• Sam Mendes could clearly use a paycheck, signs up for the new Bond. [Heat Vision]
• Navigating the season in “For Your Consideration” ads. [Vulture]
• Rodrigo Perez points out some buried points in another outlet’s coverage, namely that Apparition is aiming for a Cannes bow for Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life.” [The Playlist]
I’m glad Sam Mendes seems determined to up the languid one-film-every-three-years work rate he started out with, even if I think “Away We Go” would have benefitted from having a bit more time (and a lot more rewrites) lavished on it.
He’s not the first director I thought of to helm an adaptation of Joseph O’Neill’s brilliant novel “Netherland,” a story of immigrant displacement in post-9/11 New York. Now I can see the fit rather neatly — and the combination of a Transatlantic narrative with a healthy dose of cricket in the proceedings must have been irresistible to the Brit.
Variety reports that Mendes is “eyeing” the project with a view to direct, but he’s decisively on board as a producer, teaming with Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions and Focus Features. Meanwhile, Christopher Hampton (“Dangeous Liaisons,” “Atonement”) is on script duty, so you know this is a classy enterprise.
• 10 things action movies teach us. [CNN]
• And if you’re still in the mood for some learnin’, 10 insights on today’s film business. [indieWIRE]
• Breezing through Alfred Hitchcock’s 36 film cameos. [Empire]
• Coolest remake idea of the decade? [Associated Press]
• Looking back through the works of Sam Mendes. [/Film]
• David Lynch dives headlong into “The Interview Project” with son Austin. [Moviemaker]
• A fond farewell to analog television. [Time]
• Jennie Yabroff chats with “Hurt Locker” director Kathryn Bigelow. [Newsweek]
• Steve Appleford taps into Spinal Tap, 25 years later. [Los Angeles Times]
• Dennis Lim, meanwhile, revisits the “last gasp of an old-fashioned modernism” that is “Last Year at Marienbad.” [Los Angeles Times]
• A few of the cinema’s most inspiring, moving and emotional dad moments. [Empire]
• John Hiscock talks “Year One” with Jack Black. [Daily Telegraph]
• Popcorn as a sexual aid? [The Guardian]
• Lou Lumenick, spinning his wheels, wonders whether the top brass shakeup at Paramount this week is prelude to a merger with Universal Pictures. [Lumenick on Film]
• Sam Mendes beat Martin Scorsese to the “Middlemarch” punch. [The Independent]
• Speaking of which, Brad Brevet accuses Sam Mendes of attacking the state of American marriage. If the shoe fits… [Rope of Silicon]
You know you’re properly in the swing of a film festival when you have neither the time nor the clarity to actually write about the day’s events. And so it is today: after four back-to-back screenings, one panel discussion and a whole lot of trekking back and forth between the festival’s rather widely dispersed theaters, I haven’t really the presence of mind for anything other than a stiff drink and an early night. And with the festival’s official press party due to kick off in under an hour, it looks like I’ll only be getting the first half of that prescription.
Of course, there is much that I want to share with you from today’s proceedings, including one superb film that I’m deliberating over giving another four-star review to. (I don’t usually dish those out often.) Meanwhile, this afternoon offered up another film lover’s Sophie’s Choice: attend the in-depth Sam Mendes Q&A, or the festival’s only screening of the exquisitely restored “The Red Shoes?” Actually, my heart had no trouble deciding on the latter, and it proved every bit as nourishing as you’d expect, but I’d have liked to have made both.
All to be discussed in good time. Stay tuned.
Tuesday dawned gray, gusty and rain-spattered here in Edinburgh – the kind of morning where there’s nothing for it than to bury oneself in the comforting recesses of a dark movie theater – which, handily enough, is all that I had on my agenda for today.
After formulating a strategy over breakfast as to which films could be caught at a later date, I ended up deciding morning’s viewing with a coin-toss, a concession to fate that happily led to the droll delights of Australian animation “Mary and Max,” before my afternoon was given over to the festival’s rather more glossy opener, “Away We Go.”
As I write, Sam Mendes and cast members John Krasinski and Maggie Gyllenhaal are treading the red carpet to formally christen this year’s festival. (Not joining them is female lead Maya Rudolph, who, in an irony apparent to anyone who has seen the film, was unable to fly to Edinburgh because she is eight months pregnant.)
It’s a fitting opener, in the sense that its carefully negotiated balance between indie outsiderness and cozy Hollywood warmth reflects the transitory state of the Edinburgh Film Festival as a whole. Symbolic neatness aside, however, I see no context in which “Away We Go” (**1/2) can’t be regarded as a major disappointment from Sam Mendes.
