BEST PICTURE
The thing with The Best Picture category is that it’s always been such a mess when it comes to the nominations. I still wonder why it went to 10 nominees.
There were no big surprises at the the 38th César Awards (the French Oscars) held at the Theatre du Châtelet in Paris just this last Friday.
It won the prestigious Palme d’Or from Cannes. Reactions out of the NYFF and the Toronto Film Festival were great. And now we have the first US Theatrical Trailer for Michael Haneke‘s Amour.
Amongst the major blockbusters and must-see movies vying for your holiday viewing time, this is a proper movie that definitely requires a viewing.
Amour opens to a limited release just before Christmas this year on December 19th.
About The Film Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) are in their eighties. They are cultivated, retired music teachers and their daughter, who is also a musician, lives abroad with her family. One day, Anne has an attack and the couple’s bond of love is severely tested. Michael Haneke (Funny Games, Cache, The White Ribbon) writes and directs Amour which debuted at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival earlier this summer and won the coveted Palme d’Or. Isabelle Huppert also stars in the film which played at Telluride, TIFF and NYFF
I have seen a few “film-critic‘s” TIFF12 lists saying that the Greta Gerwig starring Frances Ha and directed by Noah Baumbach is going to be a turkey. It just had its screening at the Telluride Film Festival and it seems that these critics are going to be eating crow (as they usually do anyways) because the response has been overwhelmingly positive about the film.
Check out a snapshot of the social conversations below:
Historically speaking, when a film gets tapped by the Telluride Film Festival in the mountains of Colorado, it’s among the cream of the crop. Founded in 1974, Telluride has become the first North American venue to exhibit some of the early front-runners in the fall awards season–albeit geared more towards press and industry types. Over the years, they’ve broken the news and offered first impressions of films like Roger & Me, El Mariachi, The Crying Game, Brokeback Mountain, and The Wrestler.
The stipulation for their main program–titled “The Show”–is that the film must be a North American premiere. Every year, the intimate festival and its two or three programmers take on a guest programmer. Some years it’s a personality like Salman Rushdie, other years it’s movie industry people like documentarian Errol Morris. This year, Telluride has chosen English writer-journalist Geoff Dyer. His latest book is titled Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room (About Tarkovsky‘s Stalker, which he has programmed in a sidebar at the fest that annually shows older classics).
For TIFF fans, the fests in Venice and particularly Telluride offer us clues in our never-ending adventure in tinkering with our schedules in order to ensure we program a strong lineup of films for our own individual sake. And because Telluride only picks a couple dozen films to play over Labor Day weekend, that these selections were chosen gives movie lovers a little more certainty–as well as direction–in selecting from the vastness of the TIFF lineup, which leaves everyone dizzy with 300 films before us.
Looking over the 39th Telluride picks, it is heartening that TIFF is playing most of them. Films without asterisks will be skipping Toronto, and this year that number is only four. The rest of them will arrive here next week. They are:
*THE ACT OF KILLING (Joshua Oppenheimer, Denmark, 2012)
*AMOUR (Michael Haneke, Austria, 2012)
*AT ANY PRICE (Ramin Bahrani, U.S., 2012)
*THE ATTACK (Ziad Doueiri, Lebanon-France, 2012)
*BARBARA (Christian Petzold, Germany, 2012)
*THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE (Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, David McMahon, U.S., 2012)
*EVERYDAY (Michael Winterbottom, U.K., 2012)
*FRANCES HA (Noah Baumbach, U.S., 2012)
*THE GATEKEEPERS (Dror Moreh, Israel, 2012)
*GINGER AND ROSA (Sally Potter, England, 2012)
*THE HUNT (Thomas Vinterberg, Denmark, 2012)
*HYDE PARK ON HUDSON (Roger Michell, U.S., 2012)
*THE ICEMAN (Ariel Vromen, U.S., 2012)
*LOVE, MARILYN (Liz Garbus, U.S., 2012)
*MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN (Deepa Mehta, Canada-Sri Lanka, 2012)
*NO (Pablo Larraín, Chile, 2012)
*PARADISE: LOVE (Ulrich Seidl, Austria, 2012)
PIAZZA FONTANA (Marco Tullio Giordana, Italy, 2012)
*A ROYAL AFFAIR (Nikolaj Arcel, Denmark, 2012)
*RUST & BONE (Jacques Audiard, France, 2012)
*THE SAPPHIRES (Wayne Blair, Australia, 2012)
*STORIES WE TELL (Sarah Polley, Canada, 2012)
SUPERSTAR (Xavier Giannoli, France, 2012)
WADJDA (Haifaa Al-Mansour, Saudi Arabia, 2012)
WHAT IS THIS FILM CALLED LOVE? (Mark Cousins, Ireland-Mexico, 2012)
Now, Telluride will often show a couple or more secret screenings that pop up out of the blue, and word has it that they’ll show a sneak of Ben Affleck‘s new political-thriller Argo, which bodes well for him in his third outing as director.
