In Contention

Author: Guy Lodge

  • Guardian does the ‘all-time greatest’ meme

    Ah, lists. The gift that keeps giving — particularly in the world of film blogging, where they provide snappy short-form content, invite numerous comments and generate multiple hits when spread across a zillion pages.

    Last year’s flood of end-of-decade countdowns surely satisfied even the most ardent list fanatic for a good few months, but with no such milestone to mark this year, The Guardian has returned to an old chestnut: the greatest films of all time.

    The gimmick they’ve used for the project (the results of which have been unfolding on their website over the past week) is to subdivide the larger collective according to genre: the 25 best comedies, romances, action films, and so on. As if any all-time best isn’t prone to enough criticism, this doubles the opportunities for debate: now we can kvetch not only about the films that made the cut (or didn’t), but whether they’ve even been categorized correctly.

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  • THE LONG SHOT: Categorical denial

    Wild-eyed, table-banging outbursts — sometimes of enthusiasm, more often of outrage — are an essential part of the floor show at any Oscar viewing party, but I’ve rarely seen one more unhinged than a friend’s reaction to Angelina Jolie’s (widely expected) Best Supporting Actress victory at the 1999 ceremony.

    “Who the hell was she supporting?” she yelled, red wine slopping out of her glass as she pointed an accusatory finger at the TV screen. “The woman only went and swallowed the entire film without so much as chewing once, all but elbowed Winona out of every shot, and she’s rewarded for supporting her?” She was practically spitting now, so blind with fury she hadn’t even noticed the raven-haired Miss Jolie snogging her brother. “If that’s her idea of support, what happens when she’s against you?”

    I should perhaps explain that my friend’s love for all things Winona Ryder ran deep, and not a little frightening, in those days; the Academy’s heartless decision not to nominate Ryder for Best Actress that year already meant she was watching the ceremony under duress. So it probably wasn’t the best time to explain that, well, Jolie did have the secondary role in “Girl, Interrupted” and that, unfair world that this is, there was still no law preventing rising young actors from being much better than their first-billed co-stars. So we let her rant, at least until Phil Collins started singing and she had something new to complain about.

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  • LONDON: ‘Tabloid,’ ‘Waste Land,’ ‘The Peddler’

    Amid a fairly robust non-fiction slate in this year’s London Film Festival programme, there appears to be an informal sidebar of documentaries about the process of, well, documenting — whether via media avenues of art, film or journalism.

    That’s not to say the films in question are particularly meta. The ones grouped here are all pretty straightforward studies of complicated (or even downright hinky) creative processes, none more so than “Smash His Camera” (***), Leon Gast’s slight but enjoyable snapshot of famed US paparazzo Ron Galella, which pokes gentle fun at its gnomish subject while pointedly mourning the gradual draining of artistry from the sport of celebrity shutterbugging.

    “Smash His Camera” has already been released in the States, so I won’t dwell too long on it here, other than to say it made me even more aware than intended of my status as a viewer – largely I couldn’t block out the running commentary from the seat behind me, a ceaseless Noo Joisey-accented stream of observations like, “Now she was the real deal,” and “Whatever happened to that guy?” Only my half-British reserve prevented me turning round and politely telling him to cram it, so I was glad of my restraint when the house lights came up to reveal that the offender was… Ron Galella himself. Now that was meta.

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  • ‘King’s Speech’ told to mind its language

    Admittedly, this isn’t much of a story, but following last week’s furore over the NC-17 certificate handed to the starkly adult marital drama “Blue Valentine,” it’s amusing to see a rather more milquetoast Oscar hopeful having its own trouble with the ratings board.

    London’s Evening Standard paper reports that “The King’s Speech,” already rated R by the MPAA, has been given a 15 rating (permitting no viewers under that age) by the British censors — not a severe rating, but more restrictive than one might expect for a polite period biopic revolving around speech therapy.

    The reason for the adult rating is the same on both sides of the Atlantic: a short comic scene where Colin Firth’s stuttering King George VI is required to say “fuck” 42 times in quick succession as part of a therapeutic exercise. To be frank, 14 year-olds were unlikely to be queueing around the block to see “The King’s Speech” in the first place, but that’s not really the point: R or 15 ratings could wrongfoot mild-mannered mature viewers who otherwise sit squarely in the film’s sights.

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  • Helen Mirren: everywhere and nowhere

    Amid the club of stars surfacing in two or more 2010 releases — Leonardo DiCaprio, Annette Bening, Chloe Moretz, and so on — has anyone been more ineffectually ubiquitous than Helen Mirren? The 65 year-old Brit has been working steadily since her Oscar win nearly four years ago, but apparently cracked the secret of human cloning this year, turning up in no fewer than six titles. (Seven if you count “The Last Station,” which most civilians only laid eyes on in 2010.)

