As I intend to see the longer, more explicit 2 and 1/2 hour version of Lars Von Trier‘s Nymphomaniac, Part 1 at next month’s Berlin Film Festival, I have no regrets about missing last night’s Sundance sneak of Nymphomaniac Part 1, which ran something like two hours plus. “So to recap, Stacy Martin has lots of sex while Charlotte Gainsbourg tells a story and Stellan Skarsgard lectures us about science, which in one sense would be short-shrifting the film and in another describes pretty much all you need to know,” reports L.A. Times guy Steven Zeitchik. “There are no shortage of story lines outside the movie. Is the graphic aspect a help or a hindrance at the box office? Will Von Trier’s infamous Cannes appearance a few years ago in, which he thought it funny to call himself a Nazi, work against him? And will the star attachments break the film out of the art house or just fill up some entertainment news magazine air-time with breathlessness about stars baring it all?”

The Nymphamaniac Berlin Film Festival situation is a bit confusing. It’s also a little maddening in terms of scheduling. On one hand the two-part theatrical release version now showing in certain parts of northern Europe (and due to open in the U.S. in March) runs four hours, but the Guardian and other news orgs reported on 12.17 that a more explicit five-and-a-half hour version will premiere at the Berlinale. At the same time the Guardian quoted festival director Dieter Kosslick as saying that Berlinale audiences “will be the first to see the long uncut version of Nymphomaniac Volume I.” This obviously suggests that Part II won’t be shown, however long that may be. (Right?) So the uncut Part I is five and a half hours and Part II is God knows how long, which means the whole magilla will actually run…what, eight hours?

The following is posted on the Nymphomaniac Facebook page: “I see there is some confusion here so let me break it down: Nymphomaniac has been split into 2 parts. There is a version, the ‘Lars version’ if you will, that runs 5 and 1/2 hours. This has been split into 2 parts will be 2 and 1/2 hours for part 1 and 3 hours for part 2. The first part of this version is the one being screened at the Berlin Film Festival.”

The Santa Barbara Int’l Film Festival announced today that Wolf of Wall Street director Martin Scorsese and producer-star Leonardo DiCaprio will sit for a q & a on Thursday, February 6th at the huge Arlington Theatre. I may not be able to attend as I’ll probably be leaving on Wednesday, 2.5 for a two-day Grand Budapest Hotel press event in Berlin. I’ll also miss the SBIFF tribute to All Is Lost star Robert Redford on Friday, 2.7. I will, however, be catching the more-than-five-hour version of Lars von Trier‘s Nymphomaniac at the Berlinale (2.6 to 2.16), for which I’ve been press credentialed. If the SBIFF had stuck to their usual schedule of starting right at the tail end of Sundance, they would begin on Thursday, 2.23 and there wouldn’t be any Berlin conflict at all.

A friend has seen Wes Anderson‘s Grand Budapest Hotel, which will debut at the 2014 Berlinale before opening stateside on 3.7 via Fox Searchlight. “Very Wessy from start to finish, but still very special, very touching and with a little more oomph than standard Anderson,” he begins. “Ralph Fiennes gives it a gravitas that Anderson’s movies have sometimes lacked. I’d rate it way above Moonrise Kingdom, which I quite liked also.

“Grand Budapest Hotel has all the playfulness and detached air that you’d expect from Anderson,” he explains, “but at the same time I felt he’s pushing himself a little more, perhaps not out of his comfort zone but at least he’s stretching within his realm.

“The specter of 1930s fascism looms over the whole affair. Most of the film plays in a fantasy Europe of the early 30’s, but Anderson addresses fascism and impending war without making a film about it. (The ‘S.S.’ is called ‘Z.Z.’ as in ‘zig-zag organization’, for example.) The film is a flashback within a flashback within a flashback — a strategy which gives Anderson the opportunity to show how the once grand hotel has gone to the dogs under communism over time.

I ran a rave review of Lucy Mulloy‘s Una Noche 16 months ago, after catching it at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival. It’s opening in New York on 8.23 and on iTunes on 8.26. Una Noche “is a little raggedy at times, but always straight, fast, urgent and honed down,” I wrote. “It’s not quite on the level of Fernando Meirelles‘ brilliant City of God but is a contender in that urban realm, for sure. It’s a fine first film, and Mulloy is definitely a director with passion, intelligence and promise.

The Hanoi Film Festival began last night at a large government building two or three blocks from the Movenpick. I was happy to attend in my natty suit-and-tie and be part of the throng. The opening-night event was professionally handled and designed, and it was entirely pleasant to hang with Hanoi’s elite and learn a little about this and that. People clapped as I walked up the red carpet for no reason other than it was the polite or spirited thing to do. I smiled and felt mildly embarassed.