Some big titles appear in “The Show” this year, but what’s remarkable so far is that the gossip apparently must be true about Quentin Tarantino‘s Django Unchained not being ready yet, since it has skipped Venice, Telluride and Toronto. If New York doesn’t announce it in their lineup, that means he’ll be polishing it up until its holiday release. Same goes for the 60′s music drama Inside Llewyn Davis, the new Coen Bros. pic. And yet other absentees would have to include Sofia Coppola‘s celebrity-obsessed crime-caper The Bling Ring as well as Kar Wai Wong‘s The Grandmasters, the film that details Ip Man, better known as Bruce Lee‘s trainer.
Among the films present here, TIFF auds should put little stars next to more overlooked titles such as The Act of Killing, the new doc–exec produced by Errol Morris and Werner Herzog–that shows former death squad leaders re-enacting some of their brutality; The Attack, which follows an Israeli-Palestinian surgeon who goes on a quest to understand how his wife was implicated in a suicide bombing; Barbara, which is set in 80′s East Germany about a physician banished to the country who is pulled between two tough personal choices; and Ginger & Rosa, the new one by Sally Potter (Yes) set in 60′s London, following a pair of teen girls.
In the hours after I will have written this article, first impressions will come out from the screening of Midnight’s Children, one of TIFF’s most anticipated films, from Deepa Mehta and based off the Salman Rushdie bestseller, which he also wrote the screenplay for.
It has little to no bearing on whether they are actually any good, but huge TIFF releases like Paul Thomas Anderson‘s The Master as well as the co-production by Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis in Cloud Atlas not appearing at Telluride does have me somewhat concerned, since I thought they were a good bet to show there. By Monday, however, it might just be that they do show as secret screenings. Stay tuned.
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, the auteurs in the Masters Programme have a style all their own. When you go and check out one of these films, you’re never going to see a run-of-the-mill flick. Hot and highly-anticipated new films in this year’s lineup range from perennial Cannes winner Michael Haneke to 103 yr-old Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira to Bernardo Bertolucci‘s first film in a decade.
Peter Mettler‘s The End of Time and Bernard Emond‘s All That You Possess appear in this lineup, but you can find coverage of those ones in our special article on the Canadian lineup this year.
Here’s the news you can use on the Masters lineup at TIFF ’12:
Amour You can count on a hefty serving of meat ‘n potatoes when you walk into a Michael Haneke movie. There probably hasn’t been a hotter “master” on the festival circuit over the last decade, with very good to great movies like Code Unknown, The Piano Teacher, Cache, and The White Ribbon. Amour, yet another huge Cannes winner for Haneke this year, having snagged the Palm d’Or (his 2nd Palm in 3 years and his 5th Cannes prize overall) is the geriatric drama following eightysomething French acting legends Jean-Louis Trintignant (Z, Three Colors: Red) and Emmanuelle Riva (Hiroshima Mon Amour, 1962′s Therese Desqueyroux). They play a lifelong couple nearing the end of line when the wife suffers two strokes.
