In Contention

Author: Guy Lodge

  • EDINBURGH: ‘Au Revoir, Taipei,’ ‘Barry Munday,’ ‘brilliantlove’

    Arriving at a festival at the halfway mark is a little like turning up late to a party where the food has been eaten and the guests you know are already starting to leave – the night may not be over, but you’re going to have to work your way into it.

    So it was when my train pulled into Edinburgh yesterday afternoon: the comparative glamour of last week’s UK premieres for “The Illusionist” and “Toy Story 3” are old news, the press contingent has already thinned out and one is left to badger those who remain for hot screening tips. Admittedly, I hadn’t really done my homework beforehand: for the first time, I turned up at a festival having only glancingly browsed through the programme.

    Not that that’s too much of a disability at Edinburgh, a festival so thick with new names from the indie sector that most screenings can be seen a lucky dip of sorts: five films in, I’ve only scored once. (With a film is delightful as the first reviewed after the cut, however, once is quite enough.)

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  • No Page to Screen this week

    With the Edinburgh Film Festival occupying my attention this week — more on that in a moment — my weekly Page to Screen feature has gone on vacation too. It’ll be back next Tuesday, with Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go” the topic of discussion.

    As you were.

  • Films for my father

    Last year, Kris celebrated Father’s Day with a lovely list of films that are, for him, inextricably connected to his old man. That day has rolled around once again, and because I’m lazy, I’ve resorted to a poster tribute instead. What follows are 10 titles that I have, in my mind, re-dedicated to my own father for one reason or another. Some are old favorites that he introduced to me, others are newer discoveries we made together. One is the first film he ever took me to see on his own, another is the first I took him to see after I’d left the nest. I only chose on the former occasion.

    All are films he’s very fond of, or at least claims to be; I can’t quite say the same, but I’ll keep trying with “Where Eagles Dare.” Happy Father’s Day, Tom.

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  • Who needs consensus?

    If you keep up with the American critical scene, you’ll probably have got the message by now that people kinda like “Toy Story 3.” No surprise there: every one of Pixar’s features since their 2006 misfire “Cars” has been greeted with the kind of mass veneration usually reserved for returning messiahs, and on at least a couple of occasions, they’ve deserved it. (That’s no dig at their latest, which I have yet to see.)

    You’ll also likely have heard that a certain Armond White is less impressed, dismissing the film as “drivel” and adding that “‘Transformers 2’ already explored the same plot to greater thrill and opulence.” Of course, in its own way, this is as knee-jerk and predictable a response as many critics’ annual ejaculation over the Pixar brand; White is accused virtually on a weekly basis of disingenuous contrarianism. It’d have been greater cause for concern if he’d liked the movie.

    As exasperating as he can be, I’ve stood up for White on these pages before, and I continue to do so: as I wrote on Twitter last night, I see his reviews as calculated provocations to the reader, forcing them to engage with the idea of critical responsibility. And for all the talk of “trolling,” I do think he’s conditioned himself to the point where he believes every word he writes — for better or worse.

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  • Ronald Neame (1911-2010)

    It’s inevitable, but somewhat depressing, that most of the obituaries cropping up for British filmmaker Ronald Neame, who passed away yesterday in Los Angeles aged 99, mention “The Poseidon Adventure” at the top. (And look, I’ve only gone and done it myself.)

    As a director, writer, producer and cinematographer, Neame’s résumé is considerably more scattered and interesting than that hoary slab of big-studio Velveeta — including trick-laden DP duty on “Blithe Spirit,” Oscar-nominated script work on David Lean’s “Brief Encounter” and “Great Expectations” and a good run of unflashy but considered directorial efforts.

    Second to “The Poseidon Adventure,” Neame might remain best-known for directing Maggie Smith to her Oscar-winning (and career-best) performance in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” but on the less tony end of the scale, he had a knack for peppy comedy, including two delightful capers with happily mismatched star duos, “Gambit” (Shirley MacLaine and Michael Caine) and the particularly underrated “Hopscotch” (Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson).

