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By Harlan Jacobson, Special for USA TODAY PARK CITY, Utah — — The top two American winners at the Sundance pellicle Festival put faces on at least three political hot buttons: Hurricane Katrina as it becomes something more than an act of nature, the collapse of the frugality and illegal immigration.

Both Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s Trouble the Water, which won the documentary Grand Jury prize, and Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River, which won the dramatic Grand Jury prize, are small, personal films that reel back independent filmmaking’s more recent, polished and well-financed art-house star vehicles to the early days of Sundance social realism, where women, blacks and native Americans have to walk a tightrope to survive.

Trouble the Water mixes home-video footage shot by New Orleans wannabe rapper Kim Roberts in the days leading up to Katrina and into the teeth of the storm with footage from co-directors Lessin and Deal of Roberts and her husband’s return a year later.

Frozen River plays out in the failing administration of upstate New York as a stand-in for small-town USA, and tells a story of two women, one white working class the other Native American, sneaking illegal aliens in from Canada who want a piece of the very American Dream that has collapsed for their smugglers. Sony Pictures Classics sharp up the film at the festival for release in the USA.

Many of the films that took home awards from the American and World juries Saturday night flew under the radar of buzz. They were not, for the most part, the films talked about by the industry pros and critics, who were largely underwhelmed at the vintage.

The competition also sandbagged films with recognizable stars, with the objection of a special jury prized given to the ensemble cast of Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston, Kelly MacDonald and Brad Henke in Choke, director Clark Gregg’s adaptation of Chuck (Fight Club) Palahniuk’s novel.

Filmgoers in addition get a vote at this festival, and audience awards went to Josh Tickell’s documentary Fields of Fuel, which travels the arc of U.S. oil dependence from Rockefeller to Iraq; and to Jonathan Levine’s fictional The Wackness, a love-it or hate-it film with a wild and woolly Ben Kingsley exchanging therapy sessions with high school grad Josh Peck for pot. Sony Pictures Classics is related to be close to a deal for the film.

Said Levine: “I just accepted an award from William H. Macy in a cowboy hat. That is so (expletive) weird.”

As for other winners in the American competition, Nanette Burstein (2002’s The Kid Stays in the Picture) won best documentary director for American Teen, that waves together the stories of four throwback archetypal seniors in the all-white, all-middle class 2006 graduating class in Warsaw, Ind. Paramount Vantage paid a reported $1 million for the film.

Novice director Lance Hammer was named best dramatic film director for Ballast, an artfully shot story in the Mississippi Delta about a fractured family stumbling its way advance after the suicide of the family head. Lol Crawley also won the best cinematography award for his muted greens and grays in a year that was haunted by stories filmed in desaturated monotone color palettes.

Sleep Dealer writer/director Alex Rivera and co-writer David Riker won the screenwriting award for their sci-fi story through agua profiteers, terrorist cells and the Internet, set in the near future in Mexico. The film also won the $20,000 Alfred P. Sloan prize for films with a scientific theme or characters.

Director Steven Sebring and cameraman Philip Hunt won most excellent documentary cinematography for their dreamscape collage of color and black-and-white images in Patti Smith: Dream of Life, about the ’70s New York underground poet-punk rocker.

Documentary editing went to Joe Bini for Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired.

The festival also handed out awards to overseas films, including best documentary to British director James Marsh’s Man on Wire, a breathtaking minute-by-minute account of French daredevil Philippe Petit’s August 1974 high-wire walk at the topmost of the World Trade Center. The film also won the World Audience Award. “I saw the towers born, I married them with my wire, and I saw them die,” Petit said, after a late-week screening “And when they died, it pulled out something alive inside me.”

Jordanian counsellor Amin Matalqa’s Captain Abu Raed, about each Amman airport janitor posturing as a pilot to all the neighborhood urchins, won the best world fiction award. It’s the elementary feature film to come out of Jordan in half a century.

