In Contention

Tag: The Guard

  • Mark Harris joins the discussion with fringe lead actor picks

    Two years ago author and journalist Mark Harris wrote what I think is one of the most salient Oscar season observances ever squeezed out of this unnecessary corner of the web. I always look to him for one of the most above-the-fray, but smart and informed, perspectives on a given season. And this piece over at Grantland is a great example, too.

    He reduces these early days of the awards season to the echo-chamber they’ve come to represent. And I don’t count myself out of the insanity he cuts everything down to with this precise paragraph:

    If you’re like most moviegoers, or most Academy voters, you don’t attend any of these festivals. So “buzz” is really code for a two-way conversation conducted between a handful of awards handicappers eager to anoint or dismiss potential contenders, and a handful of studio publicists and independent firms who are listening for the dog-whistle frequency that tells them that somebody thinks their movie might be in the running.

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  • Hey Academy, why not Brendan Gleeson?

    For a series of not-entirely-connected reasons, a little Irish indie called “The Guard” has been on my mind today. For starters, a reader named Stephen asked me on Twitter when it would reach US theaters — only for me to discover that it’s been in limited release there for several weeks already. (UK audiences can see it on Friday.) Then, coincidentally enough, my brief review of the film for Heat magazine hit shelves today; it was already on my mind, however, thanks to a tweet this morning by Telegraph critic Tim Robey:

    A proper Brendan Gleeson awards push needs to happen for The Guard. He’s so often the bridesmaid, disturbing image though that may be.

    I’m not one to ignore a hat-trick of signs, however tenuous, pointing to a particular film — particularly one I saw over six months ago and could otherwise have stored on the dusty top shelves of my memory. Someone, somewhere, on high clearly wants me to blog about “The Guard” today; more to the point, I do, because I couldn’t agree more with Tim’s order.

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  • BERLIN: ‘Sleeping Sickness,’ ‘The Future,’ ‘The Guard’

    Sorry there was no Berlinale dispatch yesterday. It was my birthday, and after “celebrating” it with a triple-bill of variously despairing Competition entries — finishing with “The Turin Horse,” Béla Tarr’s impressive 146-minute ode to blizzards, boiled potatoes and dying — more traditional festivities were in order, beginning with several stiff drinks. There’s nothing like a film festival to infuse a birthday with bleaker-than-usual ruminations on mortality.

    After a dawdling start, however, the Competition really kicked into gear yesterday with a pair of substantial auteur works that will likely remain the prime topic of critical conversation for the duration of the festival: the aforementioned Tarr opus and Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s “Nader and Simin, A Separation,” now the runaway favorite for the Golden Bear for reasons both artistic and political.

    I’ll discuss both these films in due course, but neither one has quite displaced an earlier (and more critically divisive) Competition title from the top of my personal best-of-the-fest list — and indeed, if anything does in the next three days, I’ll be a very happy (and surprised) man. That title would be German director Ulrich Köhler’s third feature “Sleeping Sickness” (****), an arrestingly structured and humidly atmospheric study of immigrant living and integration in west Africa that would make a valuable companion piece to Claire Denis’s more pristine “White Material,” but also warrants discussion on its own merits.

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