In Contention

Tag: Julian Schnabel

  • Schnabel’s ‘Miral’ pushed to March 2011

    Well, it makes sense for The Weinstein Company to tidy up its slate a bit.  “Blue Valentine,” “Nowhere Boy” and big dog “The King’s Speech” are enough to play with, and there is also “The Company Men,” which has been screening lately.

    So we bid farewell to Julian Schnabel’s “Miral,” which was looking like an awards season also-ran anyway, given the response out of Venice and Toronto.  From the Lido, Guy wrote that “Schnabel’s stated passion for the material is scarcely evident in his screen treatment thereof” and that the film is “enlightening neither as emotional essay nor as straight-up history lecture…[it] seemingly lands shy of every imaginable target audience: it’s too dry for the middlebrow awards set that might otherwise thrill to its superficially good intentions, too didactic for the highbrow intelligentsia that turned out for the director’s previous outings, and too dull for just about everybody.”

    David Poland originally Tweeted the news last night.  I’ve been waiting all morning for an informed source to verify.  Crazy, I know, but anyway, with said verification, chalk it up.  The film will be released in March of next year.

    [Photo: The Weinstein Company]

  • 10/11 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Franco at MOMA, Schnabel’s Polaroids, O’Hehir and Ebert fight to the death

    • Jeffrey Wells reports from a MOMA Q&A with “127 Hours” star James Franco. [Hollywood Elsewhere]

    • Amy Kaufman talks with “Conviction” star Hilary Swank. [Los Angeles Times]

    • Add Polaroid photography to Julian Schnabel’s list of artistic pursuits. [The Guardian]

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  • 9/2 Oscarweb Round-up

    • Michael Cieply chats with comeback kid Ben Affleck, whose film “The Town” is set to play Venice this week. [New York Times]

    • Remember when “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” won the Palme d’Or?  Parisian critics would rather not. [The Guardian]

    • Catching up with Julian Schnabel, re: “Miral,” prior to Venice. [Variety]

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  • SHORT TAKE: “Miral” (**)

    Venice Film Festival

    Coming as it does from a filmmaker whose previous work has bent over backwards to reclothe and perfume the unglamorous body of the prestige biopic, the opening beats of Julian Schnabel’s latest, “Miral,” couldn’t be more prosaic.

    For a good few minutes, the credit sequence offers the eye little more than a dawdling pan over a fuzzy map of the Israel-Palestine region, ennobling music thrumming away. (The blocky purple credits themselves are hideous, by the way, but that’s already the least of our problems.) Surprises aren’t exactly forthcoming when we the credits wrap and our geography lesson is complete: “My name is Miral,” intones Freida Pinto in a helpful introductory voiceover. “I was born in 1973, but my story really begins in 1947.”

    Except it doesn’t; another woman’s does, however, and it’s the first of several admissions of the film’s own uncertainty as to why it’s here in the first place. The first of Schnabel’s biopics to come with a moderate fictional sheen, it’s scripted by Rula Jebreal — an international political journalist who became conscientized during her teenage years at an embattled Jerusalem orphanage — from her openly autobiographical novel, though it loftily purports to be about three generations of Palestinian women working toward independence.

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  • ‘Miral’ French poster

    Thanks to commenter Ziyad for alerting us to this pared-down French one-sheet for Julian Schnabel’s “Miral,” which will premiere next month at the Venice Film Festival. The film still has me (said in Tim Gunn tones) worried, but I rather like this — the expression on the face of Freida Pinto (essentially confirmed here as the film’s star, despite what her billing may imply) is ambiguous enough to counter an otherwise staid composition. Meanwhile, the naïve hand-painted lettering asserts artist-filmmaker Schnabel’s auteur identity, scarcely detectable in the film’s recent trailer.

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  • ‘Miral’ French trailer

    “Miral,” Julian Schnabel’s follow-up to his 2007 award-winning “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” has a number of readers excited, so thanks to Matt for trackking down the French trailer to the film.  For some time the perception has been that Hiam Abbas would be someone to watch in the film, but it turns out Freida Pinto in the title role was our best bet all along.  She looks great here, but I’m unsure if this will play out as an Academy thing.  The Weinstein Company secured domestic distribution last month.  Click the image below to have a look or watch the embed after the jump.

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  • Tarantino to head Venice jury

    Berlin went with Werner Herzog. Cannes with Tim Burton. Now Venice clearly felt they had to follow suit by tapping an eccentric auteur as jury president for the 67th Venice Film Festival in September. Quentin Tarantino will take the job.

    It will, of course, be Tarantino’s second stab at chairing the jury of a major European festival: in 2004, he held the position at Cannes, somewhat contentiously throwing his weight behind the decision to award the Palme d’Or to Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Tarantino made no bones about wielding his influence on the awards that year (the runner-up, Park Chan-wook’s “Oldboy” was also a film after his own heart), so it’ll be interesting to see if he’s similarly persuasive in Venice.

    Interestingly, unlike Cannes and Berlin, Tarantino has never actually taken a film to Venice — in contrast to last year’s president, two-time Golden Lion champ Ang Lee.

    Meanwhile, Variety reports that, in addition to Julian Schnabel’s “Miral,” the Venice lineup will also include Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere,” Monte Hellman’s “Road to Nowhere” and Francois Ozon’s “Potiche.” If all goes according to plan, I’ll be on the Lido once more to let you know how it all goes down. For now, I’ve got Cannes on the brain.

  • Schnabel holds ‘Miral’ for Venice

    One of the more eyebrow-raising omissions from the Cannes official selection announced this morning was Julian Schnabel’s “Miral.” The New York artist’s biopic of Hind Husseini, with a cast including Hiam Abbass, Willem Dafoe and Freida Pinto, had been widely deemed a good bet for the competition lineup, given its lofty arthouse profile and the Cannes success of Schnabel’s last feature, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” for which he won the Best Director award.

    Roger Friedman reports, however, that this year Schnabel was offered only an out-of-competition slot by festival organizers. The director declined the offer, choosing instead to unveil the film on the fall festival circuit: “Miral” will therefore premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September, before moving on to Toronto.Venice, of course, is where Schnabel premiered “Before Night Falls” in 2000 — he has form in both festivals.

    If the film turns out well, it won’t be the first time Venice has successfully fed off the bigger festival’s leftovers: both “Vera Drake” and “Brokeback Mountain” debuted on the Lido (and went on to win the Golden Lion) after being turned down by the Cannes selection committee.

  • ‘Hurt Locker’ scribe Mark Boal up for Venice award

    Mark BoalI had the pleasure of interviewing Mark Boal, the celebrated journalist and screenwriter of “The Hurt Locker,” over a beer in London last week, and was glad to find him as alert and interesting a subject as the film he wrote. (The interview will crop up on these pages soon, by the way.)

    So as awards season unfolds over the coming months, I’ll be cheering every bit of recognition that comes his way. And the first such citation, neatly enough, comes at the place where “The Hurt Locker” made its first appearance nearly a year ago: the Venice Film Festival.

    Variety reports that Boal has been shortlisted for the Gucci Group Award, a prize presented during the festival since 2006 to honor outstanding cinematic achievement by individuals from outside the world of film. Should he win, he’ll be in excellent company: previous recipients include Julian Schnabel (for “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”) and Steve McQueen (“Hunger”).

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