In Contention

Author: Guy Lodge

  • SHORT TAKE: “A Single Man” (***1/2)

    Colin Firth and Julianne Moore in A Single ManVenice Film Festival

    In a curious way, revered fashion designer Tom Ford had a defined auteur’s stamp before he ever so much as shot a frame of his debut film: from his louche advertising campaigns to his infamous curation of Vanity Fair’s 2007 Hollywood issue to the forms and textures of his designs themselves, Ford has constructed a highly idiosyncratic brand identity fusing burnished retro cool and chilly modern eroticism.

    No surprise then, that the handsome, eggshell-delicate character study “A Single Man” is very much an extension of that identity: trading in polished surfaces and swoonily aestheticized desire, the film looks on occasion like an animated GQ shoot. (And yes, Ford provides the leading man’s wardrobe.)

    But just as you’re tempted to dismiss the film as a gorgeous vanity exercise, it reveals a keen beating heart beneath the decor — and the match of Ford’s precise sensibility to Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 literary examination of the effect of grief on an overly compartmentalized life begins to make perfect sense.

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  • VENICE: ‘Mr. Nobody,’ ‘Lola’

    Jared Leto in Mr. NobodyThe Lido finish line beckons, as this morning saw the press screening of the final film in Competition, Tom Ford’s “A Single Man.”

    Ford’s debut (which I’ll deal with in a separate Short Take) surpassed my expectations, completing a slight upswing in the standard of films on display that began with yesterday’s second Surprise Film selection: Brillante Mendoza’s “Lola,” which proved surprising in more than just a programming sense.

    Jaco van Dormael’s elaborate fantasy “Mr. Nobody” never quite gelled for me — and still, none of these titles touch “White Material” — but it’s been a pleasant day’s viewing nonetheless.

    Now the process begins of sorting the wheat from the chaff — with not a whole lot of wheat to go around, in my eyes — and playing the futile guessing-game of who will take home the gold. I’ll have a post with my predictions and preferences tomorrow, but for now, the last bundle of Competition reviews:

    “Mr. Nobody” (**½)

    Jaco van Dormael’s first film in 13 years betrays the formal rustiness and structural indiscipline that such a hiatus can cause in an artist, but there’s enough unique visual artistry and demented storytelling bravery on display here to make one glad he’s back.

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  • Bill Pohlad on Apparition and working with Malick

    Bill PohladOne of the stories I’m tracking most curiously this awards season is the rise of brand-spanking-new distribution company Apparition, whose impressive slate of upcoming titles belies their fledgling status.

    “The Tree of Life,” “Bright Star” and, to a lesser extent, “The Young Victoria” are obviously the titles on people’s lips right now, but there are some interesting projects in the pipeline too: Doug Liman’s Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson biopic “Fair Game,” with Sean Penn and Naomi Watts, as well as music video director Floria Sigismondi’s “The Runaways” — another biopic, this one about the cult girl band of the title.

    Former Picturehouse chief Bob Berney has been the more-discussed name in connection with the outfit, but Variety has a handy little profile of Berney’s Apparition co-pilot Bill Pohlad, whose feature producing career only really started four years ago with “Brokeback Mountain.”

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  • VENICE: ‘Soul Kitchen,’ ‘The Double Hour’

    Soul KitchenHappily, the bug that kept me down yesterday seems to have flown on the wings of Nurofen and a night’s sleep, so I’m ready to face the Lido madness again.  As if sympathetic to my state, the Competition served up two relatively untaxing titles.

    Festival director Marco Müller made it clear that he was experimenting with a more mainstream-friendly approach in this year’s Venice programme — hence the inclusion of “Bad Lieutenant” and “Survival of the Dead,” among others, in the lineup — so the overt genre leanings of Italian psycho-thriller “The Double Hour” came as no surprise, particularly given its hometown advantage. Far less expected was that heavyweight German-Turkish auteur Fatih Akin would arrive with the fluffiest Competition entry to date.

