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Many Oscar contenders have been dive-bombed over the years, but Best Actress nominee Karla Sofía Gascón did herself in: first for complaining about rival Fernanda Torres, then for resurfaced tweets on her now-deleted X account (@karsiagascon). In past posts that went viral this week, she dissed Muslims, George Floyd, and Oscars diversity, among other things. We debate: If Gascón is out of the running, does she bring down her movie as well, which leads the field with 13 nominations?
Ryan Lattanzio is back from Sundance, which Friday announced its awards; he and Anne are both bingeing on the Sundance portal. While some films came in with distribution, the market seems slow. One Midnight entry spawned a bidding war won by Neon for over $16 million, Michael Shanks’ horror flick “Together,” starring husband-and-wife team Alison Brie and Dave Franco, which Ryan enjoyed and believes will hit big at the box office. Neon has reason to bid high for horror, having grossed $169 million from three low-budget wide releases: “Longlegs,” “Immaculate,” and “Cuckoo.”
A second big buy was Clint Bentley’s magic-hour period drama “Train Dreams” (which went to Netflix), adapted from Denis Johnson’s novella, starring an Oscar-worthy Joel Edgerton as a logger forced to spend months away from his beloved wife, Felicity Jones. Ryan also liked “Rebuilding,” starring Josh O’Connor, which also features a destructive fire, and “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” starring Rose Byrne as a stressed-out mom. “A horror movie of motherhood,” he said.
The highest profile sales title was Bill Condon’s expensive Kander and Ebb musical adaptation of Manuel Puig’s novel “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” The film stars Diego Luna and breakout star Tonatiuh as prisoners sharing a cell in 1983 Argentina, with Jennifer Lopez leading the musical fantasy sequences as a fictional screen siren. Héctor Babenco’s 1985 Oscar-winning original cost $1.5 million. (The new movie’s reps say this one’s budget is far below $50 million.) Condon’s song-and-dance take could be a tough sell. We wonder if it’s too old-fashioned to land with today’s audiences.
‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’Ana CarballosaOne reason for late-breaking buys could be due to fewer screening venues, requiring Sundance to spread the program out over more days. Some buzzy titles like “Sorry, Baby” debuted after the first weekend.
To that end, we both adored “Train Dreams” and U.S. Dramatic Competition Screenwriting winner “Sorry, Baby,” marking an auspicious debut for writer/director/actor Eva Victor, who has made a comedy splash on TikTok. Naomi Ackie costars in this well-observed academic drama about the repercussions of a “bad thing.”
Anne also focused on the documentaries, because Sundance always delivers three or four Oscar contenders at year’s end. Sundance 2024 premieres now up for Oscars include “Black Box Diaries,” “Sugarcane,” “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat,” and “Porcelain War.” We both admired “The Jinx” director Andrew Jarecki’s shocking prison expose “The Alabama Solution,” which incorporates inmates’ own phone videos to detail terrible conditions within the state’s correctional facilities; “Perfect Neighbor,” which edited police tapes into a powerful narrative about a Florida manslaughter; and “Folktales,” Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s heartwarming story of a program that teaches young people dogsledding in the Arctic. Anne liked “Prime Minister,” about New Zealand’s COVID-fighter Jacinda Ardern. “Perfect Neighbor” and “Prime Minister” both won Sundance prizes Friday.
In other Sundance-related news, Quentin Tarantino gave a festival talk where he explained setting aside his supposed final film, “The Movie Critic,” and how he likely won’t tackle a new film anytime soon, partly because the movie business, he said, died in 2019. He’s going to try theater, where the audience is in the palm of the writer’s hand. Then, if it’s a hit, he might make that into a movie. “He is under so much pressure about that tenth film,” Anne said. “He sees that the old universe that used to guarantee that a certain kind of movie would do well no longer exists. He doesn’t want to go out on his last film a failure.”
Is the movie business dead? “It was a muted Sundance,” Ryan said. “We can’t take the temperature of that broader question by Sundance alone… but so many movies are going to languish and die here.”
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Screen Talk is produced by Azwan Badruzaman and available on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify, and hosted by Megaphone. Browse previous episodes here, subscribe here, and be sure to let us know if you’d like to hear the hosts address specific issues in upcoming editions of Screen Talk.
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