'Rango,' 'Margaret' head back into movie theaters Friday

Two films that initially received very different theatrical runs are finding their way back to the big screen Friday: “Rango,” the Gore Verbinski-directed animated film that charts the adventures of a chameleon voiced by Johnny Depp who finds himself the sheriff of an Old West town, and “Margaret,” a drama starring Anna Paquin as a teenager who struggles with guilt over her role in a deadly traffic accident.

In the case of Paramount’s “Rango,” the re-release comes on the heels of the movie’s Oscar nomination for animated feature — the film, which originally opened in March of last year and grossed upward of $123 million at the domestic box office, is one of five titles that will compete for the top prize in the category at the 84th Academy Awards next month.

Verbinski, a director who typically works in live action, made a fan of Depp in his handling of the animated production that won over critics and moviegoers last year. “Gore amazed me right away with his technical ability,” Depp told The Envelope last fall. “He knows cinema backwards and forward and he’s completely unafraid. When I saw ‘Rango’ I was pretty stupefied — it was unlike anything I had ever seen before.”

As for “Margaret,” the Fox Searchlight film, written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan, has become the subject of an unlikely groundswell of interest since it opened for a very limited run last September. A number of film critics took to Twitter to campaign on the movie’s behalf, some hailing it as an overlooked masterpiece, others simply lobbying for it to play more broadly so more people would have the opportunity to see it.

“Margaret” was originally shot in 2005 but its release was delayed for years as the film ran into post-production problems and became the subject of several legal disputes.

In an interview with The Times earlier this month, Paquin — who heads up an ensemble cast that includes Matt Damon, Mark Ruffalo, Jean Reno, Allison Janney, J. Smith-Cameron, Matthew Broderick, Kieran Culkin and Jeannie Berlin, among others — had nothing but praise for Lonergan, saying, “I could not possibly have loved that script or loved doing that movie any more.”

“What I love about that character is she's not really likable all the time,” Paquin continued. “She's going through such trauma and she is kind of buried under this whole pile of guilt and confusion as to why when she tried to make it right there is all this resistance. She's sort of kicking her way to the surface and taking on everyone who stands in her way. She's hitting the self-destruct button but doing it in a really outwardly aggressive way.”

“Rango” will play for one week at the ArcLight Hollywood; “Margaret” will have a one-week run at the Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theatre in Los Angeles.

RELATED:

Anna Paquin on the unlikely resurrection of 'Margaret'

'Margaret' growing on critics, but will audiences find it?

-- Gina McIntyre, Geoff Boucher and Mark Olsen

Photo: "Rango." Credit: Paramount

Sundance 2012: IFC Midnight buys 'The Pact'

IFC Midnight on Thursday acquired the North American distribution rights to "The Pact," a horror film written and directed by Nicholas McCarthy that premiered this week at the Sundance Film Festival.

IFC Midnight paid in the high six figures for the rights, according to a source familiar with the negotiations who added that the company plans both a video-on-demand release and a theatrical run in several cities.

The deal marks a milestone for McCarthy, who was featured in a Times story last week. After years of struggling in Hollywood, he is offering up "The Pact" as his first feature film. “My whole life I have wanted to make movies that people will see and now that is going to happen,” McCarthy said shortly after the deal was completed. “Now I know it is going to be seen by thousands and thousands of people after this festival. It’s a great vote of confidence.”

PHOTOS: The scene at Sundance

Based on a short McCarthy film that played at Sundance in 2011, "The Pact" stars Caity Lotz and Casper Van Dien. It focuses on a woman struggling to deal with the tangled aftermath of her mother’s death while discovering terrifying truths about her family’s past and the house she grew up in. 

The film’s distribution rights to the Japanese, British and Australian markets have also been sold at this week’s festival, according to Ross Dinerstein, who produced "The Pact. "

RELATED:

Nicholas McCarthy's Hollywood dream is stop and go 

Sundance 2012: 'Smashed' is a booze film with dry wit

Spike Lee says studios 'know nothing about black people'

-- Kurt Streeter

Photo: A scene from 'The Pact.' Credit: Sundance Film Festival

Slamdance 2012: 'Buffalo Girls' director fought for Thai boxing doc

 

The first time filmmaker Todd Kellstein saw Thai children boxing — two 8-year-old girls with gloves on in the ring in a rural corner of Thailand — “I thought it was horrible child abuse. I wanted to make a film that would create awareness and make it end.”

 

Now, after spending three years on a project he thought would take him 10 months, Kellstein, whose unexpected and fascinating documentary “Buffalo Girls” had its debut at the Slamdance Film Festival, sees things differently.

