In Contention

Tag: I Am Love

  • A little love for ‘I Am Love’

    I know the film has a lot of devotees on this site — I’m not wholly with them, though for the second year running, I do think Tilda Swinton merits a lot more Best Actress consideration than she’s getting — so you may be pleased to know that florid Italian melodrama “I Am Love” has at least (however indirectly) taken one bit of minor silverware.

    I wasn’t aware that the inaugural Screen International UK Marketing & Distribution Awards took place two weeks ago, but so they did, with “I Am Love” (and marketing team AllCity) deservedly scooping Poster of the Year honors for the arresting hot-pink design featured to the right (and in full after the cut). As it happens, we singled out the film’s poster portfolio for praise earlier this year; nice to know we weren’t alone in our admiration. Hey, it’s something.

    Among the posters it beat is another of my favorite 2010 one-sheets recently featured on these pages: the witty crow-and-bomb design for “Four Lions.” Chris Morris’s controversial (and, yes, funny) UK terrorism satire did, however, take the award for Trailer of the Year. You can check that out, too, after the cut.

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  • ‘White Ribbon,’ Bertolucci win BBC World Cinema Awards

    Fear not, you haven’t entered a very somber Tardis and woken up in December 2009. The BBC World Cinema Award is a small but creditable gong dished out annually to honor the best in foreign-language film — but due to a significant change in the show’s calendar, this year’s award effectively spanned the last two years of UK releases.

    Hence the rather stale-sounding list of nominees, but congratulations anyway to Michael Haneke’s 2009 Cannes champ “The White Ribbon,” which triumphed over “I Am Love,” “A Prophet,” “Let the Right One In” and “Waltz With Bashir.” (Note the absence of a certain pair of recent Oscar winners for Best Foreign Language Film.) Previous winners of the award include “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “Downfall.”

    The award was determined by a jury headed by Oscar-winning screenwriter and playwright Christopher Hampton, and presented in London last week. At the same time, Bernardo Bertolucci was honored with a lifetime achievement award. Anyway, nothing to stop the presses for, but thought you’d like to know.

    [Photo: Sony Pictures Classics]

  • Italy and Spain enter foreign Oscar race

    With the official (though not necessarily final) deadline for submissions just two days away, there’s been a flood of new additions to the list in the past few days, including two big guns that were holding out on us — Italy and Spain. (Check out our updated list, now up to 55 titles, here.)

    Among those who follow this race, all eyes were on Italy’s selection, and not just because the country still holds the record for most wins in the category. (The Italians’ fortunes have dipped rather in recent years, however: since “Life is Beautiful” triumphed in 1998, they’ve managed only a single unsuccessful nod.) With a shortlist of 10 contenders to choose from, it was difficult to predict which way the Italian selectors might lean.

    Many Oscar-watchers assumed that the high-profile Tilda Swinton starrer “I Am Love” would get picked, but that was always unlikely: far less well-received in its home country than in English-speaking territories, chances are the film’s stylistic excesses wouldn’t have been to the Academy’s taste either.

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  • SUNDAY CENTS: WTF?

    *All historical figures cited are adjusted to today’s dollars.

    Forget everything I said about it being ballsy marketing your movie with a bunch of unknown, potentially scene-stealing creatures. I forget that if the creatures are at all adorable, then you automatically debut with $60 million at the box office.

    Seriously. What happened with “Despicable Me?” I’m not afraid to admit that three weeks ago I thought this would debut with $15 million. Instead, it’s the number one movie in America with $60.1 million in the bank. That already makes it the biggest computer animated film Universal has ever put out and rivals some of the better openings for non-franchise DreamWorks pictures. It should now have no problem becoming the fourth animated film of 2010 to pass $200 million. No words.

    Speaking of that threshold, “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse,” raced past it with some conviction, dropping 49% to $33.4 million. It’s about $7 million the running total of “New Moon” by this point and will have a hard time reaching the same peak. Still, it’s more than enough to have provided more work for Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. Has that not been deemed a war crime yet?

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  • More halfway-mark blues

    A few weeks ago, I commented upon the scarcity of viable awards contenders released in the last six months, coming to the unsurprising conclusion that there hasn’t been much to, well, comment upon. In the past few days, however, Variety’s Tim Gray and EW’s Dave Karger have revisited the subject … and haven’t come up with very much either.

    A common emerging sentiment is that, with such a meagre first-half slate, filling 10 slots on a Best Picture ballot could be a challenge for many voters – and could ultimately result in a decidedly weak nominee field, one with more “Blind Sides” than “District 9s.”

    Sasha Stone has challenged this by suggesting that, in what she (if not everyone else) believes will be “a great year for film,” the Academy may end up looking to arthouse or non-summer genre fare to fill the gaps – though, to take two of her listed alternatives, it has to be said that while most critics would be down with “Winter’s Bone” making the list, “Shutter Island” would be a much more contentious nominee.

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  • SUNDAY CENTS: Wonder toys

    *All historical figures cited are adjusted to today’s dollars.

    As it turns out, Armond White was unable to convince most Americans to not see “Toy Story 3.” Pixar’s eleventh animated feature became their highest debuting in history with a $109.0 million weekend. That also makes it the third biggest June debut and third biggest animated debut of all time, while instantly placing it in pole position to wind up the most successful film of the summer.

