I’m a bit out of pocket down south so a fleeting post is all I can offer the history-making moment that is ‘Precious’ winning Toronto’s audience prize. No other film has taken the audience award at both Sundance and Toronto, I believe, but this miraculous film’s Oscar trajectory has been written for months. Congrats to all involved, and onward…
Category: Daily
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Can’t stop, won’t stop
In the wake of this week’s Kanye incident, I said “Imalitchoofinish” was destined to become the new “I Drink your milkshake,” and, well, let’s just say people are having fun with it. This one is pure genius:
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A conversation with Mira Nair
Speaking of “Amelia,” the film may or may not be a factor in this year’s awards race. The jury is still out there, but over at MakingOf, director Mira Nair talks about the job of a director and her process in making a film. Take a look:
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TORONTO: Wrap up
And so it ends. The last of the press screenings have winded down, the final Gala is tonight, and the awards are on the way, ending this year;s Toronto International Film Festival.This year’s fest was terrific, one of the better festivals, though still not as strong as 2007, which for me was the greatest ever. Once again you can feel the Oscar buzz happening around several of the films and performances that have been screened here, just as you can hear and see the buzz around films without distribution. At the end of it all, it was a great time.
I sit here today exhausted, with aching legs, tired of coffee, and not really wanting to see a film for a few hours. There is nothing worse than attending a festival and struggling to find good films, but that has never happened to me in Toronto. Montreal is a different story…
The best film I saw at this year’s festival was the searing “Precious,” a stunning piece of cinema that is a work of art. Demanding, difficult, full of hate and rage, yet ultimately hope, “Precious” is extraordinary. Over the course of the festival I encountered many folks in the lines and on the streets asking me which film I thought stood out most, and each time I answered this one. Those who had seen it agreed wholeheartedly, and I met only one person who did not care for it.
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WEEKLY WRAP: Swayze passes, Venice wraps, Toronto runs
• Patrick Swayze left us this week, passing away of cancer at the age of 57.• The Venice Film Festival drew to a close, with Israeli war drama “Lebanon” taking top honors.
• It was Colin Firth, however, who emerged with Oscar buzz for the Weinstein-acquired “A Single Man.”
• Across the Atlantic, we kept you up to date with Toronto goings-on, as buzz for “Precious” continues to build.
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Just a friendly reminder…
… to any American readers privileged with access to a good arthouse cinema, that Claire Denis’s wondrous “35 Shots of Rum” finally bows Stateside this weekend. I’ve been raving about the film — a sweetly melancholy, impeccably detailed study of a devoted Parisian father and daughter gradually separating their lives — since I saw it at the Edinburgh fest in June, and it remains in my top three for 2009 thus far.You don’t have to take my word for it, though: as much as I dislike people who quote Metacritic stats as some kind of inarguable gospel, it’s fair to say that a film with an MC score of 96 is likely to quite good. To jog your memory, my brief Edinburgh take on “35 Shots of Rum” is here. (With the benefit of hindsight, that 3.5 star rating would certainly get bumped up.)
Meanwhile, with the similarly excellent “Disgrace” also opening in limited release today, discerning New York moviegoers have a rich selection before them. I just got off the phone with the film’s breakthrough star Jessica Haines (watch out for our interview in the next few weeks), and she discussed the tortuous path the film has taken to finally reach American screens after debuting on the festival circuit a full year ago. Same goes for the Denis film.
So it’d be nice if some people bothered to see them. Take a chance.
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9/18 Web Round-up
• Matt Damon on packing on the pounds for “The Informant!,” among other things. [USA Today]• Which earth crisis documentary is for you? [Beyond the Multiplex]
• In honor of “A Prophet,” newly submitted as France’s foreign film Oscar representative, a list of the best-ever prison films. [Awards Daily]
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Strong praise for Resnais
I just stumbled across Glenn Kenny’s grandiose praise for Alain Resnais’s “Wild Grass” and I’m champing at the bit for this film more than I already was:Okay, it’s “too soon,” and yeah, I’m a bit tired, but, still…here’s my Facebook page update as of now: “Resnais’ Wild Grass is a whacked-out masterpiece with an ending worthy of the final minutes of 2001 and/or the last chord of ‘A Day In The Life.’ There, I said it, I’m glad, and I’m gonna say it again, repeatedly, in various formats.”