“It’s really not our business to say what people in other cultures should or shouldn’t do,” he says now. “In the U.S., people are adamant that it has to stop, but that’s not really the point. I tried to make a film that found a balance.”

PHOTOS: The scene at Sundance

“Buffalo Girls” took as long as it did to make partially because it took a full six months for Kellstein to gain the trust of Pet and Stam, the two girls who are the center of the film, as well as their families. “Pet’s dad thought I was working for the other side, spying on her training methods,” he says. “They didn’t understand why people would want to watch them in a film."

Kellstein’s film background was in music videos, working with acts such as Bon Jovi, but he was looking for something else here. “I wanted this to be not slick, to be on the ground, me alone, with no crew,” he explains. “If I landed in these small villages with a soundman and a crew, it would have been like a Martian landing. I intentionally used the smallest, cheapest digital video camera I could find."

Right from the get-go, Kellstein started to learn the dynamics driving young girls and boys, estimated at 30,000 total, to engage not in classic American boxing, but in muay Thai, a mixed martial arts discipline that is said to be 700 years old.

"I asked a little girl, through a translator, ‘Oh my God, what are you doing, why are you doing this?’” he reports, “and she looked up at me like the biggest idiot on the planet and said, ‘Money.’”

For in a terribly poor country, where the sex trade is an option often taken to escape grinding poverty, boxing, the filmmaker says, is an opportunity to earn essential money.

“These kids are so happy, so full of joy, and they’re full of pride at doing something that contributes to the family, that can help them buy a house,” Kellstein says. The director acknowledges that the long-term physical effects of these fights are not known, but insists that having girls involved is “a huge gender coup. Thai women are very submissive, very quiet. This is unheard of in Thai culture.”

When Kellstein returned from Thailand and told his producers about his thinking, they were aghast. “They said, ‘You can’t say its OK.’ I got into a real argument with the guy who designed our poster; this was really chancey, dangerous material to get into.”

Gradually, a film that presents both sides of the issue and asks the viewer to decide took shape.

Interested in Buddhism before his time spent in Thailand, Kellstein has a quote from the celebrated teacher Milarepa tattooed near his right hand, a quote that seems in some way to speak to the film he’s made:

“Whatever is experienced will fade to a memory. Everything that is seen will not be seen again.”

RELATED:

Bingham Ray remembered by Kenneth Turan

Bawdy chicks with flicks (but don't say 'Bridesmaids')

Spike Lee says studios 'know nothing about black people'

— Kenneth Turan in Park City, Utah

Photo: A scene from "Buffalo Girls." Credit: Courtesy of Todd Kellstein

Sundance 2012: Spike Lee's co-writer joins the race conversation

Spike Lee caused a stir at the Sundance Film Festival this week when he said Hollywood studios "know nothing about black people." Now, James McBride, the co-writer  and co-producer on his latest film "Red Hook Summer," is adding his voice to the discussion.

In an open letter posted Thursday on Lee's 40 Acres & a Mule Filmworks website, McBride draws a line from President Obama's State of the Union address, to the Oscar nominations for African Americans Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer (playing maids in "The Help"), and back to Lee's comments.

He concludes: "Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens. And therein lies the problem of being a professional black storyteller, writer, musician, filmmaker. Being black is like serving as Hoke, the driver in 'Driving Miss Daisy,' except it’s a kind of TV series lasts the rest of your life: You get to drive the well-meaning boss to and fro, you love that boss, your lives are stitched together, but only when the boss decides your story intersects with his or her life is your story valid. Because you’re a kind of cultural maid."

PHOTOS: Spike Lee's controversial quotes

The full letter is below. Tell us what you think in the comments section.

'The Artist's' Uggie to retire at 10; that's 50-plus in dog years

Uggie the dog, the faithful on-screen companion of Jean Dujardin in the silent-movie "The Artist," is set to hang up his collar and retire. Which means that next month's Academy Awards will probably be the last public appearance by one of the year's biggest movie stars.

Uggie's trainer, Omar Von Muller, told Life & Style magazine, "He may do a couple of little things here and there because he enjoys them, but I don't want to put him through long hours anymore. He's getting tired."

Last year was the biggest of Uggie's on-screen career, with high-profile roles in "Water for Elephants" and the Oscar-nominated "The Artist." When the "The Artist" premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Uggie was awarded the Palm Dog (a play on the Palm d'Or) for best performance by a canine in a film at the fest. However, despite calls for a special Oscar category to be created for Uggie, the academy hasn't been as open to honoring animal performances.

