• He puts a question mark on it but Dave Karger nevertheless calls “The Ides of March” the year’s first slam-dunk Best Picture nominee. [Entertainment Weekly]
• Steve Pond talks to 2011 “it” girl Jessica Chastain. [The Odds]
• S.T. VanAirsdale gets a bunch of us awards blowhards on the record for a little early discussion on what’s in store this season. [Movieline]
The press release for this went out yesterday but I’m just now getting around to posting. In part:
In 2012 the Santa Barbara International Film Festival will continue on its path to becoming one of the world’s most sought after and prestigious film festivals with the debut of its first ever Acquisitions Program, which will take place on the first weekend of the festival, January 27-29, 2012, it was announced today by SBIFF Executive Director Roger Durling.
The weekend long program will be run in association with Traction Media, a Los Angeles-based film production and sales company, and was created to allow the acquisitions community easy, industry-friendly access to films at SBIFF. Together, SBIFF and Traction will select the films to be presented in the program, and buyers will be afforded priority access to the chosen films. For more information, log onto www.sbfilmfestival.org…
The Call for Entries is under way for the 2012 season. Films will be accepted until the drop deadline on December 9. All films can be submitted through withoutabox.com.
I’ll once again be attending Santa Barbara fest in January this season, FYI. Always a nice interlude post-nominations.
[Photo: Santa Barbara International Film Festival]
It’s no secret both Guy and I are full on in the tank for Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Drive.” It’s one of the year’s best films, full of the promise of a fresh young filmmaker just beginning to sample his abilities for us all.
One of the big takeaways for me when I saw the film at Comic-Con, I noted, was a reverence for the city of Los Angeles. “I don’t think another director has so completely captured the aura of the city like [Michael] Mann,” I wrote at the time, “but Refn comes really close.” And when I spoke to Refn later that evening, he mentioned to me that he feels Los Angeles is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, more so, even, than a picturesque burg like New York.
With that in mind, my esteemed colleague Jen Yamato has come up with one of those ideas at Movieline that I wish I had stumbled on: an interactive tour of Los Angeles with Refn’s thoughts on the locations he used throughout the shoot.
I just happened to notice when logging on to the back end of the site today that reader Michael’s comment in appreciation of Guy’s just-launched Venice coverage marks the 100,000th comment from you all here at In Contention. Of course, it surely totals more when you figure in general patrolling of the comments sections vis a vis our commenting policy, and especially considering the switch to WordPress three years ago (all of these came in those three years), but regardless, 100,000 it is. It’s not as big a number as some sites that have been running strong for that amount of time, but I know it’s a core of impassioned, niche readers who enjoy the lively discussion we get into here. And I know it also represents hundreds of thousands more who merely browse and refrain from speaking up. But for everyone involved in getting us to that number, it seems a good time here at the start of the season to simply say: thank you.
• Anne Thompson talks to “Warrior” stars Joel Edgerton and Tom Hardy and director Gavin O’Connor. [Thompson on Hollywood]
• Lucas Kavner on the debt “The Help” owes to social media for its box office staying power. [Huffington Post]
• Louis Virtel looks shines a light on five female roles that seem to have the right Oscar stuff. [Movieline]
Venice Film Festival
“I’m not a Christian. I’m not an atheist. I’m not a Muslim. I’m not Jewish. I believe in the American constitution,” intones a spiffily-suited and even fresher-faced-than-usual Ryan Gosling as the opening line of “The Ides of March,” George Clooney’s crisp, diverting and typically (even overly) studious political thriller.
Standing at the podium, he hesitates a moment — teasing us with the tantalizing possibility that he might launch into an even less rhythmic rendition of the rap interlude from Madonna’s “American Life” — before the camera pulls back to reveal the context of the rhetoric: he’s merely timing an address that his boss, a Brylkreem-slick presidential candidate played by Clooney himself, will deliver later.
