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  • Sanata Barbara’s Kirk Douglas Award goes to… Michael Douglas!

    The press release, in part:

    In recognition of his contributions to the world of film, Michael Douglas will be bestowed with his father’s honor, the 2011 KIRK DOUGLAS AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN FILM from the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. The 6th annual black-tie Gala dinner will take place at The Four Seasons Biltmore in Santa Barbara on Thursday, October 13, 2011.

    “The first time I saw Michael Douglas act was in a play at UC Santa Barbara, so it is fitting that a career that started here should be honored here” commented Kirk Douglas. “To tell the truth, I wanted Michael to be a lawyer. I secretly hoped he would be bad so I could tell him to forget it. He wasn’t. But as proud as I am of his achievements on screen, I am even prouder of the humanitarian work he has done for the United Nations and other organizations. I am very happy to give this award to my favorite actor/producer who also happens to be my firstborn son.”

    The tribute will stand as one of the most memorable events in SBIFF history as a film legend of one generation honors the next. Previous recipients of the award include such enduring stars as John Travolta, Ed Harris, Quentin Tarantino, and Harrison Ford.

    Also worth noting is that Michael Douglas was the Honorary Chair of the festival when it first began 27 years ago and he was also the very first Modern Master recipient. So, full circle and all that.

  • Meryl Streep starts the season with a Kennedy Center honor

    Last week Larry King said he had it on good authority that Meryl Streep would be honored by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Today, it turns out he was right.

    Streep will be feted alongside musicians Neil Diamond and Yo-Yo Ma, saxophonist Sonny Rollins and singer/actress Barbara Cook. The announcement is a great way to launch her into the awards season as she looks to be a good bet for Oscar recognition for her role as Margaret Thatcher in “The Iron Lady,” especially seeing as Glenn Close is dominating that conversation this week with “Albert Nobbs” bowing in Telluride before moving on to Toronto.

    The Kennedy Center Honors will take place on December 4, the week the National Board of Review really gets the awards circuit going and just under two weeks before the release of “The Iron Lady.” But the won’t be broadcast on CBS until December 27.

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  • Eastwood’s ‘J. Edgar’ tapped to open AFI Fest

    The press release, in part:

    The American Film Institute (AFI) announced today that J. EDGAR, directed by AFI Life Achievement Award recipient and Academy Award-winning director Clint Eastwood, will have its world premiere as the Opening Night Gala of AFI FEST 2011 presented by Audi…

    “Clint Eastwood is an American icon ­ one whose work as a director, actor, producer and composer not only stands the test of time, but also continues to add new, rich chapters with each passing year,” said Bob Gazzale, President and CEO of the American Film Institute. “What a gift it is to be going to the movies when Clint Eastwood is making them, and what an honor it is for the American Film Institute to premiere his latest contribution to America’s cultural legacy.”

    Recent AFI Fest openers have included “Love & Other Drugs” and “Doubt.”

    [Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures]

  • 9/7 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Summit’s ‘Better Life’ first screener with a chance, ‘Contagion’ peeps, Murphy reactions

    • Pete Hammond reports that Summit’s “A Better Life” is the first screener to go out “from a movie that has any chance in hell of getting a nomination.” [Deadline]

    • Bryan Alexander talks to the principals of Steven Soderbergh’s “Contagion.” [USA Today]

    And naturally, everyone has something to say about Eddie Murphy…

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  • REVIEW: “Wuthering Heights” (***1/2)

    Venice Film Festival

    British filmmaker Andrea Arnold would have been 16 years old when Kate Bush topped the UK pop charts with “Wuthering Heights,” a swirling art-rock ballad that stripped the Emily Brontë novel for which it is named down to a few key lines and narrative details, but evoked its grand-scale tragic romance in more intuitive terms. In its wake, a new generation of schoolgirls clutched Brontë’s words tightly to their chests.

    We can only speculate how Arnold came to the novel, but her bold, forbidding and impressively reconceptualized “Wuthering Heights” appears to take the Kate Bush course of adaptation: gutted of most of its words, with some choice ones added (I haven’t read it in some time, but I’m pretty sure Brontë didn’t write the line, “Fuck you all, cunts”), the novel serves as a theoretical starting point for an artwork that redraws the story with the most immediate sensory tools of its medium. This is a “Wuthering Heights” of weather and flesh and grass and locked eyes, one that has the simple common sense and staggering cinematic wherewithal to know that great adaptations don’t beat great writers at their own game; they play a new game entirely.

