In Contention

Category: Daily

  • TORONTO: More on ‘The Road’

    The RoadThere were some complaints in yesterday’s Toronto thread that I wasn’t specific enough as to why I enjoyed John Hillcoat’s “The Road,” so let me make it clear.

    The film captures, miraculously, in its performances and its images, a profound sense of loss, both for what was and for what will never be. Trees fall around the actors, nothing left to replace them.  There are no flowers, no bushes, no sense of life.  The land — the earth — is slowly dying and with that humanity will die as well.

    Yet The Man is dedicated to surviving and sees his son as the future, as any parent would.  “To me he’s a god.”  One day we will die but our children will live on, and that is a motivating factor carried across precisely in the film.  The Man hopes he is teaching his boy how to survive because he knows he is dying.  The constant pain is etched onto Viggo Mortenson’s face throughout the film, all joy is gone, and memory has become his foe, taking him back to happier times that simply torture him.

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  • 9/15 Web Round-up

    Jason Reitman on the set of Up in the Air• James Rocchi sits down with Jason Reitman to talk “Up in the Air.” [AMC TV]

    • Jeffrey Wells bangs the Best Picture drum for Rodrigo Garcia’s as-of-yet un-acquired “Mother and Child.” [Hollywood Elsewhere]

    • Michael Douglas talks “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.” [Empire]

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  • R.I.P. Patrick Swayze

    I got the AP alert on my iPhone while I was out this afternoon and my heart sank.  Patrick Swayze is gone. For most it was “Dirty Dancing.”  For some it was “Point Break.”  Still others, “Ghost.”  For me, the man was epitomized in the bad-assery of “Road House” and that’s how I choose to remember him.  But I couldn’t resist the opportunity to pay this ode to two of our fallen entertainers:

  • ‘Everybody’s Fine’ trailer

    Last week we told you about the Best Actor buzz potentially building on the horizon for Robert De Niro in the remake “Everybody’s Fine.”  Pete Hammond has seen the film and sung the actor’s praises, and now, we get this broad, sell-it-to-the-masses trailer.  If you can get past the awful voice over and awkward musical choices, I think there’s an interesting performance lurking in there — maybe:

  • Mid-Toronto Oscar update

    No column today, as mentioned previously.  We’ll pick it up weekly on 9/21, but I thought I’d run a comb through the sidebar today.  Some weak spots, no doubt, but we’re still knocking the dust off things as the season prepares its post-Toronto launch.

  • TORONTO: ‘The Road,’ ‘Bad Lieutenant,’ ‘Chloe’

    Chloe(Please note, as opposed to Kris and Guy, I tend to grade films on a 5-star scale.)

    Loads to catch up on today and some interviews still to write up. First off, I have to confess that I disagree with Kris’s review of “The Road,” respectfully of course, and I think I have a reason why I might have viewed and appreciated the film in a very different light than he.  I also saw Werner Herzog’s “The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans,” which features a hugely entertaining performance from Nicolas Cage, and the latest from Atom Egoyan, “Chloe,” which features a splendid performance from Amanda Seyfreid.

    Let’s dig in…

    “The Road” (****)

    This was a dark and unsettling film based on the brilliant book by Cormac McCarthy about a father (Viggo Mortensen) and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) journeying to the south after the world has essentially seen its end of days. We are never really given a clear explanation as to what happened, but the vague description we do get sounds like nuclear war finally came, and the planet is dying a slow death.  Trees are dead, there is nothing alive or growing anymore, the world is a gray and dreary place, as though hell had suddenly burst forth from the bowels of the earth.  The south brings warmer weather, which is what the man and his son need, he believes, to survive, and survivial is what the film is about.

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  • ‘Amelia’ threads and ‘Wild Things’ designs

    Costume design sketch from AmeliaIt looks like the LA Times is boning up on its coverage of the craft fields this Oscar season, as a pair of pieces landed over the weekend spotlighting below-the-line players on a pair of the year’s awards hopefuls.

    The first, a look at the fashion sense of Amelia Earhart as conveyed in the costumes of Mira Nair’s “Amelia,” includes perspective from Nair on costume designer Kasia Walicka-Maimone’s work and the legendary pilot’s uniform innovations:

    She created whatever suited her…And sold it as well. But more than anything, it came from comfort into style versus style for its own sake. She had this thing about scarves and color — rather than complete color, dashes of color. When she got the president’s medal, she wore a teal velvet skirt and ivory satin blouse with real orchids on the lapel.

    The next piece is a look at the unlikely assumption of creature design duties for artist Sonny Gerasimowicz in Spike Jonze’s “Where the Wild Things Are.”

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  • “Talk of the fest.”

  • Cha-ching

    So, Christoph Waltz taking the money and running as the villain in Michel Gondry’s “The Green Hornet.”  Thoughts?

