• Lots of buzz over “An Education” this week, with a new trailer and poster unveiled … and the talk isn’t only about Carey Mulligan.
• We kicked off a new season of Tech Support with a look at the runners and riders for Best Cinematography.
• Darwin biopic “Creation” will open this year’s Toronto fest, while “Bright Star” and “Precious” are also in the lineup.
• Speaking of “Precious,” this week’s edition of Page to Screen examined the novel behind the Sundance sensation.
• Judd Apatow’s risky departure from formula with “Funny People.” [Wall Street Journal]
• Denise Martin talks to “(500) Days of Summer” star Joseph Gordon-Levitt. [Los Angeles Times]
• PODCAST: Yours truly talks the Oscar’s move to 10, the “Let the Right One In” remake and more with John Campea et al. [The Movie Blog]
I have to say, as enchanting as this new one-sheet for Lone Sherfig’s “An Education” is, and as attractive as the composition might be, I don’t feel like it properly capitalizes on the tone or the underlying theme of the film. That’s a shame. I like it, it’s just…it could have been something meaningful. We’re talking about the best film of the year so far. Is it wrong to expect more? Anyway, your thoughts?
It seems that Lone Scherfig’s British period drama “An Education” continues to steal the heart of pretty much everyone who sees it — this has been near the top of my “most anticipated” list for some time now.
You may remember a recent piece where Kris, while echoing the resounding praise for the film and its breakout star Carey Mulligan, really flew the flag for supporting star Alfred Molina.
Now comes further applause for the film — and an emphatic endorsement for yet another member of the film’s ensemble — from an interesting source: Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling.
In an ecstatic note to Jeff Wells, one of the film’s earliest champions, Durling likens watching the film to “a state of movie nirvana” and declares Mulligan both “sublime” and “the leading contender at this point for Best Actress.” But I’m most interested to see that he singles out the supporting work of 30 year-old British actress Rosamund Pike for special attention.
• This week’s Off the Carpet column took a long, hard look at the ramifications of a 10-nominee Best Picture race.
• As the popular game of expanding past fields to ten continued, we joined in the speculation.
• Meanwhile, AMPAS added 134 members to its voting body, from Seth Rogen to Danny Boyle to Peter Gabriel.
• And they furthered their controversial remodelling, scrapping all honorary awards from the Oscar telecast.
• We bade a sad farewell to Oscar-winning actor and former AMPAS president Karl Malden.
• In other disheartening news, Michael Bay’s “Transformers” sequel rocked the box office.
• We championed “An Education” and its star Alfred Molina, while the film was the subject of this week’s Page to Screen column.
• With “Public Enemies” on everyone’s mind this week, we counted down the best performances from Michael Mann films.
• The Edinburgh Film Festival wrapped, handing its top award to Duncan Jones’s “Moon.”
“I was damaged by my education,” writes renowned British journalist Lynn Barber at the end of the captivating centerpiece essay in her newly published memoir “An Education,” a sober conclusion to a personal account that otherwise brims with breezy anecdotal humor.
The eponymous “education” is not academic, though she makes clear her lingering resentments over that too. Rather it’s an emotional – I’d say sentimental, but Barber treats it with too much venom for that – education, covering not only romantic and sexual instruction, but a deeper acquaintance with the betrayals and hypocrisies of adulthood.
The ostensible antagonist of the piece is the older lover who courts and ultimately cons the naïve 16 year-old Barber, but it becomes clear that she is using this story as a lens through which to examine the failings of her own parents, who allowed – encouraged, even – the end of a schoolgirl’s innocence.
It’s a forthright, often cruelly funny reflection that braids unconditional affection with anger, and it’s little wonder that producer Amanda Posey immediately saw its cinematic potential when the essay was published in literary magazine Granta in 2003.
I’m late to the table in some sense given that Lone Sherfig’s “An Education” dazzled audiences five months ago at the Sundance Film Festival. But after catching the film last night, I was left with one mission: spread the word on Alfred Molina.
