In Contention

Author: Guy Lodge

  • Warm reviews for latest ‘Potter’

    Daniel Radcliffe in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood PrinceI must admit upfront that I don’t really get the Harry Potter franchise. I don’t dislike it — not having exposed myself enough to its components to justify such a response — but I’ve never felt remotely compelled to deepen my acquaintance with the material. I’ve tackled one of my J.K. Rowling’s novels, but the lumpen functionality of her prose didn’t tempt me further.

    As for the films, I’ve sat through two of them — and yes, one of them was Alfonso Cuaron’s expertly crafted but still personality-deficient effort — and found them both painless yet unengaging watches. I understand that they please millions of viewers, and I commend them for that. But for fear of breeding actual resentment, I think it’s better that I no longer watch them. The Potter films and I have reached an entente cordiale, if you will, and it works for both of us.

    All of which is to say that the more enthusiastic reviews emerging for the sixth (!) installment, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” (am I the only one who always has to look the full titles up?), don’t really move me one way or the other. It would appear that director David Yates and writer Steve Kloves (are we ever getting another “Wonder Boys” from him?) have maintained their general success in streamlining the unwieldy novels with equal attention paid to character and craftsmanship, which is a significant achievement this far into a franchise. But I remain thoroughly untempted to get in line.

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  • Chief basterd

    These new “Inglourious Basterds” character posters have been knocking around for a few days now, but I only really paused to look at them this afternoon. I must say, whatever my suspicions of the film itself, the marketers deserve a bouquet: I wholeheartedly love the cinema-steeped wit and intelligence of the artwork we’ve seen thus far, and this is no exception.

    Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds

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  • 7/6 Web Round-up

    Daniel Radcliffe in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince• Ahead of the latest Harry Potter instalment, a profile of no-longer-boy wonder Daniel Radcliffe. [The Guardian]

    • Ever a must-read, Nick Davis continues reviewing the decade, taking on “American Psycho.” [Nick’s Flick Picks]

    • Dredging up the Marion Cotillard 9/11 “controversy” … again? Jeez. [Times of London]

    • Nathaniel Rogers tweaks his Oscar predictions, elevating “The Lovely Bones” to pole position. [The Film Experience]

    • A Brit offers his perspective on the ten-wide Best Picture field … and remains on the fence. [ScreenDaily]

    • List of the day: the top 10 “apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic” movies. [Rope of Silicon]

    • Jim Fusilli chats with “Public Enemies” composer Elliot Goldenthal. [Wall Street Journal]

    • Andrew O’Hehir catches up with the wonderful oddity “Tony Manero,” which is gradually making its way across the the U.S. [Salon]

  • ‘Jennifer’s Body’ red-band trailer

    As someone who believes “Juno” largely succeeded despite its multi-garlanded screenplay, rather than because of it, I can’t say I’ve been looking forward to Diablo Cody’s follow-up with great anticipation. (Evidently hot soundtrack notwithstanding.) Still, while this cheerfully tacky trailer for “Jennifer’s Body” does little to change my mind in that regard, I do credit Cody for playfully running as far from Oscarland as she could with this effort — a canny way to keep the industry pressure at bay.

    To any Karyn Kusama fans waiting for another “Girlfight” … keep waiting. To any Megan Fox fans waiting for cleavage shots … voilà.

  • Warrior

    I don’t normally delve into sporting matters on these pages, but I can’t not mention the history that has just been made this afternoon, only a couple of miles away from my own house. Today’s Wimbledon men’s final was a mammoth but weirdly cagey affair — certainly not as explosive as last year’s classic — between two fighters stubbornly defending their turf at all costs, before a tense crowd that included the disparate likes of Henry Kissinger, Russell Crowe and Woody Allen. (See, we’re still about the movies here.)

    But when — in the 30th game of the fifth set, a record statistic in itself — Andy Roddick finally handed Roger Federer his sixth Wimbledon title with a wayward, exhausted shot, the dramatics of the match were immediately swamped by its larger significance. One man. 15 Grand Slam singles titles. That’s not a record that’s getting broken for a good long while. (Longer still, if the man to do so isn’t named Rafael Nadal.)

    It’s not often one can bear witness to a fully-formed legend in the present tense — much less one who has yet to turn 30. Humbling. Hats off.

