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  • TELLURIDE: Payne’s ‘Descendants’ plays, but doesn’t quite reach the bar he’s set for himself

    Over the years Alexander Payne has been invited to Telluride to debut various films, but conflicts with other festivals have always kept that from becoming a reality. He finally attended his first SHOW here two years ago as a Guest Director for the festival. And today, he finally brought a film with him, debuting “The Descendants” to the first audience ever as part of the press and patrons special screening at the Chuck Jones Cinema.

    “It’s funny how long it can sometimes take to realize your destiny, to be a part of this festival,” he told the audience while introducing the film. And indeed, Payne fits right in here with the cineastes.

    The film, however, I found to be a bit Payne-lite. There’s a wonderful subtlety to the effort that certainly isn’t present in his past work. There’s an effortlessness here, where something akin to straining would frequently pop up in his breed of dramedy. And the level of cynicism in most of his work, including his still-best “Sideways,” was refreshingly absent here. But it doesn’t have the density of his past work, and I missed that.

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  • TELLURIDE: Herzog’s latest lands at Sundance Selects, ‘Rum Diary’ looks like a go for the SHOW (or does it?)

    Still no screenings yet here at Telluride. Most are up at the Patron Brunch smooching George Clooney’s rear at the moment. I’ve been on the porch of my B&B enjoying the crisp mountain air and doing a little work. Alejandro González Iñárritu popped in here with his family. He was here last year with “Biutiful” and maybe it sucked him in.

    On a quick stroll around town I popped into a local bookstore and noticed a display featuring festival highlights: Kaui Hart Hemmings’s “The Descendants,” John Kerr’s “A Most Dangerous Method”… and Hunter S. Thompson’s “The Rum Diary.” So chalk the latter up as surely one of the festival’s surprise “TBAs.” And, indeed, Johnny Depp is in town. (UPDATE: Anne Thompson is reporting the festival didn’t screen the film, so…who knows what’s going on with that.)

    Meanwhile, Werner Herzog’s documentary “Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life” announced distribution yesterday and I’m just now seeing it. Last year “The Way Back” held its Newmarket acquisition announcement for the first day of the fest. Herzog’s latest is definitely on my list. I hope I can get around to seeing it.

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  • REVIEW: “A Dangerous Method” (**1/2)

    Venice Film Festival

    “Do you think they know we’re on our way, bringing them the plague?” So asks Viggo Mortensen’s Sigmund Freud of his younger colleague Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), as the two approach New York City to gift the untreated denizens of America with their equally grueling brands of psychoanalysis, in the closing stretch of “A Dangerous Method,” David Cronenberg’s thoughtfully embroidered account of their professional rivalry.

    It’s the sharpest line in corset-prestige specialist Christopher Hampton’s script, adapted none-too-cinematically from his 2002 play “The Talking Cure.” It is also, as most Freudophiles will recognize, one he didn’t write himself — like so many of a writer’s best moments, it was gifted to him by legend. Freud, luckily enough, had a pretty dry line in irony; drier, perhaps, than that of Hampton, who tackles his historical subjects’ rich battle of wills and philosophies with the requisite scholarly enthusiasm, but is oddly cautious,  even a little po-faced, about the way he fashions intellectual debate into drama.

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  • OSCAR TALK: Ep. 59 — Venice thoughts from Guy Lodge, debating ‘The Artist’, Telluride musings and Soderbergh’s stripped-down ‘Contagion’

    Oscar TalkWelcome to Oscar Talk.

    In case you’re new to the site and/or the podcast, Oscar Talk is a weekly kudocast, your one-stop awards chat shop between yours truly and Anne Thompson of Thompson on Hollywood. The podcast is weekly, every Friday throughout the season, charting the ups and downs of contenders along the way. Plenty of things change en route to Oscar’s stage and we’re here to address it all as it unfolds.

    Today Anne and I are both in the Colorado Rockies for the 38th annual Telluride Film Festival. We’re joined today by Guy Lodge, who has been filing from the Venice Film Festival and has plenty to say about what he’s seen so far. Let’s see what’s on the docket today…

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  • 9/2 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: ‘Diary’ a TFF surprise?, Cronenberg talks ‘Method,’ Cody’s most anticipated

    • Word is one of the big Telluride surprises is the Johnny Depp starrer “The Rum Diary.” [Hollywood Elsewhere]

    • At Venice, is “Contagion” following “The Town”‘s awards playbook? (Uh…yeah.) [24 Frames]

    • Sticking with the Lido, Nick Vivarelli talks to “A Dangerous Method” director David Cronenberg. [Variety]

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  • REVIEW: “W.E.” (*1/2)

    Venice Film Festival

    There’s such a bounty of ripe absurdities in Madonna’s sophomore directorial effort “W.E.” — an over-the-spectacles glance at the supposedly for-the-ages romance of Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII, blending the story of “The King’s Speech,” the structure of “Julie & Julia,” the styling of “A Single Man” and the collected smarts of none of those films — that it seems positively ascetic to begin with the closing credits, but so I shall. Nestled in the final minute of a decidedly over-generous 120 comes the list of “Thank Yous,” upon which you may or may not be surprised to encounter the names John Galliano and Leni Reifenstahl (sic).

