In Contention

Author: Guy Lodge

  • ‘Blue Valentine’ trailer

    Well, speak of the devil. On the heels of the film’s unfortunate run-in with the MPAA ratings board, The Weinstein Company has unveiled the first trailer for “Blue Valentine,” and it should give you some idea of why critics have been talking up this film — and, particularly, its pair of searing lead performances — since it debuted at Sundance in January. I was impressed by the film in Cannes, and Kris also boarded the wagon earlier this week. Check out the trailer via Yahoo! Movies by clicking the image below, or watch the embed after the jump.

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  • MPAA burns ‘Blue Valentine’ with NC-17 rating

    As if Derek Cianfrance’s moving, bruising marital drama “Blue Valentine” — with its Oscar-caliber performances by Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams — didn’t face enough obstacles heading into the awards season, what with its bleak subject matter and perilously late release date, the MPAA has just thrown it an extra curveball. In their wisdom, the sensitive souls on the ratings board have ludicrously given the film an NC-17 rating: the movie-censorship equivalent of a scarlet letter, theoretically reserved for films that feature extreme, boundary-pushing violence or sexual content.

    It’s been almost five months since I saw “Blue Valentine,” so my memory may be a little hazy, but I must profess to being absolutely stumped as to what content in the film could have provoked this decision. It’s a harsh, adult-oriented drama, make no mistake, but it doesn’t even feature explicit nudity, much less any beyond-the-pale activity. Deadline’s Mike Fleming claims this was the scene that supposedly crossed the line [mild spoiler alert]:

    I’m told the rating was given for a scene in which the characters played by Gosling and Williams try to save their crumbling marriage by spending a night away in a hotel. They get drunk and their problems intensify when he wants to have sex and she doesn’t, but will to get him off her back.

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  • Why we should be watching Kristin Scott Thomas

    Hey, did you know I’m something of a Kristin Scott Thomas fan? If you didn’t, chances are you only just met me. Welcome. The precis version is that I think she’s one of the few great contemporary actresses currently working on career-peak form, and in two languages to boot. The non-precis version — well, dig around.

    It’s been nearly 14 years since her lone Oscar nomination for “The English Patient”; she’s more than due for her second, and while she narrowly missed it in 2008 for her French-speaking turn in “I’ve Loved You So Long,” I’m wondering if this year’s wide-open Best Supporting Actress race might prove more conducive.

    I’m referring, of course, to her expertly brittle but moving performance as John Lennon’s aunt (and guardian) Mimi Smith in Sam Taylor Wood’s biopic “Nowhere Boy,” which opens Stateside tomorrow. US moviegoers are getting quite a fix of Scott Thomas lately. Last week, French romantic thriller “Leaving” — showcasing even more impressive work by the actress as a neglected housewife in an updated “Madame Bovary”-style melodrama — hit theaters, drawing mixed reviews but further critical huzzahs for her performance.

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  • Metacritic scrutinizes the ‘Social Network’ critics

    Confession: since their utterly senseless redesign, Metacritic has gone from a daily (many times daily, often) stop on my web rounds to a place I barely visit. “It’s like walking through my old high school,” wrote my friend Nick, echoing my thoughts precisely. “I used to live here, now I can’t even find the bathroom.”

    It’s all for the best, probably: the less brain space I devote to the numerical quantification of critical opinion that, for some folks, now seems to stand in the place of critical opinion itself, the better for my sanity. I know which critics I like and/or which ones matter, and I can just as easily visit them in their own online living rooms.

    That said, I remain fascinated by how the advent of review-scoring has made the media (the new media, in particular) unprecedentedly obsessed with the role of critics — at a time when their opinion seemingly couldn’t have less influence on the paying public. This year alone, we’ve already seen flare-ups on the blogosphere over the critics who dared to sully the Rotten Tomatoes scores for “Toy Story 3” or “Inception”; the notoriously hard-to-please Armond White has become the critic that everyone claims not to care about, yet the arrival of one of his against-consensus pans is now greeted with mass re-Tweeting.

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  • THE LONG SHOT: When you wish upon a star

    “Mila Kunis is so winning Best Supporting Actress this year,” remarked an independent filmmaker to me over drinks today, referring, of course, to the 27 year-old’s sly breakout turn in Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan.” This was no idle fan statement. The man knew his Oscar onions – his theory was built upon established Academy affection for hot ingénues in sashaying support roles, as well as the current absence of any obvious frontrunners in the category.

