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  • TELLURIDE: Michael Fassbender and a tale of two movies

    Today’s screening of “Shame” was the big note of anticipation for me at this year’s Telluride fest. After bowing in Venice earlier this morning to generally positive praise, my hopes were still high that Steve McQueen made good on the promise of “Hunger” three years ago. And did he ever.

    I’m tired, at the end of a four-film stretch today, so I’ll try not to wander here too much. But the story of the film is Michael Fassbender’s remarkable performance as a sex addict with a dark past that McQueen only vaguely addresses on the page, allowing the actor to indicate with subtlety and precious strokes of nuance what might be eating away at him.

    Once again, McQueen utilizes long takes to allow his actors to explore in the harsh gaze of the camera. But the technique, perhaps more than his previous effort, even, becomes a tool for navigating the viewer. When Fassbender is filmed jogging for a number of minutes, the camera dollying alongside him as he passes intersection after intersection, the effect goes beyond mere observation. McQueen is ushering us, without cheap manipulation, into the character’s mindset.

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  • TELLURIDE: Gearing up yet winding down, ‘Le Havre,’ Herzog, Ballard’s long-lost ‘Rodeo’ restored

    The interesting thing about Telluride is, the moment things begin to heat up, they also feel like they’re beginning to wind down. I still have screenings of “Shame” and “A Dangerous Method” to come today, and may duck into Asghar Farhadi’s “A Separation” tomorrow morning before hopping the shuttle back to Montrose, but for the most part, it feels like we’re peaking now.

    I started the morning with a look at Aki Kaurismäki’s “Le Havre,” which played Cannes in May. I don’t actually think Guy ever got around to writing about the film in depth, but he did a wonderful pre-Cannes job of previewing it.

    Nevertheless, I don’t count myself as the biggest Kaurismäki fan, but it’s very difficult to argue with the heart in this film. It should melt you a bit, if you have warm blood pumping through your veins. The crowd was delighted by it and the director’s dry sense of humor.

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  • BOX OFFICE: ‘The Help’ makes it a three-peat

    Earlier in the week “The Help” crossed the $100 million dollar mark, but all eyes were on a potential third-straight weekend at the top of the box office chart. And, well, here we are. Bravo to Disney for finding a spread of time that could allow the film slide to this designation and surely become the only film to do so this year. The drop from last weekend was next to non-existent (though a handful of screens were added), but this fire is going to keep burning for a while. With “Warrior” and “Contagion” hitting next weekend, the film’s days as lead box office dog are surely over, but it’s nevertheless an impressive stay.

    (Courtesy: Exhibitor Relations)

  • ‘Turin Horse’ among latest foreign Oscar entries

    This news has been hanging around for a few days, but amid the Venice hubbub, I haven’t found a moment to post it until today — though we did address it briefly in Friday’s Oscar Talk. With less than a month to go until the deadline, the pile of official submissions for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar is slowly growing — and the most prominent of them is a title I already reviewed at February’s Berlinale.

    That film would be Béla Tarr’s “The Turin Horse,” which won the runner-up Grand Prix at the festival and just screened at Telluride this weekend, and which I described as “a stately, granite-textured and altogether rather tremendous” work in the famously austere director’s canon. Hungary has a history of choosing ballsy and utterly doomed Oscar submissions — “Taxidermia,” anyone? — but this is the first time they’ve dared to enter a Tarr opus.

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  • REVIEW: “Shame” (***1/2)

    Venice Film Festival

    If “Hunger,” artist-turned-filmmaker Steve McQueen’s remarkable debut feature, was a study of a body strenuously denied its fundamental needs, his satisfyingly rigorous, explicit follow-up, “Shame,” traces the very different damage done by a body over-gifted with wants.

