Nathaniel in Venice: Horrors! It's "Last Night in Soho" and "Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon"

Nathaniel reporting from the Venice Film Festival

Let’s take a wee break from the Oscar-bound and foreign arthouse offerings at Venice and talk genre. As with comedies, there’s not enough of it at festivals but it’s good to program a variety of pictures if you can. Here are two films featuring supernatural elements, one a complete misfire the other a future cult gem... 

Last Night in Soho (Edgar Wright)
I am deeply sad to report that this wasn’t (at all) for me, though I was so looking forward as I generally enjoy Wright’s work. I was worried from the start with the movie’s hyper enthusiasm about everything it’s doing even before it’s begun doing things...

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Come On Come On, C'Mon C'mon

by Jason Adams

I'm still not sure what to make of the movie year that's been 2021 -- everything still feels to me of a piece with 2020 to be honest, for reasons I am sure you can extrapolate. I have only been inside a movie theater a handful of times and those have been for press screenings or for a cannot-miss repertory screening (like when The Paris here in NYC screened Call Me By Your Name a few weeks ago); that is to say I still haven't been to see a single new movie in a theater with a crowd of normals since March of last year. Add on the fact that I saw several of this fall's big movies this past winter at Sundance (my first), while several of this fall's big movies were first meant to be last fall's big movies, and I think this has given the current moment a formlessness that I'm having trouble delineating.

Anyway my ultimate point is I was going to call Mike Mills' new film C'Mon C'Mon my most anticipated film of the fall, but I actually have no idea what that means anymore. So let's just say I really really really really really wanna see this movie. So much so that doing any "Yes No Maybe So" for this morning's just-dropped first look trailer would be a total and complete farce. I am one thousand percent down for this. I mean did you SEE 20th Century Women? 

C'Mon C'Mon will be playing NYFF in a few weeks and then will presumably be out by the end of the year but A24 hasn't set a date yet. What are your thoughts on the trailer?

Dune, review: when a dream comes true

by Elisa Giudici

Dreams are messages from the deep. This line from Denis Villeneuve's adaptation of Frank Herbert's SF novel perfectly describes the seductive dangerous power of dream we've cherished for a very long time begin to come true. Villeneuve is one of many directors of a generation that grew up reading Frank Herbert visionary sci-fi novels about messianic leadership and predestination, colonization and contamination of an alien world and culture, and the dangers of mixing politics and religion (to name only a few of the main themes of the Dune novels).

He was well aware of how insidious it can be to work on something that's long been on the back of your mind and your abmition for decades. "I talked for hours with Hans Zimmer about the possibility (a long time dream for both of us), trying to understand if it wasn't advisable to let our dream remain in our heads"...

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Breakfast with... a repurposed "Birth" Score

September is "Better Breakfast Month" so we're celebrating because we love food and movies

This post has been repurposed from the TFE vault... but for most of you it will be "new"

Seventeen years ago on this very day (September 8th) Jonathan Glazer's Birth premiered at the Venice Film Festival (where Elisa and I are right now!) and began its long journey from misunderstood/reviled oddity to cult-beloved arthouse classic. Far fewer people remember this but ten years ago, its score was repurposed in a Quaker Oats commercial called "Wake up America"! (Remember commercials? They were these interruptions to your binge-watch that you didn't cause with the pause button.) It was one of those commercials that would look right at home during the Olympics: pretty Americana, sunrise, sports, and other daily wholesome capitalistic endeavors like the building of skyscrapers. If I hadn't been looking away from the television when it aired ten years ago, I would probably have never made the connection that the commercial was the opening score to Birth.  Alexandre Desplat is one of movie composers of all time so why shouldn't his scores live on past their movies and earn him yet more coin?

The commercial and its voiceover went like so...

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Complete the sentence(s) and luxuriate in the Isaac/Chastain vibe!

With fall festival season raging, we're curious what you're thinking out there. So let's have a comment party about the Oscar buzz by completing the following three sentences.

1. I know people at (Telluride or Venice) raved about ________  but I'm still doubtful about its awards chances because ___________.

2. I think ___________ is winning an Oscar but for  _________ the nomination will be the reward.

I wish I had words for this but I really do not pic.twitter.com/xJVzOJJCeh

— Christina Newland (@christinalefou) September 4, 2021

interesting choice to award the golden lion to that slow mo getty images clip of oscar isaac kissing jessica chastain's arm but i respect it

— hannah strong (@thethirdhan) September 4, 2021

 3. That already famous video of Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac on the red carpet made me _______________ . 

Ready? Go.