    Still, even as he explained this, my eyebrows must have shot up somewhere past my hairline. As the writer who caught hell from many readers for daring not to predict Natalie Portman among my Best Actress nominees last month, the prospect of Kunis even getting nominated for subtly smoking work in an outré arthouse thriller hadn’t crossed my mind. I told him as much while emphasizing, as an admirer of the performance, how much I’d like to be wrong.

    “That’s what everyone says to me,” he replied. “‘Oh, she’s a revelation, I’d love to see her nominated, but she won’t be.’ Whenever I start hearing that kind of talk about a person or a film, that’s when I go to the bookies and put money on them. If everyone’s seeing the same thing in them, who’s to say the voters aren’t?”

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  • Leigh and Manville on their 30-year collaboration

    As you probably know, I’m rooting hard for seasoned character actress Lesley Manville to get her first Oscar nod this year for Mike Leigh’s “Another Year” — and the quality of her piercing tragicomic performance isn’t the only reason.

    For a director renowned for his close relationship with a regular, rotating crew of actors, the Academy’s response to his films thus far hasn’t really reflected that loyalty. Only three thesps (all women) have been Oscar-nominated for their work in a Leigh film — a number far smaller than it should be — and all of them, oddly enough, were tapped for their first collaboration with the director. (Moreover, only one of them has since returned to Leigh: that’d be “Vera Drake” lead Imelda Staunton, who has a striking cameo in his latest.)

    Should Lesley Manville manage a nomination, then, she’ll be the first of Leigh’s regular posse to be thus rewarded. Indeed, Manville is Leigh’s longest-serving ally. She first collaborated with the director on a 1979 radio play before going on to star in six of his feature films, climaxing with a stunning lead turn in 2002’s “All or Nothing” that was shamefully ignored by awards bodies on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s sweet to see the middle-aged actress  finally having her moment in the sun with “Another Year” — she’s earned it.

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  • SHORT TAKE: “It’s Kind of a Funny Story” (**)

    BFI London Film Festival

    (LFF coverage will begin in earnest when the fest itself kicks off next Wednesday. However, given that this film is opening Stateside on Friday, it made sense to yank the review forward.)

    Hitherto a pair of the brightest lights on the American indie-film scene, writing-directing duo Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck share an apparent interest in rerouting classic Hollywood story patterns to a sharper, sadder place. Their first two superb features both took on genres largely characterized by inspirational narratives, only to find compromised hope in irregular resolutions: “Half Nelson” is an idealistic-teacher movie where the educator in question needs as much repair as his students, while “Sugar” is a sports drama whose gifted baseballer hero winds up pursuing the American Dream off the pitch.

    If anyone, then, could breathe new life into the well-fed subgenre of the mental-asylum drama, you’d think it would be these two. Alas, Boden and Fleck have come a cropper with “It’s Kind of a Funny Story,” a terminally precious and timing-deficient youth comedy that sees the filmmakers trading in their quiet, observational character shooting style for an artificial attempt to emulate the tricked-out, capital-Q Quirkiness of early Wes Anderson.

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  • Cholodenko: Hollywood “lopsided” against female directors

    In Oscar-watching, causes can be seasonal things: there’s no guarantee that what the industry and the media jointly declare a crucial issue one year will last to the next. In 1991, “Beauty and the Beast” earned applause for breaking the animation ceiling in Best Picture, but it took 18 years (and a format change) for the Academy to go there again. The year after voters redressed the balance by handing both their lead acting Oscars to African-American actors in 2001, not a single black face featured in either category. Every year has its own story.

    We might well be learning that again this year. In many quarters, 2009 was dubbed “the year of the woman” as a string of successes for female filmmakers culminated in Kathryn Bigelow’s history-making Oscar win.

    This year, however, that level of cheerleading has been largely absent, despite another strong year for women in the field: Debra Granik and Sofia Coppola were the toast of Sundance and Venice, respectively, box-office titan Pixar announced its first female-helmed feature and Lisa Cholodenko’s “The Kids Are All Right” was the crossover arthouse story of the summer.

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  • Foreign Oscar update

    I neglected to mention this over a busy weekend, but the deadline for Best Foreign Language Film Oscar submissions passed on Friday. That doesn’t necessarily mean we have all the contenders set in stone, however — we’re still waiting on the official list from the Academy, which always features a couple of latecomers and a switched selection or two.

