In Contention

Tag: Dogtooth

  • THE LONG SHOT: A new year wishlist

    [Guy’s updated predictions here.]

    Okay, I won’t lie to you: I initially conceived this column in my head last week as a Christmas Eve wishlist, but then got too busy mulling wine and Christmas shopping in Dublin snowdrifts to actually write it.

    So a New Year’s Eve wishlist it is, then. Under either name, with the season currently in stasis until January’s Guild awards usher in the next phase of competition, here’s a list of ten open requests (or distant hopes) for Academy members currently hemming and hawing over their ballots.

    Go forth into the world: Okay, I’ve given up my fight for a foreign-language Best Picture contender for yet another year. And despite a banner year for the form, a documentary nominee ain’t happening either. But is it too much to ask the Academy to recognize that not all notable filmmaking happens within U.S. borders? We’re looking at the sad likelihood of 90% of the Best Picture race being given over to American productions, with the lone exception, “The King’s Speech,” about as authentically British as a “Mind the Gap” T-shirt. Wouldn’t “Another Year” or “Animal Kingdom” be slightly more interesting stamps in Oscar’s passport?

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  • ‘Black Swan’ leads Online Film Critics Society noms

    The nominations list just announced by the OFCS features most of the expected names, but with a few welcome twists: nice to see Edgar Ramírez and LAFCA winner Kim Hye-ja lending some international flavor in the lead acting categories, while the Best Original Screenplay bid for “Greenberg” cuts pleasingly against the grain.

    Interesting, too, to see “The King’s Speech” missing out in the top race, where both “Winter’s Bone” and “Toy Story 3” have a home. (No autopilot nod for Helena Bonham-Carter, either.) Bonus points for a Best Foreign Language Film race that finally reflects the widespread critical adoration for “Dogtooth” (over “I Am Love,” to boot). There’s even a treat for all you “Scott Pilgrim” fans.

    Full list of nominees at The Circuit.

    [Photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures]

  • FIRST HALF FYC: Best Screenplay (Original and Adapted)

    For the third episode in our new Oscar-season feature, we take a recess from the acting races and look instead to the screenplays that roped the actors in to begin with. If you’re new to the feature (or even if you aren’t), the game is simple: railing against awards voters’ usual bias towards late-year releases, we’re highlighting a ballot’s worth of notable contenders in each major category, from films released in the first half of the year.

    I’ve been doing the categories on a one-by-one basis, but today I’m doubling down and covering both the Original and Adapted Screenplay races. This is partly in order to squeeze in everything I want to cover before Oscar nomination morning, but also partly because one of the categories proved less than rewarding on its own: starting with the adaptations and finding the pickings so slim, I decided that a beefier post was to be created from twinning the categories.

    That’s not to dismiss the films and screenplays I’ve selected, even the least of which offer substantial points of interest — and for which I still have more affection than some of the bigger names being  tossed into the Oscar ring. Indeed, the films in this list that don’t entirely click for me are no less (and often more) intriguing than those that do.

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  • Beautiful but doomed: Greece submits ‘Dogtooth’ for Oscars

    Last year, I was erroneously notified that Greece had submitted Yorgos Lanthimos’s boundary-pushing festival hit “Dogtooth” as their entry for the 2009 foreign-language Oscar. As it turned out, they hadn’t — and the film wouldn’t have qualified under the Academy’s release date requirements anyway.

    Well, one year later, and here we are again. Except this time, “Dogtooth” has officially been submitted by the Greek selectors, after taking top honors at the country’s own national film awards.

    All of which immediately positions it as one of the best films in the running for the Academy Award, as well as one of the longest shots to be nominated — unless the bluehair voters who thought “The Secret in Their Eyes” superior to “A Prophet” have suddenly acquired a taste for pitch-black adult fairy tales of sexual repression, incest and feline mutilation. But here’s hoping.

