"Wuthering Heights" Buzz & 40 Years Covering Sundance in Park City

16:32Anne Thompson:Okay. It doesn't rise to the level of Surat or Sorcerer. It doesn't have the action bona fides. They're walking. They're walking in the woods and talking. It's sort of a low budget version of what it should have been. It should have been a rip roaring adventure and it wasn't.

16:51Ryan Lattanzio:it's definitely constrained by budget it's also shot in germany so there is that i mean it didn't it doesn't have that sense of americana necessarily that i think it was going for i don't know but i only learned that in retrospect so maybe now now it's coloring my point of view i like the energy that ethanog brings to the movie but uh now the there was some coherence and editorial issues i felt with that where they need to go back in there and make some trims because there were a lot of things that kind of didn't make sense to me. Suddenly people would be in places where I didn't know how they got there.

17:23Ryan Lattanzio:I mean, the basic idea of the movie is that Ethan Hawke is arrested and then put in a labor camp. This is the Depression.

17:31Anne Thompson:This is the 30s.

17:32Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, Depression era. And Russell Crowe offers him the chance to get out of prison and reunite with his daughter before she's shifted off into the adoption circuit. But his task is to smuggle gold with some fellow prisoners and then a Native American woman that also joins with them. But some of these people are shadier than others. And they bring a kind of deliverance vibe into the movie as well.

17:58Anne Thompson:That's a good comparison also. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe I just wanted more thrills and chills than it actually delivered. I mean, it's more like Treasure of the Sierra Madre, where you don't trust anyone and you you know that they're carrying these big packs full of gold bars and and that that gold is what everybody's looking and to to end up with it's a bit of a slog and that's

18:24Ryan Lattanzio:i suppose that's apropos for a movie about people walking with gold bars all right so what's your number five ryan uh my number five is a movie called harpaio uh directed by ephraeen mojica and Rebecca Zweig. And this is a documentary set in Mexico about queer rodeo cowboys. And there is verite celluloid footage mixed with sort of not quite reenactments, but moments where these guys are being more directed. And it's 70 minutes. I don't know what the future is for this movie, but it's very tenderly told and directed. And it was on the platform. It was in the next section. There were not that many queer movies at Sundance this year, to be honest, at least that I saw.

19:10Ryan Lattanzio:So this was a standout.

19:12Anne Thompson:All right. My number five, I saw a lot of documentaries. I saw more documentaries than anything else. And my number five is called The Oldest Person in the World from Sam Green, who is a favorite of mine. What was the name of that movie that he did about sound?

19:31Ryan Lattanzio:32 sounds.

19:32Anne Thompson:Thank you. 32 sounds was one of my favorite movies of that year. And he turns them into events. And what he does is he, he edits together what might be very disparate footage that he's, he's shot. He's also a very good filmmaker. So it's all quite beautiful. In this case, it's a very personal movie. He's, he's, he's tracking the eldest people in the world. and each one of them dies. And then he moves on to the one who's the next oldest person in the world. But he's also tracking his own child and his own cancer diagnosis. And it's a very beautiful movie. And I loved it. And the other movie that it compares to is The History of Concrete, which I'm not including, from John Wilson, a first time filmmaker who has been on TV, has a TV series.

20:21Anne Thompson:This movie does a similar thing, very similar. but he doesn't do it as well as Sam Green. Sorry.

20:29Ryan Lattanzio:I did not see that one. I hope to whenever it comes around when someone buys it at some point in the year. I wouldn't count on that. I'm not counting on it. I'm not counting on a lot of these to be bought. So as we've learned, we've been scorned before. My number four is, I came around on this one after finding it kind of annoying when I was watching it, Wicker. That's my number four. Yeah. This is a bawdy folktale in the kind of Jeffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spencer vein, even though it's not quite clear where in space and time we are. But it's a fantasy village somewhere where Olivia Colman is a fisherwoman who tasks Peter Dinklage with weaving her a husband out of a basket.

21:14Ryan Lattanzio:And he's played by Alexander Skarsgård, who I think gives a really charming performance.

21:18Anne Thompson:He's adorable.

21:20Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah. He's great in this. And he was also in the moment at the festival, which I think was less successful, but he was great in that kind of riffing on his succession character a bit.

21:30Anne Thompson:He can do no wrong with me right now, Mr.

21:32Ryan Lattanzio:Skarsgård. I agree. I agree. I love everything he's doing. So this is your number four also.