Opening-night festivities of film festivals are exactly the same the world over, and if I was running a film festival I would deliver the exact same routine. And opening-night attendees are the same; ditto the pre-screening schmooze hour and the post-screening after-party. With a few minor cosmetic chances I could have been at any film festival anywhere. Everybody wants to be famous and well-dressed and respected and desired.

Anyway, I was standing in the upstairs hall and listening to Hoang Tuan Anht, Vietnam’s Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism, give a speech about the aspirations of the festival and of Vietnam in general, and a thought occured. I looked around at the middle-aged men in tuxedos and women in beautiful ball gowns and various expats and guests amiably chatting and the waiters and busboys running around, and I thought to myself, “The United States fought a war and lost the lives of 58,000 men to stop this?”

The people running this event are technically Communists and that was once a fearsome term to some, but who cares now? There was once reason to be concerned about the bureaucratic rigidity and corruption of a system dedicated to fighting capitalism but look at this country now, just trying to survive and prosper and get along. People are the same the world over. People change, societies adapt, money ebbs and flows, prejudice fades.

The U.S. fought a ruinous and tragic war so that the fathers of the people currently running things in Vietnam could be prevented from unifying the country and, in the minds of the U.S. hawks and conservatives, from helping to perpetuate worldwide Communist domination, which of course went out the window in 1989 and ’90. The left saw through the crap in the ’60s and early ’70s but now even the dimmest people in the world realize that the Vietnam War was an appalling and sickening tragedy caused by blindness and obstinacy and willful ignorance.

I wish I could say that the opening-night film, a fanciful thing called Hot Sand about a magical mermaid, was good or even half-decent. I’d hoped it might aspire to the level of Neil Jordan‘s Ondine (’09) or Ron Howard‘s Splash (’84)…nope.

Sonja Heinen of the World Cinema Fudn and Berlinale co-production market

The five-day Hanoi Film Festival begins today…well, tonight for me. My Hue-to-Hanoi flight leaves this morning around 8:30 am, but I’ll need to settle down and check in and file a bit before opening-night festivities. I’ll be working it for four days straight and then leaving Hanoi for Tokyo around midnight on Wednesday, 11.28. And I definitely intend to rent a scooter and buzz around while wearing a surgical mask. And I’m looking forward to whatever occurs and hoping to see something striking or even startling.

Here are the 14 films in competition. Two of the non-regional films — A Separation and We Need To Talk About Kevin — are last year’s news, but it should be interesting to gauge reactions to Michael Haneke‘s Amour, which I’ve now seen three times. The festival is handing out cash prizes to regional filmmakers. There’s a trip to Ha Long Bay planned for Tuesday.

Sonja Heinen, Berlinale co-production market and a project manager of the World Cinema Fund, is running or officiating over the Hanoi film campus, which is some kind of advisory-instructional program. I don’t know her but she’s German and my maternal grandfather was of German ancestry and here we are in Hanoi with bombs bursting and bullets whizzing past our heads.

Baby, it’s dark outside at 5:20 am. Actually it’s now 5:40 am. Time flies when you’re filing.

In Contention‘s Guy Lodge has recently reiterated on Twitter that Miguel Gomes‘s Tabu, which he calls “a woozy, wistful black-and-white Portuguese romance,” is his favorite film of 2012 so far. Adopt Films has announced a limited release in late December; “expect Toronto and perhaps New York fest dates in the fall,” Lodge predicts.

If I knew that allegedly exciting and provocative films like Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky‘s Francine and Billy Bob Thornton‘s Jayne Mansfield’s Car were playing at 2012 South by Southwest, I would have applied for press credentials and snagged plane tix and arranged for lodging and all the rest of it. But as I said two weeks ago, Austin just doesn’t seem worth it.

21 Jump Street…possibly decent but clearly studio product, not enough throttle. Joss Whedon‘s The Cabin in the Woods…repelled. I saw about 60% of William Friedkin‘s Killer Joe at Toronto last September…meh. I caught Richard Linklater‘s Bernie at the LA Film Festival last June…not bad, “different”, engaging Jack Black performance. The Raid, which I hate, has already played Toronto and Sundance. Guy Maddin‘s Keyhole…maybe. Three episodes of Lena Dunham‘s Girls…fine. The one SXSW film that really has me halfway excited? Bobcat Goldwaith‘s God Bless America.