    The names may be there for perfectly fair reasons. Galliano is a genius fashion designer, and Madonna’s film is nothing if not well-dressed. Riefenstahl was a genius metteur en scène, and Madonna’s film is nothing if not — well, perhaps she just likes Riefenstahl’s films, even if any claim of creative influence would be on the tenuous side. The irony of thanking two prominent alleged Nazi sympathizers, mere minutes after “W.E.” goes to manful if unconvincing lengths to discredit any suggestions that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor had similar leanings, is incidental, and perhaps a little cheap to pick on, but merely one small symptom of Madonna the Auteur’s astonishing lack of self-awareness.

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  • ‘Killer Joe’ poster

    I was hoping to get William Friedkin’s “Killer Joe” here at Telluride, but Guy will have a chance to see it in Venice if he sees fit. I’m very much looking forward to it for some reason, and I dig the poster that hit the net today. Check out the full (grossly watermarked courtesy of Coming Soon) image after the jump.

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  • ‘Margaret’ trailer

    If it seems like we’ve been waiting forever to see Kenneth Lonergan’s “Margaret,” that’s because we’ve been waiting forever to see Kenneth Lonergan’s “Margaret.” Featuring a pre-“True Blood” Anna Paquin and Matt Damon, among an eclectic cast, the film has sat on a shelf for, what, six years? It’s finally getting a release this year from Fox Searchlight, and the trailer recently debuted at Apple. Check it out by clicking the image below or watch an embed after the jump.

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  • Taking questions for Oscar Talk

    Sorry once again for getting this up late. Start reminding me if it’s not up by Wednesday night! But anyway, we’ll be recording the podcast in a half hour or so for publication tomorrow. We’ll be joined by Guy in Venice and perhaps Anne’s Venice correspondent, David Gritten. Rifle off any questions you might have for us, though consider aiming plenty Venice’s way, since Anne and I haven’t dug in here in Telluride yet.

  • TELLURIDE: Settling in for the 38th annual

    So here I sit in Telluride, a nice view of the mountainside gondolas out the window, a swift flight and gorgeous shuttle ride later. As always, we were greeted with the festival program upon boarding the charter this morning, which also carried filmmakers Werner Herzog and Alexander Payne, actress Tilda Swinton, etc., their presence at the airport already hinting at what was likely to be inside.

    The three most expected films are here: Payne’s “The Descendants,” David Cronenberg’s “A Dangerous Method” and Steve McQueen’s “Shame.” Those will be at the top of my list this weekend. Rodrigo Garcia’s “Albert Nobbs” is, along with Payne’s film, the big first-look get for the festival. Though we’ll get looks at McQueen’s flick ahead of Venice, it appears. Also of interest to me are Cannes carry-overs “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” “Le Havre,” “The Kid with a Bike” and “Footnote.” And on the documentary front, there is Matin Scorsese’s “George Harrison: Living in the Material World” (centered on Beatle George Harrison) and Herzog’s latest, “Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life.”

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  • REVIEW: “Carnage” (**1/2)

    Venice Film Festival

    When the title of Yasmina Reza’s acclaimed 2006 play “God of Carnage” was given a haircut in its transition to the screen, it was hard to read what — if anything — the change implied about the film to come.

    On the one hand, “Carnage” sounds pithier and more aggressive, removing the safety net of metaphor from a text already pretty unreserved in its examination of upper-class ugliness. On the other, shearing the title of any theological implications (though the play’s less-than-incendiary speech in which the titular phrase was coined survives intact) smacked of caution: would Polanski’s treatment blunt Reza’s scalpel, selecting some of the play’s less arguable social transgressions while leaving more troublesome ones on the stage? Or did Polanski simply like the one-word title better?

    As it turns out, the mixed signals were a red herring either way: the newly godless “Carnage” stints neither on the bilious wit the play spewed on stage, nor the formality of its construction, which takes an hour to excavate raw animosity and dysfunction from yards of swaddled politesse. It is, in the final event, very much the play that critics and audiences swarmed around from its Paris debut in 2006, and such fans’ relative satisfaction or disappointment with it will hinge largely on their individual response to the wholly refreshed cast.

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  • AMPAS underwrites Telluride Guest Director program

    I’ll be hopping on a plane in a matter of hours on my way to the Rockies and another Telluride Film Festival. I can’t wait to get there. The schedule will hit while I’m in the air, but check back later for thoughts on what’s to come this weekend. For now, the Academy has once again announced a grant for the fest’s Guest Director program. The press release, in part:

    The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has awarded a $50,000 grant to underwrite the 2011 Telluride Film Festival’s Guest Director program, this year featuring musician Caetano Veloso. Veloso has over 100 film and television credits, but may be best known to moviegoers for his performance of “Cucurrucucú Paloma” (“Cucurrucucu Dove”) in Pedro Almodóvar’s Academy Award®-winning film, “Talk to Her.”

