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?
Is any other actor today building as diverse a filmography as Tilda Swinton? After serving studio time last year in the one-two shot of “Burn After Button,” this year has seen hear frighten off the purple-rinsed Academy crowd that seemingly first noticed her in “Michael Clayton” with a defiant return to arthouse “difficulty” in “Julia” and “The Limits of Control.”
Not content with that, it seems, she now shows off her linguistic skills with the wholly Italian-language lead in Luca Guadagnino’s extravagant family melodrama “I Am Love” — handily announcing herself as the film’s sole raison d’être in the first place. If the subtitles don’t unnerve her newfound mainstream following, the loving close-ups of her nipples just might. Good on her.
Coincidentally enough, it’s been a morning of language-flipping crossover stars, as Charlotte Gainsbourg’s first post-“Antichrist” venture unspooled in the shape of Patrice Chéreau’s Competition entry “Persecution,” a Paris-set romantic drama that soothes the wounds inflicted upon the actress by Lars Von Trier, if not to terribly exciting effect. Short reviews after the jump.
Another sweltering day on the Lido, though rainclouds are forming and things look set to break any moment now. Hopefully a change in climate will also bring about an upswing in the collective quality of films on display, as the first three days have served up a few well-liked titles, several misfires and nothing yet resembling a sensation.
At this stage, the Competition title with the most buzz appears to be Todd Solondz’s “Life During Wartime,” which I took a shine to yesterday — though others I spoke to seemed less enthusiastic. However, as the reviews pour in, the film looks more and more like a success: Screen International editor Mike Goodridge is a fan, while Todd McCarthy has labeled it the director’s best work yet.
Bookending a morning that began with the first sighting of “The Bad Lieutenant,” this evening opened the not-that-well-guarded secret of the Competition’s surprise film — and, as luck (or otherwise) would have it, it turned out to be a second helping of Herzog.
“My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?” (*)
It feels odd, and slightly improper, to beat up on Werner Herzog twice in one day, but sadly, the David Lynch-produced “My Son, My Son” leaves me very little choice.
Venice Film Festival
Keen students of the MTV Movie Awards will be aware that the ceremony added a highly necessary and prestigious award to their lineup for “Best WTF Moment.” I like to imagine that Werner Herzog is aware of this, as his new film “The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans” (that “The” is no typo – that’s how the title appears onscreen) appears to have been carefully tailored to fill every nominee slot in that category next year.
An iguana bursts into a bluesy rendition of Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Release Me!” Nicolas Cage shares his lucky crack pipe! A man’s soul breakdances after its owner is fatally shot! Iguanas! Nicolas Cage cuts off an octogenarian woman’s oxygen supply! More freaky shit involving iguanas!
It’s been many years since Herzog’s narrative features exuded the sure-footed directorial aplomb of his documentaries, but there is, somewhat surprisingly, a fairly clear artistic objective behind “The Bad Lieutenant”: to make a cult film, the kind of midnight movie treasured by trash geeks, stoners and the occasional leftfield auteurist alike.
I 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.
Sorry 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.
Greetings from the cavernous, marble-clad press room of the Venice Film Festival. After a more-frenzied-than-average day’s travelling (thanks to a domino set of transport delays resulting in the kind of mad airport dash usually reserved for rom-com heroes only), I have arrived in Venice in more or less one piece — and if ever a city was designed to melt away the stresses of a rough transit, it’s this one.
Even in sticky September heat, it’s as unremittingly, broodingly lovely as every postcard, photograph or film scene has ever suggested — as I navigated the shady labyrinth of criss-crossing bridges and canals to my hotel, it was hard not to expect a ghostly tyke in red to pop up a few paces ahead. Or Dirk Bogarde in a Panama hat. At least Helena Bonham-Carter in a carnival mask. But no. Such are the mild letdowns of initially meeting cities through the movies.
At 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.