And Swedish commercials director Jens Jonsson’s first feature, King of Ping Pong, here and there a dysfunctional family, was named best world dramatic film and won the foreign documentary cinematography award.

Other World awards:

Documentary directing: Nino Kirtadze (France) for Durako: Village of Fools

Dramatic directing: Anna Melikyan (Russia) for Mermaid

Screenwriting: Samuel Benchetrit (France) for I Always Wanted to Be a Gangster, which premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland in conclusion August.

Documentary editing: Irena Dol (New Zealand) for The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins.

Documentary cinematography:  Al Massad (Jordan) for Recycle.

in addition special jury prizes went to Lisa F. Jackson for Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, Ernesto Contreras for Blue Eyelids and Chusy Haney-Jardine for Anywhere, USA.

To report corrections and clarifications, contact Reader Editor Brent Jones. conducive to publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification.
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By William Keck, USA TODAY LOS ANGELES — — Apparently Sean Young had endured one acceptance speech too many.

At Saturday’s DGA Awards, where each of the five nominated feature film directors gets to make a speech before the winner is announced, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly director Julian Schnabel was the last to deliver his words. Shortly after he took the podium, Young, seated near the stage, cut him off by shouting out, “Oh come on — get to it!”

A shocked Schnabel searched the crowd to ask who was scolding him. When the actress repeated “get to it!” Schnabel post-haste wrapped up his speech, instructing Young to finish it. But upon the audience’s insistence, Schnabel finished, and Young, stumbling in her white fur coat, was escorted out of the ballroom by two security guards, and at one point fell to the floor.

It was the chatter of the night as guests exited the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel and into the rain shortly after Joel and Ethan Coen were named best directors for No Country For Old Men.

Their award was presented by Martin Scorsese.

“Ethan and I have a bookshelf in our office where we keep various plaques and such that we’ve gotten over the years that we call our ego corner,” Joel Coen said.

When brother Ethan is having a bad day, he goes over with Windex and silver polish and “spit shines his medals for an hour or two,” Joel Coen said. “It makes him feel better. This is a really big one, in every respect. It’s going to keep him busy.”

The Directors Guild winner almost evermore goes upon to win the same prize at the Oscars, and the victory also helps solidify the movie’s frunt-runner status for best picture.

Earlier in the evening, Old Men actor Josh Brolin took the stage to salute the Coens, whom he described as “weird” and “socially challenged individuals.” Brolin went on to say the two brothers never argue with each other, and in the editing room, Ethan rings a bell when he chooses a final take.

Brolin was surprised to see director Oliver Stone, who recently cast Brolin as President Bush in his upcoming biopic, Bush, assortment to go before the cameras in April.

Stone said he cast Brolin in the role after seeing his 2007 body of work. “He’s very rural, very American,” said Stone, adding that the film will portray the president from his 20s through his early 50s, before the end of his presidency.

Brolin initially didn’t want the role. “I was really against it — extremely,” he said. “I came from a (anti-Bush) bias, like most people in this town. Plus it was Oliver, and I thought Oliver would be extremely biased, and I thought he had an agenda. He was telling me he didn’t, and I didn’t convinced him. And then I read the script.”

Brolin began flipping through the pages (written by Wall Street screenwriter Stanley Weiser) at 5 a.m. while on vacation with his family. “I was utterly blown not present,” he admitted. “It’s a very unbiased bio about a guy who became president. You follow his animated existence, and you’re interested in his life. You feel for him, and you despise him and you love him and you’re amazed how smart he is. And you’re amazed how he’s stumbling through.”

Brolin said he has not yet discussed the film with his stepmother, staunch Bush criticizer Barbara Streisand. And what about the possibility of his father, James Brolin, playing the elder George Bush? Brolin got a heinous grin on his effrontery and said, “No comment.”

