In Contention

Category: Daily

  • Films for the future

    To commemorate their 75th anniversary, the British Film Institute has launched a nice little project called “Visions for the Future.” They’ve selected 75 figures from the world of film — actors, filmmakers, critics and other industry pros — and invited them to name one film they would choose to share with future generations, as well as asking for their thoughts on the future of the medium.

    The results — mainly in the form of video interviews — are really rather insightful. Obvious (albeit worthy) choices abound, from “The Wizard of Oz” to “The Third Man” to “Tokyo Story.”

    But there are a number of interesting left turns. As if there weren’t enough reasons to like her already, Cate Blanchett proves her taste and intelligence by picking Andrei Tarkovsky’s mind-blowing “Stalker,” though she admits it took her three days to get through it. (Her choice also gives me a nice excuse to post one of the most beautiful posters of all time as an illustration.)

    My favourite choice, however, is that of the brilliant playwright and screenwriter Patrick Marber — Powell and Pressburger’s “The Red Shoes,” a twisted, romantic and visually breathtaking fairytale that he economically describes as being “about wanting things too much and not getting them.”

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  • TORONTO: ‘Rachel Getting Married,’ ‘Flash of Genius’

    Greg Kinnear in Flash of GeniusWoke up dog tired this morning, yesterday’s marathon of screenings wore me out. Getting old. Do the usual pre-screening intake of food and coffee (a festival staple) before getting ready to head off to the first screening, “Flash of Genius” which I am looking to seeing.

    Greg Kinnear convinced me he was the real deal opposite Jack Nicholson in “As Good As It Gets” and even more so as Bob Crane in the dark biopic “Auto Focus.” He has got an all American quality about him that I quite enjoy.

    (Reviews after the jump.)

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  • Is ‘Slumdog’ really a slam dunk?

    It’s no secret that Danny Boyle’s “Slumdog Millionaire” is shaping up to be one of the indie darlings of 2008. The film was the uncontested hit of the Telluride festival, bowing to sensational reviews, of which Todd McCarthy’s (key phrases: “a blast;” “fantastic energy;” “a vital piece of work”) represents the consensus.

    Almost immediately, Oscar buzz began building around the film, with pundits suggesting that the film’s combination of gritty sociological themes and ultimately uplifting narrative would prove irresistible to voters seeking to annoint this year’s ‘little film that could.’ (Glib comparisons have been made to “Juno,” based on, well, nothing really — except it’s a small film that audiences like.)

    Now, the latest to board the “Slumdog” train in Toronto are Tom O’Neil and Jeffrey Wells. In this video from Gold Derby, O’Neil says the film has the “passionate rooting factor” that a film needs to get those first-place votes on the nomination ballot. In closing, O’Neil and Wells agree that the film is “without question” one of 2008’s five Best Picture nominees. Article continues after the cut:

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  • DiCaprio and Scott start talking ‘Lies’

    Leonardo DiCaprio in Body of LiesThe LA Times’ Chris Lee has reported an interesting story about Ridley Scott’s upcoming “Body of Lies,” but the best anecdote is right at the top:

    “If I’m going to get down to brass tacks, there’s no rules,” Scott exclaimed, sitting on the sun-drenched deck of his West Hollywood production company. He was speaking hypothetically about his willingness to use torture to extract information from a suspected terrorist — a pivotal plot point in the knighted British director’s political thriller “Body of Lies”…

    “If I want to get the information out of somebody, I have to do it,” Scott continued. “And it makes it a lot easier if that person put a bomb in a square or blew up a bunch of kids. I’d definitely take a cricket bat to him.” He glanced over at DiCaprio for confirmation. “Right?”

    DiCaprio clamped his lips together, averted eye contact and almost imperceptibly shook his head no. Awkward moment, anyone? The hard-charging director suddenly reversed course. “Never let me be the head of any counter-terrorist organization,” Scott said, chuckling.

    Lee has apparently seen “Body of Lies,” by the way, judging by his descriptions.  He calls the film “a deliberate throwback to Nixon-era conspiracy thrillers, films that spotlighted American political skulduggery and corruption…The film offers plenty of other visceral stimulation as well, tautly paced around shootouts, car chases and lushly photographed explosions courtesy of cinematographer Alexander Witt.  Big ideas too.”

  • Javier Bardem: Defending the character

    Some actors just have it. Javier Bardem is one of them.

    A few weeks ago, Kris posted that engaging Penelope Cruz interview with Lynn Hirschberg of the New York Times. Now, in a neat bit of symmetry, Bardem is next in the series — and he is as articulate and perceptive an interviewee as he is a performer.