In a little over an hour, I’ll be hopping on a (very) early morning train and making the 300 mile journey up north to Edinburgh. Ordinarily, this alone would be cause for excitement — for me, Scotland’s capital, with its curious combination of twisty Medieval quirk, stately academia and cooler-than-thou cultural swagger, is one of the most delightful cities in Europe. On this occasion, however, it boasts an extra drawcard — the Edinburgh International Film Festival.
It may lack the glamor of Cannes or the breadth of Toronto, but the EIFF has been modestly chugging along since 1947, making it one of the most senior of all international film festivals. It doesn’t necessarily get the glitzy international premieres that the London fest now commands, but it’s an essential date on the calendar for burgeoning UK and international filmmakers. Meanwhile, it supplements its sizable showcase of new talent with a scattering of classic retrospectives as well as new works from more established filmmakers.
Like its London counterpart, Edinburgh takes a similar “cherry-picking” approach to programming, selecting a number of proven successes from other festivals, as well as international markets. As a result, this year’s festival brings us the UK premieres of Sundance hits such as “Sin Nombre,” “Humpday” and “The Maid,” while the event I am most anticipating is the first post-Cannes screening of Andrea Arnold’s Jury Prize winner, “Fish Tank.”
Perhaps it’s telling that this recent Times interview with Sam Mendes mentions his latest film “Away We Go” in a single sentence, while focusing rather more attention on his upcoming theatrical double-bill, directing Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” and Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” for Kevin Spacey’s Old Vic in London. I have yet to see the thus-far coolly received new film (I’ll catch up with it in Edinburgh next week), but I’ve booked my theater tickets — and I know which evening I’m more excited about.
Be that as it may, it goes to demonstrate just what a busy guy he is at the moment: not many people can claim to have unveiled two major feature films and a weighty stage project in a six-month period. Not content with that, he also finds time to play cricket for a county team — there’s something I didn’t know.
As the interview makes clear, Mendes’ sudden spurt of creativity is a sort of compensation for four rather quiet years which he devoted to raising his young family. I hope he maintains the newfound energy level, given the variable nature of his filmography thus far — for a gifted filmmaker, inconsistency is best accompanied by prolificacy. (Ask Woody Allen or Clint Eastwood.)
• Carmike Cinemas honcho S. David Passman III gets back to basics, like cleaning the bathrooms. (This story hits home with me because I grew up going to a shoddy Carmike theater.) [Company Town]
• Headline of the month. Not film related, but necessary for your morning LOL dose. [MyFoxBoston.com]
• Drew McWeeny dives head-long into the tank for Ubisoft’s “Avatar” video game with a detailed description of what must have been a breath-taking E3 demonstration. [Motion/Captured]
• Why Cannes awards mean squat for Oscar. [The Playlist]
• How “Slumdog Millionaire” is changing filmmaking in India. [The Guardian]
• Dumb list du jour… [Premiere]
• Paul Dano, “prince regent of independent film,” rides the subway. Just, you know, FYI. [The Times]
• Sam Mendes drew on Hal Ashby for “Away We Go” (he just missed the poignancy). [The Hollywood Interview]
• Searching for the Berkeley home that inspired Carl’s “Up” abode. [San Francisco Chronicle]
• CAA reaches out to James Cameron to represent the director’s new Fusion Camera System technology. [Deadline Hollywood Daily]
I’ve been on board for most every Sam Mendes film since the director made his heralded debut in 1999. Even “Jarhead,” which was a big disappointment, had a lot of interesting ideas concerning the alienation of war and its effects on soldiers.
I still think last year’s “Revolutionary Road” (DVD coverage from John here) was a sublime work of art, but “Road to Perdition” probably remains his best work to date. It’s an intriguing portfolio. But “Away We Go” has been a troubling speed bump for me.
I saw the film weeks ago and wanted to give it another go before committing to an opinion, but I don’t know. The desire to wallow in its stereotypes and weirdly skewed view of the world just hasn’t been there.
Variety’s Dennis Harvey has written a review that kind of sums up my feelings, for the most part. I might not have been as harsh, but I understand feeling the need to do so:
…the protags are essentially blank slates, despite the skill and charm Krasinski and Rudolph bring to the roles. It’s their job simply to represent “normal” against so many illustrations of bad parenting, worse marriages and damaged adulthood. But given they’re such harmlessly pleasant folk, why don’t they have any non-messed-up friends?