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  • Combing through the first-half contenders

    With the year nearly at its midway point, the Hollywood Reporter’s Gregg Kilday has taken on the rather fruitless task of sussing out potential Oscar contenders from the last six months of releases. As you will no doubt be shocked to hear, he doesn’t find many — declaring “Toy Story 3” the year’s first viable Best Picture nominee (just as Pixar’s “Up” wound up as the earliest release on the 2009 slate).

    Not that this is a particularly new phenomenon. Bar the occasional “Crash,” “Erin Brockovich” or “The Silence of the Lambs” — films that tend to grow into their Oscar-contender status rather than have it thrust upon them — studios tend to save their prestige product for the year’s latter stages. Everyone and their pet lizard knows that.

    But as Kilday points out, considering last year’s expansion of the Best Picture field was a shameless grab for more blockbuster nominees, none of this year’s summer (or spring) behemoths up to now could be deemed credible contenders. (That he even bothers to consider the chances of “Alice in Wonderland” is cause for major shuddering.)

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  • DiCaprio and Eastwood team for Hoover biopic

    After three consecutive duds (in my book, anyway), Clint Eastwood will have to work hard to earn my anticipation again — harder, certainly, than dipping into the biopic well once more — but he sure gets full marks for persistence. Undeterred by his recent strike-outs with the Academy, he continues to assemble the most on-paper baity projects around — this time, a J. Edgar Hoover biopic written by Oscar-winning “Milk” scribe Dustin Lance Black and starring the Oscar-primed Leonardo DiCaprio. The only way this can miss is if it’s even half as dull as, well, “Invictus.”

    The project, of course, has been in the ether for some time; Deadline Hollywood offers the following précis of its development:

    The project began at Universal, where Imagine is based, but came together at Warners, which Eastwood’s Malpaso has long called home. Imagine had been developing the Dustin Lance Black script for over a year before showing it to Universal, where the reaction was negative. But then Grazer got the screenplay to pal Clint (they did The Changeling and have had a personal relationship ever since), the two men met about it in mid-February, and the film has been on the fast track at Warner Bros.

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  • The future is now… almost

    I love Steven Spielberg’s 2002 “Minority Report” for a number of reasons — it’s the director’s most searching and adventurous film since a certain 1993 Oscar champ, it’s got ideas as big as its set pieces and it’ll likely remain history’s only $100 million summer blockbuster to star Samantha Morton.

    All good things. But what I like most about the film is that it contains one of the cinema’s few visions of the future that I actually look forward to living in — I know I’m not the only person who was reduced to pre-adolescent gosh-wow effusiveness by its gadgetry. (For one, I know that any attempt to interest my mom in a faddish computer gizmo will result in the reply, “Until I can control the whole thing with my hands, like in “Minority Report,” I’m not interested.”)

    Good news, mom: according to this neat piece in the Guardian’s technology pages, we’re getting there. Eight years after the release of Spielberg’s film, journalist Charles Arthur offers a progress report of sorts on the film’s various futuristic inventions — pointing out the significant strides already made towards the realization of dynamic iris recognition, personalized advertising (already broached in an online capacity) and even “pre-crime” technology.

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  • Boyle and Daldry get Olympic gig

    If you can tear your thoughts away from the World Cup for a second, cast your mind back to the opening ceremony of the 2008 summer Olympics in Beijing. Pretty spectacular, wasn’t it? You might recall that that mammoth production was steered by Zhang Yimou, a one-time rebel filmmaker now safely enfolded into the system.

    Organizers of London’s 2012 Olympic effort have clearly filched the Chinese memo, as they’ve secured their own now-cuddly auteur as artistic director of their opening ceremony — one Mr. Danny Boyle. Not content with that, they have decided to double up on the movie names, tapping Stephen Daldry as one of four executive producers of the Olympic and Paralympic ceremonies.

    (Clearly, in a complicated tribute to the last Olympic year, they’re just running through the 2008 Oscar slate: I expect David Fincher is in charge of catering or something.)