PHOTOS: Which movie dog deserves Oscar treat?

Besides the Oscars, Uggie has one more big outing in February, and that's to the Golden Collar Awards, where he's a double nominee as best dog in a theatrical film for "The Artist" and "Water for Elephants."

Uggie, who is 10 (that's his mid-50s in dog years), is poised to lead a relaxing life in retirement, but he's not leaving the Hollywood community in the lurch. Uggie's trainer has the dog's brother, Dash, ready to go. According to Von Muller, Dash has already been working as Uggie's stand-in and should do just fine.

Moviegoers shouldn't worry -- this isn't like Dennis Quaid retiring and Randy Quaid taking his roles.

And for one more Uggie fix, watch our video from the Golden Globes red carpet below:

RELATED:

Photos: Top Oscar nominees

Oscar noms: Will 'The Artist' see a box office boost?

Turan: 'The Artist,' despite slams, deserves front-runner status

-- Patrick Kevin Day

Photo: Uggie the dog. Credit: Joel Ryan / Associated Press

Around Town: Anime and the real Mae

The American Cinematheque gets highly anime-ted with its "Castles in the Sky: Miyazaki, Takahata and the Masters of Studio Ghibli" retrospective, which begins Thursday at the Aero in Santa Monica with a new 35-millimeter print of Hayao Miyazaki’s 1992 "Porco Rosso," set in World War II Italy.

Friday evening’s program is a new 35-mm print of Miyazaki’s 2001 masterwork "Spirited Away," which won the Academy Award for best animated feature.

The festival moves Saturday evening to the Egyptian in Hollywood with 1984’s "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind," also in a new 35mm print, directed by Miyazaki. On tap for Sunday at the Aero is a family matinee of his charming 1988 release "My Neighbor Totoro," followed in the evening by 1995’s "Whisper of the Heart."

Sundance 2012: Mark Webber's unsuspecting castmate

When a Sundance audience learned after a Wednesday screening of "The End of Love" that director-writer-star Mark Webber had cast his own 2-year-old son Isaac in the film, a collective "awww" went up in the theater.

The crowd seemed both surprised and impressed that Webber was the father of the precocious child, who figures heavily in the film and its story of a single father's grieving the death of his wife. What most in the audience probably didn't know, however, was that Isaac's real-life mom -- the actress Frankie Shaw -- is still very much alive. In fact, Shaw and Webber reportedly recently broke up, with the split inspiring the filmmaker to write the movie.

Indeed, the drama often straddles the line between truth and fiction. Webber's character -- named Mark -- is a struggling actor, and he goes on auditions and talks about landing roles that one imagines Webber might actually seek in real life. (Webber, best known for supporting roles in "Storytelling" and "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World," is currently starring in two other films at Sundance -- "For a Good Time, Call..." and "Save the Date.")

Meanwhile, we see Mark interact with his crowd of L.A. acting buddies -- he tries out for a film with Amanda Seyfried, borrows money from Jason Ritter and attends a party at Michael Cera's house. In a way, the film has a lot in common with Cera's 2009 Sundance premiere "Paper Heart," a similarly could-this-be-real movie about the development of a romantic relationship between the actor and Charlene Yi, who were also dating off-screen at the time.

Webber said making a film that felt true to life was important for him, saying repeatedly in a question-and-answer session after the screening that he is "obsessed with realism."

"Being an actor, more than half of your job is to pretend that a P.A. didn't just take you from your trailer to a set with lights. It's been hard for me," the 31-year-old said.

Accordingly, Webber said he never told Isaac what to say in the film. Instead, he spent a month "rehearsing" with his son and a cinematographer using a discreet camera. He informed Isaac that a friend would be taking pictures and videos of them for a while, so the child never knew he was actually taking part in a feature film.

"When you're making a film that's improvised, there's a tendency to think it's somehow easier -- but it's not. We had to be very prepared, Webber said. "There was a meticulous outline with plot points and emotional beats. But I was living in character and guiding him with the power of suggestion and knowing his moods. So anything he did would pretty much be right."

How long will Webber wait to tell Isaac that he's made his film debut?

"I can't wait to show him -- when he's 7," Webber said. "I think that's the appropriate age."

