Brook (Dominic Bogart) is not a hipster – he may wear deep V-neck t-shirts, plaid and have an overwhelmingly self-deprecating attitude, but a hipster he is not (or so the title of this film claims.) Brook is an aspiring musician and while he is having a good amount of success on the San Diego indie music scene, he seems bitter and angry. Brook hates compliments and recognition, which is slightly ironic considering his best friend, Clarke (Alvaro Orlando), is his biggest fan (a fact he announces daily.) While doing a local radio interview Brook seems incredibly disinterested, almost laughing at himself for even being there, but this feeling quickly devolves into combative when the host (Brad William Henke) asks him about his mother (who passed away two years earlier.) Brook flips out and leaves the studio and it is in this moment that we begin to realize what may be the real root of Brook’s behavior.

After throwing our annual bloggerati condo party (mainly so we can all watch MacGruber together) last night, my day got switched around a bit so I could get some much needed sleep (Festival Lesson #45: There is no point in getting up early for a screening you will end up just sleeping through) making my first screening of the day, Shadow Dancer. After helping clean up the condo a bit (the place still smells like beer, but we went through about three cases of the stuff last night so what can you do?) Eric D. Snider, William Goss, and I headed out to the screening in Snider’s car, which is truly a luxury when it means you don’t have to run for a shuttle. While I thought Shadow Dancer was a decent enough film, it was just that – decent. Clive Owen and Andrea Riseborough turned in good performances under sharp direction from James Marsh, but it left me lukewarm.

From its very first moments, Mike Birbiglia‘s Sleepwalk With Me establishes a very specific relationship with its audience - Birbiglia, playing a version of himself, turns to the camera and reassures us that what we’re about to hear is indeed true, and then he makes us laugh. Birbiglia is a stand-up comedian, writer, and actor, and Sleepwalk With Me is his directorial debut, which is loosely based on his own life. A mix of painful personal stories about a failing relationship, try-and-fail outings at his primary career, and the unraveling of his life by way of a serious medical condition (yup, sleepwalking), the film is (genuinely) both hilarious and heartfelt.

Multi-hyphenate Katie Aselton returns to Sundance with her second film, a much different outing than her gorgeous and melancholy 2010 entry, The Freebie. This time around, Aselton has ceded writing duties to her husband, Mark Duplass, and the pair have made what will likely be referred to as “Deliverance for girls” for many years to come. But Black Rock is a twisty little horror outing that perhaps shares more with The Freebie than might be obvious from first blush. Both films hinge on interpersonal relationships, the confusion of behavioral signals and perceptions, and mistakes that have far-reaching consequences. Yet, Black Rock is most certainly a thriller and a genre picture, and its wooded island setting, thumping soundtrack (with remarkably sage picks from The Kills), and grim plotline only serve to show how well Aselton can cross genres with style.

Midnight movies at Sundance can be fun, often offering up bizarre and strange experiences. In the past that has included movies like Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (loved it) and Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie (wasn’t so fond of it). The real thing to take away is from this section is that you never know what you’re going to get, just like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates. With Grabbers, a UK film set in Ireland, you’re getting something very enjoyable, which will hopefully get picked up and distributed somewhere, even if it’s the Syfy channel or BBC America. I’d even love to see the Alamo Drafthouse pick up this movie with their distribution arm and turn it into a midnight event film. Why? Because the premise involves Irishmen fighting monsters while drunk. If there was ever a perfect movie for a theater connected to a bar, this is it.

One of the reasons that I love going to the Sundance Film Festival is that amidst the sea of angst-ridden romances, dramas that explore feelings that have long-since been forgotten about, and documentaries, you’ll sometimes find a gem that will change the way you see movies. Beasts of the Southern Wild was that film for me this year. At face value, it’s a difficult film to fully explain. A society that lives off the grid from the mainland of a country ignores the warnings that their lives are in danger should the nearby levee break. They live in ignorant bliss, reveling in their lives and calling their home “The Bathtub” in a light-hearted mocking of the fact that a wall of water could come crashing down and destroy them all.

We have brought you perspective on the Sundance Film Festival over the past week from critics to producers to the filmmakers themselves, but there is one person that almost everyone who comes to the festival knows (or at least has walked by before) – Franz the Bear. Franz has a prime seat on Main Street and has accumulated years of observations of the goings on that happen on the street that populates most of the party venues during the ‘Dance. I sat down with Franz one snowy night on my way home from a party of my own to find out what Sundance means to him (you know, as a bear.)

Writing is a difficult task whether you must do it for school, work, or simply because you have words in you that you must get out. But even if you are a writer, those words don’t always come easily and staring at a blank Word document or page is always intimidating. Rory Jenson (Bradley Cooper) is a struggling writer who has penned his first novel – a work that is good, but not good enough to get published. Slightly disheartened and with a new bride Dora (Zoe Saldana) to support, Rory takes a job in the mailroom of a publishing house, hoping to make some contacts and advance his career. While on their honeymoon in Paris, Dora drags Rory into yet another antique shop and Rory ends up finding an old leather briefcase that is classy and sophisticated – a symbol of a true writer and a gift Dora quickly buys for her new husband. As he later starts filling it with his own work, Rory comes to find a weathered manuscript he neglected to notice when he first purchased the briefcase. Upon reading the first page (typed on the back of a handwritten letter), Rory cannot put the manuscript down and reads it from beginning to end.

