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Brokedown Palace
David Siegel wanted a Versailles. Now he wants revenge.
What angers David Siegel about Queen of Versailles, the riotous documentary about his efforts to build the largest home in America, are not the film’s many unflattering depictions of his family. “They want to call my wife a gold-digger because she’s 30 years younger than me?” he says. “That doesn’t bother me.”
What angers the 76-year-old mogul is that the film, which was the toast of this year’s Sundance Festival, impugns his business. His specific complaint: the film’s promotional materials suggested his 90,000-square-foot Orlando dream house went into foreclosure after his luxury-rental company, Westgate Resorts, “collapsed” in 2009. “It’s just one more effort to ridicule and humiliate the 1 percent,” says Siegel, who insists his business is booming. He is suing Sundance and the filmmakers for defamation.
The buzz (and the snow) was high at the annual film festival in Park City, Utah. Marlow Stern and Chris Lee highlight the best of the fest.
Talk of the Town
Fox Searchlight paid $6 million for The Surrogate, a poignant, terribly funny story about a crippled poet’s bumpy path toward losing his virginity via a “sex surrogate” (played by Helen Hunt). John Hawkes is charming as O’Brien in a welcome break from his typically sinister roles. In the resplendent fairy tale Beasts of the Southern Wild, a 6-year-old girl tries to save her family from snow monsters unleashed when the polar ice caps melt. It’s The NeverEnding Story for a new generation. —M.S.
War on drugs documentary also gets award.
Beasts of the Southern Wild, an apocalyptic film starring an 8-year-old girl, won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah Saturday night. The film was directed and co-written by 29-year-old first-time filmmaker Benh Zeitlin, who shot the film on location in Louisiana. The House I Live In, a documentary about the war on drugs, won the top honor in its category.
The Queen of the Indies’ Triumphant Return
She ruled Sundance in the ’90s. Now Parker Posey makes her triumphant return as a crazy boss in ‘Price Check.’
Parker Posey is exhausted. We’re inside a condo besieged by faux-rustic detail off Main Street in Park City, Utah, and she’s slumped over atop a stone fireplace in front of a roaring blaze—like a Sundance throne of sorts for the “Queen of the Indies,” as she was dubbed in 1996. Her black boots dangle over a tiger-striped rug draped over the wooden floor. Despite appearing in more than 30 independent films in the ‘90s, and having more than a dozen movies premiere at Sundance, its been five years since she’s had a movie screen at the mecca of indie cinema. But Posey is back in the mountains to promote her new film, Price Check, boasting one of her juiciest roles in years.
And that’s not all she’s doing here. Posey popped up as the guest of honor during Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s much-ballyhooed hitRECord: A Night at the Movies event during Sundance. Sauntering onstage, she grabbed a microphone and gave her royal seal of approval: “This is very independent, I approve,” before engaging in a quasi-philosophical discussion with the host over what makes an indie film—(500) Days of Summer does not make the cut, according to Posey—and participating in a reading of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, along with Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbet. She was also set to host Sundance’s awards ceremony but had to back out at the last minute due to a sudden illness.
James Marsh Rips Best Doc Oscar Nominations
James Marsh tells Marlow Stern about returning to scripted drama and why the Oscar snub of 'The Interrupters' was a "disgrace."
The opening salvo was fired on Nov. 18. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released its short list of 15 films for the Best Documentary Oscar, and many in the industry were up in arms. Where was The Interrupters? No Senna? Then, the actual nominees for the Academy Award for Best Documentary were announced on Jan. 24, and people were appropriately outraged.
Opens up about hitRECord and Batman's Occupy Wall Street vibe.
It’s more than an hour till show time and the ticketholder tent outside the 1,270-seat Eccles Theatre, the Grand Théâtre Lumière of Sundance, is bursting at the seams for Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s hitRECord: A Night at the Movies. Thus, the less punctual attendees are forced to brave the heavy snow and form a long line wrapping around the theater. Judging by the high volume of beanies, as well as girls dragging their boyfriends around like disgruntled parents, the crowd is skewing very young—save a handful of older men who look like Julian Schnabel.
A Fascinating Expose on the (Racist) War on Drugs
New film 'The House I Live In.'
The War on Drugs is placed under the microscope in Eugene Jarecki’s (WHY WE FIGHT, ’05) comprehensive documentary, THE HOUSE I LIVE IN. Tracing the history of the drug war from the birth of the narc—and drug usage as a fringe, countercultural phenomenon—to the crack cocaine epidemic of the ‘80s and ‘90s (and subsequent racist practices in the enforcement of drug laws), Jarecki’s damning critique leaves no stone unturned. It even contains plenty of valuable insight from former Baltimore beat reporter-cum-creator of HBO’s THE WIRE, David Simon.
“You’re watching poor, uneducated people fed into a machine like meat to make sausage,” says investigative reporter Charles Bowden in the film.
Traci Lords on ‘Excision’ and Her Porn Past
Porn icon Traci Lords does a stunning about-face, playing a strict, religious mother in the controversial Sundance horror movie ‘Excision’—the grossest film at the festival. Lords tells Marlow Stern how being raped changed her, about her iconic porn past, and why condoms are a necessarily evil.
Bloody tampons. Decapitated talking heads. Disembowelment. Tongue removal. Wanton sex bathed in menstrual blood. An aborted fetus. Such are the joys of Excision, Richard Bates Jr.’s midnight movie making its world premiere at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. The film’s various grotesque sequences prompted scores of press and industry folk—nearly half the audience in total—to hurry out of one afternoon P&I screening at the fest.
Traci Lords plays a pious mother in "Excision.", Courtesy of Sundance Festival
Pauline, played by 90210 star AnnaLynne McCord, has a few issues. Sporting hunched posture, acne, and bushy eyebrows, 18-year-old high-school senior looks like the cousin of one of the GEICO cavemen. She’s hated by her classmates and teachers alike, and further terrorized by her hyperreligious, controlling mother, Phyllis (Traci Lords), who makes Pauline attend weekly therapy sessions with a quirky reverend, played—in a cheeky bit of casting—by John Waters. As if things couldn’t get any worse for the awkward teen, she’s prone to cold sores thanks to a herpes infection she contracted from her father when he performed CPR on her as a young child, and her little sister, Grace (Ariel Winter), has a bad case of cystic fibrosis.
2012 Sundance Trends
Women behaving badly, star-studded bombs, and physical handicaps
Now that we’ve reached the home stretch of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, it’s time to take a long, hard look at some of the major trends of this year’s fest…
WOMEN BEHAVING BADLY
It doesn’t get much meaner than Regan, the lead character played with icy deliciousness by Kirsten Dunst in BACHELORETTE. She blows loads of cocaine, has sloppy bathroom sex with douchebags, and talks down to even her best friends. Melissa Leo’s neurotic, drug-addicted mom, Penny, in PREDISPOSED is no picnic, either.

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