In Contention

Author: Guy Lodge

  • Oceans apart

    One of the great things about getting to review a film before the general press has had their say is having no idea where your views will stand in the tide of critical opinion. With only gut expectations to live up (or down) to, one can respond to nothing but the work at hand.

    So it was last week when I reviewed Guy Ritchie’s “RocknRolla,” which screened yesterday in Toronto and opens in the UK today. I thought it a dismal effort, but was quite prepared to be in the minority on that one. Nonetheless, the extreme split in opinion that is emerging has taken me by surprise — not least because it seems to be on geographical lines.

    The UK reception for “RocknRolla” has been decidedly frosty, with the tabloids and the more highbrow broadsheets seemingly united in their contempt for the film. The Daily Mail deems it an “embarrassing turkey,” and The Guardian — in a one-star review that’s not as funny as Peter Bradshaw thinks it is — is right with them, calling it a “shocker.” (Or “shocka,” to use Bradshaw Mockney-aping spelling.)

    The Times is moderately kinder, acknowledging its entertainment value, but complaining that “it brings back too many jaundiced memories and fails to lay any fresh tracks.” The drubbing continues at The Independent, who blame the “inexcusable banality” of Ritchie’s script, while The Telegraph complains the film is “loud and brash but goes nowhere.”

    Cross the pond, however, and the US trade papers seem to have seen an entirely different film at Toronto. Variety loves “RocknRolla,” declaring it “cleverly constructed, sensationally stylish and darkly hilarious,” and predicting strong Stateside business. The Hollywood Reporter seconds that emotion, calling it Ritchie’s “most accessible and enjoyable film yet.” (Have they seen “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels?”)

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  • ‘Wrestler’ off to a good start

    Now this is good news. Darren Aronofsky’s “The Wrestler” bows at Venice tomorrow, but the trades have put up their reviews from Toronto … and they’re mighty positive.

    Todd McCarthy and the Hollywood Reporter’s Stephen Farber both give credence to those Best Actor rumours for Mickey Rourke. Farber calls the performance the best of his career, while McCarthy goes further, declaring it one of the great performances, period.

    On another note, I’m pleased to see that both critics confirm a hunch I had that Marisa Tomei — a personal favourite — would deliver too.

    McCarthy raves:

    Rourke creates a galvanizing, humorous, deeply moving portrait that instantly takes its place among the great, iconic screen performances. An elemental story simply and brilliantly told, Darren Aronofsky’s fourth feature is a winner from every possible angle.

    Rourke is simply staggering as Ram. The camera is rarely off him, and one doesn’t want it to be, so entirely does he express the full life of this man with his every word and gesture … As vibrant — and as naked — as she was in last year’s “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” Tomei is in top, emotionally forthright form as she charts a life passage similar to Ram’s, if much less extreme.

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  • New ‘Quantum’ pics

    Picking up on this a day late, but Empire has unveiled a load of previously unseen stills from “Quantum of Solace.” Nothing particularly illuminating or striking about them, though my inner eight-year-old can’t wait for the scene that contains this:

    Also, I hadn’t registered until now that the UK is getting this two weeks before the Yanks. Sometimes Britannia does indeed rule.

  • Huh?

    In a year when the Venice festival lineup has been roundly deemed the weakest — not to mention, least star-powered — in some time, you have to wonder what its organisers are thinking in going head-to-head with Toronto next year.

    I assume Venice director Marco Mueller is banking on the European prestige of a potential Golden Lion to lure titles away from Toronto, which doesn’t have a competition aspect, but as the Times succinctly puts it:

    This could leave Venice in a vulnerable position: it’s a film festival noted for its glamour and certainly has more public recognition than Toronto – but no business is done there; it doesn’t have a “market” (as Toronto does) where films are bought and sold. Quite besides the red carpet fun and games, the “market” is the nuts and bolts of a film festival, including Cannes.

     Madness.

  • Critics fall hard for ‘Rachel’

    Since I saw that smart, snappy trailer, I suspected that “Rachel Getting Married” would find a following. Even so, I wouldn’t have guessed that it would turn out to be the critical darling of the Venice Film Festival at the halfway mark.

    Yet that — aided by the general perception that, the Miyazaki aside, the competition films have been lacklustre — is exactly what has happened. Hours after its Lido screening this evening, raves for the film as a whole are pouring in, while that Oscar buzz for Anne Hathaway is getting louder.