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  • Edinburgh fest kicks off with ‘The Illusionist’

    Last year’s Edinburgh Film Festival served me rather well, giving me my first look at “Antichrist,” “The Hurt Locker,” “Fish Tank,” “35 Shots of Rum,” “Mary and Max” and “London River,” all of which wound up in my Top 20 of 2009. (It was also where a little film called “The Secret of Kells” made its first awards bow, more than seven months before Hollywood cottoned on to it.)

    This year’s edition begins today; unfortunately, I’m unable to cover the entire fest this time, though I will be there for five days next week. Thanks to my other festival exploits this year, however, I am already acquainted with tonight’s opening film, “The Illusionist.”

    I reviewed Sylvain Chomet’s sublime beyond-the-grave Jacques Tati collaboration out of Berlin in February, and the film still sits comfortably atop my Best of 2010 list. Tonight’s Edinburgh premiere should be a sweet one, given how besotted the film is with that very city.

    More on the film, including a new trailer, after the cut.

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  • Guard your secrets

    Yes, another “Inception” post — the wilting lettuce garnish and half-nibbled canapés that make up this year’s summer-movie buffet aren’t providing us with a wealth of conversation topics, you may have noticed.

    Brent Lang’s lengthy piece in The Wrap on the film’s marketing strategy covers a familiar angle: positioning the film as the Great White Hope for original material in rehash-crazy Hollywood, while noting the commercial risks posed by its cerebral subject matter in the current climate. (Less familiar is the description of “Public Enemies” as a “high-concept” blockbuster — huh? — but Lang gets his point across.)

    Two things in the article, however, struck me as worthy of mention. The first, which may or may not be significant, is that Lang relies largely on the internet community for quotes, tapping Drew McWeeny of HitFix, Mike Sampson of JoBlo, Steve Weintraub of Collider and Alex Billington of FirstShowing ahead of any print journos or industry representatives.

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  • PAGE TO SCREEN: “The Long Walk” by Slavomir Rawicz

    In one of the year’s more groan-worthy feats of movie marketing magic, Disney recently slapped their plucky horse ’n’ housewife drama “Secretariat” with a paradox of a tagline in “The Impossible True Story.” No sooner had they done so than assorted sniggering blogger types responded with a perfectly reasonable question: if the story is impossible, how can it be true?

    That said, whoever ends up handling Peter Weir’s currently distributor-less “The Way Back” may rather wish they had bagged this ropey tagline first. Adapted from the ghostwritten 1956 memoir by Slavomir Rawicz, a former Polish cavalry officer and Gulag labor camp survivor, the film tackles a story that is indeed “impossible” in the Disney-dictionary sense – read: extraordinary – but also, to some extent, in the literal one: two years after his 2004 death, Rawicz’s account was entirely discredited by historians.

    In the book, following the 1939 invasion of Poland, a 25 year-old Rawicz is arrested, tortured and unjustly convicted of treason by the Soviets. Sentenced to 25 years’ hard labor in the remote Gulags of Siberia, he is placed in a POW chain-gang and subjected to a gruelling two-month journey northwards, whereupon the scarcely less arduous drill of prison life begins.

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  • Christopher Nolan speaks out on 3D

    Even with “Inception” still unseen, media and fans alike are hopefully positioning Christopher Nolan as both the artistic and commercial savior of the Hollywood blockbuster in this dreariest of summers. So his views on the lingering point of contention that is 3D strike me as more pertinent than most. And while lofty names from Scorsese to Herzog are boarding the bandwagon, it seems that Nolan — for the time being, at least — remains a sceptic.

    Writing for the LA Times, Geoff Boucher details a Q&A with Nolan that he hosted this weekend, in which the director dwelt on the industry’s current favorite fad, and indirectly alluded to pressure from certain quarters to make the next “Batman” instalment in 3D. At this stage, however, he finds the technology lacking:

    It’s all based on all the visual-effects technology, you know, that we’re currently most engaged in with match moving, so forth, and rendering 2-D imagery into a 3-D space. … On a technical level, it’s fascinating, but on an experiential level, I find the dimness of the image extremely alienating.