RELATED:

Bingham Ray remembered by Kenneth Turan

Bawdy chicks with flicks (but don't say 'Bridesmaids')

Spike Lee says studios 'know nothing about black people'

-- Amy Kaufman in Park City, Utah
twitter.com/AmyKinLA

Photo: Mark Webber's 2-year-old son, Isaac. Credit: Sundance Film Festival

Sundance 2012: An Irish spin on 'Tinker Tailor'

"Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" showed us that there's room in the modern world for a slow-burn spy movie, and one set in period to boot.

On Tuesday at the Sundance Film Festival, the director James Marsh (most acclaimed for his 2008 documentary "Man on Wire") tested the theory when he premiered "Shadow Dancer," his new movie about cerebral intelligence agents operating during a charged period in Northern Island.

Set five years before 1998’s historic Good Friday Agreement, the film centers on an MI5 agent (Clive Owen) who recruits a young Northern Irish woman (Andrea Riseborough) to spy on her own activist IRA family, and the crosses and double-crosses that ensue as attacks are carried out.

But more conspicuous than the plot is the mood: the film is restrained in a way that mirrors "Tinker Tailor" (and can at times make even that movie seem like "The Bourne Identity").  There’s an occasional burst of violence, but characters move slowly, often under gray skies, and there's a hushed feeling about the whole enterprise. The second scene of the film, about an attempted bombing in a London subway station, unfolds for five minutes without anyone speaking a word.

Marsh, who has toggled between documentaries and features--the Oscar winner's two most recent films were the primate-research documentary "Project Nim" and a crime feature in Britain's "Red Riding" trilogy--said he thought the low pitch worked to his advantage.  "I wanted the film to gather weight as it went along," Marsh told 24 Frames at a reception for the film, which is based on a novel by the thriller author Tom Bradby.

Marsh smiled a little at the "Tinker Tailor" comparison" but noted wryly that the Gary Oldman film cost a lot more to make than his low-budget independent. Still, the period details, and the brown and gray tones that Tomas Alfredson used in painting “Tinker Tailor,” are very much on the palette here.

No one’s yet bought the movie, which is hunting for distribution at the festival. The nearly $20 million in box office for “Tinker Tailor” may suggest a sizable audience, though John Le Carre’s name goes a lot further than Bradby’s.

More than “Tinker Tailor,” this movie weaves a lot of politics into its fabric—there’s a showdown between British police and IRA members at the funeral of an IRA member, for instance—but Marsh, who like Riseborough is English, said at a post-screening Q&A session that he was concerned primarily with a “universal human politics.”

Still, Riseborough added that the desperate situation of the Northern Irish shouldn’t be overlooked. “They were so angry,” she said. There was “pain and unemployment. It's almost too much for words.”

RELATED:

Sundance 2012: 'Smashed' is a booze film with a dry wit

Bawdy chicks with flicks (but don't say "Bridesmaids")

Spike Lee says studios "know nothing about black people"

--Steven Zeitchik

twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

Photo: Andrea Riseborough in "Shadow Dancer." Credit: Sundance Film Festival

Sundance 2012: 'For Ellen' puts focus on the father

 
Have breakfast with writer-director So Yong Kim, tell her how remarkable her new film is, and you'll see her put her menu in front of her face in embarrassment. But hearing compliments on the quietly exquisite “For Ellen” is something the filmmaker is going to have to get used to. It's that good.

The film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this week, stars an excellent Paul Dano as the hard-edged and distraught Joby, a twenty-something hipster rock performer who's lived only for his music and, on the verge of an unavoidable divorce, has to decide if he can live for something else as well, his young daughter, Ellen.

The role is a change of pace from Dano, and with its brooding central male character, “For Ellen” is something of a departure as well for Kim, whose previous films, “Treeless Mountain” and “In Between Days,” dealt with girls. “I didn't really want to, I felt really terrified of starting,” she said of the new direction. “But it felt like the right thing to do at that point.”

What unites “For Ellen” with Kim's earlier films is its focus on family, which stems from her own background.

“I grew up in a really weird situation in Korea,” the director, 42, said. “My parents divorced when I was 4 or 5, my father disappeared, and my mother went to America. For five years I lived with my grandparents or aunts; it was kind of a nomadic lifestyle.

“So I'm very interested in stories about individuals within a family, how that person is shaped by family or lack of family. They're always like a search for me, I'm trying to find out if other people felt the same way I did. It's a learning thing.”

One of the starting points of “For Ellen's” script, Kim said, was “a memory of my father visiting, such a little blip, but when you are in a vulnerable phase, you tend to remember things.”

So the Joby character started “as my father now, then he turned white, became younger, and when I finished he was in his late 30s, an Adrien Brody  type.”

