Park City Dispatch Day One: Bear Suits and Olivia Colman
Vulture’s back in Utah for what could be the penultimate iteration of the Sundance festival in its longtime home, Park City. We’ll be here all weekend, checking out the buzziest films and seeing the sights on the festival’s main thoroughfare. We’ve even set up a studio, Vulture Spot, on Main Street, where we’re welcoming directors, actors, producers, and all their publicists to stop by and talk movies over a spicy marg with host Jay Jurden. Keep this tab open for updates and highlights on everything going down in the studio and beyond, and check out the rest of our festival coverage here.
Day One
Alison Brie stopped by for coffee
The studio festivities kicked off bright and early Friday morning when Together star and producer Alison Brie dropped in for a conversation with Vulture senior news writer Fran Hoepfner. She discussed making the “physically intimate” psychological thriller with first-time writer/director Michael Shanks, and co-star, co-producer, and IRL-husband, Dave Franco. It being her seventh time at Sundance, she reminisced on the rag-tag days of partying and crashing on Ludwig Göransson’s couch. She also took a moment to appreciate a shirtless Adrian Brody from New York’s latest cover.
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Jimpa’s John Lithgow and Olivia Colman held hands
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Aisling Franciosi is in Twinless, and she’s funny
Twinless, starring James Sweeney, Dylan O’Brien, and Aisling Franciosi is ostensibly a movie about grief, centering around two guys dealing with the loss of their twin brothers, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still have a giggle. “In both this past summer’s Speak No Evil and Twinless, Franciosi gets big laughs out of pretending something kind of fucked up is actually totally fine and regular and not a thing to panic about. Being able to garner reactions of both horror, laughter, and the occasional double threat of horrified laughter is no small feat,” writes Fran Hoepfner. Let Aisling Franciosi be funny!
Cinderella scared us
Critic Bilge Ebiri attended the premiere of Norwegian director Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister, a dark twist on a classic fairytale. Our favorite line from his review: “Elvira swallows a tapeworm egg, and as the worms grow (and growl) inside her belly, she can eat whatever she wants and still shed inches. It’s like Ozempic, but alive.”
Dave Franco had to grin and bear it
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Sly Stone got doc’d
Bilge Ebiri walked out of Sly Lives! feeling with a deep appreciation of the legendary artist. Questlove, it seems, was well-suited for the task of documenting the story of Sly & the Family Stone. “The real power of Sly Lives! lies in its presentation of Stone’s most iconic hits, which Questlove often lets play all the way through as his interview subjects dissect the songs and the imagery associated with them… Honestly, it helps when musicians make movies about other musicians,” he writes in his review.
