“The Santa Barbara Film Festival hummed along nicely. There was Cate Blanchett, there was David O. Russell, there were Marty and Leo. There was a tribute to the virtuosos. Half of the ones not nominated for Oscars were no-shows — Adele Exarchopolous, Oscar Isaac and Daniel Bruhl. Half of them did show up — Brie Larson and Michael B. Jordan, who were not nominated, and Jared Leto and June Squibb, who were.

Leonard Maltin, Robert Redford, Roger Durling at conclusion of Friday night’s SBIFF tribute.

Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling.

“Robert Redford was the second to last of the major tributes. He drew a huge crowd of appreciative movielovers, filling the Arlington. ‘I wonder who’s going to present the award to him,’ someone asked me. I didn’t know. Usually there is a high-profile celebrity who does the introduction, like Rooney Mara or Jane Fonda (who was down with the flu for Oprah Winfrey’s tribute).

Read more

I’m getting some dental work done in Prague this week. I’m taking a 12:45 pm train there tomorrow and staying for five or six days. I don’t have dental insurance, rates are much cheaper in Prague than in the U.S., and I’ve been assured by Expats.cz editor Jason Pirodsky that the guy I’m going to does excellent work so it made sense all around as I was going to be in Berlin anyway and it’s not that costly to get to Prague and stay there, etc.

Taken this morning from the Audi Lounge next to the Berlinale Palast, about an hour before the noon Nymphomaniac screening. An Audi Lounge assistant gave me the wifi password but the connectivity wad down…naturally!

The poster for Michael Herbig’s Buddy, which opened here two months ago, reminds that puerile, lightweight formula comedies are popular the world over.

I was on my feet with my coat on as the press screening of Lars von Trier‘s Nymphomaniac, Volume 1 ended around 2:35 pm. I nudged and side-stepped my way out of the dark theatre and then scurried to the Hyatt press conference salon across the street in hopes of getting a seat. But the place was already packed to the rafters. Half of the seated journalists there probably hadn’t attended the screening. I’ll say it again — this is not the Berlinale but the Darwinale — a frenzied festival of ferrets and foxes with overcoats and blase expressions, panting and scrambling for tickets and access with God knows many thousands of smartphones fighting for “air” and all but eradicating each other (I couldn’t even get email after the screening). It’s a pigfuck, this festival. It makes Toronto feel like Telluride.

At this afternoon’s Nymphomaniac press conference, costars Shia LaBeouf (about ten minutes before he walked out) and Stacy Martin

LaBeouf attending tonight’s premiere.

Read more

I attended the noon screening of Lars Von Trier‘s Nymphomaniac, Volume One with my soul and spirit engaged, but it wasn’t long before I began to feel vaguely anesthetized and zoned out.

This explicit first portion of the 5 and 1/2 hour Nymphomaniac (which will probably be unveiled in its entirety at next May’s Cannes Film Festival) is an intelligent, jaggedly assembled, dispassionate wank that aims to provoke and intellectually arouse with an assortment of classroom observations about a young girl’s scientific, emotionally arid approach to compulsive sexuality, but without anyone (including audience members) getting off or feeling serene for the experience.

Metaphors about fly fishing and the shapes of leaves abound, but libidinal stirrings are not on the table.

Stacy Martin in Lars Von Trier‘s Nymphomaniac.

I guess I should give Von Trier credit for having achieved this peculiar synthesis. A dry, ironic tone does contribute to a series of faintly satiric philosophical points, and an assortment of explicit sex depictions are made to seem quite clinical and occasionally tedious, and vaguely repellent from an emotional/spiritual standpoint. Deliberately, I mean.

For this is a meandering, discursive, tension-free wankathon that I’m now vaguely associating in my head with Dusan Makavejev‘s W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (’71). I saw it on VHS too long ago to remember much, but I’ve read enough reviews to know that W.R. was generally regarded as somewhere between a put-on and cinematic nerve gas. Despite enthusiastic arias that festival dweebs may be writing about Von Trier’s film as we speak, Nymphomaniac, Volume One definitely lives up to the W.R. challenge.

Read more

If you’re halfway honest with yourself, you’ll admit that what The Guardian‘s Toby Young recently wrote about Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity reflects your views, your friends’ views…everyone’s. Why, then, does the Best Picture race seem (emphasis on that word) to be leaning in Gravity‘s favor? “Technically awesome” alone should never assure Best Picture glory, but in this, one of the all-time banner years for quality-level cinema, orbital verisimilitude seems to be winning the day. “Everything you’ve heard about Gravity is true,” Young wrote in a 2.7 piece about BAFTA nominees. “I actually paid to see it at the cinema in spite of being sent the DVD and it lived up to the hype. It’s mesmerizing, spellbinding, thrilling. A thing of beauty. But I can’t see it winning many of the big awards because, essentially, it’s a popcorn movie. Yes, yes, Sandra Bullock is good in the central role, but she’s not that good and I doubt there’ll be enough feminists among BAFTA’s membership who’ll vote for her because, you know, she’s proved that you can still be a female movie star after the age of 40. Best Director? Too much competition in that category. As for the script…no. It’s rubbish.”

