"This needs to be worldwide. 'Cause all the footage I've seen on TV, nobody got what I got."
With Kimberly Roberts' statement, the Oscar-nominated "Trouble the Water" invites us into a shaky cinema verite version of her experience in the middle of Hurricane Katrina, providing an intimate look at the aftermath that we might have missed from national news coverage.
"We couldn't make sense of what we were seeing [on TV]," says "Trouble" directors and producers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal. After watching six or seven days of coverage, "we decided we needed to put ourselves down there, with our cameras, to try to make sense of it all."
Lessin and Deal, whose previous documentary work includes Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" and "Bowling for Columbine," say their backgrounds have prepared them to turn on a dime, which is exactly what they had to do when the National Guard public affairs representatives in New Orleans closed off access to independent filmmakers. "You have to keep your eyes open and follow the action," Deal says. "Life is more interesting when you're surprised. I think allowing yourself to be surprised as a journalist and filmmaker is a genuine experience that will be transferred to the audience."
"Strong characters are the strength of any good story," Lessin says. And the best surprise of their journey was meeting Kimberly and Scott Roberts, whose personal transformations throughout the film are the heart of the story and help make sense of the chaos that surrounded Katrina.
Sundance is over till 2010, and sadly, not all films will get distribution. Those that do often show in art-house theaters in New York and L.A. Not packed like a sardine into those cities, and wondering how you'll get your indie film fix?
My last day in Park City, I learned the answer. My phone buzzed me with a text message that my ride to Main Street was waiting outside. (That press pass finally paid off.) It's known on Main Street as the Jaman/TiVo "cocoa wagon." The front of the RV announced "a film festival in your living room," and lured people inside with free cocoa and a huggable TiVo mascot. For the first couple days of the festival, "TiVo" was one of the biggest celebrities on Main Street. Once you got inside, the Jaman/TiVo team of Jason, Jenny and Krista gave a quick demo on the flat screen mounted inside the RV.
TiVo has partnered with Jaman.com, as well as other film and TV libraries from subscription services such as Netflix, to bring films into your living room. Not only does this offer a new, digital platform for distribution and another chance for films to generate more buzz, it allows people around the world access to festival favorites and Oscar nominated films such as "Super Size Me" and "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," Bollywood favorites and anime.
To get started, set up your Jaman.com account, and with the search ease of TiVo, rent a film for $1.99. Your film is on queue for 30 days, with a 24-hour viewing window once your press play. Check here for further instructions and to learn more.
With each of its three awards on Saturday night at the Sundance Film Festival awards ceremony, the cheers for "Push: Based On The Novel By Sapphire" grew louder and louder. By the time the film was announced as the winner of the final award of the evening, the Grand Jury Prize in the festival's U.S. Dramatic competition, the room burst with excitement.
"I'm drunk," said director Lee Daniels, adding that he downed a few drinks after the film's previous win. Fighting back tears, he continued his heartfelt remarks by thanking the festival's programmers for screening the film -- made by and starring African Americans telling the story of inner-city struggle. "I really didn't know that white people would understand the world, you showed me this is universal."
After the ceremony, Daniels said he had tried to avoid any reports of the film's growing buzz during the festival. "My friends all know never to send me reviews, bad or good. So don't you know that my mother sends me a review."
When it was announced during the ceremony that a Special Jury Prize for acting was being given to the absent Mo'Nique for her role in "Push," Daniels escorted the film's young star, Gabourey Sidibe, to the stage. After a few brief thank yous, Sidibe looked around and asked, "Is that good?"
Director Ondi Timoner won the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary for the second time when she picked up the award for "We Live In Public." She had previously won in 2004 for "Dig!"
"The first one, I didn't even know there was an awards ceremony," she said after the ceremony as she stood with her mother near the venue's entrance, just off the phone to tell her father the news.
"We Live In Public" tells the story of Internet pioneer Josh Harris, among the first to allow every aspect of his real life to also exist online.
"We all knew the message this film delivers, the questions that it raised, were absolutely of now," Timoner said of the reaction to the film. "Now is the tipping point between the virtual world and the physical world, where all of us are spending more time online, forming relationships more thoroughly than we are in our physical lives. And that has its price to pay."