    This afternoon brings a second “surprise film” in the Competition (here’s hoping it’s a more pleasant surprise than “My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?”), as well as Jaco van Dormael’s “Mr. Nobody.” As eagerly as I’m awaiting the latter, I might have to postpone it to tomorrow, as a producer friend of mine unveils a short film next door. Onto this morning’s films …

    “Soul Kitchen” (**)

    Fatih Akin’s candyfloss-light character comedy will come as a major shock to those familiar with the 36 year-old director via his solemn arthouse works “Head-On” and “The Edge of Heaven.”

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  • INTERVIEW: Mark Boal

    Mark BoalFor a man more accustomed to the dirt-under-the-fingernails highs of hard journalism, the red carpets, photo calls and cosseted hotel suites of film promotion clearly represent a very different kind of strain for Mark Boal, the journalist-turned-screenwriter who on Monday won the prestigious Gucci Group Award at the Venice Film Festival.

    Back in August, on the hottest afternoon of the year, the tall, lank-haired writer of Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker” lopes into the lobby of London’s cooler-than-thou Sanderson Hotel, dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt, and politely asks if I’ll join him over a beer.

    “I’ve been on coffee all day, and it’s not working,” he grins, his face betraying missed hours of sleep, but still more boyish than its 36 years. “Maybe this’ll make a difference.”

    Boal registers a brief flicker of bewilderment upon learning that the only beer on the Sanderson’s ultra-precious bar menu is Sri Lankan, and rather exotically priced at that, but we order two anyway. “It’s still beer, right?” he confirms with the waiter.

    It’s regular-guy moments like this that shed a little light onto Boal’s humanistic gifts as a reporter and, now, as a screenwriter: modest, relatable and defiantly no-bullshit, it’s easy to imagine a group of soldiers welcoming him into the fold, as happened in 2004, when Boal was an embedded in (or, to use his term, “hung out with”) an elite bomb disposal unit for several weeks, laying the groundwork for the screenplay he then had no plans to write.

    “I was really keen to do a story on the bomb squad,” he explains. “It was clear that IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) would be the army’s central logistical element by 2004, but still, nothing was being written on it. Iraq was a bit of a news black hole after the invasion … people simply thought it too dangerous.”

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  • Unkind cut

    Thanks to The Film Experience for sharing this wittily out-there potential Australian poster design for “Antichrist,” which is still awaiting approval. You don’t need to have seen the film to know how daring this is, though it’s still on the right side of subtle. I love it.

    Antichrist

  • Man down in Venice

    Shirley Henderson in Life During WartimeWhether due to general festival raggedness or some iffy shrimp, I’ve been decidedly under the weather today, and a day spent in a darkened movie theater was not the obvious solution. So I’m writing to you from a quiet cafe on a canalside terrace near the Biennale site, where a combination of sunshine and pistachio pastries are doing the healing.

    Luckily, my festival time-out has coincided with a bit of a lull in the lineup, apparently quite normal at this stage in the proceedings: no Competition title in the last two days has really set the Lido alight, with the reviews for George A. Romero’s “Survival of the Dead” suggesting the Venice programmers’ mainstream punt hasn’t paid off.

    (I was, however, a little disappointed to miss a midnight premiere of Antoine Fuqua’s out-of-competition “Brooklyn’s Finest,” which has accumulated some buzz for Ethan Hawke’s performance.)

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  • Catching up on foreign-language Oscar hopefuls

    Prince of Tears

    UPDATE: As I was typing this very post, reigning Oscar champ Japan announced their submission: Ryoichi Kimizuka’s thriller “Nobody to Watch Over Me.” Screen International has details.

    PREVIOUSLY: As you know, I like to keep up with the international submissions for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar as and when they emerge, and this morning’s Screen International report on the entries from Hong Kong and Taiwan reminded me that I’ve missed a few.

    To deal with those first, Hong Kong has selected Yonfan’s “Prince of Tears,” a lavish period melodrama set around the island’s communist witch-hunts of the 1950s. It premiered last week at Venice to polite, if not exactly passionate, reviews — sadly, it’s one title I missed — but seems to have quite strong international prospects. Said to be both romantic and visually breathtaking, it also has a gay subtext that may or may not be to the branch’s taste.

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  • London fest adds awards, goes heavy on Clooney

    George Clooney in Up in the AirWhile still ensconced in Venice, I must admit that the thought of diving into another festival makes me slightly dizzy — but the London Film Festival doesn’t care about that. LFF artistic director Sandra Hebron unveiled a strong lineup this morning, but the real news is that they have added a bevy of awards to their trophy cabinet.

