G-RAD - Hitting Sundance with Spout.com - The Porcupine School of Poetry

Sundance, that big fat enchilada of American film festivals, kicks off today. I'm here with Spout.com getting coverage, I've got a full schedule of interviews, screenings, meetings, parties, and various to-do's. I don't plan on sleeping.

The coverage is just starting to trickle in, so be sure to check out:
-Spout's Sundance Page
-Spout's MySpace Page (we're doing the official festival coverage for MySpace)
-and as always SpoutBlog (keep in mind that the Spout Sundance page just pulls in SpoutBlog posts about Sundance, so there's some overlap there.)

We're doing an open call for interviews for people who want to promote their films. I'll be doing interviews at a certain place and time every day, and the filmmakers will (hopefully) come to me. This is a welcome change of pace from hounding Sean Penn like a stalker until he finally agrees to an interview.

Another change in our approach to this festival is that we're going to be doing video segments on the ground and uploading them daily. I was going to be involved in this, but then we got the idea that we could have actual independent filmmakers do it, and it would be way better, so that's what we're doing. Joe Swanberg and Ronald Bronstein are both critically-acclaimed, award-winning filmmakers, but neither have ever been to Sundance. Swanberg wrote and directed Hannah Takes the Stairs (trailer here) which was a huge hit at SXSW last year, and Bronstein made Frownland (trailer here), which is definitely one of my favorite films of '07. I can't wait to see what these two come up with.

You can never really tell which movies will be great and which will suck just by reading the two sentence blurb in the program, but I've been trying. Here's a list of a few movies I'm really excited about that I'll try to see and get coverage of (a review, an interview, or both):

-The Wave a German film about the true story of a class activity that attempted to teach a lesson about fascism, but went horribly wrong.

-Up the Yangtze a Chinese documentary about poor rural folks who are drafted to work on a river cruise boat before the river is dammed, which will cover all their homes with the largest man-made lake in the world. Watch this trailer, seriously.

-Fear(s) of the Dark a French film in which 10 animators have "breathed life into phobias and nightmares..."

-Time Crimes a Spanish time-travel mystery (this better be good, or I'll be pissed!)

-Sleep Dealer all I know is that it's Mexican sci-fi set in a distopian-future. And it has this amazing teaser website. I'm sold.

-The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins this is a documentary about artist Vanessa Beecroft's attempts to adopt Sudanese twins. I hope it's as weird as it sounds.

-Choke an adaptation of a Chuck Palahniuk novel (Fight Club). Stars Angelica Huston, Sam Rockwell, and Kelly MacDonald.

And here are a few that I won't get to see because I'm not staying for the whole time, which really bums me out:

-Quentin Tarantino Presents: Hell Ride I imagine this will be nothing more than what I expect, but I still can't wait to see it.

-cASTING A gLANCE a documentary about Robert Smithson! I can't believe I'm missing this!! Hopefully it'll show up at the UICA later this year.

If that wasn't enough, I'm also really excited about what happening in the New Frontiers on Main space, which looks like it will be a phenomenal new media art show. It's featuring some of my favorites of the field: Doug Aitken, Graffiti Research Lab, Eddo Stern, and Paper Rad Art Collective in collaboration with Cory Arcangel, among many others.

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