I usually like movies that have some sense of structure and pacing.  If they don’t have these qualities, then I like these films to be truly daring and outside-the-box.  Lake Bell‘s In a World… is a rambling mess of a nice little comedy with too many characters, and has almost no sense of pacing or flow.  But somehow, it’s still a charming flick.  Bell gives a fun lead performance, and she surrounds herself with a likable cast.  Even the subtext is cutesy.  In a World… should be a movie that I found a slog, but somehow, Bell’s film won me over despite its glaring flaws.

If writer-directors Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant had put more effort into their new film Hell Baby, they could have had one of the best parodies of recent horror movies.  The film has some huge laughs as well as some insight into the genre’s weaknesses, but Lennon and Garant’s sketch comedy roots wreck the picture in the worst way.  They’re content to let their scenes run on way too long, they have no idea how to tie their scenes together, and the result feels like we’re in the middle of something that’s being workshopped rather than a finished feature.  Despite a memorable performance from Keegan Michael Key, Hell Baby feels like a gigantic waste of potential that keeps us interested because we’re waiting for the next great joke.

The world wanted to possess Linda Lovelace.  Celebrity always involves an aspect of ownership (it’s why we feel justified in judging the lives of famous people even though they’re personally strangers to us), but Lovelace was treated as a possession by her family, her husband, and ultimately the world as she became famous not for any aspect of her personality, but because she had one particular talent.  In Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman‘s biopic Lovelace, the filmmakers change the narrative of Lovelace from sex icon to victim of domestic abuse.  The movie finds a tenuous connection between the public and private possession of Lovelace, but the narrative’s strength comes from stars Amanda Seyfried and Peter Sarsgaard taking a mature approach to domestic violence, which helps Lovelace rise above its melodrama and poor structure.

In a female-led vehicle, the most powerful figure probably shouldn’t be the poor-man’s Garrett Hedlund.  Very Good Girls has two talented actresses in the leading roles, and their personalities and actions are defined not by their friendship, but how a boy controls that friendship.  For a couple of “girls” on the verge of going off to college, writer-director Naomi Foner has created a shockingly demeaning picture of shallow sisterhood and male-dependency.  Very Good Girls celebrates a friendship that shouldn’t exist by basing it around the kind of man who doesn’t exist.

One of the many films making its premiere at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival is writer/director Michael Polish’s adaptation of the Jack Kerouac novel Big Sur.  Though his work has long been described as unfilmable, there has been a bit of a boom in Kerouac feature films in the past year or so, and Big Sur marks a very faithful adaptation of one of the author’s darkest works.  The film stars Jean-Marc Barr as Kerouac and chronicle’s the author’s struggle with alcoholism and depression in the early 1960s following the publication of On the Road.

This week in Park City, I had the chance to speak with Josh Lucas and Radha Mitchell, who play Neal and Carolyn Cassady in the film.  The actors talked about the pressure of tackling such a beloved property, vocalizing Kerouac’s distinct dialogue rhythms, portraying the complexities of the Neal/Jack relationship, and more.  Read on after the jump

I’ve seen quite a few movies at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival over the past week, but one of the few that has stuck with me most is writer/director Drake Doremus’ devastating family drama Breathe In.  Doremus made a splash here at Sundance a couple of years ago with the debut of his young love story Like Crazy, and Breathe In marks a major leap forward for the filmmaker in every way.  The story centers on a New England couple with a high school senior daughter that decides to take in a foreign exchange student from the U.K. for the semester.  As the story progresses, the young girl (Felicity Jones) and the father (Guy Pearce, playing a music teacher) are drawn to each other, creating a rift that builds throughout the film with the kind of tense slow burn that you expect from a well-made thriller.  It’s a heartbreaking story with incredible performances (read my full review right here), and it’s definitely one you need to take the time to see once it hits theaters.

A few days ago, I had the chance to sit down with Doremus in Park City for an extended interview about Breathe In.  He talked about his goal of making something really different from Like Crazy, his atypical directorial process of having his actors improvise all the dialogue, landing Guy Pearce as his lead, his next project (a futuristic sci-fi romance story), and more.  Read on after the jump.

I am a huge fan of the Western genre.  So between me and the filmmakers behind the Western Sweetwater, that makes one of us.  Writer-directors Logan Miller and Noah Miller are far more interested in half-constructed ideas based solely on what seems cool.  The film rolls along without any urgency even though the audience can tell the story from start to finish, and probably tell it better.   The filmmakers somehow managed to rope in great actors like Ed Harris and Jason Isaacs to play campy stock characters, but never had any idea how to fully take advantage of their talent.  Cinematographer Brad Shield even gives the movie the look of respectability.  Despite some pretty shots and entertaining performances, Sweetwater always feels lackadaisical and half-hearted.

Director David Gordon Green broke through with indie films such as George Washington and All the Real Girls, and then seemed like he would make a strong transition to larger budget features after the success of Pineapple Express.  However, the quality of pictures decreased as the concepts increased.  The stoner medieval comedy Your Highness was painfully disappointing, and the mean-spirited The Sitter was even worse.  His new film, Prince Avalanche, is a welcome return to form as it puts Green back inside an indie budget but lets him hold onto the goofy humor of Pineapple Express and Eastbound and Down (he has directed ten episodes over the course of the series).  The result is a quiet, sweet, and funny picture about loneliness featuring noteworthy performances from stars Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch.

