• Cathy Yan chats with “Up in the Air” star Anna Kendrick. [Speakeasy]
• James Schamus sets to work on “tragic, suicidally depressing” script for Ang Lee. Terrific. [Hollywood Reporter]
• Peter Bradshaw saddles back up to “Toy Story 2,” with a father’s eye. [The Guardian]
For all the movement in the awards game this week – Jeff Bridges leap-frogging into contention, the animation race swelling to five nominees, “Precious” continuing to gather momentum – my head hasn’t really been in it this week.
That’s partly because we’re all still making blind prognoses until four unseen juggernauts – “Nine,” “Avatar,” “The Lovely Bones,” and “Invictus” – finally deign to show their faces. And partly because I’m only looking forward to one of those titles with sincere movie-fan enthusiasm, as opposed to professional curiosity. Sometimes you just get the wholly subjective feeling that it isn’t going to be ‘your’ Oscar season – and while I’m not there yet, the fear is setting in.
So, with no current awards developments getting me particularly enthralled or incensed, I’ve spent most of my time lately in a reflective state. With ‘best of the 2000s’ lists already coming thick and fast, and my DVD trawl through the decade’s leftovers for my own list in full swing, Oscar’s own performance over the last 10 years has been on my mind.
As I discussed in this space a few weeks ago, it’s been a slightly schizophrenic decade of Oscar winners, one that has blurred long-held definitions of “Oscar-bait.” One does have to wonder about the identity or cultural relevance of any group that can alternately celebrate such disparate achievements as “Slumdog Millionaire,” “Gladiator” and “No Country for Old Men.” Who are these people, and what do they know?
When the Academy Awards roll around in March, it will have been precisely two decades since the unlikely figure of Kim Basinger blasted Academy voters’ conservatism on air at the 1989 ceremony, with specific regard to their sidelining of “Do the Right Thing,” Spike Lee’s groundbreaking study of urban interracial tension.
“We’ve got five great films here, and they’re great for one reason – they tell the truth,” the star opined before presenting a clip from one of that year’s Best Picture nominees. “But there is one film missing from this list that deserves to be on it because, ironically, it might tell the biggest truth of all.”
As if in response, later that evening, the Academy handed their top prize to “Driving Miss Daisy,” as quiet and uncontroversial a portrait of the American racial divide as you could ask for. Let it never be said that the Oscars have no sense of irony.
20 years on, much has changed. (Basinger has become an Oscar-winning actress, for starters. No one saw that coming.) More to the point, the amount of black Oscar winners in acting categories has trebled. And just two years after Basinger’s outburst, the Academy named 23 year-old John Singleton their first black Best Director nominee.
Whether due to general festival raggedness or some iffy shrimp, I’ve been decidedly under the weather today, and a day spent in a darkened movie theater was not the obvious solution. So I’m writing to you from a quiet cafe on a canalside terrace near the Biennale site, where a combination of sunshine and pistachio pastries are doing the healing.
Luckily, my festival time-out has coincided with a bit of a lull in the lineup, apparently quite normal at this stage in the proceedings: no Competition title in the last two days has really set the Lido alight, with the reviews for George A. Romero’s “Survival of the Dead” suggesting the Venice programmers’ mainstream punt hasn’t paid off.
(I was, however, a little disappointed to miss a midnight premiere of Antoine Fuqua’s out-of-competition “Brooklyn’s Finest,” which has accumulated some buzz for Ethan Hawke’s performance.)
• With “Luke and Brie are on a First Date” finding its way to an Amazon release, our own Chad Hartigan gets his film re-reviewed. [Spout Blog]
• Stephen Zeitchik wants to know why Ang Lee can’t catch a break. [Risky Biz Blog]
• Gregory Ellwood sees (er, hears) awards prospects in Alexandre Desplat’s “Coco Before Chanel” score. [Awards Campaign]
• “District 9” and the legacy of high-brow sci-fi. [Film School Rejects]
• Roger Ebert talks “Inglourious Basterds” with Quentin Tarantino. [Chicago Sun-Times]
• Patrick Goldstein weighs in on the Redbox brouhaha. [The Big Picture]
Guy briefly mentioned this in Friday’s round-up, but I thought I’d address it more fully here.
I kind of feel like I owe it to myself and to Ang Lee to give his forthcoming re-edit of “Ride with the Devil” a look. This is, of course, despite a severe personal disinterest that settled in when I first saw the film 10 years ago. But as a fan of the western genre, it seems only right to see what Lee originally had in mind.
