In Contention

Tag: Todd Solondz

  • VENICE: ‘Dark Horse,’ ‘Chicken With Plums,’ ‘Sal’

    (Review of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” landing later this morning. Hang tight.)

    Todd Solondz has forged a loyal friendship with the Venice Film Festival across the second half of his career: all three of his last features have premiered here. Their mutual devotion somewhat surprises me, given that both Solondz screenings I’ve now attended on the Lido have seemingly been received with a measure of polite confusion by the home crowd, like an awkward cocktail party guest joining in the laughter at a joke he didn’t quite hear. Perhaps other high-end festivals simply lost their taste for his casual misanthropy; after the 1998 career peak of “Happiness,” most arthouse audiences seemed to do the same.

    They could potentially be lured back by “Dark Horse” (***), a more streamlined character comedy that, while neither as probing nor as acidly funny as 2009’s “Life During Wartime,” might just represent the warmest film Solondz is capable of making.

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  • VENICE: Follow the Lido — a festival preview

    “Why Venice and not Toronto?” a colleague asked when I mentioned I was heading to the Lido for the world’s oldest film festival for the third straight year. Given the North American bent of this site, it was a fair question, but also one I found easy to answer — and not just for the dully practical reason of relative airfare expense.

    Toronto may have become the bigger and, depending on your field of interest, more influential festival (certainly so if you’re in the Oscar-watching business). But with its abundance of pre-premiered films and no juried competition, it’ll never have the grandeur or ever-so-slightly scuffed glamor of the Venice event, with its beachside location, soaring marble delegate halls and saturated aroma of overpriced espresso — not to mention the artsier exclusivity of its film programming, a once hit-and-miss virtue that scored a bulls-eye with a 2010 lineup that beat last year’s Cannes for range, relevance and vitality.

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  • Venice competition includes Polanski, Cronenberg, Alfredson

    These days, so much media speculation precedes the announcement of any major festival lineup that the eventual unveiling comes almost as an anti-climax — or at least it would do if the long-expected films weren’t so appetizing in the first place. As was the case with the Toronto lineup on Tuesday, the just-revealed programme for this year’s Venice Film Festival is as heavy on highlights as it is light on surprises, and that’s good enough for this Lido-bound journo.

    In recent years, as Berlin has receded, Venice has grown into an increasingly bolshy competitor to Cannes, taking a slightly riskier, younger approach to Competition programming while nabbing enough sexy, big-name auteur titles to draw the headlines. It’s a balance that has paid off handsomely in recent years: “The Hurt Locker,” “Brokeback Mountain,” “Black Swan,” “I Am Love” and “A Single Man” all debuted in Venice before going on to greater success elsewhere.

    This year’s Competition lineup would appear to continue the pattern: for every long-established auteur in line for the Golden Lion, there’s at least one buzzy up-and-comer arriving on the back of a breakthrough hit.

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  • ‘Life During Wartime’ trailer and poster

    Todd Solondz’s loose, recast sequel to “Happiness” was, for me, one of the pleasant surprises of last autumn’s festival circuit — more focused and astringently funny than his last two features, it’s also about as humane a work as the now middle-aged enfant terrible is capable of conceiving. Fans of all actors in the formidable ensemble will be duly rewarded: Ciaran Hinds is my pick, but Allison Janney turns in the sharpest performance of her career.

    This British trailer gives a reasonable idea of what to expect: the film is too mannered and sour to win many new converts, but Solondz acolytes should get in line. The UK release is next month; IFC is making Americans wait until the summer. My review from last year’s Venice fest here. Great poster after the cut.

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  • 9/16 Web Round-up

    (from left) Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze in Point Break• Keanu Reeves on Patrick Swayze: “He was a beautiful person, an artist.” [People]

    • Peter Bart salutes John Calley for landing an honorary Oscar but highlights the producer’s roller coaster career. [BF Deal Memo]

    • Peter Knegt talks to the beautiful Anna Kendrick about butterflies going into the “Up in the Air” shoot. [indieWIRE]

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  • ‘Lebanon’ wins Venice’s Golden Lion

    Venice Film FestivalGuy will comment further on these winners later, but for now, just the facts:

    INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION JURY

    Golden Lion: “Lebanon” (Samuel Maoz)
    Silver Lion (Best Director): “Women Without Men” (Shirin Neshat)
    Grand Jury Prize: “Soul Kitchen” (Fatih Akin)
    Best Actor: Colin Firth, “A Single Man”
    Best Actress: Ksenia Rappoport, “The Double Hour”
    Marcello Mastroianni Prize for Young Performer: Jasmine Trinca, “The Big Dream”
    Best Screenplay: Todd Solondz, “Life During Wartime”
    Technical Contribution for Set Design: Sylvie Olive, “Mr. Nobody”

    OTHER JURIES

    Luigi De Laurentiss Lion of the Future: “Engkwentro”
    Venice Horizons Documentary: “1428” (Du Haibin)
    Venice Horizons Special Mention: “The Man’s Woman and Other Stories” (Amt Dutta)

  • 9/11 Web Round-up

    Meryl Streep• 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]

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  • Press conference revelation of the day

    Brace yourselves, folks … here’s something you never saw coming. In this afternoon’s press conference for her new film “I Am Love” (reviewed here), Tilda Swinton stated that one of the films that most inspires her is Nicolas Roeg’s “The Man Who Fell to Earth.” I mean, who saw that one coming?

