Both the Toronto Film Festival and yours truly are limping along, hanging in there. I almost like it more after “the crowd” goes home, or after the fourth or fifth day. I’ve been here seven days now; two more full days to go after tonight. Tomorrow is the big Douglas Trumbull demonstration of MAGI plus Pasolini, The Good Lie, This Is Where I Leave You (Shawn Levy crap) and Still Alice. Friday offers Christian Petzold‘s Phoenix plus The New Girlfriend, Eden, The Riot Club, Bang Bang Baby. Definitely more high-pedigree titles over the last few days, which wasn’t the case before. I feel fine but I’m running on fumes, apples, grapes, energy bars and an occasional Toronto spicy dog with hot sauce.
Lobby of Scotiaplex on Tuesday, 9.9 — 2:50 pm. All but dead.
(l. to r.) Sony Pictures Classics Michael Barker, Janet Jones, Red Army producer/director Gabe Polsky, Wayne Gretzky, PSC’s Tom Bernard at last night’s Red Army premiere at the Ryerson Theatre.
A very happy (one could even say giddy) Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, director and co-writer of Birdman, during last night’s Fox Searchlight party at the Sheridan bar — 11:40 pm.
Mommy director Xavier Dolan at Fox Searchlight party.
Imitation Game director Morten Tyldum and wife Janne in Sheridan bar back room.
With everyone on their way this morning to the 41st Telluride Film Festival (I’m heading out to Burbank Airport at 8 am), the slate has been officially announced. No surprises this year with Toronto having pretty much given the game away by classifying this and that film as a Canadian premiere, which meant a Telluride debut. The only film I wasn’t necessarily expecting to see in Telluride was THE 50 YEAR ARGUMENT (d. Martin Scorsese, David Tedeschi, U.K.-U.S., 2014). What are the expected or hoped-for titles that didn’t get chosen? I can’t get into this now. Taxi’s waiting, blowing his horn…already I’m so lonesome I could cry.
In alphabetical order: ’71 (d. Yann Demange, U.K., 2014 — saw it in Berlin last February); 99 HOMES (d. Ramin Bahrani, U.S., 2014); BIRDMAN (d. Alejandro González Iñárritu, U.S., 2014); DANCING ARABS (d. Eran Riklis, Israel-Germany-France, 2014); THE DECENT ONE (d. Vanessa Lapa, Australia-Israel-Germany, 2014); DIPLOMACY (d. Volker Schlöndorff, France-Germany, 2014); FOXCATCHER (d. Bennett Miller, U.S., 2014 — seen in Cannes last May by almost everyone); THE GATE (d. Régis Wargnier, France-Belgium-Cambodia, 2014); THE HOMESMAN (d. Tommy Lee Jones, U.S., 2014 — debuted in Cannes, decent but don’t get overly excited); THE IMITATION GAME (d. Morten Tyldum, U.K.-U.S., 2014); LEVIATHAN (d. Andrey Zvgagintsev, Russia, 2014); THE LOOK OF SILENCE (d. Joshua Oppenheimer, Denmark-Indonesia-Norway-Finalnd-U.S., 2014); MADAME BOVARY (d. Sophie Barthes, U.K.-Belgium, 2014); MERCHANTS OF DOUBT (d. Robert Kenner, U.S., 2014); MOMMY (d. Xavier Dolan, Canada, 2014….saw most of it in Cannes); MR. TURNER (d. Mike Leigh, U.K., 2014); THE PRICE OF FAME (d. Xavier Beauvois, France, 2014); RED ARMY (d. Gabe Polsky, U.S.-Russia, 2014); ROSEWATER (d. Jon Stewart, U.S., 2014); THE SALT OF THE EARTH (d. Wim Wenders, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, Brazil-Italy-France, 2014); TALES OF THE GRIM SLEEPER (d. Nick Broomfield, U.K.-U.S, 2014); TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT (d. Luc Dardenne, Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Belgium-Italy-France, 2014); WILD (d. Jean-Marc Valleé, U.S., 2014); WILD TALES (d. Damián Szifrón, Argentina-Spain, 2014)
The announcement also says, as per custom, that “additional sneak previews may play outside the main program and will be announced on the Telluride Film Festival website over the course of the four-day weekend.”
