In Contention

Tag: Todd Haynes

  • Emmy goes to the movies

    We don’t normally pay much attention to the Emmy Awards, this being a site primarily devoted to the bigger screen. But when the recently unveiled nomination list contains such film heavyweights as Todd Haynes, Olivier Assayas and (twice) Martin Scorsese, it’d be remiss not to mention it — and the fact that the line between cinema and television is becoming an increasingly pliable one.

    Indeed, there’s still disagreement over which category one of yesterday’s nominees falls into. Assayas’ five-hour stunner “Carlos” may have been produced for French television, but it’s a bit difficult to define a vast work from one of world cinema’s leading auteurs, one that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and was theatrically released on the arthouse circuit, as merely a TV miniseries.

    Most haven’t — it won a slew of film critics’ awards last year (and indeed made my 2010 Top 10) before more finicky eligibility rules kept it out of the Oscar race (I know, I know, as if) and in the TV races at the Globe and SAG Awards.

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  • ‘Mildred Pierce’ trailer

    Okay, this isn’t theatrical coverage, but one of the projects I’ve had my eye on for some time is Todd Haynes’s remake/re-adaptation of “Mildred Pierce.” It has been developed as a mini-series and looks incredibly striking, if viewed through a much different prism than Michael Curtiz’s original film.  Check out new trailer for the event after the jump.

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  • Better and better

    Two weeks ago, Kris expressed his (and, well, pretty much everyone’s) excitement over Todd Haynes’s HBO reimagining of “Mildred Pierce,” with Kate Winslet stepping into Joan Crawford’s Oscar-winning shoes in the title role.

    Today, The Playlist passes on two further reasons to anticipate the project, namely Guy Pearce and Evan Rachel Wood. The latter, in particular, strikes me as a smart get — assuming, of course, that she’s filling the place of Ann Blyth. The longer I think about it, the more easily I can see Wood as Winslet’s daughter.

    Does this have to be on TV? I’d watch four hours of this in a theater, frankly.

  • ‘Mildred Pierce’: bring it on

    Mildred PierceThis is the first time I can remember a TV movie rising to the top of my “gotta see it” pile, but how can you not be excited for the forthcoming Todd Haynes four-hour “Mildred Pierce” HBO mini-series with Kate Winslet?  I forgot all about this project, which has been in the works for some time.

    The news is now official, however, as shooting is set to begin in April in New York.  I couldn’t be more excited.  Perhaps this, along with the Coens’ “True Grit” remake will help jump-start the engine on revisiting classic American genres.  “The Good German” was a failed experiment, and the Coens have been here before with “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” but have hope.

    Anyway, we can probably pave the way in 2011 for Kate Winslet’s awards run.  Talk about a collaboration that couldn’t be more right.  But I hope the filmmakers don’t feel locked-in to black and white.  I’d like to see Ed Lachman play with the darker hues of a color palette in what would be a grim but personality-ridden affair.

  • Disconnected Venice

    Peggy Guggenheim CollectionI had every intention last night of bringing you a report on a couple more films, but packed-out screenings and overlapping screening schedules put paid to that idea.

    Moreover, filing material online is proving something of a challenge, as the festival’s wi-fi access works in fits and starts, while my hotel has helpfully decided to dispense with their own such facilities altogether.

    The slate of evening screenings, meanwhile, was sacrificed in favor of other plans. Call it lack of cinematic dedication on my part, but would you turn down dinner on the rooftop of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, with Todd Haynes and John Sayles in attendance?

    I was lucky enough to be seated at an especially chatty table, with affable Australian critic (and former Edinburgh fest director) Shane Danielsen and Screen International’s Mike Goodridge leading the conversation.

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  • INTERVIEW: Michelle Williams

    Fate can have a bittersweet sense of timing, and Michelle Williams understands this better than most. A 2008 that started bleakly with the passing of Heath Ledger, her former partner and the father of her daughter, has ended as a professional banner year for the 28 year-old actress.

    A triptych of startling performances in a disparate array of projects — Sharon Maguire’s “Incendiary,” Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York,” and, most prominently, Kelly Reichardt’s “Wendy and Lucy” — have made this the year Williams consolidated the Oscar-nominated promise she demonstrated as a member of strong indie ensembles in the likes of “Brokeback Mountain” and “The Station Agent,” and emerged as a great, free-standing actor in her own right.

    Further accolades have rolled in, with her tricky, film-carrying performance in “Wendy and Lucy” earning her an Independent Spirit nod and a Best Actress award from the Toronto critics, while in the background, her late ex remains the year’s most talked-about thespian. When she sighs wistfully over the phone from New York and says that it’s been “a weird year,” that barely seems to cover it.

    It’s another curious reversal that the film largely responsible for making this such a big year for Williams truthfully couldn’t be any smaller. “Wendy and Lucy” is a brilliant, elegiac piece of Americana that easily ranks among the year’s finest films. The story of a young, broke drifter, Wendy, whose already fragile existence collapses when she is separated from her best friend Lucy, a yellow-gold mongrel, it inauspiciously came her way as a short story (“Train Choir,” by co-scripter Jon Raymond) with a brief note attached — the lean script still uncompleted.

    “Todd Haynes recommended it to me,” she says, referring to the iconoclastic auteur who directed her in last year’s “I’m Not There.” “He’s a mutual friend of mine and Kelly’s, and he thought we’d be a good fit. So I read it — I mean, I’d be stupid not to trust the judgment of someone like Todd.”

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