    David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to EarthTilda Swinton

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  • VENICE: ‘The Road,’ ‘Life During Wartime,’ ‘Great Directors’

    Ciaran Hinds in Life During WartimeSorry to duck out there for the whole morning — a combination of wireless misbehavior and delayed screenings has played havoc with my planned writing time. As a festival, Venice has multiple charms, but smooth organization is not among them.

    This morning’s glitch-bedeviled  screening of Todd Solondz’s “Life During Wartime” is a case in point: after starting 20 minutes late (leaving journalists waiting outside in sunstroke-inducing heat), the projector broke down during the opening credits. A second quarter-hour delay followed,  only for the film to restart with severely mistimed Italian subtitles — the vocal protests from Italian audience members drowning out the dialogue in the film’s opening scenes. Oh, well.

    Anyway, enough kvetching and on to the movies.

    Kris will have a more detailed take on “The Road” (**1/2) up later today, but given that it’s one of the Lido’s biggest drawcards, I feel it necessary to take a moment to discuss the film, which seems to have left several journalists I’ve spoken to disappointed, or at least mildly befuddled — and with good reason.

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  • The five Venice titles I’m most curious to see

    Jared Leto in Mr. NobodyAt the crack of dawn, I board a flight to Italy — so this time tomorrow, if all goes well, I’ll be writing to you from the water-riven city of Venice after having attended a festival screening of John Hillcoat’s “The Road.” It’s both my first visit to the city and my first taste of one of the major film festivals, so it should be an exciting few days all round.

    Venice may lag slightly behind Cannes in terms of glamor and auteur attractions, but it’s arguably the European festival that feeds most into the awards season to come: as recent Cannes winners have remained largely arthouse-bound, Venice has birthed several crossover successes that went on to factor to varying degrees in the race: in recent years, “Brokeback Mountain,” “The Queen,” “Atonement” and “The Wrestler,” among others, saw their buzz begin on the Lido.

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  • Venice lineup includes ‘The Road,’ ‘Capitalism: A Love Story’

    Venice Film Festival(UPDATE: For whatever reason, my initial source failed to mention that George A. Romero’s latest zombie opus, “Survival of the Dead,” is also in competition.)

    In years past, the Venice Film Festival has unveiled several titles that went on to figure significantly in the awards season ahead — “Brokeback Mountain,”The Queen,” “Far From Heaven” and “Vera Drake” all began their journeys with major wins on the Venetian Lido. Last year alone gifted us with “The Wrestler,” “Rachel Getting Married” and this summer’s hot property, “The Hurt Locker.”

    However, looking down the list of list of titles in competition at this year’s fest, it’s hard to tell if there are any selections that could go a similar distance.

    As usual for the festival, it’s a Euro-loaded menu — and a tasty one at that, featuring new offerings from the likes of Claire Denis, Fatih Akin and Jacques Rivette — while, as with Cannes this year, the U.S. contingent is on the small side. (There is, incidentally, one “surprise film” film in competition, so the speculation is not yet over.)

    Now is as good a time as any to reveal that I have an invested interest in the lineup, as I’m attending the festival for the first time, so we’ll be bringing you all the Venice news and reviews first-hand for a change.

    (More details, and a full list of films in competition, after the cut.)

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  • John Updike (1932-2009)

    This may be a film site, but I cannot let the passing of John Updike go without comment. While he contributed little directly to the artform — and the two feature-length attempts at bringing his work to the screen were, to say the least, regrettable — but it’s impossible to underestimate his level of influence across media.

    He may not have been the very first writer to appreciate suburban America for the seethingly dramatic storytelling space that it is, to investigate its paradoxical balance of suffocating community spirit and equally oppressive loneliness, but he became indisputably its most precise and prolific chronicler — while in his “Rabbit” quartet, he created arguably the most complete, searching study of shifting American social mores in the last half-century. Contemporary writers such as Tom Perrotta and Jonathan Franzen are as indebted to his legacy as filmmakers like Todd Solondz or Alexander Payne.

    We all have our heroes, and Updike is mine. In a way, it’s pointless writing obituaries for figures like him — though the Guardian takes an excellent stab — because his own work speaks more eloquently for itself than anyone else can. Indeed, it was Updike himself who, in the foreword to his essential 2003 “Early Stories” compilation (buy it if you don’t yet have it), best described his achievement as a writer:

    After I gave up cigarettes, I smoked nickel cigarillos to allay my nervousness at the majesty of my calling and the intricacy of my craft; the empty boxes, with their comforting image of another writer, Robert Burns, piled up. Not only were the boxes useful for storing little things like foreign coins and cufflinks, but the caustic aura of cigars discouraged visitors. I felt that I was packaging something as delicately pervasive as smoke, one box after another, in that room, where my only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me — to give the mundane its beautiful due.

  • What the… ?

    Insane pre-production news for the day: Charlotte Rampling and Paris Hilton are to appear in the same film. I could make some crack about moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, but… oh wait, I already did.

    If that tidbit isn’t enough to blow your mind, let me put it in context — they have been added to the cast of the new film from Todd Solondz, which is to be a “part-sequel, part-variation” to his boundary-pushing 1998 masterpiece “Happiness.” Also lined up for the ensemble are Allison Janney, Michael Kenneth Williams and Paul Reubens, among others.

    The very idea of it all makes my head swim. I’ve always thought Paris Hilton was destined for an ironic moment of arthouse lunacy some point in her career — a la Shania Twain in “I Heart Huckabees” or, well, the entire cast of “Southland Tales.” This looks like it. Meanwhile, the thought of Rampling and Solondz joining their very intense forces makes me positively tingly.

    Can this year be over already? 2009 sounds so much more exciting.