In Contention

Category: Daily

  • Almodovar tapped as Guest Director for AFI Fest

    The press release, in part:

    American Film Institute (AFI) announced today that internationally acclaimed filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar will serve as its Guest Artistic Director at AFI FEST 2011 presented by Audi. AFI FEST — celebrating its 25th year in 2011 — will take place November 3 through 10 in Hollywood, California at the historic Chinese Theatre, the Chinese 6 Theatres, the Egyptian Theatre and the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.

    As Guest Artistic Director, Almodóvar will present a screening of his 1986 film, LAW OF DESIRE, commemorating the 25th Anniversary of the film and his production company, El Deseo S.A. He will also curate a sidebar program of films that have inspired his work (to be announced in October), and he will be featured in the creative campaign of AFI FEST 2011 presented by Audi…

    “I have an enormous respect for AFI FEST, which has always been very generous with me, so I am very honored to be its Guest Artistic Director this year,” said Almodóvar. “This will give me the chance to present a selection of some of my favorite films along with one of my own, LAW OF DESIRE, on its 25th anniversary. I’m looking forward to being in LA this November with my AFI FEST friends.”

    [Photo: Atomic Popcorn]

  • 8/29 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: ‘Help’ detractors racist?, Stoll on Hemingway, ‘Dangerous Method’ buzz

    Welcome to the new season…

    • “‘The Help’ isn’t racist. It’s critics are.” [The New Republic]

    • Pete Hammond takes note of indies looking to make Oscar plays this year. [Deadline]

    • Steve Pond talks to “Midnight in Paris” star Corey Stoll. [The Odds]

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  • Gervais invited to repeat at Globes — but what about Oscars?

    Obviously it’s too early to be concerned about who’s hosting next year’s Golden Globe ceremony. The day before next year’s Golden Globes ceremony would to be concerned about that. But the pre-weekend news that Ricky Gervais has been invited (if not confirmed) to emcee the show, in his typically irreverent manner, for a third straight year is more interesting for a disputed side note: his claim that the Academy requested his services too.

    Gervais is currently playing coy about his offer from the Hollywood Foreign Press — claiming that he’s considering it, but is wary of outstaying his welcome — though I have a hunch he’ll end up accepting. He’s more adamant about refusing the Oscars gig, dismissing it as “a thankless task for a comedian.”

    Oscars broadcaster ABC, however, denies that the Academy ever approached Gervais in the first place. Take whoever’s word you find more fun to believe.

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  • Nants ingonyama bagithi Baba

    Disney held it’s big premiere for “The Lion King 3D” today at The El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, fit with live African bongo music, a green carpet (made of fake grass) and a “Hakuna Matata” dress code. Not a bad way to spend an early Saturday afternoon, and I’ve been looking forward to this for a little while now, I must say.

    First thing’s first: the 3D. It’s actually quite wonderful. I was struck by how much the conversion had to work with, as there is a lot of depth built into the film as is. Whether it’s the foreground/background of the ants and zebras in the prologue, the use of Red-billed Hornbill Zazu in flight or just the opportunity to lend striking separation in sequences like the pulp Nazi-inspired “Be Prepared” number, there was just a lot of opportunity to make the 3D effective. That’s always helpful.

    The movie, for me, is a perfect one, and my favorite animated film ever. I’ve always been taken by it’s story, taking cues from Shakespeare and painting one of the studio’s most indelible, thematically potent gems. I haven’t seen it in a theater since the summer of 1994, and I was choking up five minutes in.

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  • ‘The Artist’ trailer

    Guy offered up the new poster for Michel Hazanavicius’s “The Artist” yesterday. Today we get a look at the trailer for the film, which played at Cannes, is set for Toronto and will more than likely pop up in Telluride, too. The first Gurus chart of the year had it very much in contention for a Best Picture nomination, so you can count this as one of the big possibilities of the upcoming season. Check out the trailer via Apple by clicking the image below or watch an embed after the jump. (But beware. It seems to me it lays out the whole damn story.)

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  • Taking questions for Oscar Talk

    If you can get them in quickly, we’re going to be recording tomorrow’s podcast in a few. I forgot to put this up earlier in the week, but anyway, maybe there is something pressing you want to run by us. Try to keep it to one question if you can. Rattle them off and we’ll see what we can get to.