We all know what it means to be sauced, but John Dies At The End shows audiences what it means to be “on the sauce” – soy sauce that is, a hallucinogenic drug that not only messes with your mind, it messes with how you perceive time. This idea could be fun, but when you know one of your best friends meets his demise somewhere in that disjointed timeline (no spoilers there, as it’s revealed in the film’s title) this time manipulation becomes both stressful and confusing. While at a party, Dave (Chase Williamson) gets into a conversation with a reggae “magician” (Tai Bennett) who Dave doesn’t believe can do real magic. But when Robert Marley (the magician’s name, of course) is able to recount, in vivid detail, a dream Dave had the night before, he gets Dave’s attention. Later that night Dave gets a call from his best friend, a panicked and confused-sounding John (Rob Mayes) who thinks he has called Dave a bunch of times already that night and needs him to come over right away.

From the film’s opening, it is clear that while LCD Soundsystem may be over, they certainly went out with one hell of a goodbye party. The decision to end the band was more than surprising to their fans and Shut Up and Play the Hits takes viewers behind-the-scenes of the moments leading up to, during, and after the band’s final show. The film takes its cue from the title and focuses on the music while directors Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace also lace in interviews and quiet moments with front man James Murphy off-stage. The film opens asking the question on everyone’s mind – why would a band, at the height of their career, decide to walk away from it all? During an interview with Chuck Klosterman, Murphy explains that he simply wants to lead a normal life and while he is not sure that is a good enough reason to quit, it’s the truth. Murphy sums his experience with LCD up by saying he just wanted to make a record that happened to lead to these different experiences and successes, but that was never his goal, he just wanted to make music that people could dance and have fun listening to. And whether he meant to our not, Murphy did just that, just on a much scale bigger than he could have imagined.

The brainchild of producer Brad Miska, horror anthology film V/H/S features five shorts (and one wrap-around story) from a variety of genre directors, writers, and actors handily proves that the found footage genre is far from dead and there’s plenty of new material to bleed. The film’s “wrap-around” section features a group of Jackass-inspired wankers who get their kicks by filming mayhem and destruction. Dispatched by a mysterious person to break into a house and steal something, they agree – partly for the laughs, partly for the pay-off. The item they must procure? A simple, singular VHS tape. The actual mission? Multi-level and rife with unexpected complications.

Michael Walker’s feature directorial debut, Price Check, starts off innocently enough, sort of a twist on Office Space if Lumbergh was a nice guy who wanted his unmotivated employees to succeed. Eric Mabius stars as Pete, who lost his dream job in music and is now forced to work in a regional pricing and marketing division for a failing division of a multi-brand grocery store company. Like most people these days, Pete is concerned about finances – he’s the only breadwinner in the house, and he and his wife have credit card bills to pay and a three-year-old to raise and probably a new car to get – and the recent departure of his beloved boss isn’t helping matters much. Who is going to replace him? And how is that going to affect Pete and his life? If this plotline doesn’t sound just a bit boring, that’s okay, it is. But instead of beefing up his film with great lines and performances from more than just Mabius’ co-star, Parker Posey, Walker decides to go for some cheap switcheroos that left the audience at Eccles Theatre (where the film premiered) groaning.

My first memory from this morning is turning over to find Eric D. Snider mooning at me and asking me what my plan for the day is. Then I checked my email to find a link to this story from my pal, Moviefone’s Mike Ryan (who is becoming a frequent hero of these daily wrap-ups), regarding the true story behind Compliance. When we saw the film together yesterday, he grabbed my notebook halfway through the film to scribble “Nobody is this stupid!!!” He titled his email “okay, I was wrong.” Then I ate muffins in bed. It was the best morning at Sundance yet.

Based on the article, Seeing A Sex Surrogate, The Surrogate takes you into the life thirty-eight year old Mark O’Brien (John Hawkes) who has lived with polio since the age of six. Only able to be out of his iron lung for a few hours a day, Mark is otherwise stuck inside with just his thoughts, poetry, and faith. Most would resent a life like this, but Mark finds the humor in his situation, always putting those around him at ease and never letting the fact that he can barely move his head from side to side limit his ambition. Having graduated from the University of Berkeley, Mark now has even bigger aspirations in his life – he wants to lose his virginity. Mark takes a shine to one of his aids and while it seems she seems to return his affection, when he expresses it, she gets scared and runs away. Mark jokes to his priest (William H. Macy) that he tried to go about his sexual revolution the “proper” way, but now he has another option he is considering – a sex surrogate who specializes in helping the disabled not only have sex, but teach them the tools and skills to have their own sexual relationships.