    This is the fourth consecutive year that the Academy has funded the program. In 2010 the festival’s guest director was writer Michael Ondaatje; in 2009, it was Alexander Payne, the director and Oscar®-winning screenwriter of “Sideways;” and in 2008, it was Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian political philosopher and cultural critic.

    More of Guy’s thoughts from Venice, including reactions to Roman Polanski’s “Carnage” and Madonna’s “W.E.” coming shortly.

  • 9/1 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: “It” girl Chastain still on the circuit, Lindelof hearts ‘Raiders,’ ‘Ides’ first slam-dunk?

    • He puts a question mark on it but Dave Karger nevertheless calls “The Ides of March” the year’s first slam-dunk Best Picture nominee. [Entertainment Weekly]

    • Steve Pond talks to 2011 “it” girl Jessica Chastain. [The Odds]

    • S.T. VanAirsdale gets a bunch of us awards blowhards on the record for a little early discussion on what’s in store this season. [Movieline]

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  • Santa Barbara fest announces acquisitons program

    The press release for this went out yesterday but I’m just now getting around to posting. In part:

    In 2012 the Santa Barbara International Film Festival will continue on its path to becoming one of the world’s most sought after and prestigious film festivals with the debut of its first ever Acquisitions Program, which will take place on the first weekend of the festival, January 27-29, 2012, it was announced today by SBIFF Executive Director Roger Durling.

    The weekend long program will be run in association with Traction Media, a Los Angeles-based film production and sales company, and was created to allow the acquisitions community easy, industry-friendly access to films at SBIFF. Together, SBIFF and Traction will select the films to be presented in the program, and buyers will be afforded priority access to the chosen films. For more information, log onto www.sbfilmfestival.org…

    The Call for Entries is under way for the 2012 season. Films will be accepted until the drop deadline on December 9. All films can be submitted through withoutabox.com.

    I’ll once again be attending Santa Barbara fest in January this season, FYI. Always a nice interlude post-nominations.

    [Photo: Santa Barbara International Film Festival]

  • ‘Drive’ on an interactive tour of Los Angeles

    It’s no secret both Guy and I are full on in the tank for Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Drive.” It’s one of the year’s best films, full of the promise of a fresh young filmmaker just beginning to sample his abilities for us all.

    One of the big takeaways for me when I saw the film at Comic-Con, I noted, was a reverence for the city of Los Angeles. “I don’t think another director has so completely captured the aura of the city like [Michael] Mann,” I wrote at the time, “but Refn comes really close.” And when I spoke to Refn later that evening, he mentioned to me that he feels Los Angeles is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, more so, even, than a picturesque burg like New York.

    With that in mind, my esteemed colleague Jen Yamato has come up with one of those ideas at Movieline that I wish I had stumbled on: an interactive tour of Los Angeles with Refn’s thoughts on the locations he used throughout the shoot.

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  • 100,000 comments

    I just happened to notice when logging on to the back end of the site today that reader Michael’s comment in appreciation of Guy’s just-launched Venice coverage marks the 100,000th comment from you all here at In Contention. Of course, it surely totals more when you figure in general patrolling of the comments sections vis a vis our commenting policy, and especially considering the switch to WordPress three years ago (all of these came in those three years), but regardless, 100,000 it is. It’s not as big a number as some sites that have been running strong for that amount of time, but I know it’s a core of impassioned, niche readers who enjoy the lively discussion we get into here. And I know it also represents hundreds of thousands more who merely browse and refrain from speaking up. But for everyone involved in getting us to that number, it seems a good time here at the start of the season to simply say: thank you.

  • INTERVIEW: ‘Contagion’ screenwriter Scott Z. Burns

    There’s a scene in 2009’s “The Informant!,” Steven Soderbergh’s tongue-in-cheek look at corporate malfeasance written by Scott Z. Burns, when Matt Damon’s pathological liar Mark Whitacre rants internally about the spread of a virus, spurred by a sneeze from co-star Scott Bakula.

    By the time the film was complete, Soderbergh had built a solid working relationship with Burns and the two were eager to dive into something new. The director asked what Burns would like to do next, and the writer brought up Damon’s rant scene and mentioned that he thought it would be cool to do an outbreak movie.

    “That was literally the extent of the pitch,” Burns says over breakfast poolside at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. “And he said, ‘That’s great. Go do that.’”

    And so the germ (no pun intended) of “Contagion” was born. The film — a dialed down, ultra-realistic look at societal breakdown in the wake of an unpredictable virus strain mutation catching hold and wreaking havoc across the globe — quickly spun away from those simplistic beginnings and became, for Burns and Soderbergh, an opportunity to metaphorically dissect the spread of misinformation in a time of crisis.

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  • 8/31 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Social media boost ‘The Help,’ actress Oscar plays, Bird Flu back ahead of ‘Contagion’

    • Anne Thompson talks to “Warrior” stars Joel Edgerton and Tom Hardy and director Gavin O’Connor. [Thompson on Hollywood]

    • Lucas Kavner on the debt “The Help” owes to social media for its box office staying power. [Huffington Post]

    • Louis Virtel looks shines a light on five female roles that seem to have the right Oscar stuff. [Movieline]

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