In Contention

Tag: Alps

  • Venice awards make a stand

    To judge from the press reaction to yesterday’s Venice Film Festival awards, you could be forgiven for thinking that Michael Fassbender won every single one of them, plus an extra certificate for full attendance.

    That’d hardly be surprising in any circumstances, given Fassbender’s growing celebrity and the media’s reliable aversion to world cinema. Best Actor was the only major prize handed to an English-language film, after all — prompting cries of “Boring!” in many a comment board, for what in cinema is more boring than subtitles and faces you don’t immediately recognize?

    But I’m being unfair. Surely one reason for Fassbender hogging last night’s Lido headlines — with Golden Lion winner “Faust” generally relegated to a grudging postscript — is that his was one choice made by the jury that nearly everyone could agree upon, and had indeed agreed upon since “Shame”‘s first screening a week before. I’d have been equally happy with an award for quick-witted “Carnage” savior Christoph Waltz, but I’m pleased the more exciting film got indirectly honored.

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  • VENICE: What will win… and what should

    This year’s Competition strand of the Venice Film comprised 23 films — a large-ish number by major festival standards, and yet it still feels remarkably thin.

    Admittedly, I’m viewing the field with a slight eyepatch on, having only seen 17 of the 23 films. Yet compared to last year’s lineup — where the successes ranged from higher-profile American auteur works like “Black Swan” and “Meek’s Cutoff” to more rarefied critical hits like “Silent Souls” and “Post Mortem,” with several heavily discussed possibilities in between — it feels this year like the Lido conversation has centered on the same small handful of titles for the past week.

    Last year, Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere” was something of a shock Golden Lion winner; this year, anything that extensively discussed would be in the thick of consideration. As I wrote earlier, the extreme front-loading of the schedule, combined with the lack of breakout critical sleepers in the festival’s quiet second week, has made for a rather static buzz wave.

    (Thoughts on this year’s contenders, and my own list of predictions and preferences, after the jump.)

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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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  • VENICE: Follow the Lido — a festival preview

    “Why Venice and not Toronto?” a colleague asked when I mentioned I was heading to the Lido for the world’s oldest film festival for the third straight year. Given the North American bent of this site, it was a fair question, but also one I found easy to answer — and not just for the dully practical reason of relative airfare expense.

    Toronto may have become the bigger and, depending on your field of interest, more influential festival (certainly so if you’re in the Oscar-watching business). But with its abundance of pre-premiered films and no juried competition, it’ll never have the grandeur or ever-so-slightly scuffed glamor of the Venice event, with its beachside location, soaring marble delegate halls and saturated aroma of overpriced espresso — not to mention the artsier exclusivity of its film programming, a once hit-and-miss virtue that scored a bulls-eye with a 2010 lineup that beat last year’s Cannes for range, relevance and vitality.

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