John Lasseter certainly gives good interview. We linked back in June to a candid and very thorough piece in which the Pixar maven talked through his up-and-down (and up again) history with Disney. Now Variety carries a worthwhile profile of the man, in anticipation of the lifetime-achievement Golden Lion he is due to receive at the Venice Film Festival next week.
In it, he reveals the supposed secret behind Pixar’s unbroken run of hits (not to mention their enviable critical track record) to be a collaborative “creative brain trust,” whereby an in-progress project is screened every three months, then critiqued and workshopped by Lasseter and the studio’s leading creatives.
It’s a process designed to nip potential story problems in the bud, while Lasseter and his collaborators would have you believe that such problems emerge more often than not:
“We fail a lot,” admits “Toy Story 3” director Lee Unkrich. “We just don’t fail by the time the movie comes out. John would be the first to tell you that every movie we’ve made has been at one point the biggest piece of garbage we’ve ever worked on.”
I had the pleasure of interviewing Mark Boal, the celebrated journalist and screenwriter of “The Hurt Locker,” over a beer in London last week, and was glad to find him as alert and interesting a subject as the film he wrote. (The interview will crop up on these pages soon, by the way.)
So as awards season unfolds over the coming months, I’ll be cheering every bit of recognition that comes his way. And the first such citation, neatly enough, comes at the place where “The Hurt Locker” made its first appearance nearly a year ago: the Venice Film Festival.
Variety reports that Boal has been shortlisted for the Gucci Group Award, a prize presented during the festival since 2006 to honor outstanding cinematic achievement by individuals from outside the world of film. Should he win, he’ll be in excellent company: previous recipients include Julian Schnabel (for “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”) and Steve McQueen (“Hunger”).
We may be celebrating the 70th birthday of “The Wizard of Oz” today, but the Venice Film Festival has decided to start the party early for another major film-related milestone coming up next year: the 100-year anniversary of Akira Kurosawa’s birth.
I’m sure we can expect more retrospectives of the great man’s work when the day rolls around on March 23, 2010, but since Venice has something of a history with the filmmaker (“Rashomon” winning the Golden Lion in 1951 gave a critical boost to his international profile), festival organizers have decided to pay tribute on their own time, with an in-depth panel discussion of his work.
The formidable, internationally-flavored panel will be chaired by venerable film historian Peter Cowie, while the likes of Richard Corliss, Michel Ciment and Donald Richie. Should be a good sit, though I’m disappointed they haven’t yet mentioned any screenings to accompany proceedings. Surely that would be advisable? Press release extract after the jump.
Earlier this morning, Kris pointed you to the news that four features have been added to the Venice lineup: Joe Dante’s “The Movie Orgy: Ultimate Version,” Angela Ismailos’s “Great Directors,” Hana Makhmalbaf’s “Green Days” and Peter Greenaway’s “The Marriage.” Under the radar (and out of competition) they may be, but all of them further my anticipation for my trip to the Lido next week.
The former two are intriguing American cinema-themed documentaries: Ismailos’s film, her debut, lives up to its rather blunt title by examining the work of ten contemporary helmers, including Todd Haynes, Richard Linklater, John Sayles and David Lynch. Dante’s film, meanwhile, is a slightly (and, at 280 minutes, I mean only slightly) more disciplined cut of his mammoth 1968 film, a 7-hour valentine to B-movies of the 1950s and 1960s.
• Jeff Wells speaks up on the Best Actress race. [Hollywood Elsewhere]
• “Black Dynamite” goes to Apparition. [Variety]
• Behinds the scenes of “The Burning Plain.” [Coming Soon]
There’s been much prophesying of doom among film journalists lately, with everyone from Roger Ebert to Jeff Wells harping on about an imminent cinematic dark age, brought on by mainstream audiences who prefer “G.I. Joe” to “The Hurt Locker.”
If I don’t quite share their alarm, it’s because it’s a cry that is repeated at least every other year, as we near the end of another summer stuffed with celluloid shit — that this year’s better blockbusters didn’t quite catch on to the degree of a “Dark Knight,” or (in pop-culture impact, at least) a “WALL-E,” to me suggests a return to the status quo rather than a significant dip.
