Utopia has taken U.S. rights to writer-director-producer Lena Dunham’s latest directorial Sharp Stick which made its world premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. A theatrical release is planned for later this year.
24.01.2022 - 01:13 / theplaylist.net
Playing in the Premieres section of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, “Sharp Stick,” produced during lockdown, was conceived by Lena Dunham and the film’s director of photography, Ashley Connor, starting from the base elements that were already available to them — namely a set of actors and locations. But while many quarantine-made films have appeared to embrace a “will this do?” aesthetic, implicitly relying on the audience’s sympathy and compassionate understanding to fill gaps and forgive compromises in production value, Dunham has instead created a work of art that comfortably fits within and plays with the limitations imposed by the pandemic.
Utopia has taken U.S. rights to writer-director-producer Lena Dunham’s latest directorial Sharp Stick which made its world premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. A theatrical release is planned for later this year.
Jazz Tangcay Artisans EditorLena Dunham’s Sundance entry “Sharp Stick” has been acquired by small indie distributor Utopia for U.S. rights.
Utopia has acquired the U.S. rights to writer-director-producer Lena Dunham’s Sundance comedy “Sharp Stick,” which follows a young woman’s unexpected quest of sexual exploration and self-discovery, Utopia announced on Monday.Utopia will release the film theatrically in the U.S.
Lena Dunham got a little help from her friends! For her new movie,, the star tells that she asked Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn for their help, which is why they are given a Thank You credit at the end of the film.«They are just really great friends of mine who watched a really early cut of the film and gave me notes,» Dunham says of Swift, who was a bridesmaid in her wedding, and her actor boyfriend. «They’re both just really interesting, perceptive people. Taylor’s been one of my close friends for a really long time and Joe is an actor who I actually ended up working with on a project that I shot just a few months after this.», directed and written by Dunham and starring Kristine Froseth, Jon Bernthal and Luka Sabbat, follows Sarah Jo, a naive 26-year-old living on the fringes of Hollywood with her mother and sister.
Elizabeth Wagmeister Senior CorrespondentAfter Lena Dunham’s new movie “Sharp Stick” was criticized on Twitter by an autism activist who claimed she was approached to be a consultant on the project, the filmmaking team behind the Sundance film says that the central character, Sarah Jo, was never written to be on the spectrum. Producers say the drama about a young woman’s sexual awakening was inspired entirely by creator Lena Dunham’s personal journey, dealing with severe endometriosis which resulted in a hysterectomy.“Sarah Jo was never written nor imagined as a neurodivergent woman,” a spokesperson for the film says, in part, in a statement to Variety.
in a post-screening Q&A, Dunham ran down its many high-minded inspirations. She said she wanted to “give porn its due as something that can be really healing.” And, as a woman who can’t have biological children due to a hysterectomy, Dunham, 35, wished to tell a story about “what it means to make your own family and design your own family and how that’s just as meaningful.” Yes, it is. But does that beautiful message come during the scene when the 26-year-old main character Sarah Jo (Kristine Froseth) scrawls an A-to-Z list of sex acts on colorful construction paper that she’d like to try out with randos? Or when her mom (Jennifer Jason Leigh) gives a vocab lesson on a crude nickname for the male anatomy? Sarah Jo’s sister Treina (Taylour Paige) is adopted, true, but the world is already in universal agreement that adoption is a great thing to do.
“There is no timeline to figuring this out,” Jane tells her best friend Lucy in Tig Notaro and Stephanie Allynne’s directorial debut feature film “AM I OK?” This is a film for late bloomers of any kind but will resonate particularly with anyone who came into their sexual identity later in life. Screenwriter Lauren Pomerantz (“Me, Myself and I”) took inspiration from her own late in life, coming out and close relationship with her best friend, producer Jessica Elbaum (“Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar,” “Hustlers”).
Attempting to remake a classic film is never an easy assignment. Especially when said classic is as revered as Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 drama “Ikiru.” Director Oliver Hermanus and screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro could have placed the story in contemporary times, making a new version more palatable for some critics, but instead, set it in the exact same era only interchanging London for Tokyo.
His name was Brandon and to almost everyone at Glasgow’s Bearsden Academy, he seemed a bit odd. This new pupil was much taller than the other students, said he was from Canada and, well, his face looked…strange.
American tourists spooked out by what they see on their visit to a European country will always be a valid premise for a film. The same goes for movies concerned with voyeurism, whether our protagonist is the one watching or the one being watched — though they usually are both, as is the case in Chloe Okuno’s “Watcher.” Playing in the U.S.
Lena Dunham hasn’t made a feature film since Tiny Furniture 12 years ago, but she has some plausible excuses—running Girls for six seasons, conceiving another series, writing two books, acting here and there. It took the pandemic to get her behind the camera again and, low and behold, the resulting film is about people living in very close quarters, not going out much and, at least for some, having a lot of sex. Sharp Stick brims over with the energy of young people who wanted to make something, quickly and down and dirty. The result is an invigorating film about a beautiful woman who, in her mid-20s, sheds her lifelong avoidance of sex to dive into the deep end. The FilmNation production is making its world premiere in the Premieres section of this year’s festival.
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticFor a decade, Lena Dunham has kept more than busy, executive producing TV series like “Camping” and “Generation” and putting out her memoir. Yet she’s been notably selective about her main slate of projects, and “Sharp Stick,” which premiered tonight at the Sundance Film Festival, is her third major act.
iveté of Alana Haim’s Alana Kane in “Licorice Pizza.” Sarah Jo is placed as a caregiver in the family of Zach (Liam Michel Saux), his hip, white-dude-who-raps, stay-at-home dad, Josh (Jon Bernthal), and nagging, very pregnant realtor mom, Heather (Dunham). When Treina, through a little social-media sleuthing, catches her man hanging out with his ex’s cousin at Universal Studios, Marilyn offers this advice: “You wanna know if he is really yours? You look him in the eye and you say, ‘Do you find me beautiful?’ It’s foolproof . . .
Seemingly a rejection of monocausal history in that it twists the firehose nozzle all the way open to spray from any and every direction, “Riotsville, U.S.A.” is no less problematic from where it sits on the other side of that theoretical chasm. Grabbing at anything that conforms to the half-cooked epiphanies the documentary has from moment to moment, the path of the film’s discussion weaves through about a dozen provocative ideas without betraying much of an attempt to critically analyze any one of them.
I always see the nannies when I take my kids to the park. They’re hard to miss, over there on the park benches with the strollers and bags of snacks, gossiping and swapping war stories and strategies and shouting out admonishments to the cherubs they’re there to supervise.