    Still, to all intents and purposes, the eventual Oscar shortlist is set to come from the 62 titles entered thus far. (Check out our updated list here.) The most notable submission among the last-minute stragglers is Argentina’s “Carancho,” a romantic legal thriller from director Pablo Trapero — whose previous feature, the strong female proson drama “Lion’s Den,” was the country’s unsuccessful Oscar submission in 2008.

    The film stars Ricardo Darin, a familiar face to that voting branch; the Argentine superstar has headlined five of the country’s last nine entries, including reigning Oscar champ “The Secret in Their Eyes.” The film played in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, where it was rather well-received. I’ll be catching up with it at the London fest this month.

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  • The ‘Social Network’ generation split

    Last week, I mused on the possibility of “The Social Network”‘s highly youth-oriented narrative proving a bit of an obstacle to older audiences, Academy members among them. So far, it seems not to be a problem: judging on reactions I’ve skimmed and conversations I’ve had, interest in the film spans a broad demographic range, as the media saturation has ensured even people who wouldn’t dream of opening a Facebook account are aware of its existence.

    Nevertheless, a couple of articles published over the weekend suggest that the film does still expose a generational divide — just not in simple “will see/won’t see” terms. Rather, as the NYT’s David Carr writes, it’s the way audiences respond to the film and its characters that is likely to differ across age groups, with some seeing it as a cautionary tale and others as a success story:

    “When you talk to people afterward, it was as if they were seeing two different films,” said Scott Rudin, one of the producers. “The older audiences see Zuckerberg as a tragic figure who comes out of the film with less of himself than when he went in, while young people see him as completely enhanced, a rock star, who did what he needed to do to protect the thing that he had created.”

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  • ‘Moon’ redrawn: own a future classic

    I know there are a lot of “Moon” fans and collector types among you, so I thought this worth mention. The great British design studio All City, who dreamed up the justly famous poster for Duncan Jones’s sci-fi debut, have launched a new series of limited edition Redrawn poster concepts for some of their most famous titles of recent years — all of them available to purchase.

    The striking sketch-based prints are all eminently frameable: this rejigged take on the “Moon” poster appears to be the most popular, but I’m just as keen on what they’ve done with the likes of “Control,” “Let the Right One In” and “Spirited Away.” At around $120 to $240 a pop, they’re not quite bargainous, but should age pretty nicely. Check ’em out here; some of my favorites after the cut.

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  • ‘Tree of Life’ not waiting for Cannes?

    When Terrence Malick’s endlessly postponed “The Tree of Life” was finally handed over to Fox Searchlight and ruled a 2011 release, the conversation turned to which festival would get to host the film’s premiere. Many pundits (myself included) assumed that Cannes’s top dog status — in terms of both red-carpet allure and awards heft — would get it the gig, but if this tweet from the ever well-informed Cédric Succivalli is to be believed, we could be seeing it earlier than that.

    Succivalli writes that the film’s French distributor EuropaCorp has confirmed a February 23 release date, obviously ruling out a Cannes appointment three months later. That leaves only two major fests where it could potentially bow: Sundance (an idea Anne Thompson previously floated on Oscar Talk) and Berlin.

    Interestingly, the mid-February Berlinale was the festival of choice for both “The Thin Red Line” (which won the Golden Bear) and “The New World” (which played out of competition), even if neither film actually had its world premiere there. So it wouldn’t be entirely surprising to see “The Tree of Life” extend that relationship.

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  • Tony Curtis (1925-2010)

    This has been such a grim week for losing major industry talents — Gloria Stuart, Sally Menke, Arthur Penn and now Tony Curtis — that I’m almost loath to mention it, lest fate be tempted. But the passing of Curtis can hardly go without at least brief notice: for many, he’ll always come to mind first in the guise of his gleeful Cary Grant send-up from “Some Like It Hot,” but he was also one of the tartest and most evasive leading men of his generation, balancing rote beefcake duty with broad comedy and excitingly off-kilter choices like “The Boston Strangler” and “Sweet Smell of Success.”

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  • On the art of ‘Wall Street’

    Last week, Kris and I came to a disagreement over the merits of Oliver Stone’s splashy, silly and consistently surface-level sequel “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.” Neither of us is disputing that the film is a mess, but where Kris thought it clumsy, ill-judged junk, I was more forgiving in my Cannes review: for me, the film partially succeeds on the level of campy self-satire.

