24 Jan 2015 5:11 PM PT
Reposted from The Hollywood Reporter
The Women in the film industry are being celebrated this year at Sundance Film Festival. John Cooper, Director of the Sundance Film Festival has some personal favorites including Liz Garbus’s Nina Simone documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?; Leslye Headland’s romantic comedy Sleeping With Other People; Sarah Silverman’s I Smile Back; Greta Gerwig’s Mistress America; Toni Collette’s Grassland; and Melissa Rauch, star and co-writer of opening night selection, The Bronze.
Cooper explained “the Sundance Film Festival annually emerges as a prime showcase for talented female filmmakers and actors,” he said via email, noting that 32% of the movies screening at this edition were directed by women (compared to only 4.4% of the top 100 movies at the box office each year from 2002 to 2012). “There’s heightened intensity, emotion and drama in many of this year’s films, and much of that is seen in films by women or with women in key roles.”
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The Bronze doesn’t always try hard enough; there are only so many laughs to be wrung from dirty words pronounced in a prim Midwestern accent. But the film and its talented star (best known for her work on TV series The Big Bang Theory) commit fully to the rude, crude creature at the center of it all: with her high pony tail and harsh bangs, unflattering track suit and dyspeptic demeanor, Hope is a bracing comic creation, and the movie allows her to behave badly — punching her father, poisoning her protégé, hurling insults at anyone who nears her toxic orbit — without humiliating her. To the filmmakers’ credit, and Rauch’s, Hope doesn’t start out monstrous and end up endearing; she’s both at once, all along — a ferocious caricature of a woman with shades of realness.