In Contention

Tag: festivals

  • VENICE: ‘Soul Kitchen,’ ‘The Double Hour’

    Soul KitchenHappily, the bug that kept me down yesterday seems to have flown on the wings of Nurofen and a night’s sleep, so I’m ready to face the Lido madness again.  As if sympathetic to my state, the Competition served up two relatively untaxing titles.

    Festival director Marco Müller made it clear that he was experimenting with a more mainstream-friendly approach in this year’s Venice programme — hence the inclusion of “Bad Lieutenant” and “Survival of the Dead,” among others, in the lineup — so the overt genre leanings of Italian psycho-thriller “The Double Hour” came as no surprise, particularly given its hometown advantage. Far less expected was that heavyweight German-Turkish auteur Fatih Akin would arrive with the fluffiest Competition entry to date.

    This afternoon brings a second “surprise film” in the Competition (here’s hoping it’s a more pleasant surprise than “My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?”), as well as Jaco van Dormael’s “Mr. Nobody.” As eagerly as I’m awaiting the latter, I might have to postpone it to tomorrow, as a producer friend of mine unveils a short film next door. Onto this morning’s films …

    “Soul Kitchen” (**)

    Fatih Akin’s candyfloss-light character comedy will come as a major shock to those familiar with the 36 year-old director via his solemn arthouse works “Head-On” and “The Edge of Heaven.”

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  • Man down in Venice

    Shirley Henderson in Life During WartimeWhether 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.)

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  • London fest adds awards, goes heavy on Clooney

    George Clooney in Up in the AirWhile still ensconced in Venice, I must admit that the thought of diving into another festival makes me slightly dizzy — but the London Film Festival doesn’t care about that. LFF artistic director Sandra Hebron unveiled a strong lineup this morning, but the real news is that they have added a bevy of awards to their trophy cabinet.

    In addition to their existing honors, including the Sutherland Trophy for best debut feature and the Grierson Award for best documentary, the festival will, for the first time, hand out an overall Best Film award, as well as an honor for Best British Newcomer. Meanwhile, the British Film Institute will award writing and directing fellowships. Compounding these changes, the festival will, for the first time, hold a formal awards ceremony on the final day.

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  • SHORT TAKE: “The Men Who Stare at Goats” (***)

    George Clooney and Ewan McGregor in The Men Who Stare at Goats

    Venice Film Festival

    A trim, lively comedy powered by a winning quartet of personality performances and an endearingly naff drive-time rock soundtrack, Grant Heslov’s helming debut “The Men Who Stare at Goats” doesn’t make too many demands of its audience. In return, we shouldn’t make too many demands of the film.

    Anyone looking for a skewering satire of U.S. military practice might come away disappointed, even as the film opens with the cute semi-disclaimer, “More of this is true than you might imagine.”

    Based on British journalist-humorist Jon Ronson’s book of the same title, which investigated the development of outlandish psychological warfare techniques in the U.S. army and their application in the Iraq war, Heslov’s film (from a script by Peter Straughan) jettisons most of Ronson’s dark gallows humor in favor of a sunnier, sillier sort of absurdity.

    Not much has been retained but the idea of crazy psychic soldiers with telekinetic powers (the title is to be taken literally), but given the indifference of film audiences to anything remotely Iraq-related, you can hardly blame the “Goats” team for playing down the political currency of their source material.

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  • Mark Boal wins Gucci Award at Venice

    Mark BoalI’ve been promising my interview with “The Hurt Locker” writer Mark Boal for too long now, but simply haven’t had a moment to — as Kate Winslet would say — gather. With a lighter load today, I’m hoping I can have it ready for tomorrow.

    Meanwhile, however, I’m thrilled to report that yesterday, Boal claimed his first official award for his work on the film, taking the Venice Film Festival’s relatively young Gucci Group Award.

    Established in 2006, the award recognizes outstanding achievement in film by an artist from a different professional background — as you are surely aware, Boal is an accomplished journalist, whose “Hurt Locker” screenplay grew from his own experience embedded in an EOD bomb squad in Iraq.

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  • VENICE: ‘White Material,’ ‘Around a Small Mountain,’ ‘Lebanon’

    White MaterialVenice Film Festival

    The big deal on the Lido today was Oliver Stone rolling into town for his Hugo Chavez documentary “South of the Border” — I did my level best to catch the screening this afternoon, but demand greatly exceeded seat supply on this particular occasion. Tomorrow, perhaps.

