Ogden’s Egyptian brings Sundance closer to your door
Park City may be two hours away, but students with the independent itch can catch select Sundance Film Festival screenings all week at Peery’s Egptian Theater in Ogden. Here’s a look at what’s playing.
My Idiot Brother
When: Monday, Jan. 24, 6:30 p.m.
Tickets: Waitlist Only
Paul Rudd dons shoulder-length hair and a beard for his turn as Ned, a free-spirited and well-intentioned farmer whose unconditional belief in the best of people leads to a series of unfortunate situations. After being released from prison for selling drugs to a uniformed officer, Ned finds himself homeless and unemployed and bounces around under the care of his three sisters (Elizabeth Banks, Zooey Deschanel, Emily Mortimer), igniting fires with his honesty.
MIB is a fresh, realistic look at the complexities of adult familial relationships. While the three supporting players each shine, the film rests comfortably on Rudd’s lovable shoulders. While the hijinks that ensue are at times uncomfortable, Ned is effortlessly embodied with a personality that you just want to sit down and spend time with.
The film dabbles in the dramatic – two of his sisters deal with infidelity – but the tone of the film stays squarely in the hopeful, comedic idealism Ned personifies.
Rudd shows his range, shedding his normal polo-wearing underdog in exchange for a neo-hippie, and dons the character’s skin so naturally that no matter how odd things get, the character seems 100 percent natural. A-
The Greatest Movie Ever Sold
When: Wednesday, Jan. 26, 6:30 p.m.
Tickets: Available (likely to sell out)
With his 2004 smash “Super Size Me,” documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock struck gold and singlehandedly made documentaries cool. Since then, Spurlock has stayed busy but mostly off the public’s radar. With TGMES, Spurlock returns to the fundamentals of what made him a household name: the evils of modern American consumerism.
This time around, Spurlock focuses his lens on the practice of brand partnerships in films, a.k.a. product placement. He sets off to make a movie financed 100 percent by brand partnerships, essentially selling every inch of the film from the cars he drives to the shoes he wears and the beverage that touches his lips – in this case POM Wonderful 100 percent pomegranate juice.
Along the way, he chats with media experts and marketing gurus about the modern advertising industry, peppering the film with nuggets of information like how ads are engineered to target the craving sensors of your brain. We get Spurlock-esque interviews of everyone from environmentalist Ralph Nader to director Bret Ratner, who exclaims “Artistic integrity? Whatever.”
The film lags somewhat in the plethora of self-acknowledgments. The movie is about the making of the very movie you’re watching and after so many endless mirror moments, suspicion creeps in every so often that you’re not actually watching anything at all. However, it may slow down, but it never stops. It all culminates in a montage of synergistic cross-marketing products and branded objects while a movie-specific song by OK Go plays in the background about being the greatest song you’ve ever heard, and the effect delivers.
It may not be as socially poignant as “Super Size Me,” but it’s just as entertaining and Spurlock shows us again how telling the truth can be hard to do. B+
Like Crazy
When: Friday, Jan. 28, 6:30 p.m.
Tickets: Available (likely to sell out)
Like Crazy tells the story of Jacob (Star Trek’s Anton Yelchin) and Anna (Felicity Jones), who meet while attending college in L.A. Anna, a British student, overstays her student visa, initiating a long and tumultuous series of long-distance relationships while the couple battles the bureaucratic processes that separate them and the strained emotions that result.
Director Drake Doremus brings his traditional dialogue-less outline formula to create a heart-wrenching, raw and understated film. Alternating between times tender and traumatic, the viewers are rushed back and forth as the two lovers are drawn together, crumble apart and pull themselves together again. The films wastes no time, skipping the typical rom-com chats with friends to get right back to the action, literally fast-forwarding the passing of time to bring us instantaneously to the next emotional wave.
Yelchin’s Jacob is the perfect blend of devil-may-care millennial and stability-craving everyman. Jones, on the other hand, livens the flirtatious foreigner angle with a relentless desire for reconciliation even while biding her time in the arms of another man – Charlie Bewley, of Twilight, apparently.
These are tortured characters, but through Doremus’s crafting the story is not torturous. It instead reminds us that we are all fools in love and romantically calls to mind the kind of hopeful masochism that we endure when we love like crazy. B+
– b.c.wood@aggiemail.usu.edu