In Contention

Tag: festivals

  • Fox Searchlight picks up McQueen’s ‘Shame’

    I would say “Toldja!,” but I think that’s trademarked elsewhere. Nevertheless, as indicated here a few times, Fox Searchlight Pictures was pretty serious about “Shame” after the film bowed at Venice and Telluride on the same day over the weekend. It’s set to screen Sunday in Toronto, but ahead of that, the dependent has bravely swooped in and picked the title up. The press release, in part:

    Fox Searchlight Pictures Presidents Nancy Utley and Stephen Gilula announced today that the company has acquired U. S. rights to the intimate and provocative drama SHAME…

    “Fox Searchlight contacted us immediately after the screening in Telluride to tell us how much they loved the film. Their approach to marketing and distributing the film this year was incredibly detailed and impressive. We are excited to be working with them on a film that is sparking debate and a strong emotional reaction from audiences,” said Canning and Sherman.

    “This is a brave statement and an important move by Fox Searchlight.   I am very happy they came on board to release Shame in the U.S.  It’s great to be working with a team that is so passionate about cinema,” said McQueen.

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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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  • OSCAR TALK: Ep. 60 — A sprint Telluride recap, ‘Descendants,’ ‘Albert Nobbs,’ disagreeing on ‘Dangerous Method,’ thoughts on Eddie Murphy, Toronto preview (ish)

    Oscar TalkWelcome to Oscar Talk.

    In case you’re new to the site and/or the podcast, Oscar Talk is a weekly kudocast, your one-stop awards chat shop between yours truly and Anne Thompson of Thompson on Hollywood. The podcast is weekly, every Friday throughout the season, charting the ups and downs of contenders along the way. Plenty of things change en route to Oscar’s stage and we’re here to address it all as it unfolds.

    Today we’re back from the Telluride film fest, but Anne is up in Toronto and things are, well, kind of nuts. She’s up against the wall trying to get to a screening so we don’t get to dig in as much as we’d like. But we try. We really try. So, let’s see what’s on the docket today…

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  • Naïveté you can believe in

    Guy has already covered George Clooney’s  “The Ides of March” for us out of Venice. It’s too bad I couldn’t get into any pre-Toronto screenings (due to not attending the festival), since I was anticipating liking it more than Guy and it could have been nice counter-balance. But then again, maybe not.

    I’ve been reading a lot of reviews and Tweets out of Toronto screenings yesterday from the less-than-enthused. “There isn’t anything shockingly new in this political thriller,” Kyle Smith of the New York Post asserted. “[I]t was pretty much all in ‘Primary Colors’ 15 years ago.” His colleague, Lou Lumenick, Tweeted something similar (while nevertheless praising the cast).

    Similarly, eFilmCritic’s Erik Childress Tweeted that the film “is tremendously disappointing. No more than a watered down version of ‘Primary Colors.’” It’s beginning to sound like the film is going to be saddled by comparisons to that 1998 Mike Nichols effort (which was to Bill Clinton what “The Ides of March” is to Howard Dean). That film, by the way, only wound up with nominations for Best Supporting Actress (Kathy Bates) and Best Adapted Screenplay.

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  • 9/9 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Gosling King of Toronto, ‘Descendants’ drops earlier, spoilers in trailers

    • Susan Wloszczyna writes up Toronto as the Oscar season kickstarter, hears good buzz for Woody Harrelson in “Rampart.” [USA Today]

    • Jeff Labrecque chalks Ryan Gosling up as the King of Toronto with two films set for the fest. [Entertainment Weekly]

    • Fox Searchlight moves “The Descendants” up five days to November 18. [Variety]

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  • VENICE: ‘Texas Killing Fields,’ ‘Faust,’ competition stragglers

    After a ten-day, 23-film Venice Competition that started slowly but respectably, hit a healthy stride midway through and began wheezing with exhaustion in its closing stages, things have finally ground to a permanent halt with “Texas Killing Fields” (**), the sophomore feature from Ami Canaan Mann — daughter of Michael,  who predictably takes a producer credit here. Mann fille arrived on the Lido a mostly unknown quantity — her debut feature dropped 10 years ago, and appears to have been by precisely nobody in that time — and I’d love to say she proved to be something of a secret weapon up festival director Marco Mueller’s sleeve.

