Siegel may hate being the butt of a joke, but treating the wealthy with scorn is a treasured American pastime. Newt Gingrich’s ridicule forced Mitt Romney to release his tax returns last week. An appetite for humiliation drove sales for Stephanie Madoff Mack’s tell-all book last year and made Raj Rajaratnam’s insider-trading trial a news sensation. As a weapon in class warfare, derision easily beats occupation.

Which helps explain why Siegel is out for revenge. He tried to stop Sundance from screening the film, “but they cited their First Amendment rights, or whatever,” he says. So while fur-coated Hollywood liberals were chuckling at his life, Florida’s time-share king was busy litigating. His suit seeks at least $75,000 in damages, though he hopes for millions. The Siegels’ unfinished palace, modeled in homage to Louis XIV, is on the market for $75 million.

Beyond the damages, there is a prin-ciple at stake. Siegel seeks to defend the freedoms of the garishly rich. “They made it look like my company is in ruins, that I live in a pigsty, that my wife is a gold-digging blonde bimbo, that she’s overendowed, that she’s a shopaholic,” he says. “Some of that might be true, but it’s not the way they presented it. She is a shopaholic, but what woman isn’t?” He says the film seeks to exaggerate and condemn his largesse: “They said we had 15 servants, when we never had more than four or five nannies for eight children.”

Art-umentaries Rule

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry offers an insider’s look at the artist and political dissident’s creative process and free-speech struggles; Ai so thoroughly upset China’s government, officials locked him down for 81 days. Meanwhile, Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present provides a mesmerizing view of the performance daredevil and chronicles her career retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. There, Abramovic engaged in silent face-off with thousands in a demonstration of physical endurance and spiritual uplift. —C.L.

Grumpy Old Men

According to Posey, the Sundance Film Festival has changed a great deal over the years since the heyday of indie cinema—the ‘90s. Now the strange mélange of indie zest and corporate interests resembles, she says, an episode of The Twilight Zone.

“You do these photographs in these [gifting suites], and someone came up to me and said, ‘Hello. Can I give you this leather bag?’” Posey says. “I said, ‘No, I don’t need a bag. I already have one.’ It was a room as big as a hotel room but there was a lemonade stand, a Chex Mix, a martini bar, mints, and then this bag. I move along, and then the guy behind the bar says, ‘Hi. Can I take a picture of you shaking a vodka martini?’ Again, I said, ‘No.’ It’s so weird.”

Price Check, a modest little film by Michael Walker that was shot in 18 days on a budget of $500,000, definitely qualifies as an indie. Posey plays Susan, a frantic, newly hired powerhouse executive at a supermarket chain who hopes to change the company’s sorry culture. She enlists Pete Cozy (Eric Mabius), a happily married father—and unhappily employed worker—as her boy Friday, offering him a huge raise to help settle his outstanding debt. However, as Pete becomes more and more of a “yes man” to his dynamo boss, he finds himself losing track of who he really wants to be.

Since reality is such a nightmare, Pauline often finds herself drifting off into her own fantasy world where she harbors bizarre delusions of being a body-altering surgeon. These beautifully photographed dream sequences depict her as a glamorous vixen—like the McCord we’ve come to know on 90210 and Nip/Tuck—dry-humping a host of cadavers, removing the tongue of a woman, performing an abortion, and cleansing herself in a bathtub filled with blood. Oh, and Pauline also wishes to lose her virginity to the most popular boy in school (Jeremy Sumpter) … while she’s on her period.

For all the vile, depraved acts flaunted onscreen in Excision, one of the most shocking things about Bates’s film is the convincing performance of porn icon Traci Lords as Pauline’s hysterical, totalitarian mother.

“I wasn’t sure if I should play Phyllis,” says Lords, who dyed her hair flaming red in honor of the bloody Excision, in an interview with The Daily Beast during Sundance. “When you first come into the business, you have that ‘arrival moment’ of how the public perceives you. The first thing they’ll always think of when they think of me is ‘sex.’ It doesn’t matter that that was 25 years ago when I was a porn star. So I think Excision was a pivotal moment for me where I wanted to add another layer.”