  • ‘Tyrannosaur’ trailer

    Paddy Considine’s directorial debut was one of the international success stories at this year’s Sundance fest, nabbing awards for both Olivia Colman and Peter Mullan’s performances, as well as one for Considine’s direction. I saw the film, a bruising, thoughtful portrait of abuse and emotional isolation in suburban England, and found the hype more than justified on the acting front. Mullan is as superbly tender-tough as we’ve come to expect from him, but it’s Olivia Colman — perhaps best known for her expert underplaying in the UK sitcom “Peep Show” — who’s the revelation here. I’ll save my full impressions of her stunning performance  for a review soon, but I will say that if Meryl Streep makes half as worthy a case for an Oscar nomination later this year, I’ll eat my literal hat.

    The film will get a fresh blast of wind in its sails at next month’s Toronto Film Festival; Strand Releasing already has the US distribution rights, but has yet to announce a release date. (UK audiences have only until October 7 to wait.) Meanwhile, The Guardian unveiled a trailer this morning that gives but a hint of the acting firepower on offer here. Check out the embed after the jump.

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  • “You don’t want the opinion of another writer.”

    One of the biggest delights of the year for me was Corey Stoll’s performance as Ernest Hemingway in Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris.” I had a giant grin on my face, ear to ear, the whole time he was on screen. So I’m glad David Poland dedicated one of his long-form interviews to the actor.

  • ‘Blackthorn’ trailer

    Things were looking up for the western after “True Grit” pulled in solid bank last year. But after “Cowboys & Aliens” took a massive dump at the box office this summer, well…I’m trying to keep the faith. We have a few projects on the way, others still percolating. One of them is Mateo Gil’s “Blackthorn,” featuring Sam Shepard as Butch Cassidy and proceeding from the premise that the famed outlaw made it out of Bolivia alive. The trailer was released today via Apple. Check it out by clicking the image below, or watch an embed after the jump.

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  • ‘The Artist’ poster

    I recall our learned friend Anne Thompson responding with scepticism when I mentioned over a Cannes lunch that I expected Michel Hazanavicius’s “The Artist” to be a major player in this year’s Oscar race. Looks like Anne has come round to the idea over the summer, as she — together with Steve Pond and David Poland — placed the film in her top spot on the Gurus o’ Gold’s Best Picture chart. I’d be right there with them. The Weinstein Company’s marketing push for the audience-friendly silent-cinema homage begins today with a supremely elegant poster that puts its Cannes-honored star to the fore, and nails the film’s vintage romantic allure. Nicely played. Check it out after the jump.

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  • Meirelles’s ‘360’ to open London fest

    I’m trying not to think too much about my hometown film festival right now — with the chaos of Venice only a week away, the idea of diving into another five-films-a-day fortnight shortly afterwards seems somewhat deadly. Still, with this week essentially amounting to the calm before the storm, now is as good a time as any for the London Film Festival to announce that they’ll be kicking off their 55th edition with Fernando Meirelles’s starry erotic drama “360.”

    It’s a choice that’ll bring the requisite glamor to the fest’s opening night — the cast includes Jude Law, Rachel Weisz (set to be the fall festival season’s most ubiquitous face), Anthony Hopkins, Eminem and Ben Foster — but I must admit to being somewhat disappointed.

    The LFF raised its international profile considerably in 2008 and 2009 by opening with major world premieres (“Frost/Nixon” and “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” respectively), and while I’m aware of the difficulty of securing such coups, a curtain-raiser that has already been seen and critically assessed at Toronto — whatever its merits — just doesn’t carry the same level of excitement.

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  • ‘The Lady’ poster

    Luc Besson’s “The Lady” doesn’t have domestic distribution in place yet, but the wheels are already turning as a teaser trailer dropped at Yahoo! Movies today. Meanwhile, a Shepard Fairey-designed poster based on the artist’s own piece celebrating Burmese revolutionary Aung San Suu Kyi has also hit. This film could certainly be an awards play for actress Michelle Yeoh and actor David Thewlis. It’ll be part of our festival preview in next week’s Off the Carpet column. For now, check out the full image after the jump.

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  • Gurus back on the attack

    Here’s the pre-Toronto guesses from the group, via Movie City News. Additionally, we were polled on picks for an actor and an actress that could pop up as a “surprise” nominee. People like Michelle Yeoh and Charlize Theron don’t really qualify for me (the former dripping with bait, the latter stretching herself again in a role many expect to find traction). Ditto Gary Oldman, certainly. So I went with Kristin Scott Thomas and Rhys Ifans, one of which potentially has a stealth studio push coming, the other getting talked up by everyone I know who has seen the film. In any case, we’re just getting our engines humming, I guess.

    (EDIT: Now that Poland has corrected his typo, the order is slightly different.)

  • Three more join the foreign Oscar fray

    With the deadline for submissions not even six weeks away, expect a number of posts in this vein before then; for now, however, the number of formal entries for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar has swelled to a modest five.