    Alas, the only weapons brandished by this color-by-numbers tumbleweed policier are those belonging to the dutifully scowling small-town cops played by Sam Worthington, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and one of Jessica Chastain’s recently minted clones — the ones to whom she now hands the second-string scripts that don’t quite merit her personal attention.

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  • VENICE: ‘Killer Joe,’ ‘The Exchange,’ ‘4:44: Last Day on Earth’

    With two days to go until wrap-up, and a host of journalists having defected to Toronto, one can feel the air not-so-slowly hissing out of the Venice balloon. And while this certainly has its upsides — it no longer takes half an hour to get an espresso as the festival café, for example — it’s difficult to escape the sense that we’re drinking the dregs of the film programme. (If I had a euro for every time I’ve heard the term “front-loaded” uttered around the Lido…)

    Or perhaps not — the festival didn’t start to a tune of critical consensus, and it’s not ending that way, either. Last night, the last of the heavyweight Euro auteurs in competition, Aleksandr Sokurov, unveiled his take on Goethe’s “Faust” — and while I thought it a mostly agonizing misstep for the Russian formalist (with a bevy of walkouts suggesting others agreed), ecstatic applause all the way through the closing credits didn’t bode well for critical consensus. Sure enough, Sight & Sound’s Kieron Corless tweeted this morning that the film is “flawless,” and online bookies appear to be knocking down its Golden Lion odds. To each his own cinema, and all that — but I’ll happily let others have mine, in this case.

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  • (UPDATED) ‘Moneyball’ reviews fire the Toronto starting gun

    Okay, not reviews, plural. Not yet. The only reaction I’m finding for Bennett Miller’s “Moneyball” (which screened here in LA a few times despite the usual studio falsehood — “we don’t have any screenings set right now” — typical) is Jeff Wells’s take at Hollywood Elsewhere. And it’s a glowing assessment, to say the least. He calls the film a “triumph” and thinks it’s definitely a nominee for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Brad Pitt) and Best Adapted Screenplay. He doesn’t mention anything about Wally Pfister’s cinematography or Christopher Tellefsen’s editing, unfortunately.

    But regardless, we’ll save our sure-thing card until we see it — Jeff flies off the Oscar handle on dubious players too frequently to trust this just yet. And he kind of sends up a red flag when he alludes to the film not being a rousing sort of thing (which, obviously, isn’t in and of itself a drawback — I’m just playing Jeff’s own game of parsing words to death). I’m nevertheless hopeful and I’ve been looking forward to this one for a while.

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  • ‘Shame’ igniting pre-Toronto bidding war?

    I first reported out of Telluride that Fox Searchlight was looking like a good possibility to pick up Steve McQueen’s brilliant, stirring — and naughty — “Shame,” and expanded my thoughts on that possibility in Tuesday’s Off the Carpet column. Well, it looks like Deadline’s Mike Fleming is hearing similar things, and not just that Searchlight is in the mix, but that the film is kicking up a bidding war ahead of its Toronto bow. He writes:

    This year’s festival hasn’t started and already there are fireworks. Deadline broke news yesterday that Harvey Weinstein would start a VOD business, making the acquisitions market for fringe films more competitive; and last night, I heard that a bidding battle had already broken out for the Steve McQueen-directed Shame, which should be sold by the time it screens Sunday. Fox Searchlight is the favorite, Sony Pictures Classics is in the mix and I’ve heard that The Weinstein Company is hovering.

