• 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]
• Jeffrey Wells attempts to sum up the season’s beginnings with his own nuggets of insight regarding Venice and Telluride. [Hollywood Elsewhere]
• Kelly Reichardt compares “Meek’s Cutoff” to the Iraq War. [The Hollywood Reporter]
• Reports of paramedics assisting folks stricken by the intensity of “127 Hours.” (Though I’ve heard it was just altitude sickness.) [Thompson on Hollywood]
This afternoon I received a copy of Posy Simmonds’s graphic novel “Tamara Drewe,” which has been adapted as a film by director Stephen Frears. A nice bit of promotion, though I must admit, this has been way off my radar all year. Guy was no fan at all when he saw it at Cannes, but it’s set to hit the festival circuit in the coming weeks. The trailer just launched via Yahoo! Movies. Check it out by clicking the image below or watch the embed on the jump.
This trailer has been hanging around for a few days, but since Stephen Frears’s countryside romp was recently tapped for the Toronto Film Festival, it seems appropriate to feature it now. I reviewed the film out of Cannes and found it singularly strained and irritating — the kind of thing described as “quintessentially English” by those who think “That’s Amore” quintessentially Italian. Nonetheless, it found a number of credible admirers on the Croisette, and will likely continue to do so in Toronto. See what you think. Click on the image below to check it out at Momentum Pictures, or watch the embed after the cut.
Sadly, this is looking like a second consecutive day of minimal film viewing — thanks to the scheduling of my morning roundtable interview with the “Blue Valentine” team of Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams and director Derek Cianfrance, I had to forgo this morning’s screening of Lee Chang-dong’s “Poetry,” of which I have rather high expectations — I hope to catch the repeat tomorrow.
Meanwhile, the interviews ran late enough to ensure I missed today’s hottest ticket: Olivier Assayas’s five-and-a-half hour “Carlos.” On the one hand, I’m obviously disappointed. On the other, 330 minutes is a pretty lavish gift of time, and it’s thanks to that that I’m able to write this very piece.
So, to every cloud a silver lining and all that — and there are a lot of clouds doing the rounds on this uncharacteristically damp and chilly day in Cannes. Perhaps the sun saw that monk-massacre movie everyone’s raving about, and couldn’t see the point in continuing.
On with the review catch-up.
Okay, before you ask, “The Tree of Life” is reportedly not ready — though the Cannes selection has apparently seen a cut, so never say never. Four slots in the competition lineup have yet to be filled.
That aside, many of the expected names are present and correct, including former Cannes champs Leigh, Kiarostami, Mikhalkov, Tavernier, Weerasethakul and González Iñárritu. (Beefing up the veteran auteur quotient, Jean-Luc Godard shows up in the very appetizing Un Certain Regard strand, as does 101 year-old Manoel de Oliveira.)
On paper — which is all we have at the moment, after all — it’s the first two of the aforementioned directors that I’m most excited to see in competition: “Another Year” will mark Leigh’s first trip to Croisette since the undervalued “All or Nothing” in 2002, and boasts the almost unfeasibly Leigh-ian cast of Imelda Staunton, Jim Broadbent, Phil Davis and Lesley Manville.
Meanwhile, Kiarostami’s “Certified Copy” — a romantic drama starring Juliette Binoche, and the director’s first film to be shot outside his native Iran — has had me curious for the better part of two years now. I sensed this might be afoot when Binoche was revealed as the official face of this year’s festival.
(More thoughts, and a complete list of films in the official selection, after the cut.)
• If you’re dismissing the Oscar potential of “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” Gregory Ellwood says, “Not so fast.” [Awards Campaign]
• Meryl Streep on why Hollywood’s men don’t trust women. [The Times]
• Betsy Sharkey sits down with “Precious” director Lee Daniels. [The Envelope]
• Rachel Abramowitz catches up with Johnny Depp on the “Public Enemies” publicity trail. [Los Angeles Times]
• Helen O’Hara remembers Michael Jackson’s movie moments. [Empire]
• Jenni Miller talks to “Cheri” director Stephen Frears. [Cinematical]
• Guillermo DelToro’s credo. [The Independent]
• “Do the Right Thing” still asks burning questions. [Washingotn Post]
• Hey, remember Julia Ormond? [New York Daily News]
• David Cairns talks to “Pontypool” director Bruce Macdonald. [The Autuers’ Notebook]
As you know, despite a mixed critical reception over here in the UK, I was quite taken with Stephen Frears’ “Chéri,” a tarter-than-expected Belle Epoque romance that showcases the director’s best work in nine years, and Michelle Pfeiffer’s best work in … well, longer than that.
