COBRA VERDE, PUTA MADRE: Sundance

Blurt’s sleuthy sources dish on Sundance 2009 buzz flicks.

By RANDY HARWARD

It’s January in Salt Lake City, Utah. Wafting off the Wasatch Mountains, from a crevice called Parley’s Canyon that leads to Park City, is an enticing bouquet of hope, desperation, delusion and pretension… or maybe it’s just Axe™ body spray and swag bag perfume samples. It’s time again for the Sundance Film Festival, a veritable three-ring circus of the stars, where films are made and broken, and stiff smiles and firm handshakes—in even firmer, newly purchased ski gloves—are exchanged. Here’s a peek at what Blurt’s shadowy sources say will be the talk of Park City next week.

Cobra Verde, Puta Madre

Quentin Tarantino presents this grindhouse-meets-arthouse film in which Klaus Kinski and Cheech Marin play an odd couple who run a temp staffing agency as a front for their private investigation business. When a tile setter goes rogue and starts taking side jobs, Kinski and Marin set out to teach the fucker a lesson, only to learn a little something themselves—from a Zen Dadaist who calls himself The Last Slice of Pizza. (R, 87 minutes, dir: Werner Jodorowsky)

Anything is Popsicle

A young music blogger with a Jew-fro (Napoleon Dynamite’s Jon Heder) gets a once-in-a-lifetime chance to write a cover story for a national magazine but clashes with his editor, who requests numerous rewrites and refuses to let the young scribe use his affliction—malapropism—as an excuse. A subplot follows a mother-daughter rock crit/groupie team that gets interviews via unscrupulous front-row slurping. (R, 101 minutes, dir: Charlie Kaufman)

Excreted

From the producers of An American Carol and Expelled comes a film about how we all came from Ben Stein’s droning anus. (PG-13, 61 minutes, dir: Alan Smithee)

Itty Bitty Titty Kumite

Loosely based on Joe R. Lansdale’s short story The Pit. Four flat-chested barely-legals and their chaperone (Kate Hudson) on a post-high school trip to Alabama take a wrong turn and are abducted by a snake-handling preacher who forces them to fight each other in underground, to-the-death cage matches. Hudson falls for a toothless Cajun with literary aspirations while the girls come to grips with their heterosexuality. (R, 89 minutes, dir: Harmony Korine)

Our Band Could Fuck Your Wife… If You Enroll In Our Super Special VIP Fan Club

Exploring the phenomenon of VIP fan clubs, in which fans pay money for the privilege to pay even more money for VIP ticket packages, worthless tchotchkes and maybe/maybe-not backstage meet-and-greets. It doesn’t stop there: Our Band…reveals that some artists—such as kabuki-rockers KISS—plan to take the fleecing to ridiculous levels. (NC-17, 78 minutes, dir: Miranda Azerrad-Meltzer)

Doll Farts: The Ringer 2

Penniless and even more desperate, Courtney Love (Courtney Love) blows an appellate court judge and wins the right to replace Kurt Cobain (played in flashbacks by Kurt Cobain’s exhumed skeleton) in Nirvana. Remaining members Dave Grohl (Aziz Ansari) and Krist Novoselic (Aaron Eckhart) figure “fuck it” and allow the hijinks to ensue, hoping that by the end of the band’s second meteoric rise to fame, Love will blow her head off, too. (R, 114 minutes, dir: Benjamin Silverman for Reveille Productions)

Pop Rocks

Popstar puppy mill Disney answers Before the Music Dies with an apologist documentary about the New Bubblegum, the cloying yet flavorless style of pop music where a pretty face is all you need. Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers and Demi Lovato argue for the fair use of Auto-Tune, with Cyrus paraphrasing the famous Elvis quote about her McMusic: “Like, 50 billion Cyrus fans can’t all be tone-deaf.”

Each screening to be preceded by the short film Hannah Mantegna, in which character actor Joe Mantegna plays a cross-dressing tribute performer with a stutter. (PG, 90 minutes, dir: Walt Disney’s frozen head)

Wigger

Melvin Van Peebles (Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song) directs this tale of a twenty-year-old, rail-thin, albino Jiffy Lube employee in suburban Utah that experiences a downward spiral when his rims are stolen from his Datsun B210 Wagon, his own mother calls him a wigger and kicks his ass, and Soulja Boy’s career tanks. (Unrated, 79 minutes, dir: Melvin Van Peebles)

Just a Juggalo

The tagline for this horror show is “They’re dumb… and they’ve come (for handouts).” Forget Jimmy Buffett’s “Parrotheads” and David Archuleta’s “Archies”: Insane Clown Posse’s “Juggalos” are most devoted (and retarded) fans of all—and they’re breeding. Juggalo Julz (The Sopranos’ Aida Turturro) is a heavyweight Juggalette [Editor’s Note: Redundancy?] whose favorite pastime, other than being a Juggalo—is washing down Xanax with beer. Julz discovers she’s pregnant on Valentine’s Day and delivers on Mother’s Day. When the baby—named Annabelle Lotus after ICP side project Dark Lotus—dies after only 13 minutes, she gives her “little Ninjette” an ICP-themed funeral… then blames the doctors and calls ICP’s WFuckOff Radio to announce the news—and use it as leverage when she complains about not receiving promised swag. Based on a true story. Seriously… we couldn’t make this shit up. (NC-17, 105 minutes, dir: Jorg Buttgereit)