In Contention

Author: Guy Lodge

  • ‘Certified Copy’ trailer

    Those who followed my Cannes coverage will know that “Certified Copy,” Abbas Kiarostami’s first film shot outside his native Iran, was comfortably my favorite film of the festival — and one of my favorites of the year, period. The Guardian posted the British trailer yesterday; they’re claiming an “exclusive,” though it’s actually been in UK cinemas since last week. I hesitated before posting this, and not only because a crisp embed has yet to emerge: the trailer doesn’t serve the film terribly well, though it’s admittedly a talky piece that’s tricky to market. It should, however, give you an inkling of why Juliette Binoche took well-deserved gold at Cannes — in a fair world, she’d be right in the thick of the Best Actress discussion. Click on the image to check it out at The Guardian, or watch the (slightly fuzzy) embed after the cut.

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  • Venice to host midnight premiere of ‘Machete’

    The full lineup  for the Venice Film Festival is due shortly, but several pieces are already falling into place. We know that “Black Swan” and “The Tempest” will be bookending the proceedings, while yesterday’s Toronto festival list indirectly gave away several of the titles we’ll be seeing on the Lido.

    Now comes a slightly less highbrow inclusion, as Venice organisers have announced that Robert Rodriguez’s “Machete” will have its world premiere as a midnight screening on September 1, the opening night of the festival — right after Darren Aronofsky’s latest, in other words. Clearly, I’m not going to be allowed much sleep on my first day. Same as it ever was.

    Of course, the film opens Stateside only two days later, but it’s a nice little launchpad all the same. Good for the festival, too, which appears to be balancing populist and arthouse concerns quite ably. Full press release after the cut. Kris, meanwhile, reported on the film’s Comic-Con presence (and its red-band trailer) here.

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  • PAGE TO SCREEN: “The Accidental Billionaires” by Ben Mezrich

    (NOTE: This week’s Page to Screen text is the source material for David Fincher’s upcoming film “The Social Network.”)

    If, with its short, sketchy chapters and preponderance of surface-level description, Ben Mezrich’s “The Accidental Billionaires” resembles less a work of literary non-fiction than a treatment for a more substantially developed screenplay, that’s probably precisely what the author intended: after all, the movie rights to Mezrich’s thin, gossipy account of the birth of Facebook were snapped up well before he’d even finished writing it.

    Mezrich has turned this trick before: his 2003 bestseller “Bringing Down the House,” the story of a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology students who managed to swindle millions out of top Las Vegas casinos, was recently turned into a reasonably profitable (if rapidly forgotten) film, “21.” Mezrich’s work certainly commands more respect from Hollywood than it does from literary critics.

    A former sci-fi author, Mezrich delights in fudging (and often blatantly fabricating) the facts in his non-fiction work: a disclaimer at the start of “The Accidental Billionaires” acknowledges that numerous “conversations and scenes [have been] recreated and compressed,” verbs that sound decidedly euphemistic by the time the writer is casually describing the interior thoughts of people he admits to never having met. (Mark Zuckerberg, the young Facebook founder at the center of Mezrich’s story, refused any meetings or interviews with the author, giving this already skimpily researched volume a distinctly lopsided perspective.)

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  • ‘Never Let Me Go,’ ‘Rabbit Hole’ among Toronto premieres

    Toronto International Film Festival organisers unveiled a typically cluttered lineup of galas and premieres for this year’s edition — including, as usual, a number of films pencilled in as 2010 awards contenders.

    Of the 50 titles announced thus far, half will be world premieres: those include such highly anticipated works as Mark Romanek’s “Never Let Me Go,” John Cameron Mitchell’s “Rabbit Hole,” Robert Redford’s “The Conspirator,” Tony Goldwyn’s “Conviction” and Rowan Joffe’s “Brighton Rock.” The remaining half have either appeared at previous festivals — with a hefty contingent from Cannes, including Mike Leigh’s “Another Year,” Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Biutiful” and Woody Allen’s “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” — or look set to make their debut at Venice the week before.

    With Venice due to reveal its own lineup tomorrow, the fact that such still-unseen titles as Ben Affleck’s “The Town,” Francois Ozon’s “Potiche,” Julian Schnabel’s “Miral,” John Madden’s “The Debt” and Tom Hooper’s “The King’s Speech” are all marked only as North American premieres would appear to confirm that they are all Lido-bound. (I’m surprised, however, that Guillaume Canet’s “Little White Lies” will be making its first appearance at Toronto rather than at a European festival.)

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  • Taymor’s ‘Tempest’ to bookend Venice fest

    Days after naming Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” as the festival’s curtain-raiser, the Venice Film Festival’s have picked another not-entirely-expected title to close the fest on September 11: Julie Taymor’s long-delayed Shakespeare adaptation, “The Tempest.”

