Straight from Slamdance: Terms and Conditions May Apply

Check out @variety's @joeleydon's excellent and detailed review of @cullenhoback's and my film @tacma_doc: bit.ly/VWvwgG (@slamdance)

— John Ramos (@couchbaron) January 23, 2013

The more I think about Terms and Conditions May Apply, the more I worry about posting anything on line. Hey, wait a minute...

Coming soon to a theater near... well, not me, but maybe you

When The Four-Faced Liar premiered last winter at the Slamdance Film Festival, I praised lead players Marja-Lewis Ryan and Emily Peck in my Variety review for "infusing their performances with effective and affecting measures of raw emotion and avid sensuality." Evidently, that wasn't quite explicit enough for the movie's marketers, who perferred to emphasize sensuality over emotion while, er, adjusting my wording for the above trailer. (Wait until the 1:24 mark, and you'll see what I mean.) I suppose I should get outraged, or at least a mite peevish, but what the hell. It's a nice little indie movie, and it showcases some promising talents on both side of the camera, so if not-quite-precisely quoting me can get a few folks to check it out this weekend, when it kicks off its limited theatrical run, well, no harm, no foul. Trust me: I have seen my words twisted worse.

Slamming

IndieWire has the lineup for next month's edition of Slamdance, the upstart rival to the Sundance Film Festival. Sight unseen, two world premiere documentaries seem especially promising: Seth Gordon's King of Kong, an up-close and personal view of obsessive video-game competitors who evidently share my fascination with Pac-Man; and Jeremy and Randy Stulberg's Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa, a study of neo-"Wild West" life in a New Mexico desert community inhabited by survivalists, teen runaways and Gulf War vets.