That sneaky Steven Soderbergh screened his latest work-in-progress, The Girlfriend Experience, in the “Sneak Preview 2” slot at Sundance this week. In Entertainment Weekly, Owen Glieberman describes it as “one of the director's wee, semi-improvised, non-star-cast, shot-on-easy-to-tote-video doodles,” and apparently means that as a compliment. The movie is already semi-notorious for Soderbergh’s casting of an actual porn star (pictured here in one of the few photos we can, uh, picture here). The director address the issue in a post-screening Q & A: “Even though the film's not very explicit," Soderbergh said of Sasha Grey, "there's a comfort level she obviously has from making all of those films that I think is difficult to fake. There's a kind of attitude.”
Good news for fans of Nazi zombie comedies! IFC has acquired the rights to Sundance feature Dead Snow. “The Norwegian horror pic about medical student co-eds on a ski holiday who meet up with evil Nazi zombies premiered in the international narrative feature section.” That’s about it deal-wise, although The Killing Room is also reportedly close to finding distribution.
Otherwise, the big news was reported earlier today by our man on the scene Bilge Ebiri: the steel cage match between Variety critic John Anderson and Dude inspiration Jeff Dowd. “Offering support for Anderson was filmmaker Nicholas Winding Refn, who received a glowing review from the critic for his movie Bronson, an explosive biopic about Britain’s most violent prisoner, Charles Bronson,” the Vulture reports. “‘I will pay his bail money if needed,’ Winding Refn told us. ‘But think about it, we now live in a new era of film criticism thanks to John Anderson. Now, when some jerk gets into a critic’s face and he fights back, we’ll say he went Bronson on them.’”
Previously:
Sundance Roundup: Day Six
Sundance Roundup: Day Five