Most of the end-of-year awards talk will surely surround Carey Mulligan’s absolutely peerless and incredibly refined leading performance, as well it should. She won’t need much of a boost into the Oscar race when people get a load of what she has to offer here. But I’m circling the wagons for Molina, whose portrayal of a concerned father of the era is, not to put too fine a point on it, the work of a master.
Molina has no showy moment. He has nothing you would say represents a classic “Oscar clip.” But truly, when has he? This is an actor, still without proper recognition from the Academy, who has delivered time after time, from “Boogie Nights” to “Frida” (his one brush with the derby) to “The Hoax” and even blockbuster fare such as “Spider-Man 2.” And in “An Education,” he’s at the top of his game. I was more affected by his subtle additions to the film than I expected and that, I’d say, is the hallmark of an accomplished supporting performance.
OK, I held off compiling a set of 2009 Oscar predictions for as long as I could. Actually, I tried to hold off even thinking about them — so long and largely depressing was the 2008 derby that I felt I owed myself a few months of pretending that movies are their own reward. (Not that the artistically desolate spring season is the best time for idealism.)
Year-in-advance predictions are the strict preserve of crazy people. (And we love them for it.) By contrast, in offering up my first predictions a mere 7-8 months before nomination day, I feel only slightly unhinged.
Before you peruse my predix, I should offer the disclaimer that my best guesses may just as easily be my worst. Living a continent away, I can’t approach Kris for ear-to-the-ground expertise, and I often run with notions that are fanciful, to say the least. This time last year, I was predicting 5 nominations for “Happy-Go-Lucky,” including a Best Picture bid. Then again, I walked out of “In Bruges” last April convinced I’d seen a future screenplay nominee. I have my isolated (often very isolated) moments of clarity.
All of which is to say to say that these predictions aren’t to be taken terribly seriously. At this early stage in the game, with so many variables in the equation, why not have a bit of fun and float a few wild-card possibilities? By the time the unknowns become known and the race starts narrowing down, there’s little room to be playful, so I like to get it out of my system now.
One of the more popular Oscar bets doing the rounds is that, along with rising star Carey Mulligan, writer Nick Hornby will find himself in the race for Sundance favorite “An Education.” (I have a hunch the film may do even better than that, but that’s me.)
In contrast to the wealth of popular books reaching our screens this year, however, Hornby’s adaptation has taken a rather more circuitous journey: his script is a fictionalisation of journalist Lynn Barber’s autobiographical short story which appeared in Granta magazine a while back, but is actually just a taster for Barber’s full-length memoir, which is only being published later this month. Still with me? Good.
I will of course be covering all this in a Page to Screen column eventually. For now, the Observer has helpfully provided a 6000-word extract from Barber’s memoir that essentially covers the events that inspired the film, wherein a wide-eyed 16 year-old girl experiences the rush of first love and heartbreak at the hands of an older man in early 1960s London. It’s a delightful read — warm, melancholy and streaked with acerbic humor — and gives some idea of what to expect from the film. I particularly liked this extract, which balances specific personal emotion and sly social critique quite beautifully:
Events overtook me in the last few days of term. Miss R Garwood Scott the headmistress somehow got wind of my engagement and summoned me to see her. Was it true I was engaged? Yes, I said, but I would still like to take the Oxford exams. She was ruthless. I could not return to school (in those days you had to stay for an extra term to do Oxbridge entrance) if I was getting married. When was the wedding and which church would it be in? Not in church, I said, because my fiancé was Jewish. Jewish! She looked aghast – “Don’t you realise that the Jews killed Our Lord?” I stared at her. “So I won’t take the Oxford exams,” I said. My little gang was waiting for me outside her study. “I told her I was leaving,” I announced. “She tried to persuade me to stay but I refused.” They all congratulated me and begged to be bridesmaids. Then I went to the bogs and cried my eyes out.
