In Contention

Tag: festivals

  • OSCAR TALK: Ep. 56 — Special Edition! — Cannes so far, ‘Tree of Life,’ Von Trier, taking the 2011 awards pulse

    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.

    It has been nearly three months since we last got on the horn to talk the film wards landscape. We promised another dip during Cannes, so here we are. Today Anne and I are joined by Guy Lodge as the two of them have been working the Croisette all week. Let’s see what’s on the docket today…

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  • ‘Take Shelter’ takes first award at Cannes

    Nine days in, the Cannes Film Festival is winding down. Many of the US journos are flying home, and with Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Skin I Live In” having premiered this morning — review coming tomorrow — the superstar auteurs have all shown their hand. (That’s not to say Nuri Bilge Ceylan or Paolo Sorrentino can’t alter the shape of the festival, however.)

    But with the drop in energy comes the scent of gold, as we prepare for the annual Cannes parlor game of loudly criticizing the jury’s decisions. We’re still three days away from the Competition awards — though Aki Kaurismäki’s broadly liked comedy “Le Havre” (which I frustratingly still haven’t seen after three attempts) has emerged as the sizeable Palme d’Or favorite, while I hear rumors that Olivier Assayas is the lone “Tree of Life” fan on the jury — but the trophy run began tonight with the winners of the Critics’ Week sidebar.

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  • How do you solve a problem like Von Trier?

    It couldn’t last. As the closing credits began rolling on Wednesday morning’s 8.30am Cannes press screening of “Melancholia,” Lars Von Trier’s elegant rumination on anxiety, the apocalypse and all those other swell things, I was stunned by how civil the atmosphere in the vast Lumiere theater was.

    Enthusiastic applause greeted the film — more surprisingly, so did a distinct absence of boos. Soaking up the post-screening chatter in the foyer, I didn’t once hear the words “misogynist,” “perverted” or “clitoridectomy,” but I did pick up a bushel apiece of “moving” and “beautiful.” A number of critics disliked it, of course, but it rather seemed as if Lars Von Trier had pulled off the (for him) impossible: a film that touched many and upset no one.

    And then came this.

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  • Persona non whateva

    Guy is on his way to a screening of Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Drive” at Cannes right now, but he will eventually get around to addressing Lars Von Trier’s spanking by the festival, which now considers him persona non grata.

    In the meantime, however, I’ll align myself with this statement from David Poland’s assessment:

    Is von Trier an ass at times? Absolutely. Aggressive provocateur? Absolutely.

    But he is one of the few high profile filmmakers who pushes audiences to Think. You can hate what he makes, but you can’t deny that he is skilled and alive with ideas. Who will stand for this in a homogenized, instant-news-cycle culture if Film Critics and Festivals will not?

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  • REVIEW: “Melancholia” (***1/2)

    Cannes Film Festival

    It’s the end of the world as we know it, and Lars von Trier feels fine. Well, not “fine,” exactly: he feels as despairing and sceptical and faithless as he usually does, but that’s clearly where he’s comfortable, and where his creative faculties thrive most actively.

    They’re certainly in rude health in “Melancholia,” a ravishing arthouse blockbuster that extends the self-therapy he began in 2009’s bracingly unhinged horror film “Antichrist,” but with more thematic cohesion and tonal restraint. The sensation-hungry, who label any new von Trier film ‘controversial’ before seeing a shred of footage, will likely be disappointed — that is, if they’re not appeased by some tame shots of Kirsten Dunst rutting on a golf course. (Luckily for them, as if realizing the deficit, the director compensated with some trademark shenanigans at the press conference.)

    For the rest of von Trier’s fans, however, the film’s lack of overt audience-baiting serves to place his formal gifts in starker relief. A subdued, even elegant, vision of the apocalypse that begins as a waking dream and continues in an actuality no less feverish, “Melancholia” represents the natural culmination of the depressive doubt in self and society that has needled most of von Trier’s features. As a statement on the spiritual bankruptcy of the human race, it may well prove unfurtherable: after destroying the world we live in — a spoiler only to the most tone-deaf of viewers, I assure you — where does the man have left to go?

