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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

Spike Lee arrived in Park City with both guns blazing.

On Sunday night, at the Sundance premiere of his faith-based drama Red Hook Summer, the notoriously outspoken writer-director wanted to make a few things abundantly clear:

1) The film follows Flik (Jules Brown), a 13-year-old Atlanta boy with a “fro-hawk” and a ubiquitous iPad 2, who is transplanted to Brooklyn’s Red Hook housing projects to live with his fire-and-brimstone-spouting preacher grandfather for the summer—and potentially find a place for accepting Jesus Christ into his life. Lee said he financed Red Hook Summer himself because he feels the studio system would never let him make “a multidimensional portrait of a young African-American.”

The stars turned out for the Museum of Modern Art’s Tribute to Pedro Almodóvar in mid-November. Sarah Jessica Parker and Blake Lively shoot the breeze with fashion mavens Anna Wintour and Karl Lagerfeld. A stunning, doe-eyed blonde emerges, posing for photographs before a Raúl Àvila–designed wall of 25,000 crimson roses. Donning a black Chanel fall 2009 couture dress accented by a red waistband, she resembles a softer, younger Michelle Pfeiffer; a paragon of glamour and sophistication at just 22 years of age.

“Elizabeth Olsen, I saw your movie!” a man exclaims. It’s the guest of honor, Almodóvar. The Chanel-clad ingénue is in a state of shock. “Oh my god!” she shouts, “I wrote a paper about you when I was in high school!”

Back at the college dorms, the same gal, a bookish theater major, is studying when she’s interrupted by a knock at the door.