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TUESDAY, JANUARY 22, 2013
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Don't miss 2013's anticipated science fiction movies
ALEX LAMB alamb@kansan.com
"OBLIVION" - APRIL 19
Co-writer/director Joseph Kosinski constructed one of the most visually satisfying and flat-out cool sci-fi action films in recent memory with "TRON: Legacy". In his sophomore effort, he takes on an original concept involving a human-evacuated Earth. Tom Cruise stars as one of the planet's last drone repairman who discovers an underground group of survivors as well as a much greater threat. I can't promise an overly unique story, but it will certainly be a grand feast for the eyes.
"STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS"
- MAY 17
There's a reason FX plays the "Star Trek" reboot all the time. It's so perfectly entertaining that it never gets old. The only aspect lacking a bit is the villain. This seems resolved in the sequel, as British badass Benedict Cumberbatch plays a dastardly opponent who's destroying Starfleet from within, leading Captain Kirk and the Enterprise crew on an epic fight for retribution. With J.J. Abrams at the helm again, this should be even more dazzling than the first one. The final frontier never looked so promising.
"PACIFIC RIM"-JULY 12
Creature master Guillermo del Toro returns to the director's chair
with a project of enormous scope and the simplest categorization: giant monster movie. Better yet, it's exactly the kind your inner-child has been dying to see ever since you stopped watching Godzilla films: humongous robots vs. garganuan monsters. Seriously, what's not to like? Even if that sounds silly, del Toro is an excellent filmmaker who's guaranteed to turn this guilty
pleasure premise into a righteously awesome spectacle.
"ELYSIUM"-AUG.9
South African wunderkind Neill Blomkamp surprised everyone with his mind-blowing blow, "District 9," creating one of the most unique, meaningful and visceral sci-fi movies ever made. Well, imagine that on steroids with a dystopian future instead of aliens and you've got his follow-up, "Elysium." Matt Damon stars as a man outfitted in crazy high-tech weaponry on a mission to equalize the playing field between the poor, living on a desolate Earth, and the rich, living on a perfect-world space station. Expect one intensely kick-ass ride.
"GRAVITY" - OCT. 4
a way home before oxygen runs out, is nothing short of revolutionary filmmaking. Alfonso Cuaron ("Children of Men") brings his signature long takes — the opening shot alone lasts 17 minutes — to the phenomenon of drifting weightlessly in magnificent 3D. If you've ever wanted to feel like you're in space, here's your ticket.
SCHMIDT HAPPENS
MARSHALL SCHMIDT/KANSAN
festivals line up outside of the Egyptian Theatre on Main Street during the 2013 Sundance Film Festival yesterday in Park City, Utah.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Short films shine on Monday at Sundance Film Festival
MCCLATCHY-TRIBUNE
Think of the Sundance Film Festival's shorts program as a glimpse into the future of movies.
Trevor Groth, director of programming for the festival, knows the crystal-ball aspects of Sundance's shorts firsthand. He remembers the years both Andersons' work surfaced in the pile of submissions. It still gives him chills. "Watching, you can feel the future that is going to unfold in front of them." Groth says. "From the beginning their voices were that distinctive."
Though you never know how fate, or fickle audiences, will favor them, the shorts filmmakers at Sundance this year are an eclectic international bunch whose work carries that sweet sense of discovery. The programming team's mantra show us something we've never seen before has resulted in a creative canvas of 65 shorts infused with an irrepressible sense of invention that is infectious to watch.
Groth, who began his Sundance career 20 years ago by helping program shorts, will never forget the moment when a studio exec passed along an underground video whose irreverent dark humor and inherent weirdness just spoke to him. Called "The Spirit of Christmas," it was by a couple of unknowns Matt Stone and Trey Parker before "South Park." Groth tracked down Stone and Parker, nabbed their film for the festival, and says it still stands for him as a classic example of how you can find "the purest of cinema in shorts there is no need to compromise."
It's easy to shortchange shorts as merely stepping stones to the real deal feature-length films. But just as a short story is not a novel with fewer pages, a short film is its own beast. A great one requires a rigorous discipline in storytelling, masterful editing and a clear understanding of what exactly you are trying to say. An inspired idea doesn't hurt either.
This is why Groth loves to see established filmmakers like Todd Haynes and Neil LaBute come back to the form again and again. LaBute, for example, is credited with writing three shorts in 2012, directing one, and contributing a segment to last year's "Stars in Shorts," which is exactly what the title suggests all that while working on three feature films in various stages of production.
Among my early favorites is the existential animation piece "Oh Willy .." from Belgium's Marc James Roels and Emma De Swaef. It unfolds during Willy's return to his most elemental self, specifically the nudist camp where he was raised. The stuffed-cloth characters, constructed out of what looks to be flesh-colored felt, tell a modern-day story about mortality and the measure of a life. It's a quirky yet emotional piece about a savage more pudgy than noble, his bumbling indecision remarkably captured in meticulous stopmotion.
Two other animation pieces that caught my eye "Seraph" and "Thank You" could not be more different in style or tone. Both take provocative cuts at the ways in which love leaves its mark: a graphically rendered gay teen who carves eyes into everything, including flesh, and a snowman whose heart literally melts for a fire-tinged puppy.
Whether 2013 will uncover any filmmakers, it certainly has its share of wonderfully weird shorts.
Sundance's short shorts and long shorts range from a few minutes to nearly 50; the average is closer to 15. With so little time to play with, a filmmaker can't afford to squander a second, much less a minute.
Los Angeles-based mixed-media artist Rachael Mayeri, whose work more frequently turns up in museums around the world, the film is a wildly provocative meta meditation on media, monkeys and humans dressed as monkeys. Essentially
a soap opera about the social dynamics of chimpanzees, it was made for chimp consumption and played to the primate inhabitants of Scotland's Edinburgh Zoo on TVs scattered around their space. It is strangely funny, yet absorbing to watch them watch and like so many of the shorts, leaves you pondering the implications long after.
Sundance's democratic process helps, literally anyone, can submit a short for festival consideration.
That audiences are increasingly open to embracing "six minutes of weird," as Sundance's current shorts programmer Jon Korn put it, is one of the more gratifying shifts he and co-programmer Mike Plante have seen take place. There are fewer "shorts as calling cards" from feature director hopefuls and more making the most of a few minutes in the entries the two personally screened during the selection process this year roughly 3,000 between them, a record 8,127 submissions in all screened by the team of eight.
And then there are the documentaries, typically the longest of the shorts, often close to the 50-minute cutoff. Among the standouts is "Outlawed in Pakistan," tracing one girl's fight against the rape that brought her, not her attackers, a death sentence by tribal elders.
The shorts are, quite simply, seductive; even the ones that don't hit all the right notes are intriguing. As Korn says, "It's great to see something on its way to being something special."
EXCESS HOLLYWOOD
KANSAN
PODCAST
This week on Excess Hollywood, film critics Alex Lamb and Landon McDonald discuss "Zero Dark Thirty." "The Impossible," "Promised Land," "Hyde Park on Hudson," "The House I Live In" and "Gangster Squad." Check it out at Kansan.com.
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