    As much as this looks like a banner year for the actress on paper, however, her strike rate has been bewilderingly low. Brothel-madam biopic “Love Ranch,” directed by her husband Taylor Hackford, flunked with critics and audiences back in June, while “The Tempest,” her would-be highbrow awards bid, met with widespread scorn at the Venice and New York festivals.

    Two other adult-oriented dramas were left in limbo at Toronto, with John Madden’s “The Debt” booted to 2011, while “Brighton Rock” — for which Mirren ceded the critical spotlight to newcomer Andrea Riseborough — still languishes without a US distributor.

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  • LONDON: ‘Cold Weather,’ ‘Carlos,’ ‘Little White Lies’

    Okay, so my weekend plans to catch up on my LFF review backlog didn’t entirely pan out — though the schedulers have, at least, kindly slowed the snowball effect by screening a number of films today that I had already seen. Strange as it sounds, given that it’s been on the festival track for five months now, Mike Leigh’s “Another Year” (reviewed in Cannes) finally premiered in its home country this evening, while Julian Schnabel’s “Miral” continued to dismay critics at this morning’s press screening — as I treated myself to a smug lie-in.

    The weekend, however, was one of multiple festival treats for me, including my first dip into this year’s particularly enticing Treasures From the Archives sidebar, featuring a broad array of immaculately restored classics and curios.

    Joshua Logan’s “Picnic,” a widely forgotten Best Picture nominee from 1955, was an unexpected candidate for this treatment, but the gleaming new print of this creaky but affecting slice of small-town Americana repaid the archivists’ gamble — the film’s ambitious narrative-hopscotch structure remains fresh, the scattergun ensemble acting less so, but the real purpose of the outing was seeing master DP James Wong Howe’s luscious color lensing primped, polished and projected on London’s classiest cinema screen.

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  • LONDON: Five foreign Oscar contenders

    (Please note that one of the films reviewed here, “Aftershock,” was not screened as part of the London Film Festival programme — but since I saw it this week, it made sense to include it in this discussion.)

    Admittedly, 11 out of 65 is a figure that is only impressive if you’re counting the listenable tracks on most latter-day hip-hop albums, but as a measure of the number of Best Foreign Language Film contenders I’ve seen, it’s more than I’ve ever managed by this early point in the race. For that, I have my growing trail of film festivals to thank (even if I also have Venice schedulers to blame for ensuring that I missed Canada’s hot prospect “Incendies” in favour of — of all things — “Miral”), and this year’s London Film Festival has served me particularly well in this regard.

    I’ll be seeing Belgium and Spain’s entries toward the back end of the festival, but having attended screenings of five contenders in the past week (four of them at the fest), it seemed a neat number for a cluster-review. (I’ve already discussed the hopefuls from Algeria, Czech Republic, Greece, Mexico, South Africa and Thailand on these pages, as well as in Friday’s episode of Oscar Talk. Meanwhile, I thought it less curmudgeonly to limit myself to a 140-character review of India’s entry a few weeks back.)

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  • LONDON: ‘Conviction,’ ‘Amigo,’ ‘Everything Must Go’

    “To get the challenge to play someone like this makes me a better person,” said a rather intense-looking Hilary Swank at yesterday’s London Film Festival press conference — the someone in question, single mom turned crusading lawyer Betty Ann Waters, sitting to her immediate left.

    Not being personally acquainted with Ms. Swank, I can’t verify the before-and-after truth of this claim, but I can say that this endearingly earnest tone is entirely shared by Tony Goldwyn’s film “Conviction” (**1/2).

    A rote courtroom drama that is but one “The Betty Ann Waters Story” subtitle — and Jaclyn Smith casting switch — away from being Thursday night TV fodder circa 1988, “Conviction” (which opened in the US yesterday) is one of those so-implausible-it-has-to-be-true stories that blandly and single-mindedly champion blanket virtues like hope, loyalty and tenacity over finer, more fractious social and personal details, but keeps you dorkily invested in its principals’ plight despite your better instincts.

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  • Portman and Giacchino: too many notes?

    “It’s quality work. There are simply too many notes,” says the Emperor Joseph II to an incredulous Mozart in Milos Forman’s 1984 Oscar-guzzler “Amadeus.” It’s a delicious critique, and it’s one I’ve found myself remembering a lot over the past few weeks of London Film Festival viewing, during which I seem have jotted down the word “overscored” in more shorthand film reviews than I care to count. (On the bright side, it’s made me all the more appreciative of the minimalist power of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s work on “The Social Network.”)

