In Contention

Author: Guy Lodge

  • ‘Drive’ poster

    So, this little movie called “Drive” hits US theaters in just over six weeks, and you may have gathered by now that I kind of like it. After a spiffy trailer debuted last week, a fresh poster was due, and Film District have obliged with a one-sheet that makes no bones about how they’re pitching this thing — as The Ryan Gosling Show first and foremost, with the film’s sleek thriller qualities very much in the rear-view mirror. With American audiences current lapping up Gosling’s charms in romcom “Crazy, Stupid, Love,” it’s probably canny to emphasise the cool of their in-demand star, while the kitsch hot-pink typeface (the same used for the film’s credits) offers a hint of the 1980s pastiche to come. (That corny-sounding tagline, meanwhile, references the film’s most delicious soundtrack cut.) Not the most creative design, then, but one I can see gracing a lot of teenagers’ walls in the months to come.

    (more…)

  • On the origins of ‘Martha Marcy May Marlene’

    Sean Durkin’s stunning debut feature “Martha Marcy May Marlene” has been running a steady marathon in terms of buzz-building ahead of its late-October release: first came breathless critical plaudits and the Best Director prize at Sundance in January, while a well-received appearance in the Un Certain Regard strand at Cannes kept things humming through the summer lull.

    Expect the acclaim to continue through the fall festival run: it’s booked for Toronto, though as Kris speculated last week, it’ll probably pop up in Telluride beforehand. (Finally, I’d count on a London Film Festival date in October.)

    The buzz isn’t there by sheer good fortune: as I wrote in my Cannes review, Durkin’s film is a startlingly assured and unsettling fusion of meticulous character study and full-throttle psychodrama, centered on a sharply etched breakout performance by Elizabeth Olsen that handily defies any pundits to define the young actress by her more famous twin sisters.

    (more…)

  • Starting the prediction game

    Right, I stayed out of the Oscar prediction racket for a while — partly to give myself a vacation from any such thoughts after 2010’s long, wearying season, and partly because I found myself struggling to blindly sort a pile of late-year prestige titles that struck me from afar as a little lean.

    The latter problem hasn’t really resolved itself, but with the recent revelation of key autumn festival slates, a kind of faint shape to the season is starting to emerge — and with Kris already having kicked off the guesswork earlier this month, I thought I may as well draw up a list of pre-festival nomination predictions, a first draft ready to get substantially rewritten as the hits and misses of Venice, Telluride and Toronto emerge.

    As my predictions took shape, two films emerged dominant: one of them the big-name spectacle near the top of everyone’s list (Spielberg’s “War Horse,” of course), the other the foreign wild card that I’ve nurtured a strong hunch about ever since its breakfast-hour Cannes screening. Yes, the Weinstein-backed silent Hollywood homage “The Artist” looks nothing like a conventional Oscar juggernaut at first glance — but that could be its strength if a number of the more typically baity awards prospects lean toward the generic.

    (more…)

  • ‘The Ides of March’ banner poster

    Hitting the internet simultaneously with that well-received trailer yesterday was this unusual poster for George Clooney’s Venice curtain-raiser “The Ides of March.” It’s always nice to see designers attempting something a little more conceptual than the norm — indeed, the simple split-face gimmick here could almost be taken as an ironic rebuttal to floating-head convention. Most interesting, however, is the tripling of the core composition into a UK quad-style format: it’ll be a duller poster when it’s inevitably chopped vertical for multiplex use, but it does raise the point that with posters all debuting online these days, there’s little initial reason for a standard format. Anyway, nice job — check out the full one-sheet after the jump.

    (more…)

  • Venice competition includes Polanski, Cronenberg, Alfredson

    These days, so much media speculation precedes the announcement of any major festival lineup that the eventual unveiling comes almost as an anti-climax — or at least it would do if the long-expected films weren’t so appetizing in the first place. As was the case with the Toronto lineup on Tuesday, the just-revealed programme for this year’s Venice Film Festival is as heavy on highlights as it is light on surprises, and that’s good enough for this Lido-bound journo.