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  • CANNES: ‘The Kid With a Bike,’ ‘House of Tolerance,’ ‘Michael,’ ‘Footnote’

    Perhaps lulled by the twin effects of the Côte d’Azur sun and copious amounts of cheap rosé between screenings, I’ve fallen behind somewhat on the reviewing front — but lest you think I’ve only seen one film a day before heading back to the swimming pool at Villa Romance, it’s time for a bit of a Competition catch-up. (I’ll get round to a handful of Un Certain Regard and Critics’ Week titles — a couple of them very strong — as soon as I can.) Tomorrow brings another of my most anticipated titles of the festival, Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia,” which should steer Croisette conversation forward after a low-level day of screenings, over which talk of “The Tree of Life” has remained the dominant hum.

    “The Kid With a Bike” (***)

    “More of the same, but less,” I tweeted immediately after seeing the latest finely-honed study in urban realism from Belgium’s two-time Cannes champs, the Dardenne brothers. It’s a statement I stand by — it’s difficult not to think that after the muted acclaim for “Lorna’s Silence,” their 2008 flirtation with higher-concept storytelling, they’ve retreated to a safe space — even as I admit it doesn’t factor in some subtle novelties in the new film. “The Kid With a Bike” is literally their brightest film to date, for starters, shot mostly in crisp summer sunlight and poppy primary hues, which may also be why it feels like their most uncomplicatedly redemptive.

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  • REVIEW: “The Tree of Life” (***)

    Cannes Film Festival

    Landscape has always been character in the films of Terrence Malick. The even, rolling fields of “Days of Heaven,” the sweatily green hill ladders of “The Thin Red Line,” even the dry-toast mesa of “Badlands”: all expansive, overwhelming environments that dictate the behavior of the films’ human occupants through sheer force of presence, for it’s often all they have to live in and live with. It’s an approach that, across 33 years of widely-spaced work, has drawn as many accusations of vacant pictorialism as it has rapt devotion — without the mystique Malick has accrued through his slow-loris work patterns, it’s difficult to say which camp might have emerged dominant — but it’s made for an oeuvre with a stylistic and textual throughline that belies its scattered production.

    Until, that is, “The Tree of Life,” Malick’s long, long delayed fifth feature that is at once his most interior work and his most grandiosely conceived. A fractured, impressionistic memory album documenting the roots of familial estrangement in a middle-class 1950s household in the director’s hometown of Waco, Texas, it arrives on the screen surrounded by bookends within bookends: scenes depicting the present-day social alienation of the family’s grown eldest son (Sean Penn), bracketed by vastly scaled sequences addressing more generalized concerns of theology, evolution and mortality.

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  • SHORT TAKE: “The Artist” (***1/2)

    Cannes Film Festival

    “Please be silent behind the screen,” requests a sign in the cinema where silent movie star Georges Valentin’s latest work is screening, near the beginning of “The Artist,” Michel Hazanavicius’ semi-sweet paean to pre-talkie cinema.

    It’s a witty clue as to how Hazanavicius is going to run the ship in his own not-quite-silent movie: swooping strings accompany the film-within-a-film’s finale as Valentin (Jean Dujardin) waits confidently in the wings, only for sound to cut out just as the audience bursts into thunderous applause. It’s a neat trick, one the director pulls and reverses a few times in 100-odd minutes that follow, and one that cunningly aims to replicate in negative the disorientation 1920s picturegoers might have felt when films suddenly started speaking.

    If “The Artist” never quite becomes the ingeniously self-reflexive cinematic essay this scene promises, it succeeds on several warmer, more immediate levels: as an infectiously affectionate reminder of a lost art form’s joys, as a lushly imagined exercise in style, and most crucially, as a funny, emotionally connected entertainment in its own right. As in his pair of hit “OSS 117” films — droll spoofs of 1960s spy cinema, the casual pleasures of which his latest considerably builds upon — Hazanavicius’ approach to pastiche is exacting but not academic: story remains the top priority here, and he has settled on one that is snugly predicated on the film’s very own formal conceits.