    Maybe it was the 3D, maybe it was the weak market, or maybe it was nostalgia for Jim Varney but the film was able to one up the $89.8 million debut of “Toy Story 2,” although its $27,100 per theater average is virtually identical to the figure posted by its predecessor. Reviews amongst those who don’t receive weekly death threats are universally positive and this should have the staying power to flirt with $400 million by the end of its run.

    Are we looking at the second threequel to get a Best Picture nomination and the first without similar recognition for the previous installments? In a word, yes.

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  • I am Tilda

    Has any actor in recent years put an Oscar to quite such good use as Tilda Swinton? I admit I wasn’t quite behind her win two years ago for “Michael Clayton,” but I’ve enjoyed watching how, after two decades as a kind of alien fringe goddess, she’s recently morphed into a movie star of sorts — still reassuringly batty in her decisions but now capable of propelling a foreign-language arthouse curio like “I Am Love” to healthy box-office returns in the UK. (The film hits US theaters in June.)

    It’s interesting, then, to see an array of lustrous poster designs for the film all playing on the “Tilda Swinton, movie star” meme, placing her front, center and glammed-up to the hilt. Take this unused concept from UK designers All City:

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  • UK trailer and poster for ‘I Am Love’

    Back in September, at Venice, I found my senses dazzled and my brain nonplussed by Luca Guadagnino’s “I Am Love” — a fulsomely stylized family melodrama showcasing  yet more marvelous work from Tilda Swinton (in Italian, to boot) over an otherwise undernourished story and ensemble.

    I Am Love

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  • Tom Ford, Scott Cooper on Variety’s Directors to Watch list

    Tom FordVariety’s annual Directors to Watch list lives up to its title more often than not, frequently highlighting names that go on to be hotter talking points in the year that follows.

    Last year’s list, for example, include “(500) Days of Summer” helmer Marc Webb, who recently signed on to reboot the “Spider-Man” franchise, as well as Cary Fukunaga (“Sin Nombre”) and Adam Elliot (“Mary & Max”) — in addition to already-lauded names like Matteo Garrone and Steve McQueen.

    This year’s list similarly blends directors still in the wings with those who have already arrived. The year’s most successful freshman filmmaker, Neill Blomkamp, isn’t on the list (Variety hardly needs to remind the industry of his presence, after all), but two first-timers with films in the Oscar hunt are: “A Single Man”‘s Tom Ford and “Crazy Heart”‘s Scott Cooper.

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  • Waltz, Frechette tapped by Hollywood fest, plus world awards

    Christoph WaltzThe list of Hollywood Film Festival award winners is winding down.  Today’s announcement brings the Hollywood Supporting Actor prize for Christoph Waltz in “Inglourious Basterds,” making this officially the widest possible net festival brass could have cast.  But Waltz will be going into the season with two wins under his belt already, here and in Cannes, so it’s safe to say we have a frontrunner in the supporting actor category (until Stanley Tucci comes along in a few months, that is).

    Meanwhile, Father Rick Frechette will receive the festival’s Hollywood Humanitarium Award.  From the press release:

    Father Rick Frechette is currently the Director of Medical Services of Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos International and a priest who has devoted his life to the medical needs of children in the Caribbean and around the world. He is NPH’s Regional Director of the Caribbean, the Haiti home’s National Director and a member of the NPH International Health Services Team, which oversees the medical needs of the children in nine countries.

    To make a difference, Frechette went to medical school to learn how to minister to the children’s physical needs, which resulted in his medical degree in 1998 from the New York College of Osteopathic Medicine and his becoming a general practitioner licensed in New York and Florida. “The poor people have scant access to medical care. Even if they are lucky enough to get evaluated at a clinic, both scarcity of medicines and their relatively high prices prevent their getting treatment. Our own working conditions, especially in the poorest areas of Port-au-Prince, are tragic and are deplorable. We have little water, no electricity, few medicines and supplies,” says the doctor-priest.

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  • Tornatore to represent Italy in Oscar race again

    BaariaAs the deadline for Best Foreign Language Film submissions looms on October 1, news of further entries keeps rolling in. Italy, Vietnam and Norway are the latest additions to the list, which presently numbers 54. (By my count, at least.)

    Italy’s selection is obviously the newsiest: the country’s 13 previous wins make it the leading Oscar champ in this category (though France still holds the record for nominations by a sizable margin). They’ve rather lost their golden touch of late, however, scoring only a solitary nom (“Don’t Tell,” 2005) since “Life is Beautiful” won over a decade ago, and I’m not sure they’ve made the wisest choice to reverse that state of affairs this year.

    On paper, their pick of Giuseppe Tornatore’s “Baaria” may seem like an Oscar slam-dunk. It’s a lavish, decades-spanning period drama from an Academy-favored filmmaker — Tornatore won for “Cinema Paradiso” in 1989, scored a further nod for “The Star Maker” in 1995 and made the 9-film shortlist with “The Unknown Woman” two years ago.

    Which is all well and good, except that “Baaria” was critically slaughtered when it opened the Venice Film Festival last month. Clearly, the massive budget of Tornatore’s film factored into the decision. I never got to see it myself, but Variety’s pan (“overblown in every sense … awash in phony nostalgia (and) cheap sentimentalism”) was typical of the consensus.

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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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