    But then I seem to have watched an inordinate number of recent films — be they down-the-middle Hollywood product like “Conviction” or ungainly European art films like Ferzan Ozpetek’s “Loose Cannons” — that suffer to some extent from the sheer conspicuousness of their music scores, scene after scene smothered in swooping strings or plinky piano motifs aimed to telegraph emotion instead of supplementing it.

    The two biggest offenders, in my book, are scores from gifted, Oscar-winning composers that have garnered much acclaim and even awards buzz: Rachel Portman’s for “Never Let Me Go” and Michael Giacchino’s for “Let Me In.”

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  • Gray and Elise the pick of ‘For Colored Girls?’

    Tyler Perry’s “For Colored Girls” has been a question mark on our Oscar lists for some time, but even those pessimistic about the film itself can see potential in the film’s vast, and formidable, female ensemble — if there is to be any kind of awards play for the film, it’ll be the actors who spearhead it.

    A couple of weeks ago, word spread that Kimberly Elise looks to be the standout performer in the group, and a feasible contender in a still wide-open Best Supporting Actress race — 12 years after the actress was the subject of similar (if ultimately fruitless) talk for her work in “Beloved.” Recently, we heard that Thandie Newton could be the film’s second possibility. However, Jeff Wells quotes an inside source who has seen (and loved) the film, and names a far less expected standout: singer Macy Gray. Here’s his enthusiastic endorsement:

    [I]t’s the real deal — maybe too conceptually out there for safe, old, mainstream white Academy tastes, but the performances range from good (Janet Jackson, Loretta Devine) to great (Phylicia Rashad, Thandie Newton) to pretty much masterful (Kimberly Elise, Macy Gray).

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  • International ‘Black Swan’ teaser posters

    Okay, now we’re talking. By now, you should be quite familiar with the US one-sheet for Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” — an attractively demure (and unexpectedly snow-white) design that coyly masks the sexy, shadowy craziness served up by the erotic ballet thriller. Now, however, a set of four international teaser posters have landed via Empire — and they certainly aren’t hiding the crazy. Love the alternately Expressionist and Art Deco flourishes and the stark, uniform color palette (though if they were really channeling the film, that red would be replaced with blush-pink). My favorite among the quartet previewed above — check ’em all out after the cut.

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  • LONDON: Never let me in

    In a year that has seen me give over more of my time than is strictly sensible to covering the Cannes, Venice, Berlin and Edinburgh programmes, there’s something oddly disconcerting about attending a festival in my home city.

    Admittedly, the atmosphere is dampened by the fact that many of the London Film Festival’s biggest drawcards this year are films I already caught at, well, Cannes, Venice and Berlin — I feel rather as if I’ve betrayed the fest that’s been my cinephile lifeline for five years. More than that, however, when your thoughts between screenings are peppered with grocery lists, doctor’s appointments and other everyday intrusions, it’s hard to feel you’re at a festival at all.

    Yet a festival the LFF most proudly is, and a large one at that, incorporating over 170 new(ish) features, plus formidable retrospective and short-film sidebars. The advantage of having got a head start with many of the most anticipated gala screenings (“Black Swan,” “Another Year” and the like) is that I’ve been afforded time this year to seek more buried treasure.

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  • THE LONG SHOT: What becomes of the broken-hearted?

    (A day later than usual — apologies.)

    After the London Film Festival raised its curtain last night with a typically flashy European premiere for Mark Romanek’s “Never Let Me Go,” this morning’s papers and breakfast TV reports have been busy with chatter about what Britfilm’s two it-girls, Carey Mulligan and Keira Knightley, were wearing; how the next Spider-Man (that is, The Artist Formerly Known As Andrew Garfield) is settling into his red-carpet duties; and what the whole event promises about the beleaguered British film industry’s ability to, well, throw fancy parties.

    Something far fewer people have been talking about, however, is the film itself. That’s no great surprise: after securing eagerly awaited world premieres — “Frost/Nixon” and “Fantastic Mr. Fox” — for their last two opening nights, London fest organizers dropped the ball slightly by picking a film that bowed at Toronto last month and has already opened in the States. You can’t expect the same level of excitement for a gift that has already been opened by someone else, even if the ribbon has been retied.

    Still, the air surrounding “Never Let Me Go” was not merely one of used goods, but of damaged goods at that: yesterday morning’s press screening was characterized by a near-palpable cloud of lowered expectations, as tepid-to-respectable reviews and fizzling box-office from across the pond foretold a high-class shrug of a movie. “That’s going to get Oscar nominations?” a critic in the row behind me asked as the end credits rolled; his tone translated the question as, “Yeah, good luck with that.”

