As Nina Sayers might observe, “Ooh, look how pink! So preeeeetty.” Minor fluff, but the ad does point out just how well-matched Natalie Portman’s lissome screen presence is to Sofia Coppola’s fey visual sensibility — how has a feature collaboration between the two not happened yet? (If the male decoration looks familiar, by the way, it’s Alden Ehrenreich — the man some excitable critics briefly afflicted with “new Brando” talk after he appeared in Papa Coppola’s “Tetro” two years ago.)
Author: Guy Lodge
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Oscarcast loses montages and acting tributes
Forgive me if this news, from the Hollywood Reporter, is a couple of days old — I’m still catching up on Oscar-related nuggets I missed while I was in Berlin. But I was so pleased by these details relating to Sunday’s telecast that I had to share them.I’m on the record as saying I thought last year’s show, produced by Adam Shankman and Bill Mechanic, was one of the sloppiest I’d seen in my lifetime of Oscar-watching, and I know a number of others were similarly dismayed. So as far as I’m concerned, the duo steering this year’s ceremony, Bruce Cohen and Don Mischer, would benefit by doing things as differently from Team Shankman as possible — and indeed, that seems to be their MO this year.
Their first good move came with the reinstatement of the nominated song performances — disrespectfully binned last year to make room for such gems as breakdance routine to the “Hurt Locker” score — though Cohen admits to being “disappointed” the Academy’s music branch didn’t give them a Cher number to work with.
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James Franco takes on Cher
If you’re still sore about Cher and Diane Warren being denied a place on Oscar night for their Golden Globe-winning effort “You Haven’t Seen the Last of Me” — hey, is there any rule to prevent them busking on the red carpet? — at least take comfort in the knowledge that James Franco feels your pain.
Franco’s own tuneful rendition of the power ballad appeared on his site yesterday, with the explanatory caption: “They pulled this from the Oscar show. Damn it.” Seem’s whoever’s singing it, the song just can’t catch a break.
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Best Picture, in black and white
These hit the web last week, but I was distracted with Berlin matters. There’s no sell-by date on pretty pictures, after all. And these are particularly pretty: every year, BAFTA commissions an illustrator to design brochure artwork for each of the group’s five Best Film nominees. This year’s artist, Adam Simpson, has taken a highly stylized monochrome approach; my favorite, this solemn image for “The King’s Speech,” rather puts all the film’s own posters to shame. Full image, plus another good one, after the cut.
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‘A Prophet’ tops International Cinephile Society honors
One last set of kinda-critics’ awards to see out the season — the International Cinephile Society is an online group of journalists, academics and industry professionals that, true to their name, offers a slightly more global outlook in their measuring of the year’s best.It’s a small organization, but I mention their awards here for two reasons: 1) I’m one of the voters, and 2) despite that hindrance, they’ve assembled one of the best winners lists I’ve seen all season. Jacques Audiard’s long-lingering prison drama “A Prophet” evidently still weighs heavily on people’s minds, as it took the group’s top two awards, plus an acting win for Niels Arestrup.
Its tally was equalled, however, by “Another Year” and “The Social Network,” making for a pretty generous spread of choices — few of which we’re likely to see echoed on Sunday night. Vive la différence, and all that. Full list of winners after the cut.
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BERLIN: ‘Nader and Simin’ wins big
Unlike large voting bodies such as the Academy, the decisions of rotating festival juries are rarely easy to anticipate — when only six people are determining the awards, as was the case at this year’s Berlinale, who knows what idiosyncratic personal tastes might come into play?So it is that the only truly surprising thing about this year’s Berlin Competition winners, announced at a ceremony last night, is just how unsurprising they are. As I predicted in my Friday review of both films, Isabella Rossellini and her fellow jurors sided with the critics, as it came down to Béla Tarr’s imposing survival study “The Turin Horse” and Asghar Farhadi’s intricate moral drama “Nader and Simin, a Separation” for the Golden Bear.