I wasn’t aware, as Anne Thompson discusses in a recent piece, that the film represents the only project Lee ever edited away from his vision at a studio’s request. It doesn’t sound significant, but apparently the 11 minutes Lee trimmed (from an original 146-minute running time) were significant enough that Focus Features honcho (and frequent Lee collaborator) James Schamus has decided to dipped into the Focus-owned Polygram library to restore Lee’s version of the film.
• Patrick Goldstein revisits a collection of filmmakers’ tributes to John Hughes, “the Tolstoy of American teenagers.” [The Big Picture]
• The irrepressible Pedro Almodovar talks aging, Cruz and “Broken Embraces.” On a side note, how sweet is the photo to the right? [Daily Telegraph]
• Meryl Streep has a problem with male bloggers. Love you anyway, Meryl. [Salon]
The competition lineup for the 66th Venice Film Festival is due later today, but ahead of that major announcement, other bits and bobs relating to to yesterday’s fest have been trickling through recently.
Yesterday organisers announced the complete (and pleasantly eccentric) jury lineup. It’s been known for some time that it will be headed by Ang Lee — who has a good rapport with Venice, after all, having won the Golden Lion twice in the last four years.
Now we know that he’ll be joined by U.S. director Joe Dante (“Gremlins”), French actress Sandrine Bonnaire (herself a previous Venice prize winner for “La Ceremonie”) and firebrand Italian auteur Liliana Cavani (“The Night Porter”). Rounding out the group are two less internationally familiar names: Indian multi-hyphenate Anurag Kashyap and Italian musician-filmmaker Luciano Ligabue.
It’s somewhat surprising that our year-in-advance Oscar coverage is only three months old. That now ancient list of predictions seems so long ago, and yet, even with Cannes behind us and this or that indication of a few of the contenders, I have no idea how to offer an educated update beyond general housekeeping. The season, it seems, will remain elusive for just a little while longer.
Here’s what we know: Critics didn’t respond to Universal’s “The Boat That Rocked” across the pond. But the Brits hardly have a soft spot for Richard Curtis. Along similar lines, Stephen Frears’s “Chéri” hasn’t exactly inspired either. But both films, from awards savvy studios, could find a second wind when they eventually open Stateside.
The biggest Oscar hopeful to emerge from this year’s Cannes fest is, in my opinion, Jane Campion’s “Bright Star.” Heralded in some quarters as a return to form for the director, and snatched up by the intrepid Bob Berney (formerly of Picturehouse and now closing in on a name for his distribution company with partner Bill Polhad), the film could be a nominations hog, anywhere from six to 10 possibilities. You’ll note all of my ponderings in that regard in the latest chart update below.
I’ve been on board for most every Sam Mendes film since the director made his heralded debut in 1999. Even “Jarhead,” which was a big disappointment, had a lot of interesting ideas concerning the alienation of war and its effects on soldiers.
I still think last year’s “Revolutionary Road” (DVD coverage from John here) was a sublime work of art, but “Road to Perdition” probably remains his best work to date. It’s an intriguing portfolio. But “Away We Go” has been a troubling speed bump for me.
I saw the film weeks ago and wanted to give it another go before committing to an opinion, but I don’t know. The desire to wallow in its stereotypes and weirdly skewed view of the world just hasn’t been there.
Variety’s Dennis Harvey has written a review that kind of sums up my feelings, for the most part. I might not have been as harsh, but I understand feeling the need to do so:
…the protags are essentially blank slates, despite the skill and charm Krasinski and Rudolph bring to the roles. It’s their job simply to represent “normal” against so many illustrations of bad parenting, worse marriages and damaged adulthood. But given they’re such harmlessly pleasant folk, why don’t they have any non-messed-up friends?
Because that would un-stack the deck in a script that needs to paint them as two lonely souls in a hostile world. But in positing normal as special, the pic requires caricaturing almost everyone else.
While handled by resourceful actors, the foibles of the supporting characters are less funny than they are forced and unpleasant. Janney and Gyllenhaal in particular play figures venomously conceived.
Meant to amp up the pic’s indie-quirky cred, the soundtrack, papered with lyrically trite soundalike cuts by Scottish singer-songwriter Alexi Murdoch, instead makes progress seem more meandering and monotonous. Other design/tech contributions are solid. Still, this alternately condescending and hazy material doesn’t trigger the kind of sharp aesthetic choices Mendes and collaborators made in response to past projects from “American Beauty” to “Revolutionary Road.”
Ang Lee’s “Taking Woodstock” appears to have provided Cannes with its first high-profile disappointment. While it doesn’t appear to be a disaster by any means, the general consensus appears to be that it doesn’t meet the very high standard Lee set for himself with his last two features.