    In recent years, as Berlin has receded, Venice has grown into an increasingly bolshy competitor to Cannes, taking a slightly riskier, younger approach to Competition programming while nabbing enough sexy, big-name auteur titles to draw the headlines. It’s a balance that has paid off handsomely in recent years: “The Hurt Locker,” “Brokeback Mountain,” “Black Swan,” “I Am Love” and “A Single Man” all debuted in Venice before going on to greater success elsewhere.

    This year’s Competition lineup would appear to continue the pattern: for every long-established auteur in line for the Golden Lion, there’s at least one buzzy up-and-comer arriving on the back of a breakthrough hit.

    (more…)

  • ‘Descendants,’ ‘Moneyball,’ ‘Twixt’ among Toronto premieres

    As usual, there are few surprises in the newly unveiled lineup for September’s Toronto Film Festival — which is largely because, as usual, the lineup consists of pretty much everything.

    We know by now to expect a cherry-picked selection of proven successes from previous festivals, including Cannes (“The Artist,” “Drive,” “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” “Melancholia”), Sundance (“Martha Marcy May Marlene,” “Tyrannosaur,” “Take Shelter”) and Berlin (“Coriolanus”). Equally, and of more interest to festival veterans, there’s the usual generous handful of prestige US premieres, many of them with an eye on awards season — including Alexander Payne’s “The Descendants,” Bennett Miller’s “Moneyball,” Rodrigo Garcia’s Glenn Close vehicle “Albert Nobbs” and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Twixt.”

    Meanwhile, the Toronto lineup also offers some pointers as to what we can (and can’t) expect to see at Venice only days before. It was already in ink that George Clooney’s Lido curtain-raiser “The Ides of March” would play both fests; now, thanks to the TIFF classifying them as “North American” rather than “World” premieres, we can confirm (albeit to no raised eyebrows) that David Cronenberg’s “A Dangerous Method,” Steve McQueen’s “Shame,” William Friedkin’s “Killer Joe,” Todd Solondz’s “Dark Horse” and Madonna’s “W.E.” will also do the double.

    (more…)

  • Three days left to catch ‘Melancholia’ in LA

    I should really have drawn attention to this earlier, but as Jeff Wells pointed out on Hollywood Elsewhere, Lars von Trier’s Cannes hit “Melancholia” began a one-week, once-a-day screening run at Los Angeles’ out-of-the-way Laemmle Fallbrook 7 theatre on Friday — a handy opportunity for local film buffs with free afternoons to sneak a look at the film months ahead of its November 11 release in the US. (Most European viewers haven’t quite so long to wait.)

    As you can gather from my enthusiastic Cannes review of the film, it’s worth getting impatient for. One of von Trier’s most elegant and elegiac works — the silly controversy over his unwise Nazi-related comments at the festival is a red herring that doesn’t reflect remotely on the surprisingly subdued film — it showcases the man in full command of his formal powers, as well as a fascinating ensemble, the pleasures of which extend beyond Kirsten Dunst’s fairly rewarded performance.

    (more…)

  • Clint Mansell scoring ‘The Iron Lady’

    I’ll level with you, folks: there are a lot of prestige titles coming out in late 2011 that I’m itching to see, and “The Iron Lady” isn’t one of them. Putting to one side concerns about Phyllida Lloyd’s filmmaking prowess — I thought her ill at ease with the medium in “Mamma Mia!”, but she’s an accomplished theater director and everyone deserves a second chance — Margaret Thatcher’s story requires ambiguity and incisiveness in the telling (and playing) to avoid predictable rhetoric, and the margin for error is a fine one.

    That teaser trailer released a few weeks ago wasn’t terribly illuminating: the writing is jokey, while the flash of Meryl Streep’s performance hints at “Julie & Julia”-scale broadness, but it’s altogether too brief and context-free to offer a sense of the film’s overall tone.

    Indeed, the most intriguing thing about the trailer is the unexpected use of Clint Mansell’s brooding “Moon” score as accompaniment — and as it turns out, there was more to that particular choice than initially met the eye. A reliable first-hand source informs me that Mansell is on board to score the actual film, which adds some lustre to a respectable but slightly unsexy list of below-the-line contributors.