Debra Messing said she has wrapped her role in the remake of the 1939 classic The Women, which features not a single male actor in any constitute. And that was just fine by Messing. “It was really wonderful,” she admitted, through her husband, Daniel Zelman, standing next to her. “Whether you like it or not, it changes the dynamic when men are around.”

The WGA strike will have to end ahead of she can begin production on the weekly series version of her USA Network TV movie, The Starter Wife.

Academy Award producer Gil Cates, there to present an award, offered an update on the status of his show, which might have to go on without stars, who won’t cross likely WGA picket lines. “I’m waiting to see up to about two weeks before what the body of the show’s going to be — whether the actors will be there or not,” said Cates. “If they’re not, then we’ll do one being without them. And if they are, then we’ll have them.”

Either way, Cates believe audiences will tune in on Feb. 24 “They’ll watch it because it’s a news event to discovery out who won these awards. They’ll watch it because they’ll be curious to find out what’s going to be on this show. They’ll watch it because in that place’s going to be singing and dancing.”

Plenty of Oscar nominees made it to the DGAs. Amy Ryan, a supporting actress Oscar nominee for Gone Baby Gone, took the stage and almost revealed the best TV drama director winner before reciting the nominees. A gasp filled the room. Deeply embarrassed, the actress looked down sheepishly, in consequence aforesaid humbly, “See, this is why actors need directors.”

Now that Ryan has seen all the other nominees in her Oscar category, which of the competition has her most worried? “Every uncompounded one of them,” she said. “The great Cate (Blanchett) and the classic Ruby Dee. And Tilda (Swinton) too. Obviously I wasn’t aware of Saoirse (Ronan’s) work until Atonement. But they’re all such forceful women.”

Swinton was in that place showing off a short cropped red hairdo. Asked if she overmuch has checked out her competition, Swinton joked, “put on’t know. Who are they? I don’t know who they are.”

Swinton admitted she has heard good buzz about Ryan’s representation. “I’ll do all that in one lies to see them all (before Oscars),” said Swinton, “but I’ll probably fail.”

Luckily, Tom Wilkinson, in that place to honor his Michael Clayton director Tony Gilroy, was only kidding when he threatened on the red carpet to strip down, like his emotionally unstable character does in Clayton.

“Oh, I’ll do it,” he joked.

Wilkinson has further to see most of the other nominated actors in his supporting actor Oscar category. “Some of them haven’t opened in England,” he explained. “But I’ll go see them. I saw Casey Affleck in the Jesse James movie. Good obstruct.”

One of the other nominees in that category, Hal Holbrook of Into the Wild, was in that place with Emile Hirsch to salute their director, Sean Penn, who was absent. Holbrook admitted, “the big money’s not on me” to win.

Ellen Page, an Oscar nominee for Juno, was there to present the commercial directing award. Page recently caught a glimpse of a Juno marketing campaign gimmick. The studio is promoting the film via a truck driving around Los Angeles with a re-creation of Juno’s bedroom assembled inside a glass chamber.

“I have seen it,” said Page. “Juno has a very specific room, and I guess she’s one of those characters that young individuals are able to identity through, so I mistrust something like that would be appealing. Someone power want to sit on her hollow.”

But not Page, who won’t be riding around in the truck to make mall appearances. “You get asked to do some crazy things,” she said. “You do some of them, and you don’t do some others.”

Contributing: Associated Press

To report corrections and clarifications, contact Reader Editor Brent Jones. in favor of publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for authentication.

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Joel and Ethan Coen won the top prize from the Directors Guild of America for No Country on account of Old Men, giving them the inside track for the same honor at the Academy Awards — assuming the Oscars go on amid the writers dart.

“Oh, we get two of them,” Ethan Coen said when he and his brother were presented with their trophies Saturday night.

The Coens were only the second two-person team to win the Directors Guild honor, following Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins for 1961’s West Side Story.

“Ethan and I have a bookshelf in our office where we keep various plaques and like that we’ve gotten over the years that we call our ego corner,” Joel Coen said.

