What if there have been no independent film business? There can be no "Slumdog Millionaire, " no "Little Miss Sunshine, " no "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" or "The Blair Witch Project. "
There can be no Ryan Gosling or Maggie Gyllenhaal or Quentin Tarantino.
No "Winter's Bone" or Jennifer Lawrence.
What, you may well ask. Who?
Those are identical questions audiences inquired about "Swingers" in 1996, but no one wonders now when considering that film and it is key players, actors Vince Vaughn, Jon Favreau and director Doug Liman.
Whether moviegoers remember "Winter's Bone, " its director Debra Granik or even the movie's lead actress, 19-year-old Lawrence, awaits the way the movie plays at box offices over the following couple of months and whether or not this can gain critical attention that puts it in Hollywood's 2010 awards race.
But a couple of things are for several. One, amid a dearth of excellent summer movies from major studios, "Winter's Bone" is probably the best reviewed films in theaters and 2, like a lot of indie movies nowadays it proved difficult to find money to make.
"We got really lucky, " admits Granik. "But also there are individuals who worry about American art, it's not only the commerce of movies. They're interested in how to keep that part of the American film culture alive. The little, the scrappy, the marginal, the regional. "
THROW THE INDIE A "BONE"
"Winter's Bone" is those activities. Made in a budget around $2 million, the movie's story is really a bleak human drama revolving around a little group residing in the rural Ozark Mountains of southern Missouri who're involved with making a kind of crystal methamphetamine, commonly called "crank. "
One of these, an adolescent named Ree (Lawrence), is told she and her younger siblings is going to be evicted using their home unless she will find her dad, that has disappeared. So, Ree sets on an outing through her community to locate her lost dad.
What she uncovers is really a web of secrets inside a close knit community, and what emerges is really a tale of one young woman's determination when confronted with enduring hardship.
Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Phillips said hello "sets a stern suspense narrative against a blessedly unconventional cinematic backdrop. " Of Lawrence, he wrote: "It's for performances such as this that moviegoers end up going for a chance on the title that does not possess a fast-food tie-in. "
"Winter's Bone" earned the Grand Jury Prize for best drama along with a screenwriting award only at that past Sundance Film Festival, and contains scored a 92 percent positive rating on review website rottentomatoes. com.
On its U. S. debut last weekend, the film enjoyed a powerful per theater average of $21, 000 at box offices in four theaters. It rolls to 14 U. S. cities on Friday.
By any account, making an indie movie continues to be difficult since 2008 when financing basically dried out and many major distributors failed. But lost in several tales of gloom and doom in U. S. art houses would be that the overall box office continues to be solid, and investors can make money.
"Good indie movies can and therefore are getting made, and good indie movies can and therefore are succeeding in the box office, " said Tom Ortenberg, who runs film consulting firm One Way to avoid it Media.
"My feeling on the changing marketplace over the final few years... almost always there is room for any good movie. In which the bottom is receding is incorporated in the marginal movies, " he explained.
That is nice news for Granik and Lawrence, who fought for that role of Ree because, she said, she supported the need for a dark human drama at any given time when big studios are, mostly, cranking out family films, comedies and comic action.
"In my head, I figured, this is not what America wants, but it is what they desire. It's unrelenting, it's gritty and it is real, " Lawrence said. "I visited Sundance, hoping many people would begin to see the movie, hoping many people want also it would be a surprise hit, " she said. "You reached take risks. "
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