    The decision to bookend proceedings with highly anticipated U.S. productions suggests the Venice brass are aiming for higher star wattage on the Lido than at last year’s low-key edition, which opened with Giuseppe Tornatore’s misfire “Baaria” and closed with the little-seen Chinese portmanteau pic “Chengdu, I Love You.” More strategically, this choice of closer seems calculated to compel journalists to stay for the full duration of the fest — something of a challenge when Toronto begins but a few days earlier.

    I admit I hadn’t counted on seeing Taymor’s film, which stars Helen Mirren as a gender-switched Prospero in the director’s typically loose interpretation of the Shakespeare standard, in the fall festival pack — though distributor Disney (picking up where Miramax left off) had already confirmed a December release date.

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  • ‘Margaret’ will see light of day, says Searchlight

    Last year, I dedicated a couple of posts to the mysterious case of “Margaret,” Kenneth Lonergan’s seemingly terminally delayed follow-up to his 2000 directorial debut “You Can Count on Me.” The film, a character drama starring Anna Paquin as a traumatised witness to a bus accident, with Mark Ruffalo and Matt Damon in support, was shot in 2005 — but has been stuck in the editing suite ever since.

    Working from a vast, ambitious 168-page script, Lonergan has reportedly been unable in four years to complete a cut of the film that pleases him. (This extensive LA Times report details the financial and legal consequences of his creative blockage.) However, just as the issue had slipped from memory — with many assuming the film would never be released at all — Anne Thompson dropped this brief but encouraging update from distributor Fox Searchlight a few days ago:

    Searchlight states: “we do have a finished cut by Lonergan and we plan to release the film sometime in 2011.”

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  • ‘The Company Men’ trailer

    The debut feature of director John Wells (best known for his TV work on such series as “ER” and “The West Wing”) garnered fairly reserved reviews at Sundance in January. The trailer, which hit yesterday via Yahoo! Movies, does play a little on the beige side, but the story is topical, the cast excellent (always nice to see Rosemarie DeWitt getting work) and The Weinstein Company is putting it out in the prime real estate of late October. Maybe there’s something here. Maybe not. Judge for yourself by by clicking the link below, or watch the embed on the jump.

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  • Aronofsky’s ‘Black Swan’ to open Venice

    [FURTHER UPDATE: Focus has confirmed that “The American” will not, in fact, be appearing at Venice.]

    [UPDATE: “Black Swan” has indeed been confirmed as the Venice opener, and will play in Competition. More soon.]

    I’ve been saying for some time that this year’s Venice Film Festival looks to be a very good vintage, capitalizing on the number of highly anticipated auteur works that weren’t quite ready in time for Cannes. Even with Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” still a major question mark — some are even suggesting it won’t surface this year — there’s plenty to get quivery about besides, as is clear from this tasty Variety piece.

    Nick Vivarelli’s article reiterates the titles — including Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere” and Julian Schnabel’s “Miral” — that have long been all-but-guaranteed to show up at Venice, but adds some tantalizing new ones. Chief among them is Darren Aronofsky’s ballet psycho-thriller “Black Swan,” which will premiere as the festival’s opening film on September 1.

    The press release breaking the news, and more Venice possibilities, after the cut.

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  • LA Times on DC vs. Marvel

    Full disclosure: I don’t do comics. It’s not a matter of snobbery or dislike — I quite admire the medium, in fact — but I wasn’t brought up on them and can’t fabricate the kind of lifelong enthusiasm they inspire in others. The pile of unread novels on my bedside table is high enough without bringing graphics into the equation.

    This is a roundabout way of saying that talk of the rivalry between Marvel and DC Comics means about as much to me personally as that of the teams atop the German Bundesliga table — I understand both the game and the stakes, but my knowledge of the players themselves is elementary at best. So I found this LA Times article, in which Geoff Boucher and Ben Fritz break down the recent fortunes of Marvel and DC’s respective film production divisions, rather enlightening.

    With DC Entertainment’s extreme polarities of success (Christopher Nolan’s Batman pictures) and failure (the still-reeking “Jonah Hex”) putting them on shakier economic ground than the more consistent Marvel, the studio has appointed former “Harry Potter” brand manager Diane Nelson and comic-book writer Geoff Johns to take the reins. Nelson’s background is telling: parent company Warner Bros. will be relying heavily on DC Entertainment to plug the gap left when the Potter film series concludes next year.

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  • Wahlberg talks up ‘The Fighter’

    When I remarked in a post yesterday that the upcoming awards season looks a little short on the high-profile biopic contenders so beloved of Academy voters, I had a feeling I was forgetting something obvious. And so I was: “The Fighter,” David O. Russell’s biopic of against-the-odds boxing champ “Irish” Micky Ward, starring Mark Wahlberg in the title role.

