The “Inception” marketing finally goes all Escher on us with this rather terrific poster. Is now as good a time as any to admit that, as much as I’m looking forward to Christopher Nolan’s latest, I wish it had another title?
[Source: Yahoo! Movies]
Author: Guy Lodge
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Bated breath
Cédric Succivalli (AKA @OnTheCroisette), the first person you should be following for Cannes updates, just posted this tweet that will bring hope to the hearts of Cannes-watchers everywhere:
A new film is going to be added to the official competition today or over the week-end! Which one do you think it’ll be?
Before you ask, it won’t be “The Tree of Life” — apart from anything else, Alexandre Desplat’s presence on the jury would represent an unallowable conflict of interest.
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Tarantino to head Venice jury
Berlin went with Werner Herzog. Cannes with Tim Burton. Now Venice clearly felt they had to follow suit by tapping an eccentric auteur as jury president for the 67th Venice Film Festival in September. Quentin Tarantino will take the job.It will, of course, be Tarantino’s second stab at chairing the jury of a major European festival: in 2004, he held the position at Cannes, somewhat contentiously throwing his weight behind the decision to award the Palme d’Or to Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Tarantino made no bones about wielding his influence on the awards that year (the runner-up, Park Chan-wook’s “Oldboy” was also a film after his own heart), so it’ll be interesting to see if he’s similarly persuasive in Venice.
Interestingly, unlike Cannes and Berlin, Tarantino has never actually taken a film to Venice — in contrast to last year’s president, two-time Golden Lion champ Ang Lee.
Meanwhile, Variety reports that, in addition to Julian Schnabel’s “Miral,” the Venice lineup will also include Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere,” Monte Hellman’s “Road to Nowhere” and Francois Ozon’s “Potiche.” If all goes according to plan, I’ll be on the Lido once more to let you know how it all goes down. For now, I’ve got Cannes on the brain.
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CANNES PREVIEW: Sizing up the Competition, part one
(This is the first of three Cannes preview pieces we’re running before my festival coverage begins on Wednesday. The first two will break down the 18 films in the running for this year’s Palme d’Or; the third will comb through potential highlights that lie outside the Competition, as well as listing my own most anticipated titles of the festival.)The groans were almost audible from across the Atlantic as Cannes festival director Thierry Frémaux unveiled this year’s Competition lineup, unusually trim at 16 (eventually 18) titles, and shorter than expected on big-ticket auteurs. Where was Terrence Malick, journos wailed. (Not yet ready, ran the simple answer.) Where were Julian Schnabel, Olivier Assayas, Darren Aronofsky? (Not wanted, not eligible, and not ready, respectively.)
As they looked down the very global-flavored list — only two English-language films, only one of them American — more than one blogger suggested that Cannes may not be worth the trip this year.
I say it’s too soon to be disappointed. Frémaux and his team have hardly been obscure in their choices: the list abounds with esteemed critical pets ranging from Mike Leigh to Abbas Kiarostami, Alejandro González Iñárritu to Apichatpong Weereasethakul. It is perhaps a more granola selection than last year’s all-star lineup of Almodóvar, Haneke, Campion, Von Trier, et al, but that one drew just as many accusations (justified, I think) of being too insular and unadventurous — 19 of the 20 directors chosen had been in Competition before. Frémaux, it seems, can’t win.
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UK trailer for ‘The Killer Inside Me’
Sorry for the second lazy embed in a row, but the day serves up what the day serves up. I already offered my thoughts on Michael Winterbottom’s controversial Jim Thompson adaptation from Berlin — it’s a bit of a mixed bag, with Casey Affleck’s riveting lead turn slightly overwhelming the structurally uncertain film. (And yes, Jessica Alba is pretty good in it too.) Still, this British trailer does a superb job of highlighting its atmospheric strengths. It debuted at The Guardian today; a less crisp YouTube version is below.
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A soupçon of ‘Certified Copy’
I’ll begin a more in-depth Cannes preview tomorrow, but I’m happy to trail it with this vaguest of teasers for my own most anticipated film of the festival: Abbas Kiarostami’s “Certified Copy,” starring Juliette Binoche. (Thanks to AwardsDaily for the tip.)
