In Contention

Author: Guy Lodge

  • Schnabel holds ‘Miral’ for Venice

    One of the more eyebrow-raising omissions from the Cannes official selection announced this morning was Julian Schnabel’s “Miral.” The New York artist’s biopic of Hind Husseini, with a cast including Hiam Abbass, Willem Dafoe and Freida Pinto, had been widely deemed a good bet for the competition lineup, given its lofty arthouse profile and the Cannes success of Schnabel’s last feature, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” for which he won the Best Director award.

    Roger Friedman reports, however, that this year Schnabel was offered only an out-of-competition slot by festival organizers. The director declined the offer, choosing instead to unveil the film on the fall festival circuit: “Miral” will therefore premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September, before moving on to Toronto.Venice, of course, is where Schnabel premiered “Before Night Falls” in 2000 — he has form in both festivals.

    If the film turns out well, it won’t be the first time Venice has successfully fed off the bigger festival’s leftovers: both “Vera Drake” and “Brokeback Mountain” debuted on the Lido (and went on to win the Golden Lion) after being turned down by the Cannes selection committee.

  • Cannes official selection unveiled, includes Leigh, Iñárritu

    Okay, before you ask, “The Tree of Life” is reportedly not ready — though the Cannes selection has apparently seen a cut, so never say never. Four slots in the competition lineup have yet to be filled.

    That aside, many of the expected names are present and correct, including former Cannes champs Leigh, Kiarostami, Mikhalkov, Tavernier, Weerasethakul and González Iñárritu. (Beefing up the veteran auteur quotient, Jean-Luc Godard shows up in the very appetizing Un Certain Regard strand, as does 101 year-old Manoel de Oliveira.)

    On paper — which is all we have at the moment, after all — it’s the first two of the aforementioned directors that I’m most excited to see in competition: “Another Year” will mark Leigh’s first trip to Croisette since the undervalued “All or Nothing” in 2002, and boasts the almost unfeasibly Leigh-ian cast of Imelda Staunton, Jim Broadbent, Phil Davis and Lesley Manville.

    Meanwhile, Kiarostami’s “Certified Copy” — a romantic drama starring Juliette Binoche, and the director’s first film to be shot outside his native Iran — has had me curious for the better part of two years now. I sensed this might be afoot when Binoche was revealed as the official face of this year’s festival.

    (More thoughts, and a complete list of films in the official selection, after the cut.)

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  • Hurry, only 319 days until…

    We have less than a month left until Cannes likely triggers the first mass Oscar chatter of the year. (More so if Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” is included in tomorrow’s Official Selection announcement.) These are precious days, then … enjoy them while they last.

    Of course, if my “precious” is your “miserable,” and you’ve spent the last five weeks suffering Oscar-talk withdrawal, the indefatigable Nathaniel Rogers over at The Film Experience has your fix. You’ll remember that Kris decided against doing year-in-advance nomination predictions this year, which makes this very thorough Oscar forecast the first of its kind I’ve seen this year.

    Needless to say, a hefty pinch of salt is required at this foetal stage in the competition — Nathaniel himself headlines his predictions with the caveat “for fun and discussion.” Still, his lists raise some interesting possibilities: most notably, a Best Picture slate with a very different populist-specialist balance to last year’s ten.

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  • Scorsese and Herzog venture into 3D

    If you can’t fix it, you’ve got to stand it. And so it is, apparently, with me and 3D.

    As I’ve written before, I’m not a big fan of Hollywood’s favorite rediscovered gimmick. As a gee-whiz novelty — expertly embellishing the odd genuine event film like “Avatar” — it works a treat. As a now-regular moviegoing ritual — awkwardly grafted onto dreary blockbusters like “Clash of the Titans” and “Alice in Wonderland,” making them even more invasive and exhausting than they need to be — it’s rapidly becoming an irritant. And until some genius fashions 3D glasses that can fit comfortably over an existing pair of spectacles, I’ll remain hostile.

    Clearly, however, I’m going to have to find a way to love the third dimension, as it continues to seep outside the effects-driven blockbuster box, and even into the arthouse. The gentrification, if you will, of 3D took a forward leap this week with the news that both Martin Scorsese and Werner Herzog will be shooting their next projects in 3D.