    Screen International gushes:

    Hand-held, free-wheeling and at times joyously spontaneous, the dogme-like “Rachel Getting Married” sees Jonathan Demme paying tribute to Robert Altman (in particular “A Wedding”) but there’s such a large dose of music in here it almost forms a genre of its own … Packed with superb performances, in particular from Anne Hathaway in the lead role and Debra Winger in a small supporting turn she makes memorable, Rachel Getting Married will undoubtedly be up for awards consideration in the major categories.

    Variety’s breathless review, meanwhile, sums up Hathaway’s performance as “fragile, angry and superb,” while comparing the film to my own favourite Demme work:

    Brimming with energy, elan and the unpredictability of his “Something Wild,” Jonathan Demme’s triumphant “Rachel Getting Married” may just lay the wedding film to rest, being such a hard act to follow … Riding emotional rollercoasters to the ever-changing rhythms of the wonderfully eclectic in-house bands whose music never ceases, Demme’s self-styled stunner should appeal to arthouse auds.

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  • ‘Slumdog’ to close London fest

    The full lineup for October’s London Film Festival will be revealed in a week’s time, but we do now know what its bookends will be.

    “Frost/Nixon” was confirmed months ago as the festival opener. Now comes the announcement that Danny Boyle’s surprise package “Slumdog Millionaire,” coming off sensational buzz at Telluride, will have its European premiere as the closing film of the festival. Guess which one I’m more excited about.

    Festival director Sandra Hebron faces a tough task trying to top last year’s amazing slate, which included “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” “No Country for Old Men,” “4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days,” “I’m Not There,”  “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” and “The Savages,” to name but a few of the highlights.

    But this bodes very well indeed … and it’s a nice touch to round out this very British festival with a hot film from a homegrown talent. I can’t wait.

  • Hollywood Awards get the craft races rolling

    I’ve never quite got a handle on what purpose the Hollywood Awards serve, since they frequently seem to honour achievements in still-unseen films. Their picks can be quite prescient (last year’s honorees included Marion Cotillard and Dante Ferretti), but they can frequently baffle too. (Based on “Charlie Wilson’s War,” did anyone really think that Stephen Goldblatt was the cinematographer of 2007?)

    However, following the announcement of this year’s craft honorees, I am pretty confident that we will see a couple of these names in the awards derby.

    A couple of months ago, I discussed the awards prospects of “Australia” DP Mandy Walker, so it’s nice to see she’s been named Cinematographer of the Year. The one thing that’s not in doubt about “Australia” is that it’s going to be a visual feast, so things are looking good for Walker to become the first female Best Cinematography nominee in Oscar history.

    Also on this site, Kris recently mused on the surprisingly poor Oscar record of Danny Elfman, one of the most distinctive composers in the business. He in turn has been named Composer of the Year. Elfman’s had a busy 2008, scoring “Wanted,” “Hellboy II: The Golden Army,” and Errol Morris doc “Standard Operating Procedure,” but it’s the heavily-buzzed “Milk” that could reverse his Academy fortunes.

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  • ‘Broken’ beauty

    The news that Sony Pictures Classics has acquired rights to “Broken Embraces,” the latest from Spanish master Pedro Almodovar, isn’t really much of a story. After all, SPC have handled Almodovar’s last nine features, and after the success of “Volver,” why would they stop now?

    However, it does provide a nice excuse to post this gorgeous still from the film, courtesy of Almodovar’s always-interesting blog:

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  • Foreign film watch: Holland and Taiwan pick their horses

    For those of you keeping track of the Best Foreign Language Film race, Screen Daily carries details of submissions from two countries with good previous form in the category.

    After fouling foul of the Academy’s arcane rules last year — their entry “Lust, Caution” was disqualified for not being sufficiently Taiwanese — Taiwan is hoping for better luck this time with “Cape No. 7,” a romantic comedy about a group of coastal townspeople who form a support band for a visiting pop star.

    The Netherlands, meanwhile, has selected “Dunya and Desie,” a youth-oriented road comedy about two best friends travelling through Morocco. I find it a surprising choice — the sweeping period weepie “Bride Flight” seemed more Oscar-friendly to me — but the film’s topical theme of Muslim-Western relations might resonate with voters.

    Variety, reviewing it at the Berlin fest in February, loved the film, saying it “positively sings with upbeat energy and humor,” drawing favourable comparisons to “Bend It Like Beckham,” and finally citing “enormous remake potential.”

    For a country with such a small industry, the Dutch have an enviable track record in this category, having won three times, as well as managing nominations for such minor works as “Zus en Zo” and “Twin Sisters.” They are always ones to watch.