    (more…)

  • ‘Drive’ red-band trailer

    As you can see from the previous post, Kris is every bit as punch-drunk on Nicolas Winding Refn’s electric throwback thriller “Drive” as I was at Cannes — read my review here — where it deservedly won the Best Director prize. It stands as my favourite narrative feature of the year so far; the rest of 2011 would have to be nothing short of miraculous to dislodge it from my year-end Top 10. Anyway, on the heels of last night’s Comic-Con screening comes a neatly assembled red-band trailer via IGN — and as sleek, smart and propulsive a taster as it is, it still can’t quite capture what a rush the film is. I’d almost recommend saving yourself for the full movie, but who am I kidding? Click on the image to watch it at IGN, or check out the embed after the cut.

    (more…)

  • Greece and Poland first to enter foreign Oscar race

    The Oscar race for Best Foreign Language Film — or, to use its formal title, Most Inoffensively Socially Conscious Non-English-Language Feature To Pass Through The Academy’s Narrow Qualifying Hoops Whilst Remaining Sufficiently Low-Profile For Voters To Feel Like They Discovered It For Themselves — is truly the gift that gives all year round.

    Scarcely have the previous year’s nominees finally trickled out to US theaters, to a chorus of polite indifference, than countries begin formally submitting their chosen contenders for the next year’s award — and the baseless speculation and generally befuddled head-scratching begins anew. In the past few weeks, Greece and Poland have become the first countries to enter the race ahead of the Academy’s October 1 deadline — and while such early birds are rarely heard from again in the game, these two films (both from female directors, and one of which I’ve seen) are rather higher on the radar.

    Poland, in particular, appears to have intensively focus-grouped the Academy’s foreign-language branch and subsequently created their Oscar entry in a purpose-built lab: Agnieszka Holland’s “In Darkness” is a true-life Holocaust drama about a Leopold Socha, a reformed petty criminal who heroically helped numerous Jewish refugees hide in the sewers of Nazi-occupied Lvov.

    (more…)

  • ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’ poster

    Yes, another poster — but it’s a good one, and for a film many of us are awaiting rather eagerly, so hopefully you’ll let it slide. The teaser trailer for Tomas Alfredson’s adaptation of John le Carré’s classic spy novel (previously, and very successfully, filmed for television with Alec Guinness in 1979) debuted to a warm response a few weeks ago, and this tastefully sober one-sheet, playing up the more cerebral qualities of the material,  further supports expectations of a classy package. (Spot the release date, by the way.) Also nice to see Gary Oldman given lone above-the-title billing, despite the presence of supporting names that might currently be more marketable. Full poster, courtesy of Empire, after the cut.

    (more…)

  • ‘Tyrannosaur’ poster

    I’ve just come from a screening of “Tyrannosaur,” Paddy Considine’s feature directing debut that made something of a splash at Sundance in January, winning awards for Considine and stars Olivia Colman and Peter Mullan. I’ll discuss the film in more detail soon, but I’m happy to report that the early festival hype is thoroughly justified — it’s a startlingly severe but compassionate character study broken open by a tremendous pair of lead performances that merit major awards consideration. Strand Releasing have the US rights, though a release date hasn’t been confirmed; for now, however, the film’s cryptic UK one-sheet ranks as one of 2011’s finest. (No, it’s not about dinosaurs.) Check out the full poster after the jump.

    (more…)

  • The hidden voice of ‘Blue Valentine’

    Fans of “Blue Valentine” — and I know there are many of us around these parts — should be tickled by this little discovery: the previously unidentified singer of “You and Me,” the obscure 1970 soul cut picked out by star Ryan Gosling for a key scene in the film, has been named as Nannie Sharpe, a then 22 year-old church choir member who recorded the demo with her brothers in a single take.

    The song was never released, Sharpe was never signed and she went on to work as a mail sorter for 30 years — so no one is more surprised than her that her 40 year-old recording surfaced on a cassette-tape compilation, happened to catch the collective ear of the “Blue Valentine” team and is now garnering a kind of cult status. It’s a lovely story which you can read in detail at The Other Paper (via The Guardian), and of course, a good excuse to revisit the gorgeous, woozily yearning song:

  • Emmy goes to the movies

    We don’t normally pay much attention to the Emmy Awards, this being a site primarily devoted to the bigger screen. But when the recently unveiled nomination list contains such film heavyweights as Todd Haynes, Olivier Assayas and (twice) Martin Scorsese, it’d be remiss not to mention it — and the fact that the line between cinema and television is becoming an increasingly pliable one.

