BLOGGING SUNDANCE: Movies make money. So do scams.

We've reached a point in the festival where a number of this year's entries have acquired solid distribution deals, some of which are very exciting. Grace is Gone director Jim Strouce tells me that under the $4 million dollar deal he signed with the Weinstein Company (a speedy 12 hours after the first screening), the contract guarantees that Strouce will have control of the final cut for the production, which stars John Cusack. Considering how Bob and Harvey Weinstein are notorious for revising so-called finished versions of movies (providing "graduate school" for unemployed film students in need of editing work), the situation with Grace is quite the positive anomaly. According to Strouce, interest in the acquisition of the film was also expressed by Sony and Fox Searchlight. But neither company has suffered from lack of game. Sony apparently picked up Adam Bhala Lough's Weapons (which I haven't seen, but the anti-violence drama has been generating wildly divisive reactions), while Fox dropped $3.7 million on Joshua,  director George Ratliff's unsettling thriller about a brilliantly evil nine-year-old who engineers a way to destroy his family. The second film I've seen here that has Sam Rockwell playing a young father who slowly loses his mind (the first being David Gordon Green's marvelous Snow Angels, which remains on the market), the movie's gradual pacing and enigmatic plot make it more a thriller than a horror film, but it still seems poised to bring in the big bucks. I wasn't sure what to make of it—it's hard to tell if you're watching a thoughtful drama about the implications of a child's imagination or a terrifying narrative about misguided parents who choose to play favorites—but the sum of these parts are engaging enough that it could eventually draw huge crowds, if it opens at the right time.

A few small films arrived at the festival with a distributor in tow. The debut feature of Zoe Cassavetes (son of indie cinema god John) arrived with Magnolia Pictures handling its US and Canadian release. It's not a bad movie, but it uses a very simple, straightforward manner to tell a familiar story, so I doubt that Cassavetes will become a hipster princess to the masses the way her pal Sophia Coppola did after the release of Virgin Suicides. The real reason to see the movie is Parker Posey's performance as a woman drifting from one bed to the next, as her personal expectations careen out of control. The New York City setting is refreshing because it doesn't exploit the city as New York-based romantic comedies tend to do, which is to say that there aren't any epic skyline shots set to Gershwin. A single scene inside Film Forum is the biggest reference to a locally familiar spot. At least it's not shelter porn.

But all this big news gets in the way of the movies that are still waiting to find the right hand to lead them into theaters. Documentaries, which were overloaded with exposure after Robert Redford declared their prominence on the first day of the festival, aren't all pure gold. An entry that doesn't achieve greatness: Nanking, the bold, revealing account of the decimation of the helpless Chinese city in 1937 at the hands of the Japanese. It seems too dour even for this year's markedly bleak festival. I'm less a fan of the film than simply an admirer of it; Academy Award-winning director Bill Guttentag uses a curious process where accounts of the experience, written by Westerners living there at the time, are read on a stage by actors. Among them are Woody Harrelson (on a panel discussion yesterday, someone asked Guttentag why he chose to include "the guy from Cheers" in such a seriously-minded film). The acted scenes are mixed together with loads of powerful imagery in an impressive collection of archival footage. I find the acted segments a bit of a distraction from the more powerful moments, particularly because the technique feels like a nifty creative flourish that has nothing to do with the material itself. I also get the sense that the first half hour might be too slow for most people.

One movie at the festival, screening out of competition, triumphs over the boundaries of constrained budgets and crew by way of fascinating filmmaking prowess. The Great World of Sound assembles a thoughtful story that impressively navigates humor amid a sad exploration of unfulfilled American dreams. Director Craig Zobel, whose work with David Gorden Green lead to this directorial debut (which lists Green as a producer), adopts two radically different approaches to film form and unites them with a disarmingly engaging script and wonderfully deliberated performances. At one end of the spectrum, certain scenes in Sound follow a slightly skewed documentary tradition, while other moments are assembled as standard fictional storytelling. The combination works because the two approaches are indistinguishable. The basic plot focuses on aspiring music producers Martin and Clarence (Pat Healy and Kene Holliday) who become cogs in a scam that requires them to recruit aspiring musicians and convince them to pay upfront. Unlike the central characters, the auditions in the film are real. Healy and Holliday conducted interviews with people who had responded to newspaper advertisements. All the participants were eventually aware of their role in the construction of the film, in addition to learning how to avoid the machinations of the scam that the ad mimicked.

I realize that describing this candid camera approach makes Sound seem like the Borat  of the music business, but it's much more complicated than that. Watching the movie, you wouldn't necessarily assume that the documentary components aren't fictionalized, since the actors' behavior ties into their character arcs as they develop throughout the film. The interviews do feel more organic than other segments, but that just lends credence to the rest of the scenes, particularly Holliday's rousing monologue about the stakes of success, which received a round of applause during last night's Salt Lake City screening. As I told Zobel after seeing the film, I had high expectations beforehand (placing faith in the generally reliable festival hype), but I didn't know what to expect.  The first act of Sound, which features several detailed training sessions that make us, along with the characters, fall prey to the vicious ruse, channels Robert Altman in its application of ways to envelop multiple conversations within a single crowd. For the first fifteen minutes or so, it's unclear where Sound is headed. Then the true intentions grow clear—this is a cautionary story in addition to a bittersweet character drama—and it's impossible not to get involved in the ongoing developments as the situation careens out of control. If the top third of Sound feels vaguely like a matured cousin of NBC's The Office (not a negative comparison, in my eyes), the rest of the movie enters the Twilight Zone of the music business, applying an anecdotal approach to an unexpected career-from-hell turn of events. A great feel-bad movie with noble intentions, this sound deserves to get heard. Listen up.