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  • A NSFW night at the Oscars

    In honor of today’s news, my favorite bit from “Raw”:

  • Oscar hopes for Venice flicks

    I had asked Guy for a quick one-off on each of the Oscar-contending films he’s seen at Venice so far. I was going to use it for today’s Off the Carpet column, but I published before he got around to it. Nevertheless, it’s worth boiling things down (from his perspective), so here’s what he’s thinking (with the film titles linked to his Venice reviews):

    “The Ides of March”
    Possible Best Picture and Director nominee (but only if US critics are more enthusiastic than the ones at Venice and the film does okay commercially). If it gets those, possible supporting nods for Philip Seymour Hoffman and Evan Rachel Wood. Film Editing is the only tech possibility.

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  • OFF THE CARPET: And we’re off!

    This morning’s interview with “Into the Abyss” director Werner Herzog represented my last Telluride communique (though I guess I was already home) from this year’s 38th annual festivities. Five days, 18 posts, nine movies and three interviews. It was a dense sprint to start the race, and now, with Venice still in-progress and Toronto set to raise the curtain Thursday, we find ourselves in the thick of the season’s early breaths.

    Up in the Colorado mountains, the biggest takeaway was Alexander Payne’s “The Descendants.” Payne was highly visible throughout the festival, sometimes taking in six or seven movies a day, fielding compliments for his work and settling in to what has apparently become his favorite festival experience.

    His film first dropped on Thursday afternoon as a special invitation screening for press and patrons. That’s where most of the early word stemmed from as critics and bloggers (yours truly among them) raced back to offer up our thoughts on the director’s first film in seven years. But that’s not the story of that film’s life at Telluride. The story was its discovery for the rest of the attendees over the next four days.

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  • (UPDATED with AMPAS press release) Eddie Murphy set to host the 84th annual Academy Awards, official announcement to come

    The possibility of Eddie Murphy hosting the Oscars this year first started swirling over the weekend while I was up at the Telluride Film Festival. It was interesting to note that, of the various press and industry people I spoke to about the possibility, most were somewhat positive on the prospect. And the more I thought about it, the more I was strangely okay with it, too. And now, according to Deadline, the press release is imminent.

    Murphy’s career has obviously been little more than a cash-grab for quite a while now. Save 2006’s “Dreamgirls,” which brought him within arm’s reach of an Oscar win, he has stayed in the frame of schlock comedy and crowd-pleasing shenanigans. But one thing is rather clear: he’s still very much the showman he always was, and with a newly developed relationship with Oscarcast producer Brett Ratner (who recently directed Murphy in “Tower Heist”), it seems a stint hosting the Oscars could work.

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  • INTERVIEW: ‘Into the Abyss’ director Werner Herzog

    Telluride Film Festival

    Legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog first attended the Telluride Film Festival at its second annual way back in 1975. He brought with him “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” which would not be released in the US for another two years, and “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.” He was also set to receive a tribute, still at the beginnings of his career. He has come back almost every year since, and almost every year with a new film to show audiences.

    The film he brought to the 38th annual fest is perhaps his most accomplished documentary in some time: “Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life.” It was, as outlined from the mountains, my favorite film of the festival and a testament to Herzog’s powers of observation and reverence for everyday people and their plights.

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  • ‘Young Adult’ teaser poster

    Jason Reitman was a sadly absent from this year’s Telluride fest. His last two films, “Juno” and “Up in the Air,” both landed there as an early Sneak Preview before heading to Toronto and awards glory. But the strategy on “Young Adult” has been to stay away from peaking too early. But it’s smart to get the talk moving with a teaser poster for the film, which you can check out after the jump.

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  • 9/6 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Nolte on ‘Warrior,’ southern perspective on ‘The Help,’ Oscar plays out of Telluride

    • Nick Nolte talks “Warrior.” [Making Of]

    • A little southern perspective on “The Help.” [Los Angeles Times]

    • Greg Wellwood considers who got an Oscar boost at Telluride and who didn’t. [Awards Campaign]

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  • TELLURIDE: Sent off on a high note

    Today is the final day of the 38th annual Telluride fest, and the whole thing was another rewarding sprint through the Labor Day weekend. This afternoon I had the great pleasure of sitting down with “The Descendants” star Shailene Woodley to get her wide-eyed, “it’s all happening” perspective on the early days of this year’s awards season. But the day started with perhaps the narrative highlight of the festival for me so far.

    Asghar Farhadi’s “A Separation” is, plain and simple, a masterful piece of work that will be with me for a very long time. On the surface it is about the fallout of an Iranian couple headed for divorce but side-tracked by a tragic accident that leaves the husband tangled in a judicial web, but on a deeper level, it’s about so much more. Call it “divorce and its discontents,” because it is, ultimately, a study of parenthood and integrity and situational decisions that impact the impressionable.