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  • VENICE: ‘Black Venus,’ ’13 Assassins,’ ‘Attenberg,’ ‘A Sad Trumpet Ballad’

    On my way to Tom Tykwer’s latest, so no time for an intro. Further rounding up highlights (and lowlights) of the Venice competition lineup:

    Expectations were appreciably high, and the press screening queue consequently doubled back on itself, for Abdellatif Kechiche’s historical drama “Black Venus” (**1/2) – after all, Kechiche had a hit on the Lido three years ago with the excellent “The Secret of the Grain,” and for those who know it, the story he’s working with here seemed overdue for screen treatment. By the time the credits rolled on this hard, dense, 165-minute slap of a movie, however, applause was more scattered than one might have expected for a display of such voluminous craft and ambition; the silence, one suspects, was that of an audience assessing which lines had and hadn’t been crossed.

    For my part, I remain stuck in a halfway house between immense appreciation that Kechiche has brought the extraordinary story of Saartjie Baartman, the black South African maid whose unusual physique (and genitalia) briefly made her the toast of the European vaudeville circuit in the 19th century, to the screen; and regret that he’s chosen to tell it in such a way that the film becomes complicit in the objectification it claims to decry.

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  • Things of beauty: Guy’s best of 2009

    Julianne Moore and Colin Firth in A Single ManThe year of the woman. The year of animation. The year of science-fiction. Depending on who you read (and believe), the final year of the decade has been an awful lot of things.

    If you’re with Kris, it’s also the best cinematic year of the last ten. If you’re with an awful lot of others, it’s quite the opposite. I’ll stop short of rewriting the first page of “A Tale of Two Cities,” but suffice to say it’s been different things to different people.

    What kind of year has it been for me? I think I’ll need another year to figure that out in detail. But as I compiled the list you’re about to read, I happily concluded that it’s been, at the very least, a good one: the 25 titles gathered here were jotted down with minimal brain-racking, with still more fighting from the sidelines.

    None of them are grudging inclusions, either: I sincerely liked most of these titles too much to allow room for popular or critical phenomena that are worthy of respect, but nonetheless didn’t connect with me personally. There was a sufficient range of quality work in 2009 (following a lean 2008) that any film lover could afford to construct his own playlist of future treasures without resorting to consensus.

    Before we begin, a note on the construction of the list. In addition to my Top 10, there are 15 honorable mentions here, five of them singled out for extra consideration. Some of you will quibble that I opt to include international or festival releases that have yet to surface in the U.S.

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  • LONDON: ‘Dogtooth,’ ‘Kinatay,’ ‘Burrowing’

    DogtoothOnce more, Friday’s major festival screenings covered ground I’d already trod in Venice — the day’s glossiest gala slot was reserved for “The Road” (which you know did little for me), with a less prominent early evening slot for Tom Ford’s “A Single Man” (which did rather more).

    Given the current buzz levels for each film, they perhaps should have swapped places, but festival programmers can be forgiven for not knowing that in advance.

    In fact, it was a crammed day for anyone hoping to catch up on the hot Venice titles, including “Life During Wartime,” “The Double Hour” and “White Material,” still my film of 2009 so far. (Friend and critic Tim Robey shares my enthusiasm for the film, claiming the LFF will have a hard time topping it. Truth.)

    Hard as it was to resist giving “Material” another whirl, I took advantage of my head-start to catch a stark Swedish mood piece and two provocative Cannes winners that had been intriguing me since May, and not only because of Old Man Ebert’s proclamation that Brillante Mendoza’s “Kinatay” was the worst film ever screened on the Croisette. See if I agree after the cut.

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  • Counting down to the London fest

    Fantastic Mr. Fox(Apologies for the “Fantastic Mr. Fox” review that appeared prematurely here as a result of embargo confusion. It will be reposted later today.)

    There may have been silence on my end these past few days, but I assure you it hasn’t been for lack of activity. The days leading up to the London Film Festival — which officially kicks off tonight with the world premiere of Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox” — have been crammed with press screenings and assorted admin duties.

    Yesterday, meanwhile, was given over to the film’s extraordinarily elaborate, and most enjoyable, press junket, staged across a range of picturesque locations in Roald Dahl’s home village of Great Missenden, an hour’s train ride from London. (More on that later.) Fox has spared no effort or expense in the launch for this unusual film, which culminates tonight with the LFF Opening Gala party at the Saatchi Gallery in Chelsea.