The audience award for documentary went to "The Cove," about the environmental impact on a Japanese fishing village. After producer Fisher Stevens invited the film's main subject, activist Rick O'Barry, to the stage, O'Barry made a direct plea to Japanese broadcaster NHK -- which had earlier in the evening bestowed filmmaker grants -- to show the film in Japan.
The biggest surprise of the evening, met by some palpable dismay in the audience, was likely the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award going to Nicholas Jasenovec and Charlyne Yi for "Paper Heart." The film is a hybrid of documentary and improvised comedy, and while accepting the award Jasenovec said there were only five pages of written material.
"The writing isn't necessarily written, it was a different form," Yi said after the ceremony of the film's unusual construction. "I feel like we put so much work into trying to blend documentary with fiction. I think we did put in the effort, it was just a different form of effort."
Jury member Mike White defended the decision when he said, "We really liked 'Paper Heart,' and it was hard to find the right category for it. And it felt weirdest to put it in the screenplay category, but we said that's kind of punk rock, which is the spirit of the movie and the spirit of Sundance."
There were at least half a dozen references to President Obama during the ceremony, from an audio excerpt of his inauguration speech used during an opening clip montage, to a T-shirt worn by presenter Joseph Gordon-Levitt, to a badge held up by the Sundance Institute's executive director, Ken Brecher, which declared Obama honorary head of the festival's juries.
"What we wanted to do was make sure it didn't actually take over," Geoff Gilmore, director of the festival, said about the Obama factor throughout the festival . It became a subtext, which is what it should be in this thing. There was going to be so much visibility for what happened, the historic day, that Tuesday, and I think so many people here feel so strongly about it that we knew it was going to be a part of what we talked about."
As for the fact that "Push" happened to win during this Obama-accented festival, Gilmore noted, "It couldn't have been more choice. And yet it's so unanticipated because you don't predict this stuff. You literally watch and see what happens."
As he introduced Friday night's world premiere screening of his debut feature "Moon," Duncan Jones announced that it would be distributed by Sony Pictures Classics. Sure enough, the film was preceded by the distributor's blue-and-white logo, just as it did at Thursday night's screening of "An Education," which was acquired by SPC earlier in the week.
Jones is the 37-year-old son of David Bowie -- and onetime holder of the original crazy celebrity baby name, Zowie Bowie. The apparently proud father was in attendance at the screening, sitting right next to fellow music superstar Sting, whose wife, Trudie Styler, is a producer on the film. (She would later thank Sting for both his financial and emotional support.)
The film opens with a rather spooky commercial, advertising that the majority of the Earth's energy now comes through harvesting helium from the far side of the moon. Sam Rockwell plays the lone worker at a remote facility, with only a few weeks left on a three-year contract. He may be cracking from the fatigue of such crushing long-term isolation, or there may be something more sinister afoot.
The film is at once surprisingly straightforward, while Jones is able to ratchet up an increasing level of emotional complexity as it unfolds. (The screenplay is by Nathan Parker, from a story by Jones.) Rockwell, a frequent fixture at Sundance, turns in another brilliantly modulated performance, as he surveys the emotional slippage that may be tearing a man's identity to shreds. The special effects, a mix of miniatures and CGI, have a pleasantly anachronistic handmade feel to them.
After the screening, Jones took the stage wearing a puffy, bright-yellow spacesuit featured in the film. Rockwell, Styler and members of the production team soon followed him onstage.
The film does feature a rather significant twist that comes fairly early on -- "I don't mind giving it away," Jones would say -- and it isn't a spoiler, we hope, to reveal that Rockwell at times shares the screen with himself. "How hard was it to work with myself?" he responded to the first question. "I tell you, that guy is such a diva. What a pain in the ass, me, me, me." As the audience's laughter subsided, he added, "Cheap joke."
Kevin Spacey voices a robot named Gerty, who is the only constant counterpoint to the character(s) played by Rockwell. The most obvious antecedent to Gerty is the HAL-9000 from "2001: A Space Odyssey."
"A couple people have obviously asked what the references were," said Jones, "and whether '2001' was. I would suggest that we were referencing the films that were themselves referencing '2001.' So, 'Outland,' 'Silent Running' and the original 'Alien.' Those were the films that we had been watching when we were growing up."
And then, straight from the son of Mr. "Space Oddity" himself, "Dare I say it, '2001' maybe was the influence of our parents' generation."