I’ve already got 21 Toronto Film Festival films on my priority list so there’s not a lot of room to jam in selections from this morning’s announcement of fresh titles. I’my definitely adding four or five but I can’t fool around. I can’t be whimsical or open to exotic experiments. Well, I usually wind up succumbing to precisely those experiments due to occasional scheduling gaps and pocket-drops but for the most part I have to be hard and mean.
I’m definitely adding Michael Winterbottom’s The Face of an Angel because it’s Winterbottom doing a real-life, Italy-based murder tale “inspired by” the Amanda Knox case (i.e., Kate Beckinsale and Daniel Bruhl as journalists looking into the case, Cara Delevingne as the femme fatale). MW’s last real-events recapturing, A Mighty Heart, was quite good. Pic is more or less based on “Angel Face,” a 2010 investigative study.
I’m expecting to catch my second viewing of Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan in Telluride (following my first immersion in Cannes two and a half months ago) so there’s no need for a third go-round in Toronto, but it’s an absolute must-see for anyone who hasn’t yet had the pleasure.
Mark Hartley’s Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films is a definite add-on. I’ve been hearing all along that Hartley’s doc is tougher and snarkier than Hilla Medalia’s The Go-Go Boys, which I saw and reviewed in Cannes last May. (Medalia’s doc was produced, I’m told, to counterbalance the expected impact of the Hartley.) I’m also invested as I worked as a Cannon publicity press-kit writer in in ’86, ’87 and early ’88.
I saw Steve James‘ warm, amusing, candid and sometimes hilarious Life Itself (Magnolia, theatres/VOD/iTunes, 7.4) for the third…well, nearly the third time last night. It holds up. It will always hold up. They say “dying is easy but comedy is hard” but dying is pretty hard stuff. I was admitting to myself as I watched that I might not have the courage to face up to disease and difficulty the way Roger Ebert faced it, particularly when things got really tough during the last year or so of his life. The man was a bull, and I’m not sure I have even half of that strength. I nonetheless smirked, laughed, felt a little sadness, smiled, felt the fervor, etc. Life Itself is a journey through the realm of serious, devotional movie-worship over the last 45 years or so, and it’s quite a thing to let into your heart. A vital, necessary film for the HE crowd.
Friday, 5.16, 8:20 am inside Grand Lumiere prior to screening of Atom Egoyan’s uniformly panned The Captive. (Photo taken by Sasha Stone.)
Adrien Grenier (a good egg and a mensch who always says hello), unidentified hotties at 5.16 Deadline party.
Former Cannon Films toppers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus prior to this 8 pm screening of Hilla Medalia’s The Go-Go Boys at Salle Bunuel. I’ll review tomorrow morning — it’s after 1 am and I’m wiped.
Deadline staffers Anthony d’Alessandro, Deadline publisher Stacey Farish, Nancy Tartaglione, Pete Hammond, Mike Fleming at today’s 3 to 5 pm beach party.
Editor David Scott Smith, Red Army dp Svetlana Cvetko prior to 7:45 pm premiere at Salle du Soixentieme.
Gabe Polsky‘s Red Army is a soulful humanistic doc about Russian hockey, struggle, destiny, love of country, recent Russian history and the things that matter deep down, which is to say the things that last. In a marginal or tangential sense you could also call Red Army the flip side of Gavin O’Connor‘s Miracle, the 2004 sleeper about the U.S. Olympic hockey team’s victory over the Russians at Lake Placid in 1980. In that film Russia’s Olympic hockey team was depicted as a gang of formidable ogres — here they’re revealed as men struggling with loves and longings like anyone else. The central figure is Vyacheslav Fetisov, the Russian hockey superstar who reigned from the mid ’60s to late ’90s, initially as a Russian player and then with the New Jersey Devils and the Detroit Red Wings. His story is the story of Russia from the bad old Soviet days of the ’70s to the present. The film is crisply shot and tightly cut — it moves right along with efficiency and pizazz, and is augmented by Polsky’s dry sense of humor and a general undercurrent of feeling. Cheers to Polsky, Fetisov, producers Werner Herzog and Jerry Weintraub and the two dps — Herzog collaborator Peter Zeitlinger and HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko.