21:36Anne Thompson:Yeah. So I would just say that Olivia Colman is great in it. And so is Dinklage. And so is Skarsgård. But what's great about this movie is that what they model is what a good relationship might be. he's devoted to her and he gives her great sex and they break the bed and and everyone in the village these other women who have horrible relationships with their husbands everybody's thrown off everybody's out of whack they don't have this they they they don't even understand it and i love that it's a satire it's it's it's very effective i think very well written

22:14Ryan Lattanzio:uh my next one is going to be the friends houses here which was in u.s dramatic and that's directed by Hossein Keshavars and Mariam Atai. Oh, I got those right. And this is another of those made-in-secret Iranian dramas where it's about women who we see them not wearing the veil, and so there's a bit of resistance there. But I think when you think Seed of Sacred Fig, you think it was just an accident, though obviously there are so many Iranian movies before that, this one is more in conversation with Abbas Kirstami, and it ends up being more also in conversation with Jacques Rivette, I would say.

22:51Ryan Lattanzio:It's a kind of droll slice of life about two female artist friends that are together sort of plotting to emigrate out of the country, ultimately with varying success. And David Ehrlich, our critic, compared it to Frances Ha. And I think that's accurate. I think the barrier to entry for this movie might be challenging, but it's a really lovely film.

23:11Anne Thompson:You make me want to see it. You definitely make me want to see it. My number three is Time and Water from Saradosa. I think we talked about this already, which we remember her from Fire of Love. And she uses a similar technique where she has a narrator who is in this case, a local Iceland activist, eco activist. And he's he's lovely and and it all goes to the last little glacier this is about the first little glacier to die and and we go inside other glaciers they have a very talented cinematographer and we see them dying we see them melting and we realize that this is going on across the world that that the glaciers are not going to be with us forever.

24:00Anne Thompson:And it's a beautiful movie. It really brings you up against what we're looking at, which is a lot of extinction.

24:11Ryan Lattanzio:Her last film, Fire of Love, was more engaging at a narrative level. But I think this is visually a very beautiful movie. And I think it'll be an awards contender. I agree with that.

24:21Anne Thompson:And Nat Geo has it. What's your number two?

24:24Ryan Lattanzio:My number two would be The History of Concrete, directed by John Wilson. I come into the show already as a baked, I'm sorry, this film already.

24:32Anne Thompson:Did you not say earlier that you didn't see it? Oh, you didn't see the Sam Green.

24:38Ryan Lattanzio:I didn't see the Sam Green.

24:39Anne Thompson:Oh, I don't know if that's clear. Okay, go ahead. Go ahead. Sorry. I misunderstood you. Go ahead.

24:44Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah. Well, we'll, we'll, we'll look back at that part of it. Yeah. My number two is the history of concrete directed by John Wilson, which is very much like his HBO show that ended after three seasons not too long ago. And I wouldn't say that the show, the film is, it's not him picking up the scraps of what he didn't, you know, wasn't able to achieve, which he ended his show on his own terms. But it does feel like a feature length version of one of these episodes that really takes you on a wending path from him starting with the ambition to make a documentary about concrete to then becoming this very kind of the sort of sad melancholy commentary on death and impermanence.

25:26Ryan Lattanzio:which we learned from the movie that this material really only lasts about 40 years until it starts crumbling. So that that lends itself to some poetic asides. And he has this great collection of archival footage that he uses for all these visual puns. It's just very well. He's very clever.

25:43Anne Thompson:He is very clever. I laughed out loud a few times at some of it. But he also seems to revel in in how foolish and stupid a lot of people are. He just he interviews people with with a great deal of of sincerity and they reveal themselves. It's a little disturbing. But there is one guy who's a musician who I was very moved by. I was moved by that guy.

26:08Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, there's a twist about him that is totally kind of shocking that I won't talk about here. But you're right. John Wilson is not laughing at these people, but he gets them to I don't want to say embarrass themselves, but they do a little bit.

26:21Anne Thompson:Yeah, they do. I'm afraid they do. All right. So my next one is The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, which is from director and screenwriter Noah Segan. And let's be honest, I'm the target audience for this movie, in the sense that I grew up in New York, this movie has a really 70s flavor to it. It has a jazzy soundtrack that you would see from a movie like, you know, Across 110th Street or something. And it's John Turturro plays this aging pickpocket who at the wrong place in the wrong time lifts the wrong thing. And he gets into serious, serious trouble. And he has to figure his way out of it without hurting his family or getting, you know, or himself.

27:10Anne Thompson:And it's a very beautiful, very sad movie, but he's very clever. And so we get a kick out of that. We get a kick out of his ability to wrangle himself in these situations and turn the tables on people. So John, the other people in it are Steve Buscemi. He's wonderful in it. And there's even a cameo from Jamie Lee Curtis, who's fantastic in that last scene in the movie.

27:37Ryan Lattanzio:There's often a cameo from Jamie Lee Curtis. I feel like these days I'm dying to see this one. It played after I left. Maybe I'm not the target audience, but I love all these actors. And John Turturro is one of my favorites. The other day I was on the four train in New York and he was on it next to me. I was very, very touched by that, that he's riding the subway. He would, though.