    A sternly formalist parable on the pruning and stunting of relationships both familial and carnal in modern-day urban society, “Shame” is only for the purposes of swift summary a story of sex addiction — specifically that endured by Brandon, Michael Fassbender’s dourly handsome New York advertising hotshot. Sex, and the pursuit thereof, is what needles Brandon first and foremost, but it doesn’t take Freud (or indeed Fassbender’s own Jung from “A Dangerous Method”) to tell that it’s a displaced urge in a life whose most crippling vacancies take longer to fill than a Friday night fuck.

    “Hunger” was a film that dismantled known history and re-presented it in highly sensual, imagistic terms. The new film might be a foray into fiction for its director — working from an original screenplay by British playwright and television scribe Abi Morgan — but it performs a similar trick with psychology so embedded in the popular consciousness it would appear to offer little room for surprise.

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  • “I’m Shiva the God of Death!”

    Given their dual tributes at Telluride this year, it seems perfectly reasonable to revisit this gem of a scene:

    And lest fellow tributee Pierre Étaix feel left out, a nod to his work after the jump.

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  • TELLURIDE: Sony Classics, IFC and Searchlight party into the night

    I opted out of tonight’s screening of “Butter” largely because — sorry to say — the Galaxy theater is just too cramped and uncomfortable and hot to fully enjoy a film experience. For me, anyway. I tend to be a furnace regardless, but they need to pump some AC into that joint. By some accounts, though, it was a delightful if somewhat skippable affair. Instead I took to the party circuit, as three studios chose Saturday to hold their talent-studded affairs.

    The night started with Sony Pictures Classics’ annual dinner gathering at La Marmotte. In attendance were “A Dangerous Method” scribe Christopher Hampton, “A Separation” writer/director Asghar Farhadi and “In Darkness” director Agnieszka Holland. Pay close attention to those last two, as they will no doubt figure into this year’s race for Best Foreign Language Film.

    I had a few choice moments with Hampton to discuss his collaboration with David Cronenberg. Unfortunately, I haven’t yet seen the film (Sunday night seems to make the most sense), but I did ask about his take on some reviewers (including our own Guy Lodge) preferring a bit of overt and edgy Cronenberg for a clearly sexual project. His response was that austerity was preferred considering a commitment to truth, and indeed, it seems to me a more cerebral approach would be, at the very least, more realistic for a film such as this. I’ll have an opinion soon enough.

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  • Eddie Murphy in talks to host the 84th annual Oscars

    Ratner strikes, it appears. Nikki Finke has the scoop at Deadline:

    This Tuesday, a confab is scheduled for Oscar producer Brett Ratner to tell the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences whom he wants to host the Oscars. I’ve learned that Ratner will offer one name to Academy President Tom Sherak: Eddie Murphy. This is by no means a done deal yet, but this is a first step – though a lot more steps have to happen before this becomes a reality.

    Reportedly the actor is “showing interest,” but what do you think? Would this be a good fit or a distasteful “Tower Heist” commercial?

    [Photo: The Guardian]

  • TELLURIDE: Clooney takes center stage

    George Clooney has been tapped this year for one of Telluride’s three big tributes, and it’s certainly the biggest of the trio. Whether it’s press and patrons schmoozing with the star at yesterday’s Patron Brunch, whispers around town (“Did you hear George Clooney is here?” “I really hope ‘The Ides of March’ is a TBA.”) or the ecstatic response to Alexander Payne’s “The Descendants,” this mountain burgh has been taken by Clooney fever.

    It’s a curious thing to see happen here at a festival that is so smooth and cool and not at all phased by celebrity. Clooney changes all those rules, though. And most of it has to be owed to his trooper disposition and charming charisma. He’s always “on,” and just about everyone wants to just throw back a few with the guy. Men want to be him, women want to…well, you get my drift.

    I tend to stay away from the tributes and spend that time taking in a film at Telluride. But since the actor is set to be feted later this evening, I thought I’d at least dedicate some space to his still in-progress career and the highlights that have brought him to this point.

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  • Jessica Chastain wins award in Venice — more to come?