    Roger Federer

  • Love your ‘Enemies’

    Marion Cotillard in Public EnemiesI’ve had a busy week, so I’m a bit late to the table on “Public Enemies” — but in a way, it seemed fitting to wait until the 4th of July to watch such a muscular, intrinsically American piece of cinema.

    Much has already been said on these pages about the film, so there’s no need for me to discuss it at great length, but I do want to say how befuddled I am by the numerous lukewarm-to-cool critical reactions out there. I went into the theater with guarded expectations — not being an ardent devotee of Michael Mann’s oeuvre in the first place — only to be greeted by something rare and rather special: a broad, red-blooded blockbuster that is nonetheless tailored specifically for adults.

    Calling it Mann’s finest film since “The Insider” may sound like faint (albeit merited) praise. Perhaps more meaningful is to declare the film — with its elegant synthesis of crisp, confidently linear storytelling and rich, unfussy visual construction — the most completely realized major American studio picture of the last two or three years.

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  • New Yorker semi-reviews ‘Julie & Julia,’ exalts Streep

    Meryl Streep in Julie & JuliaAs far as I know, Nora Ephron’s “Julie & Julia” is still under a reviewing embargo, but the New Yorker’s Ariel Levy has sneakily buried a brief, incisive critique of the film at the tail of a substantial profile of Ephron. (Thanks to Jeff Wells for pointing it out.) You’ll need a subscription to read the whole thing, but here are the juiciest bits on the film — which will no doubt please the numerous Streepophiles out there:

    The truth is, “Julie & Julia” is not a fair fight. For half he film we are in Paris with Julia Child played by Meryl Streep. It is pretty transcendent. For the other half, we are stuck in Long Island City, Queens, with the ‘lowly cubicle worker’ Julie Powell, a character who is immature, self-pitying, and frazzled (which is to say, an average human being). Powell is played by Amy Adams, who is a talented actress, but she is up against the queen herself.

    When Adams, as Julie, is on the screen, it necessarily means that Streep, as Julia, is not, and you come to resent her for this. It is possible that the film would not have worked if it were simply a biopic of Julia Child — that it derives its narrative thrust and commercial potential from the interplay between a young woman idolizing and relying upon Child in the more-or-less present and the splendid story of Julia Child’s past. Perhaps Child is able to emerge in this film as an almost mythical creature because she is presented in contrast to a mere mortal.

    But there may be another reason the Julia Child portions of “Julie & Julia” are so irresistably vivid and the Julie Powell bits feel a little flat. It is possible that Nora Ephron no longer understands half as well what it’s like to be ordinary as she understands being remarkable.

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  • WEEKLY WRAP: Academy expands, Malden passes

    Karl Malden and Claire Trevor at the 1951 Academy Awards• This week’s Off the Carpet column took a long, hard look at the ramifications of a 10-nominee Best Picture race.

    • As the popular game of expanding past fields to ten continued, we joined in the speculation.

    • Meanwhile, AMPAS added 134 members to its voting body, from Seth Rogen to Danny Boyle to Peter Gabriel.

    • And they furthered their controversial remodelling, scrapping all honorary awards from the Oscar telecast.

    • We bade a sad farewell to Oscar-winning actor and former AMPAS president Karl Malden.

    • In other disheartening news, Michael Bay’s “Transformers” sequel rocked the box office.

    • We championed “An Education” and its star Alfred Molina, while the film was the subject of this week’s Page to Screen column.

    • With “Public Enemies” on everyone’s mind this week, we counted down the best performances from Michael Mann films.

    • The Edinburgh Film Festival wrapped, handing its top award to Duncan Jones’s “Moon.”

  • ‘Brothers’ trailer

    As someone who was never particularly taken with Susanne Bier’s popular 2004 melodrama “Brothers” — I find Bier’s work too patly earnest to repay real emotional investment — I approach Jim Sheridan’s long-delayed remake with a measure of caution.

    Judging from this just-released trailer, it seems to hew very close to the original, with added studio gloss and a gloopy background of Fray balladry that I hope isn’t in the film itself. On the plus side, Natalie Portman looks rather good, and needless to say, it’s a step up for Sheridan from the grim career nadir of “Get Rich or Die Tryin’.” (Uh, what isn’t?) Some might have Oscar-level expectations of this, given its December release date, but I’ll need to see the film to be convinced.