    In Friday’s episode of Oscar Talk, Kris expressed his high hopes for the film, singling out Christian Bale (as Ward’s half-brother and trainer Dicky Eklund) as a rumored standout. His faith is reflected in the updated predictions to your right, including potential bids in the two top races, as well as three acting categories. (Melissa Leo is currently tapped for Best Supporting Actress, but Amy Adams could be in the mix too.)

    Anne Thompson responded somewhat skeptically to Kris’s enthusiasm, suggesting that Russell’s film (should it turn out well, of course) is in a position to take some in the industry by surprise — always a good place to be from an awards-campaign standpoint. Meanwhile, it would appear that the film’s minders are opting not to build up buzz via the fall festival track: in this Collider interview, Wahlberg explains that they’ll likely skip Toronto and the rest, choosing instead to “go out and go big” with a December release.

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  • Oren Moverman, Kurt Cobain and the biopic

    One of my favorite current film writers, Ryan Gilbey, has an excellent piece in today’s Guardian on the subject of biopics — in particular, on the rise of the postmodern biopic in the face of Hollywood’s increasingly tepid stabs at the form. It’s a good read, but far better is the unabridged version of the article at Gilbey’s own blog, which contains some fascinating nuggets cut by the Guardian subs.

    Among them is this intriguing tidbit on an upcoming Kurt Cobain biopic from writer Oren Moverman. Moverman was, of course, a semi-surprise Oscar nominee earlier this year for his screenplay of “The Messenger,” but more pertinently to the subject at hand, he also co-wrote Todd Haynes’s oblique Bob Dylan study “I’m Not There.”

    Talking to Gilbey after the cut, Moverman explains that his next stab at the life of a rock icon won’t be quite as avant-garde as Haynes’s film (or Gus van Sant’s “Last Days,” for that matter), but he has no intention of ceding to the ‘greatest hits’ biopic structure so favored by Hollywood screenwriters.

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  • Degrees of devotion

    The best thing that came out of last week’s online fracas over assorted critics’ response to “Inception” was a brief swell in useful conversation about critical nuance and responsibility. On Thursday, I touched on the Rotten Tomatoes-trained tendency of many readers to box film criticism into distinct ‘love’ and ‘hate’ camps, and as far as I’m concerned, US-based British writer Tom Shone has pretty much the last word on the matter. Responding to a Sasha Stone post about the blogger/critic divide, Shone writes:

    The blogger/critic dust-up over Inception illustrates the divide between those who for whom love of a film means nothing less than full-throated devotion, coupled with a blindness to all its flaws — a kind of creeping politesse that insists on nary a bad word be said of the great and the good. The kind of writer for whom the words “genius” and “masterpiece” silence all internal debate. And those whose admiration for a film or filmmaker comes striated with a sense of its imperfections, who see no contradiction between loving a film and finding fault with it — the faults peg their admiration higher. The blogosphere seems sometimes to forget this. They mistake reverence for respect. They’re strangely pious. Again: where are the outlaws?

    I have nothing further. (P.S. He likes “Inception” just fine.)

  • ‘Inception’: the dream is (too) real

    It seems almost mandatory to begin any discussion of “Inception” with an acknowledgement of its scale of ambition – both aesthetic and intellectual – not least when set against the sights of most other $200 million summer studio pictures.

    So yes, let’s acknowledge it. Christopher Nolan’s latest is an uncommonly heady and intricate tentpole blockbuster, taking on themes of memory, mortality and family that, in conventional Hollywood logic, don’t tend to mesh with noisy, rain-sodden car chases and 007-style explosions in remote Arctic fortresses. I saw it on Monday in pristine IMAX splendor, and took immense pleasure in watching something on that scale that demanded to be kept up with, puzzled out, mentally reassembled, and not merely looked at. And yes, in a season of few mainstream pleasures — and unsurprising ones at best – I’m glad it’s in theaters.

    But it’s easy to praise “Inception” for not being the film it was never intended to be in the first place. Certainly, we can pat Nolan on the back for having crafted an immeasurably brainier and more beautiful summer blockbuster than “Transformers 2,” or even “Iron Man 2,” but to me, it feels glib and condescending to do so: handling with kid gloves a work that asks to be judged by more rigorous standards.

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  • Meet me halfway

    (Yes, more “Inception.” I’ll be writing about it once more today. Certain readers have been warned.)

    One day away from “Inception,” and after a fresh spate of reviews hit the web in the past few days, a familiar “you’re either with us or the terrorists” mentality is starting to emerge. We had a taste of it last month, when critics not on board with “Toy Story 3” were taken to task for daring to sully its Rotten Tomatoes rating — and already, even mild detractors of Christopher Nolan’s latest are being branded “bitter,” “haters” or simply “wrong” by the film’s more enthusiastic online champions.

