Well, not really. But it’s a better song than The Beautiful South’s “Rotterdam Or Anywhere.”
Hup Holland Hup, and all that. I’m off to my friendly local beer garden. How are you celebrating World Cup Final Day?
Author: Guy Lodge
-
‘Kids’ rewind
With a raft of glowing reviews — for those who place stock in such things, its Metacritic score is currently an enviable 86 — and reportedly robust box office returns, it’s fair to call “The Kids Are All Right” the first all-purpose Oscar contender of 2010. So it is with a measure of indignation that some of you have emailed me to ask why we haven’t reviewed it yet.I forgive you, folks: February was a long time ago. For those of you who missed it, or weren’t with us back in the winter months, my full-length review of the film from the Berlinale can be found here. And yes, I like it:
A spry, sun-bleached and often rather sexy study of what makes a family in modern America, “The Kids Are All Right” breezes by so pleasurably it’s easy to forget what a daring and very necessary film it is. Gift-wrapping its smart sexual politics with kicky dialogue, bright visuals and a pleasingly messy tangle of relationships, Los Angeles-born auteur Lisa Cholodenko’s fourth (and finest) feature is her most mainstream to date, but makes a virtue of those concessions.
-
INTERVIEW: ‘Restrepo’ co-director Sebastian Junger
It may have a hard time distracting audiences from shinier baubles on the summer-movie tree, but there are few films currently in theaters more invigorating and essential than “Restrepo.”An unprecedentedly first-hand war documentary, shot on the fly by a pair of filmmakers embedded in a U.S. Army unit stationed in Afghanistan’s perilous Korengal Valley, it emphatically earns the previously overused adjective “immersive”: as Taliban bullets rattle past the camera lens, the terror and confusion of combat hits harder than it has – or could – in any narrative war film.
The film, which expands its release considerably today, leads an already impressive charge of American non-fiction cinema in 2010; it won the top prize at the Sundance Film Festival in January, and we can expect an outcry if due respect isn’t paid by the Academy’s documentary branch.
The achievement is all the more impressive for being the debut film of Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, not that either name is an unfamiliar one. Hetherington is an acclaimed British photographer who won the coveted World Press Photo Award in 2007: interestingly, for an image from the same assignment that bore this film. Junger, meanwhile, is something of a superstar journalist, an adventurer best-known for his 1991 book “The Perfect Storm.” That work may have been Hollywood-ized in 2000, but Junger’s own big-screen ambitions were rather more casual.
-
Kathryn Bigelow elected to AMPAS Board of Governors
Well, this is a pretty nifty ascent for a director whose seven previous features received not a sniff of an Oscar nod between them. Four months after becoming the first female Best Director winner in Oscar history, Kathryn Bigelow has been named one of three first-time electees to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Board of Governors.Joining Bigelow are two other previous Oscar champs: documentarian Michael Moore (I guess AMPAS brass don’t hold a grudge over that acceptance speech) and one of the greatest editors in the history of the medium, Anne V. Coates (“Lawrence of Arabia,” “Out of Sight”). Congratulations all round.
To give you an idea of the exclusivity of the honor, AMPAS has only 43 Governors in total — three for each of their 15 branches (which the exception of Makeup, which has a single representative). Bigelow therefore joins Martha Coolidge and Edward Zwick in leading the Directors branch. Interesting that this long male-skewing branch should now have two female Governors.
-
Tom Hardy on ‘Inception’ and being Nolan
In Kris’s thorough rundown of the collected performances in “Inception,” I was both pleased and unsurprised to see rising British star Tom Hardy come in for praise. From the outset, his is the name I’ve been most intrigued by in the film’s formidable ensemble. Hardy has been doing stellar, even stunning, work on stage, TV and on the Britfilm scene — culminating in a British Independent Film Award for “Bronson” last year that should rightfully have been the start of a longer awards trail.But “Inception” — a minor role in 2001’s “Black Hawk Down” notwithstanding — really marks the actor’s arrival in mainstream Hollywood, and he’s obviously made it an auspicious one. Call it groundwork for his bid for superstardom in George Miller’s revival of the “Mad Max” franchise: he’s an inspired choice to fill Mel Gibson’s shoes, so here’s hoping the rest of the reboot is similarly adventurous.
It’d be exciting to see Hardy become a star, and not merely because he’s a fine actor. His sullen model’s features and inked-up boxer’s physique don’t quite fit Hollywood’s leading-man mold; nor does his messy (and gladly disclosed) backstory of early alcoholism and addiction.
