In Contention

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  • Warner ventures into the arthouse with ‘Chanel’

    Well, if nothing else, 2009’s Best Costume Design award is forespoken.

    Screen Daily reports that Warner Brothers is beginning production next month on “Coco Before Chanel,” a French-language biopic of the iconic fashion designer. Warner will distribute the film internationally next year.

    Audrey Tautou will play Chanel (presumably after flipping a coin with Marion Cotillard), while an interesting supporting cast includes Alessandro Nivola and Emmanuelle Devos. Actress-turned-filmmaker Anne Fontaine, probably best-known for the family melodrama “How I Killed My Father” is at the helm; she also wrote the script, with Christopher Hampton, no less, as consultant.

    In a nice touch, proving that Warner really is throwing a lot into the project, they’ve lined up none other than current Chanel director Karl Lagerfeld to personally supervise the costumes.

    A lot could be riding on this: after shamefully shutting down both Warner Independent Pictures and Picturehouse (which interestingly had great success with another biopic of a French icon, “La Vie en Rose”), “Coco Before Chanel” will test how well the parent studio can handle this kind of bijou release. It’s not the most adventurous foray into the arthouse they could have made – we all know how wary the Academy is of pretty period biopics – but it’s an encouraging sign nonetheless.

  • ‘Rachel’ not just about the women?

    In his autumn preview, Noah Forrest at Movie City News briefly kinda-reviews Jonathan Demme’s “Rachel Getting Married,” which will make its official bow at Venice next week. Having seen an unfinished cut, he gives it the thumbs-up, citing “beautiful music, excellent performances and a few surprises I didn’t see coming.”

    Most excitingly, he compares it to Demme’s loosier, funkier output from the 1980’s, which is fine by me. If the film has anything approaching the wit and danger of “Something Wild,” I’m there.

    Forrest also throws a new, relatively unheralded name into the Oscar cauldron. Much has been made of the awards potential the film offers for Anne Hathaway and Debra Winger – though in the latter case, the buzz seems to be built more on industry goodwill towards the actress than on anything else. As Kris has pointed out, Rosemarie DeWitt (best known as Jon Hamm’s boho mistress in “Mad Men”) appears to have the meatier supporting role, and could well make an awards run. Forrest, meanwhile, has someone else in mind:

    While Anne Hathaway and Rosemarie DeWitt (are) excellent in it, I want to start beating the Best Supporting Actor drum for Bill Irwin. He plays the patriarch of the fractured clan and he is so damn good that I couldn’t stop shaking my head, awed by how effortlessly he brings both pathos and humour to the role.

    A respected Tony-winning stage actor whose screen work ranges from “Sesame Street” to Ron Howard’s ill-fated “Grinch” film, Irwin hasn’t had a breakthrough film role yet – this could be it.

    So far, “Rachel” is looking more like a contender for acting (and possibly writing) nominations than the big prize, but the Academy can occasionally give a lot of acting slots to an otherwise low-profile pic (“Iris” being a good example). This film seems to have a lot of balls in the air.

  • Countdown to Venice: the future of festivals?

    So the Venice Film Festival kicks off tonight with its glossiest title, the out-of-competition “Burn After Reading.” Reviews ought to start trickling in tonight, though it’s worth bearing in mind that festival fever can often give the premature illusion of critical consensus.

    Screen International has a very handy rundown of the festival lineup – both in and out of competition – which paints a much clearer picture of the more international entries than anything else I’ve read so far.

    Less-covered competition films that particularly caught my eye include “Inju: The Beast in the Shadow,” a Franco-Japanese thriller starring the excellent Benoit Magimel, marking a return to fiction film for Oscar nominee Barbet Schroeder, “Jerichow,” a German riff on “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” and, by far the least heralded of the US entries, “Vegas: Based on a True Story,” a portrait of down-and-outs in the titular city from Iranian director Amir Naderi.

    (Not to mention an out-of-competition contingent that includes new works from such weighty auteurs as Claire Denis, Agnes Varda and Abbas Kiarostami, whose “Shirin,” starring Juliette Binoche, I’ve already mentioned is my most anticipated film of the fest.)

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  • What is this babbling bullshit on CNN?

    Someone just interviewed a blubbering idiot Hillary supporter who apparently didn’t understand what the fuck Clinton’s message was, the one she delivered not 10 minutes ago.  You’re going to be faced with something you’ve never been faced with?  You’d rather not vote at all than vote for Barack Obama?  What kind of blind ignorant shit is this and who the fuck had the wisdom to pave the way for her to be a delgate.

    God I hope that is a considerable minority opinion.  Yes, Clinton did exactly what she was supposed to do tonight and it’s time — SO time — for her supporters to understand that they still have a vote that counts and if they throw it away, on McCain or a blank ballot, they’re betraying anything they supposedly stood for in the first place.