    Predictably, some are labeling the film a “love it or hate it” deal — a statement that necessitates boxing a number of mixed or conflicted reactions into the “hate it” pile to be true. Todd McCarthy’s indieWIRE review, for example, is a respectful piece that nonetheless states some reservations with the film, but has been conveniently described by Jeff Wells as a “slam.” I’ll detail my own thoughts on “Inception” later today, but I’m already being told in some quarters that I’m against the film because I judged it a flawed-but-respectable “B/B-” effort in my initial Twitter take.

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  • PAGE TO SCREEN: “London Boulevard” by Ken Bruen

    When Oscar-winning screenwriter William Monahan (“The Departed”) brings Irish crime writer Ken Bruen’s 2001 novel “London Boulevard” to screen in his directorial debut, he won’t be adapting the text so much as returning it to its natural source.

    A short, sharp, deliciously black-hearted thriller that reads not unlike a readymade screenplay in its brisk, dialogue-dominated prose, Bruen’s novel makes its debt to Hollywood clear not only in its construction (brief, propulsive chapters of only a couple pages’ length resemble individual cinematic scenes) and its assorted winking namechecks of bygone films and stars, but in its very conception.

    The title – not a location (locals will know that there is no London Boulevard in the British capital) but a metaphor of sorts – is our first clue to what Bruen is up to: the novel is itself an adaptation, and Billy Wilder’s gothic Hollywood noir “Sunset Boulevard” is the source material.

    The novel’s allusions to the 1950 classic aren’t exactly subtle. Where Wilder’s film gave us Joseph C. Gillis, a destitute L.A. screenwriter who seeks shelter in the mansion of faded movie goddess Norma Desmond to escape the repo man, “London Boulevard” crosses the Channel, jumps a half-century forward, and replaces Gillis with Mitchell, a middle-aged ex-con who dodges the ghosts of his past (and his own compulsive criminal urges) by shacking up in the plush Holland Park pad of Lillian Palmer, a washed-up theater diva plotting her triumphant West End return.

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  • Now what?

    With “Inception” very nearly upon us, those of you who have been salivating over Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster for months on end will need to find something else to look forward to. Call it waiting withdrawal, if you will.

    Happily, the good folks of In Review Online have compiled a handy list of their 25 most anticipated films due in the latter half of 2010 (or later, depending on the US distribution situation). Thanks mostly to my festival exploits of the past year, I’ve already seen nine of them, most of them well worth waiting for — and the InRO editors were kind enough to invite me to write up my favorite film of the year thus far, Sylvain Chomet’s “The Illusionist,” for the list:

    If seven years seems like a long time to have waited for a feature-length follow-up to French animator Sylvain Chomet’s cheerfully batty “The Triplets of Belleville,” the intricacy of the hand-drawn imagery on display in “The Illusionist” should put you in a forgiving mood. (Beauty shouldn’t be rushed, as Heidi Montag could well tell you.) It’s been some time since we’ve heard from Jacques Tati, too, though his entirely reasonable excuse is that he’s been dead for 27 years.

    Read the rest, and their thoughts on 24 other films, here. No prizes for guessing their (and everyone else’s) #1.

  • Keep an eye on it

    Writing from Cannes in May, I broke form to issue my only concrete Oscar prediction of the year: that Oliver Schmitz’s South African AIDS-crisis drama “Life, Above All” (then competing in the Un Certain Regard strand) will be nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar next year, and could even win.

    “Is it that bad?” quipped some of my colleagues after I wrote this. On the contrary: Schmitz’s film, impressively shouldered by 12 year-old actress Khomotoso Manyaka, takes a measured, moving approach to subject matter that could lend itself to didacticism. It’s a richer, more searching film than Darrell James Roodts’s similarly themed “Yesterday,” which, you might recall, earned South Africa its first Oscar nod in the category five years ago.

    Human-interest themes and child-led narratives often score with voters in the foreign-language race, and between last year’s surfeit of cinematic interest and this year’s World Cup exposure, it’s fair to say that South Africa is having a bit of a moment right now. That was my reasoning behind the prediction in May — and that was before a very valuable player entered the scene in the shape of Sony Pictures Classics.

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  • Hey, want David Lynch on your wall?

    I mean, what self-respecting teenaged girl doesn’t? Well, good news. A new documentary is being made about the maverick/ingenious/enigmatic/barking auteur, and its makers are funding it entirely with online fan donations. Before you reach for your small change purse, however, it should be said that they’re after contributions of $50 per person.

    What do you get in return, other than the warm, self-satisfied glow that comes with being a patron of the arts? Well, for one thing, you get some David Lynch art (after a fashion) yourself. The director has drawn the lovely, wholly anatomically accurate self-portrait that you see to your right — and all donors will receive a limited edition collectible print, to frame on your bedroom wall and have your dreams haunted by for years to come.

    You can also receive it printed on a T-shirt or tote bag — make multiple donations and your Christmas shopping will be sorted before the summer is out.

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