Lest it seem that Jones has some generational chip against his lineage, he wound up the Q&A by saying, "I want to thank my dad, who was a huge influence on me growing up and had the patience to allow me to take the time to find out what I wanted to do even though it took a hell of a long time."
When it seemed everyone was already packed up and gone, the biggest acquisition of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival was announced Friday. It was reported that "Spread," directed by David McKenzie and starring Ashton Kutcher, sold U.S. and Australian rights to Anchor Bay Films for $3.5 million to $4 million.
According to a report on IndieWire, a number of titles, including "The Greatest," "Art and Copy" and "The Cove," may also close deals by the end of the weekend.
On Friday night the 15th edition of the Slamdance Film Festival wrapped up with its awards ceremony. "A Quiet Little Marriage," directed by Mo Perkins, won the grand jury award for best narrative feature. A special jury mention for best performance went to Larry Fessenden in "I Sell the Dead."
"Strongman," directed by Zachary Levy, won the grand jury award for documentary feature. A special jury mention went to "Second Sight," directed by Alison McAlpine.
"Punching the Clown," directed by Gregory Viens, won the audience award for best narrative feature. "Heart of Stone," directed by Beth Toni Kruvant, won the audience award for best documentary feature.
The Spirit of Slamdance Award, decided by each year's class of filmmakers, was a tie between "Zombie Girl," directed by Aaron Marshall, Erik Mauck and Justin Johnson, and "Vapid Lovelies," directed by Frank Feldman.
“We stalk other sister filmmaking teams,” Elizabeth and Emily Dell tell me. In post-production on their indie hip-hop film, “B-girl,” they are at the Women in Film panel and brunch, eager to swap stories with Emily and Sarah Kunstler, whose documentary about their father, civil rights lawyer William Kunstler is in competition at the festival. The film, based on their father’s experience going from hero to “most hated lawyer in America,” explores the cases Kunstler fought for justice.
I breathe in the smells of the brunch: coffee, orange juice, estrogen. Outside a spa locker room I don’t know that I’ve seen an event with such a high ratio of women over men. Certainly not in the film world, still known as a good ole’ boys club where I’d been called “doll.” But the women gathered here are making a change in those statistics.
The metaphor of sisterhood amongst women who may have never met before is true in this room. Maria Burton, who works with her four sisters at Five Sisters Productions, tells me about her recent trip to Africa. Bonded by common passions for storytelling, film and the subject of the day -- social consciousness in filmmaking -- the conversations flow easily and openly.
A few men mingle as well, including two of the subjects in the Kunstlers' documentary, “William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe.” Gregory “Joey” Johnson, whose case centered around the right to burn the American flag as free speech, and Yousef Salaam, wrongfully convicted in the Central Park jogger case and jailed from age 15 to 22 before he was exonerated.
Trudie Styler, perhaps the most easily identified on the panel for her marriage to rock star Sting, produced the feature "Moon" and was a crucial figure in the film "Crude," a documentary about the battle between communities and a corporation, an indigenous people nearly destroyed by oil drilling and Chevron. Mary Ann Smothers Bruni’s documentary explores women honor killings in Iraq.
“We are in an awakening, a soul-shaking in this country. For the first time Americans want to change,” says Lucy Webb, actress, writer, producer and moderator of the panel. “Will we see changes in film?”
Styler fields the question first. “Going forward, I don’t want to be involved in anything without substance.... We hope Obama will change everything, but he’s not God and we have to be accountable, and as filmmakers we need to be accountable and responsible....To provoke and entertain.”
Some days the festival mojo never quite kicks in, as it was on Thursday with a series of near-misses and almost-rans. I made my way to the top of Main Street to the Treasure Mountain Inn, home of the Slamdance Film Festival. Straight away the vibe seems different, more homespun and with none of the pressure and free-floating anxiety that marks much of Sundance. (Although truth be told, the seating risers and video projection presentation do leave something to be desired.) Three members of the Broken Lizard comedy team were in the lobby, greeting friends and well-wishers before a screening of their latest film "The Slammin' Salmon."
Broken Lizard made their mark at Sundance, first with "Puddle Cruiser" and then with "Super Troopers," which would go on to be a cult hit on cable and home video, before moving on to bigger, studio-funded projects. During the post-screening Q&A, member Steve Lemme pointedly remarked that "Salmon" finds them "returning to our indie roots," as they found financing for the film themselves and shot it during last year's writers strike from a script they already had.