    Otherwise, the search continues at the festival for a talk-of-the-town critical hit: I had hoped that the extraordinary “White Material” might be it, but the reception so far seems to be warm rather ecstatic. Still, given the general goodwill towards Claire Denis (who has surprisingly never claimed major festival gold) and the undeniable quality of the film, it has to be regarded as one of the frontrunners.

    The title that keeps resurfacing in conversation, interestingly enough, is Todd Solondz’s “Life During Wartime”: people really like the film, it seems, and the fact that an extra screening has been arranged for it may or may not be significant. If I were a betting man, this is where I’d place my chips. Anyway, onto some short takes of the great, the good and the befuddling.

    “White Material” (****)

    I’ve been chided elsewhere for not being direct enough in my reviews, so let’s just get this out of the way: Claire Denis is one of the greatest filmmakers alive, and “White Material” is one of her greatest films.

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  • TELLURIDE: ‘Red Riding,’ ‘A Prophet’

    Tamar Rahim in A ProphetThings are winding down in Telluride.  I saw the last film I’ll see here last night (Jacques Audiard’s “A Prophet”) and have a few things to square away before I hop the shuttle for Montrose and, finally, the flight back to Los Angeles.

    The fest has been a low key delight.  An IFC-sponsored dinner Saturday night brought out a number of the principals from films on display (where I had fun throwing back a few and discussing “that moment” when you decide film will be your life with “Red Riding” producer Andrew Eaton).  Nicolas Cage was strolling the streets last night with his kid, free of the usual adoring mob.  Jason Reitman, Viggo Mortensen, Paul Schneider, Carey Mulligan, etc. have made themselves available for interviews, priming the pump for Oscar season.  Good times all around.

    The big winners of the fest, from what I can gather from conversations with a number of attendees, are Michael Hoffman’s “The Last Station,” Todd Solondz’s “Life During Wartime” and, of course, Jason Reitman’s “Up in the Air,” among others.  Unfortunately, I missed (again) Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon” and a number of the once-in-a-lifetime screenings from Alexander Payne’s program, but I had a full, enjoyable time regardless.  I have a few more interviews to get to today, but I thought I’d rattle off the last pair of capsule reviews before I head off into town for some meet-and-greets.

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  • SHORT TAKE: “The Informant!” (***)

    The Informant!

    Venice Film Festival

    That jaunty exclamation mark handily sets the tone for Steven Soderbergh’s “The Informant!,” a flip, frisky entertainment that may well represent the year’s most audacious feat of adaptation.

    Of course, the trailer already (and unavoidably) pulled the covers from the film’s biggest trick: that writer Scott Z. Burns (“The Bourne Ultimatum”) has reimagined Kurt Eichenwald’s dense non-fiction thriller about a mid-1990s agribusiness price-fixing scandal as a rapid-fire corporate comedy of errors, like “The Insider” as filtered through the dry whimsy of Preston Sturges.

    It’s a double or nothing strategy that merrily pays off, offering rich comic dividends as the true-life nature of the material elevates its absurdity, but — far more surprisingly — not sacrificing the sense of consequence and complexity in the events at hand.

    Critically touching on both the antisocial nature of corporate American greed and the inefficiency of the government in curbing it, the film actually makes an elegant companion piece to its its festival compatriot, Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story” (reviewed here).

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  • Congratulations, Pixar

    I just realized I probably should have posted something about Pixar (and directors John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Brad Bird, Pete Docter and Lee Unkrich) receiving the Golden Lion for career achievement in Venice yesterday afternoon. Unfortunately, not having been present for the occasion, I can’t offer much beyond that fact.

    George Lucas presenting John Lasseter with the Golden Lion

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  • Werner, Werner, what have ye done?

    Nicolas Cage in The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New OrleansDon’t get me wrong.  I’m kind of glad to know there’s a lunatic out there making films.  Never a dull moment, that kind of thing.  But I want to know what happened to Werner Herzog.  What happened to the artist who gave us grand statements like “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” “Fitzcaraldo” and “Woyzeck?”  Who is this new guy?

    “The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans” is a train wreck from the starting gun with a performance that almost captivates for two acts and soars of the rails for the last big push.  It would be embarrassing if it wasn’t so oddly endearing for being so utterly brazen.  And yet it doesn’t have the balls to embrace that sense of cinematic anarchy because it is, in the final analysis, a generic, inconsequential story.

    Intriguingly enough, the crowd response was considerably positive.  That could have had something to do with the fact that Nicolas Cage was on hand to talk about the film, but the madness of it all clearly struck a nerve with this early morning crowd.  Color me confused.