I’m not sure how the film, a rather subtle specialty item, will play on its American release in a month’s time, but Miramax clearly has hopes for it, and have launched this rather attractive official website to make their case. (They appear to have dispensed with the accent aigu, perhaps to prevent anyone mistaking it for a foreign-language effort.)
The site features the standard promotional bumf, but does a good job of showing off the film’s lavish technical credits, particularly Consolata Boyle’s costumes and Alexandre Desplat’s lovely score, which is actually more delicate than the selected excerpt here suggests. Both are, I think, very much in the Oscar mix, while Pfeiffer’s radiant performance may need to find more critical champions Stateside to sustain momentum.
• AFI launches its own YouTube channel. [YouTube]
• Robin Sanders reports on the Stephen Frears event from Cannes. [indieWIRE]
• The wars continue: Patrick Goldstein lays into Peter Bart (and Variety) once again for being soft on the industry. [The Big Picture]
• Lionsgate launches an impressive new website for festival Sensation “Precious.” [WeAreAllPrecious.com]
• Chris Lee talks to “The Girlfriend Experience” star Sasha Grey. [Los Angeles Times]
• Kim Voynar, meanwhile, dissects Grey’s character and wonders whether the film objectifies women. [Movie City News]
• The publicity floodgates open for “Terminator Salvation,” starting with Irina Aleksander’s interview with the film’s rookie producers. [New York Daily News]
• Todd Gilchrist, meanwhile, corners director McG. [Cinematical]
• And finally, headline of the day, from John Anderson’s review of the film: “Hasta La Levity, Baby.” [Washington Post]
• Aha, headline of the day #2: “Tarantino ‘Basterd’-izes Cannes. Such sweet truth. [USA Today]
My first thought on leaving the theatre after watching Stephen Frears’ crisp, elegantly turned new effort is that it is, in many ways, a consummate Frears film. My second thought, however, ran counter to the first: it has, over the years, become increasingly difficult to define what “a Stephen Frears film” might be.
We are talking about a filmmaker, after all, who deals in polarities, following up the broad music-hall frivolity of the ghastly “Mrs Henderson Presents” with the austere docu-realism of “The Queen,” or a glib studio bauble like “Accidental Hero” with the jagged domestic comedy of “The Snapper.”
The uncharitable could call Frears something of a dilettante, subsuming his own long-term artistic preoccupations beneath a veneer of versatile professionalism. That, however, would be to miss the keen emotional detail and bone-dry irony that lace themselves through all of Frears’ best work.
Whether he finds them in a Chicago record store or an 18th century French chateau, Frears dissects his characters with an amused, academic precision that inevitably reveals the Oxbridge intellectual he is – and it’s a sensibility that meshes beautifully with the prose of Colette, who in 1920, wrote “Chéri” in much the same tartly tragic register that Frears and screenwriter Christopher Hampton tell it. (I discussed the novel in greater depth here.)
Contrary to the shrill period rom-com that the trailer appears to be pitching it as, “Chéri” remains a cutting, economic study of love thwarted by the twinned obstacles of aging and social expectation. Painstakingly mapping the end of the affair between the eponymous 25 year-old playboy (Rupert Friend) and Léa (Michelle Pfeiffer), the world-weary courtesan twice his age, it becomes something of a dual coming-of-age story, as the lovers are forced to accept the indignities of adulthood and middle age, respectively.
Merely casual acquaintances of French literature will likely associate the name Colette with her short story “Gigi” – or rather, the flouncy musical film adaptation thereof that swept the board at the 1958 Academy Awards. A sunny, sanitized interpretation of an intricate study in sexual politics, it captured the author’s sensibility in its lavish set-dressing, but little else.