    Nathaniel Rogers tipped me off today to the fact that Jessica Chastain has won her first (of many?) award of the season in Venice. The prize, presented by “W.E.” director Madonna, was the Gucci Award for Women in Film. And it’s a pretty good pick when you consider how prolific she is this year.

    Chastain is at the fest with two films — “Wilde Salome” and “Texas Killing Fields” — but of course she’s been seen in everything from “The Tree of Life” to “The Help” to “The Debt” this year, with Sundance and Cannes hit “Take Shelter” and Weinstein-pushed “Coriolanus” still to hit Toronto and open in theaters. Seven movies? A little difficult to argue with that, especially since she gives quality work across the board (though I haven’t seen the Venice films).

    It really would be a shame if she couldn’t get enough of a groundswell to nab an Oscar nod for something (I prefer her in “The Help”), but she’s assured any number of precursor honors for her body of work throughout the season.

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  • TELLURIDE: Herzog’s meditative and crucial ‘Into the Abyss’ is best of the fest so far

    The weather is keeping up here, with rain only threatening a drop or two here and there. As festival co-director Julie Huntsinger quipped at yesterday’s press orientation, there must have been a deal struck with the devil somewhere along the line, because the weather is always miserable here for the three or four weeks leading up to the fest, and then, on the Thursday when most arrive in town, the clouds part and the air clears and the Show is on.

    After sitting down for a few choice minutes with Glenn Close earlier this morning, I hoofed it up the hill a bit to the Palm theater and my first screening of the day, and, well, it was impactful, to say the least.

    Werner Herzog is a movie deity to me. “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” is a top 15 all time kind of film in my view. His work with Klaus Kinski so many years ago is the sort of cinema madness that digs under your skin and I just love it. But his feature work as of late has left me a bit cold, while his documentary work — an obvious passion for him these days — hasn’t registered for me despite much acclaim.

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  • VENICE: ‘Alps’ and other drugs

    The first few days of the Venice Film Festival were so jam-packed with the big-name premieres you’ve been most restless to hear about that, between thrashing out full-length individual reviews of those and negotiating the braided Venice obstacles of crippling humidity and crippled wi-fi facilities, my usual roundups of less flashy fare got a bit shunted. As did anything in the way of an introduction: we may have already reached the close of Day Four, but hey, welcome to this year’s Venice coverage! Hope you’re enjoying it at least as much as I am. More, hopefully.

    As you’ve probably gathered from the reviews I have written, it’s been a quiet festival so far: perhaps I’m more down than most on such titles as “A Dangerous Method” and “The Ides of March,” but even accounting for the more encouraging reviews, no big film has yet set the Lido alight the way last year’s opener, “Black Swan,” did. Indeed, the buzz film of the festival so far may well be Madonna’s “W.E.,” if only because critics, when bored, thrive on schadenfreude.

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  • INTERVIEW: ‘Albert Nobbs’ producer, screenwriter and actress Glenn Close

    Telluride Film Festival

    Actress Glenn Close has known the title character of “Albert Nobbs” for nearly 30 years. Ever since she was first asked to audition for the play “The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs” in 1982, which brought her to George Moore’s short story about a woman living as a male waiter in male-dominated 19th Century Ireland. That’s a long time for any performer to live with a role, and it takes a special breed of stick-to-it-tiveness to see the journey she’s seen for the character all the way to the big screen.

    “It’s always been a little surreal,” the actress says at the Chuck Jones Theater after introducing the film to its second crowd here at Telluride. “Every morning when I would go to the set, I couldn’t believe that, something that’s been in my head so long, people were actually working on this movie.”

    The role originally sparked Close’s interest because of the inherent challenges it presented. Servants in that era, she notes, were not supposed to look people in the eye. They were meant to be invisible. And here is a character, invisible in her own right by virtue of her secret, also in a profession where she must be under the radar. It wasn’t an opportunity to be emotionally expressive for much of the narrative, but Close says that was an attraction to the part.