When brother Ethan is having a bad day, he goes over with Windex and silver polish and “pierce shines his medals for an hour or two,” Joel Coen said. “It makes him feel better. This is a really big one, in every respect. It’s going to be true to him busy.”

As with Martin Scorsese, who as last year’s winner for The Departed presented the award to the Coens, the Directors Guild winner almost always goes on to win the same prize at the Oscars.

Adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s novel, No Country for Old Men stars Josh Brolin as a good old Texan who makes from with loot from a drug deal gone detrimental, Javier Bardem as a ruthless killer on his trail, and Tommy Lee Jones as a sheriff tracking both men.

With the Directors Guild honor, No Country also may emerge as the favorite to win best picture at the Oscars.

The fate of the Oscars remnants uncertain, though. Writers, who have been on strike for nearly three months, have refused to work on some major awards shows, among them the Golden Globes, whose ceremony was scrapped for lack of stars.

The Coens’ former cinematographer, Barry Sonnenfeld, also was a guild winner. Sonnenfeld, whose films include the Men in Black series, won a small-screen prize, receiving the award for television comedy despite directing an episode of Pushing Daisies.

Mad Men earned the TV drama honor for Alan Taylor, while Yves Simoneau won the TV movie award for Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

Other TV winners included Glenn P. Weiss in opposition to musical variety for The 61st Annual Tony Awards ; Bertram Van Munster for realty programming for The Amazing Race; Paul Hoen for children’s programs for Jump In; and Larry Carpenter for daytime serials for One Life to Live.

Asger Leth won the documentary honor for Ghosts of Cite Soleil, his portrait of two brothers who are gang leaders in a notorious Haitian slum.

Unlike other major glories, such as Sunday night’s Screen Actors Guild Awards, the DGA stateliness is untelevised, making it a more laid-back gathering of Hollywood’s elite and shielding it from some of the attention the industry’s labor strife has brought to other ceremonies.

The Golden Globes banquet was canceled after stars made clear they would stay away in support of the Writers Guild of America strike, and the Oscars may face the same dilemma come Feb. 24.

Still, the writers’ punish did cast a mantle over the directors’ huge night, on a level although their guild last week negotiated a new contract after just days of meetings with producers. A fair number of Directors Guild members also belong to the writers union, whose strike has shut down TV shows and postponed movies, throwing thousands in the collation industry out of work.

Hal Holbrook, nominated for the supporting-actor Oscar for Directors Guild nominee Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, said before the Directors Guild awards that the “strike is becoming really dangerous. They’re losing their homes. …”

“All I can hope is before this we all have to share in producing anything — from the studio to the actors to the camera person to the costume lady, whatever, the set dresser — we all share,” Holbrook said.

Many in Hollywood hope the Directors Guild deal will help resuscitate talks between writers and producers, whose negotiations broke down Dec. 7, a month after guild members walked off the job.

Dan Glickman — who heads the Motion Picture Association of America, Hollywood’s top trade group — reported before the directing awards that the union’s new contract “offers a very good template for the other guilds,” which could jump-start the labor impasse in time to let the Oscars go on.

“I sure hope so. The Oscars are kind of the connect between the world of consumers and the world of entertainment,” Glickman said. “I mean, a billion people or more watch the Oscars, and so it would be a real shame if we weren’t able to keep that precedent, that history of this event going.”

Winners, presenters and host Carl Reiner generally ignored Hollywood’s labor problems during the Directors Guild ceremony, custody the tone celebratory. There were only a few passing references to agree negotiations.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Reader Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. embody name, phone number, city and state for verification.  Enlarge By Mark J. Terrill, AP

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PARK CITY, Utah (AP) — For the third year in a row, a movie revolving around immigrants won the grand-jury prize for best U.S. theatrical piece at the Sundance Film Festival on Saturday. Only this time, they come from the north.

