• The French lose their marbles not just over the exclusion of “Of Gods and Men” from this year’s foreign film shortlist, but the INCLUSION of Algeria’s “Outside the Law.” [The Carpetbagger]
• Elizabeth Snead talks to a number of costumers on this year’s awards circuit [Deadline]
• Is this Banksy? [Cinematical]
Venice Film Festival
Too few film reviews open with the wisdom of Feargal Sharkey, so it brings me great pleasure to begin this one by saying that a good heart these days is, indeed, hard to find. That’s the chief conclusion to be taken from not just the narrative but the execution of “Barney’s Version,” a measured, thoughtful and agreeably down-the-middle adult romance that makes up in mature sincerity for what it lacks in style.
I am, I admit, unfamiliar with the popular 1997 novel by Mordecai Richler from which Canadian TV director Richard J. Lewis’s film is adapted; it is, by all accounts, a dense, inventive and stingingly satirical work that has been substantially pared back and ironed out for the screen. This is not surprising: even without knowledge of the material, it’s easy to see where corners have been either cut or sanded smooth in the adaptation of a decades-spanning life study.
Charting the fortunes and (mostly) misfortunes of Paul Giamatti’s eponymous anti-hero, principally his three failed marriages, Lewis and novice screenwriter Michael Konyves have fashioned a busy, baggy flashback structure that races through some key plot points as it leaves others dangling, and never makes good on its literary opening gambit to tell the story as Barney’s autobiography.