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PARK CITY, Utah — The 2013 Sundance Film Festival got off to a rowdy and wry start Friday with “Don Jon’s Addiction,” written, directed by and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and co-starring Scarlett Johansson and Tony Danza.
As a wanna-be womanizer hooked on porn, Gordon-Levitt (“Looper”) lends his charming smile to a role that highlights his offbeat sensibility. Johansson plays the woman who could reroute his libido to the real world.
ohansson — whose current Broadway role in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” kept her from attending the festival opener at the Eccles Theatre — adds mainstream marketability to “Don’s” indie spirit, still the hallmark of Sundance as it laps its 25th official year.
ScarJo may not have had to endure the frigid Park City temperatures, which struggled to hit the double digits, but Naomi Watts was looking great to promote “Two Mothers,” which also bowed Friday.
The film, about lifelong friends (Watts and Robin Wright) who fall in love with each other’s grown sons, marks the Australian star’s return to edgier material. Female audiences at the Eccles may have been distracted by Watts and Wright’s on-screen objects of affection, newcomers Xavier Samuel and James Frecheville.
Earlier, festival-goers got a look at “Kill Your Darlings,” part of “Harry Potter” star Daniel Radcliffe’s transition from boy wizard to grownup. Playing gay Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg, Radcliffe is unrecognizable in dyed black hair and horn-rimmed glasses (on the red carpet, he added some chin scruff).
The film, co-starring Elizabeth Olsen as the Beats’ guardian angel, Edie Parker, is one of two Beat flicks at the fest, sharing space with the Jack Kerouac flick “Big Sur.”
Keri Russell, TV’s former “Felicity,” gives a comic turn in the adaptation of the best-selling novel “Austenland,” as a woman so obsessed with Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” that she heads to a theme park devoted to the 19th-century author. And Shailene Woodley sparked the high school dramedy treat “The Spectacular Now,” which was met with thunderous applause
Kristen Bell goes from box-office sinker “When in Rome” to the thoughtful indie “The Lifeguard,” about a frazzled New York reporter going back to her Connecticut hometown to take a job at a local pool.
The serious-minded “Mud,” a chewy Southern tale from “Take Shelter” director Jeff Nichols stars Matthew McConaughey as a criminal hiding out in a swamp who is discovered by two Arkansas kids. A de-glammed Reese Witherspoon co-stars as his wild girlfriend.
Another buzz-maker was “Emanuel and the Truth About Fishes,” in which Jessica Biel plays a mysterious neighbor to a troubled girl (Kaya Scodelario).
Finally, one of Saturday’s midnight slots was occupied by the hyperjumpy horror flick “S-V/H/S.” A sequel to a cult hit about videotapes that reveal ghastly happenings, it debuted in the spot that unleashed “The Blair Witch Project” from Sundance nearly 15 years ago. If that kind of success happens again, it’s an example of another thing Sundance does best — create heat even when the temperature is crazy cold.
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