As expected, it was Farhadi’s more accessible, though no less deserving, film that came out on top — two years after the filmmaker took the festival’s Best Director award for “About Elly” — while a seemingly surly Tarr had to settle for the runner-up Grand Prix. (The severe Hungarian auteur was there to pick up his award, but refused to give an acceptance speech.)
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James Franco joins the Twitterfolk
After viewing his art exhibition yesterday, I suggested James Franco might want to remove one string from his bow, but the man apparently thinks he hasn’t been busy enough lately: he can now add “celebrity Twitterer” to his increasingly long list of occupations. There’s not much yet on the @jamesfranco account to prompt discussion — just two introductory tweets to a rapidly accrued 45,000 followers (and counting, of course) — but I have no doubt he’ll mold his entertaining odd persona to the medium soon enough. His online hello is below. (Meanwhile, while we’re gathering Franco videos, he and Judd Apatow kid about Oscar hosting after the cut.)
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BERLIN: Béla Tarr and Golden Bear favorites
The Berlinale competition drew to a close this morning, with Joshua Marston’s “The Forgiveness of Blood” — more on that in a final roundup this weekend — wrapping up a selection that’s been a typically mixed bag for the festival. Healthy critical argument has flared up over a number of titles — including lone Asian entry “Come Rain, Come Shine,” a bare-bones day in the life of a separating couple that struck some as delicately affecting and others merely as attractively vacant. (I’m one of the others, sad to say.)Meanwhile, films the critical majority has sided against include “Lipstikka,” a reportedly bananas Israeli melodrama that Telegraph critic Tim Robey warned me off with this choice dialogue sample: “You play games with me, like you used to do with your men, with your sex and boobs.” Part of me regrets missing this one.
Amid the splinters of the Competition, however, a pair of critical favorites have moved comfortably ahead of the pack in terms of general approval and all-round buzz — they screened three days ago, eons in festival time, yet I’ve barely heard anyone talk about any other films since. I’m afraid to say that my own top film of the fest, Cameroon-set German drama “Sleeping Sickness” (reviewed here), isn’t one of them.
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BERLIN: The art of James Franco
James Franco obviously had to sleep for a couple of hours between rehearsing for the Oscars, campaigning for the Oscars, filming one of his four films set for release this year, preparing to direct two prestige literary adaptations, planning his Broadway revival of “Sweet Bird of Youth” opposite Nicole Kidman, writing the Great American Novel and solving world hunger — since amid those distractions, he didn’t have a film to premiere at this year’s Berlinale. The man’s slacking.Still, he isn’t entirely absent from the city over the festival period: his first solo European art exhibition, “The Dangerous Book Four Boys” opened last week in a private gallery in Berlin’s hipster-saturated Oranienburger Strasse district. As a welcome distraction from a second consecutive day of mostly unfulfilling filmgoing (the festival schedule is very much in the winding-down stages, though I still have some crackers to review), I went along to check it out — and as much as I like Franco, I must admit that if, amid his legion of other activities, “visual artist” got dropped from his résumé, it wouldn’t be the most crushing of losses.
(Note: depending on your sensitivities, pictures after the cut may not be suitable for the office.)
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‘Meek’s Cutoff’ poster
Regular readers probably know by now how much I love Kelly Reichardt’s spare, serene Oregon Trail western “Meek’s Cutoff,” which premiered at Venice back in the early days of autumn (how long ago does that feel?), clocked in at #2 on my Best of 2010 list and finally hits US theaters in April. (An unglamorous but sensible choice of slot for a challenging arthouse picture.) Now the first poster for the film has hit, and while the atypically badass image of a fierce-looking Michelle Williams brandishing a rifle was seemingly chosen to lure the “True Grit” audience, it does convey the film’s pastel, handmade visual quality. Full poster after the cut; check out my Venice review of the film here.