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  • Jeremy Renner joins the club

    Every June, bloggers like to pick over the list of newly invited AMPAS members, seeing which recent nominees or long-serving industry stalwarts have been deemed good enough to vote for the Oscars. This year’s crop has yet to be announced, but at least one invitee has been named: Jeremy Renner. Thanks to Steve Pond for sharing this minor but happy tidbit.

    The “Hurt Locker” star — still, I think, the most deserving of 2009’s Best Actor nominees — had his membership made public at Saturday’s Student Academy Awards, by AMPAS president Tom Sherak:

    Introducing actor Jeremy Renner, Sherak … called him “the very talented – and now, brand new member of the Academy, Jeremy Renner.”

    Beaming, Renner walked onstage and said, “Yeah, that does sound good, doesn’t it?”

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  • Hollywood colonizes Broadway

    I wouldn’t normally make much mention of the Tony Awards, which took place in New York last night — this being a film site, after all, and me being an entire ocean away from the U.S. theater scene. (That said, I saw yesterday’s big winner “Red” on its initial run in London, and was suitably impressed. The play, incidentally, is by Oscar-nominated screenwriter John Logan, of “Gladiator” and “The Aviator” fame.)

    Still, when the list of winners contains more Hollywood star power than in an average edition of the Golden Globes, it’s hard not to pay attention. Denzel Washington, Scarlett Johansson, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Viola Davis all took home trophies last night, and while I have only second-hand critical word to go on, I am led to believe that this was merit-based starfucking.

    The victory must taste particularly sweet for Johansson, who took Best Supporting Actress in a Play for her well-regarded turn in a revival of Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge.” With the actress’s screen work of late having made her something of a critics’ punch-bag, this serves as a welcome reminder of her neglected talent — here’s hoping this ushers in some suitable cinematic vehicles for it.

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  • ‘Somewhere’ poster

    The first one-sheet for Sofia Coppola’s latest — starring the Château Marmont, apparently, with support from Stephen Dorff and Elle Fanning — isn’t the most striking image around, but it’s of a piece with the woozy, offhand visual approach in the marketing of her previous films. I feel like I know exactly what to expect here: job done, then. The film, meanwhile, is likely to surface at Venice in September … World Cup and sunshine notwithstanding, can we just skip summer already?  Full version after the jump.

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  • Queen’s Honors for Harwood, Zeta-Jones, Okonedo

    Capping what was a pretty decent day for South Africa yesterday, one of the country’s most notable cinematic sons, Ronald Harwood, was accorded a knighthood in yesterday’s Queen Birthday Honors list. The Oscar-winning playwright and screenwriter (“The Pianist,” “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” “The Dresser”) is the only film figure granted that top honor in this year’s list. He offers this quote in response:

    “I was truly surprised and greatly delighted to learn that I was to receive this honour. I arrived in England in 1951, at the age of 17, from South Africa where I was born in the hope of making my way in the great world. So it has been a long, fruitful and immensely enjoyable journey, crowned by this splendid reward for which I am deeply grateful.”

    Lower down on the list is a trio of British actresses; most elevated among these is a second 2002 Oscar champ, Catherine Zeta-Jones, who was named a Commander of the British Empire for her film and charity work. (Okay, a CBE, but I like the mental image of the “Chicago” star commandeering an entire empire. You know she would.)

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  • Let’s hear it for the boy

    Regular readers will know that there is no current film writer, great or small, whom I look up to more than Nick Davis — a Chicago-based English professor whose blogging balances rich academic perspective with truly heroic levels of Oscar geekdom.

    These two elements combined to form a lifelong project in which Nick resolved to see and rank every one of the 408 performances nominated for Best Actress by the Academy — reviewing 45 of them along the way.

    Insane? Of course. Difficult? Have you tried to locate a copy of, say, 1929’s “The Barker,” with its nominated performance by Betty Compson? (The guy had to go to the UCLA Film & TV Archive to track it down. That’s crazy dedication. Or just crazy.) But congratulations are in order, since Nick just completed this epic undertaking, saving Judy Garland’s iconic turn in “A Star is Born” for last.

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