It would be foolish to deny that there is a certain kind of “Sundance romance” film – minor affairs that chronicle the beautiful and directionless as they stumble through the motions in an attempt to find something real. Most of the time, these films take place somewhere in East Los Angeles (Echo Park, Silverlake, Los Feliz), and usually there’s someone in a band. There is always a bevy of navel-gazing that occurs. Meeting those criteria for this year’s festival is Michael Mohan‘s Save the Date. The film centers on a pair of sisters (Lizzy Caplan and Alison Brie) who have very different expectations of and desires for love. Caplan’s Sarah is a commitment-phobe who is about to move in with her long-term boyfriend (Geoffrey Arend as Kevin), while Brie’s Beth is about to marry Kevin’s best friend and bandmate, Andrew (Martin Starr). Cue conflicts.

As George Bush once bastardized, “There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — [pauses] — shame on you. Fool me — [pauses] — You can’t get fooled again.” Although I have the feeling that the filmmakers behind The Comedy probably enjoy P.T. Barnum’s statement a lot more, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” By filling theaters full of willing film festival audiences at Sundance 2012, they’ve put together groups of suckers, just waiting to be taken in. Just heed our warning and don’t take the bait.

The critics and movie fans who attend Sundance can take to the web, Twitter, Facebook and any other outlet to report on the various films shown during the festival (and what they think of them), but it is the distributors that come to this snowy mountaintop to decide which of those films will make it to you. Having gone to college in Los Angeles you are bound to spend those years alongside classmates who graduate and become a part of this crazy world of entertainment. Nick Donnermeyer is not only a fellow Loyola Marymount University graduate (and good friend), he is now a producer and distributor for Bleiberg Entertainment who have released such films as Adam Resurrected and Robotropolis. We turned to Nick to get the perspective of someone attending the festival to not only watch new movies, but potentially purchase and distribute them as well. Nick is returning to Park City this year to see what new titles Bleiberg may want to add to their release list while also taking in the unique experience that is Sundance and proves that no matter what your reason for attending the festival there is one thing that unites us all – a love of film.

It is day four of the festival (although it feels like we’ve been here much longer) and I realized this morning as I sleepily boarded the shuttle that since I have only been going to P&I (press and industry i.e., you don’t need a hard ticket but you do need credentials) screenings, I have only been to the Holiday and none of the other venues. That will change tomorrow morning when I finally hit up Eccles (one of my favorite theaters here), but it was strange to realize I haven’t really been outside the Holiday, Yarrow, Sundance HQ radius the past few days. (This may also explain why things are starting to blend together for me.) Averaging about five hours of sleep a night (better than last year’s two!) and one real meal a day, I try to make that one meal count. Today I (along with almost every other critic and blogger here at the fest) hit up Flippin’ Burgers, which not only has amazing burgers, fries and shakes, but also free WiFi and plays a constant loop of terribly hilarious songs and yes, Enrique Iglesias’ “Baby I Like It” has been stuck in my head all afternoon. Hopefully this place sticks around for another year (although, rumor has it that it’s been around and we just now discovered it) so if you make it to Sundance next year, add it to your list of places to check out. Granted, you have to Frogger your way across the street [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

It seems that there is always at least one film at Sundance that stirs up some sort of controversy – the kind with people running out of screenings and people screaming at post-movie question-and-answer sessions. Last year, it was Lucky McKee’s The Woman, this year, it’s undoubtedly Craig Zobel‘s Compliance. Much like McKee was taken to task about presumed misogyny in his film, Zobel has already endured two Q&As where the film was damned as being exploitative. In both cases, those hecklers were quite wrong. Compliance is an exceedingly well-made interpersonal drama that hinges on the limits (and, oftentimes, depths) of human nature and people’s response to certain carefully calibrated psychological tricks. The film centers on fast food cashier Becky (Dreama Walker) on a day when her boss, Sandra (Ann Dowd), is already on edge and suspicious of her employees. So when a man calls up the Chick-Wich, claiming to be a police officer conducting an investigation that involves Becky, Sandra doesn’t blink at taking her to the back room and assuming the role of authority in the situation. The cops can’t get there just yet, and the investigation is ongoing, and Sandra, wouldn’t it be wonderful if you just helped out nice Officer Daniels (Pat Healy) until back-up arrives? You’ll help, Sandra? Wonderful. Great. Except, well, no, it’s not wonderful, and this is no regular police investigation. In fact, it’s not one at all.

A man places an ad in a local paper looking for a partner to go on a journey with him – but this particular man is not looking to make a love connection, he is in need of a companion to travel through time with him. He’s done it once before, but you’ll have to bring to your own weapons because, as he tells it, “safety not guaranteed.” From this seed of an idea, director Colin Trevorrow and screenwriter Derek Connolly have crafted Safety Not Guaranteed, a low-fi romance that benefits both from charismatic performances and the intriguing background that the time travel element provides. The film is loosely based on a true story – an ad did appear in a Seattle paper, exactly as it appears in the film, but Connolly and Trevorrow have taken their film in a different direction – stuff mentioned in the ad (payment, that it’s been done before) never comes up after its first read, and no one ever says anything else about it. Instead, the film focuses on a trio of intrepid reporters (really just one mild douchebags and two interns who don’t have a choice in the matter) who decide to craft a piece about the man who has placed the ad. A fluff piece, something silly. Of course, they find much more than they bargained for once their investigation commence.