-
Directed by Kevin Macdonald and you
If you’ve ever thought your YouTube videos merit more than a few “ZOMG LOL” comments from bored teenagers with names like “funkychik817,” Kevin Macdonald and Ridley Scott have a proposition for you. In honor of YouTube’s fifth birthday, the filmmakers are collaborating with the video-sharing website producing the first feature documentary composed entirely user-generated footage.
Members of the public are invited to submit videos reflecting an aspect of their daily lives — all of which must be filmed in the 24-hour period of July 24. Macdonald and a presumably large team of editors will sift through the entries and select a “couple hundred” to make up a film titled “A Life in the Day,” which will premiere at Sundance at next year. (Scott will act as executive producer.) Nifty idea — USA Today’s Susan Wloszczyna has more details here.
-
U.S. distrib finally steps forward for ‘Uncle Boonmee’
It’s unusual for a Palme d’Or winner to wait this long after Cannes to find to secure a North American distributor — but then, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s death-dreams-and-monkey-ghosts fantasy “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” is a pretty unusual Palme d’Or winner.You’ll get why it’s such a tough sell when you see it, but that won’t be until spring 2011 for U.S. audiences. It has just been announced that boutique distribution company Strand Releasing — who previously handled Weerasethakul’s features “Tropical Malady,” “Syndromes and a Century” and “Blissfully Yours” — have once again come to the rescue, and will open the film in the quiet half of next year.
Probably the right call: even with the Cannes fanfare, the film is destined to remain an extreme niche item, and would get buried in the late-year crush of more accessible highbrow fare.
-
Moore and Ruffalo are all right, too
Even in the most evenly matched and mutually dependent of ensembles, it seems, some will always be deemed more equal than others. So it is with this summer’s great white indie hope, “The Kids Are All Right.” Since the film bowed at Sundance in January, all its players have been warmly received by critics — but it was Annette Bening, as the more authoritative half of a middle-aged lesbian couple, who initially emerged as the consensus standout and likely awards player.That’s understandable in many respects. It’s a fine performance, and arguably the film’s most surprising: Bening can be a divisively mannered actor, but this is the loosest and most spontaneous she’s yet let allowed herself to be on screen. It doesn’t hurt that, between the film’s adult characters, hers perhaps tests audience sympathies the least.
But in what is plainly a two-lead film at the very least — for my money, there’s a convincing case to be made for Mark Ruffalo’s intruding third parent as a leading player — people shouldn’t be so hasty to hand out best-in-show ribbons.
-
More halfway-mark blues
A few weeks ago, I commented upon the scarcity of viable awards contenders released in the last six months, coming to the unsurprising conclusion that there hasn’t been much to, well, comment upon. In the past few days, however, Variety’s Tim Gray and EW’s Dave Karger have revisited the subject … and haven’t come up with very much either.A common emerging sentiment is that, with such a meagre first-half slate, filling 10 slots on a Best Picture ballot could be a challenge for many voters – and could ultimately result in a decidedly weak nominee field, one with more “Blind Sides” than “District 9s.”
Sasha Stone has challenged this by suggesting that, in what she (if not everyone else) believes will be “a great year for film,” the Academy may end up looking to arthouse or non-summer genre fare to fill the gaps – though, to take two of her listed alternatives, it has to be said that while most critics would be down with “Winter’s Bone” making the list, “Shutter Island” would be a much more contentious nominee.
-
Andrew Garfield is Spider-Man
Yes, the franchise reboot — to be helmed by Marc Webb of “(500) Days of Summer” fame — has finally settled on a leading man, and it’s the 26 year-old, red-haired Brit Andrew Garfield.I can’t say I saw that coming, but it’s a welcome surprise. I’ve been predicting big things for Garfield for some time: he came fourth on my list of the industry’s best under-30 actors last year. This, however, should accelerate that progress big-time.
Some of you will know him from “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” or “Lions for Lambs,” but Garfield’s most impressive work so far has come in British TV projects (that were nonetheless released theatrically Stateside) “Boy A” and “Red Riding: 1974.”
This year should really announce him as a big screen presence, with hefty roles in both “Never Let Me Go” and “The Social Network” waiting in the wings. It’s interesting that the studios have once more opted for actorly credentials over teen-idol status: Tobey Maguire’s CV was similarly high-end (if a little more advanced) when he first donned the suit in 2002.