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  • London Film Festival unveils Weisz-bookended lineup

    I’m not going to spend too much time on the London Film Festival lineup, which was announced in all its glory this morning — partly because I’m still at Venice and am experiencing disturbing festival double vision, and partly because I’ve already seen a number of its choicest selections.

    As usual, festival director Sandra Hebron (in her final year steering the fest) and her team have done a stellar job of cherry-picking the hottest titles from Cannes (“The Artist,” “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” “Miss Bala”), Sundance (“Like Crazy,” “Martha Marcy May Marlene”), Venice (“Alps,” “Shame,” “Wuthering Heights”), while bulking out the programme with exciting lesser-known British and international cinema titles — world premieres, a number of them.

    204 films films will play over the course of 16 days, which, with so many inclusions already checked off my list, should afford me plenty of time to dig into more buried treasures from the lineup. As usual, I’ll be keeping you abreast of my discoveries, as well as the handful of autumn prestige titles that I’ll get my first look at there.

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  • Sanata Barbara’s Kirk Douglas Award goes to… Michael Douglas!

    The press release, in part:

    In recognition of his contributions to the world of film, Michael Douglas will be bestowed with his father’s honor, the 2011 KIRK DOUGLAS AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN FILM from the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. The 6th annual black-tie Gala dinner will take place at The Four Seasons Biltmore in Santa Barbara on Thursday, October 13, 2011.

    “The first time I saw Michael Douglas act was in a play at UC Santa Barbara, so it is fitting that a career that started here should be honored here” commented Kirk Douglas. “To tell the truth, I wanted Michael to be a lawyer. I secretly hoped he would be bad so I could tell him to forget it. He wasn’t. But as proud as I am of his achievements on screen, I am even prouder of the humanitarian work he has done for the United Nations and other organizations. I am very happy to give this award to my favorite actor/producer who also happens to be my firstborn son.”

    The tribute will stand as one of the most memorable events in SBIFF history as a film legend of one generation honors the next. Previous recipients of the award include such enduring stars as John Travolta, Ed Harris, Quentin Tarantino, and Harrison Ford.

    Also worth noting is that Michael Douglas was the Honorary Chair of the festival when it first began 27 years ago and he was also the very first Modern Master recipient. So, full circle and all that.

  • Eastwood’s ‘J. Edgar’ tapped to open AFI Fest

    The press release, in part:

    The American Film Institute (AFI) announced today that J. EDGAR, directed by AFI Life Achievement Award recipient and Academy Award-winning director Clint Eastwood, will have its world premiere as the Opening Night Gala of AFI FEST 2011 presented by Audi…

    “Clint Eastwood is an American icon ­ one whose work as a director, actor, producer and composer not only stands the test of time, but also continues to add new, rich chapters with each passing year,” said Bob Gazzale, President and CEO of the American Film Institute. “What a gift it is to be going to the movies when Clint Eastwood is making them, and what an honor it is for the American Film Institute to premiere his latest contribution to America’s cultural legacy.”

    Recent AFI Fest openers have included “Love & Other Drugs” and “Doubt.”

    [Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures]

  • REVIEW: “Wuthering Heights” (***1/2)

    Venice Film Festival

    British filmmaker Andrea Arnold would have been 16 years old when Kate Bush topped the UK pop charts with “Wuthering Heights,” a swirling art-rock ballad that stripped the Emily Brontë novel for which it is named down to a few key lines and narrative details, but evoked its grand-scale tragic romance in more intuitive terms. In its wake, a new generation of schoolgirls clutched Brontë’s words tightly to their chests.

    We can only speculate how Arnold came to the novel, but her bold, forbidding and impressively reconceptualized “Wuthering Heights” appears to take the Kate Bush course of adaptation: gutted of most of its words, with some choice ones added (I haven’t read it in some time, but I’m pretty sure Brontë didn’t write the line, “Fuck you all, cunts”), the novel serves as a theoretical starting point for an artwork that redraws the story with the most immediate sensory tools of its medium. This is a “Wuthering Heights” of weather and flesh and grass and locked eyes, one that has the simple common sense and staggering cinematic wherewithal to know that great adaptations don’t beat great writers at their own game; they play a new game entirely.