Because that would un-stack the deck in a script that needs to paint them as two lonely souls in a hostile world. But in positing normal as special, the pic requires caricaturing almost everyone else.
While handled by resourceful actors, the foibles of the supporting characters are less funny than they are forced and unpleasant. Janney and Gyllenhaal in particular play figures venomously conceived.
Meant to amp up the pic’s indie-quirky cred, the soundtrack, papered with lyrically trite soundalike cuts by Scottish singer-songwriter Alexi Murdoch, instead makes progress seem more meandering and monotonous. Other design/tech contributions are solid. Still, this alternately condescending and hazy material doesn’t trigger the kind of sharp aesthetic choices Mendes and collaborators made in response to past projects from “American Beauty” to “Revolutionary Road.”
When “The Wizard of Oz” was released in 1939, neither audiences or critics were particularly fond of the film and it died a rather quick death at the box office. When “Citizen Kane” was first released in theatres in 1941, audiences did not warm to it, and despite winning the New York Film Critics Circle award for best film, and nine Academy Award nominations, it too died a fast death.
In 1956, John Ford’s magnificent western “The Searchers” was not nominated for a single Academy Award, and though well liked at the time, no one seemed to think it was the work of art it is considered to be today. Even Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull” did not find an audience when first released, and though the film had many strong reviews, no one thought iof it on the level they do today.
It happens all the time. Great films get ignored by both audiences and film critics. And though it would be an obvious stretch to consider Sam Mendes’s “Revolutionary Road” in the above company, it is nevertheless a perfect recent example.
True enough, some critics (myself included) admired “Revolutionary Road” when it was released, but there were simply not enough of us to get the word out. Not even the casting of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winlet could help the film pull in audiences. Incredibly, the Hollywood Foriegn Press Association (their choices sometimes dubious at best) nominated the film for several awards and Kate Winslet rightfully won Best Actress in a Drama for her performance in the film. A couple of weeks later, collective jaws hit the floor when she was nominated for a leading actress Oscar, but for “The Reader,” a lesser performance and film.
Earlier this week I received my DVD of the film, which hits shelves on June 2, and so I sat down at once to watch it again. I made my way through the features, wanting to learn more and more about this astonishing film. And it is my sincere hope that “Revolutionary Road” will some day come to be recognized for the sublime work of art it truly is.
Same jaunty home-made aesthetic as the trailer. And hey, who knew Jonathan Franzen was playing romantic leads these days? Oh, wait.
Anyway, I like it, but I’m still having trouble squaring such imagery with the tag of “from director Sam Mendes.” Is this coming from a genuine place inside him, or did he think, “Hmm, I think I’ll try my hand at one of those gentle indie comedies that have done quite well lately?” Nothing wrong with that. Kudos for the change of pace, either way.
I’m excited for Mendes to seem him going this way creatively. And from “Revolutionary Road” to this, talk about an about face on the American romantic relationship:
I’ll dig into individual film reviews in due time. It’s been a slow start up here in Santa Barbara but the first two nights have been charming enough.
Rod Lurie’s “Nothing But the Truth” gets better and better each time I see it, particularly where Lurie’s work as a writer is concerned. Some beats are on the nose, perhaps too much for some people’s tastes, but I think he’s really developing as a filmmaker. And the flick went over like gangbusters with the crowd at the packed Arlington Theatre opening night gala yesterday. All the clever jokes found a home. The performances caught their stride with the viewers, it seemed, and everyone seemed to be in tune with the film’s tight rhythm. Most of all, the message seemed to settle (not surprising in a town this left of center), and that’s encouraging.
Jeff Bridges and James Cromwell were among the A-listers who came out to celebrate the film, which has been all but smothered by an untimely Yari Film Group bankruptcy. And the after-party at Paseo Nuevo up the street was slammed — too slammed. But, as always, upstairs in a V.I.P. setting is the place to be, and that’s where Lurie and his sharp college-bound son yukked it up with Bridges and “Truth” star Noah Wyle, among others.
Here’s my brief one-off on the film from back in September when it was playing Toronto.
Tonight, Kate Winslet was in town to accept the Montecito award, becoming the first person in the history of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival to be awarded twice. With that in mind, festival director Roger Durling took playful umbrage on stage with her remarks at the Golden Globe ceremony a week ago when she claimed she never wins anything.