    While the first two in the game, Greece and Poland, were reasonably high-profile contenders — the latter’s entry, in particular, sounds like something of a perfect Oscar storm for this category — the most recent three are rather less prominent. Romania, Morocco and Venezuela are all angling for their first ever nomination in the Oscar race.

    Of the three, Romania’s running duck in this race is perhaps the most surprising. The Academy has remained wholly resistant to the country’s critically hailed cinematic renaissance in the last decade; indeed, the snubbing of Palme d’Or winner “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” was one of the final straws that prompted a new voting system in the category. It’d be just like the Academy to finally relent for a film low on the radar, so perhaps Marian Crisan’s “Morgen” could be the one.

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  • Penn on Malick, part deux

    I originally posted this in the previous comment thread, but since the web seems to have latched onto this story, I think it’s worth highlighting more prominently. The media is determined to interpret Sean Penn’s fairly reasoned personal reservations about “The Tree of Life” as some kind of ego-driven attack — but before everyone starts taking sides in the Penn-Malick Celebrity Deathmatch, it’s worth reading the second half of his statement to Le Figaro, which doesn’t seem to have been translated by the English-speaking press. My rough translation below paints a rather more gracious picture:

    But it’s a film I recommend, as long as you go in without any preconceived ideas. It’s up to each person to find their own personal, emotional or spiritual connection to it. Those that do generally emerge very moved.

    So, what we have have here is a statement of respectful artistic dissent from someone clearly still proud to have been involved with the picture. Not as much fun as a highbrow bitchfight, granted, but there it is. At ease, everyone.

    [Photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures]

  • Sean Penn bitch-slaps ‘Tree of Life’

    It seems actor Sean Penn is still upset about the fact that so much of his performance in “The Tree of Life” was left on the cutting room floor. I guess he and Adrian Brody can drown their woes in a few down at the pub. Said the actor to French magazine Le Figaro:

    I didn’t at all find on the screen the emotion of the script, which is the most magnificent one that I’ve ever read. A clearer and more conventional narrative would have helped the film without, in my opinion, lessening its beauty and its impact. Frankly, I’m still trying to figure out what I’m doing there and what I was supposed to add in that context! What’s more, Terry himself never managed to explain it to me clearly.

    The thing is, I don’t entirely disagree with him. The bookend nature of his role is the weaker element of the film, particularly the reprise at the end. But I do think the early stuff works because it’s a brilliant, human lead-in to the film’s central question: “Why hast thou forsaken me?” Penn asking the almighty “Where were you” when his character’s brother died leads to the film’s extended cosmos sequence, and that is key, something I dug into when I wrote about the film at length in May.

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  • ‘Warrior’ pulls its punches

    I have to say, even though the pieces were there and I tend to respond overwhelmingly to father/son dramas, I was really surprised at how little I felt emotionally while watching Gavin O’Connor’s “Warrior.” And O’Connor really excels at this stuff, in general, for me. But it didn’t come together this time.

    I feel pretty much alone here because the film has been affecting a number of critics and press members for the past month or so now and the room I was in tonight was all energy and tears, right there with it. But I don’t know, there is something in the fabric of the writing that kept me at arm’s length.

    So Nick Nolte’s Paddy Conlon character was an asshole father to sons Tommy (Tom Hardy) and Brendan (Joel Edgerton). I know this because I’m being told over and over and over again. I know it, but I don’t feel it. Being presented with a thousand-day sober man looking to make amends really shoots that in the foot and you start wondering why his kids can’t just stop being pricks. Something, anything, that would have keyed us into their perspective would have gone a long way.

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  • Gordon-Levitt, Rogen and Reiser on tragicomedy and ‘50/50’

    Yesterday I sang the praises of Jonathan Levine’s “50/50,” particularly the writing from real-life cancer survivor Will Reiser and actors Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Seth Rogen. Today, Summit has pointed us to a sit-down chat between the three regarding the film as part of Gordon-Levitt’s hitRECord call for submissions of personal stories of tragedy blended with comedy. He writes:

    Contribute your tragic/comic story here.  Tell us about something terribly unfortunate in your life, but do it with a sense of humor.  You could write your story in text, you could RECord yourself telling the story into your camera or microphone, draw a picture, write a song, whatever’s comfortable.

    And can I say this? I really didn’t know Rogen was essentially playing himself in the film and that the story is both his and Reiser’s. Had no idea at all. The things that fly under one’s radar. Anyway, check out the chat after the jump. And feel free to offer up your tragicomedy selections at hitRECord.

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