This time out the film is directed by member Kevin Heffernan, following the events of one evening at a Miami restaurant owned by a former boxing champion. Part workplace comedy, part freewheeling farce, the film makes for a pleasantly funny diversion but lacks the punch of surprise of the Broken Lizard's best work. Hopefully this isn't a sign of creative wheel-spinning, but merely a make-work stop-gap before their next major project.
Later I caught "The Missing Person," which stars newly minted Oscar nominee Michael Shannon. Written and directed by Noah Buschel, the film is a conceit in search of movie. Shannon plays a booze-soaked private eye who seems to have stepped right from the pages of a Dashiell Hammett pulp story. Except he lives in the modern day, as signaled by the ringing cellphone which wakes him from sleep at the film's opening.
Shannon's flaky, moody performance is something to watch, and Amy Ryan (also an executive producer), Frank Wood and Liza Weil round out the cast with a palpable sense of zesty fun, but it never all quite adds up. The film has a somnabulent, downcast mood which while true to itself makes for an arduous sit.
Before the first midnight screening of "White Lightnin' " Sundance programmer Trevor Groth noted that "sometimes we show films that defy categorization" and this film certainly lived up to that. A rollicking, terrifying trip through good-times Americana and nightmares of madness and revenge, the film tells the not-entirely-true story of Jesco White.
For those who have not seen Jacob Young's 1991 documentary "The Dancing Outlaw" -- and if you haven't, you really should -- Jesco White is a champion Appalachian dancer, continuing a tradition that has run in his family for generations. Part tap, part clogging, part quest for spiritual freedom, Jesco's dancing is truly one-of-a-kind. Add to that his larger-than-life personality -- marked by violence, addiction and more than a little genuine crazy -- and he is everything strange and sad, funny and wonderful about rural American culture.
Directed by Dominic Murphy from a script by Eddy Moretti and Shane Smith, "White Lightnin'" is no simple reading of Jesco's story. Rather, they use the bones of his life as a jumping-off place, taking the story to places fantasical and horrifying. "Walk the Line" it is not.
Edward Hogg stars as Jesco, in a star-making performance of remarkable range and quicksilver agility. In preparing for the role, the British-born actor met the real Jesco -- "He's crazy as hell, but you fall in love with him straight away," Hogg said in an interview the day after the screening -- and even learned steps from the master himself. Though a stand-in was shot, the actor exhibited such a feel for the dancing that all the footage that made it into the film is Hogg himself.
As for the amazing, implacable look of serene bliss that is on Hogg's face whether he is dancing, huffing gasoline or attacking someone with a hatchet, both Hogg and Murphy recalled that the director would shout "be nice!" at the actor as he delved into evil behavior. "I told him, the more angry you get, the more polite you've got to get," recalled Murphy the next day.
Murphy told me how the filmmakers made the decision to follow Jesco's real story and where to leap off into a world of violent revenge and salvation that is of their own devising.
"It wasn't about the real Jesco, it was a more twisted imagining of what could have been, or might have been. And some of the things that happen in the movie are things Jesco describes, that he has imagined or he wants to do. For me it made complete sense in a kind of poetic sense."
"Sometimes I think, '[Forget] it, I am going to write a Kate Hudson comedy,'" Bobcat Goldthwait said after the screening of his latest cinematic outing, "World's Greatest Dad" at an 8:30 a.m. packed house in the Prospector Theatre.
Audience members were extremely appreciative that the comedian-turned-auteur has stayed true to his own muse.
With his longtime friend Robin Williams in the titular role, Goldthwait has upped his game once again, improving on the work he began in the early '90s with the cultish "Shakes The Clown" and the disturbingly funny 2006 Sundance entry "Stay." Following a theme developed in the latter, Goldthwait uses a perverse sexual incident as the game-changer in his characters' lives. Hilarity and heartbreak ensue.
"Dad" revolves around a schlumpy high school poetry teacher (a wonderfully restrained Williams) who cashes in on his son's death-by-misadventure (autoerotic asphyxiation) and finds himself suddenly popular. And living a lie.