It’s the first of several occasions where the film strips political speech down to its mere machinations, and where the mind of one character is filtered through the voice of another. It’ll come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Clooney’s work as a filmmaker and as an activist that “The Ides of March” takes a wearily disapproving stance on the manipulations and (mostly bad) manners of US politics, prizing the candid idealism of Stevie Meyers, Gosling’s gifted 30 year-old press secretary, over the more urbane truth-parsing of Clooney’s Democratic hopeful Mike Morris — loosely inspired, as in the play, “Farragut North,” from which the film is adapted, on failed 2004 campaigner Howard Dean.
In case you didn’t know, recent Oscar-winner Jeff Bridges has a new album in stores. It’s been on shelves for two weeks now. I spotted this piece at CNN and thought it was worth passing along:
Now that you’re here, nude-celeb-surfing keyword junkie, take a look around. We cover Oscars and stuff, too.
(This is from the DVD/Blu-ray release, by the way, which hits shelves a week from Friday. Couldn’t resist a little SEO fun with the headline.)
“Why Venice and not Toronto?” a colleague asked when I mentioned I was heading to the Lido for the world’s oldest film festival for the third straight year. Given the North American bent of this site, it was a fair question, but also one I found easy to answer — and not just for the dully practical reason of relative airfare expense.
Toronto may have become the bigger and, depending on your field of interest, more influential festival (certainly so if you’re in the Oscar-watching business). But with its abundance of pre-premiered films and no juried competition, it’ll never have the grandeur or ever-so-slightly scuffed glamor of the Venice event, with its beachside location, soaring marble delegate halls and saturated aroma of overpriced espresso — not to mention the artsier exclusivity of its film programming, a once hit-and-miss virtue that scored a bulls-eye with a 2010 lineup that beat last year’s Cannes for range, relevance and vitality.
Many of you may be interested, so, the press release, in part:
Santa Monica, CA, August 30, 2011- LIONSGATE® (NYSE: LGF), a leading global entertainment company, today announced a special sneak preview screening program for inspirational sports drama WARRIOR. The screenings will be held on Sunday, September 4th at 7:00 pm, at theaters nationwide. The announcement was made by Lionsgate’s co-COO and Motion Picture Group President Joe Drake.
To promote the sneak previews, Lionsgate has partnered with Twitter to designate the hashtag #WARRIORMovieSneakPreview, which Lionsgate has also sponsored as a Promoted Trend, allowing Twitter’s powerful user base a direct link to buy tickets and continue to spread the tremendous word of mouth the film is receiving.
[Photo: Lionsgate]
After the film caused a major splash at Sundance in January and continued the discussion at Cannes in May, it’s safe to say I’ve been champing at the bit to see what Sean Durkin’s “Martha Marcy May Marlene” had in store. I expected an above average indie experience with highlights of talent to likely be scattered across projects in the future, sure. But I didn’t expect such a complete, layered, visionary construction.
I share Guy’s feelings out of Cannes pretty much word for word. It’s an elegantly structured film that not only finds a unique way of telling backstory but bleeds it into the present in such a way as to put the viewer right in the paranoid perspective of the troubled Martha (Elizabeth Olsen). And it’s not just writerly chops on display from the first-time feature filmmaker. Durkin weaves this menagerie of slow-boiling intrigue while getting quality work out of his actors.
Some weeks back we posted the intriguing banner-style poster for George Clooney’s “The Ides of March.” I’ve been waiting on a typical one-sheet to make its way here and now, it has, fit with a dry tagline and more of that double imagery, given the placement of Clooney and Ryan Gosling’s heads. The film is set to play Venice very shortly. I imagine Guy will post a review some time in the next 24 hours. Check out the full poster after the jump.
