Sundance.org is dispatching its writers to daily screenings and events to capture the 10 days of festivities during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Check back each morning for roundups from the previous days events.The D Train by Jeremy Kinser
The crowd-pleasing The D Train offers a bawdy and frequently surprising look at the cult of celebrity that takes bromance to the next level and features a pair of no-holds-barred performances by Jack Black and James Marsden that rank with their best work. Screenwriters Andrew Mogel and Jarrad Paul make their joint directorial debuts with the subversive comedy which premiered Friday night in the U.S. Dramatic Competition.
Black stars as Dan Landsman, a small-town high school reject who concocts a scheme to become a local hero by luring Oliver Lawless, the most popular kid in his class (Marsden) back to their upcoming 20-year reunion. When Dan travels to Hollywood to meet his former classmate for a drink, he spins a web of lies as his seduction plan goes awry in an unexpected way that threatens Dan's family and career and results in a jaw-dropping conclusion.
During the post-screening Q&A, Mogel and Paul insisted their screenplay isn't fact-based. We just wrote this character who was so desperate and looking for the popular guy, Paul revealed. It didn't come from anything personal.
The D Train Black generated more laughter from the audience when he said his own high school reunion was less eventful than the one seen on screen and that it was the clever screenplay that drew him to the project. I just loved the script, he said. It made me laugh so hard. I loved how surprised I was by the twists and turns and so many things I'd never seen done before in a comedy. I was interested in the desperation of the character. I feel that I know that, not just in myself but in other people.
Told by an audience member that his performance here was perhaps his best yet and contained some of the swagger of Warren Beatty's libidinous character in Shampoo, Marsden seemed to blush at the compliment before shifting the attention back to Paul and Mogel.
As an actor it's so nice to have all the work laid out for me, Marsden shared. In comedies you feel like you've seen it all, but this was so subversive and such an interesting character for me and under their guidance we just played every day.
The End of the Tour by Eric Hynes
Judging from conversations and Twitter activity in the moments before the world premiere screening of The End of the Tour, there was as much trepidation as there was excitement about the prospect of the life of the late, great author David Foster Wallace being dramatized on film. Yet even though the film, and actor Jason Segel in particular, made great pains to evoke Wallace's singular way of talking, thinking, and being, it turned out that The End of the Tour is far from a biopic it documents just a few days at the end of the author's press tour for Infinite Jest and rather uses writer David Lipsky's best-selling account of his time reporting an ultimately unpublished profile of Wallace for Rolling Stone Magazine as a jumping off point for a rumination on fame, American manhood and loneliness, among many other things. It's also, despite a bigger budget and stars like Segel, Jesse Eisenberg, and Joan Cusack, very much a deeply felt James Ponsoldt (Smashed, The Spectacular Now) film.
I'm a massive David Foster Wallace fan. I read Infinite Jest as I was going into college and proceeded to read everything I could get my hands on. I had some of his writing read at my wedding, so it's very near and dear to me, Ponsoldt said after the screening. Donald [Margulies, the screenwriter] was actually my playwriting professor at college, and when he reached out and said he'd written this script, I was thrilled and very nervous to read it. And it just moved me to my core.
One of the things that attracted me to David Lipsky's memoir is that to me it became a universal story of artists who struggle, and artists who achieve, and the conundrum of success when you're an artist, added Margulies. The fact that it was David Foster Wallace, one of the most compelling figures of American letters of our time, was certainly a very thrilling aspect of it. But what I also saw in Dave and David, was this kind of doppelganger, two very bright, very complicated guys bumping up against each other over the course of an abbreviated period of time, and encapsulated in those days was friendship, competition, so many conflicting things about the nature of art, the publicizing of art, and how do people reconcile that?
Though he's better known for writing plays, Margulies said that he felt that writing this as a two-hander for the stage would not do it justice. I was very compelled by the idea of placing David Foster Wallace, one of the great chroniclers of American culture, on the American landscape, was a thrilling idea. The fact that he's in a car, on highways, stopping for fast food, and going to the Mall of America. I thought this is just too fantastic, he said.
Jason Segel at the premiere of The End of the Tour.
Sundance Institute | Stephen Speckman To play the part, Segel said he immersed himself in all things David Foster Wallace, but that he also accessed a bit of himself. I had access to the tapes, and I had David Lipsky's book, I had Donald's screenplay, and there were a lot of interviews that I got to watch and listen to, and then I read and read and read, he said. I started a book club in the little town that I live in, outside of L.A., with three really great book dorks who had read Infinite Jest like 5 or 6 times. And we talked through it. One of the things that's so special about David Foster Wallace's writing is that he touches on s