When the lights came up and the rapturous applause died down, Goldthwait faced the crowd, a somewhat shy presence compared with his stand-up routine, in which his voice often sounds like a creature yelping through a throat filled with phlegm.
"Oh, you're all taking pictures," he said. As cameras clicked and flashes flashed, he struck a few Vogue poses.
"You're smiling. That's all I care about," he declared. "Well, no, that's not all I care about."
Summing up his second Sundance experience, Goldthwait related a story from his first: "I told the audience this is the nicest thing that ever happened to me next to my daughter being born. Everyone thought that meant she was a newborn and went 'Awww,' but they didn't realize she was grown up and out there pounding beers with them."
"I want to thank you for making me so uncomfortable in my seat," said one audience member. "You're welcome," Goldthwait replied with a bemused gurgle. "I felt like Margaret Dumont in one of those Marx Brothers movies with all these crazy people running around."
In a short cameo, the writer-director appears as a driver dispatched to bring Williams' newly famous character to a television studio. Goldthwait played it straight. "I'd feel nervous ad-libbing around Mork," he admitted.
It was Williams' idea to strip off his clothes in the film's final frames, Goldthwait said, a moment that provides a brief flash of full frontal (though filmed from underneath and underwater). "I got naked too," he added.
Asked about his writing process, Goldthwait had this to say: "I check into a chain-quality hotel so no one can call me up and say, 'Hey, do you want to go to the movies?' I pace the floor and smoke cigarettes. They think I'm the Unabomber."
-- David A. Keeps
(Photo: Bobcat Goldthwait and Robin Williams. Courtesy Sundance Institute)
Director Gregor Jordan warned the audience in his introduction that everyone might not get or like "The Informers." In the seats surrounding me, there were a few grumbles, but in general, the audience not only enjoyed but identified with the '80s-themed drama.
The synergy may not have been with the drugs and constant sex, but the clothes, the music and the hairstyles were very evocative of the era without making caricatures of the people. Many times during the movie, a song would play, or a music video would be in the background, and there was a chuckle of familiarity throughout the theater.
Not a traditionally linear beginning-middle-end tale, the movie starts off with tragedy, then continues to display the excess of the '80s even in the face of a life lost. There were many different story lines being told, all intersecting through a group of young men and women who spend their days intoxicated and having sex (lots of nudity). The plots include a boozing rocker, a Hollywood executive, a newscaster and one that focused on Brad Renfro as a doorman whose ex-con uncle, played by recent Oscar nominee Mickey Rourke, kidnaps a kid. Lots going on.
In the Q&A following, it was revealed that the young actors had to be put through something of an '80s boot camp. When the people portraying the roles were "eating cereal and watching cartoons" (see Jon Foster video below) during the decade, a little help might've been on target. We caught up with two of the "decadent" youth (in the movie) -- Amber Heard and Jon Foster -- as they hurriedly entered the building on the premiere's small red carpet:
The doctor and the patient in "Shrink" sat down to talk (separately) as Kevin Spacey and Keke Palmer made the rounds in Sundance. One is a festival veteran, honored for his work in the independent film community by festival director Geoffrey Gilmore before the film's premiere. The other wasn't exactly sure who Robert Redford was at first, but liked his speech and his views on film.
Both have a lot of things going, and both are good at getting the word out about their other projects. Here's Kevin and Keke:
The cast and director of Sundance's "Dare," a high school drama about kids coming of age and exploring their sexuality, sat down for a quick chat at the Stansfield Art Gallery in Park City.
The main actors, Emmy Rossum, Zach Gilford and Ashley Springer, spoke about what they brought to their characters in "Dare." Backstory for the question: A teacher in the movie -- played by Alan Cumming -- tells Emmy Rossum's character that she can't act in a specific role because she doesn't have the breadth of emotion and experience required to feel what she's saying.
Emmy wanted to bring a realism to her role, though she never went to a traditional high school. Ashley didn't want to bring anything to it, preferring instead to distance his own personality from the material. And Zach? Well, Zach loved high school. He believed that having lived through it and being able to look back with a more mature point of view helped the performance.
Oscars nominations morning always brings surprises -- not the least of which this year is the discovery that three acting nominees are at Sundance right now.
That list includes Michael Shannon (best supporting actor "Revolutionary Road), Melissa Leo (best actress "Frozen River") and Josh Brolin (best supporting actor "Milk").
