Sundance 2010 Preview: Etc.

After a hard day watching documentaries about globalisation and touching dramas about growing up in a gentrified Echo Park, what’s a still fiending film fan to do? The answer is head for Sundance’s fringe events. This year, Park City at Midnight serves up a helping of Canadian revenge, a Guillermo del Toro-endorsed horror film, and the wackiest ski thriller since Hot Dog. Also pulling in the A-list names to Utah are two premieres celebrating the great American traditions of hot rock chicks and dying slowly in Texas.

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Click here to read our International Documentary Competition Preview
Click here to read our International Dramatic Competition Preview

Premieres

The Killer Inside Me

Jim Thompson’s bone-dry noir novels of dice ‘n’ deceit have inspired plenty of cinematic adaptations, ranging from Steve McQueen in The Getaway to John Cusack palming twenties in The Grifters. Bringing his 1952 masterpiece to the screen is director Michael Winterbottom, more used to guerilla filmmaking like In This World. The dream cast includes Casey Affleck as a sociopathic Texas sheriff and Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson as his itchy women. Don’t worry about the plot, because Thompson never did. Just groove on the fetid funereal atmosphere.

The Runaways

In the late ‘70s, the all-girl band The Runaways were fun, flirty, and just a little bit jailbait. After lighting up the charts with “Cherry Bomb,” guitarist Joan Jett hearted rock ‘n’ roll, lead guitarist Lita Ford kissed me deadly and singer Cherie Currie fell off the charts into addiction. Her memoir is the basis for this biopic, whose kiss between leads Dakota Fanning and Kristen Stewart has fuelled at least fanboy fantasy. Michael Shannon plays Kim Fowley, the scariest Svengali in rock ‘n’ roll.

Cannes Names Its Godfathers

We’re still waiting for the Cannes line-up, but Variety reports that the festival will honor two up-and-comers in Spanish cinema. Both Juan Antonio Bayona and Juan Carlos Fresnadillo will be named “Godfathers” at the Critics’ Week sidebar. Does this mean they’ll have to dump their brothers in Lake Tahoe and make Harvey Weinstein an offer he can’t refuse? We will probably never know.

Fresnadillo is best-known for his decent sequel 28 Weeks Later. He’s currently working on a remake of Roger Corman’s X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes, which sounds like sacrilege, but then so did 28 Weeks Later. So cut the man some slack.

Bayona got on the global map with the Guillermo del Toro-endorsed The Orphanage, a timely reminder that it’s possible to make a scary movie that wasn’t originally released in the 1970s. His name has been attached to the Twilight movie Eclipse, but his next confirmed project is Hater, where a British parking attendant hands out tickets in a world where people go crazy and kill each other on impulse. Sounds like a 28 Weeks Later remake, then.

When Opie Met H.P. Lovecraft

Everyone’s favorite anti-Semitic, racist, classist “weird fiction” author could be meeting everyone’s favorite director of middlebrow entertainment. Variety reports that Imagine and Universal have snapped up the rights to The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft, with an eye to Ron Howard both producing and directing.

The title is a graphic novel based on Lovecraft’s life by commercial directors Mac Carter and Jeff Blitz. The writer himself battles the creatures of his Cthulhu Mythos when they are unleashed in the world. Carter will write the script. Variety says that Universal snapped up the Lovecraft property, believing the author would make a good fit with their monster franchises like Dracula, The Mummy and the Wolf Man (who gets a film of his own in November.) And you know what that means …

Nothing wrong with the author as hero, and Strange Adventures apparently deals with issues like the mental illness which afflicted Lovecraft’s mom and dad. But will it deal with his intolerance? A spell living in Red Hook, Brooklyn reinforced the New Englander’s hatred of the lower classes and non-whites (which found expression in his story “The Horror of Red Hook”). Throughout Lovecraft’s work, he frequently casts “ethnic types” as threats to civilization. In one virulent letter, he wrote, “The so-called Jews of today are either Carthaginians or squat Mongoloids from Central Asia, & the so-called Christians are healthy Aryan pagans who have adopted the external forms of a faith whose original flabbiness would disgust them.” In his “Re-animator” story, one African-American is described as “gorilla-like.” To ignore this would be like making a movie about Edgar Allan Poe where the strongest thing he drinks is tea.

Of course, Lovecraft is remembered less as a horrid little man and more as one of science fiction’s titans. Roger Corman brought The Dunwich Horrorto the screen, and the ’80s sex ‘n’ goo exploitationers Reanimator and From Beyond had their origins in his tales. Reanimator director Stuart Gordon is hoping to make The Thing on the Doorstep and Guillermo del Toro may do At the Mountains of Madness once he gets out of Hobbit-land.

His fan club includes Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, and Michel Houellebecq, who described his stories as “an open slice of howling fear.” Reviewing his Tales, published in the Library of America series, Daniel Handler was more guarded in his assessment:

Just as Oscar Wilde noted that ”one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing,” it’s tough to venture into a Lovecraft story with a straight face, let alone with chattering teeth. Lovecraft’s stories are so overwrought that they make Jules Verne look like a homebody and Edgar Allan Poe a well-adjusted realist; he pushes at the already extreme boundaries of the Gothic, horror and science fiction genres — not so much in the way that John Ashbery pushes at the boundaries of poetic form but more as Spinal Tap pushes at the boundaries of heavy metal: by turning the volume up to 11.

Will Howard wake up one morning and laugh his head off at the prospect of bringing the real Lovecraft to the screen? Time will tell. Let us know whether the dementia of Lovecraft the man should be unleashed upon the world.