    In addition to their existing honors, including the Sutherland Trophy for best debut feature and the Grierson Award for best documentary, the festival will, for the first time, hand out an overall Best Film award, as well as an honor for Best British Newcomer. Meanwhile, the British Film Institute will award writing and directing fellowships. Compounding these changes, the festival will, for the first time, hold a formal awards ceremony on the final day.

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  • SHORT TAKE: “The Men Who Stare at Goats” (***)

    George Clooney and Ewan McGregor in The Men Who Stare at Goats

    Venice Film Festival

    A trim, lively comedy powered by a winning quartet of personality performances and an endearingly naff drive-time rock soundtrack, Grant Heslov’s helming debut “The Men Who Stare at Goats” doesn’t make too many demands of its audience. In return, we shouldn’t make too many demands of the film.

    Anyone looking for a skewering satire of U.S. military practice might come away disappointed, even as the film opens with the cute semi-disclaimer, “More of this is true than you might imagine.”

    Based on British journalist-humorist Jon Ronson’s book of the same title, which investigated the development of outlandish psychological warfare techniques in the U.S. army and their application in the Iraq war, Heslov’s film (from a script by Peter Straughan) jettisons most of Ronson’s dark gallows humor in favor of a sunnier, sillier sort of absurdity.

    Not much has been retained but the idea of crazy psychic soldiers with telekinetic powers (the title is to be taken literally), but given the indifference of film audiences to anything remotely Iraq-related, you can hardly blame the “Goats” team for playing down the political currency of their source material.

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  • Mark Boal wins Gucci Award at Venice

    Mark BoalI’ve been promising my interview with “The Hurt Locker” writer Mark Boal for too long now, but simply haven’t had a moment to — as Kate Winslet would say — gather. With a lighter load today, I’m hoping I can have it ready for tomorrow.

    Meanwhile, however, I’m thrilled to report that yesterday, Boal claimed his first official award for his work on the film, taking the Venice Film Festival’s relatively young Gucci Group Award.

    Established in 2006, the award recognizes outstanding achievement in film by an artist from a different professional background — as you are surely aware, Boal is an accomplished journalist, whose “Hurt Locker” screenplay grew from his own experience embedded in an EOD bomb squad in Iraq.

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  • Hey, the rest of the year counts too

    Marion Cotillard in Public EnemiesAs we sit in the flurry of festival season, with the even more flurry-ful (sorry, I’m tired) awards season upcoming, everyone’s eyes are pointed forward, as we impatiently await the supposedly Oscar-tailored collection of movies peppered across the next 3 or 4 months.

    At this point, it’s easy to forget that the year is actually 12 months long, and that the warmer seasons offer their (admittedly, usually smaller) share of work worthy of celebration.

    So I’m grateful to friend, reader and generally superb film writer Nick Davis for assembling this handy (though very idiosyncratic) alterna-Oscar ballot of the best work released in 2009 thus far.

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  • VENICE: ‘White Material,’ ‘Around a Small Mountain,’ ‘Lebanon’

    White MaterialVenice Film Festival

    The big deal on the Lido today was Oliver Stone rolling into town for his Hugo Chavez documentary “South of the Border” — I did my level best to catch the screening this afternoon, but demand greatly exceeded seat supply on this particular occasion. Tomorrow, perhaps.

    Otherwise, the search continues at the festival for a talk-of-the-town critical hit: I had hoped that the extraordinary “White Material” might be it, but the reception so far seems to be warm rather ecstatic. Still, given the general goodwill towards Claire Denis (who has surprisingly never claimed major festival gold) and the undeniable quality of the film, it has to be regarded as one of the frontrunners.

    The title that keeps resurfacing in conversation, interestingly enough, is Todd Solondz’s “Life During Wartime”: people really like the film, it seems, and the fact that an extra screening has been arranged for it may or may not be significant. If I were a betting man, this is where I’d place my chips. Anyway, onto some short takes of the great, the good and the befuddling.