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  • Streep elected to American Academy of Arts and Letters

    Any Meryl Streep fans still sulking over over her twelfth consecutive Oscar loss last month should dry their eyes right about now. This morning brings the news that the actress has just been honored by a rather tonier Academy, as the American Academy of Arts and Letters has appointed Streep to their ranks.

    Streep joins former honorees like Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen in the American Honorary class of membership, reserved for individuals whose work fall outside the institution’s traditional remit of music, art and literature. She is, however, the first person to be named solely for her achievements in acting.

    If that’s not better than a little gold statue, I don’t know what is.

    A quick glance through the list of the Academy’s living members (ranging from Philip Glass to Frank Gehry, Toni Morrison to Stephen Sondheim, Sam Shepard to Philip Roth) drives home the stunning scale of this honor.

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  • ‘The Kids Are All Right’ trailer

    As you know, I’m a big fan of this Focus summer release, which puts a neat mainstream spin on progressive sexual politics, and boasts Julianne Moore’s best performance in eight years to boot. It’s interesting (and, I think, appropriate) to see this trailer putting the film’s comedic properties front-and-center rather than going for the highbrow Oscar grab — some viewers might find themselves surprised by how artful and moving it is. It hits screens on July 7; read my Berlin review here.

  • García Bernal among names added to Cannes jury

    Just over a week away from the announcement of the official selection for this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and any festival-related news is received gratefully by the blogging community. Today, those who deemed Tim Burton too “Hollywood” a choice as this year’s jury president might be appeased by a host of more arthouse-leaning names lined up for jury duty.

    Chief among them are actors Gael García Bernal and Giovanna Mezzogiorno, both worthy selections to join Burton on the competition jury; that announcement surely means Bernal starrer “Even the Rain,” a Spanish-language epic telling parallel stories of Christopher Columbus and Bolivia’s Water Wars, will not appear in competition, as some speculated it might. Thanks to Anne Thompson for passing along the news.

    More exciting to me is the news that Claire Denis, one of the greatest filmmakers at work today, will be presiding over the Un Certain Regard section, where she herself competed with “I Can’t Sleep” in 1994. It’s a nice gesture towards a filmmaker who isn’t quite the Cannes fixture you might expect — she hasn’t been represented at the fest since “Trouble Every Day” played out of competition in 2001. Atom Egoyan, meanwhile, will head up the Cinéfondation jury.

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  • SHORT TAKE: “Kick-Ass” (**)

    “With no power comes no responsibility,” smirks high school student Dave Lizewski (aka Kick-Ass) over halfway through British director Matthew Vaughn’s slick, smug bubblegum-burst of a superhero movie. “Except that’s totally not true.”

    This essentially meaningless inversion of Lizewski’s Marvel stablemate Peter Parker’s motto – one wonders which half of the original aphorism is “totally not true,” for starters – is ultimately an apt summation of a film that tries to have its cake, eat it and noisily smash the plate against the wall.

    Aiming at once for nihilism and cuddliness, Vaughn delights in a long and loose moral leash, as an 11 year-old girl guns down corridors full of grown men without batting an eyelid, but steers clear of truly subversive thinking. Or much thinking at all.

    The “Spider-Man” reference is intended to ram home the concept of Lizewski (gamely played by Aaron Johnson, curiously resembling John Lennon slightly more here than he did in the Lennon biopic “Nowhere Boy”) as a YouTube-generation Peter Parker: both are four-eyed, put-upon teenaged geeks spurred into assuming positions of moral authority by a lifetime of bullying, landing implausibly hot girlfriends in the process.

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  • 3D effects for ‘Secret of Kells’ follow-up?

    (Earlier, this story accidentally credited the incorrect source — apologies to Brendon Connelly and /Film UK.)

    Following his surprise Oscar nomination for “The Secret of Kells,” which only recently landed in U.S. theaters, Irish animator Tomm Moore is already deep into his follow-up, “Song of the Sea.”

    The film, which should go into production later this year, will be another excursion into Irish folklore, this time taking the mythical Selkie creatures — also the subject of John Sayles’s 1995 film “The Secret of Roan Inish,” if memory serves — as its inspiration.