    One thing we can both agree on, however, is that subtlety is not in the film’s vocabulary — least of all when it comes to its gaudy collection of visual cues and symbols. Four months after watching the film, the one that sticks most insistently in my mind is a certain highly recognizable painting in the office of Josh Brolin’s character Bretton James.

    Not content with underlining James’s Mephistophelean deviousness by clothing Brolin in a maroon-colored suit, Stone and ace production designer Kristi Zea (“GoodFellas,” “Revolutionary Road”) have Francisco Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son” (pictured) as his office backdrop to drive home the capital-E Evil of the character.

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  • THE LONG SHOT: Bait, switch

    Whether you choose to believe them or not – and speaking for myself, I don’t quite – the media powers that be have currently reduced the 2010 Best Picture race to just two titles: “The Social Network” and “The King’s Speech.” That’s entirely (and hopefully, lest things get too dull too soon) subject to change over the next four months, but given what we’ve seen at this point, it’s difficult to devise a could-win theory for many of the films most fancied for the remaining eight slots, be it “Inception” or “Another Year.”

    I don’t really blame those in the blogosphere who are narrowing things down to this pair of films: after a lackluster Toronto fest failed to turn up a hidden dragon along the lines of “Slumdog Millionaire,” the slate of contenders looks much as it did before the fall festival season began. With expectations for “Network” and “Speech” pegged high all along, meeting them was enough to seal frontrunner status.

    Moreover, the temptation to pit David Fincher’s modish Facebook story and Tom Hooper’s tony royalty porn against each other is hard to resist, given how conveniently the films are opposed: both acclaimed biopics after a fashion, but one concerned with present-day American youth, the other with British aristocracy of yore. “It’s the time-capsule piece versus the time-warp piece,” snarked one friend of mine recently, anticipating a narrative that will likely run all season, even if other frontrunners enter the fray.

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  • Italy and Spain enter foreign Oscar race

    With the official (though not necessarily final) deadline for submissions just two days away, there’s been a flood of new additions to the list in the past few days, including two big guns that were holding out on us — Italy and Spain. (Check out our updated list, now up to 55 titles, here.)

    Among those who follow this race, all eyes were on Italy’s selection, and not just because the country still holds the record for most wins in the category. (The Italians’ fortunes have dipped rather in recent years, however: since “Life is Beautiful” triumphed in 1998, they’ve managed only a single unsuccessful nod.) With a shortlist of 10 contenders to choose from, it was difficult to predict which way the Italian selectors might lean.

    Many Oscar-watchers assumed that the high-profile Tilda Swinton starrer “I Am Love” would get picked, but that was always unlikely: far less well-received in its home country than in English-speaking territories, chances are the film’s stylistic excesses wouldn’t have been to the Academy’s taste either.

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  • London fest honors Boyle, announces award shortlist

    The 2010 London Film Festival only kicks off in two weeks’ time, but with press screenings having started on Monday, I’m already feeling the festival spirit. (Those of you who follow my Twitter feed may have noticed some 140-character reviews trickling through.)

    Without a major world premiere like “Frost/Nixon” or “Fantastic Mr. Fox” in this year’s lineup, the LFF looks to be a more local affair than recent editions, but they’re still luring in big-name visitors — some of them with the promise of more awards hardware.

    Today, LFF organizers revealed the 11-film shortlist for the festival’s second annual Best Film award, which will be determined by the eminently classy jury of president Patricia Clarkson, Sandy Powell, Gabriel Byrne and Shekhar Kapur. (Should be a cushier judging assignment for Kapur than his Cannes juror stint earlier this year.)

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  • Bardem on his role in González Iñárritu’s “masterpiece”

    Following Mexico’s submission of “Biutiful” to the Academy yesterday, I wrote that I’m sceptical about the film’s chances of nabbing a Best Foreign Language Film nod — but if Roadside Attractions really put some welly into their campaign, a Best Actor nomination for Javier Bardem is looking quite conceivable.

    As a contender, the performance comes with some obvious handicaps. The actors’ branch can be resistant to foreign-language work at the best of times — not least in the Best Actor category, where no non-English performance has been nominated since Roberto Benigni’s 1998 win — and the grim, oblique film won’t be to the taste of many voters.

    (It’s interesting that Roadside face a similar challenge, minus the language barrier, to secure a nod for their Best Actress hopeful Jennifer Lawrence. They certainly haven’t picked the cuddliest of ponies.)

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