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  • Oscar hopes for Venice flicks

    I had asked Guy for a quick one-off on each of the Oscar-contending films he’s seen at Venice so far. I was going to use it for today’s Off the Carpet column, but I published before he got around to it. Nevertheless, it’s worth boiling things down (from his perspective), so here’s what he’s thinking (with the film titles linked to his Venice reviews):

    “The Ides of March”
    Possible Best Picture and Director nominee (but only if US critics are more enthusiastic than the ones at Venice and the film does okay commercially). If it gets those, possible supporting nods for Philip Seymour Hoffman and Evan Rachel Wood. Film Editing is the only tech possibility.

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  • OFF THE CARPET: And we’re off!

    This morning’s interview with “Into the Abyss” director Werner Herzog represented my last Telluride communique (though I guess I was already home) from this year’s 38th annual festivities. Five days, 18 posts, nine movies and three interviews. It was a dense sprint to start the race, and now, with Venice still in-progress and Toronto set to raise the curtain Thursday, we find ourselves in the thick of the season’s early breaths.

    Up in the Colorado mountains, the biggest takeaway was Alexander Payne’s “The Descendants.” Payne was highly visible throughout the festival, sometimes taking in six or seven movies a day, fielding compliments for his work and settling in to what has apparently become his favorite festival experience.

    His film first dropped on Thursday afternoon as a special invitation screening for press and patrons. That’s where most of the early word stemmed from as critics and bloggers (yours truly among them) raced back to offer up our thoughts on the director’s first film in seven years. But that’s not the story of that film’s life at Telluride. The story was its discovery for the rest of the attendees over the next four days.

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  • INTERVIEW: ‘Into the Abyss’ director Werner Herzog

    Telluride Film Festival

    Legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog first attended the Telluride Film Festival at its second annual way back in 1975. He brought with him “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” which would not be released in the US for another two years, and “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.” He was also set to receive a tribute, still at the beginnings of his career. He has come back almost every year since, and almost every year with a new film to show audiences.

    The film he brought to the 38th annual fest is perhaps his most accomplished documentary in some time: “Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life.” It was, as outlined from the mountains, my favorite film of the festival and a testament to Herzog’s powers of observation and reverence for everyday people and their plights.

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  • 9/6 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Nolte on ‘Warrior,’ southern perspective on ‘The Help,’ Oscar plays out of Telluride

    • Nick Nolte talks “Warrior.” [Making Of]

    • A little southern perspective on “The Help.” [Los Angeles Times]

    • Greg Wellwood considers who got an Oscar boost at Telluride and who didn’t. [Awards Campaign]

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  • INTERVIEW: ‘The Descendants’ actress Shailene Woodley

    Telluride Film Festival

    If anything or anyone is a break-out, on-the-rise element of this year’s Telluride Film Festival, it’s 19-year-old “The Descendants” star Shailene Woodley. She stars in the film opposite George Clooney as a teenager with the appropriate angst but gives a performance that has captured the attention of many in attendance here. Naturally, she’s frequently found herself stopped on the street by admirers and well-wishers praising her work and the festival’s most talked-about film.

    When you talk to Woodley, you get the sense of a young person crossing that key boundary in life between adolescence and adulthood. Call it “finding yourself” if you like, but the experience of making the film in Hawaii with the likes of filmmaker Alexander Payne and actor George Clooney had a major impact on her.

    “The four months in Hawaii really shifted who I am as a human being,” she says at the New Sheridan Hotel restaurant in town. “It was such a spiritual thing for me. It has a different energy than anywhere else. The pace there, the way you move and talk, it’s so different. I left there being authentically happy with myself. It was both being on set and hiking and being outdoors and meeting people. I feel so fortunate to have got a callback for this movie, let alone have done it. It’s mind-blowing.”

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