there's nothing to watch. But in the spirit of actually giving your PR some bang for its buck, two of said movies were Portland and Shifting the Canvas, which will star JT Pitoc from Trick. Excited? Too bad! You have to wait!
> All of the boys at Out are apparently now lesbians, because the best piece of gossip they texted back was about how awesome it was to stand five feet from The Donnas as they played the Queer Lounge premiere party for Derek, the documentary about Jarman by Issac Julien narrated and written as a love letter from Tilda Swinton. Bill says it's good for Jarman beginners -- lots of archival footage from films and Jarman's friends -- and will definitely make you want to hole up with as many as you can track down. But it was also a huge hit among the die-hard fans.
> Mysteries of Pittsburgh was elusive. We had one editor there who'd read the book (Bill), one who hadn't (Matthew Breen), and you can guess which one managed to sneak his way into the screening after repeatedly failing to be granted an actual pass. (Thanks for making that so easy on us, publicist types!) The knee-jerk gay outrage prompted by reports that the movie would be significantly less queer than the Michael Chabon novel on which it's based -- a staff favorite -- only partially played out in the end. The "love rhombus" of the book is now a love triangle (including a sex scene) between Jon Foster, Sienna Miller and the twice-as-hot-when-bearded Peter Sarsgaard. (Here are some scenes from the movie, which on my computer are playing at an insanely low volume, but maybe it'll work better for you!)
> Savage Grace is beautiful and amazingly screwed up -- and helpfully based on a true story! If it wasn't so good and real, the incestuous family drama (literally) starring Julianne Moore as Barbara Baekeland, and Eddie Redmayne (above) as her cute yet troubled gay son, would have been totally offensive. But Bill loved it anyway. Possibly because the son has sex scenes with Hugh Dancy (and, um, Julianne Moore)!
> "Everyone looks cute at Sundance in a permanent Sunday brunch, mussed hair-and -beard way," Bill says, though that might just be his excuse for having waited until he got back to finally shave off his mountain man facial hair.
A few other miscellaneous observations:
All the good action, as usual, happened at Queer Lounge. GLAAD put up video from a kazillion panels over at their cineQUEER blog, if you want it, including Savage Grace director Christine Vachon talking about the ironic and inherent conflict of groups like GLAAD policing what is and isn't a "good" gay film. And Bill says that in comparison to last year there was precisely 400
percent more queer content in the festival, but he refuses to provide
any actual math along with his other notes, so I can neither confirm
nor deny.
Previously > It's snow time at Sundance!
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