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Almodóvar and Banderas, together again
Speaking as we just were of actors returning from the wilderness, when was the last time Antonio Banderas starred in a film you had any interest in seeing? (Talk to the hand if your answer contains the word “Shrek.”)From strained paycheck jobs like “My Mom’s New Boyfriend” to gruesomely botched prestige projects like “The Other Man” and “Imagining Argentina,” it’s been a lean couple of years for Melanie Griffith’s better half.
But things are looking up for the Spaniard, who rather improbably hits 50 this year. A role in a Woody Allen film is a pretty hit-or-miss proposition these days, but “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” is easily the toniest thing the actor has been attached to in years — we’ll find out next week at Cannes if the film has the goods.
More promising, however, is news of a reunion with the director who launched him to stardom in the 1980s — one Pedro Almodóvar.
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Paging Rene Russo
Honestly, the last time the name “Rene Russo” crossed my mind, I was still wearing school uniform and Bill Clinton was still president of the United States. Even then, it was only fleetingly: if you want the last time she was in a film that actually merited a second thought, we’re looking more at the year my voice broke. (Yes, that’d be “Tin Cup.”) How time flies.Of course, film history is littered with the swiftly curtailed careers of briefly ubiquitous stars — women in particular, given the regrettable age-40 sell-by date the industry still applies to many actresses. Hey, remember Madeleine Stowe? Andie MacDowell? Penelope Ann Miller? I can’t say Russo’s big-screen absence struck me as especially conspicuous, but Telegraph arts editor Sarah Crompton clearly thinks otherwise.
Crompton takes the casting of Russo in Kenneth Branagh’s Marvel comic adaptation “Thor” — her first film role in over five years — as occasion for a valentine to the actress, holding her up as a 1990s ideal of “the woman every woman wanted to be,” and mourning a larger absence in the process.
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Ebert versus the third dimension
By now, you may have read Roger Ebert’s lengthy nine-point diatribe against 3D in Newsweek — it has certainly generated a substantial amount of online conversation in the last few days.On the face of it, as a declared 3D agnostic myself, I should be pleased with the article: when a “Clash of the Titans” proves the technology a potential artistic liability as emphatically as “Avatar” suggests the opposite, 3D needs to be both argued for and argued with.
I fear Ebert, however, has slightly let the opposing side down: his piece is impassioned and sincere, but for every viable point he makes — and there are several — there’s another that is short-sighted, obstinate or just tautological: however much you may agree, it’s difficult to accept “it adds nothing to the experience” and “it’s a waste of a dimension” as separate claims in a serious argument, as opposed to simple whining.
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SHORT TAKE: “Iron Man 2” (**1/2)
“Good is the enemy of Great,” wrote Jim Collins, in one of the more high-maintenance self-help plans you’re likely to encounter. As nice a thought as it is, this law appears to have no place in the world of the Hollywood franchise blockbuster, where Crap is the enemy of pretty much everything, and Good is usually one courtesy too many for time-strapped, dollar-eyed producers.With myriad noisy-yet-joyless “Transformers” types littering the release schedule each summer, then, the bar for commendability is set rather low: it often takes but one redeeming feature to launch such products into critics’ good books in addition to the box office charts.
It’s in this way that Jon Favreau’s “Iron Man” carved a reputation as one of 2008’s pleasant surprises: narratively choppy, technically perfunctory and indifferently performed in support, it nonetheless boasted a star turn from Robert Downey Jr so fleet-footed and gleefully off-message that it made all the surrounding elements seem wittier by sheer association.
It should come as no surprise to students of the Hollywood mainstream that Favreau’s swiftly delivered sequel, already raking in the cash on its European release, aims no higher, and reaches no wider, than its predecessor. By and large, Favreau and his collaborators have figured that the shortcuts they got away with in the first film are still fit for purpose.
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Never knowingly undersold
Spotted this on the homepage of online retailer Zavvi and had to share. Move over, Mr. Welles.
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Sony Classics adopts ‘The Illusionist’
Quelle surprise. “The Illusionist,” Sylvain Chomet’s long-gestating follow-up to the Oscar-nominated “The Triplets of Belleville,” has found the US distributor we all knew it eventually would. Sony Pictures Classics today announced their acquisition of the film, which they are readying for an end-of-year release — mirroring the strategy they took with “Belleville” back in 2003.In doing so, Sony has all but secured its first Oscar nomination of the 2010 season. “The Illusionist” — a riff on an unproduced Jacques Tati screenplay and handily, for me, the year’s best film so far — is too ravishing an animator’s showcase not to gain serious awards notice, and a late-2010 release should keep it fresh on the radar.