    Most intriguing is Moore’s admission that he is “experimenting” with 3D stereo effects within his handdrawn 2D aesthetic, though he makes no promises that they’ll turn up in the final film. After the cut, meanwhile, a conceptual trailer for “Song of the Sea” promises more of the stylized stained-glass visuals that so impressed the Academy’s animation branch. (Thanks to /Film UK’s Brendon Connelly for the link.)

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  • Nolan on dreaming up ‘Inception’

    I’ve largely steered clear of the frantic speculation over Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” that has done the online rounds for several months now. For one thing, I’d like to spare the film the pressure of overhype — some fans appear to be expecting something between “Memento: Bigger, Longer and Uncut” and the second coming of Christ — but for another, if the film really is the remarkable crypto-puzzle we’re all hoping for, I’d rather remain as ignorant of its secrets as possible.

    Nonetheless, it’s hard to read this L.A. Times piece by Geoff Boucher — one of the blessed few to have read Nolan’s script and visited the set — and not get a little excited. I admit I skimmed over some of the specifics, but any summer blockbuster that inspires assorted references to Sigmund Freud, Ian Fleming, M.C. Escher and Haruki Murakami (the latter comparison courtesy of star Ellen Page) can only succeed or fail in interesting ways, right?

    Nolan himself describes the sci-fi film as an attempt to “[approach] dream and the dream life as another state of reality,” and brief that initially didn’t mess with the cool genre storytelling he’d devised. After the cut, he describes how things got darker, messier and more intimate.

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  • Fletcher rides Oscar momentum to directorial debut

    In retrospect, Geoffrey Fletcher’s Best Adapted Screenplay win for “Precious” at last month’s Academy Awards shouldn’t have come as quite the shock it did. In the last few years, Oscar voters have been especially kind to newcomers in the writing races, with this year’s pair of freshman winners, Fletcher and Mark Boal, coming on the heels of three others who struck gold for their first feature credit: Michael Arndt, Diablo Cody and Dustin Lance Black.

    How do you follow that kind of debut success? In the case of many of those names, we’re on the verge on finding out. Arndt has lain low since striking gold with “Little Miss Sunshine” in 2006, but will be back on the radar this summer with “Toy Story 3” — for which, unusually for a Pixar production, he has sole script credit.

    Cody may have struck out with “Jennifer’s Body” last year, but is having more luck on the small screen with “The United States of Tara.” Boal, meanwhile, is continuing his happy partnership with Kathryn Bigelow, as the two are readying the South American-set thriller “Triple Frontier” for shooting.

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  • Zellweger sings Dylan in ‘My Own Love Song’

    Back in 2008, I professed myself less than ecstatic at the prospect of “My Own Love Song,” the first English-language effort from “La Vie en Rose” helmer Olivier Dahan, in which Renée Zellweger plays a wheelchair-bound country singer on a road trip with her eccentric best friend Forest Whitaker, in search of her long-lost son. (I believe my exact words may have been: “This could literally be the worst film of all time.”)

    The film opens in France next week, and while the trailer (after the cut) suggests I may have been a tad overdramatic, I can wait a very healthy amount of time to see it. I suppose we might be forced to endure a measure of Oscar chatter for Zellweger — “ZOMG it’s the female ‘Crazy Heart!’” — but the film is really looking to make a splash in the Best Original Song category.

    The Playlist reports that Bob Dylan (a former Oscar champ for the 2000 “Wonder Boys” cut “Things Have Changed,” in case you forgot) has composed no fewer than 16 original songs for the film. One of them, “Life is Hard,” is performed in the film by Zellweger, and features quite prominently in the trailer.

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  • Record box office for Oscar shorts

    Early in my Oscar-watching days, long before the advent of YouTube or VOD, the short film awards represented little more than a chance to get ahead in the Oscar pool by sheer guesswork.

    With no means of viewing the nominees, and the field of awards coverage considerably less comprehensive than it is today, you’d do well to find out what the shorts were about, much less whether they were any good. In the end, you picked the title that most caught your fancy, and hoped for the best.