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  • TELLURIDE: ‘Descendants’ Q&A

    Thanks to Sasha Stone at Awards Daily for grabbing video of yesterday’s post-screening Q&A with “The Descendants” stars George Clooney and Shailene Woodley and director Alexander Payne, which I had to miss:

  • TELLURIDE: ‘La Luna’ is Pixar’s best short in years

    Yesterday before the 3D screening of Wim Wenders’s “Pina,” the audience was treated to Pixar’s latest animated short (which was also shown to audiences, I believe, at the D23 convention last month). I felt like it deserved some notice here, because it’s my favorite short from the studio in quite some time.

    I greatly admired “Day & Night,” which was attached to last year’s “Toy Story 3.” I wasn’t too keen on “Partly Cloudy” (which accompanied “Up” in theaters) and “Presto,” which tagged along with “WALL-E,” was cute and a nice ode. But the last Pixar short that I really got all that jazzed about was “Lifted,” Gary Rydstrom’s nifty, though admittedly slight, 2006 UFO abduction spoof.

    “La Luna” is my favorite since then, and probably since “Gerri’s Game” way back in 1997. It’s a delightful piece about finding your own way and eschewing expectations for your own identity, all built within a typically magical and imaginative narrative, and it doesn’t stoop to being blatant about its message. It’s also rendered with some of the best animation we’ve seen yet from the studio.

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  • TELLURIDE: Close’s passion for ‘Nobbs’ unmistakable, though maybe blinds to flaws

    Hats off to Glenn Close. Really. When you’ve lived with and loved a role and a story for as long as she’s hung on to “Albert Nobbs” (which she first performed as a play way back in 1982), you deserve a pat on the back.

    She’s been trying to get this made as a film ever since she stumbled onto the George Moore short story, and even saw things fall apart 10 years ago when she was oh so close (no pun intended). Finally, it’s a reality, thanks to filmmaker Rodrigo Garcia. But with great passion can come, often, blinders to the flaws of a story.

    The film tells the tale of Albert Nobbs, who appears to merely be a “kind little man,” a hotel waiter in 19th-century Ireland. Or so it would seem. In reality, Nobbs is an older woman posing as a man in a male-dominated society, glacially putting together the funds to live her dream: purchasing a small shop and selling, oh, tobacco will do.

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  • TELLURIDE: ‘The Artist,’ ‘Pina’

    Today began, as already conveyed, with the first-ever screening of Alexander Payne’s “The Descendants.” I managed two more films, one of them capsuled here. I’ll get to “Albert Nobbs” separately, but just to clean my plate a little…

    Hazanavicius’s ‘Artist’ doesn’t quite reach the hype

    There is very little doubt in my mind that we’ll all be talking about Michel Hazanavicius’s Cannes sensation “The Artist” over the next six months. The film will generate a lot of respect from Academy members who understand that getting a silent film made in this day and age, let alone a popular one, is an amazing feat. As is well-documented, the film speaks to the industry’s history with reverence and passion, is impeccably crafted (which will generate support across the branches) and features a lead performance that is easy to root for.

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  • ‘Contagion’ keeps you at arm’s length — by design

    Spinning off of comments made in the podcast this morning, I liked Steven Soderbergh’s “Contagion” quite a bit. It doesn’t reinvent the outbreak movie wheel per se, but it manifests a unique cross-section of characters and dissects them clinically, perhaps the film’s (and screenplay’s) biggest stroke of genius.

    There isn’t a lot of heart to be found in the film, though when it peeks through, it counts. And even then, Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns aren’t concerned with lingering on it. They’re more interested in depicting a global community in crisis, dropping the players onto a Petri dish to observe — coldly — societal breakdown and human frailty.

    The film pulses along (driven by precise editing by Stephen Mirrione and thumping electronic interludes by composer Cliff Martinez), rarely taking time to burrow into a character before pushing on to the next. Indeed, some threads are left dangling, handled in closing by mere suggestion. And it’s all of a piece with a film that seems determined to keep you at arm’s length — and for good reason.

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