• This week’s installments of the Oscar Guide covered the animated feature, sound mixing, lead actor, live action short and film editing categories.
• Kris toasted the career of Jeff bridges with his list of the actor’s top 10 performances (off-site).
• We caught up with “Red Riding: 1974” director Julian Jarrold as well as “A Prophet” helmer Jacques Audiard.
• Elsewhere, we spotlighted the crafts of “Bright Star” in our weekly Tech Support Interview series.
Nearly a year after they first landed on UK television screens, the three feature-length films that comprise the “Red Riding” trilogy have reached American audiences – and in the theatrical environment where they belong, no less.
IFC is marketing and distributing “Red Riding,” an adaptation of David Peace’s decade-spanning quartet of crime novels inspired by the real-life Yorkshire Ripper murders, as a single theatrical event. The truth, however, is that these are three very distinct, even self-standing, works from three dissimilar directors: Julian Jarrold, James Marsh and Anand Tucker.
Where “Man on Wire” director Marsh’s documentary chops are evident in a film that takes on the nuts and bolts of police corruption, and Tucker (“Hilary and Jackie”) takes a straightforward character-based approach to tie up loose ends, Jarrold’s film, the opener, is the most boldly stylized of the three.
Following young journalist Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield) as he probes the disappearance of a young girl and becomes ill-advisedly involved with her grieving mother (Rebecca Hall), the film consciously fuses the languages of film noir and social realism to striking effect.
With a resurgence of talk about the “Red Riding” trilogy of films ahead of their U.S. release next month, I’ve been reminded of a critical omission I made in my Best of 2009 list a few weeks back.
As I wrote when the films premiered on British TV around 10 months ago, they are wholly cinematic works and deserve to be considered (and distributed) as such — but because they were introduced to me as television, my mind keeps skipping over them when I think back on the year in film.
All of which is terribly unfair on Julian Jarrold’s “1974,” the first of the three tonally and structurally separate films, which I described as follows in the spring:
Following Andrew (”Boy A”) Garfield’s swaggering rookie journalist as he investigates the link between three missing girls and rapidly finds himself in over his head, it’s an astonishingly textured, sensory film, awash in dusk-coloured light and a gorgeous Northern soul soundtrack, that recalls “Zodiac” in its measured narrative approach and even shades of “Twin Peaks” in the alluring strangeness cast over its very ordinary locale.
You may remember that back in March I raved about “Red Riding,” the British TV adaptation of David Peace’s quartet of Yorkshire-set crime novels that IFC will soon be distributing theatrically in the U.S.
Specifically, I flipped for the first installment of the three-film series, Julian Jarrold’s “1974” — an exquisitely textured mood piece, with vivid turns from Andrew Garfield and Rebecca Hall, that remains one of the best films I’ve seen this year on any size screen.
Six months later, Americans got to see what British critics had been gushing about since the spring (David Thomson overexcitedly stated that the films excelled “The Godfather” in the pantheon of crime cinema), as “Red Riding” played to a very warm reception in Telluride. (Even if Kris wasn’t entirely won over.)
Now the buzz continues with the announcement that Columbia has acquired remake rights to the project, with director Ridley Scott and screenwriter Steven Zaillian in line to compress Peace’s mammoth narrative into a single feature film. (As a feat of adaptation, expect comparisons to what Curtis Hanson and Brian Helegeland took on James Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet.) Scott will also produce via his Scott Free production company.
Things 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.
Here’s some fantastic news. You may remember that, a couple of months ago, I totally flipped for “Red Riding,” a trilogy of British TV movies deftly adapted from David Peace’s quartet of crime novels about the Yorkshire Ripper murders of the 70s and early 80s.
Actually, to be specific, I went crazy for the first film in the trilogy, Julian Jarrold’s “1974,” a haunting, exquisitely realized mood piece with a sterling cast led by rising Brit stars Andrew Garfield and Rebecca Hall — the latter’s sad, sensual performance even topping her breakthrough work in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.” The next two films, helmed by Oscar-winner James Marsh and Anand Tucker respectively, were strong pieces of work too, but it’s Jarrold’s film that I can’t shake from my system.
Anyway, I said at the time that the film belonged on a bigger screen, and I’ve got my wish. Fresh from their acquisition of another outstanding Brit TV effort, Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Sundance winner “Five Minutes of Heaven,” IFC has picked up the U.S. rights to the entire trilogy:
IFC plans to release The Red Riding Trilogy this autumn in theatres and on demand through its IFC In Theaters platform following a festival circuit run.
IFC Entertainment president Jonathan Sehring called The Red Riding “an absolutely thrilling work of cinema and one of the great true crime adaptations of recent times.
So justice is done. You’ll see what I mean in the fall. A brief taster after the cut.
I didn’t get a chance to mention it during our recent hiatus, but last Wednesday I saw a film that stands, for me, head and shoulders above any other 2009 release so far — one I can easily imagine still coming into play for my own Best of 2009 honours come December. A heady artistic breakthrough from a filmmaker I had never previously rated, with an immaculate cast of rising talent, it’s truly significant, surprising cinema.
There’s a catch, however. It’s not showing at a theatre near you — or any other, for that matter. For the film I’m talking about is “Nineteen Seventy-Four,” the first part of Channel 4’s ambitious, much-hyped TV endeavour “Red Riding” — a trilogy of self-standing films chronicling the infamous Yorkshire Ripper murders of the 1970s and early 1980s.
Deftly adapted by Tony Grisoni (“In This World,” “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”) from a quartet of novels by David Peace (a brilliant writer occasionally labelled, not without justification, as the UK’s answer to James Ellroy — he’s also behind the upcoming “Damned United”), the films examine both the social and official levels of corruption stirred by the crimes over an entire decade, but each has its own distinct thematic and cinematic character.
I was first alerted to the project when interviewing James Marsh last year — the Oscar-winning “Man on Wire” filmmaker helmed “Nineteen Eighty,” the second instalment of the trilogy. Marsh’s contribution is a sober, intelligent piece of procedural drama, enlivened by a terrific lead turn from Paddy Considine, but it’s really “Nineteen Seventy-Four,” the more oblique, mood-driven piece, that has stuck with me these past two weeks.
In response to the most recent Oscar update I received a note from Miramax publicity this afternoon, regarding Stephen Frears’s “Chéri.” It seems the film is staying in 2009, narrowing the studio’s awards hopefuls to Mike Leigh’s “Happy-Go-Lucky” and John Shanley’s “Doubt.”
The critically thumped “Blindness” is still lingering as a possibility, while Julian Jarrold’s “Brideshead Revisited” needs to overcome the widespread opinion that Evelyn Waugh’s novel has already been filmed definitively.
As for the current Oscar charts, I’ll update them at some point this week to strike “Chéri” from the record. Tell a friend.