I doubt 1950’s Hollywood would have known where to begin with “Chéri,” a darker portrait of the louche demimonde of Parisian courtesans – and we are close to finding out if they do even now. Certainly, those who approach the novel with the jolly peals of laughter from the meringue-light trailer for Stephen Frears’ upcoming film still ringing in their ears, may be taken off-guard by the elegiac, often cruel comedy of manners that awaits them.
Though “Chéri” is a slender, subtle volume, it’s easy to see what drew Frears and screenwriter Christopher Hampton to the material. Much like their previous collaboration, 1988’s “Dangerous Liaisons” (and other Hampton works such as “Atonement” and “Total Eclipse”), this is a story of sexual awakening gone awry — which is not to say that the novel lacks for romance. Amid the rueful cynicism lies a rather tender love story between two people who only realize they are in love a full six years into their relationship.
The affair between Fred, an aimless 25 year-old dandy known to all by his family nickname Chéri, and Léa, a wealthy courtesan twice his age, is introduced in the novel as a pragmatic transaction: the beautiful yet increasingly insecure Léa feeds vicariously off her lover’s youth, offering material rewards and a sexual (if not sentimental) education in exchange.
As such, “Chéri” is truly a coming of age story, a gender-reversed “Pygmalion” even, in which an older, more worldly woman grooms a boy for marriage, before releasing him into gentlemanly society. The twist comes when, the ink barely dry on the certificate of his marriage to sweet, shy debutante Edmée, Chéri discovers that carnal and sensual affections are not merely transferrable between different women. Léa, meanwhile, having undertaken this schooling for multiple men in her career and living by the philosophy that “being disinterested is its own reward,” realizes that she’s more emotionally invested in Chéri’s maturation than she knew at the time.
I wrote about this trailer after being surprised by it at the cinema almost two weeks ago. Now it’s finally appeared online, you can see for yourselves. I’m still a little uncertain of the brittle, faintly campy comic tone present here — Colette’s novella (which I’ll get into when our Page to Screen series begins) is a rather more delicate, melancholy animal. But it looks like a classy outing all round. We’ll see.
In a recent interview, Michael Sheen bristles at being labelled an impressionist. Understandably so — he’s a fine actor. However, the answer may be to stop doing quite so many biopics of figures from recent British history: so far, we’ve had Tony Blair (twice), David Frost, Kenneth Williams and now Brian Clough, the controversial British football manager whose brief, ill-fated attempt at heading up Leeds United in 1974 is the subject of “The Damned United,” which drops in the UK on March 27.
Originally developed with Stephen Frears but now helmed by TV journeyman Tom Hooper (“John Adams”), the film also represents yet another dip into fact-oriented waters for writer Peter Morgan — another talented man who I’d like to see try his hand at something different. The trailer below looks jaunty and entertaining enough (though I don’t see the heavily football-steeped story resonating much across the pond), but am I the only one feeling a bit of déjà vu?
I can’t remember the last time I first laid eyes on a trailer for a prestige film in the cinema rather than on a computer screen. I kind of miss it — as a kid, the unexpectedness of such sightings, combined with the darkness of the theatre, made trailers something of an event for me.
So it was this afternoon when, sitting in my local London multiplex, I was taken off-guard by the trailer for Stephen Frears’ “Chéri” — which, to my knowledge, hasn’t surfaced online yet. Hoping to share it with you all once I got home, a thorough scouring of the internet proved fruitless. What gives?
As for the trailer itself, it surprised me in more ways than one. The film appears more openly comic than I was expecting, with a shrill tone that recalled “Mrs Henderson Presents” more than “Dangerous Liaisons” on the Frears scale. Of course, as we saw with “Happy-Go-Lucky,” Miramax isn’t averse to painting subtler material with a broad marketer’s brush, so we’ll see.
Anyway, even with the film’s UK release set back to early May, the trailer is bound to appear online soon. Watch this space.
If it isn’t quite the unanimous chorus of approval one might have hoped for, there’s still enough praise for Stephen Frears’ latest film “Chéri,” which premiered in Berlin last night, to mark it as a potential 2009 contender in several areas — among them, Best Actress for Michelle Pfeiffer’s much-anticipated return to dramatic roles. (Thanks, of course, to the ever-diligent Nat Rogers for the heads-up.)