Frozen River, a film about a struggling single mother in upstate New York who teams with a Mohawk woman to smuggle people athwart the Canadian border, is the first feature from director-writer Courtney Hunt. She adapted it from her own 2004 short of the same name.

Trouble the Water, ready the survival of a New Orleans couple through Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, earned the grand jury award in the U.S. documentary competition at the festival, the nation’s top showcase for independent film.

BLOG: Live updates from the carpet in Utah TOTAL ACCESS:The ultimate guide to Sundance

The movie by Michael Moore collaborators Tia Lessin and Carl Deal utilizes footage shot by one of its subjects, Kimberly Rivers Roberts. Roberts traveled to the festival with her husband Scott and gave production to a daughter, Skyy, in Salt Lake City on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

“We had pair world premieres this week,” Lessin said.

William H. Macy hosted the awards ceremony Saturday night, opening with an off-color monologue that incorporated the titles of many films at the fest, from Downloading Nancy to Flow: For Love of Water.

The Wackness, starring a loose and lively Ben Kingsley as a psychiatrist who trades therapy for marijuana, won the congregation award for favorite U.S. drama as chosen by balloting among Sundance movie-goers.

“Part of what this is about is making a relationship with an audience, not necessarily making a relationship with a studio or agents or whatever,” writer-director Jonathan Levine said dryly. His coming-of-age dramedy had been expected to be picked up for distribution during the festival, but was not.

Sony Pictures Classics purchased Frozen River, trade papers reported, for under $1 million. Juror Quentin Tarantino described the film, starring Melissa Leo and Misty Upham, as “a wonderful depiction of poverty in America.”

“It took my breath away and then somewhere around the last hour, it put my heart in a vice and proceeded to twist that vice until the last frame,” Tarantino said.

Swedish filmmaker Jens Jonsson’s King of Ping Pong, about pair at-odds brothers who uncover their family history upward of spring break, earned the jury and cinematography prizes in the world cinema dramatic competition.

The world cinema jury and audience awards for documentary went to Man on Wire, British director James Marsh’s retelling of French sketcher Philippe Petit’s chivalrous — and illegal — 1974 wire-walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

Fields of Fuel, activist-filmmaker Josh Tickell’s call to break the U.S. from dependence on oil, earned the U.S. audience allotment for documentaries. Tickell said he made it over 10 years.

Director Amin Matalqa’s Captain Abu Raed, which Sundance said was the first feature film from Jordan in 50 years, won the world cinema audience award.

“This is a illusion,” a breathless Matalqa said at the ceremony.

Alex Rivera and David Riker won the Waldo Salt screenwriting award for Sleep Dealer. Rivera, also the director, won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize for ideas and issues in science and technology.

The U.S. dramatic jury, which included Marcia Gay Harden, Diego Luna and Sandra Oh, presented a special jury appraise for work by an ensemble cast to Choke. Actors in the adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel include Sam Rockwell and Anjelica Huston.

Among other Sundance honors:

• Directing, U.S. drama: Lance Hammer, Ballast.

• Directing, U.S. documentary: Nanette Burstein, American Teen.

• Cinematography, U.S. drama: Lol Crawley, Ballast.

• Editing, U.S. documentary: Joe Bini, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired.

• Special jury prize for singularity of vision, U.S. drama: Chusy Haney-Jardine, Anywhere, USA.

• Special jury prize, world cinema dramatic competition: Blue Eyelids, Ernesto Contreras, director.

• Special jury prize, world cinema documentary competition: Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, Lisa F. Jackson, director.

• Jury prize, U.S. short films: My Olympic Summer, directed by Daniel Robin, and Sikumi (On the Ice), directed by Andrew Okpeaha MacLean.

• Jury prize, international short films: Soft, Simon Ellis, director.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Reader Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification.  Enlarge By Amy Sancetta, AP

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 SUNDANCING AS FAST AS I CANUSA TODAY's Anthony Breznican blogs live from Sundance

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 OTHER VOICES FROM THE WEB
Seniors singing hip tunes a must-see at Sundance By Anthony Breznican, USA TODAY PARK CITY, Utah — Meet the new penguins — septuagenarians, octogenarians and even the occasional nonagenarian.