That is far from Dano's age (he's 27), but Kim gave him the script because she was thinking he might be good for the role of Joby's divorce attorney.

“He called back and said in his soft-spoken way that he didn't want to step on my toes but the [character Joby] could be younger, that would be really interesting.”

The filmmaker considered carefully, gave Dano the part and never looked back.

“Working with Paul was an incredible experience; he takes the character to another level, explores all the dimensions I could not express,” Kim said. “He totally spoiled me.”

Playing Joby's super-serious daughter Ellen is Shaylena Mandigo, discovered in a first-grade physical education class in Massena, N.Y., where the film was shot.

“She was one of the most serious little girls I'd ever seen, even doing skipping and jumping jacks in P.E.,” the director remembered. “She was meticulous, she would not stop until she finished,” a trait that pays off in a wonderful scene in the film where Ellen carefully picks out a doll with her dad.

Given what a gifted filmmaker the New York-based Kim has turned out to be, it is a bit surprising to discover that she went to the Art Institute of Chicago determined to be an artist.

“But a professor told me I was a horrible painter, I didn't have the touch,” she remembers. “I had to do something else with my life, and I started doing multimedia and experimental videos.”

It was at the Art Institute that she met her future husband and fellow director Bradley Rust Gray (“The Exploding Girl”).

“Brad had been to USC, a proper production school, and when I saw him shooting it seemed so natural in a way, I thought ‘This is how you do it.'”

Despite her experimental background, Kim makes films she considers to be “not cutting edge, not pushing the boundaries of cinema. I really want to do traditional filmmaking very well, that's my focus at the moment. I want to get really good at telling stories in a way that conveys emotional journeys.”

In this she is helped by Gray, who co-produced and co-edited “For Ellen” with Kim. (When he makes a movie, she returns the favor.) “It's up and down, interesting and challenging, but it makes our work better,” said Kim, who's hoping to find a distributor at Sundance.

“I do the first cut on my films, I include all the precious pieces I love and don't want to let go. We battle over every cut, even four frames. ‘If you cut that, he's not going to blink. What's what going to mean?'

“When you're writing, you put as much as you can into the script, you don't know what might be important. When you're editing you take a lot out, you take out everything that distracts from the focus. A little extra fat is not necessary. It's not perfect until everything is out that doesn't need to be there.”

RELATED:

Sundance 2012: Bingham Ray remembered by Kenneth Turan

Sundance 2012: Bawdy chicks with flicks (but don't say "Bridesmaids")

Sundance 2012: Spike Lee says studios "know nothing about black people"

-- Kenneth Turan in Park City, Utah

Photo: Director So Yong Kim poses for a portrait at the Sundance Film Festival. Her latest film is "For Ellen." Credit: Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times

Sundance 2012: Gere, De Niro films bound for theaters

The deals continued to come at the Sundance Film Festival on Wednesday, ensuring that a few more films will have a life outside the Park City, Utah, bubble.

Jake Schreier's drama "Robot & Frank" was acquired by Samuel Goldwyn and Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions. Set in the near future, the movie centers on a lonely seventysomething man (Frank Langella) who is given a robot companion by his children and then forms an odd bond with it.

Nicholas Jarecki's "Arbitrage" also went to two companies: Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions co-acquired the film and will team up to release it. The companies paired on the release of last year's Sundance financial drama, "Margin Call," to which this film has been compared. In the 2012 picture, Richard Gere plays a master-of-the-universe banker who scrambles to prevent his life from coming apart after becoming involved in a shady investment and a fatal car accident.

And "Red Lights," Rodrigo Cortes' follow-up to his 2010 Sundance pic "Buried," has also found a home. The supernatural thriller has been acquired by Millennium Entertainment; the movie stars Robert De Niro as a world-famous psychic and Cillian Murphy and Elizabeth Olsen as two paranormal experts who seek him out. No release dates have been given for any of the films.

Nearly every major specialty company has now bought a film (Focus, Sony Pictures Classics, Magnolia and Fox Searchlight bought at least one earlier in the festival) -- save for the Weinstein Co., a rarity in a period when Harvey Weinstein has been one of the most active festival buyers. The firm does have a busy fall, with new films from Quentin Tarantinio, Paul Thomas Anderson and David O. Russell set for release.

RELATED:

Bingham Ray remembered by Kenneth Turan

Bawdy chicks with flicks (but don't say 'Bridesmaids')

Spike Lee says studios 'know nothing about black people'

--Steven Zeitchik

twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

Photo: Richard Gere in "Arbitrage." Credit: Sundance Film Festival