The Hollywood Reporter’s Kirk Honeycutt is absolutely besotted with the film, gushing that there is “no false moment or off-key note” in the entire production:
Stephen Frears never makes the same movie twice. What he does do though is make thoroughly professional and immensely entertaining stories that pay particular attention to characters, their flaws, emotions and deepest desires. In “Cheri,” he has another dandy. Whether it will travel as far as his last film, “The Queen,” is hard to say, but with a radiant Michelle Pfeiffer as his heroine, “Cheri” could well be another breakout hit.
The chemistry between Pfeiffer and (Rupert) Friend is positively combustible. One feels the hunger in each, the rising physical passion and emotional vulnerability in two people who, if asked, would scorn love as a human weakness. The film is in English, of course, but it can’t escape a certain Frenchness: Those who would mock love are done in by love.
There is also, predictably, much praise lavished on the film’s scrumptious-looking tech credits, with top honours going to Alexandre Desplat’s “nostalgic, romantic, melancholy score.”
Several days into the Berlin Festival, it remains a rather quiet affair from the outside. A couple of starry titles have been thrown to the wolves, while we’re still awaiting news of a breakout film or performance along the lines of “Happy-Go-Lucky” last year.
However, tonight’s screening will bring the first word on Stephen Frears’ eagerly anticipated “Chéri,” which has been prompting awards talk since mid-2008. (Nat Rogers, for one, idly muses on the Oscar chances of the film’s stars, Michelle Pfeiffer and Kathy Bates, here.)
As for two of the films that have already been rather harshly received across the board, I was interested to hear a voice of positive dissent from one of my favourite critics, as Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek finds much to like in both Tom Tykwer’s “The International” and Lukas Moodysson’s “Mammoth.” In particular, she argues that the former, a “strange and beautifully made thriller,” may be a victim of an overt anti-Hollywood sentiment among festival critics:
The movie I saw and loved felt “Hollywood” to me only in the best sense: Tykwer obviously had some money to work with here, and he spent some of it on the kind of elaborate, elegantly constructed set pieces that few mainstream directors know how to do anymore. (Wait until you see what he does with the Guggenheim Museum.) What’s more, “The International” is a leisurely thriller, which means it’s automatically a contradiction in terms: It can be called too slick, too boring, too “unlike anything else out there” and too “just like everything else out there” all at once. Those very conflicts are exactly what make it interesting.
Over the last several years, Alexandre Desplat has gone from being a relatively unknown (in the United States anyway) French composer to emerging as one of the most acclaimed and sought after commodities in the business today. Receiving his second Oscar nomination this year for “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” Desplat has continued to cement his place at the top of his field.
Despite the acclaim, however, he remains very close to his home in European cinema. “I have tried to keep as much of a relationship as I can with my French directors,” he says. “I always try to go to do two or three French movies a year. That’s a lot but I don’t want to lose that.”
While there are certainly exceptions, there is definitely a difference in the manner that French and American filmmakers approach their work, Desplat says. Being forced to think differently because of different filmmaking styles helps his creative resources. “It feeds me,” he says.
David Fincher’s “Button” posed unique challenges for Desplat. “It doesn’t have a linear storytelling,” he says. “It’s a complex puzzle and I’d ask myself, ‘How do you deal with this in music and deal with the main character when he is a passive character?’ It’s not easy to capture in music.”
Describing the film as a “sound epic,” Desplat notes that the music had to be strong without being overly dramatic or imposing. It was a crucial demand from Fincher that Desplat says he had to struggle with.
The composer has worked with some of the world’s top directors in recent years – Ang Lee, Stephen Frears, Jacques Audiard — but despite Fincher’s unique perspective in the wake of those talent helmers, Desplat says certain professional similarities smoothed the journey.
“He has an amazing quality as a collaborator,” Desplat says. “He’s very demanding but so am I so that’s fine. He’s very detailed but so am I, so that’s also fine. He wants his people to bring their own world, talents and colors into the film. I think that’s the sign of a great director. All the great directors I’ve worked with know that it is crucial that your creative energy is opened and not just restrained.”