The Girl With the Drive-By Linkings

Film School Rejects 33 things we learned from David Cronenberg's commentary on The Fly (1986)
Slant Ed Gonzalez unleashes his Prime Time Emmy predictions
Wow Report a funny run in with young actor Logan Lerman
Awards Daily Sasha Stone (aka David Fincher's #1 Fan*) loves loves loves the early footage of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

And while we're on the subject have you seen the fun Muppets parody of it's "feel bad" trailer?

Alt Screen on the Gus Van Sant retrospective at MOMI
IndieWire on the director of Norwegian Oscar submission Happy Happy, Anne Sewitsky
Antagony & Ecstasy travels back in time to the gender-flipping anxiety of Mr Mom (1983)
Pink is the New Blog Madonna unleashing a Truth or Dare perfume next year. The Brand ever expands... and if that reminds one person to check out Truth or Dare, it's done the world a service. Best music doc evah.
IndieWire in non-news news Tom Ford has his A Single Man follow up planned but has no intention to make it in the next couple of years ??? I post this only as a reminder of what passes for news on the future-obsessed blogosphere. Let's discuss films that actually exists! Anyone? Anyone? ;) 

Broadway Blog No Way! A Meryl Streep interview from 1977. "I think she's going to be the next Carole Lombard" HEE. Her laugh and breathy intakes are exactly the same 31 years ago. Now go read what Broadway Blog has to say about her.
Cinema Blend more trouble for Netflix. This worries me so. Nobody should wish death on DVD services since Netflix had such a better selection than most services and any service that has more films is good for film buffs. The scarcity of older films is so scary.

Drive I Said
My New Plaid Pants recorded a Q&A with Drive's director Nicolas Winding Refn for you. Go watch it if you got a spare 37 minutes.
Self Styled Siren on Drive. I haven't read this yet because I haven't yet written my review and you shouldn't either unless you've seen the film. But if you have The Siren is always worth a read.

Just for fun
Business Pundit interesting map of the USA that renames states as foreign countries with similar GDP. 

*I mean this in the most endearing way because David Fincher is the man.

TIFF: Fonda Plays a Hippie, Jennifer Sculpts "Butter", Viola Talks "Dark Girls"

Paolo here again to discuss three new films.

Peace Love and Misunderstanding
Bruce Beresford's new film begins with a table full of stuffy bourgeois lawyers taking down Pulitzer-winning playwrights. They seem like the kind of people the audience would like to become when they're older, having real opinions about theatre and the other high arts. This party takes place despite the Reaganite hostess, Diane Hudson (Catherine Keener) considering a divorcing from her husband (Kyle McLachlan). She takes her kids Zoe (Elizabeth Olsen) and 'documentarian' Jake (Nat Wolff) to the legendary Woodstock, New York to see their hippie grandmother (Jane Fonda). Fonda's character's presence thus questions one's notion of adulthood, as she is older yet free as the grandmother we wish we had.

Divorce and the other conflicts pop up one after another only to be resolved, a tricky comic tone to maintain. This light freedom is also evident in one scene when a chicken practically blocks our view of a character adding to the chaotic yet natural energy in this home and town. Every member of the household gets to hook up, Diane with a local musician (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), vegetarian Zoe's surprise match with a butcher named Cole (Chace Crawford) and Jake with a barista.

Fonda was the master of modern American elocution and we still hear that when she fires off the script's great one liners. But even Fonda can't help when her character turns into a Kristen Wiig caricature. Chace Crawford, capably evokes the heavy air that comes with a young man who has grown up in a rural area. And since I might not get to catch Martha Marcy May Marlene at the festival, watching Olsen's supporting work here is a decent consolation prize. She performs Zoe just as intelligent and emotionally sound as the script suggests.

Butter
This comedy about the world of butter sculpture competition in Iowa centers around Laura Pickler (Jennifer Garner), a sculptor's wife who takes on her husband Bob's (Ty Burrell) job after he is forced into retirement. Quirk topic with the strangest case of a joke bombing in a movie... (more on Butter and the documentary Dark Girls with Viola Davis after the jump.)