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  • INTERVIEW: ‘The Descendants’ actress Shailene Woodley

    Telluride Film Festival

    If anything or anyone is a break-out, on-the-rise element of this year’s Telluride Film Festival, it’s 19-year-old “The Descendants” star Shailene Woodley. She stars in the film opposite George Clooney as a teenager with the appropriate angst but gives a performance that has captured the attention of many in attendance here. Naturally, she’s frequently found herself stopped on the street by admirers and well-wishers praising her work and the festival’s most talked-about film.

    When you talk to Woodley, you get the sense of a young person crossing that key boundary in life between adolescence and adulthood. Call it “finding yourself” if you like, but the experience of making the film in Hawaii with the likes of filmmaker Alexander Payne and actor George Clooney had a major impact on her.

    “The four months in Hawaii really shifted who I am as a human being,” she says at the New Sheridan Hotel restaurant in town. “It was such a spiritual thing for me. It has a different energy than anywhere else. The pace there, the way you move and talk, it’s so different. I left there being authentically happy with myself. It was both being on set and hiking and being outdoors and meeting people. I feel so fortunate to have got a callback for this movie, let alone have done it. It’s mind-blowing.”

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  • REVIEW: “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” (***1/2)

    Venice Film Festival

    An uncharacteristically dark Venetian downpour greeted this morning’s premiere screening of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” and if some flashbulbs of lightning last night hadn’t already previewed the turn in weather, I’d suspect the pervasively, necessarily drab atmospherics of Tomas Alfredson’s artful John le Carré adaptation of bleeding out from the screen and into the beyond.

    Looking for all the world as if the print has been stewed in black tea before being left to gather a few months’ worth of dust in the projection room — and that’s a good thing, I hasten to add — the film proves a happy marriage between two very different brands of understated precision: the British scholarliness of le Carré’s dense espionage lore and the icier Scandinavian calm that Alfredson brought to his breakout vampire drama, “Let the Right One In.”

    In many ways, Alfredson directs le Carré’s self-described “little gray men” of Britain’s MI6 intelligence service as they are themselves vampires of the Cold War: lurking in irremovable half-light, striking efficiently and selectively, and only notionally acquainted with the concept of sunlight, these thickly-tweeded spies appear to bear the burden of their profession as a lifelong alibi for the avoidance of intimacy, social functionality and even standard-issue conversation.

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  • 9/5 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Murphy upside, ‘The Help’ abroad, comparing two ‘Straw Dogs’

    • S.T. VanAirsdale looks for the upside in Eddie Murphy potentially hosting the Oscars. [Movieline]

    • Nicole Sperling writes up Tilda Swinton’s tribute track at Telluride and Toronto. [24 Frames]

    • Emma Stone and Viola Davis talk about “The Help”‘s appeal abroad. [The Hollywood Reporter]

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  • VENICE: ‘Dark Horse,’ ‘Chicken With Plums,’ ‘Sal’

    (Review of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” landing later this morning. Hang tight.)

    Todd Solondz has forged a loyal friendship with the Venice Film Festival across the second half of his career: all three of his last features have premiered here. Their mutual devotion somewhat surprises me, given that both Solondz screenings I’ve now attended on the Lido have seemingly been received with a measure of polite confusion by the home crowd, like an awkward cocktail party guest joining in the laughter at a joke he didn’t quite hear. Perhaps other high-end festivals simply lost their taste for his casual misanthropy; after the 1998 career peak of “Happiness,” most arthouse audiences seemed to do the same.

    They could potentially be lured back by “Dark Horse” (***), a more streamlined character comedy that, while neither as probing nor as acidly funny as 2009’s “Life During Wartime,” might just represent the warmest film Solondz is capable of making.

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  • TELLURIDE: The expensive, painstaking restoration of ‘A Trip to the Moon’

    Following today’s “Shame” screening I really wanted to make it across the mountain to the Chuck Jones Cinema and my last chance to catch Agnieszka Holland’s buzzed-about “In Darkness.” But with 15 minutes to get there before it started, a 10 minute walk and a 15 minute gondola ride ahead, it just didn’t seem to be in the cards. Pity.

    Instead, it suddenly hit me that I’d do well to just take in something that didn’t bring with it the pressure of instant coverage. So I looked at the schedule and saw that Serge Bromberg’s cinephile paradise program “A Trip to the Moon and Beyond” was the perfect call.

    The program consisted of a number of discovered and restored silents with Bromberg’s piano accompaniment. The material ranged from pre- and post-earthquake footage of San Francisco along Market Street in 1906, Buster Keaton’s “The Love Nest,” the animated “Balloon Land” (from unsung Disney hero Ub Iwerks) and various other treats here and there. The crown jewel of the presentation, though, was the most elaborate and expensive film restoration project in history.

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