-
‘Tree of Life’ alone in Apparition stable
Things looked so upbeat for fledgling distribution outfit Apparition when they started out last year. Masterminded by former Picturehouse head Bob Berney, the company was christened with the acquisition of one of 2009’s best films, Jane Campion’s “Bright Star.” A classy roster of titles followed, including “The Young Victoria,” “Fair Game,” “The Runaways” and, most eagerly awaited of all, Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life.”They didn’t quite know what to do with everything they had — “Bright Star” was unfortunately buried by ill-thought scheduling and idle marketing — but they did manage to eke out an Oscar win for “Victoria” before their first birthday, and also nabbed one of the starrier titles at this year’s Sundance fest: the Kristen Stewart and James Gandolfini starrer “Welcome to the Rileys.” Not bad going, particularly in the current indie climate.
How quickly things change in Hollywood. Just before Cannes, Berney caught industry watchers off-guard by pulling out of Apparition, and the company has been reeling from the shock ever since. Anne Thompson reports that co-founder Bill Pohlad has taken the drastic measure of shutting down their New York office and nearly halving the staff.
-
PAGE TO SCREEN: “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro
SPOILER ALERT: By necessity, this article must reveal some key plot developments of the novel, though no more than you might have gleaned from the film’s recent trailer.“(T)hough the tears rolled down my face, I wasn’t sobbing or out of control,” writes Kathy, the young female narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel “Never Let Me Go,” on its final page. She’d certainly be entitled to a good sob: over the course of 31 years and 282 pages, she has had the possibility of real life – with its attendant romance and independence and uncertainty – dangled in front of her, only to be unceremoniously denied at every turn, a Pinocchio figure resigned to eternal wooden form.
That Kathy (to be played by Carey Mulligan in Mark Romanek’s upcoming film) remains so stoic and accepting in the face of even the novel’s most crushing revelations makes her very much of a piece with other Ishiguro protagonists; in many ways, she’s something of a modern-day sister (or daughter) to Stevens, the emotionally stunted butler later played by Anthony Hopkins in “The Remains of the Day,” the only other screen adaptation of the British-Japanese novelist’s work to date.
Stevens denied himself feeling, but the disability of Kathy – and her classmates at Hailsham, the plush private college where they spend their entire childhood – is less autonomous than that: if her responses aren’t entirely human, it’s because she’s not entirely human herself.
You may have heard “Never Let Me Go” described as a work of science fiction, and if you haven’t read it – and, say, are only going on the high-end, contemporary-set romance (albeit with mildly gothic overtones) of the film’s trailer – you could be forgiven for being a bit puzzled by that classification.
-
‘Get Low,’ ‘Monsters,’ ‘Skeletons’ among Edinburgh winners
I have an irritating habit of missing key prizewinners at film festivals, so it was with some astonishment that I perused the list of films honored at the close of the Edinburgh Film Festival — only to find that I’d seen most of them. Considering the brevity of my visit, and my mostly random selection procedure, I can only conclude that the less I prepare for a fest, the better I do.Clearly, it’s not because I have a natural nose for a winner — I’d never have guessed that Aaron Schneider’s sluggish, self-regarding folk tale “Get Low” was a likely winner of the festival’s Audience Award, yet the public evidently responded to it more than I did. No accounting for tastes, I suppose.
This particular award has proven something of a good luck charm in recent years, with winners like “Tsotsi,” “Man on Wire” and “The Secret of Kells” all going on to bigger things — perhaps last year’s Toronto buzz for the Robert Duvall vehicle wasn’t a false alarm after all.
-
EDINBURGH: ‘Monsters,’ ‘The Dry Land,’ ‘Mouth of the Wolf’
My brief trip to the Edinburgh Film Festival came to an end Friday evening, as I hopped on a bus to Glasgow for a weekend with friends — sadly, that means I missed Tilda Swinton’s flashmob dance event, but I’m waving my right hand in the air as I type. It’ll have to do.I had planned to do a separate post for each of my final two days at the fest, but the notable films from that period can be squeezed into a single roundup. It’s perhaps kinder not to dwell on the likes of Britfilm “The Kid” — a paperback misery memoir put to film that bottoms out with Natascha McElhone trying to out-monster Mo’Nique in National Health glasses and oddly well-conditioned hair — while some titles are already old news Stateside.