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  • CANNES: ‘Polisse,’ ‘Habemus Papam’

    “Polisse” (***) That the title for “Polisse” reportedly derives from writer-director-star Maïwenn’s misspelling of the word “police” aptly summarises both the charms and weaknesses of her third feature, a garrulous, chaotic, intermittently hot-wired ensemble soap braiding the personal and professional lives of officers in the Paris police department’s Child Protection Unit.No doubt the product of much earnest first-hand research into that environment — the numerous individual cases portrayed here are all rooted in fact — the film nonetheless feels creatively informed to a greater degree by the rhythms and structures of TV procedural drama.

    If that reads as a slight, it is and it isn’t: Maïwenn (the tearaway French star who had Luc Besson’s child at 17 and was allegedly the inspiration for Natalie Portman’s character in “The Professional,” so perhaps she knows more about CPU than most) gets what makes such shows propulsive, as she restlessly scurries between multiple crises rendered in cinematic shorthand, patly completing some strands and leaving others hovering for future episodes that will never get made. Casually bed-hopping and entering volcanic shouting matches at the drop of a hat, her characters don’t behave quite like human beings so much as the heightened reflections of them dictated by short-form storytelling; in some respects, Maïwenn’s writing is as phonetic and overheard as her spelling.

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  • SHORT TAKE: “Restless” (*1/2)

    Cannes Film Festival
    Un Certain Regard

    “What can you say about a 25 year-old girl who died?” Written by Erich Segal before being plaintively voiced by Ryan O’Neal, this presumably rhetorical question is the opening gambit of “Love Story,” the simple but phenomenally successful weeper in which a young couple’s relationship is prematurely halted when the girl contracts leukemia — a bummer at any stage of life, but particularly so when you’re young and in love and have Ali MacGraw’s very nice hair.

    As it turned out, the film didn’t have an awful lot to say about the 25 year-old in question, beyond the indirect observations that love is sweet, death is sad and that neither one of those truths alters the other. Gus Van Sant’s new film “Restless,” meanwhile, asks the same question — just with a slightly lower number replacing the 25 — and, as laws of both algebra and Hollywood would have it, asks it to somewhat lower returns.

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  • REVIEW: “We Need to Talk About Kevin” (****)

    Cannes Film Festival

    Lionel Shriver’s 2003 bestseller “We Need to Talk About Kevin” is a rare pop novel indeed: a nippy, low-comfort social essay that lures readers into messily untied arguments on topical subject matter the talk-show circuit would have far less trouble resolving. It might have made for a cluttered, stentorian film about things, particularly as the novel’s candid, epistolary format — a series of unreturned letters from an emotionally paralyzed wife and mother to her absent husband — lends itself to reams of dense, subtext-securing voiceover.

    That knowledge makes the already graceful cinematic language of Lynne Ramsay’s film adaptation (the Scottish director’s third feature, and her first in a regrettable period of nine years) all the more remarkable: altering not a jot of narrative detail, Ramsay and co-writer Rory Kinnear have ingeniously hollowed out Shriver’s wordy text into a largely tacit, imagistic memory collage that substitutes sound and vision for dialogue as extensively as possible. The woman who had a similarly unlikely literary hit, Alice Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones,” taken out of her hands by commercially-minded producers has exacted her revenge in the most rewarding of ways.

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  • SHORT TAKE: “Sleeping Beauty” (***1/2)

    Cannes Film Festival

    “My vagina is not a temple.” So says terse, inscrutable college student Lucy, her dry conviction belying an edgeless china-doll face, immediately after being told (instructed, even) otherwise by an employer with a less-than-honorable stake in the matter. It’s a loaded line, one that reveals she knows much more than her elders think she does — yet much less than she thinks she does — and it’s one of several moments in “Sleeping Beauty,” Australian novelist Julia Leigh’s unnervingly precise directorial debut, that denude sex of any movie mystique it usually carries.