• Helen Mirren on “The Debt,” getting played by Jessica Chastain and everyone’s ongoing obsession with her body. [Vulture]
• Newly minted UK resident Julianne Moore talks “Crazy, Stupid, Love” across the pond. [Daily Telegraph]
• Susan Wloszczyna talks shooting in India with “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” principals. [USA Today]
Just a note, given the Telluride and Venice festivities on the way, and the fact that sometimes we can’t get back to the computer to file quick enough, be sure to follow @guylodge and me, @kristapley at Twitter for one-offs and general reactions to the two fests we’ll be covering.
American viewers already frustrated about waiting two months longer than the Brits to lay eyes on Tomas Alfredson’s “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” — welcome to our world, guys — won’t be pleased by Pete Hammond’s revelation in a recent column that the wait has been extended by three weeks.
Yes, Focus Features has pushed the film back from its original November 18 release date to December 9, a move that some will interpret as indicative of bolshy awards-season hopes for the star-studded John Le Carré adaptation — though the pre-Thanksgiving berth wasn’t exactly Oscar-unfriendly either.
That said, Focus might have picked a date with less intimidating high-end competition: originally set to precede “The Artist,” “The Descendants” and “Hugo” by only a few days, the film now need only stare down limited releases of Madonna’s “W.E.” and Jason Reitman’s “Young Adult.”
This morning’s festival preview Off the Carpet column offered up a cross-section of films taking bows in the next few weeks. But a number of them can’t exactly be confirmed for Telluride, because, as always, the line-up is kept secret. It’s a unique strategy that has served the fest well over the years, and over at The Hollywood Reporter, Todd McCarthy pays tribute to the tactic.
McCarthy is a very well-versed Telluride vet, so he knows what he’s talking about here. He charts the course of Oscar’s dance with the early fall fest, which first proved to be a launching pad for such a campaign back in 1992 when Neil Jordan’s “The Crying Game” waltzed unassumingly into the mountain village. But it was 2005, McCarthy notes, with the bows of soon-to-be Oscar big guns “Brokeback Mountain,” “Capote” and “Walk the Line” that studios really started to get serious about taking their products there for an early peek.
Naturally, McCarthy eventually gets around to spit-balling potential films on the program, everything from the generally-expected “The Descendants” to Martin Scorsese’s set-for-Toronto documentary “George Harrison: Living in the Material World.” But the true virtue, again, is the sense of being surprised.
I haven’t heard too many great things about Marc Forster’s “Machine Gun Preacher,” which is set for a bow at Toronto next month. I’ve been interested in it mainly for the contribution of Chris Cornell on the soundtrack, as the Soundgarden front man cooked up the original song “The Keeper” for the film.
I haven’t seen the film so I can speak to how the song is used. It might be used organically within or saved for the closing credits. (Remember, it’s key to understand how a song is used in a film because that impacts perception in the Best Original Song voting.) It’s a rolling little ditty that’s pleasant enough, the kind of acoustic lingering Cornell seems to relish outside of his work with Soundgarden.
The song was released exclusively today via Cornell’s website with an option to donate to Sam Childer’s Angels of East Africa charity. (Gerard Butler plays Childers in the film.) It will be available for download tomorrow via iTunes. Have a listen to “The Keeper” after the jump.
Not to overstate things, but it’s time to talk about Michael Shannon and the fact that it’ll be amazing if there is a better, more refined, more electrifying performance this year than his work in Jeff Nichols’s “Take Shelter.” This is his best work to date and it deserves a huge swell of awards support.
I got to know Shannon a few years ago when he was on the campaign trail for “Revolutionary Road” (which yielded him a surprise Oscar nod for Best Supporting Actor at the end of the year). When you know the softhearted guy behind the work, it’s all the more impressive. And in “Take Shelter,” he covers so much performance terrain with such controlled ease that it’s just awe-inspiring. He is one of the best of his generation, hands down.
Oh, and that the performance comes in the midst of one of the year’s standout films, surrounded by equally confident portrayals of all shades, well… How many good things can you say about something before it’s just embarrassing? Let me try.