    Un-fucking-believeable.

  • “It’s about the future versus the past.”

    I’d say he knocked that comfortably out of the park…

  • My DVR is about to get FULL

    Has anyone taken a moment to notice how friggin’ packed this Fall is set to be on the small screen? Just as far as the shows I watch (you guys may watch many more):

    “Friday Night Lights,” “The Shield,” “Lost,” “Real Time with Bill Maher,” “Heroes,” “Entourage,” “Flight of the Conchords,” “The Office”…And then there’s the new stuff I’m interested in: “True Blood,” “Crusoe,” “My Own Worst Enemy”…oh yeah, and FOOTBALL.

    Sheesh…

  • Jeff Wells buys into the Hawkins hype

    As Kris pointed out earlier today, Jeff Wells is no fan of Mike Leigh’s “Happy-Go-Lucky.” I suspected from the get-go that the film and Poppy, its gobby, exaggeratedly high-energy protagonist, would polarise audiences – but I still find Wells’ argument does a disservice both to the film and to his own critical perspicacity.

    In his extended critique, Wells judges the film to a rather alarming extent simply on the basis of his loathing for Poppy herself – going so far as to call her, with typical Wells dramatics, an “emotional fascist.” More crucially, he makes the error of assuming that the perspectives of Poppy and Leigh himself are interchangeable – an interpretation that, in my view, ignores a considerable portion of the film’s irony and pathos. (If anything, the film’s fundamental message is that even the most oppressive optimists are incapable of changing the world around them.)

    But no matter. For all his personal dislike of the film, Wells can see the skill involved in the whole endeavour, and is quick to credit the achievement of Best Actress contender Sally Hawkins:

    It is probably inevitable that Sally Hawkins … will be talked up as a Best Actress nominee once the film starts showing around. An elementary-school teacher who happy-vibes just about everything and everyone, Polly is an unstoppable alpha dispenser — spirited, effervescent — and Hawkins certainly inhabits her whole-hog.

    She carries “Happy-Go-Lucky,” she carries its spirit, and she does handle herself well in the sad-shock scenes at the end of the film with Eddie Marsan, the driving instructor with the correct manner and ferociously uptight, anti-immigrant attitude. In fact, the last 15 to 20 minutes contain the best stuff in the film, and I throughly respect Hawkins for her performance in this section. She handles her scenes with quiet maturity and resigned grace.

    This kind of reluctant admiration suggests to me that Hawkins in conclusively in the race, even if the film could still go either way. As Kris said, this one is gonna divide people right down the middle. For every Jeff Wells, there will be a Patrick Goldstein. At the very least, after an incredibly dull spell for specialty film, it’s nice to have a title that provokes some argument.

  • That’s one hell of a still…

    Viggo Mortensen in Good

  • ‘Flash of Genius’ with Greg Kinnear

    I keep forgetting to write something about “Flash of Genius,” the upcoming Universal release starring Greg Kinnear as the inventor who designed the intermittent windshield wiper, only to have Ford rip him off.

    It sounds like an interesting premise (based on a true story, by the way), if potentially trite on the big screen. However, what’s keeping my interest piqued is the involvement of Kinnear, one of the most underrated actors working today. He’s shown before that he has the chops, and not just with his Oscar-nominated work in “As Good As It Gets” or in 2006’s ensemble gem “Little Miss Sunshine.”

    Go back and look at his focus (no pun intended) in “Auto Focus” or his steadfastness opposite one of 2005’s best performances in “The Matador.” I even found his work in “Fast Food Nation” to be the only saving grace of what was an otherwise flimsy adaptation, while he owns every inch of “Mystery Men” with his douchebag Captain Amazing portrayal.

    So count me in, if only to see what kind of humanity Kinnear can give to a film that has a lot of potential.

    “Flash of Genius” will play the Toronto International Film Festival in two weeks. Also, I wonder if Alan Alda’s appearance here could bring him more goodwill for his solid portrayal in “Nothing But the Truth.”

    Here’s the trailer:

  • Greatest movie sequels of all time?

    Elsa Lanchester in Bride of FrankensteinTwo friends of IC, Rope of Silicon and The Movie Blog, have decided this week to chart the greatest movie sequels of all time. Obviously it’s a subjective endeavor, but I thought I’d crank out my list. Pick it apart, praise it and/or add your choices in the comments below!

    Before getting to the list, however, I want to note the criteria. For me, I don’t think this is one of those lists where #1 is necessarily a better film than #2, etc. I think judging a list of sequels should entail what a sequel does for the film or films that preceded it and how it fits into that overall landscape.

    A fantastic sequel to a terrible film might deserve more credence than a fantastic sequel to a fantastic film, but if the latter happens to add considerably to the overall palette rather than continue down already trailblazing territory, then it should be taken into serious account as well.