Reached by phone around 9:00 a.m., Brolin explained that he's at the festival to perform a reading of "The People Speak: Voices of a People's History of the United States" at the ASCAP Music Cafe tonight. The spoken word event "brings to light little known voices from U.S. history" according to a festival write-up and is the basis for a forthcoming documentary of the same name.
Shannon is at the fest to promote the film noir feature in which he stars, "The Missing Person."
"I'm in Sundance," Brolin said. "I actually woke up early, I screwed up the time difference [between Park City and Los Angeles]. I woke up at 5:55 [a.m.], naturally there were no calls. 'OK.' Twenty minutes later, CNN is on. And I got a great call from Javier [Bardem] from Spain. He's been running through the streets screaming." (Bardem was Brolin's co-star in "No Country for Old Men.")
"How am I going to celebrate? I'm going to do a live performance. I do a Mark Twain speech and a Dalton Trumbo speech. Melissa Leo's here. She's going to do a speech. Redford's going to do a speech. And Rich Robinson from the Black Crowes is going to do a musical piece."
"Shrink," the story of a therapist to the stars struggling with his own loss while bonding with some of his quirky patients, was very well received at its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival last night.
In a Hollywood-adjacent role, which Kevin Spacey later likened to his film "Swimming With Sharks," the good doctor goes through the ho-hum job of seeing obsessive-compulsive super-agents, sex-addled actors and writers in his daily duties as a therapist. He becomes more depressed by the day as he carries the burden of his wife's suicide. He's given a pro bono case, a teenager who's recently lost her mother but doesn't want to talk about it.
Spacey, Keke Palmer, Saffron Burrows and many other members of the cast and crew joined director Jonas Pate onstage for a Q&A session with some very revealing answers.
To the question of shooting on location in L.A. and how difficult or easy it was, Pate said, "One advantage of [shooting in L.A.] is just don't get a permit. A lot of the locations honestly were [through] friends that we shot in. There were several, just going back to a guerrilla, indie style of filmmaking [as in a laundromat scene], where we walked in and gave the lady 50 bucks and said, 'Please don't call the cops. We'll hurry.' "
Soon after the question, someone asked Spacey about the marijuana used constantly by his character in the movie. What was he really smoking? Said Spacey, "Christmas in Vietnam [one of the many types of marijuana mentioned in the movie]. No, actually it was just some herbs. Maybe some Marlboro Lights, but never the real stuff 'cause we are a professional production!"
Director Pate spoke about having great casting and how actors were generally chosen in the conventional way. But, though it may not be a first, actor Dallas Roberts took the unusual step of performing in a Skype'd audition for his role.
-- Jevon Phillips
(Kevin Spacey and Saffron Burrows courtesy WireImage)
Tea Leoni obviously stands out in the male-dominated cast of "Manure," which premiered to a capacity crowd Tuesday night in the huge Eccles Theater in Park City, Utah. With Billy Bob Thornton, Kyle McLachlan and a cast full of male salesmen, Leoni took it all in stride with a great sense of humor.
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"This needs to be worldwide. 'Cause all the footage I've seen on TV, nobody got what I got."
“We stalk other sister filmmaking teams,” Elizabeth and Emily Dell tell me. In post-production on their indie hip-hop film, 
Trudie Styler, perhaps the most easily identified on the panel for her marriage to rock star Sting, produced the feature "Moon" and was a crucial figure in the film 
Later I caught "The Missing Person," which stars newly minted Oscar nominee Michael Shannon. Written and directed by Noah Buschel, the film is a conceit in search of movie. Shannon plays a booze-soaked private eye who seems to have stepped right from the pages of a Dashiell Hammett pulp story. Except he lives in the modern day, as signaled by the ringing cellphone which wakes him from sleep at the film's opening. 
"Sometimes I think, '[Forget] it, I am going to write a Kate Hudson comedy,'" Bobcat Goldthwait said after the screening of his latest cinematic outing, "World's Greatest Dad" at an 8:30 a.m. packed house in the Prospector Theatre.
Oscars nominations morning always brings surprises -- not the least of which this year is the discovery that three acting nominees are at Sundance right now. 
"Shrink," the story of a therapist to the stars struggling with his own loss while bonding with some of his quirky patients, was very well received at its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival last night.