LFF: All is Lost

David reports from the London Film Festival on his first voyage to meet Robert Redford, lost at sea... (This film is also playing at NYFF)

Since Kanye West just brought The Truman Show and its climatic sailing sequence into public parlance again, it’s perfectly appropriate for me to refer to All is Lost as an enlarged version of that scene. The manipulator of the heavens here is not a flatcapped Ed Harris, but writer-director J. C. Chandor, fleeing from the immensely talkative boardroom of Margin Call to the vast sea of a practically wordless one-man-show. ‘Our Man’ (as the credits call him) is Robert Redford, in an Oscar-buzzed performance that is certainly his most remarkable in many years. Not only for the physical commitment - the rough winds of the sea buffet the sailor every which way - but for the restraint with which he crafts a stolid and complex man who barely says a word.

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Tarantino's Preemie Top Ten

October 5th seems like an exceptionally weird time to deliver a top ten list. It's too late in the year for a "so far" list and too early for anything like completist summation and way way too early for anything like retrospective nostalgia. But Quentin Tarantino has never been known to shut up when he felt like talking so he's revealed his top ten of 2013 (so far) which are, in alphabetical order

• Afternoon Delight (Jill Soloway)
• Before Midnight (Richard Linklater)
• Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen)
• The Conjuring (James Wan)
• Drinking Buddies (Joe Swanberg)
• Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach)
• Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón)
• Kick Ass 2 (Jeff Wadlow)
• The Lone Ranger (Gore Verbinski)
• This Is The End (Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg)

It's very Tarantino and that's all I have to say about that. I only wish he had revealed a top ten of 2012 instead since he never did one for that year. Yes, conflict of interest with Django Unchained or what not, but literally no one would blink if he had put his own film on it. It would've been very Tarantino and that's all anyone could have said about that. 

P.S. the world would be a better place if all directors did this, don'cha think? I mean not in October but at all.

Accidental Rewatches: Hocus Pocus

Hocus Pocus has been on the telly a lot lately. I guess that means it's October? I started to watch but Bette Midler forced me away with her insane voicework. I swear every other word in every line of her dialogue she treats like it's the climax of the sentence AND the movie. It's just impossible to listen to. Good grief that movie is noisy.

And so much mugging! I'm surprised I still had a wallet by the time the credits rolled.

Remember when Sarah Jessica Parker was a silver screen sex symbol? That girl has had so many acts in her career. The comic but non-ironic sex symbol years were inbetween the memorable TV personas from the early Square Pegs geekery and the Sex and the City Mega-Icon status. Let's call it the "SanDeE*" years. What a strong stretch that was for her. So many enjoyable performances in mostly good films: L.A. Story, Ed Wood, Honeymoon in Vegas, Til There Was You, Miami Rhapsody, Mars Attacks!, The First Wives Club. 

Do you think her career has a fourth act in it?

But back to Hocus Pocus... when was the last time you watched it? And do you think the remake/sequel idea that was floated last year is ever going to happen?

I, Linkenstein

Big Screen
Artsbeat Alfonso Cuaron talks us through a dizzy-making scene in Gravity
Flick Filosopher "Hollywood, you are 300 movies away from making me want to marry you" The manic pixie dream guy bit is fab. It's so hard to imagine... which is the point. 
Guardian Olivier Hirschbiegel reacts to the terrible reviews to his Diana biopic 

David Poland 22 weeks to Oscar. He correctly sees that there are very few locks but bizarrely thinks Forrest Whitaker is a lock for Best Actor for The Butler
BuzzFeed live action footage (and actors) that helped created The Little Mermaid 
i09 thinks I, Frankenstein might be the most insane movie of 2014
Movie City News asks a great question about Amy Adams in American Hustle 

Small Screen
Salon interviews Adam Scott on his television breakthroughs and his new film A.C.O.D.
i09 Honestly I did not see this coming. Halle Berry, whose big screen career is still going well (consider how much her ermegency call center movie made), will headline the tv series Extant about an astronaut whose baby might be half alien

Look! A new Halloween opening for The Simpsons courtesy of Guillermo del Toro so naturally there's a fair amount of Pan's Labyrinth up in there. Lots of movie referencing but the funniest bit I think is that misanthrope naughtiness of the Alfred Hitchcock cameo via The Birds. 

Finally, can I just say "amen" to this Vulture piece requesting a moratorium on anti-heroes as the leads of television series?  I mean you're not going to top Don Draper, Tony Soprano, Walter White, Carrie Bradshaw (yeah, she was one. deal with it) and Nurse Jackie... so let it die a natural death now instead of death from ubiquity. Mark Harris has also wisely noticed that this trend has now poisoned the broadcast networks without the antidote of the artistry that made this type of protagonist so popular on cable television in the first place.

Super Dude

JA from MNPP here, popping in for a quick sec to take the opportunity to hurrah the news that Aaron Taylor-Johnson has been officially announced to play the character of Quicksilver in the second Avengers movie from Mr. Whedon & Co. (Also I've posted all the good exploitative pictures of him at my own site before, and so posting this news over here at TFE gives me the chance to look for the fiftieth time at a current favorite picture. Va va va voom.)

Aaron's the second actor who'll be playing the role in the next year - because of rights complications Quicksilver can also show up in the X-Men movies, and so American Horror Story's Evan Peters is playing him in Bryan Singer's X-Men: Days of Future Past. That shouldn't prove too confusing for the world! Maybe eventually instead of one new Spider-Man every five years we'll have four different Spider-Men all at once? (Curse me for giving the suits in Hollywood any new horrible ideas.)

This news regarding Aaron comes a day after Samuel L. Jackson let it slip that Elizabeth Olsen's playing  Scarlet Witch, aka Quicksilver's sister, in Avengers: Age of Ultron - that hasn't been offically confirmed, but I think they make for a killer pair and I hope that's how it susses out, anyway.