Middleburg Celebrates Diane Warren with the "Impact Award"

by Nathaniel R

Each year at the Middleburg Film Festival, TFE's favorite event is a live concert honoring a film composer. This year Sheila C Johnson, the co-founder of BET who created the Middleburg Festival opted to do things a bit differently. Though there was a composer honored at a smaller event (29 year-old rising talent Kris Bowers who scored both the likely Oscar smash Green Book and the critically acclaimed indie Monsters and Men this year) the main concert and "Impact Award" was reserved for hit-machine songwriter Diane Warren.

This year Warren co-wrote the much memed "Why'd You Do That?" from A Star is Born but her Oscar bid for 2018 will surely be the theme song from the documentary hit RBG, "I'll Fight"

More after the jump including a couple of song snippets...

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Beauty Break: To Catherine Deneuve on her 75th

The French movie star of French movie stars turns 75 today. She's won two prizes at Cannes, two at Berlinale, and two at the Césars (with 12 additional nominations) in her career that's been as lustrous as the famous golden hair. Catherine Deneuve hasn't been as celebrated in recent years as Isabelle Huppert (who is 10 years younger) but her list of classics, hits, and indelible experiments is long: Belle de Jour (BAFTA nomination), The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Young Girls of Rochefort, Repulsion, Mississippi Mermaid, Tristana, Donkey Skin, The Hunger, The Metro (César win), Indochine (Oscar nomination, César win), East/West, Pola X, Dancer in the Dark, 8 Women, and Kings and Queen among them.

The last eight years have been quiet but it wasn't so long ago that the one-two-three punch of voice work in the Oscar-nominated Persepolis (2007 -- she voiced both the French & English versions), an amazing performance in Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale (2008), and the delights of François Ozon's comedy Potiche (2010) made an impact...

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Middleburg Sneak: "Stan & Ollie"s gentle charms

Stan & Ollie had its world premiere in London today and we caught a sneak peek at the Middleburg Festival...

by Nathaniel R

The original odd couple of screen comedy, Laurel & Hardy, had several familiar gestures that delighted audiences in the 1930s. Thin Brit Stan Laurel's main move was to scratch his head comically from the top, his hand like a curious clawed hat. Rotund American Oliver Hardy's sometimes did a fey little wave, hand tight against the body, the fingers doing all the wiggling work. Why these were funny to audiences at the time will possibly be a mystery to contemporary audiences.

Stan & Ollie, starring Steve Coogan and John C Reilly, is a brisk well-paced movie about the legendary early-cinema comedy act in their waning days. It doesn't attempt to explain their appeal to us in 2018 but merely exists in the space between then and now...

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The Plane! The Plane! The Link! The Link!

As your host begins his final busy day at the Middleburg festival, here are some news tidbits and amusements to enjoy elsewhere...

• Variety Highlights from the Jane Fonda Masterclass at the Lumiere festival
• EW Peter Dinklage on playing Hervé Villechaize on HBO and disputing the claims of whitewashing 
• Vulture amazingly accurate collection of faux headlines about 'how the media would have covered the events of A Star is Born'
• New Now Next cute interview with Judy Greer about her gay fans and Jawbreaker
• Variety our hearts go out to Selma Blair who has announced that she has multiple sclerosis
• Out Cate Blanchett adamantly defends straight actors playing queer characters. I totally understand her reasoning and I think identity politics can sometimes feel anti-art and anti-creativity BUT actual gay actors are discriminated against so this is kind of tacky to be so aggressive about
• The Playlist Cannes and Netflix meet... perhaps 2019 will have a different outcome?
• MNPP Glen Powell photoshoot worth gawking at
• /Film Netflix seems to be on a cancellation spree. Now it's Luke Cage getting the chop
• io9 Turns out Disney wouldn't let Wreck-It Ralph make a joke about Kylo Ren from Star Wars. Or as Gerry Canavan so wisely stated on twitter...

maybe we should have more than one entertainment company

Middleburg: "Ruben Brandt" Collects and "Widows" Thrills

Day two of the Middleburg Film Festival

Friday kicked off with a special "sneak" of Stan & Ollie (which, more on tomorrow) and then two more movies which went like so...

Ruben Brandt, Collector
From the opening shot of this animated film from Hungary you know you're in for an idiosyncratic lark. We're humorously crosscutting between an ultra fast moving train and the molasses crawl of a snail on the tracks. Then we're inside the train with Ruben Brandt, a famous psychotherapist who is promptly attacked by a little girl with a very sharp bite who is dressed suspiciously like Diego Velázquez's  "Infanta Margarita Teresa in a Blue Dress". I say 'dressed like' because it's hard to make the connection at first...

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