Thursday, January 28, 2010

For Kristen Stewart, this is her dawn


Kristen Stewart is unofficially the belle of Sundance with two decidedly un-'Twilight' films.






Call it a casting fluke, call it kismet. In both of her movies premiering at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Kristen Stewart portrays a 16-year-old runaway.


For the gritty family drama "Welcome to the Rileys," the "Twilight Saga" star inhabits a role quite unlike Bella Swan, the long-suffering vampire-lover character that made Stewart an international icon. She plays Mallory, a stripper-hooker with a porn star's wardrobe and a mascara-tarred visage whose sexual frankness could make a trucker blush.

In the high-octane coming-of-age drama "The Runaways," meanwhile, Stewart portrays real-life proto-punk Joan Jett, who co-founded the all-girl teenage rock band called -- you guessed it -- the Runaways at age 16. In the film, Stewart's character snorts cocaine, makes out with costar Dakota Fanning and drunkenly urinates on an electric guitar.

Although both characters' shock quotient would be hard to deny even if the actress inhabiting them was not a household name synonymous with exquisite romantic longing (and vampires), neither of her new roles can match Stewart's real-life influence on this year's festival. As has been widely reported, she's 2010's unofficial "Ms. Sundance": the high profile leading lady who appears in at least two of the fest's buzzworthiest films.

But what many media types -- and by extension, their audiences -- have been discussing in the wake of Stewart's trudge across Sundance's red carpets and press junkets could be fairly called the central paradox of K-Stew.

That is, her continuing hostility toward the celebrity limelight vis-à-vis an unending impulse to self-promote, a predicament that was thrown into stark relief as a reporter trailed the actress over the course of two days.

Read the Full Article HERE

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