I dipped into Icelandic director Dagur Kári’s “The Good Heart,” for example, to see if the critical pounding US critics gave it in April was justified. Alas, it was: after this and “The Extra Man” (easily the worst film I saw here) Paul Dano should be wary of any script that calls on him to shack up with batty old codgers in Manhattan. Thankfully, my final day provided me with two of my favorite discoveries of the week, a happy conclusion to a cheerily-run festival that has been needlessly mauled in certain media quarters.
-
AMPAS welcomes 135 new members
Well, we already knew Jeremy Renner had got the nod. And no surprise that many of his fellow acting nominees from this year’s Oscar race — Christoph Waltz, Mo’Nique, Carey Mulligan, Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick among them — have now been granted Academy membership. (Lest you think that the invitation automatically follows a nomination, Saoirse Ronan only gets in now, two years after her nod.)Other inclusions from Oscar’s class of 2009 include directors Lee Daniels and Juan Jose Campanella, writers Mark Boal, Geoffrey Fletcher, Neill Blomkamp, Nick Hornby and Tom McCarthy, cinematographers Barry Ackroyd and Christian Berger, musician T-Bone Burnett, editors Bob Murawski and Joe Klotz, sound designer Paul N.J. Ottosson and costumer Catherine Leterrier.
More thoughts, and the full list of 135 invitees, after the cut.
-
EDINBURGH: ‘Get Low,’ ‘Restrepo,’ ‘Vacation!’
My third day in the ‘Burgh (shut up, I have legitimately heard people call it that) wasn’t as film-heavy as the previous one: social commitments and a certain football match between Slovenia and some other country got in the way. Under these circumstances, three screenings — taken together, as disparate a cross-section of the U.S. indie scene as one could ask for — felt like an entirely honorable commitment, particularly when the first (and worst) of them rewarded me with the still-smarting black eye I mentioned yesterday.Chalk it up, however unfairly, as a further gripe I have with a would-be Oscar vehicle for Robert Duvall that has been pestering the festival circuit since last fall.
“GET LOW” (**)
Oscar-winning short director Aaron Schneider’s feature debut is the kind of prestige production that has critics reaching for adjectives like “handsome” (or, at a push, “elegant”) in the absence of any more compelling emotional connection to the material. If anything, however, the ample visual burnishment on display (it’s no surprise to learn Schneider began his career as an acclaimed cinematographer) only ends up smothering a decidedly minor-key narrative: a folksy slab of mini-Americana that Horton Foote might have penned in a particularly mannered mood, and then binned for lack of consequence.
-
Pixar animators = Renaissance masters?
I’m not saying it — Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones is. In a brief but gutsy blog post, Jones adds an alternative (but still admiring) view to the past week’s pile of love letters to “Toy Story 3,” focusing less on their storytelling and more on their value as fine art pieces.In so doing, he concludes that Pixar and its fellow digital animation studios are artistic innovators equivalent not only to the artists of Disney’s golden age, but Renaissance masters like Leonardo da Vinci:
If you watch the “making of” features on your DVD of the original Toy Story you will be told the story of a modern Renaissance. The Pixar team did not accidentally hit on a new way to make toys apparently come to life on screen. After seeing earlier attempts at digital animation they actively theorised that it was possible to perfect this technology, and to use it to create “real” animated worlds of an intricacy and vitality that would amaze and move audiences in a completely new way … Toy Story and its successors are colossal artistic achievements.
-
EDINBURGH: ‘The Extra Man,’ ‘Two Eyes Staring’ and others
My third afternoon at the festival finds me wandering around the premises boasting a still-expanding black eye – not, alas, from a macho fistfight with Patrick Wilson over yesterday’s evaluation of “Barry Munday,” but from an accidental collision with a handrail after sneaking late into a pitch-dark screening theater this morning. The more I try to explain it, the stupider it sounds; perhaps it’s better to let people think I’m a critic who is truly prepared to fight for his darlings.Not that such darlings are thick on the ground: yesterday’s slate of five films, each one slightly better than the last, nonetheless turned up no true gems.
“THE EXTRA MAN” (*)
It’s a sign of deep-seated trouble in a film when, in spite of an ensemble that includes Kevin Kline, Paul Dano, John. C. Reilly and Celia Weston, it’s Katie Holmes’s appearances that you start looking forward to most. Not that hers is an especially remarkable performance, mind: but playing the kooky, environmentally-obsessed dreamgirl to Paul Dano’s perma-geek protagonist, she’s the only recognizably human element in this insufferably affected society comedy.