That would be 70-, 80- and 90-somethings in plain language — the stars of the Sundance Film Festival’s Young@Heart, about a senior-citizen chorus group that tries to reclaim a little vigor by tackling punk, rock and R&B songs.

Just as Sundance helped launch the blockbuster March of the Penguins, it has made Young@Heart individual of the must-see documentaries of the festival, a comedic tearjerker about the group’s struggle to grasp the music of Sonic Youth, Coldplay and The Clash while coping through the complications of aging.

Parts of it are uproarious, as the wrinkled would-be rockers belt out The Ramones’ I Wanna Be Sedated or struggle with the tongue-twisting lyrics of Allen Toussaint’s Yes We Can Can.

Dark jocularity is approached fearlessly: When they sing the Bee Gees’ Stayin’ Alive, they really mean it.

But there are also moments of poignancy: among them, Fred Knittle, suffering from congestive heart failure and breathing with the aid of an oxygen tank, crooning in a rich, deep voice Coldplay’s Fix You, lending the song an entirely different dimension. It’s all the more heartbreaking to know his solo rendition was originally planned as a duet.

Director Stephen Walker says the juxtaposition of the younger generation’s music being performed by people nearing the end of their lives is a reminder to anyone about the importance of living life to the fullest: “We are all on a suite, and these guys are getting off at an earlier stop, but we all will get off at more point.”

Interestingly, U2 kicked off the festival with their U2 3D movie the night before Young@Heart made its debut. That was one band that would not allow their songs to be used in the film, said Walker, who doesn’t blame Bono or The Edge, who expressed interest in seeing Young@Heart in an earlier interview. Walker says the denial was just the work of lawyers and publishing executives, who apparently never consulted the artists.

“Everyone else we could get,” Walker said. “Coldplay, no problem at all. They were absolutely fine about it. Talking Heads, really no problem at all. There was a helluva great number of music to clear in the film. We got the Jimi Hendrix estate to sign off, and they came without interruption board. There’s a ton of music.”

He hopes one of the artists from U2 might see or hear about the movie before Fox Searchlight releases it April 18. He has footage of one elderly singer doing a soulful version of One— and it turned out to be among his final songs with the group before he died. Walker has ever wanted to add it to the film.

Only a handful of the singers made the trek to Park City for the movie’s Sundance run. Young@Heart singer Steve Martin, 79, who brags that he owned the name long before the famous comedian, is the self-described Casanova of the movie. He’s a bit of a flirt and came to the festival accompanied by two other singers from the group, women, naturally: Jeanne Hatch, 81, and Dora Morrow, 85.

At a party for the film at the Blind Dog restaurant, they sipped wine, told jokes and mingled with a post-screening crowd young enough to be their grandchildren. They posed on this account that pictures, basking in their newfound celebrity.

They’ve got the fast-living lifestyle of rock stars down. Told that they have a lot of spirit in the movie, Hatch said: “That’s because we drink a lot of spirits!”

To report corrections and clarifications, junction Reader Editor Brent Jones. as far as concerns blazon consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification.  Enlarge By Brandy Eve Allen, Fox Searchlight Pictures

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Plot Summary:
An average kind of guy who has a slight problem with gambling goes to the track, and mystically, it seems as though he can’t lose, no matter how he bets; and he has an incredible day.

Starring:
Richard Dreyfuss | David Johansen | Teri Garr | Jennifer Tilly | Allen Garfield | Edward Walsh | Richard Edson | David Schramm | John Roselius | Joseph Walsh | Ralph Seymour | Cynthia Nixon | Richard Dimitri | Robert Towers | Michelle Phillips |

Directed By:
Joe Pytka |

Stills balcony during the term of this movie is here.