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  • Foreign film correction: Greece submits ‘Slaves’

    Slaves in Their BondsLast week, based on word from a source I had no reason to disbelieve, I reported that Greece had submitted the acclaimed Cannes prizewinner “Dogtooth” in the Best Foreign Language Film race. Not so, apparently.

    I’m not sure whether this was incorrect from the start or the selectors changed their minds — details can get murky in this race — but Screen International confirms that the the Greek entry is actually veteran director Adonis Lykouresis’s “Slaves In Their Bonds.” Apologies for the misinformation.

    Either way, it’s probably a savvy choice. For all its critical kudos, Academy voters most likely wouldn’t have touched the violent, discomfiting “Dogtooth” with a bargepole, while Lykouresis’s film, a romantic family saga set in Corfu at the turn of the 20th century, sounds rather more up their alley.

  • Foreign film watch: ‘Dogtooth’ and ‘The Milk of Sorrow’

    DogtoothAmong the films squeezing in under yesterday ‘s foreign-language submission deadline were two pretty major titles, both boasting hefty festival hardware — not that that makes them strong Oscar possibilities by any means.

    As we suspected, Greece (not nominated in the category since 1977) did indeed submit Yorgos Lanthiomos’s surreal family drama “Dogtooth,” which won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes, and recently played at Toronto. The film is gradually acquiring an ardent critical following, chief champion of which is James Rocchi, who suggests it is the year’s best so far:

    “Dogtooth” speaks to Greek history, to be sure, but it also works as a universal fable about the blunt mechanics — and bizarre appeal — of dictatorship … “Dogtooth” is funny and then terrifying and, somehow, both at the same time. Haunting, bold and truly cinematic in its ambitions, expressions and convictions, “Dogtooth” might be the best film I’ve seen all year — and, somehow, it got even deeper and more disturbing on the second viewing.

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  • Foreign film watch: Uruguay, Mongolia submit

    By the Will of Genghis KhanToday is officially the Academy deadline for Best Foreign Language Film submissions — though countries have made late entries in the past — so expect more titles to trickle in through the day. (Our contenders page is presently up to 59 titles, and counting.)

    Greece, for example, is widely expected to submit Cannes prizewinner “Dogtooth” as their entry later today — we’re just awaiting the official announcement.

    Two to formally add to the pile, however, are Uruguay’s “Bad Day to Go Fishing” and Mongolia’s “By the Will of Genghis Khan.” The latter country, making only their third ever submission, are seeking a first nomination; Uruguay, meanwhile, is still seeking a breakthrough after their only nominated film (“A Place in the World,” 1992) was disqualified by the Academy for having too little local input.

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  • ‘Dogtooth,’ ‘Adjective’ top Un Certain Regard winners

    DogtoothIt’s been a while since a Greek production made any impact on the world cinema scene — arguably not since Theodouros Angelopoulos claimed the Palme d’Or in 1998 — so it’s interesting to see that Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Dogtooth,” a dark family drama about three siblings disconnected from the outside world by their parents, pushed past more fancied contenders to take the top prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard strand last night.

    In doing so, it beat out the likes of “Precious” and “Samson and Delilah,” both of which enjoyed substantial attention and acclaim on the Croisette but went home empty-handed. (NOTE: “Samson and Delilah” later won the Camera d’Or award at the final awards ceremony.) Not that the former needed any more of a boost after its Sundance sweep, really.

    The runner-up Jury Prize went to “Police, Adjective,” a comic Romanian policier about on a policeman wrestling with his conscience, which also took a FIPRESCI critics’ award yesterday. Raves have been coming thick and fast for this film, with the Guardian’s Mark Cousins one of several critics I’ve heard declaring it the best of the festival, in any section of competition. (Coming on the heels of “The Death of Mr Lazarescu” and “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” one must wonder: what are they teaching in Romanian film schools?)

    Another common critical line doing the rounds is that the Un Certain Regard selection was, pound for pound, stronger than the Palme d’Or lineup. It’s hardly surprising, given that the strand has become more imposing with each year since it was introduced in 1998: UCR winners that have gone on to estimable arthouse success include “The Band’s Visit,” “Tyson” and the aforementioned “Lazarescu.” It’s a sign that, as I’ve said before, the selectors  need to start taking more chances in the main competition.

    More details on the rest of this year’s Un Certain Regard winners here.