    If that makes the film sound explicitly carnal, it isn’t: the words “no penetration” are repeated so often in the script as to became a mantra, and it sticks to that promise. But in telling the story of a girl falling into the most eerily art-directed prostitution ring this side of a Freemason hazing ceremony, Leigh’s way revisionist fairytale bluntly points out the ways in which our society has over-designed sexual experience even as it has undervalued raw human contact; “Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex, But Were Afraid to Touch” might have been a more specific title.

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  • REVIEW: “Midnight in Paris” (**1/2)

    Cannes Film Festival
    Opening Night

    “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” Nobody actually quotes L.P. Hartley in “Midnight in Paris,” Woody Allen’s often charming if largely over-explicated ode to the healing and deceiving properties of nostalgia. If they don’t, however, that could just be because a spring breeze stole the last few pages of the script at some point on the shoot of this amiably unfinished choux-pastry film, and Allen didn’t feel much like rewriting them.

    Up until that point, Allen hasn’t exactly shied away from obvious references or externalized subtext — this is a film that trades in emphatic cultural and historical caricature, a picture-book approach that will delight some viewers even as it strikes others as aggravatingly twee, but one Allen commits to with the take-it-or-leave-it dispatch of a 75 year-old master working in quick-sketch mode.

    Either way, the tourist-style filmmaking that surfaced in such recent Allen films as “Match Point” and “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” feels more thematically motivated in “Midnight in Paris,” a study of a character not merely a traveller in his physical surroundings, but his generational ones too. I kept wondering if the film’s narrowness of perspective was that of Allen or Owen Wilson’s Allen-substitute protagonist, and what textual difference the distinction even makes.

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  • Cannes kicking off

    I’ve been in Cannes less than 12 hours and already I can feel the sleep deficit kicking in, so I’ll keep this post short. It’s been an administrative day, anyway: unpacking, registering, collecting my press badge (in the rigid Cannes class system, I’ve been upgraded from a yellow badge to a blue one, so I guess Thierry Frémaux received my muffin basket) and moving into the apartment (improbably named Villa Romance) that I’ll share for the next 12 days with US critics James Rocchi and Aaron Hillis. (Karina Longworth joins our household tomorrow. There’s a decidedly niche sitcom waiting to be made here, folks.)

    You may have noticed that this evening, and not a moment too soon, I completed my Cannes Check series breaking down the individual titles in Competition — you can catch up with all 20 entries here.

    One more plug, while I’m about it: I’m taking part in Ioncinema’s 2011 Cannes Critics’ Panel, in which a selection of 16 international critics will rate the festival’s major films on a daily basis. Like an expanded version of Screen Daily’s traditional poll, it’s a handy way to monitor the consensus hits and misses; check out the full panel here.

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  • CANNES CHECK: ‘Drive’

    The director: Nicolas Winding Refn (Denmark)

    The talent: Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan — the latter making her first significant foray into multiplex territory — are the star attractions here, but the supporting cast isn’t too shabby, either: Albert Brooks, Ron Perlman and current TV darlings Christina Hendricks and Bryan Cranston are all on board. The screenplay, adapted from a James Sallis novel, has a rather unexpected name attached to it: Hossein Amini, an Oscar nominee for 1997’s “The Wings of the Dove.” Reliable Hollywood workhorse Newton Thomas Sigel (“Three Kings,” “X-Men”) is the DP; Cliff Martinez, best known for his collaborations with Steven Soderbergh, did the score.

