In Contention

Tag: Wim Wenders

  • Wenders on why ‘Pina’ needs 3D

    Since seeing the film in February, I’ve been something of a broken record saying that Wim Wenders’s marvellous performance film “Pina” — which has been drawing rave responses at Toronto, and was recently submitted as Germany’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar — single-handedly restates the case for 3D, a technology that any number of recent Hollywood blockbusters have tarnished somewhat.

    While even the most well-executed 3D narrative films have hardly depended on the gimmick for anything more than bonus effect, 3D actively enhances the audience’s understanding of the subject in “Pina,” where movement patterns and spatial deconstruction in the late Pina Bausch’s choreography are brought to the fore, replicating the immediacy and interactivity of live performance.

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  • ‘Pina’ among latest entries in foreign Oscar race

    I predicted on Twitter a couple of weeks ago that Wim Wenders’ 3D dance film “Pina” would be selected as Germany’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, and that it could well be a surprise shortlist entry if the executive committee gives it a leg up. The first half of that forecast panned out today, and I’m sticking by the second — though Kris, I should add, thinks I’m off my rocker.

    It’s a riskily unconventional choice for Germany, which tends to play this game pretty safe — and has six nominations in the last nine years to show for it. “Waltz With Bashir” may have recently opened the door for documentary (or at least hybrid) filmmaking to get recognition in this category, but that was still a more narrative film than “Pina,” the bulk of which amounts to filmed performance art. It’s also the first 3D submission that I can recall.

    There’s no precedent for such a nomination, yet that novelty is exactly why I think the branch’s executive committee — which has made a concerted effort to bring a more adventurous streak to a frequently fusty category — might stand up for it.

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  • TELLURIDE: ‘The Artist,’ ‘Pina’

    Today began, as already conveyed, with the first-ever screening of Alexander Payne’s “The Descendants.” I managed two more films, one of them capsuled here. I’ll get to “Albert Nobbs” separately, but just to clean my plate a little…

    Hazanavicius’s ‘Artist’ doesn’t quite reach the hype

    There is very little doubt in my mind that we’ll all be talking about Michel Hazanavicius’s Cannes sensation “The Artist” over the next six months. The film will generate a lot of respect from Academy members who understand that getting a silent film made in this day and age, let alone a popular one, is an amazing feat. As is well-documented, the film speaks to the industry’s history with reverence and passion, is impeccably crafted (which will generate support across the branches) and features a lead performance that is easy to root for.

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  • BERLIN: 3D comes to the arthouse

    Determined to make up for my rather  feeble start to the Berlinale, I made it to five films on Sunday – and in a shock twist that defied the law of both averages and film festivals, I liked all of them to some extent, and two of them rather more than that. How appropriate that I get to put my poison pen away on Valentine’s Day of all days.

    I’ll get to writing about “The Guard” (a scuzzily hilarious Irish cop comedy from John Michael McDonagh, brother of Martin) and Competition entry “Sleeping Sickness” (by some measure the best thing I’ve seen, or am likely to see, here) in a later roundup. The other three, however, demand to be grouped in a single post, just as Berlin programmers were making a point by scheduling them back-to-back: all of them were specialist niche films in 3D, marking the moment at which the technology formally stepped outside the multiplex and into the arthouse.

    When Werner Herzog announced his intention to make his latest documentary in 3D, the howls of anguish from stern cinephiles could only have increased in volume if he’d added that it was actually going to be a Miley Cyrus concert movie. When his compatriot and contemporary Wim Wenders revealed similar plans for his non-narrative tribute to the late choreographer Pina Bausch, there were fewer protests, if only because after his last few features, nobody’s been paying much attention to anything Wenders does these days.

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  • Off to the Berlinale

    In a couple of hours, I’m jumping on a crack-of-dawn flight to one of the coolest cities on earth for a week at the Berlin International Film Festival — or, to use the name that rolls more luxuriously off the tongue, the Berlinale.

    I probably should have mentioned this earlier and posted some sort of festival preview. The truth, however, is that I’ve been so preoccupied with other business that I’ve barely read through the festival programme myself — the date rather snuck up on me. I’ve never done so little homework ahead of a festival — yet after my first Berlinale experience last year, that doesn’t feel like a bad approach.

    Berlin prides itself as being a festival of discovery, with more of an emphasis on rising talent than the lofty auteur names that tend to favor the sunnier festival climes of Cannes and Venice. True to form, my favorite finds of last year’s festival were ones I knew little about in advance (like Arvin Chen’s “Au Revoir, Taipei,” which wound up in my 2010 Top 10) or ones I wasn’t aware would show up until the last minute (like “The Illusionist,” buried so deep in last year’s programme many critics missed it altogether).

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  • First Berlinale selections revealed, ‘True Grit’ to open fest

    Of all the festivals I attended this year, Berlin was perhaps the one with the most covert significance. At the time, it seemed critics were foraging for scraps amid a dismal competition lineup and a confusingly scattered selection of sidebars — and yet so many of the films I caught there (and some that I didn’t) are still with me at the year’s end.

    Prizewinners like “The Ghost Writer” and “How I Ended This Summer” continue to grow in stature in Europe, Sundance follow-ons like “Winter’s Bone,” “The Kids Are All Right” and “Exit Through the Gift Shop” are in the thick of the Oscar conversation, and you probably all know by now how I feel about the 2010 Berlinale’s most buried world premiere, “The Illusionist.”

    In other words, there’s little way of telling what treasure might be gleaned from the festival lineup until you’re actually there. That said, although that tantalizing, briefly-floated possibility of the Berlinale snagging “Tree of Life” didn’t pan out, this morning’s freshly unveiled list of the fest’s first eight official selections offers smaller notes of intrigue.

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  • Cannes: uneducated guesses

    Well, it’s almost over. The competition films have all been screened, picked over and digested by the world’s critics, and now all that’s left to do is that finicky business of handing out some prizes. Sean Penn and his formidable jury (Marjane Satrapi, Alfonso Cuaron and Natalie Portman are just some of those involved) will be deliberating over a crop of films that has generally been deemed a solid selection, with few outright “Brown Bunny”-style disasters.

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