The undercover thriller is a familiar genre, but it rarely reaches its full potential.  For a setting where betrayal and shifting sympathies are central to the plot, most of these stories only provide the semblance of a grey area.  Yes, the terrorist is planning to destroy the western seaboard, but his kid died ten years ago, so he’s not all bad.  This is an easy road to nominal dramatic conflict while still keeping the audience firmly supporting the hero.  With their new film The East, director Zal Batmanglij and co-writer Brit Marling have played the undercover thriller to near-perfection by forcing the audience to sit uncomfortably as we wonder who should deserve our sympathies.  Playing to the conventions of the genre stops The East from holding any major surprises, but Batmanglij and his strong cast always keep us riveted as we become as conflicted as the film’s protagonist.

I love documentaries that can teach me something I don’t know, and do so in an entertaining fashion.  I’m incredibly ignorant when it comes to understanding music production, and two-thirds of Dave Grohl‘s documentary Sound City provides a fascinating, hilarious, and passionate look at the eponymous studio, its prominence in rock history, and the technical details behind creating some of the best music of all time.  Grohl does an amazing job at going into the nuts and bolts of music production but always keeping the lesson upbeat and inviting.  However, once Grohl has completed telling the history of Sound City, the documentary shifts into an uneasy place where Grohl’s promotion of the physical music studio over Pro Tools creates a direct analog-vs-digital exploration, and an indirect deprecation of those who share the rock star’s passion for music, but lack the resources to book studio time.

Among the films that are premiering at Sundance Film Festival is the documentary Sound City.  Directed by Dave Grohl (of Nirvana and Foo Fighters), the film is about the legendary Sound City Recording Studios and the equally legendary Neve mixing console it housed.  The film looks at the role of the studio in the stories of many, many current musicians who have helped define the age of rock including Nirvana, Stevie Nicks, Neil Young, Tom Petty, Rick Rubin, Fleetwood Mac and countless others.  The film also features an original soundtrack and performances by many of the artists.

At a press conference Q & A session moderated by Elliot Scheiner (7-time Grammy Award winning music producer/engineer), Grohl spoke about how the film turned from a conceptualized 12 minute short into the full length documentary film.  He also discussed how he feels about the current evolution of music and why the lack of live performance shows and the corresponding wealth of singing contest shows are dangerous for our cultural valuation of music.  According to Grohl, the film will be released in February on the website soundcitymovie.com where patrons can potentially access it for free, because he believes it’s the most important thing he’s ever done.  To read more highlights from the Q & A session, click after the jump.

In their directorial debut, The Way, Way Back, writers Nat Faxon and Jim Rash show they’re incredibly adept at humor.  They know how to tell a good joke, push the envelope without being mean-spirited, and find the right actors to deliver the comedy.  Unfortunately, a film has to put story and characters before comedy, and the film fails where it matters most.  Faxon and Rash put a painfully bland character at the center of their movie, and then try to convince us that anyone would help the uninteresting protagonist.  Surrounded by one-dimensional characters and a predictable plot, The Way, Way Back can tell a joke, but has difficulty doing anything else.

With Primer and his latest film Upstream Color, writer-director Shane Carruth has clearly established a unique cinematic voice.  With the exception of a few filmmakers, Carruth demands every ounce of his audience’s attention.  It’s great to have a filmmaker like Carruth out there who has an unmistakable style and knows how to keep us captivated.  But in his films, holding our attention is a trick to get us to invest in solving his characters and story.  Carruth hopes that his abstract, dreamlike narrative can hold us in its sway, and that by struggling to follow the plot, we will somehow care about the characters’ problems.  Upstream Color is masterful at keeping our attention through its complex storytelling, but it ironically makes its emotions as nebulous as its plotting and characters.

In Chan-wook Park‘s Stoker, the hunt is more rewarding than the kill.  Park has beautifully crafted an unnerving, slow-burn mystery-thriller that delves into a bloodline destined to shed blood.  In his English-language debut, Park takes his immaculate yet eerie style, and uses it to enhance a relatively simple tale of a disturbed girl who begins a bizarre and disturbing relationship with her recently-discovered uncle.  Through Park’s lens and the tremendous performances of stars Mia Wasikowska and Matthew Goode, Stoker may not cut deep, but it slashes hard.

I don’t know what other people don’t know.  I can’t cite empirical data regarding the knowledge or ignorance of a potential audience.  Viewers coming into Jacob Kornbluth‘s documentary Inequality for All will find Robert Reich‘s explanation of wealth disparity an eye-opening experience or a remedial course with nice visual aids.  The film is transparently an advocacy documentary, and it won’t change the minds of viewers who are convinced that Reich is a communist or a socialist (also because people who level those charges usually don’t know the definition of a communist or socialist).  Kornbluth finds an affable lead figure in the diminutive Reich, but his well-spoken lesson only leads to facile solutions.