    Indeed, there’s still disagreement over which category one of yesterday’s nominees falls into. Assayas’ five-hour stunner “Carlos” may have been produced for French television, but it’s a bit difficult to define a vast work from one of world cinema’s leading auteurs, one that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and was theatrically released on the arthouse circuit, as merely a TV miniseries.

    Most haven’t — it won a slew of film critics’ awards last year (and indeed made my 2010 Top 10) before more finicky eligibility rules kept it out of the Oscar race (I know, I know, as if) and in the TV races at the Globe and SAG Awards.

    (more…)

  • Twigs off ‘The Tree of Life’

    After two internet-free weeks in the Italian countryside, I’m gradually sifting through recent film news and coming to the conclusion that I chose as good a fortnight as any to drop out of the world. (File “Cars 2” and “Transformers Trois” under Things That Can Wait; ditto the Oscar-motivated fang-sharpening of rival Glenn Close and Meryl Streep camps.)

    The fact that I returned home days after “The Tree of Life” finally hit UK theaters, prompting a fresh gust of ooh-ing, aah-ing and arguing, only enhanced my sense that Terrence Malick’s arthouse blockbuster is the only true movie event of the summer thus far, so forgive me for making it the subject of yet another post, but I thought it was worth drawing attention to two unrelated snippets on the film.

    Particularly welcome is this LA Times piece that delves into the film’s spectacular soundtrack — where Alexandre Desplat’s typically intelligent original contributions nonetheless take a back seat to the dense collage of interpolations of existing classical music that is customary for a Malick film.

    (more…)

  • On the ballots wasted under new Best Pic rules

    Since the Academy announced its latest mathematical tweak to the Best Picture category last week, few have taken against the adjustment in principle — in a race notionally about “best,” it seems fair that films liked by many but loved by few should be left out, even if there’s no clear way of knowing which films that might hinder. (Many are taking it for granted that the new system would have spared us a “The Blind Side” nomination last year — but can we be so sure that fewer than 1 in 20 voters named it their favorite film of the year? I’m not.)

    The downside of the change, as The Wrap’s Steve Pond explains, is that the new-model Best Picture slate will likely end up representing a smaller portion of Academy members than the previous one. The beauty of the old system, which redistributed the votes of those members whose top choices hadn’t made the cut, is that nearly every ballot wound up contributing to the final list of nominees. Even if a member’s vote eventually went to, say, his fifth-favorite film, he still exerted a measure of influence on the outcome — encouraging for voters whose ballots are dominated by less Oscar-friendly fare.

    (more…)

  • ‘A Dangerous Method’ UK trailer

    Yesterday, news dropped of the Venice Film Festival’s opening film; now, with the first look at David Cronenberg’s Lido-bound latest (courtesy of Empire), the autumn festival season is starting to feel alarmingly close. Given the hot cast and the highbrow material, many have been pegging this as a likely Oscar player, despite the fact that Cronenberg (even in period dress) has never caught the Academy’s fancy. My personal hope is that the film is as Oscar-unfriendly as possible — after two accomplished but straightforward genre spins, I’d love to see the director tap into his kinky side again. As is my usual practice these days, I’m not watching the trailer, so I’ll just have to wait and see. You, however, can share your thoughts below. Click the image below to take a look or watch an embed after the jump.

    (more…)

  • Beatty got back

    Usually, the news that someone is about to write, direct, produce and star in some film of no clear description for Paramount wouldn’t seem particularly worthy of notice until the parties involved release a few more details.

    But when the “someone” in question is 74 year-old Warren Beatty, the one-time Hollywood monarch whose name hasn’t appeared on screen since 2001 (as an ensemble member of all-star embarrassment “Town and Country”), it’s hard not to get curious.

    With Beatty not having steered a film of his own since 1998’s “Bulworth” — the fascinating but frustratingly scattershot political satire that never found a place in the popular imagination, despite netting him a writing Oscar nod and arguably featuring Halle Berry’s strongest performance — there’s likely a generation or two with little concept of what an industry force the man was across four decades. (Perhaps more enduring, on the pop-culture scale, is his reputation as Hollywood’s most storied lothario, though Annette Bening put a stop that 20 years ago.)

    (more…)