Wowsers.
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Mendes and Oprah unite on ‘Netherland’
I’m glad Sam Mendes seems determined to up the languid one-film-every-three-years work rate he started out with, even if I think “Away We Go” would have benefitted from having a bit more time (and a lot more rewrites) lavished on it.He’s not the first director I thought of to helm an adaptation of Joseph O’Neill’s brilliant novel “Netherland,” a story of immigrant displacement in post-9/11 New York. Now I can see the fit rather neatly — and the combination of a Transatlantic narrative with a healthy dose of cricket in the proceedings must have been irresistible to the Brit.
Variety reports that Mendes is “eyeing” the project with a view to direct, but he’s decisively on board as a producer, teaming with Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions and Focus Features. Meanwhile, Christopher Hampton (“Dangeous Liaisons,” “Atonement”) is on script duty, so you know this is a classy enterprise.
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Speaking of South Africa…
… as I just was, my Cape Town-based friend Ed just notified me that the country has selected their official foreign-language Oscar submission. “White Wedding” is a romantic comedy from novelist-turned-filmmaker Jann Turner, and starring Jodie Whittaker of “Venus” fame.The blurb describes it as “an appealing, feel-good movie about love, commitment, intimacy and friendship and a host of maddening obstacles that can get in the way of a happy ending.” Yes, but what’s it actually about? I’m afraid I’m none the wiser.
Turner’s accomplished novels are on the sentimental side of socially conscious; I’m guessing that sensibility extends to her films. “White Wedding” has had a healthy domestic box-office run; an unusual feat in a country where local adult-oriented cinema rarely finds a large audience.
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TORONTO: ‘Whip It,’ ‘Valhalla Rising’
More from the fest…“Whip It” (***)
Skinny Milly Miller. I remember that name from the roller derby shows on Saturday afternoons in the 1970s. My grandfather loved sports of any kind and when there was nothing else, it was roller derby he would watch, and invite me to do so with him. I loved him so much I never had the heart to tell him how stupid a sport I though it was, so I sat down and watched it with him. His favorite skater was a tall, black woman named Skinny Milly Miller.
Anyway, I have always liked Drew Barrymore, that familiar manner in which she makes you feel like an old friend, even when meeting you for the first time. Though I never thought much of her as an actress until this year (in HBO’s “Grey Gardens”), I have always respected her as a fine movie star.
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Corliss on the Coens’ latest
Today we’re pointed, via Awards Daily, to Richard Corliss’s review of the Coen brothers’ “A Serious Man” in Time magazine with this thoughtful closer:As Fate keeps stomping him, he embraces Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. What he tells his class about the theory — “Even if you can’t figure it out, you’re still responsible for it on the midterm” — applies, in spades, to his crumbling life. And yet for most of the movie he hangs in there, behaving honorably, seeking the wisdom of his ancestors, trying to observe the Jewish concept of Hashem. “Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you,” says Elie Wiesel’s Rashi. To absorb God’s body blows, this disquieting, haunting movie says, is to be fully alive. To do otherwise could kill you.
And yet, as much as I respect and agree with that sentiment, the film is much more than that, working on deeper, even more universal levels — so much so that it is quickly firming itself up as the best film of the year, in my view.
Anne Thompson and I will be discussing “A Serious Man,” among other things, in the next installment of Oscar Talk.
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TORONTO: Douglas tops in the tedious ‘Solitary Man’
People tend to forget that Michael Douglas won his first Academy Award not as an actor but as a producer, bringing the classic film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” to the screen in 1975.His father Kirk had given him the project after years of trying to get the things going and Michael went outside the industry to find the money to make the picture, approaching music giant Saul Zaentz. The rest, as they say, is history, and Douglas became a major player in the business who has no doubt gone toe-to-toe with many a studio executive to get what he wants for his films.
I wonder, however, even with an acting Oscar eventually to his credit (for Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street”), has Douglas ever been given his proper due as an actor?
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9/17 Web Round-up
• Success. The Tokyo International Film Festival bows to global pressure and allows screening of “The Cove.” [Variety]• Jeffrey Wells gets a comment from festival jury chief Alejandro González Iñárritu. [Hollywood Elsewhere]
• Anne Thompson spends some quality time with Michael Moore. [Thompson on Hollywood]