Kidnapping thrillers don’t — can’t — get much dumber or cheaply teasing in a foggy smoke-and-mirrors sense than Atom Egoyan‘s Captives (aka The Captive), which screened this morning at the Cannes Film Festival. Intentionally confusing by way of coy misdirection, this is one of those “can you guess what’s really happening here?” melodramas that use time-shift games to throw you off the scent. I only know that Captives, a wildly ineffective stinker with some of the worst over-acting in a film of this type that I’ve ever seen, was making me groan less than five minutes in. Then I began to flinch, throw up my hands, pitch forward in my seat, cover my face with my hands, etc. Then I settled into a state of numb resignation. “Go on, pour it on, poison me,” I told the movie. “Inject your awfulness into my veins.”
It’s only the third day of the Cannes Film Festival, but I’m willing to say at this point that Captives is the winner of the Only God Forgives Cote d’Azur Wipeout Award of 2014. Stab me in the chest with a pencil…please!
Ryan Reynolds and Mireille Enos (the not-hot-enough wife of Brad Pitt in World War Z) are Canadian working-class parents of ginger-haired Cass (Peyton Kennedy as a child, Alexia Fast as an eight-years-older version), who abruptly disappears from the back seat of Reynolds’ truck as he’s picking up food in a diner. For help the couple turns to Rosario Dawson and Scott Speedman, independent investigators (or possibly legit cops — I wasn’t sure) who specialize in child predators and kidnappers. Most of the action happens eight years after the kidnapping but the movie shifts back and forth in order to keep things fuzzy and inconclusive.
I’m slated to see four films today (i.e., Friday, 5.16), which will allow for very little time for postings. Atom Egoyan‘s 113-minute The Captive begins the day at 8:30 am inside the Grand Lumiere. I’ll have two and a half hours to file before the 1 pm press screening of Gabe Polsky‘s Red Army (80-something minutes) at the Salle Bazin. (This means skipping the Mr. Turner lunch from 12:45 to 2:30 pm.) At 3 pm comes the mother of long-runnning-time Cannes competition films — Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Winter Sleep at 196 minutes. Then I stay to the end or blow off the last hour to attend a Weinstein Co. preview event at the Majestic starting at 5:30 pm. Then comes the 8pm screening of Hilla Medalia‘s The Go-Go Boys, a doc about Cannon Films’ Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. After which there’s a Red Army premiere after-party starting around 10:30 pm.
All this stuff jammed in today, and they couldn’t program one of these films or events to happen yesterday or particularly the day before, which was all but dead?
The Hitfix Cannes guys (Gregory Ellwood, Guy Lodge, Drew McWeeny…wait, Ellwood is attending this year?) have listed and summarized 12 films that are on almost every high-priority list of every Cannes-attending journo-schmourno: Bennett Miller‘s Foxcatcher (the top of my list), Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Winter Sleep (a close second), Mike Leigh‘s Mr. Turner, Tommy Lee Jones‘ The Homesman, David Cronenberg‘s Maps to the Stars, David Michod‘s The Rover, Gabe Polsky‘s Red Army (co-lensed by HE pally Svetlana Cvetko), Olivier Assayas‘ Clouds of Sils Maria (mopey movie-industry women hanging out in a small Swiss town), Jean-Luc Godard‘s Adieu Au Langage (who outside of Godard-ophiles would be even half-interested in this if not for the 3D photography?), Ryan Gosling‘s “experimental” (read: probably somewhat dicey) Lost River, Asia ArgentoIncompresa (not on my list, pally) and Atom Egoyan‘s The Captive (nope). And yet they’ve left off Michel Hazanavicius‘s The Search, which could turn out to be one of the more distinctive and penetrating dramas of the lot. (Lodge ran a separate piece about it, but including Incompresa or The Captive at the expense of The Search seems…well, perverse.) And they totally overlooked Abel Ferrara‘s Welcome to New York. The festival (which kicks off five days hence, or four days if you count the annual La Pizza gathering as the kickoff event) still seems to me like the most underwhelming, Cote d’Azur-centric, self-regarding, not-necessarily-trailblazing-in-a-commercial-or-awards-context roster in a long, long time.
Ferenice Bejo, Maksim Emelyanov in Michel Hazanavicius’s The Search.