  • Is the auteur a dying breed?

    Lars von TrierBy far the boldest, baldest expression of auteur identity I’ve seen in recent times came in the opening credits of Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist.” It’s a sequence that consists of precisely two emphatically scrawled title cards — “Lars von Trier” and “Antichrist” — in that order. No actors, no production credits, no “a film by,” nothing. Lars von Trier. Antichrist.

    It’s an insistent, slightly tongue-in-cheek declaration of full creative ownership — the film that follows is entirely the product of his own imagination, and all other collaborators are merely at the service of his vision. It may strike some as an arrogant, even hostile, approach, but it drives home the point that he’s one of the few contemporary filmmakers who can legitimately claim the title “auteur” — the term coined by New Wave doyen Francois Truffaut to assert the rise of directorial control in a previously producer-centered artform.

    How many directors in the current film lanscape can boast that kind of brand-name power? It’s a question raised by critic Kaleem Aftap in an interesting — and highly debatable — piece in today’s Independent, in which he argues that, in America at least, the notion of auteurism is on the way out:

    Films directed by Truffaut himself, Jean-Luc Godard, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola (used to be) must-see events. At its height, the draw of the auteur was such that films by the Italian modernist Michelangelo Antonioni would regularly appear in the top 25 box-office hits of the year. The right director’s name on a poster was enough to sell tickets and what the directors would do next was something to be genuinely excited about. Now barely any film is sold on the director’s name alone.

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  • Stunning new ‘Broken Embraces’ trailer

    The Guardian has exclusively debuted the brand new trailer for Pedro Almodovar’s “Broken Embraces,” and it’s a thing of considerable beauty.

    Mixed reviews be damned — the oil-painting saturated color of Rodrigo Prieto’s lensing (which weirdly reminds me of Vittorio Storaro’s work on Bertolucci’s “The Spider’s Stratagem”), the cannily cool choice of Cat Power on the soundtrack, not to mention the stylistics of Penelope Cruz’s headlong dive into fetishized femme fatale territory, all have my mouth positively watering. I’ll be seeing the film later this month, and that day can’t come too soon.

    The Guardian selfishly won’t let us embed the trailer, so watch it here. Now. We’ll post it here as soon as it becomes available.

  • ‘Five Minutes of Heaven’ trailer

    I offered some very brief notes a while back on Oliver Hirschbiegel’s excellent “Five Minutes of Heaven,” which premiered on television here in the UK, but will thankfully get the theatrical release (along with VOD) it deserves Stateside in August. Thank God for IFC. (More thoughts after the cut.)

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  • Brit critics cool on ‘Enemies’

    Marion Cotillard and Johnny Depp in Public EnemiesWith Stateside critics somewhat split on “Public Enemies,” I was interested to see what the UK reception for the film would be like. For all the brawny Americanness of his aesthetic, Michael Mann has many passionate apologists on these shores — he even received a BAFTA nod in 2005 for “Collateral” — perhaps to some degree because Britain is where he studied film and began his career.

    On this occasion, however, the limeys aren’t feeling the love, as the film has opened to a raft of disappointing notices from the major British broadsheets. Wendy Ide at the Times of London is harshest, calling the film “a bloody, muddy mess.” She’s no fan of the film’s digital aspects, perhaps rather naively complaining about the lack of studio sheen:

    Mann’s aim appears to be to develop a new, distinctive digital aesthetic. Which is admirable in theory, but Mann’s digital aesthetic seems to involve making the movie look as grimy and unpolished as possible. Post-production is for wimps. That irresistibly glossy, larger-than-life reality created by Hollywood movies is diminished here. The flat glare of the digital camera emphasises the artifice of the film-making process rather than bringing the hoped-for gritty authenticity to the story.

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  • Counting to ten

    Since the Academy announced the new ten-lane track for the Best Picture race, any number of bloggers have projected which extra films might have made the cut under this format in the last few years, a process that, for many, retrospectively hands hypothetical nods to everything from “Doubt” to “Memoirs of a Geisha” to “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.”