Only the greenest of awards-watchers needs reminding of the following statistic: a mere three women have been nominated for Best Director in the 81-year history of the Academy Awards. It’s long been an embarrassing state of affairs — never more so than in the late 80s and early 90s, when in three out of six consecutive years, the Best Picture nominee denied a directing nod happened to be made by a woman.
Still, the sad truth is that the workings of the industry are such that female filmmakers are rarely entrusted with the kind of prestige studio product that grabs awards attention. (It’s no coincidence that the three past nominees — Lina Wertmuller, Jane Campion and Sofia Coppola — all come from the foreign and/or independent sector.)
2009, however, offers a considerably rosier outlook. As I was compiling my own early Oscar predictions (which I’ll share with you next week) in the wake of Cannes, it occurred to me that the Academy has an opportunity to double that paltry aforementioned statistic in the space of a single year. More than double, actually: looking down the list of awards possibilities, it is feasible — if still not very likely — that as many as four of this year’s five Best Director slots could be filled by the fairer sex.
Apparently, I’m not the only one thinking alone these lines: IndieWire’s Peter Knegt considers the possibilities of three ladies in his post-Cannes awards speculation column, going so far as to predict nods for all three (based only on films he’s seen so far). So who are these women (including the one Knegt isn’t considering) with a chance of making Oscar history come January?
That Jane Campion is one of three female auteurs competing for the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year is seen as a relative step up for the fairer sex compared to years past, though by any logical standards, a 3-to-17 ratio is still an indication of a globally male-biased industry.
Campion, however, has an interesting take on the matter: though she blames studio sexism to an extent, though she thinks women themselves have some responsibility for the situation. Noting that the imbalance begins as early as the film school stage, she wondered at a Cannes press conference whether her female peers are more easily deterred by criticism:
I would love to see more women directors because they represent half of the population and gave birth to the whole world … Without them the rest are not getting to know the whole story. I think women don’t grow up with the kind of criticism that men grow up with. We are more sensitively treated. It is quite harsh when you first experience the world of film-making — you have to have a tough skin. My suspicion is that women are not used to that. We must put on our coats of armour and get going because we need them [female directors].
I’m neither agreeing nor disagreeing, but from a successful auteur who has endured her share of criticism in past years, it’s an interesting perspective. Thankfully, considering the wealth of high-profile female-directed projects in the wings this year — from “Bright Star” to “The Hurt Locker” to “An Education” — things may be looking up.
Meanwhile, strong reviews for Campion’s film continue to pour in; Todd McCarthy calls it an “impressive return” for Jane Campion, and amps up the buzz for star Abbie Cornish. U.S. distribution rights were snapped up a few days ago by ex-Picturehouse chief Bob Berney and Bill Pohlad’s new outfit.
As many of you already know, one of my central irritations of this year’s Oscar season has been the “Slumdog” backlash, an unnecessarily cruel response to a brilliant film’s rather boring sweep of all the major film awards over the past three months. I understand it on one level, because no one wants a predictable circuit. But Danny Boyle’s film has been unfairly maligned if only because it is such a masterful achievement in the face of the mediocrity to which it has been compared.