In the meantime, the film will continue to wow on the festival circuit. It has already been selected to open the Edinburgh Film Festival in June — an ideal choice, given that the film is something of a valentine to the Scottish capital. Check out my review of the film from the Berlinale here, and an early Russian trailer here.
Full press release from Sony after the cut.
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Cannes finalizes Competition lineup, jury
Those who were hoping that the promised additions to the Cannes Competition selection announced last week would bring some added name appeal to a lineup shorter than usual on star auteurs — particularly in the English-language realm — will be disappointed by today’s announcement. Cease your prayers for “The Tree of Life” to show up … they haven’t been answered.Boosting the number of Competition titles to 18 are “Tender Son: The Frankenstein Project,” from Hungarian director Kornél Mondruczó (who also made the lineup two years ago with “Delta”) and Wang Xiaoshuai’s “Chongqing Blues.”
The latter has been promoted from its initial placing in the Un Certain Regard lineup — which suggests to me that selectors are running thin on options as certain hoped-for candidates have failed to pan out. As it stands, it’s one of the more sober (not to mention shorter) Competition lists in recent memory.
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I am Tilda
Has any actor in recent years put an Oscar to quite such good use as Tilda Swinton? I admit I wasn’t quite behind her win two years ago for “Michael Clayton,” but I’ve enjoyed watching how, after two decades as a kind of alien fringe goddess, she’s recently morphed into a movie star of sorts — still reassuringly batty in her decisions but now capable of propelling a foreign-language arthouse curio like “I Am Love” to healthy box-office returns in the UK. (The film hits US theaters in June.)
It’s interesting, then, to see an array of lustrous poster designs for the film all playing on the “Tilda Swinton, movie star” meme, placing her front, center and glammed-up to the hilt. Take this unused concept from UK designers All City:
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Carter Burwell on musical inspiration for ‘True Grit’
Amid his coverage of the Nashville Film Festival, Nathaniel Rogers at The Film Experience served up a nice little nugget on composer Carter Burwell, the subject of a much-deserved individual tribute at the fest. Naturally, there was much emphasis on his ongoing collaboration with the Brothers Coen, which will continue this year with “True Grit.”His score for the film is still in the conceptual stages, but his current source of inspiration suggests something typically singular is in the works:
“We don’t always see eye to eye.” Burwell noted when discussing his 14th collaboration with Joel and Ethan Coen. But when it came to the conception of the True Grit score “We both had the same idea at the same time: Protestant hymns.” The composer went on to explain that the lead character, Mattie Ross (to be played by Hailee Steinfeld) was so convinced of her own righteousness that they all thought Protestant hymns would be a fine way to play with her misplaced rectitude … He’s currently looking for appropriate hymn recordings but griped that “they all sound too sweet.”
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‘Get Low’ trailer
Hey, remember when an unheralded indie called “Get Low” debuted to standing ovations at Toronto last September? And remember the accompanying talk that Robert Duvall’s second Oscar could be in the bag? And remember when all such talk died as soon as the movie was pushed back to 2010? Such is the give-and-take nature of the festival circuit.
Anyway, it’s baaaaaack. And so, I suspect, will be the Duvall Oscar talk. The trailer sets my Twee Alarm ringing something fierce, but others seem impressed.
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And you thought awards season was over…
Well, you were right. But for the true completists among you — we do promise awards coverage “this deep,” after all — here’s a suitably obscure nugget to wrap up the 2009 parade.The Ivor Novello Awards supposedly honor the finest in British music composition, and while they receive a reasonable amount of press in the UK for their pop music citations, many aren’t aware that they have a film score category too. With that in mind, the nominees for Best Original Film Score are:
John Powell, “Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs”
Helene Muddiman, “Skin”
Ilan Eshkeri, “The Young Victoria”Well, now you know. I’d say the nominating committee clearly didn’t see “Moon,” but hell, they saw “Skin.” Curious. Still, any organisation that recognises the songwriting skillz of both Lily Allen and The Duckworth Lewis Method ain’t all bad.
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Because it made me laugh
Is “Iron Man 2” really just 10 days away? This is the buzziest thing I’ve seen about it.