Live From Sundance 2013: Monday, Jan. 21

By
Guest Writer
– January 23, 2013Posted in: Entertainment

Courtesy of The Huff Post

Every once in a while, you accidentally wind up with a thematic day at a film festival: a day where, for one reason or another, you wind up seeing a string of films that seem to all hue to a similar theme.

Not because you chose them for that reason but that’s just how it turned out.

All five of the films I saw on Monday at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival seemed to deal with issues of family, in one way or another. And as it happened, it was also a day in which I felt exhilarated or moved — or both — by each of the films I saw.

Three of the films were features and two were documentaries. The happiest accident of the day, in fact, was that I happened to see In a World, written and directed by and starring Lake Bell. It was showing at a press screening that started at 11:30 a.m. and I happened to get to the holding tent outside the Holiday Village multiplex, where press screenings take place, around 11 to see something that started at 12. Instead, being impatient, I went in to see “In a World” and was glad I did.

Bell plays Carol, a struggling vocal coach in Los Angeles who wants to be the first great female voice-over artist. Her father (played by Fred Melamed) is a voice-over king, who discourages her. So does her sister (Michaela Watkins), who is slightly bored in her marriage to a loving, work-at-home tech guy (Rob Corddry). As Carol reaches for her dream, she runs up against her father’s own vanity and competitiveness in a movie that is consistently smart and funny.

It also features an exceptional cast, every one of whom — from comedians Demetri Martin and Tig Notaro to Watkins, Corddry and Lake — knows where the laughs are but never labors to deliver them. It’s an intelligent and insightful comedy that never winks at the camera. Bell is a triple-threat talent to keep an eye on.

Just before that, I was practically giddy when I walked out of my first screening of the day, Chan-wook Park’s first American film, Stoker, which was written by Wentworth Miller (Michael Scofield on Prison Break) and which takes a much darker view of the family. Miller’s script is vaguely reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, right down to a suspicious character named Uncle Charlie (played by the ever-reliable Matthew Goode), whose niece, India (Mia Wasikowska), has a feeling there’s something hinky about him when he shows up for her father’s funeral.

She’s right — and Park puts us on edge right from the start, with his restless camera and the insinuating, disquieting music of Clint Mansell. Park’s deliberate and deliberately eye-catching camera work and editing (there are cross-fades that will take your breath away, not to mention the action itself) are simply stunning, a wild ride given a dazzling visual component that raises the stakes considerably. Goode and Wasikowska are a fascinatingly matched pair — and Nicole Kidman is the wild card as Wasikowska’s newly widowed mother, who is beguiled by Charlie, the brother-in-law she’s never met.

Stoker isn’t for the faint of heart and yet the violence is seldom graphic — but always shocking. Watching this film is like taking an adrenaline shot to the cerebral cortex.

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