    I particularly like his description (borrowed from Victoria Abril) of the acting process as being akin to that of a lawyer, defending their characters through their portrayals — even when they’re as despicable as Anton Chigurh. Further on, it’s nice to hear someone who appears genuinely honoured and humbled by his whole Oscar experience.

    And just in case he wasn’t cool enough… the first film he saw was “All That Jazz.”

  • Robert Downey Jr. to join the lead actor race in ‘The Soloist?’

    Robert Downey Jr. in The SoloistI’m hearing (not altogether surprising) rumblings that Robert Downey Jr.’s role in Joe Wright’s “The Soloist” is larger than Jamie Foxx’s homeless violinist Nathaniel Ayers and that he’ll be pushed as a leading actor contender by the good folks at Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks SKG.  Apparently this is coming from a place of beaming confidence from the studio and Downey Jr. is said to be fantastic in the film.

    “The Soloist” is, of course, largely Steve Lopez’s story.  It is told from his perspective and is about, as the title of the book lets us know, “the redemptive power of music.”  That would be Lopez’s redemption as much as Ayers’, seeing as the LA Times columnist has picked up his guitar again as a result of his relationship with the man.  (Listen to Lopez discuss his interaction with Ayers and the process of committing that story to print here).

    Of course, actors with star power have a say in these things.  I can’t imagine Paramount would want to put both of these guys in the same category, but I’m starting to get more of a “Resurrecting the Champ” vibe out of Foxx’s role than before.  Perhaps he’d be better suited in the supporting arena, but again, these are decisions that have yet to be finalized.

    It goes without saying that Downey Jr. is having a hell of a come-back year.  I’m still having conversations with industry folks that think he has a shot at Oscar gold for his work in “Iron Man,” but perhaps Paramount can spin that goodwill into the Best Actor group think for “The Soloist.”

    Downey Jr., DiCaprio, Rourke, Jenkins, Langella, Penn, Mortensen, Eastwood, Pitt, Sheen……it’s gettin’ crowded in here.  And Heath Ledger may have just seized the supporting prize.

    More as it develops…

  • ‘Wrestler’: Is Golden Lion just the beginning?

    As Kris just reported, Darren Aronosky’s “The Wrestler” has won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. No surprise there — in what was widely deemed a lukewarm festival, Aronofsky’s film, which only screened yesterday on the Lido, was one of the few outright critical sensations.

    What is surprising is that Mickey Rourke, whose lauded comeback performance is the predominant source of the film’s buzz, missed out on the Best Actor prize, which went to Italy’s Silvio Orlando for “Giovanna’s Father.”

    Perhaps the jury wanted to spread the love. Perhaps after wins for David Strathairn, Ben Affleck and Brad Pitt in the last three years, they felt American actors had been sufficiently rewarded for a while. Prize or no prize, however, this recognition for the film — to which his performance is so integral — makes it quite clear that Rourke is on the awards trail.

    But what of the film itself? In years past, the Golden Lion has been the start of a healthy awards-season run for a couple of films — examples include “Atlantic City,” “Vera Drake,” and most notably, “Brokeback Mountain.”

    It’s no guarantee of future glory, though. In 1996, Neil Jordan’s lavishly mounted biopic “Michael Collins” seemed poised for an awards sweep after it took the Golden Lion and its star, Liam Neeson, nabbed the Best Actor prize. But the film never quite clicked with other awards bodies — and on Oscar nomination morning, all that awaited it was a pair of technical nods.

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  • ‘Wrestler’ wins the Golden Lion in Venice

    Can’t wait.  Can’t freakin’ wait.  Read the full story here.

  • TORONTO: ‘Burn After Reading,’ ‘Appaloosa,’ ‘Miracle at St. Anna’

    Ed Harris in AppaloosaRough day on the legs yesterday, a lot of walking.  Five films. One of them I will watch on DVD in the luxury of my room tonight, so four that I am running to, but hey, these are films I want to see, which always helps, right?

    I scanned the local papers for reaction to Thursday’s Gala of “Passchendaele” first thing yesterday.  The reviews seem to be fair in their honesty; no one thinks the film is a masterpiece but no one is tearing it apart either. The real news seems to be the demonstrators outside of Roy Thomson Hall protesting our government’s recent announcement of massive funding cuts to the arts.

    Dumb, dumb, dumb.  When will they learn that a culture without art ceases to be a culture?

    Anyway, I arrived at the first screening and took my seat only to overhear a distressing conversation (a dangerous part of this job) between two American film critics. One said the festival had lost its identity this year because its programmers have not brought in any Oscar contenders, unlike last year when four of the five best picture nominees played here.

    I was stunned by his arrogance and ignorance. How could he possibly make that statement? The Oscar nominations…as far as I know…are not announced until January. Perhaps he is forgetting that this festival was created to celebrate the art form.  That films that went on to Oscar attention was just icing on the cake. And who is to say many of the films here may not head in Oscar’s direction? And so what…SO WHAT (??!!) if they do not?