    “White Material” (****)

    I’ve been chided elsewhere for not being direct enough in my reviews, so let’s just get this out of the way: Claire Denis is one of the greatest filmmakers alive, and “White Material” is one of her greatest films.

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  • SHORT TAKE: “The Informant!” (***)

    The Informant!

    Venice Film Festival

    That jaunty exclamation mark handily sets the tone for Steven Soderbergh’s “The Informant!,” a flip, frisky entertainment that may well represent the year’s most audacious feat of adaptation.

    Of course, the trailer already (and unavoidably) pulled the covers from the film’s biggest trick: that writer Scott Z. Burns (“The Bourne Ultimatum”) has reimagined Kurt Eichenwald’s dense non-fiction thriller about a mid-1990s agribusiness price-fixing scandal as a rapid-fire corporate comedy of errors, like “The Insider” as filtered through the dry whimsy of Preston Sturges.

    It’s a double or nothing strategy that merrily pays off, offering rich comic dividends as the true-life nature of the material elevates its absurdity, but — far more surprisingly — not sacrificing the sense of consequence and complexity in the events at hand.

    Critically touching on both the antisocial nature of corporate American greed and the inefficiency of the government in curbing it, the film actually makes an elegant companion piece to its its festival compatriot, Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story” (reviewed here).

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  • Congratulations, Pixar

    I just realized I probably should have posted something about Pixar (and directors John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Brad Bird, Pete Docter and Lee Unkrich) receiving the Golden Lion for career achievement in Venice yesterday afternoon. Unfortunately, not having been present for the occasion, I can’t offer much beyond that fact.

    George Lucas presenting John Lasseter with the Golden Lion

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  • ‘White’ diamond in Venice

    Isabelle Huppert in White MaterialGood festival vibes are traveling through both sides of the Atlantic this weekend, it seems. Just as Kris lost his heart to a movie in Telluride yesterday, so, on this bright Venice morning, did I.

    It’s a beautiful thing when faith is rewarded. I had already pegged Claire Denis’s “White Material” as my most anticipated film of the festival, and was duly met with an unalloyed masterpiece that outstrips its seen Competition rivals by such a wide margin it’s almost a little embarrassing.

    A searing study of political and personal rebellion in West Africa, led by a premier-form Isabelle Huppert as a French plantation owner obstinately clinging to her land as order and sanity crumble around her, it’s plainly the strongest film in any Venice strand thus far. It also might just be the year’s finest to date.

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  • REVIEW: “Capitalism: A Love Story” (***)

    Capitalism: A Love StoryVenice Film Festival

    It was well before Michael Moore dropped an extensive archive-footage chunk of a Franklin D. Roosevelt speech into the last reel of “Capitalism: A Love Story” that the following thought entered my head, but the appearance of FDR and his homespun common sense crystallized it: Michael Moore is this generation’s Frank Capra.

    By that token, “Capitalism: A Love Story” – an artlessly effective slice of rah-rah rhetoric more sincerely idealistic than anything the director has yet put his name to – represents Moore’s “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

    A film made in the infant stages of vast social healing (substitute the end of WWII for the beginning of the Obama presidency), it uses its transitional timing to examine alternately the America that was, could have been and hopefully will be.

    As with the prototypical Capra film, “Capitalism” places its faith in the American everyman, while blanketing evil as a vaguer collective, defending the rights and ability of the former with unashamed sentimentality and sledgehammer subtlety.

    The bait for the filmmaker’s multiple critics to seize upon is left prominently and deliberately exposed – the film is a veritable compendium of all Moore’s most manipulative muckraking tactics, whether it’s the wilfully decontextualized use of vintage news clips or the breathtaking exploitation of having an ordinary Joe tearfully read a love letter to his deceased wife on camera. No button is left unpushed in the service of an argument that already doesn’t have to work very hard to win over the liberal public, but Moore isn’t one to leave much to chance.

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  • Press conference revelation of the day

    Brace yourselves, folks … here’s something you never saw coming. In this afternoon’s press conference for her new film “I Am Love” (reviewed here), Tilda Swinton stated that one of the films that most inspires her is Nicolas Roeg’s “The Man Who Fell to Earth.” I mean, who saw that one coming?

    David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to EarthTilda Swinton

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