27:56Anne Thompson:He would. He would. New Yorkers do that. New Yorkers do. It's easier than taking a cab. Taking cabs or Ubers is just a frustrating experience in New York. If you're smart, you know that you don't do that. What's your number one, Ryan?

28:10Ryan Lattanzio:Well, I think I know what your number one is going to be. And so, and I'm - I think it's the same movie. Well, I'm going to just go in a different direction so that you can talk about that one. But the one I wanted to point out that Neon bought, it was like the first buy to actually happen on the ground in the festival is Leviticus directed by Adrian Chiarella, a queer horror movie in the vein of It Follows that features Joe Bird, Stacey Clausen, who I'm not as familiar with, and then Mia Vosikowska, who is back on screens. And it has flaws, certainly. The lore is a little confusing. It's about a conversion therapy camp where you are sort of possessed by being haunted by a specter of the person that you desire the most.

28:56Ryan Lattanzio:And so these teenage boys desire each other the most and both go through this therapy camp. And so they are very confused about if the person they are being intimate with is the actual one or not. and most of the time it isn't. And it's a very creepy and moving film. And like I said, there was kind of a dearth of queer movies at the festival. And this was certainly the standout. What's your number one?

29:19Anne Thompson:You tipped me to this one. So I watched it on the portal and I ended up liking it the best. And it's called Closure. And it's a Polish movie from Michel Marzak. And he hasn't directed for a long time. and he it's a there's a good story that chris a fault did on on the on indywire about how this movie got made and and everything but i will tell you in all honesty i wasn't paying that close attention to which section it was in or whatever and i was watching this movie thinking it was a fiction film that's how beautiful it is that's how well shot it is that's how good it is and we're following this man who's a father whose son has died, who probably jumped off a bridge into water.

30:06Anne Thompson:And we follow him doing all of these obsessive things, trying to track where the body ended up or where he could find the body. And he needs to get closure. He needs to end his questioning about how could his son have done this and what did he do wrong as a father. And it's, and then there's this moment where he's sitting by a campfire and he's talking to someone And I went, oh, and I looked it up and it's a documentary. It's a documentary. So this filmmaker is in the boat with him and on these all these different, you know, missions with him and and camping with him and shooting him. And it's it's extraordinary.

30:48Anne Thompson:It's an extraordinary movie. And I was very moved by it. But it's also a very skilled filmmaker.

30:56Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, this is a beautiful movie. And, you know, this director, Marshak, had a movie 10 years ago that I also love that was also at Sundance called All These Sleepless Nights, which was about sort of reveling teenagers on the cusp of adulthood in Warsaw. And it was the same situation where it could pass for a fiction feature, so much so that he was primed to do a fiction movie afterward. But then he realized, you know, he found this story and realized that his heart was in documentary. Yeah, I really hope that someone buys this movie. Does it have a theatrical future? No. But I could see this being in the conversation as definitely among the year's best documentaries.

31:33Anne Thompson:I would like to see Poland submit this for best documentary. And there's another, I mean, or excuse me, for foreign language, international feature. But there's also another one that I saw in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition called Hold On To Me, which was from Cyprus and was very good, a father-daughter story, I could see that being submitted also. You know, it's sort of a question of, you know, Cannes tends to be the big kahuna when it comes to, but any, you know, any movie that gets into Sundance or Cannes has a leg up in terms of getting some attention from their home country. So Ryan, what movie is opening?

32:24Anne Thompson:this weekend that we should see?

32:27Ryan Lattanzio:Well, the funny thing is that we are in the February moment where all the movies opening are movies that opened previously in limited release to qualify for awards. It's funny, I got asked, I got invited to the Surratt premiere this week and I said, we're still premiering Surratt? I feel like I saw that a year ago. I didn't go. And I feel like I've been to many premieres of Surratt since then. But I guess the one, so that's opening. Also, finally, Pillion is opening in a wider release at a, you know, I was hoping this would be a Christmas or a Valentine's Day movie. So it'll settle for Valentine's Day.

33:05Ryan Lattanzio:We've talked about it many times. Alexander Skarsgård, whom we just professed our love for, and Harry Melling, who we also adore, are in a BDSM relationship. But it is not one of founded upon degradation as the other one that we discussed potentially was today.

33:22Anne Thompson:It's a lovely movie. and I got to talk to Harry Melling. You spoke to the director and to Skarsgård.

33:29Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, I got to file that.

33:30Anne Thompson:I ended up filing mine first, Ryan.

33:34Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, you did good. You did good. I've got one more day.

33:39Anne Thompson:All right. Talk to you next week.

33:41Ryan Lattanzio:Okay, bye.

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