Beyond the Hills Romanian helmer Cristian Mungiu is another festival hottie at the moment, having won the Palm D’Or in 2007 for his neo-realistic and gritty drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days. That was a sad but highly rewarding film and I’m looking forward to his new one, another female-centric drama that netted Mungiu the screenplay prize at Cannes this year while the films two leads (Cosmina Stratan and Cristina Flutur) shared the Best Actress prize. They play two young adult women and lifelong friends who met as children while at the same orphanage.
Everyday Michael Winterbottom is the most internationally diverse director working today. Earlier this year he treated us to the absorbing Indian drama Trishna, an updating of Thomas Hardy‘s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (which also has its premiere at last year’s TIFF). Now he’s back with a family drama that was quietly shot over 5 years and follows a wife and her four kids and how they must get by when dad is incarcerated in prison. Laurence Coriat, who co-scripted Winterbottom’s Genova and Wonderland, returns to help pen this one, starring Shirley Henderson (Life During Wartime, Meek’s Cutoff) and John Simms (24 Hour Party People).
Gebo and the Shadow The story here is that Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira is, at nearly 103 years young, still pumping out a feature every year and is in pre-production on another one already. This end of the 19th century drama follows a Parisian family facing down an economic crisis. This film features another cast of French acting royalty, with Jeanne Moreau (Jules and Jim), Michael Lonsdale (The Day of the Jackal), and Claudia Cardinale (Fitzcarraldo).
In Another Country South Korean festival vet Hong Sang-soo (Woman on the Beach, Hahaha) returns with this three-parter featuring the inimitable Isabelle Huppert (starring in what must be a record 4 films at TIFF this year with Amour, Dormant Beauty, and Lines of Wellington among the rest). And if that’s not enough, she plays 3 characters here, all named Anne. Seven characters in 5 movies. Remarkable.
Like Someone in Love For all my endless love of Iranian cinema over the last 15 years, Abbas Kiarostami‘s work tends to elude me. Taste of Cherry and Ten were festival hits, but bored the heck out of me. His 2010 Juliette Binoche drama Certified Copy, however, was highly enjoyable and so hopefully his new one continues that trend. This is a Japan-France co-production about the mystical relationship of an old man and a young woman.
Me and You Italian heavyweight Bernardo Bertolucci (Last Tango in Paris, The Last Emperor) is back after a decade-long hiatus since The Dreamers from 2003–an erotic romantic-drama that I loved. His new one follows 14 yr-old loner Lorenzo, who hides out for the week in the cellar of his apartment building with his older half-sister. Can’t wait.
Night Across the Street This represents Chilean-French helmer Raul Ruiz‘s (Mysteries of Lisbon, Time Regained) posthumous final effort in a character-driven drama following a worker on the verge of retirement and a look at is life at three different ages.
Pieta Kim Ki-duk is one of my favorite South Korean directors. His brilliant and touching Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…Spring and 3-Iron are two of the best foreign films of the past decade. His new one is a gritty character drama about a violent man employed by a loan shark who reconsiders his ways when a woman claiming to be his mother returns on the scene. You can count on Ki-duk for interesting stories, good acting, natural charm, and humanistic narratives that touch upon philosophical themes.
Something in the Air TIFF regular Olivier Assayas (Clean, Summer Hours) returns with this late 60′s coming-of-ager that is hot among younger ticket buyers this year. It follows a Parisian high schooler and absorbs us in culture, art and film with the political backdrop of the social changes of the time. Can’t wait, Assayas is on a roll.
Student Kazakhstan helmer Darezhan Omirbayev is the “master” you’ve never heard of, or me for that fact. He’s the name in this lineup whose films play a few festivals and then disappear. It’s humbling to know there’s still so much to learn about cinema just when you think you’re on top of everything. His new one lifts Dostoevsky‘s Crime and Punishment to his native land.
When Day Breaks Serbian helmer Goran Paskaljevic made one of my favorite 90′s films with his brutal Cabaret Balkan. His new one centers on a retired music professor who receives a call from the Jewish Museum in Belgrade, informing him of documents that set-off a path of self-discovery for the man.
The 37th Toronto International Film Festival runs September 6-16. Ticket packages are on sale now. Keep it tuned to Xavierpop for the sweet ‘n lowdown on all the films showing this year.
- MovieJay
