In Contention

Tag: Mark Friedberg

  • TECH SUPPORT: Best Art Direction — Volume II

    Oh how things have changed since I last wrote in this space. In the past four weeks, Tech Support has taken a break, allowing the dust from the festival circuit to settle, and other titles to open. Over the next 10 weeks, we’ll take a second look at each of the crafts categories, finishing in mid-December – just as awards circuit takes hold.

    Today, we take a second glance at Best Art Direction. As stated last time, this category tends to reward period and fantasy films.The branch  has some favorites, but it’s not overly incestuous. And while being a Best Picture contender certainly helps, nominees can often come from the surrounding fray.

    Perhaps I’ll start with a film that I thought would score here, but came out of Toronto in even greater shape than I expected: Tom Hooper’s “The King’s Speech.” With prestige and period attached, I am virtually certain Eve Stewart, who was nominated in this category 11 years ago for Mike Leigh’s “Topsy-Turvy,” will be heading to the Kodak. Not only am I confident she’ll be nominated again, I think she has excellent potential to win.

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  • REVIEW: “The Tempest” (*)

    Venice Film Festival

    If any one title in the Shakespeare library has been sufficiently fiddled about with on screen, it’s “The Tempest,” among the most tonally malleable of his comedies, and a fantasy that gifts filmmakers with obvious opportunities for spectacle.

    “Forbidden Planet,” a terrific 1956 sci-fi riff on the play, perhaps took this adaptability furthest, but it only set the ball rolling for assorted free interpretations: Derek Jarman gave it a homoerotic spin in 1979, Paul Mazursky rewrote it as a neurotic modern-day sex comedy in 1982 and Peter Greenaway played all manner of metatextual games in 1991’s “Prospero’s Books.” At this point, about the most radical thing a filmmaker could do with “The Tempest” on screen is play it straight.

    That is evidently not a view shared by one Julie Taymor, whose murky, lunk-headed and signally boring new film tricks out Shakespeare’s text with gaudy CGI saturation, a wardrobe from “Zoolander”‘s Derelicte collection and a key sex change in the lead, as sorcerer and doting father Prospero here morphs into Helen Mirren’s Prospera, a highbrow voodoo priestess of sorts with a permanent Patty Hewes-style scowl.

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