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BERLIN: ‘Sleeping Sickness,’ ‘The Future,’ ‘The Guard’
Sorry there was no Berlinale dispatch yesterday. It was my birthday, and after “celebrating” it with a triple-bill of variously despairing Competition entries — finishing with “The Turin Horse,” Béla Tarr’s impressive 146-minute ode to blizzards, boiled potatoes and dying — more traditional festivities were in order, beginning with several stiff drinks. There’s nothing like a film festival to infuse a birthday with bleaker-than-usual ruminations on mortality.After a dawdling start, however, the Competition really kicked into gear yesterday with a pair of substantial auteur works that will likely remain the prime topic of critical conversation for the duration of the festival: the aforementioned Tarr opus and Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s “Nader and Simin, A Separation,” now the runaway favorite for the Golden Bear for reasons both artistic and political.
I’ll discuss both these films in due course, but neither one has quite displaced an earlier (and more critically divisive) Competition title from the top of my personal best-of-the-fest list — and indeed, if anything does in the next three days, I’ll be a very happy (and surprised) man. That title would be German director Ulrich Köhler’s third feature “Sleeping Sickness” (****), an arrestingly structured and humidly atmospheric study of immigrant living and integration in west Africa that would make a valuable companion piece to Claire Denis’s more pristine “White Material,” but also warrants discussion on its own merits.
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BERLIN: ‘Coriolanus,’ Redgrave and an early Oscar bet
The cavernous Berlinale Palast theatre was packed to the gills for today’s noontime press screening of “Coriolanus” (***), and small wonder — in a Competition lineup heavy on oatmeal fare boasting comparatively unfamiliar names, Ralph Fiennes’s directorial debut is one of the few entries that affords viewers a little star-gazing.Fiennes, of course, takes the title role in his revisionist take on Shakespeare’s under-filmed tragedy, with Gerard Butler, Brian Cox and the soon-to-be-ubiquitous Jessica Chastain adding further name appeal.
As the crowd staggered out of the auditorium two hours later, the name being murmured most approvingly was that of the film’s oldest and most distinguished star. And with good reason. As Volumnia, the proud, politically-minded mother of the titular Roman general, Vanessa Redgrave gives one of “those” performances, an Olympian masterclass in classical acting that conjures spontaneous emotional fire upon a bed of immaculate technique.
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“Or once.”
I can’t let February the 14th pass without some acknowledgement on my part, so here it is: one of the coolest, warmest, hottest romantic exchanges I can think of in any movie. Scott Frank’s writing is conversational poetry here, Anne V. Coates’s editing shapes all the politics of lovemaking into a single scene, and George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez, both as beautiful and as human as they’ve ever been on screen, define chemistry. I love this scene. I love this movie. Happy Valentine’s Day.
What screen romances do it for you?
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BERLIN: 3D comes to the arthouse
Determined to make up for my rather feeble start to the Berlinale, I made it to five films on Sunday – and in a shock twist that defied the law of both averages and film festivals, I liked all of them to some extent, and two of them rather more than that. How appropriate that I get to put my poison pen away on Valentine’s Day of all days.I’ll get to writing about “The Guard” (a scuzzily hilarious Irish cop comedy from John Michael McDonagh, brother of Martin) and Competition entry “Sleeping Sickness” (by some measure the best thing I’ve seen, or am likely to see, here) in a later roundup. The other three, however, demand to be grouped in a single post, just as Berlin programmers were making a point by scheduling them back-to-back: all of them were specialist niche films in 3D, marking the moment at which the technology formally stepped outside the multiplex and into the arthouse.
When Werner Herzog announced his intention to make his latest documentary in 3D, the howls of anguish from stern cinephiles could only have increased in volume if he’d added that it was actually going to be a Miley Cyrus concert movie. When his compatriot and contemporary Wim Wenders revealed similar plans for his non-narrative tribute to the late choreographer Pina Bausch, there were fewer protests, if only because after his last few features, nobody’s been paying much attention to anything Wenders does these days.