    For most casual viewers, of course, the short film awards still mean little more than a handy bathroom-break opportunity in the telecast. But for serious awards-watchers, there’s less of an excuse these days to be uninformed: clips of the nominees (and sometimes even the entire films) are readily available online, while Shorts International and Magnolia Pictures have screened an annual program of the nominees in theaters for the last five years.

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  • ‘Life During Wartime’ trailer and poster

    Todd Solondz’s loose, recast sequel to “Happiness” was, for me, one of the pleasant surprises of last autumn’s festival circuit — more focused and astringently funny than his last two features, it’s also about as humane a work as the now middle-aged enfant terrible is capable of conceiving. Fans of all actors in the formidable ensemble will be duly rewarded: Ciaran Hinds is my pick, but Allison Janney turns in the sharpest performance of her career.

    This British trailer gives a reasonable idea of what to expect: the film is too mannered and sour to win many new converts, but Solondz acolytes should get in line. The UK release is next month; IFC is making Americans wait until the summer. My review from last year’s Venice fest here. Great poster after the cut.

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  • ‘Robin Hood’ to open Cannes

    More of a handy PR opportunity than an actual festival honor, Ridley Scott’s “Robin Hood” has secured the opening night slot at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival on May 12, two days ahead of its US and UK release date.

    Like last year’s Cannes opener, “Up,” the film will premiere out of competition, affording it the lustre, but not the critical pressure, of a festival berth. That said, the slot is no guarantee of prestige — in 2006, Cannes programmers were taken to task when Ron Howard’s widely derided “The Da Vinci Code” was selected to open the fest. Here’s hoping Scott fares a little better.

    “Up,” of course, broke something of a curse attached to Cannes’s opening night, which in recent years has showcased disappointments more often than not — in the years when festival directors haven’t courted blockbusters, the slot has housed in-competition flops like “Blindness” and “My Blueberry Nights.”

    I can’t see “Robin Hood” lending the fest the same hip cache that last year’s Pixar pic did, making it something of a conservative choice. But who cares — let’s get to the competition titles already.

  • Mulligan set for ‘My Fair Lady’

    Between Carey Mulligan and Mia Wasikowska, it seems the industry has no need for other 20-something actresses — they’ll divvy up all the plum parts between them.

    Days after Mulligan’s name was connected to the English-language remake of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” comes the news that she’s to play Eliza Doolittle in the long-mooted remake of “My Fair Lady.”

    Almost two years ago, it was announced that a new version of the 1964 Best Picture winner was in the works, with Keira Knightley and director Joe Wright in the frame. Some games of musical chairs have apparently been played since then — John Madden (“Shakespeare in Love”) in now in the director’s chair, while Emma Thompson is on script duty.

    At last night’s premiere for the “Nanny McPhee” sequel, Thompson confirmed that Mulligan — with whom she co-starred, of course, in “An Education” — is on board, adding that she “would love” Hugh Grant to fill Rex Harrison’s Oscar-winning shoes as Professor Henry Higgins.

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  • Russian trailer for ‘The Illusionist’

    A tip of the hat to Twitch for digging up a Russian trailer for Sylvain Chomet’s “The Illusionist,” which I reviewed out of Berlin last month. Calling it my favorite film of 2010 is faint praise at this stage, but I’ll be surprised if 10 more films come along to top it. Either way, it’s certain to be in the animation awards discussion if/when it secures a US distributor.

    This trailer is oddly structured, to say the least, but you should get some idea of the visual splendor on offer.

  • Bullock calls for real comedy

    Sandra Bullock in All About SteveIt’s not like one needed a further reason to hop on the “We Love Sandra Bullock” train in this of all weeks, but the actress obligingly provides one anyway in this highly enjoyable Guardian interview with John Patterson. Speaking of the genre that has become her bread and butter over the years, she offers these rather forthright words:

    Usually comedy is only available to us ladies in the romantic comedy. That’s why I hate romantic comedies. I want to make comedic-comedies – let’s get back to being funny!

    There are so many things to like about this statement, only one of them being that it’s absolutely true. She may have predictably made her Oscar breakthrough by crossing over to “respectable” middlebrow drama, but Bullock is one of our most gifted screen comediennes, possessed of wit, timing and physical performance ability surplus to the requirements of the lame comedic vehicles she is usully given.

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