  • Another vote of confidence for ‘Button’

    Kris linked earlier to Anne Thompson’s defence of the 20-minute taster of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” — a riposte to the underwhelmed response from certain corners of the blogosphere.

    Encouragingly, Thompson’s Variety colleague Todd McCarthy is of the same mind. Saying the footage “pushes all the right buttons,” he elaborates:

    The footage looked artistically and technically impeccable, and quite different in style from Fincher’s previous work. The ambitious aging technique, employed to tell the story of a man who is born with the features of an old man and gradually grows bigger and younger, was seamless in the footage Fincher presented.

    I must say I took the criticism with a pinch of salt when I heard it — I think it’s impossible to draw conclusions on such a structurally and thematically complex work based on so little footage. As far as I’m concerned, until we can see the entirety of David Fincher’s vision, his film is innocent until proven guilty.   

  • Cinematical swoons over Scott Thomas

    Compared to the drought of previous years, where the five nominees have been all but pre-determined for months in advance, the Best Actress race is looking rather crowded at this point. (It’s certainly the major category that gave me the most pause when I updated my predictions this morning.)

    What’s gratifying to see is that the field features so many contenders from independent films, including the much-discussed Sally Hawkins, Charlize Theron (coming off a lot of Venice buzz), Anne Hathaway, Melissa Leo and Michelle Williams.

    But perhaps the darkest horse of all is Kristin Scott Thomas, an actress whose star has dimmed somewhat Stateside since receiving her only Oscar nomination twelve years ago. In that time, she’s been working more and more frequently in her adopted homeland of France, and she now returns to prominence with the French-language “I’ve Loved You So Long,” a dark domestic drama in which she plays a woman reconnecting with her family after fifteen years in prison.

    Scott Thomas has been garnering steady acclaim since the film bowed at Berlin in February. Now, in the wake of its Telluride screening, and in the midst of a rave review declaring the film a “rare masterpiece,” Cinematical joins the chorus with this bold assertion:

    Thomas’s performance here has been generating Oscar buzz for a while now, and deservedly so; she will almost certainly garner a Best Actress Oscar nod for this film.

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  • Raves roll in for Miyazaki

    Six days in, and a rather quiet Venice Film Festival has come up with its first unalloyed critical triumph – an animated Japanese re-imagining of Hans Christian Andersen, aimed primarily at children still in the single digits.

    That would be surprising were “Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea” directed by anyone other than Hayao Miyazaki, the Oscar-winning animation master who has, in recent years, crossed over to being one of the industry’s most venerated auteurs. After all, “Spirited Away” — for me, still one of the crowning cinematic achievements of the decade — began its incredible success story when it won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 2002 (sharing with Paul Greengrass’ “Bloody Sunday,” no less).

    2005 follow-up “Howl’s Moving Castle” didn’t reach quite the same dizzy heights, but it was another richly textured, narratively daring work that received its fair share of acclaim, and a second Oscar nomination for Miyazaki.

    Now comes “Ponyo,” apparently a return to the simpler, gentler storytelling of earlier films like “My Neighbour Totoro,” that is already doing spectacular business in its home country. And it seems the looser style and younger target audience hasn’t deterred critics in the slightest. Screen Daily breathlessly raves:

    Visually, it’s extraordinary; imaginatively, it’s daring. Once again Hayao Miyazaki is playing in a league of his own with … a sweet, gentle, moving, and always delightful Japanese take on the classic Little Mermaid fable … “Ponyo” is firing on all cylinders on every level. From the sheer creativity of its traditional cell animation to its characterisations (every adult here feels real); the interactions between old and young; the untrammelled imagination on display throughout the story; and, above all, the way Miyazaki still dares to be different.

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  • ‘Plain’ brings buzz for Theron

    I’ve already said how high my hopes are for “The Burning Plain,” the directorial debut from one of the most interesting screenwriters in the business, Guillermo Arriaga. Now the reviews are trickling in, and they’re — predictably — mixed.

    Variety, as is often the case these days, provides the major buzzkill, dismissing it as “an elaborate writing exercise” (like that’s a bad thing) with “little to become engaged with.” Happily, Lee Marshall at Variety’s UK equivalent, Screen International, couldn’t disagree more:

    A powerful contemporary melodrama, more restrained but also much cleaner, in dramatic focus and emotional thrust, than the three films Arriaga penned for Inarritu … A sombre story about an unforgivable act and its cross-generational fallout is here leavened by a greater dose of hope and redemption than Arriaga has yet allowed himself, and the games The Burning Plain plays with its audience are amply justified by the emotional punch of the film’s denouement.