Allan Hunter at Screen Daily finds much to like in the film, calling it a “sweet, meandearing tribute” to the eponymous festival, he ultimately declares it inconsequential:
Taking Woodstock is accessible but very lightweight and should enjoy moderate commercial success as a specialised domestic release. The very American, softly sentimental nature of the film will make it a harder sell internationally … While the wider themes are persuasive enough its the smaller human stories that are disappointingly banal as Woodstock becomes a form of therapy for Elliot and his parents. Enjoyable in places and merely humdrum in others, Taking Woodstock ultimately feels like a minor Ang Lee digression in between more memorable works.
Hunter finds the film’s ensemble an equally mixed bag:
(Demetri Martin’s) gentle, guileless manner makes him perfect casting for Elliot without settling the matter of whether he is charismatic enough to have a sustained cinema career. Liev Schreiber brings dashes of sass and style to cross-dressing Vilma but Imelda Staunton’s dowdy, embittered Sonia is overcooked and all too reminiscent of Shelley Winters in full flow.
With the Cannes Film Festival only two days away, it’s time to take a long hard look (or just a look, if you prefer) at the 20 films in contention for the Palme d’Or, a typically eclectic bunch married by only one factor: all but one are from directors who have been in the race before. (And people accuse the Oscars of playing favorites.)
Cannes is a notoriously tricky (and often well-nigh impossible) contest to predict: partly because the voting body is an ever-changing template, but largely because there’s been no time ahead of the festival for any kind of critical or popular consensus to build around the mostly unseen films on the shortlist.
This may mean that in some cases the jury is susceptible to a film’s auteur cache — think “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” in 2006 — but it also allows for surprise attacks by less heralded titles on the basis of quality alone. Though it may seem an obvious winner in retrspect, few were talking about “The Class” last year before it snuck up on the last day and slayed the competition.
With those caveats on the table, here’s a film-by-film (10 today, 10 tomorrow) rundown of this year’s lineup, detailing the Cannes credentials of each director, and offering some thoughts as to where they may sit in the competition. I make no promises — except that at least half my speculation will likely be proved wildly wrong in a fortnight’s time.
“BROKEN EMBRACES” (Pedro Almodovar)
The pitch: Already widely seen and reviewed, the film marks a return to film noir territory for the Spanish master, a complex melodrama headed by Penelope Cruz as an actress trying to rid herself of an aging lover. (Spanish dialogue)
The history: On his two previous Competition appearances, for “All About My Mother” in 1999 and “Volver” in 2006, Almodovar entered the race as the bookies’ favourite, only to land the consolation prizes of Best Director and Best Screenplay, respectively.
The outlook: Reviews so far have been kind, if reserved; several critics appear to delight in Almodovar’s trademark color-saturated visuals and off-kilter humor, but few have suggested that this ranks among his finest works. Almodovar is surely overdue for the festival’s top honor, but if a more unanimously lauded work like “Volver” couldn’t do the trick, my guess is that “Broken Embraces” won’t either. I think the jury may pass altogether.
Few film projects in recent years have come with as formidable a chain of prospective directors attached than Fox 2000’s adaptation of Yann Martel’s bestselling 2002 Booker Prize winner “Life of Pi.”
First M. Night Shyamalan was on board — which, admittedly, might have been a more appealing prospect five years ago. The next name attached was a considerable step up: “Amelie” helmer Jean-Pierre Jeunet would have been a pretty natural fit for Martel’s brand of surreal whimsy. I seem to recall Alfonso Cuaron being mentioned in connection with the project at one point too. Like I said, an impressive roster.
In the end, however, it looks like Ang Lee will ultimately accept the challenge, and I do mean ‘challenge.’ For those of you unfamiliar with the novel, it’s an allegorical fantasy about a shipwrecked Indian boy who survives by sharing a raft with a Bengal tiger, among other wild animals. It’s a tricky film premise to say the least, but Lee has proved time and again that he knows his way around delicate, potentially uncinematic literary source material. I think his visual grace and lightness of touch is just what is required here. Smart choice.
I do love how busy Lee is keeping himself, compared to many other auteurs of his calibre. “Lust, Caution” is a fresh, searing memory still, and it was only a few months ago that we heard he was beginning work on “Taking Woodstock,” an ensemble piece centred around the eponymous music festival. With that film already wrapped and due for release in August (perhaps a title set for discussion in our upcoming 2009 Oscar preview), Lee is ready to move on, with yet another wholly different proposition for his filmography. Good on him.