    It’s a process that is as dispiriting as it is occasionally heartening, but so far there hasn’t been much informed analysis of how the Academy’s weighted balloting system might affect the lower reaches of the list. (I must wonder, for example, whether a “Geisha” had enough number-one votes to even crack a list of ten — the new format will certainly test the remaining power of the studio system.)

    Anne Thompson, however, offers by far the most interesting backward-glancing “what-if” piece I’ve yet read, in which an unnamed (but clearly authoritative) film historian digs a little further back to consider what a ten-nominee Best Picture category might have looked like in the years from 1967 to 1979.

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  • PAGE TO SCREEN: “An Education” by Lynn Barber

    An Education by Lynn Barber“I was damaged by my education,” writes renowned British journalist Lynn Barber at the end of the captivating centerpiece essay in her newly published memoir “An Education,” a sober conclusion to a personal account that otherwise brims with breezy anecdotal humor.

    The eponymous “education” is not academic, though she makes clear her lingering resentments over that too. Rather it’s an emotional – I’d say sentimental, but Barber treats it with too much venom for that – education, covering not only romantic and sexual instruction, but a deeper acquaintance with the betrayals and hypocrisies of adulthood.

    The ostensible antagonist of the piece is the older lover who courts and ultimately cons the naïve 16 year-old Barber, but it becomes clear that she is using this story as a lens through which to examine the failings of her own parents, who allowed – encouraged, even – the end of a schoolgirl’s innocence.

    It’s a forthright, often cruelly funny reflection that braids unconditional affection with anger, and it’s little wonder that producer Amanda Posey immediately saw its cinematic potential when the essay was published in literary magazine Granta in 2003.

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  • Woody does Paris

    Goldie Hawn and Woody Allen in Everyone Says I Love YouAmong the many things I love about Woody Allen — his staying power, his eye for talent, more masterpieces than I can count on two hands — is the fact that whenever anyone refers to “the untitled Woody Allen project,” one usually has to ask which one they mean. His unfailing film-a-year work ethic means there are generally at least two upcoming Allen films floating in the general conversation.

    So, while we’re all aware that his next film after the Big Apple homecoming of “Whatever Works” will be a return to his recently beloved gray skies of London, with Naomi Watts, Josh Brolin, Anthony Hopkins and Freida Pinto in the mix, some details have already emerged of his next project after that one.

    Screen International reports that Woody’s 2011 project will see him continuing his European sojourn, this time with a romantic drama set in Paris. Spanish production outfit Mediapro revealed the information, though a script has yet to be completed.

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  • Gangster lovin’

    Johnny Depp in Public EnemiesJoe Queenan is one of my least favorite Guardian film contributors — too often perversely hard to please — but I did appreciate the boyish honesty of this piece, in which he sheds his usual cineaste grousing to indiscriminately geek out over guns and fedoras. With “Public Enemies” only a few days away, he extols the simple joys of the gangster genre:

    For those of us who secretly believe that gangster movies are the only ones worth making – despite our obsequious lip service to Truffaut and Antonioni – the timing could not be better. Aficionados of gangster movies view reality as a daisy chain connecting one gangland saga to the next, with ordinary life – family, children, career, lunch – occurring in between. We do not need an uninterrupted stream of gangster movies to survive, and we certainly do not need half-hearted twaddle like Knockaround Guys to function properly – but we cannot tolerate long gaps between high-quality releases.

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  • ‘Moon’ takes top prize at Edinburgh

    Sam Rockwell in MoonThe Edinburgh International Film Festival closed today with an awards ceremony that culminated in Duncan Jones’s sci-fi debut feature “Moon” landing the fest’s most coveted prize, the Michael Powell Award for Best British Feature. The jury, headed by Joe Wright and including Oscar-nominee Frank Langella, said of the film:

    We award “Moon” for its singular vision and remarkably assured direction as well as for the inspired manner in which it transcends genre. The central performance by Sam Rockwell embodies the film’s emotional complexity and compelling philosophical perspective.

    The award is an aupicious one; recent winners that have gone on to considerable international success include “My Summer of Love,” “Control” and Oscar-winner “Tsotsi” (yes, it’s British). I suspect Jones might land a few more citations, particularly of the Best First Film variety, before the year is out.

    (More details, and a full list of awards, after the cut.)

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