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  • ‘White’ diamond in Venice

    Isabelle Huppert in White MaterialGood festival vibes are traveling through both sides of the Atlantic this weekend, it seems. Just as Kris lost his heart to a movie in Telluride yesterday, so, on this bright Venice morning, did I.

    It’s a beautiful thing when faith is rewarded. I had already pegged Claire Denis’s “White Material” as my most anticipated film of the festival, and was duly met with an unalloyed masterpiece that outstrips its seen Competition rivals by such a wide margin it’s almost a little embarrassing.

    A searing study of political and personal rebellion in West Africa, led by a premier-form Isabelle Huppert as a French plantation owner obstinately clinging to her land as order and sanity crumble around her, it’s plainly the strongest film in any Venice strand thus far. It also might just be the year’s finest to date.

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  • REVIEW: “Capitalism: A Love Story” (***)

    Capitalism: A Love StoryVenice Film Festival

    It was well before Michael Moore dropped an extensive archive-footage chunk of a Franklin D. Roosevelt speech into the last reel of “Capitalism: A Love Story” that the following thought entered my head, but the appearance of FDR and his homespun common sense crystallized it: Michael Moore is this generation’s Frank Capra.

    By that token, “Capitalism: A Love Story” – an artlessly effective slice of rah-rah rhetoric more sincerely idealistic than anything the director has yet put his name to – represents Moore’s “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

    A film made in the infant stages of vast social healing (substitute the end of WWII for the beginning of the Obama presidency), it uses its transitional timing to examine alternately the America that was, could have been and hopefully will be.

    As with the prototypical Capra film, “Capitalism” places its faith in the American everyman, while blanketing evil as a vaguer collective, defending the rights and ability of the former with unashamed sentimentality and sledgehammer subtlety.

    The bait for the filmmaker’s multiple critics to seize upon is left prominently and deliberately exposed – the film is a veritable compendium of all Moore’s most manipulative muckraking tactics, whether it’s the wilfully decontextualized use of vintage news clips or the breathtaking exploitation of having an ordinary Joe tearfully read a love letter to his deceased wife on camera. No button is left unpushed in the service of an argument that already doesn’t have to work very hard to win over the liberal public, but Moore isn’t one to leave much to chance.

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  • VENICE: Swinton in ‘I Am Love,’ Gainsbourg in ‘Persecution’

    Tilda Swinton in I Am LoveIs any other actor today building as diverse a filmography as Tilda Swinton? After serving studio time last year in the one-two shot of “Burn After Button,” this year has seen hear frighten off the purple-rinsed Academy crowd that seemingly first noticed her in “Michael Clayton” with a defiant return to arthouse “difficulty” in “Julia” and “The Limits of Control.”

    Not content with that, it seems, she now shows off her linguistic skills with the wholly Italian-language lead in Luca Guadagnino’s extravagant family melodrama “I Am Love” — handily announcing herself as the film’s sole raison d’être in the first place. If the subtitles don’t unnerve her newfound mainstream following, the loving close-ups of her nipples just might. Good on her.

    Coincidentally enough, it’s been a morning of language-flipping crossover stars, as Charlotte Gainsbourg’s first post-“Antichrist” venture unspooled in the shape of Patrice Chéreau’s Competition entry “Persecution,” a Paris-set romantic drama that soothes the wounds inflicted upon the actress by Lars Von Trier, if not to terribly exciting effect. Short reviews after the jump.

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  • TELLURIDE: ‘The Last Station’ premieres to the world

    (from left) Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren in The Last StationMichael Hoffman’s “The Last Station,” adapted from Jay Parini’s novel about the last days of famed Russian author Leo Tolstoy, has been on my radar for quite some time.  There seemed to be an air of awards potential around Christopher Plummer, who stars as a dwindling Tolstoy, and Helen Mirren, as his fiery wife, Countess Sofya.

    The film had its world premiere tonight here in Telluride in front of a packed audience.  The line was out the door and around the block, partly because it’s opening night, partly because of the fact that Helen Mirren is on-hand (though, as it turns out, not until later tonight).  But those hoping to hear a nice chat with the actress after the film weren’t disappointed for long:  Hoffman had Vladimir Tolstoy in tow, overseer of the Tolstoy estate, and a number of other Tolstoy family members as well.