Click to read more ...

Distant Relatives Season 2 Preview

Robert here peeking my head in to say that my series Distant Relatives, where we compare one contemporary film to one classic film and explore the many, sometimes surprising ways they're related will be returning for its second season this month. Check out the first season here.  As for the upcoming season, we'll have fun tackling all sorts of cinematic conventions and themes including myths of the Old West (especially when it comes down to who shot who), relationship breakdowns with child and without (and sometimes because of), and how extra-marital longing can be a little sweet and a little sad, whether on a train platform or in a recording studio.

Charlie and Buster live on in modern times, generally speaking.

We'll walkabout with Gus Van Sant, visit Sam Rockwell and his replicants and compare cinema's greatest fantasy epic to its greatest epic based in real-life. But there's more! We'll reopen the old Chaplin/Keaton debate as it fits neatly into the Pixar/Dreamworks rivalry. We'll revisit the same great classic three times and see its influence in three very different modern films. No need for secrets here: that classic will be The Bicycle Thief  and if by featuring it three times in a row I can convince just one of you who hasn't seen it to do so, I'll be satisfied with my accomplishments in this world. And we're going to start it all off with a special request from Nathaniel himself.
 
Speaking of requests, I'd like to honor as many as I can this season. So if you've got an old movie, a new movie, and a thread between them that you find fascinating and/or unexpected, please share it with me in the comments. I'd love to know where you find distant relatives in cinema's long-stretching family tree.

Oscar Submissions: Spain, Iran, Lebanon, Portugal, The Phillipines and Finland

This just in... well, actually it's been burning a whole in my inbox for a day or two. SPAIN, no stranger to Oscar glory with 19 nominations and 4 wins behind them, have narrowed their Oscar list down to 3 films.

It's a fairly standard choice facing Spain. They've got a Pedro Almodóvar film (The Skin I Live In), which automatically assures high profile discussions and viewers in the States even if the film isn't particularly Oscar-ready competing with a lesser known film which is more loved at home (Agustí Villaronga's Pa Negre or Black Bread) and a new film that not a lot of people have seen that hasn't even been released yet (Benito Zambrano's La voz dormida). The latter film is based on a novel and about women who were jailed during the Franco years. 

I'm guessing they go with Pa Negre (which translates to Black Bread) since it made such a very impressive showing at the Goyas this year taking Best Picture and eight more trophies along with it. The film is set in rural Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War and features Sergí Lopez (Pan's Labyrinth) and I hear that the child actors, one of whom discovers a dead body in the forest, are just great in it. I posted the trailer some months ago. [UPDATE 09/28/11: Yes, it was selected. See the Oscar Charts]

UPDATE: In confusing official and then not official but maybe possibly official eventually news...

IRAN (1 nomination) supposedly submitted Asghar Fahradi's A Separation, (pictured left) which is already an award winning film, a marital drama with a high international profile. Sony Pictures Classics will distribute. I immediately put it in my prediction list. But supposedly Iran wasn't happy that this news rushed out and it wasn't official official. Distinctions! So it might be A Separation but they're now considering Ahmad-Reza Motamedi's Alzheimer's, Bahram Tavakkoli's Here without Me, Ali-Reza Davoudnejad's Salve and Rambod Javan's No Men Allowed as well.

In more official news

FINLAND (1 nomination) has gone with Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre as everyone suspected wish is about a shoe shiner who befriends an immigrant. Kaurismäki gave Finland its only nomination with the dry funny The Man Without a Past some years back. 

LEBANON (never nominated) has submitted the musical that's now playing at TIFF, Nadine Labaki's Where Do We Go Now? which is from the director of Caramel.