  • A ‘Serious’ conversation

    I stumbled across this quick interview with Richard Kind, Sari Lennick and Michael Stuhlbarg from “A Serious Man” over at Making Of.  Great stuff about the audition process, working with the Coens, high praise from Kind for Stuhlbarg (who really deserves to be in the lead actor race), etc.  I wish it were longer, but take a look:

  • ‘This Is It’ trailer

  • 9/14 Web Round-up

    Christopher Plummer• Overture angles for the domestic rights to Antoine Fuqua’s “Brooklyn’s Finest,” perhaps giving a leg up to Ethan Hawke in the Best Actor race. [Variety]

    • Is Charles Darwin too controversial for American multiplexes? [CHUD]

    • Christopher Plummer at 80, busy as ever. [The Toronto Star]

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  • Justice for ‘Lourdes’

    Sylvie Testud in LourdesAs I wrote in my reflection on the Venice festival awards yesterday, the biggest surprise (and by no means a pleasant one) of the jury’s winners list was the complete lack of recognition for Jessica Hausner’s excellent, quietly subversive religious drama “Lourdes,” a favorite of critics and pundits alike.

    Happily, FIPRESCI is there to set things right. The international critics’ organization, which hands out its own awards at every major festival (and many minor ones, too), has honored “Lourdes” as the best film at Venice this year.

    It’s a prestigious citation, often given to films with broader arthouse appeal than those the jury might select: recent Venice FIPRESCI honorees include “The Queen,” “Good Night, and Good Luck” and “The Secret of the Grain” (or “Couscous,” to my fellow Brits). They’re not always contrarian, either: they matched the Cannes jury this year by picking “The White Ribbon.”

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  • Chile joins foreign-language fray

    Dawson, Island 10 Chile is the latest country to formally join the Best Foreign Language Film race, having selected true-life political drama “Dawson, Island 10” as their official submission.

    To go by the trailer, the film, which tells the story of a group of political prisoners held captive on the titular island after a 1973 military coup in the country, looks suitably large and ennobling. At the very least, that should make it more to the Academy’s taste than last year’s ballsy Chilean selection, the superb black comedy “Tony Manero.”

    Catching up on older news, we should also add a trio of Eastern European titles to the mix: Slovenia’s “Landscape No. 2,” Hungary’s “Chameleon” and Bulgaria’s imposingly titled “The World is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner.” (I bet Tyler Perry’s mad he didn’t think that one up first.)

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  • New ‘Christmas Carol’ trailer

  • TORONTO: Duvall the talk of the fest — shades of 1997

    Robert Duvall in Get LowYou know a film is hot when it is the subject of conversation in the screening, in the press room, and in the hallways of the hotels where the press junkets and meetings are being held.  In 1997, “The Apostle,” the exquisite film directed, written by and starring Robert Duvall, was the talk of the Toronto film fest after its world premiere the night before, but in fact, the buzz started partway through the film when October Films and Miramax began a bidding battle that has become the stuff of legend.

    Duvall left the festival with his career reborn, the film, which he financed, was sold (to October), and the multi-hyphenate began winning critics awards for the film at year’s end. The Los Angeles Film Critics Association named him Best Actor that year and a few weeks later the National Society of Film Critics did the same. Though snubbed for a Golden Globe nomination, he was nominated by both the Screen Actors Guild and the Academy, but he eventually lost to Jack Nicholson in “As Good as It Get.”

    The film eventually nailed down a solid $24 million at the box office and Duvall’s performance is considered by and large one of his best.  He came back to a couple of years later with his new film “Assassination Tango,” a failure, and he is here again with two films — John Hillcoat’s “The Road,” which I will write about later today, and “Get Low,” a film recalling shades of the 1997 fest as it has captured the conversation here.

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  • Much better…

    Would have been, anyway.  Doesn’t help the film any, but it represents the best moment in the piece with the right amount of psychedelia.  Dumb tagline, though:

    Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

    (Courtesy: Ain’t It Cool News)

  • Robert Duvall leaps onto the Oscar radar with ‘Get Low?’

    Robert Duvall in Get LowI hate doing this from afar, but hey, we do what we can.  And I imagine John will chime in with his thoughts on Aaron Schneider’s “Get Low” in due time, but apparently the film received a standing ovation in Toronto tonight.  And word is, Robert Duvall might be on course for some Oscar attention.

    Duvall stars in the film as a Tennessee hermit, derived from a mixture of truth and folk tale, who famously threw his own funeral while still alive.  I think in tandem with good graces for his cameo in “The Road,” Duvall could be in the mix.  But the film needs a distributor first.

    Funnily enough I was in the middle of an email exchange with a colleague regarding the lead actor Oscar race when I began putting this post together.  As much as I loved “Up in the Air,” I don’t feel like this is a win for George Clooney.  Plus, he already has a (recent) statue.  Matt Damon is wonderful in “The Informant!,” but the film may be too slight.  Of course, Morgan Freeman is still lurking.  But maybe we have a potential winner here?  Duvall hasn’t won in 25 years, and damn if he isn’t consistent (which can’t be said of a number of his contemporaries).  There’s also Michael Caine flying under the radar in the still distributor-less “Harry Brown” to consider.

    Check out a clip from “Get Low” after the jump.

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