Film critic and historian Leonard Maltin sat down with Winslet for a two-hour conversation through her career that I frankly expected to be a bore, but it was a lively and candid chat. Clips from her wide ranging portfolio were peppered in here and there, but the cutest moment came when the actress couldn’t stop chuckling at the “Titanic” clip. “It’s so funny because I don’t see me and Leo playing Jack and Rose,” she said. “It’s just me and Leo. What are we doing there? It’s so funny to me that we were in ‘Titanic,’ I don’t know how to explain it.”
GENTLE SPOILERS WITHIN — READ WITH CAUTION
Fear of change, fear of risk.
“If you don’t try anything, you can’t fail,” she tells him, striking at the heart of what has him so afraid of uprooting their family to Paris in the hopes of a better way of life. Frank Wheeler is terrified of change, but his wife April longs for it. She needs change to survive as a person, as a wife, believing, wrongly perhaps (perhaps not), that change will help her marriage and better define her place in it.
The characters in “Revolutionary Road” are in agonizing pain as they go about their daily lives, each trying to keep their marriage intact while also trying to live out their dreams. Deep down, they must know their dreams have to be sacrificed to a degree. Way down in their gut, they must know their dreams may never come true, and it is quietly destroying them.
Is “Revolutionary Road” a classic American film destined to be remembered for decades to come? Or is it merely an over-praised, depressing work that will be forgotten once it hits DVD, a bizarre blip on the careers of the creators? I tend to believe the former. It is a sublime work of art and a demanding piece of cinema that takes audiences on a difficult journey through a rocky relationship that, for me, resembles the young years of George and Martha in Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
• Tom O’Neil chats with Pete Hammond and Anthony Breznican about possible repeat victors from Sunday night’s Globe ceremony. [Gold Derby]
• Sasha Stone reminds that Kate Winslet is much more due in 2009 than Sigourney Weaver was in 1988. [Awards Daily]
• David Carr catches up with Danny Boyle at the Fox Searchlight Golden Globes afterparty. [The Carpetbagger]
• John Wayne and Heath Ledger make Steve Mason’s list of the best final performances ever. [/Film]
• Anita Singh reports the Oscar odds in Kate Winslet’s favor. [Daily Telegraph]
• Danny Boyle says he’ll never be a “proper director.” [The Guardian]
• Rebecca Ascher-Walsh gives a quick preview of the 2009 film year. [Los Angeles Times]
• Christopher Campbell goes with Sam Mendes for the lone director spot. Hmm… [Spout Blog]
In less than a decade, filmmaker Sam Mendes has established himself as one of the most intriguing directors of his generation. “Revolutionary Road,” his fourth film to date, hit theaters over last weekend. Regardless of its Oscar fate in the writing, directing and acting categories, the film seems poised to be a major player in the craft arenas, our central focus here at Tech Support.
I recently spoke to cinematographer Roger Deakins, production designer Kristi Zea, costume designer Albert Wolsky and film editor Tariq Anwar about their work on the film, a 1950s period piece featuring the on-screen reunion of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. All four artists are veterans, having had long (Deakins is the youngest at age 59) and successful (each has been nominated for an Oscar at least once, with Wolsky earning two statues to date) careers.
Each of the respective department heads commented on Mendes’s tendency to balance a well-defined vision with the necessity of cooperative discovery on the set. Deakins previously worked with Mendes on “Jarhead,” stepping into the shoes of late legend Conrad L. Hall, who lensed Mendes’s first two efforts. “He’s not happy until he gets what he wants,” he says of the director, “but he has an enormous respect for the collaborative process.”
Zea, meanwhile, says Mendes has a great “willingness and affection for collaboration, but has a precise vision and, because of that, the movie, in its entirety, is very controlled.”
Anwar received an Oscar nomination in 1999 for his work on Mendes’s “American Beauty.” This year marks their own reunion. He agrees with Zea’s reflection of the director’s balance of his own preparation and the input of his collaborators.
“In spite of being so sure-footed in his approach to film production, there is never a feeling of being excluded from the creative process,” he says, “or a sense that his material is too precious not to be rearranged or even deleted.”
• Bob Tourtellotte spends a minute with Sam Mendes. [Reuters]
• David Poland responds to the week’s “Watchmen” wowser. [The Hot Blog]
• Jeffrey Wells re-runs his thoughts on “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” [Hollywood Elsewhere]
• Joel Stein wants it understood that Jews still run Hollywood, m’kay? [Los Angeles Times]
• Lisa Marks responds. [The Guardian]
• Kim Voynar considers the adapting of a dramatic work from an inherently undramatic source with Edward Zwick’s “Defiance” in mind. [Movie City News]
• David Carr gives you a chance to cast your vote. [The Carpetbagger]