    The pitch: The most overtly mainstream film in Competition this year, “Drive” seemingly marks subversive Danish genre stylist Winding Refn’s shift into the realm of slam-bang Hollywood action, via the classic subgenre of the car-chase thriller. Gosling plays a movie stunt driver moonlighting as a hired getaway driver for assorted Los Angeles criminals. After one botched job for the husband of his attractive neighbor (Mulligan), he is forced to drive for his life and hers. The synopsis (and indeed the little footage we’ve seen) promises an old-school, hard-boiled entertainment in the vein of early Walter Hill or Michael Mann; not the sort of thing we usually expect to see vying for the Palme d’Or, and no less welcome for that.

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  • CANNES CHECK: ‘Melancholia’

    The director: Lars von Trier (Denmark)

    The talent: After the lonesome two-hander that was “Antichrist,” von Trier is back to the all-star ensemble form of “Dogville” — and an eclectic ensemble at that. Taking on the traditionally punishing duties of von Trier’s female lead (though the man maintains she got off lightly) is Kirsten Dunst. Previous von Trier alumni in the cast include Charlotte Gainsbourg, John Hurt and Stellan Skarsgård, while Charlotte Rampling, Skarsgård’s son Alexander and, most unexpectedly, Kiefer Sutherland join in the fun. (Plus, Udo Kier is credited as “Wedding planner,” which sounds like very good value indeed.) Below the line, the most important thing to note is the switch from von Trier’s regular DP Anthony Dod Mantle to the less familiar Manuel Alberto Claro (“Videocracy”).

    The pitch: The film’s official one-line synopsis may well be one of the most brazenly off-balance I’ve ever read, so I see no need to paraphrase: “Two sisters find their relationship challenged as a nearby planet threatens to collide into the Earth.” (Well, yes — planetary collisions have a way of complicating things.)

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  • CANNES CHECK: ‘This Must Be the Place’

    The director: Paolo Sorrentino (Italy)

    The talent: Sean Penn (a Best Actor winner at Cannes back in 1997 for “She’s So Lovely”) pops up in his second film of the Competition, though this time in a clear lead role. Frances McDormand makes it two Oscar-winners on board, while the eccentric supporting cast includes Harry Dean Stanton, Judd Hirsch, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne (guess he sanctioned the film’s title, then) and Eve Hewson — the 19 year-old daughter of Bono.  Byrne also contributed the film’s score, with original songs by US folk star Will Oldham (aka Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy). Overall, however, the crew remains heavily Italian; Sorrentino’s regular (and regularly flashy) cinematographer, Luca Bigazzi, is also on board.

    The pitch: Sorrentino’s first English-language feature — hardly a surprising move, given how his previous features toyed with Hollywood forms — sounds like a decidedly odd duck on paper. If you think the film’s various connections to rock royalty seem thematically related, you’d be right: Penn plays Cheyenne (!), a former Goth rock star living in wealthy retirement in Dublin, shaken out of his self-involved stupor by his estranged father’s death.

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  • CANNES CHECK: ‘Michael’

    The director: Markus Schleinzer (Austria)

    The talent: An actor and accomplished casting director — whose credits in the latter field include several films by his compatriots Michael Haneke and Jessica Hausner — 39 year-old Schleinzer has cast his debut feature as writer-director with several actors he previously tapped for other directors’ films. Lead actor Michael Futih won’t be an especially familiar name to international audiences, while his young co-star David Rauchenberger is a newcomer. Overall, the film has less name appeal than of its Competition rivals, making it one of the lineup’s more intriguing prospects.

    The pitch: This may disappoint you, but Schleinzer’s debut isn’t an arthouse remake of Nora Ephron’s 1996 Travolta-as-angel romcom of the same title. Something rather more somber awaits. Only a one-line synopsis has been issued, describing the film as a study of “the last five months of 10-year-old Wolfgang and 35-year-old Michael’s involuntary life together.” That coy “involuntary” evidently refers to a kidnapping: the film is allegedly inspired by the real-life case of Natascha Kampusch, the Austrian girl abducted at the age of 10 and held captive for eight years. With Austria having been rocked both by this and the Josef Fritzl case in recent years, Schleinzer’s film looks likely to touch on a few nerves.

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