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  • REVIEW: “RocknRolla” (*1/2)

    Warner Bros. Pictures\'s RocknRollaShort of seeking or citing any legitimate critical opinion, the marketing team behind “RocknRolla,” the fifth feature from Guy Ritchie, have gone to much effort to portray it as a creative comeback for the much-maligned filmmaker.

    Here in the UK, the words “return to form” are splashed prominently across billboards for the film (set to make its North American bow at the Toronto fest): a frank admission that Ritchie’s last two efforts, “Revolver” and “Swept Away,” were across-the-board disasters. They appear to be working the angle that this is something of a back-to-basics effort, a happy reunion between Ritchie and knockabout gangland comedy.

    And indeed, for the first few minutes of “RocknRolla,” hopes are high that Ritchie has rediscovered the fleet-footed timing and lightness of touch that made his trend-setting 1998 debut “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” such a delight, and its lesser follow-up, “Snatch,” such a guilty pleasure. The animated credit sequence, as you may have heard, is a thing of considerable beauty. More importantly, the opening scene, which employs swift, sexy cuts between multiple actors and locations to maintain a multi-voiced monologue on the fortunes of present-day London (Ritchie presumably wrote this before the recession), is something to behold.

    But then the pace settles, the actual narrative reveals itself — and the whole enterprise, shorn of these initial stylistic tics, steadily falls apart. Ritchie has dialed down his style of story construction since the incomprehensibly convoluted “Revolver,” but he may have overcompensated — the size of the ensemble notwithstanding, there is really very little storytelling motor here.

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  • ‘Australia’ steps aside for Bond

    Jeff Wells reports that the release date for Baz Luhrmann’s vast period romance “Australia” has been pushed back from November 14 to November 26.

    Fair enough – I wouldn’t want to go up against “Quantum of Solace” either. Given that it seems to have become fashionable to beat up on “Australia,” sight unseen, there will no doubt be a lot of snarky speculation about what state the film is currently in – though seriously, there’s only so much that can be done in twelve days.

    As perhaps the only person on earth who loved that trailer, I remain resolutely optimistic. Luhrmann is quite possibly insane, but the world needs more of that.

  • Docs scramble for the deadline

    Today’s New York Times carries an interesting piece about the crunch of documentaries currently being screened in Manhattan to empty houses – all in the name of Oscar eligibility. A simplified rule change now requires that, in order to qualify for the awards, feature docs must be screened for a week – on both coasts – before August 31.

    However, in a rather surreal bit of logic, the filmmakers involved are doing their utmost not to attract audiences, presumably so as to avoid peaking too early in terms of media coverage:

    “I didn’t advertise, I didn’t seek reviews,” said Roberta Grossman, producer of “Blessed is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh,” the story of a Jewish-Hungarian resistance fighter during World War II. “My goal for this run was to qualify for the Academy Awards, period.”

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  • The Brits feeling ‘Burn’

    You’ve surely heard by now that the US trade papers aren’t exactly crazy for the Coen Brothers’ latest, “Burn After Reading,” which bowed in Venice last night. “Arch and ungainly” was one of the less damning descriptions in Todd McCarthy’s review, while Kirk Honeycutt was moderately kinder in calling the film “a minor piece of silliness.”

    Which makes the reaction of the frequently grouchy Limey press all the more surprising. They like it, they really like it. The film has gone four-for-four with the major British papers, all of them seemingly welcoming the brothers’ fleet-footed change of pace. The Independent’s venerable Geoffrey Macnab calls it “dark, convoluted, chaotic – and extremely funny,” arguing that the film goes deeper than has been advertised:

    The Coens suggest this is simply a story about knuckleheads. But the film offers a damning portrait of a society in which the knuckleheads continue to hold the levers of power. The Coens introduce plenty of familiar, noirish elements. On one level, this is a dark thriller in which paranoia, avarice and sexual jealousy rule. But thanks to the increasingly absurd behaviour of the protagonists,it is also very funny.

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  • Shameless

    Sitting at a bus stop in London’s Shoreditch at 2am, waiting for the ever-elusive night bus home, I had rather a long time to contemplate the new UK poster for “The Duchess,” Paramount Vantage’s Keira Knightley costume flick…

    … and my initial reaction was that, to my surprise, I rather liked it. Clean, stark, beautifully lit (the colours are richer in print), it also squarely emphasises the basic drawcard of what looks (to me) like a rather uninteresting film: a gorgeous woman in nice frocks.

    But then I came to that tagline – “There are three people in her marriage” – and, well, ick.

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