Sunday’s Berlinale schedule involves three films, one press conference and 14 hours. First is a noon press screening of Lars Von Trier‘s Nymphomaniac, Volume One (the skankier 145-minute version). I don’t trust Berlinale organizers to handle the large crowd (not after suffering through that mob scene prior to Wes Anderson‘s film last Thursday) so I’ll be there at 11 am if not before. The comes a Nymphomaniac press conference at 2:45 pm. I’m planning to write between 4 pm and 7 pm (as I’m definitely not interested Pascal Chaumeil‘s A Long Way Down at 6:30 pm) before catching Hossein Amini‘s The Two Faces of January, an adaptation of a 1964 Patricia Highsmith novel, at 8 pm. The final screening will be Benjamin Naishtat‘s History of Fear at 10:30 pm. (It’s now 11:40 pm on Saturday.)

I wondered this morning about the significance of Captain Phillips‘ Christopher Rouse winning the dramatic feature Eddie Award, and/or about American Hustle editors Jay Cassidy, Crispin Struthers and Alan Baumgarten winning an Eddie for best comedy or musical feature editing. Editing awards are supposed to be significant bellwethers. Does this indicate that Hustle might push aside Gravity and 12 Years A Slave for the Best Picture Oscar? Or that Phillips might be a stronger contender, especially considering that it won the WGA’s Best Adapted Screenplay award last weekend? I don’t know anything. Nobody does. Certain Oscar bloggers (I suppose this includes myself) are leaning toward Gravity winning the Best Picture Oscar at this stage but…who knows? “I wish you was a wishing well so that I could tie a bucket to ya and sink ya.” — James Cagney in William Wellman‘s Public Enemy (1931).

In a curiously undated (but presumably recent) q & a with Wag’s Revue contributor Matt Siegel, Sandra Bernhard rips into the politically correct manic-obsessives who vent on comment threads. I know whereof she speaks, having been taken to task by these ranting mullahs myself. Then again if you’re going to initiate any sort of high-profile conversation or debate you have to accept that flak of this sort will come your way.

The things that I liked and loved about Joe Johnston‘s Captain America (’11), particularly the unabashed retro-vibe patriotism and the amber-lighted 1940s-era production design, are obviously absent in the forthcoming sequel, which looks too bright and flashy and CG-ish in this recently-posted trailer. If a movie features a leather-clad Samuel L. Jackson glaring or scowling in an action context, forget it. If Captain America: The Winter Soldier doesn’t turn out to be jizz-whizz I’ll be hugely surprised.

Here I am at the 2014 Berlinale, all robust and credentialed and ready to go on a Saturday (i.e., the third day of the festival), and I’m not seeing a single film on the public or press schedule that (a) I want to attend or (b) that I’m able to attend due to not having a ticket. If you want to catch a public screening you have to request a ticket the day before, and that means an early wake-up and showing up at Berlinale press headquarters between 8 am and 9 am and getting in line and hoping for the best. If you go there much after 9 am the tickets start to dry up. In other words if you’re a credentialed press person you need to participate in a daily Darwinian struggle to see the films you want to see. I would love to see all the goodies and perhaps a surprise or two but why all the grief? Cannes and Sundance are far more hospitable environments. I’m not sure I’ll want to attend the Berlinale again. Too few screening opportunities, too much work, too many lines. I’m moving out of the Grand Wyndham today and into my Airbnb apartment in Charlottenburg, but my screening options are pretty much zilch.

Last night in Santa Barbara Robert Redford had his final All Is Lost moment in the sun. After a stellar and industrious career of 50-plus years Redford gave the finest performance of his career, a performance that seems all the more skillful and affecting because of its deftness and spareness and near-silence. And yet he was blown off by SAG colleagues and Academy members because…okay, because he didn’t campaign that much (certainly not to the extent that Bruce Dern did) but mainly because they couldn’t be bothered to watch All Is Lost. Why? Because they’re lazy but also, I suspect, because they didn’t want to see a film about a resourceful old guy struggling to survive against nature’s merciless persistence. Nature will get us all sooner or later, and they didn’t to grapple with that — too close to the bone.

SBIBB photos copied/stolen from Getty Images.

Read more