    Perhaps they have forgotten their own identity as film critics and why they took up the job: to write about great films, big and small, Oscars or not.

    (Reviews after the jump.)

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  • 9/6 Oscarweb Round-up

    Gerard Butler and Thandie Newton in RocknRolla• Nancy Kriparos keeps her Oscar diary going with looks at “Passchendaele,” “RocknRolla” and “Burn After Reading.” [Awards Daily]

    • Tom O’Neil and Jeffrey Wells talk up the Oscar prospects of Danny Boyle’s “Slumdog Millionaire.” [Gold Derby]

    • Wells, meanwhile, seems to be talking himself out of seeing Spike Lee’s “Miracle at St. Anna” as best he can. [Hollywood Elsewhere]

    • David Poland calls “Lovely, Still” the first real surprise of Toronto. [The Hot Blog]

    • Anne Thompson responds positively to Richard Linklater’s “Me and Orson Welles.” [Thompson on Hollywood]

    • The Kingdom of Jordan will leap into Oscar’s foreign language film race for the first time ever with Amin Matalqua’s “Captain Abu Raed.” [Variety]

  • Back on the radar

    Here’s some happy news. After being put so far on the back burner as to be almost invisible, Spike Jonze’s intriguing adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are” has been assigned a release date by Warner Bros.

    The film will apparently open on October 16, 2009, which should allow Jonze plenty of time to complete his vision — hopefully unimpeded. (No confirmation yet on whether Karen O is really doing the music.)

    I understand the studio’s concerns about audience accessibility, but c’mon — you don’t put Spike Jonze on a project and expect “Charlotte’s Web.” We’re talking about a potential audience that goes way beyond the kid demographic. Let the man’s freak flag fly.

  • Anyone want to see this?

    Sorry this news is a few days old, but it escaped my notice until now. Variety reports on a new independent drama that enters production next month. I’m just going to lay down the details, one by one:

    Renee Zellweger plays a wheelchair-bound former singer.

    Forest Whitaker plays an emotionally damaged fireman.

    Together, they embark on a road trip to Memphis, wherein they work through the tragedy they have both faced in their lives.

    And apparently find love.

    It’s written and directed by Olivier Dahan, he of “La Vie en Rose.”

    And it’s called “My Own Love Song.”

    I should keep an open mind. Maybe it’s a masterpiece in the making. But based on those facts, is there not a strong possibility this could literally be the worst film of all time?

  • TORONTO: ‘The Wrestler’ is the talk of the fest

    Just two days and a few hours into TIFF 2008 and already one film is emerging as the talk of the festival.

    I do not see “The Wrestler” until Monday, right after “Che.” But I am counting the hours. Every year there seems to be a little film that arrives here with not a lot of advance notice and captures the imaginations of the audiences and critics on the way to becoming one of the hottest films of the season. Discovery is often what TIFF is all about. Finding that gem, celebrating it and letting the world know it is here.

    I remember “The Apostle” in 1997, as I’ve recounted in this space before. Two groups of men got up and ran out of the theater, dialing their cell phones on their way up the aisle. As Robert Duvall told it to me, they began making deals for the film in the lobby of the the theater, until Harvey Weinstein turned it into a nightmare.

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  • ‘Following’ Chris Nolan at LACMA

    (from left) Christopher Nolan and Kenneth Turan at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Bing TheaterI had not seen Christopher Nolan’s directorial debut “Following” in six or seven years, which made for the perfect excuse to drop 20 bucks on a ticket to tonight’s Slamdance screening and Q&A over at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

    The film holds up as a wonderful, if slightly obscure excerpt from that sensational year of cinema: 1999.  It contains the seeds of a director’s fascination with broken narrative storytelling, borrows humbly from genre particulars already developed by David Mamet and Stephen Frears in years past (while turning them on their heads) and is a modest announcement of a significant new talent.

    Little did we know this unassuming director with a film rejected by Sundance would go on to helm one of the highest-grossing movies in film history.

    It’s a delight to listen to Nolan discuss the particulars of his craft today, with five other films under his belt and a lot of perspective to shine back on his initial cinematic foray.  The narrative with Nolan has become, “He still maintains that independent edge even in blockbuster territory.”  Yes, but it’s deeper, and yet simpler than that.  It would be fairer to say he still maintains an understanding of lean storytelling (for the most part), even in the midst of dramatically ambitious stories.

    “Following” is a case study in that.  And of course, the year-long filming process astounds me to this day, grabbing footage here and there on the weekends, the actors maintaining their appearance long enough to complete the project.  Amazing.