Thankfully, those of us who share in this irritation have author Nick Hornby on our side. Here is what he had to say (via Awards Daily) in response to a letter published in the London Review of Books:
There’s a lot packed in here: the snobbery, the smug and unexamined assumptions, the writer’s apparent pride in his utter ignorance of the independent film-making process, the nonsensical contradictions (can something be both “garish” and “gaggingly photogenic”?) It’s perfectly possible not to enjoy Slumdog Millionaire, of course – nothing appeals to everybody, and I didn’t have enough invested in the love story for the film to lift me as much as it seems to have lifted others. But typically, when the success of a book or a film or a piece of music baffles the liberal intelligentsia, then that success will usually be put down to the cynicism of the makers, or the depressing ignorance of the consumers. (Sometimes, when these critics are trying to be nice, they make a plea for better arts education. “It’s not the public’s fault that they enjoy the paintings of Jack Vettriano. They just don’t know any better.”) This letter is a prime example of that attitude: you loved Slumdog? You’re a moron…
In film people tend to talk about films “working” or “not working”, and ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ clearly works – just as ‘Trainspotting’ and ‘Shallow Grave’, two of Danny Boyle’s other films, worked – in fact, Boyle’s ability to turn forbiddingly unpromising material into movies that people actually want to see is remarkable. If his films are commercial, it’s because he wants them to be seen by a mainstream audience; the money-making that ensues is a by-product, rather than a goal in itself…
It would be nice to think that our artier film-makers and more literary novelists could look at ‘Slumdog’ and steal a few of its underpinnings. Is energy, for example, as vulgar an attribute as many of them seem to believe? And is coherent structure really such an awful thing? On the evidence of the LRB letter, though, our intellectuals are more likely to sneer. I’m sure they’re all very clever people, but they can be terribly dim sometimes.
Amen, brother. Hornby, by the way, is likely to be in the thick of the awards season this year with his adaptation “An Education.”
Ahh. The dust is settling. And on the horizon, just visible through the mist and waiting to drive us all up the wall once again: the 2009 Oscar season.
I’ve been writing this year-in-advance column for probably six years now, and I always look forward to gazing ahead. No one dives in so pathetically deep this far out as yours truly, but in exchange for not having a life for the past few months, I get to unload this burden the day after our annual season’s peak and forget about little gold men entirely for a few months.
It’s quite liberating.
The most interesting thing about the season to come, from my vantage point, is the lack of a dreaded “frontrunner status” for any of the contenders. Some might say Clint Eastwood’s Nelson Mandela project (which is not called “The Human Factor,” mind you — the director says the film is currently untitled and is based on John Carlin’s book “Playing the Enemy”).
Others might say Rob Marshall’s “Nine” (coming from a money-tight company hoping to avoid echoes of “Memoirs of a Geisha”). But I don’t see a “Geisha” from here, or a “Charlie Wilson’s War,” expected heavies waiting to miss the mark. The field is curiously flat, and as a result, excitingly broad.
Let’s get to it, shall we?
It had become quite clear over the past few days that Lee Daniels’ sophomore feature “Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire” was one of the few titles raising pulses at a very quiet Sundance Film Festival. The film, a hard-hitting urban tale of an African-American teenager overcoming merciless parental abuse in 1980’s Harlem, has received breathless critical notices across the board, with Variety declaring it “a diamond – clear, bright, but oh so hard.”
So hardly anyone is surprised that the film cleaned up at yesterday’s Sundance Awards, nabbing both the Grand Jury and Audience Prizes in the U.S. dramatic competition — only the third film ever to achieve that double. It also received a Special Jury Prize for the performance of Mo’Nique as the protagonist’s monstrously neglectful mother.
Sundance Awards have a spotty record of indicating future success: looking down the list of previous Grand Jury Prize winners, for every “You Can Count on Me” or “Frozen River” that rides its momentum all the way to Oscar night a whole year later, there’s a “Quinceanera” or “Forty Shades of Blue” that pretty much sinks without trace. “Push” certainly sounds like a tough sell for future awards attention, but if the critical championing continues, it’s hard to predict what might be in store.
One winner we seem increasingly likely to hear more about as the year progresses is Lone Scherfig’s British charmer “An Education,” which inspired a heated bidding contest between specialty studios, and last night landed the Audience Award in the world dramatic competition, as well as a gong for cinematographer John De Borman. (Check out Todd McCarthy’s unabashed rave for the film here – we haven’t seen too many of those lately.)
Meanwhile, the jury’s choice in the world dramatic section was Chilean class-themed comedy “The Maid,” while directing and screenwriting honours went to Oliver Hirschbiegel’s “Five Minutes of Heaven,” a study of political conflict in 1970’s Northen Ireland headlined by Liam Neeson. After the disaster that was Hirschbiegel’s first English-language effort, “The Invasion,” it’s nice to see the “Downfall” director getting back on track.