PORTUGAL (never nominated) will submit José & Pilar, which is a documentary by Miguel Gonçalves Mendes about the bestselling novelist José Saramago (Blindness) and his wife as well as the friction between private artists and their public lives. Sounds interesting. Guess what? Actor Gael García Bernal and director Fernando Meirelles (who were of course both involved in the Blindness film adaptation) also appear in the film.

This just in...

THE PHILIPPINES (never nominated) are submitting Woman in a Septic Tank which sounds really interesting. I'm also in love with the poster.

It's a comedy about the making of a movie as three filmmakers meet in Starbucks, call on their lead actress (played by Eugene Domingo as both herself and the character in the movie) and plan their poverty drama's shoot which will take place in a garbage dump. The movie gets reinvented several times over and changes genres and form in their imaginations.

TIFF: ALPS, Edwin Boyd

Amir reporting again from The Toronto International Film Festival where I saw something I frankly can't recall ever seeing on the big screen before: Toronto history.

EDWIN BOYD
I’d watched Edwin Boyd only a couple of hours after Rampart (covered yesterday), but the review had to wait.  Scott Speedman plays the titular character, a serial bank robber in the post-war Canada of the 50s. Boyd, if you haven’t heard of him, is something like a Canadian John Dillinger figure. But I assure you this film is miles better than Public Enemies.

I’d heard the film was a total crowd-pleaser and the reports were true. It’s a clichéd film that uses all the tricks of the gangster genre – bursts of action sequences, romantic subplots, pretty girls, crazy sidekicks – but it doesn’t misuse them. Sure, you’ve seen this stuff before, and yes, the film feels too self-aware of its cinematic qualities as many genre films do, but the two hours go by like two minutes as Speedman charmingly reincarnates Boyd. This version of Boyd’s life is extensively romanticized and many details of his life have been completely eliminated, but from a purely cinematic standpoint, Edwin Boyd was a pleasure.

ALPS
The most significant film of the past two days was my personal most anticipated of the festival, Yorgos Lanthimos’ ALPS (If you’ve ever stumbled upon my blog, chances are you already know the extent of my affection for his last film, Dogtooth.) The good news is that ALPS totally lived up to my expectations. Though it’s hard to imagine Lanthimos finding new fans with this film - I’ve even encountered a few Dogtooth fans who were left cold by it - this signature work moved me in ways I did not expect and it stands high above the lot as the festival’s best offering so far.

ALPS is about a group of four people who get paid to substitute for the recently deceased to comfort their families. No information is given to us about the personal lives of three of them, but for the fact that one is the gymnastics coach of another. The fourth person, Monte Rosa (played by the brilliant Aggeliki Papoulia) is a nurse who’s also taking care of her aging father at home.

Peppered with absurd comic situations and brutal violence similar to what we saw in Dogooth, and boasting even bolder stylistic choices, ALPS reaffirms Lanthimos as a distinctive voice in today’s cinema and a visionary storyteller. He’s maintained his confident directorial control, only this time he adds a more poignant and heartfelt dimension to the film. And partnering with a new cinematographer here, he plays beautiful games with camera focus that he admitted (during the Q&A) weren’t always thought of in advance, but feel so right on the screen.

The real strength of the film however, lies in its script. If Dogtooth raised essential questions about the nature of identity, ALPS asks us to reconsider our perceptions of the identity of those around us. It will leave you thinking about the authenticity of your relationships and wondering how strong the bases of our interactions really are. How difficult is it to really replace someone? On what basis are relationships formed anyway? Do we maintain them by habit or will anybody do, if they wear the right clothes and repeat the same sentences? And so on. These questions are masked by Lanthimos’ surreal approach to storytelling but if you dig deep enough, ALPS is a layered and rich psychological study.

Often times at major festivals, we hear that a screenplay or a director award is given to compensate when a great film misses out on the top prize. Rumours about ALPS’ screenplay win at Venice say the same, but in this particular case, I think we can reject the possibility. This script can stand on its own merits.

Still to come: Andrea Arnold, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Joachim Trier and Tahar Rahim to talk about, so stay tuned!