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  • Academy announces official list of 65 foreign Oscar entries

    For the past few months, we’ve been keeping you abreast of the submissions for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, so this finalized list of contenders, which was sleuthed by Pete Hammond earlier this morning (and officially unveiled by AMPAS via press release here), doesn’t contain too many surprises.

    As usual, however, a few low-profile late entries have snuck into the mix since the October 1 submissions deadline, while one film (Afghanistan’s entry “Black Tulip”) appears to have been disqualified, as the country does not feature on the Academy screening schedule. An eligibility-date snafu, I’ll be bound.

    The four titles new to our list come from Ethiopia (“The Athlete”), Georgia (“Street Days”), Greenland (“Nuummloq”) and Kyrgyzstan (“The Light Thief”). I’m hoping to see the last of those — reportedly a heartwarmer about an electrician coming to the aid of an impoverished rural community — at the London fest later this week, but the other three are unfamiliar to me. Always nice to see more African countries in the running, however.

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  • THE LISTS: Top 10 NC-17 rated films

    Amid the recent kerfuffle over the Motion Picture Association of America’s curious decision to slap Derek Cianfrance’s sensitive marital drama (and Oscar hopeful) “Blue Valentine” with a commercially inhibiting NC-17 certificate, I failed to note that the MPAA’s most drastic rating celebrated rather a significant anniversary last week.

    October 5 made it 20 years since Philip Kaufman’s sexually explicit literary biopic “Henry & June,” the first film ever to be given the NC-17 classification, opened in US theaters.

    Like “Blue Valentine,” Kaufman’s film was a high-end prestige item aiming for critical kudos and even a shot at year-end awards (indeed, it did wind up nabbing a solitary Oscar bid) that the sage folks on the ratings board nonetheless deemed a little too adult for the adults.

    For decades before then, the X rating (now defunct, but still prevalent in everyday speech) had been their standby for such films — of which one, “Midnight Cowboy,” managed to override the X-rated stigma to win the Best Picture Oscar — but had since become too closely associated with grimy pornographic material.

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  • Looking back on Oscar’s Old Left leanings

    Its installments come all too infrequently these days, but Best Pictures From The Outside In — a collaborative project between The Film Experience’s Nathaniel Rogers and his learned pals — is one of the best sources of Oscar discussion and analysis on the web.

    That’s not only because it provides ample opportunity for kvetching over the Academy’s past mistakes (our favorite sport, let’s face it), but because its system of pairing up Best Picture champs from opposite ends of history often reveals unexpected patterns of progression (or not, in some cases) among the voters.

    Their latest episode is a doozy on both counts, covering as it does one of the most roundly jeered winners in the category’s history, 1989’s thoroughly vanilla race-relations drama “Driving Miss Daisy.” (By contrast, the other featured champ, 1946’s “The Best Years of Our Lives,” holds up to this day.)

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  • Mike Leigh celebrates “hidden city” of London

    My attention was drawn to this article last week, but since the London Film Festival kicks off this week (and Mike Leigh’s “Another Year” will be competing for top honors there), now seems an appropriate time to link to it. Picking up on the role England’s capital city has played in a number of Leigh’s films — including his latest — the Wall Street Journal quotes the Salford-born director on his self-proclaimed status as an “ethnic London filmmaker”:

    It’s precisely the city’s specificity that engenders the grittiness of Leigh’s “Naked,” for example, or the quiet melancholy of “Another Year.” “By definition, London is a kind of place that means so many things,” Leigh said. “I’ve lived in London exactly 50 years. When you reflect on your life in a slab of 50 years…I adore London. I think it’s a wonderful, glorious city. That does inform the stuff that you’re talking about.”

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  • ‘White Ribbon,’ Bertolucci win BBC World Cinema Awards

    Fear not, you haven’t entered a very somber Tardis and woken up in December 2009. The BBC World Cinema Award is a small but creditable gong dished out annually to honor the best in foreign-language film — but due to a significant change in the show’s calendar, this year’s award effectively spanned the last two years of UK releases.

    Hence the rather stale-sounding list of nominees, but congratulations anyway to Michael Haneke’s 2009 Cannes champ “The White Ribbon,” which triumphed over “I Am Love,” “A Prophet,” “Let the Right One In” and “Waltz With Bashir.” (Note the absence of a certain pair of recent Oscar winners for Best Foreign Language Film.) Previous winners of the award include “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “Downfall.”

    The award was determined by a jury headed by Oscar-winning screenwriter and playwright Christopher Hampton, and presented in London last week. At the same time, Bernardo Bertolucci was honored with a lifetime achievement award. Anyway, nothing to stop the presses for, but thought you’d like to know.

    [Photo: Sony Pictures Classics]