A full list of the (many) feature awards dished out is below the cut. For more details, check out Variety’s report here.
Yesterday I mentioned how Lone Scherfig’s British period romance “An Education,” starring much-buzzed ingenue Carey Mulligan, had become the talk of Sundance, with Fox Searchlight zeroing in on the film.
Now Anne Thompson reports that Searchlight, and several others, have been beaten to the punch by Sony Pictures Classics, who have acquired the North American rights for $3 million:
Fox Searchlight came back into the negotiation on a second round but was unable to close … Also bidding on An Education were The Weinstein Co., Focus Features, Lionsgate and Overture. SPC will launch the film in the fall with an eye on an awards campaign.
Wow, that some hefty interest there. SPC sounds like an appropriate fit for the film, given that they’ve had some success lately with female-skewing arthouse titles like “Rachel Getting Married,” “I’ve Loved You So Long” and their canny acquisition from last year’s festival, “Frozen River” — even if those films’ campaigns have lost some steam over the course of the season.
The news of an awards-oriented release is certainly interesting … could Mulligan be this year’s Ellen Page? Stu Van Airsdale thinks she’s rather better than that, saying that Page’s “Juno” turn comes off looking like “a Lifetime reject” by comparison.
Don’t say I didn’t give you the heads-up on this one. Looking over the Sundance lineup last month, I singled out Lone Scherfig’s “An Education” as a title about which I was particularly excited — not least because it stars Carey Mulligan, a lovely young Brit for whom I’ve been predicting big things for some time.
Well, once in a blue moon, I’m right.
“An Education,” a 1960s-set coming-of-age drama penned by Nick Hornby, recently bowed at Sundance, and while the notices for the film itself are warm, the real buzz centers on 23 year-old Mulligan. A star, it appears, is born. Jeff Wells was first out the gate, and it’s fair to say that he’s besotted with both star and film — which he reckons we may still be talking about this time next year:
The best film of the Sundance Film Festival, a finely tuned and deeply engaging film by regular popcorn-watching standards, an award-calibre drama that will definitely be in contention at the end of the year, and a movie that has launched a genuine movie star in an old-fashioned and yet very new-fashioned sense — 23 year-old Carey Mulligan. I know that special old-soul-mixed-with-youthful-effervescence quality that you see in very few actors and actresses over the years, and trust me, Mulligan has it.
For those who really want to get an early start in the awards-guessing game, the lineups of films competing for honours at next month’s 25th annual Sundance Film Festival has been announced. As usual, the competition is split into four sections — US dramatic, US documentary, world dramatic, world documentary — with 16 films competing in each.
Looking down the list of films, it’s pretty much impossible to anticipate hits or highlights based on name recognition alone. After all, the whole point of Sundance is for unexpected successes to emerge out of nowhere. This time last year, who could have predicted that a miniscule, star-free picture called “Frozen River” would be making waves on the awards circuit following a win at Sundance? Nobody. That’s the beauty.
With that in mind, I’ve selected one film from each section that piques my interest — either I’ve been following its progression for some time, or I simply like the pitch and/or people involved.
AN EDUCATION (World Dramatic) I’ve been intrigued by this one for a while, partly because it’s written by Nick Hornby, and partly because it stars the incandescent young Carey Mulligan, who blew me away as Nina in last year’s Royal Court production of “The Seagull” (now on Broadway). I predicted then and there she’d be a star, so I’m interested to see if this demonstrates her potential. She plays a smart teenager in 1960’s London who falls under the spell of a debonair older man. Peter Sarsgaard, Emma Thompson and Sally Hawkins are also in the impressive cast, while Lone Scherfig, best known for “Italian for Beginners” (an unusually cuddly work from the Dogme sect), directs. I’m in.