I drove over to the serene Sunset Marquis yesterday afternoon for a quick chat with Pawel Pawlikowski, the Polish-born director of Ida (Music Box Films, 5.2), the austere, undeniably brilliant black-and-white drama that I saw and raved about at last January’s Sundance Film Festival. I only had 20 minutes with the guy so all we did was bat the ball around. Here’s the mp3 of our discussion. Pawlikowski has a cultivated, easy-going aura, like that of a laid-back jazz musician or art curator or novelist. He’s one of those European cool-cat types with a discreet eye for the ladies — you can see that in Ida and his earlier films, most notably Last Resort (’00), My Summer of Love (’04) and Woman in the Fifth (’11). And so we naturally discussed Ida’s quietly alluring lead actress, Agata Trzebuchowska, who is presently in school and is not, even after Ida, with any particular interest in an acting career. Until recently, that is, when a big-name director (whom Pawlikowski declined to name) asked her to audition for something. So maybe.
Ida director & co-writer Pawel Pawlikowski at rear outdoor restaurant attached to Sunset Marquis hotel — Wednesday, 4.23, 2:45 pm.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences got the show it deserved last night. The members own it and one day, trust me, they won’t feel so good about that. As usual the show felt a little schmaltzy, a little out-of-time in a gay Las Vegas-y sense. The show’s producers, Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, got to remind us what a great film Chicago was and how much we miss films of this type. And…I don’t know what else to say. I really don’t. Somebody help me out here.
The engagingly adult, nicely crafted Argo won Best Picture, and apart from the fact that Zero Dark Thirty and Silver Linings Playbook were, are and always will be far more vital and alive and crackling…why am I going through my routine again? It’s over. On to 2013.
I didn’t file a reaction piece right after the Oscar telecast because the only persistent thought I had during the show was “what is this? Why do I feel so removed?” I agreed with or accepted many of the calls, but I felt it wasn’t my type of Oscar telecast. At most my investment felt marginal. When the show ended I knew I needed to get out. I went down to Canter’s and ordered some vaguely unhealthy food. A grilled-cheese-and-tomato sandwich and potato chips and Diet Coke and a coffee. You’re not supposed to eat after 9:30 or 10 pm, and yet there I was. Not “bummed” but vaguely unhappy, for sure.
I’ve been through Oscar shows that made me feel amazed, elated (i.e., Roman Polanski‘s Best Director win for The Pianist) and sometimes outraged (the Brokeback Mountain Best Picture loss) but I can count the emotional current moments from last night’s show on one hand, and none were especially intense. The Les Miserables sing-out, Jennifer Lawrence falling on the stage, Adele‘s confident delivery of Skyfall (and Seth MacFarlane‘s quip about Rex Reed‘s forthcoming review)…what else?
I know that not long after Quentin Tarantino‘s mystifying win for Best Original Screenplay I started playing Jimi Hendrix‘s “I Don’t Live Today” in my head. I shrugged at the William Shatner future-forecast routine and “We Saw Your Boobs” number. Many seem to agree that MacFarlane, who has taken it in the neck from at least one female columnist so far, should have been less “ceremonial” and gone for broke.
I fully respect and in most cases sincerely admire the efforts of the winners, but are you going to tell me that Christoph Waltz didn’t deliver the same kind of curt, deflecting, dryly verbose performance (i.e., “I’m having an enormously good time saying these droll but florid lines while at the same time standing outside my character and in fact outside the film itself”) in Django Unchained that he gave in Inglourious Basterds? Two Oscars for essentially the same performance. Waltz played a good guy in Django and a monster in Basterds, but there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between them. He knows it, Tarantino knows it, you know it, the Academy knows it.
Are you going to tell me that Brave was the cleverest, most original or most spiritually engaging animated feature of the year? From a 12.26 post: “I’ve experienced moments of satisfaction and even uplift from the best Pixar films, but nothing suffocates my spirit like a glossy, connect-the-dots mainstream animated feature (i.e., big-name actors doing the voicing) looking to sell an empowerment fable about a young person being tested and fulfilling his/her destiny. I half-liked the big cowardly bear but it went no further. Every exaggerated expression and every gut-slam visual or aural effect felt like a tiny cyanide capsule.”