Eugene Hernandez at indieWIRE shares in the general dissatisfaction with this summer’s crop — bemoaning in particular the dearth of originally-scripted hits — but hits a more upbeat note than his colleagues by painting the upcoming fall festival season as a kind of beacon of hope for serious film lovers.
I’m as guilty as the next man of laughing off Sylvester Stallone in the face of his largely catastrophic latter-day film career, but I’m still willing to defend the man on a few counts.
“Rocky” has become one of those unfortunate good films needlessly punished for beating great films to the punch on Oscar night, and “Cop Land” isn’t so distant a memory that we should entirely dismiss his onscreen ability. Hell, some people I know were making similar claims recently for “Rocky Balboa.” (No comment.)
Nonetheless, I think the organizers of the Venice Film Festival may have taken such revisionist charity a bit far by awarding him the “Jaeger-Le Coultre Glory to the Filmmaker Award,” which is given annually to “an artist” (ahem) “who has left his mark in contemporary cinema.” Previous recipents include Abbas Kiarostami, Takeshi Kitano and Agnes Varda. I repeat: Kiarostami, Kitano, Varda … and Stallone.
If you think that’s bizarre, wait until you read the press release that delivered the news to my inbox this afternoon, excerpted after the cut.
Last month I mentioned that the Venice Film Festival is making a rather large gesture of faith in the current 3-D fad by introducing a new award for the best 3-D film of the year. The prize will be awarded by a separate three-person jury comprising critics Dave Kehr and Scott Foundas and experimental filmmaker Nadia Ranocchi.
The award is not limited to films competing at the festival — but in case you didn’t get that, the point is made abundantly clear by this frankly bizarre 9-title shortlist for the gong that was unveiled yesterday. Via Variety:
“Battle for Terra” (Aristomenis Tsirbas)
“Coraline” (Henry Selick)
“The Hole” (Joe Dante)
“Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs” (Carlos Saldana)
“Jonas Brothers: The 3-D Concert Experience” (Bruce Hendricks)
“Journey to the Center of the Earth” (Eric Brevig)
“Monsters vs Aliens” (Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon)
“My Bloody Valentine” (Patrick Lussier)
“Up” (Pete Docter)
One of the most unique virtues of the Venice Film Festival is that it every two years, it runs alongside the Venice Biennale — the world’s foremost contemporary art showcase, spanning almost 6 months and housing exhibitions from over 90 international artists. The overlap between the film festival and the Biennale can therefore bridge the artforms in some exciting ways.
As much as I’m looking forward to attending the Venice fest in September, I’m as excited to sample the delights of the Biennale for the first time, not least because two artist-filmmaker hyphenates I really admire will be exhibiting new work.
Steve McQueen, whose Bobby Sands biopic “Hunger” was one of the great directorial debuts of recent years, will be representing Britain on the international pavilion, has been the talk of the Biennale since unveiling his 40-minute gallery film “Giardini” in June. A cinematic portrait of Venice and its residents in winter composed of minute environmental details — greyhounds lurching in alleys, the roar of distant football crowds — it has drawn ecstatic notices from the art press. I’m keen to check it out.
Thanks to the reader (modestly unnamed) who sent me a reminder of the recently released U.S. trailer for Guillermo Arriaga’s “The Burning Plain,” a film that has endured a wildly uneven buzz trajectory since debuting at Venice nearly a year ago.
Hailed out the gate as a strong 2008 Oscar vehicle for Charlize Theron, despite mixed notices for the film itself, it then dropped from view entirely, languishing in distributor-less purgatory for months on end. Its UK release came and went in March with zero fanfare and tepid reviews, and its U.S. prospects looked little better.
I offered some thoughts on the film then, deeming it worthy as performance showcase (young Jennifer Lawrence, in particular, is a revelation) but dramatically thin and structurally obvious as storytelling.