    The 10 greatest movie sequels of all time:

    10. “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (Steven Spielberg, 1989)
    Before Steven Spielberg and George Lucas raped my childhood earlier this year, they were separately responsible for the greatest trilogy in movie history. While my personal favorite of the set is “Temple of Doom” (a minority opinion I cherish), this late-80s denouement (well, we thought it was a denouement) had all the right ingredients for sending our valiant hero of the decade off into the sunset.

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  • New shot from ‘Revolutionary Road’

    From the August issue of Empire Magazine:

    Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in Revolutionary Road

    Speaking of Empire, they’ve put together a hilarious new list: The Stupidest Character Names. I have to say, they got the #1 choice dead on. But screw ’em for sticking John Matrix up there.

  • PAGE TO SCREEN: “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” by Eric Roth

    Page to Screen at In Contention“Time is the most precious of God’s gifts. It is untouchable, unseeable, unknowable…it is as light as a feather…as heavy as a stone…Time, my darling, what precious little there is, is all we have…”

    I’ve known from Eric Roth for a few years now. I’ve spent some time investigating his process, picking apart his tendencies and have committed such findings, in addition to personal impressions of the man, to print. So one thing I’ve always taken to heart when sitting down to read one of his scripts is that, “bastardized art form” or not, he is insistent on challenging himself with his screenwriting, stretching the potential for thematic resilience and above all, treating the work like an exercise in elegant prose.

    Such is the case with “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” a 159-page adaptation of a 30-page F. Scott Fitzgerald short story. It’s a rare thing to flip through the pages of a script written by someone focused on the words almost more so than the images he or she expects them to become. And as part of an art form that can be insufferable as a result, I have to say that “Benjamin Button” is something of a masterpiece.

    The script begins with an aging Daisy (to be played by Cate Blanchett), recounting, via the reading of a diary by her daughter Caroline (Julia Ormond), the life and times of Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt). The love of her life, the one that got away, the one that came back and the one that will stay in her heart forever, Benjamin was born, as you certainly know, “under unusual circumstances.”

    Roth decides to do away with the hilarity of Fitzgerald’s take on Benjamin’s birth. We aren’t treated to a full-grown 85-year-old man in a baby crib greeting his father with a hearty hello. Instead, he treats Benjamin’s early years as something of a potential disease that makes a newborn aged beyond his or her years, so to speak. Frail skin, deformities…”His body is failing him before it has begun,” a doctor conveys with flabbergasted wonder.

    Benjamin’s mother does not survive childbirth, while his father instinctively passes him off on a lonely Baltimore doorstep before disappearing from his life…for a time. It is there, not hours old, that Benjamin is taken in by Queenie (Taraji P. Henson) at an old-timers’ home, for lack of better vernacular on my part.

    It was actually a stroke of brilliance by Roth to place Benjamin in such a setting for his formative years (and he’ll come back frequently throughout the tale). The writer’s commentary on wisdom and its many vessels is perfectly conveyed in this environment, simultaneously providing a fair share of comedic relief here and there, most of the time via unexpected flatulence (but it works).

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  • Bryce Dallas Howard in ‘Teardrop Diamond’

    Our friend Brad Brevet at Rope of Silicon has scored a first look at Bryce Dallas Howard in the upcoming Tennessee Williams-scripted “The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond.”  Check it out:

    Bryce Dallas Howard in The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond

    Pretty.  He’s also got some shots of Neil Burger’s “Illusionist” follow-up “The Lucky Ones,” as well as Gavin O’Connor’s “Pride and Glory.” Both films will be playing at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

  • Jeff Wells finds ‘Happy-Go-Lucky’ to be “oppressive”

    Eddie Marsan in Happy-Go-LuckyUh-oh.

    I’ve expressed my sentiments for this film. So has Guy. I think there’s something to the “oppressive” comment because Poppy will no doubt be a character that grates on the nerves of plenty of viewers. But I found charms here and there and, with a second viewing, I think I might settle into it more.

    Here’s Wells:

    Just got back from Mike Leigh’s Happy Go Lucky, a movie about a quirky, plucky lady (Sally Hawkins) given to laying spirited, feel-good emotional fascism upon others, including the audience. If this sort of thing lights you up, you may do cartwheels. (As Patrick Goldstein did.) If you find it oppressive, as I did, you’ll be in hell. And yet this is a very assured, self-aware film. Respect must be paid to Leigh, who knows his characters and their world and precisely how to make it all unfold in just the right way.

    I think the real story of “Happy-Go-Lucky” will be Eddie Marsan, who is creepy but diabolically human, if you’ll forgive an odd adverb choice.

    The question still remains, though. How will Miramax position this? Can it be a Best Picture contender (I don’t think so). Is the studio really willing to put all its eggs into “Doubt?” It’s an interesting scenario this year for them, to say the least. Lots of “small,” it seems.