I realize that one or two special films I’m not eyeballing right now may pop through and start some conversation. That’s fine, but I can wait. I’m at peace with not being there for the first Austin showings. I’m looking at Tribeca two months hence and then Cannes, of course, and…well, that’s enough.

“The younger generation is just basically film-ignorant. Not just about Bergman, but Antonioni, Truffaut, Kurosawa, Bunuel. Film is not part of their general literacy. They don’t know The Bicycle Thief; they don’t know Grand Illusion. And many, many of them don’t know Citizen Kane. If they do know it, they know it as something they happened to see on television. They don’t have the same general reverence — which I’m not criticizing them for — there’s no reason why they would or should. It’s just a different time. Their icons and heroes lie in a different area.” — Woody Allen speaking to The Hollywood Reporter‘s Gregg Kilday in a 2.4.11 interview about a forthcoming Ingmar Bergman retrospective at the Berlin Film Festival.

“Readers…will notice the conspicuous absence from The Film Snob*s Dictionary, apart from passing references, of such titans of foreign cinema as Federico Fellini (8 1/2), Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal), Akira Kurosawa (The Seven Samurai), and Satyajit Ray (the Apu trilogy). The Film Snob may indeed know a fair amount about these filmmakers, but he generally scoffs at them, deeming them to be mere name-drops for bourgeois losers wishing to seem cultured. Watching a Bergman film is so PBS tote-bag, so Mom-and-Dad-on-a-date-in-college, so baguettes-and-Chardonnay.” — from intro to David Kamp and Lawrence Levi‘s The Film Snob Dictionary (2006).

Indiewire‘s Eugene Hernandez has written that Kawasaki’s Rose, the latest from prolific Czech director Jan Hrebejk and screenwriter Petr Jarchovsky, is “easily the best feature of the first few days of the Berlin Film Festival — the one undeniable find so far.”

“A story about an elderly ex-Communist whose misdeeds during the Dubcek era are slowly revealed, it slipps easily back and forth between various perspectives (and such is Jarchovsky’s skill, every character here was nuanced, contradictory, fully realized), and parceled out its revelations as deliberately and rigorously as a conspiracy thriller.” Kawasaki’s Rose “ranks among the writer and director’s very finest work to date.”

I wonder how Kawasaki’s Rose will play with the people who made Garry Marshall‘s Valentine’s Day the weekend’s #1 hit, pouring $52.4 million into Warner Bros. coffers? Is there a chance that a small fraction might pay to see it? What if paramilitary squads were to promise to destroy their homes with flame-throwers and grenades if they don’t see it? Is it possible some could be persuaded?

More interesting than Jude Law playing a tranvestite named “Minx” in Sally Potter‘s Rage, which will have its first press screening at the Berlin Film Festival this Sunday, is a post from Potter (appearing on her site) about the unusual cutting style of the film:

“Rage has been a consistent experience at every stage of the working process,” she states. “None of the usual rules seemed to apply. In the cutting room the handheld material (no cut-aways, no reverse angles) dictated a different way of editing. The so-called ‘language’ of film — where and how to cut to create pace and energy — seemed irrelevant, even fake, and was not an option.”

There’s always some kind of curious stylistic scheme going in in a Potter film, isn’t there? Always some kind of high-aesthetic gimmick.

“Similarly, the sound world seemed to reach such degrees of ’emptiness’ in order to feel ‘full’, that we found we had to re-think the process of hearing itself. This is in large part because most of the big events and action in the story happen (audibly) off-screen. In parallel with listening to the character who is talking we have to absorb a lot of activity that is happening out of sight.

“The criteria was to search always for what kept us connected with the core of the material or the character. No empty effects, nothing redundant or gratuitous. It was kind of exhilarating to not be able to take anything for granted.”

As for Law’s character and the general subject matter:

“Part of the subject matter of Rage is the ugly use of beauty in the pursuit of profit,” Potter writes. “Drugged by marketing, sapped by fear of aging, conned by the cult of celebrity — image becomes all.”

“Law, whose beauty has sometimes been held against him as an actor, made the courageous decision to accept the role of Minx — a ‘celebrity super-model’ — and took on a kind of hyper-beauty for this persona…a ‘female’ beauty which gradually unravels as the story unfolds. Strangely, the more he became a ‘she’, coiffed and made-up, the more naked was his performance. There was great strength in his willingness to make himself vulnerable. It was an extraordinarily intense part of the shoot.”

http://www.berlinale.de/en/presse/pressevorfuehrungen/datenblatt.php?film_id=20091073