Courtesy: MakingOf)
Blog
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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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SHORT TAKE: “Disgrace” (***1/2)
“As long as one is alive, one is all right.”These words, spoken with pithy irony by John Malkovich halfway through Steve Jacobs’s brilliant, bruising adaptation of J.M. Coetzee’s novel “Disgrace” — which opens Stateside tomorrow — encapsulate a post-apartheid South Africa more riven by crime and inequality than the bandages of democracy can cover. It’s a world where survivor’s grief is constantly chased by the threat of a more fatal occurrence; where, with no commodity more valuable than security, ugly human compromises must be made.
Published in 1999, Coetzee’s novel was a well-aimed bullet to the heart of a nation still negotiating its social and racial prejudices, laying them bare with few pointers towards reconciliation. Denounced as racist in some quarters of the ruling African National Congress, it doesn’t cast any social group in a particularly flattering light. Rather, it focuses on individuals, and the very different ways they manage their escalating mistrust of the other.
The story’s dependence on the country’s multi-splintered cultural differentiations makes the outside-in achievement of Australian director Jacobs (and his wife Anna Maria Monticelli, who wrote the screenplay) all the more miraculous. I can’t recall another feature film that so tangibly evokes the country that I grew up in, from its point-on account of lingering (and shifting) master-servant acrimony to minute details of production design.
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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]
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Guess again
I realized yesterday I hadn’t updated my own Oscar predictions since July, so a spring-clean was in order. I should really wait for the end of Toronto, but I’m off on vacation on Saturday, so there’s no time like the present.Needless to say, a lot can change in two months — particularly when those two months include the start of the festival season. Back in July, “Shutter Island” was still a fall release, Colin Firth wasn’t even on my radar and I still expected “Up in the Air” to be a minor-key adaptation of a minor-key novel. It was a more innocent time.
As always, if you want sensible, well-reasoned, informed predictions, you’re better off looking to your right.
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France enters ‘A Prophet’ in Oscar race
News has just come in that France has selected Jacques Audiard’s critically lauded prison drama “A Prophet” as their official entry in the Best Foreign Language Film competition. (Thanks to reader Ali for the tip.)The film was chosen by a panel including actress Jeanne Moreau, Cannes festival director Thierry Frémaux and filmmakers Jean-Jacques Annaud, Costa-Gavras and Régis Wargnier. Classy.
The choice comes as no surprise whatsoever: many have regarded it as a virtual fait accompli since the film’s sensational debut in Cannes, where it won the runner-up Grand Prix. (It will, of course, once more face its Cannes conqueror, “The White Ribbon,” in the Oscar race.)
Meanwhile, for the last two years running, the French have gone with comparatively edgy Cannes winners as their Oscar ponies (“The Class” was nominated, “Persepolis” infamously snubbed), so the selection of “A Prophet” continues that pattern.
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Foreign film watch: Finland, Serbia … and Cyndi Lauper
Three more to add to the growing pile of official Best Foreign Language Film submissions:Finland (a nominee in 2002 for Aki Kaurismaki’s “The Man Without a Past”) has opted for Klaus Hero’s “Letters to Father Jacob,” a reportedly gentle drama about a paroled murderer who finds redemption working as a secretary to a blind rural priest.
Sounds Academy-friendly so far; Variety’s rave review, which lauds director and cast alike for making “something fresh and heartrending out of predictable material,” further suggests this could be one to keep an eye on.
Serbia, still seeking a first nomination in the category, has decided to appeal to American sensibilities by picking the partially New York-set “Here and There,” which follows the trials of an American saxophonist and a Serbian immigrant, each struggling to get by in the other’s country. (Is there enough non-English dialogue to qualify?)
Well-received at the Tribeca fest earlier this year — Variety makes a charitable comparison to “The Visitor” — where it won a pair of awards including Best New Filmmaker for director Darko Lungulov, it also has the unusual distinction of featuring Cyndi Lauper and her real-life husband in the cast.
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Could ‘Mother and Child’ corner the female vote?
One of the surprises of the TIFF coverage I’ve read so far has been the notably enthusiastic reception for Rodrigo Garcia’s “Mother and Child.” It’s a film I confess hadn’t been on my radar at all until now, despite my high regard for Garcia’s quiet, character-oriented work in film and especially television.“Mother and Child” seems to further carve his cinematic niche of tasteful, female-focused ensemble dramas, so I was expecting the same kind of warm, if slightly reserved, critical reaction that greeted “Nine Lives” and his underrated debut “Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her,” but so far, “Mother and Child” seems to be aiming higher than that.
Jeff Wells was eager to be first on Monday, gushing that it was “a super-sensitive, perfectly acted and exquisitely written adult drama” and “a Best Picture contender — guaranteed, hands down, take it to the bank.” He then rather spoiled his own party by later admitting that he’d skipped the film’s last half-hour, which he later found wanting — but still generally stands by the film.
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New ‘Wild Things’ poster, character banners
The “Where the Wild Things Are” marketers continue to demonstrate their chronic inability to put a foot wrong. Cinematical has unveiled another superb poster, this time for the IMAX release, and a further four character banners.
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Jason Reitman in a gondola
I had to hand it to /Film‘s Peter Sciretta in Telluride, who got a few minutes with “Up in the Air” director Jason Reitman right after I did. His and FirstShowing‘s Alex Billington’s idea: interview Reitman in a gondola. Get it? — up in the air.
Anyway, Reitman’s a good sport and clearly had a good time here. It’s worth a look. Peter is taking donations for a tripod:
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TORONTO: Michael Caine, ‘Harry Brown’ and Oscar
Michael Caine has won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor twice, the first time for his performance in Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters,”and the second for Lasse Hallström’s “The Cider House Rules.” Among others, he ousted Tom Cruises’s brilliant performance in “Magnolia” with the latter.Beloved within the business, Caine is considered an old war horse who has made as many bad movies as he has good ones (I think I’m being very fair), and it is my belief the Academy would like nothing more than to finally recognize his work as a leading man. He has been nominated in the past for “Alfie,” “Slueth,” “Educating Rita” and “The Quiet American,” but he’s never won in the category.
Let me be clear: SO WHAT?
The man has two Academy Awards on his mantle — two — while many other actors are still waiting for their first (and in some cases, many still await their first nod). Why is it that every time Caine makes a film that is reasonably good and he offers a typically fine performance, people start talking Oscar? Personally, if I were Caine, I would find it a tad demeaning.