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‘King’s Speech’ nabs seven BAFTA Awards
I had more interesting things to do at the Berlinale this evening than watch the BAFTAs, so the only commentary I can offer is on the winners list itself. And, well, it doesn’t make for terribly exciting reading. To the surprise of precisely no one, “The King’s Speech” ruled the night with seven trophies, though as I predicted, “The Social Network” barred its way in the Best Director category — with further wins for Adapted Screenplay and Editing bringing its total to three.Clearly, Fincher’s Oscar hopes are still alive, though it would be unwise to read too much into this result: as I noted earlier, BAFTA voters split their top two awards more often than not.
Two of the wins for “The King’s Speech,” however, were widely unexpected. With Geoffrey Rush beating Christian Bale to the Best Supporting Actor award — and Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter both predictably winning their categories — the film becomes only the third in BAFTA history to scoop three of the four acting categories.
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BERLIN: Getting started, ‘Yelling to the Sky’
Well, it didn’t take long for me to break my promise of daily festival reports. In the unlikely event that you were eagerly awaiting for my first Berlinale dispatch yesterday, I can only apologize: it’s hard to review films you haven’t seen.A domino-like series of misfortunes conspired to make my first day of planned festival action entirely: a last-minute train cancellation from London caused me to miss my flight, while the rescheduled flight landed me in Berlin too late to register with the press office. Add the fact that I’m still limping round the city on a single crutch, and I am the poster boy for the Twitter hashtag titled #festivalfail.
On the plus side, I can inform you that the Competition title I missed yesterday — corporate thriller “Margin Call,” whose starry cast includes Kevin Spacey and Demi Moore — was at least one that has been roundly dismissed. Meanwhile, while I gained no film-related knowledge yesterday, I can at least share a culinary tip: the best burger you’ve ever eaten in your life is to be found at a pleasingly rowdy American bar called The Bird in Prenzlauerberg. Book a flight, and thank me later. (I understand there’s a second branch opening in Wyoming soon. I swear I’m not making this up.)
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Previewing BAFTA
In the 10 years since they moved up in the calendar to pre-Oscar status, the BAFTAs have hovered uncertainly between complying with awards trends across the pond, thereby establishing themselves as a viable precursor, and stubbornly standing by their own – as in 2007, when they opted out of the Coen Brothers-P.T. Anderson faceoff by picking “Atonement,” despite the film’s only other award coming for Best Art Direction.This year, however, offers them the best of both worlds. Rewarding “The King’s Speech” will simultaneously allow them to co-sign a heavy Oscar favourite and preserve their national pride.
Add in the fact that a vote for the film also represents a vote for the much-mourned UK Film Council – oh, and that it just happens to be a smash hit with British audiences – and the royal biopic would likely have been a lock for the top prize even without the support of major US guilds.
(More, plus predictions, after the jump.)
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Off to the Berlinale
In a couple of hours, I’m jumping on a crack-of-dawn flight to one of the coolest cities on earth for a week at the Berlin International Film Festival — or, to use the name that rolls more luxuriously off the tongue, the Berlinale.I probably should have mentioned this earlier and posted some sort of festival preview. The truth, however, is that I’ve been so preoccupied with other business that I’ve barely read through the festival programme myself — the date rather snuck up on me. I’ve never done so little homework ahead of a festival — yet after my first Berlinale experience last year, that doesn’t feel like a bad approach.
Berlin prides itself as being a festival of discovery, with more of an emphasis on rising talent than the lofty auteur names that tend to favor the sunnier festival climes of Cannes and Venice. True to form, my favorite finds of last year’s festival were ones I knew little about in advance (like Arvin Chen’s “Au Revoir, Taipei,” which wound up in my 2010 Top 10) or ones I wasn’t aware would show up until the last minute (like “The Illusionist,” buried so deep in last year’s programme many critics missed it altogether).