I’ll dig into individual film reviews in due time. It’s been a slow start up here in Santa Barbara but the first two nights have been charming enough.
Rod Lurie’s “Nothing But the Truth” gets better and better each time I see it, particularly where Lurie’s work as a writer is concerned. Some beats are on the nose, perhaps too much for some people’s tastes, but I think he’s really developing as a filmmaker. And the flick went over like gangbusters with the crowd at the packed Arlington Theatre opening night gala yesterday. All the clever jokes found a home. The performances caught their stride with the viewers, it seemed, and everyone seemed to be in tune with the film’s tight rhythm. Most of all, the message seemed to settle (not surprising in a town this left of center), and that’s encouraging.
Jeff Bridges and James Cromwell were among the A-listers who came out to celebrate the film, which has been all but smothered by an untimely Yari Film Group bankruptcy. And the after-party at Paseo Nuevo up the street was slammed — too slammed. But, as always, upstairs in a V.I.P. setting is the place to be, and that’s where Lurie and his sharp college-bound son yukked it up with Bridges and “Truth” star Noah Wyle, among others.
Here’s my brief one-off on the film from back in September when it was playing Toronto.
Tonight, Kate Winslet was in town to accept the Montecito award, becoming the first person in the history of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival to be awarded twice. With that in mind, festival director Roger Durling took playful umbrage on stage with her remarks at the Golden Globe ceremony a week ago when she claimed she never wins anything.
Film critic and historian Leonard Maltin sat down with Winslet for a two-hour conversation through her career that I frankly expected to be a bore, but it was a lively and candid chat. Clips from her wide ranging portfolio were peppered in here and there, but the cutest moment came when the actress couldn’t stop chuckling at the “Titanic” clip. “It’s so funny because I don’t see me and Leo playing Jack and Rose,” she said. “It’s just me and Leo. What are we doing there? It’s so funny to me that we were in ‘Titanic,’ I don’t know how to explain it.”
In 1969, the Academy saw fit to give “Midnight Cowboy” the award for Best Picture — a first ever for an X-rated film. Some saw the moment as a bellwether signaling a new dawn for the group, that they were developing a growing acceptance for the films that would start coming at them around this time of creative invigoration in the cinema. But was it really?
I remember somewhere that a high-ranking Academy official stated that if “A Clockwork Orange” won the Oscar for Best Picture they would resign their membership! The film had already won top honors from the New York Film Critics Circle and was nominated for four Academy Awards, among them Best Picture and Best Director. A ground-breaking work, the best of Kubrick’s career, still looking futuristic 37 years later, the film is an obvious masterpiece. But it frightened the Academy for whatever reason.
A year later Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Last Tango in Paris” came along with a galvanizing performance from Marlon Brando and was certainly a better film than at least two of the pictures nomination int he top race, “The Sting” and “A Touch of Class,” yet as expected, the Academy backed away from the film, nominating only Brando and Bertolucci.
What is it in the makeup of this esteemed organization of artists that makes them steer clear controversial films, films that push the envelope, that go further out on a limb than most in exploring dark and sometimes daring subject matter?
Here’s what I love about Ang Lee: there is simply no way of anticipating what his next project is going to be. So far, the decade has seen him bounce from “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” to “Hulk” to “Brokeback Mountain” to “Lust, Caution” – a group arguably linked by thematic concerns of outsider identity, but with precious little in common besides. If there’s a more adventurous filmmaker at work these days, I don’t know his name.
Now Variety confirms that his next project sees him revisiting Nixon-era America, the period having served him well in “Brokeback” (part of it, at least) and what I believe to be his finest work, “The Ice Storm.” Not that “Taking Woodstock” – Lee’s third film in a row for Focus Features – sounds like anything he’s done before either.
The project, which enters production this month, has been adapted by James Schamus, Lee’s regular cohort, from the memoir of Elliot Tiber, a Greenwich Village interior designer who wound up in the creation of the biggest rock concert of all time when he lent his family’s motel to the event organisers.
In an inspired piece of casting, Tiber will be played by “The Daily Show”‘s Demetri Martin, while other members of an interesting, and evidently complex, ensemble include Imelda Staunton as Tiber’s mother, Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Tiber’s closeted lover, Emile Hirsch as a Vietnam vet, Paul Dano as a hippie concertgoer, Liev Schreiber as a transvestite, and Eugene Levy as Max Yasgur, the owner of the farm where it all took place.
Sounds like a suitably broad canvas for Lee to paint on – this should afford him plenty of room for a typically nuanced investigation of class, sexuality and popular culture, while offering him another completely new story world to explore. I can’t wait.