    Nolan spoke an all-too-brief 20 minutes to the LA Times’ Kenneth Turan (who was double-checking his notes constantly) in front of a relatively diverse crowd, bringing in examples from his steadily expanding portfolio to emboss artistic points about his view of the filmmaking process.  With Bat-hysteria flying off the rails this summer, it was a treat to listen in on a developing master’s serene take on the nuts and bolts of his art form.

    And that’s what it’s always about at the end of the day, no?

    Here is a recording of the proceedings.  Nolan is soft spoken, and Turan doesn’t exactly announce his queries with the loudest authority, but you might catch some gems of the conversation if you crank the volume:

    [display_podcast]

  • Phoning it in from LACMA

    I’m sitting here at LACMA’s Bing Theater awaiting a screening of Christopher Nolan’s “Following,” to be followed (no pun intended) by a Q&A with the man himself.

    The energy is pretty high. Nearly packed theater with a mix of anxious fans and reserved night-on-the-towners.

    I’ll report back later this evening or in the morning with some snaps and an mp3 of the discussion. Ken Turan is moderating, I believe.

  • BEST ACTOR WATCH: Jeff Goldblum in ‘Adam Resurrected’

    Looking at the latest contenders to muscle in on an already crowded Best Actor field, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s 1986 or something.

    First, the formerly washed-up Mickey Rourke rebounds with an apparently career-best performance in “The Wrestler” that is generating loud Oscar buzz.

    Now Rourke’s relative contemporary, Jeff Goldblum, is setting tongues wagging for another indie effort, albeit one with a much lower profile going in. As Holocaust survivor Adam Steiner in “Adam Resurrected,” the latest film from the ever-underrated Paul Schrader, Goldblum is attracting the kind of attention he hasn’t seen since, well, his career-making performance in “The Fly.”

    Writing from Telluride, where the film bowed, Cinematical’s Kim Voynar began beating the drum:

    Goldblum’s performance as Adam is complex and engrossing to watch, and while I can’t begin to fathom what it must have taken out of him to get inside this story and character to pull the performance off at this level, it’s truly a wonder to behold onscreen. The Oscar buzz circulating Goldblum’s turn in this film is far from hype; he educes the death and rebirth of a man’s soul in such a way that I’d be hard pressed to compare it to anything I’ve ever seen onscreen.

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  • Finally an American digs the Coens’ ‘Burn’

    Brad Pitt in Burn After ReadingIt seems Jeff Wells is one of the few to walk out of Joel and Ethan Coen’s “Burn After Reading” with a big smile on his face.

    Here’s what he had to say, in part:

    I didn’t laugh all that much, but I loved every minute of this thing. Relished it, and mainly I sat there with a bemused smile on my face. If you’re on the misanthrope boat, this half-espionage, half-comedy of modern fools and manners is about as good as this sort of thing gets. But you have to forget about “laughing.” (Which is overrated anyway, despite what Joel McCrea‘s John L. Sullivan might have thought.) Because this movie is about much more than that.

    Sounds promiing, despite the negative early Stateside opinions (the Brits, however, sided with Wells on this one).  I’ll know for myself in, oh, four hours when I check it out over in Beverly Hills.  I’m quite looking forward to it, to tell you the truth.

  • TORONTO: “Passchendaele” (***)

    PasschendaeleLet’s face it, we all wanted it to be the great Canadian film we have been waiting for for so long, the one that would become mainstream enough to make its mark on the box office charts and enjoy some praise from critics around North America. We wanted “Passchendaele” to be the great Canadian film that was also popular with mass audiences in the manner of Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan.”

    And it’s a rare occurrence.  Two examples leap to mind.  “The Sweet Hereafter,” Atom Egoyan’s 1997 masterpiece, was the last universally acclaimed work of cinematic art out of this country, while “The Barbarian Invasions” took home an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

    Paul Gross, a bona fide stud of a Canadian movie star (but no Spielberg) has wanted to make “Passchendaele” since listening to the stories his grandfather used to tell him. The $21 million dollars he was given to start production was unheard of for a Canadian film, but to his credit every penny is up there on the screen. His recreation of the period is quite stunning, capturing the very essence of a small Canadian town circa 1917.

    Gross catapults his audience back to the muddy fields of the First World War, where soldiers sat and slept in cold, wet and muddy trenches, the smell and sights of death all around them, awaiting the enemy’s advance, awaiting hell to escape from the bowels of the earth. His work at the helm in these sequences is flawless, and though all war films are forever compared to what Spielberg accomplished in the summer of 1998, this was a very different war.  It was one lacking the technologies we had by the 1940s, a much more brutal and unforgiving conflict with almost barbaric weaponry. I mean, Jesus, bayonets?  Gas? Rocks? Whatever they could hit with or throw.

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