    But first, the film.  It’s a delightful effort with bright comedic spots throughout, but it’s also thematically resilient in its depiction of a relationship, 48 years on, nearly torn apart by diverging philosophies on religion, property, etc.  It’s a touching exploration of love in its many forms.  “Yes, love is hard,” Hoffman said after the screening.  “You want to do what you need to do, they want to do what they need to do, but I don’t know what else to do.”

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  • VENICE: ‘My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?,’ ‘Lourdes’

    Michael Shannon and Chloe Sevigny in My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?Another sweltering day on the Lido, though rainclouds are forming and things look set to break any moment now. Hopefully a change in climate will also bring about an upswing in the collective quality of films on display, as the first three days have served up a few well-liked titles, several misfires and nothing yet resembling a sensation.

    At this stage, the Competition title with the most buzz appears to be Todd Solondz’s “Life During Wartime,” which I took a shine to yesterday — though others I spoke to seemed less enthusiastic. However, as the reviews pour in, the film looks more and more like a success: Screen International editor Mike Goodridge is a fan, while Todd McCarthy has labeled it the director’s best work yet.

    Bookending a morning that began with the first sighting of “The Bad Lieutenant,” this evening opened the not-that-well-guarded secret of the Competition’s surprise film — and, as luck (or otherwise) would have it, it turned out to be a second helping of Herzog.

    “My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?” (*)

    It feels odd, and slightly improper, to beat up on Werner Herzog twice in one day, but sadly, the David Lynch-produced “My Son, My Son” leaves me very little choice.

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  • TELLURIDE: ‘An Education,’ ‘Bright Star,’ ‘London River’

    London RiverThis year’s Telluride fest is slowly gearing up.  There are a handful of press screenings this afternoon and the opener, Marco Bellochio’s “Vincere,” is set to play at 5:00pm.  I’ll probably miss that in order to take in “The Last Station,” which if it picks up a buyer, could make good on awards potential for Christopher Plummer and James McAvoy.

    Before things get going, though, I though it best to clear the slate with a few reactions to films playing here which I’ve already seen.  More to come later this evening, I’m sure.

    “An Education” (****)

    Few films are likely to have the refined air of artistry that Lone Scherfig’s “An Education” offers.  Based on a memoir by Lynn Barber, the story is, in a nutshell, that of a young girl eager to grow up but unprepared for the disappointments of adulthood.  But the film is, of course, so much more than that.

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  • VENICE: ‘The Road,’ ‘Life During Wartime,’ ‘Great Directors’

    Ciaran Hinds in Life During WartimeSorry to duck out there for the whole morning — a combination of wireless misbehavior and delayed screenings has played havoc with my planned writing time. As a festival, Venice has multiple charms, but smooth organization is not among them.

    This morning’s glitch-bedeviled  screening of Todd Solondz’s “Life During Wartime” is a case in point: after starting 20 minutes late (leaving journalists waiting outside in sunstroke-inducing heat), the projector broke down during the opening credits. A second quarter-hour delay followed,  only for the film to restart with severely mistimed Italian subtitles — the vocal protests from Italian audience members drowning out the dialogue in the film’s opening scenes. Oh, well.

    Anyway, enough kvetching and on to the movies.

    Kris will have a more detailed take on “The Road” (**1/2) up later today, but given that it’s one of the Lido’s biggest drawcards, I feel it necessary to take a moment to discuss the film, which seems to have left several journalists I’ve spoken to disappointed, or at least mildly befuddled — and with good reason.

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  • Prepping for Telluride

    36h annual Telluride Film FestivalTomorrow morning I’m on a plane at 10:30 to the mountains of Colorado and the 36th annual Telluride Film Festival.

    This will be my first trek to the fest, which has always been, by many accounts, the most coveted detour of the fall festival season.  They keep it small.  The vibe is meant to be intimate, definitely an antidote to Cannes or Toronto, where the media frenzy stretches on for a week and a half.  Here we get four days in the refreshing thin air, and there are a number of films I’m looking forward to.

    The line-up used to be a tightly guarded secret.  It was a leap of faith.  You land, get the schedule, and then you know.  But news travels fast in a town like this, so more and more, the secrecy of Telluride’s schedule has leaked out over the years.  This year is no different on that front.

    “Up in the Air” from director Jason Reitman is way at the top of my list.  Something about the project is tugging at me, and that USA Today interview with the director yesterday did a lot to fan the flames.  Reitman had great success with “Juno” when he took it to Telluride in 2007, so he’ll be looking to duplicate that again as Paramount primes its Oscar pony.

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