We’re living in aesthetically degraded times. There are an awful lot of unsophisticated, not especially sharp or knowledgable people out there today. That is incontestable. And, it appears, the sensibilities of this group are being expressed by a certain portion of Academy voters. I’m trying to think of another explanation.
Did you see that expression on Joaquin Phoenix’s face when the camera cut to him during the Best Actor sequence? Did you feel what he was feeling a bit? I went there from time to time.
Here’s a pretty decent account of the Vanity Fair after-party, written by Chris Rovzar.
I just can’t think of anything to say beyond this. I mostly feel relieved that the season is over and we can now push our way into 2013, free and clear.
But beyond this I think I missed the absence of any fire-in-the-belly stuff by way of strong political current. There was no sense of cultural conflict, no Michael Moore-ish rants. Everyone in the audience seemed to be on the same go-along page. And on some level I regretted the absence of…if not rancor then at least something a tiny bit uncomfortable.
Consider this recollection, posted this morning, from The Nation‘s Rick Perlstein:
“And then there was 1975, the most bizarrely political Oscar night of all.
“Late in 1974 a director named Peter Davis showed a documentary called Hearts and Minds briefly in a Los Angeles theater to qualify it for Academy Award consideration (watch the whole stunning thing here). It opened with images of a 1973 homecoming parade for POW George Thomas Coker, who told a crowd on the steps of the Linden, New Jersey, city hall about Vietnam, ‘If it wasn’t for the people, it was very pretty. The people there are very backwards and primitive, and they make a mess out of everything.’ General William Westmoreland, former commander of U.S. forces, in a comment the director explained had not been spontaneous but had come on a third take, was shown explaining, ‘The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.’ (Thereupon, the film cut to a sobbing Vietnamese mother being restrained from climbing into the grave atop the coffin of her son.) Daniel Ellsberg was quoted: ‘We aren’t on the wrong side. We are the wrong side.’ The movie concluded with an interview with an activist from Vietnam Veterans Against the War. ‘We’ve all tried very hard to escape what we have learned in Vietnam,’ he said. ‘I think Americans have worked extremely hard not to see the criminalities that their officials and their policy-makers exhibited.”
“A massive thunderstorm raged outside at the Oscar ceremony at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion on Oscar Night, April 8, twenty days before the final fall of Saigon to North Vietnam’s Communist forces — where after Sammy Davis, Jr.’s musical tribute to Fred Astaire, and Ingrid Bergman‘s acceptance of the best supporting actress award for Murder on the Orient Express, and Francis Ford Coppola‘s award for best director (one of six Oscars for The Godfather Part II: ‘I’m wearing a tuxedo with a bulletproof cumberbund,’ cohost Bob Hope cracked. “Who knows what will happen if Al Pacino doesn’t win’), Lauren Hutton and Danny Thomas opened the envelop and announced Hearts and Minds had won as the year’s best documentary.
“Producer Bert Schneider took the microphone and said, ‘It’s ironic that we’re here at a time just before Vietnam is about to be liberated. Then he read a telegram from the head of the North Vietnamese delegation to the Paris peace talks. It thanked the antiwar movement ‘for all they have done on behalf of peace… Greetings of friendship to all American people.’
“Backstage, Bob Hope was so livid he tried to push his way past the broadcast’s producer to issue a rebuttal onstage. Shirley MacLaine, who had already mocked Sammy Davis from the stage for having endorsed Richard Nixon, shouted, ‘Don’t you dare!’ Anguished telegrams from viewers began piling up backstage. One, from a retired Army colonel, read, ‘WITH 55,000 DEAD YOUNG AMERICANS IN DEFENSE OF FREEDOM AND MILLIONS OF VIETNAMESE FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM…DEMAND WITHDRAWAL OF AWARD.’ On its back, Hope madly scribbled a disclaimer for his cohost Frank Sinatra to read onstage. Sinatra read it to a mix of boos and applause: ‘The Academy is saying we are not responsible for any political utterances on this program and we are sorry that had to take place.’ Upon which, backstage, the broadcast’s third cohost, Shirley MacLaine, berated Sinatra: ‘You said you were speaking for the Academy. Well, I’m a member of the academy and you didn’t ask me!’ Her brother, Warren Beatty, snarled at Sinatra on camera: ‘Thank you, Frank, you old Republican.'”