    Anyway, I don’t personally think Wells was ever going to be a lover of this one, for what it’s worth. Not his thing. Too big a target for him to take aim and shoot it down, etc. But it will have its followers and I think they will be avid.

    UPDATE (10:45 a.m.): Well’s goes a bit deeper here.

  • Will ‘W.’ hold a candle to ‘Nixon?’

    Hollywood Pictures' NixonWith Lionsgate Films’ “W.” on the horizon, we are reminded of the last film Oliver Stone made about an American President: “Nixon,” a critically praised and Oscar nominated work that was the exact opposite of what most thought it would be.

    An angry child of the 1960s, having chronicled Vietnam on screen (some say definitively), Stone announced he was making a biography of President Richard M. Nixon and the feeling was that the film would be an attack on the man, who resigned office in 1974.  Yet when the film was released and critics got a look at it, they were overwhelmed by Stone’s work. Instead of an all out diatribe, he had created a study of a man who felt unworthy of the highest office in the land, even though he spent much of his life trying to get there, and was for most of his presidency a very good Commander-in-Chief.

    Stone’s film portrayed Nixon warts and all, the paranoia, the vulgar language he was known to use, his mistrust of even those closest to him, his jealousy of the Kennedy clan, and the strange hold his mother had on him, even in his later years.  The film displayed a brilliant statesman who struggled with his own sense of self worth, knowing that he could never be loved as Kennedy was, yet also aware of the good he was doing.

    Nixon opened relations with two communist countries, Russia and China, a huge move for him as he was a known communist hater and right hand man to no less than Senator Joseph McCarthy during the red purge of the 1950s that ruined many innocents. He would end Vietnam after having escalated a war he inherited, admitting defeat, and when the nation screamed for his impeachment just two years after being re-elected with the largest margin in the history of United States politics, he resigned in disgrace.

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  • Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor do the nasty

    (from left) Ewan McGregor and Jim Carrey in I Love You Phillip MorrisThe first still for “I Love You Phillip Morris” has been released, and it’s an enticing shot for the two or three people in the world who’d like to see these guys bumping uglies…

    But seriously, I do think it’s hilarious that this film was pitched as “‘Catch Me If You Can’ meets “Brokeback Mountain.’”  Gotta give Hollywood one of those recipe pitches every now and then, assure the suits that they aren’t straying TOO far from the norm.

    I’ve never read Steve McVicker’s book, but it does sound interesting.  And no, it’s not about a man who falls in love with Big Tobacco.

    I also like Jim Carrey’s choice of material lately.  As “Liar Liar”-ish as “Yes Man” sounds, it could be a solid piece of work and “Morris,” of course, coming from the “Bad Santa” team, has a lot of potential.  I’m also looking forward to “The Christmas Carol,” which could be dazzling.

    The guy sure could use a boost after three stinkers in a row.

  • Do you believe?

    God only knows where the Telegraph managed to dig up this rumour – if it was in The Sun, I’d assume some intern made it up during a particularly slow bank-holiday interlude.

    But just for fun, let’s humour them and enter their world of make-believe for a moment. Okay? By that token, I’m excited to inform you that, in Christopher Nolan’s next Batman installment, the role of Catwoman will be played by…

    Cher.

    Riiiiiight. Even with my full guard of irony intact, that’s still hilarious. Don’t get me wrong, I like Cher’s acting work back in the day – when her face could still move and Ronald Reagan was still president. She’s great in “Moonstruck,” better in “Mask,” better still in “Silkwood.” But the thought of the 62 year-old strapping herself into the leather suit and getting frisky with Christian Bale … well, “beggars belief” is putting it lightly. According to them:

    A studio executive said: “Cher is Nolan’s first choice to play Catwoman. He wants to her to portray her like a vamp in her twilight years.

    “The new Catwoman will be the absolute opposite of Michelle Pfeiffer and Halle Berry’s purring creations.”

    Well, I must say I like the idea of a revisionist take on the character, particularly after Berry pretty much shredded the credibility of Catwoman’s conventional incarnation. They’d need to do something radical with her along the lines of Nolan’s reconceptualisation of the Joker, and the prospect of Catwoman as a surgery-paralysed Norma Desmond type sure fits with Nolan’s bleaker approach. It’s arguably insane enough to work … but I still don’t believe a word of it. (Not least because the story takes as a given the casting of Johnny Depp as the Riddler.)

    Kris’ own Batman casting call a while back generated numerous suggestions for Catwoman, ranging from Milla Jovovich (Kris’ choice) to Angelina Jolie (seemingly the default selection) to Christina Hendricks (my own left-field pick). All that, and not one of us picked Cher. Shame on us. I’m switching.

  • Reel Geezers not big on ‘Elegy’

    These getting old yet? Maybe not…but the closing line of this one is cute enough: