AFI Fest Honors Sophia Loren, Actress, Fashion Icon, Mistress of Throwing Shade

 Anne Marie from the AFI Fest on an International Legend...

At age 80, Sophia Loren is still magnetic. When the Academy Award-winning actress appeared onstage at the Dolby Theatre on Wednesday night for an AFI Fest tribute to her career, she received a two-minute long standing ovation. The audience whooped and yelled "Bellisima" before Loren, elegant in a black gown studded with crystals, could do more than walk onstage and smile. Once the furor died down, Rob Marshall, her director for Nine, interviewed Sophia Loren about her career, co-stars, and controversies.

“When I saw the movies, I forgot the war, forgot hunger. It was possible to believe there was another life than the one I was in.”

Despite her glamorous image, Loren's description of her early life growing up poor in the slums of Italy was bleak. When she met her husband, producer Carlo Ponti (who passed away in 2007), he took an active role in shaping her career. Ponti was the one who brought her to America after a successful Italian film career and encouraged her to learn English (“you have to learn English, because movies are in English"). Of course, we all know how that turned out. She had a hugely successful international film career, starring in films by some of the best American and Italian directors (not Fellini, of whom she said “I was not his kind of actress"), and an Oscar in 1961 for Two Women, a movie to which she felt deeply connected, since it reflected her own impoverished childhood.

Besides an illustrious film career, Sophia Loren also has a wicked sense of humor. She was happy to dish on her various famous co-leading men. Here are some scattered observations:

On Cary Grant: "...a great actor, absolutely incredible as a person, as a man.”

Peter Sellars: “very melancholic person. He would light up only when the director said action.”

Clark Gable: "He had a watch and it rang every evening at 5. When it rang, he would leave without saying goodbye."

Daniel Day Lewis: "One of the best alive."

Marlon Brando: <shrug> "Eh."

But of course, nothing could top her most famous moment of shade, the immortal side-eye she gave Jayne Mansfield at a Hollywood party. Rob Marshall showed Loren the picture, and asked her exactly what was going through her mind. Here, for a brief moment, Loren was at a loss for words.

"I was afraid that everything would... come out!"

The tribute concluded with two films starring the legendary actress: her son Edoardo Ponti's short film, The Human Voice, and Marriage Italian Style, the 1964 film for which Loren earned her second Academy Award nomination. As Sophia Loren rose to leave the stage before the movies began, she received another standing ovation. She paused briefly, clearly touched, and then swept away.

AFI: Selma Premiere or, We Ate Cookies With Lorraine Toussaint!

Safely happily physically ensconced back in New York City, my head is still ping-ponging around that exciting week in Los Angeles. My thoughts take scary stumbles back in time to 1960s Alabama when white politicians and racists were trying to stop black citizens from voting. Sound familiar? The first part, I mean. Sadly in 2014 we're still fighting efforts to surpress the vote, making Ava DuVernay's upcoming Christmas release Selma a historical drama that is also uncomfortably contemporary.

The AFI FESTIVAL PRESENTED BY CORPORATION (don't make me say it, publicists!) closes tonight with Foxcatcher but we'll have a few more days of coverage to catch up. My closing night film was the world premiere of Selma. It was so fresh from the editing bay that the great cinematographer Bradford Young was brought up on stage five days earlier for that A Most Violent Year premiere (he's busy) only to instantly return to the film for color corrections. It was so new that a couple of visual effects and a few sound issues had not been fully resolved. The event was pitched as a preview of 30 minutes of the film but Oprah Winfrey, who produced, convinced Ava to seize the opportunity to present the (nearly) completed work. We were actually asked not to review it though I see that the rest of the internet has thoroughly disobeyed this studio request. Virtually the whole cast was there with the exception of the white guys (Allesandro Nivola, Giovanni Ribisi, Tom Wilkinson) and Carmen Ejogo who plays Coretta Scott King.

More on Ejogo, Oscar play, and a party photos after the jump...

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AFI Fest: 'Tales of the Grim Sleeper' and the Politics of Telling Other People's Stories

Margaret reporting from the AFI Fest...

The new documentary Tales of the Grim Sleeper, on the long list of eligible Oscar doc titles, screened for the first time in Los Angeles not ten miles from the scene of the brutal crimes it addresses. The feature investigates a serial murderer and his staggering number of victims over two decades in a close-knit South L.A. community-- and these are not the kind of crimes that "could have happened anywhere." Visited on an already underserved and overlooked neighborhood, the killings targeted upwards of one hundred black women, many prostitutes and drug users, whose lives the police disregarded so entirely that for years the crimes were designated by the LAPD as NHI-- No Human Involved. 

The entry point for the film is an investigation of Lonnie Franklin, Jr., the suspect in custody who is still awaiting trial, but as the documentary picks apart layers of the case it instead becomes a scathing indictment of a broken justice system.

Director Nick Broomfield, a white British man whose background gives him little in common with the subjects of his narrative, has significant advantages in accessing and broadcasting this story. A pioneer in the self-reflexive documentary style that has since been employed by Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock, he inserts himself into the narrative just enough be transparent about his outsider relationship to the community, and his platform as an affluent white filmmaker.

Thankfully, Broomfield doesn't seem to labor under the impression that it's his story to tell. For his Q&A after the AFI Fest screening, he brought up Pam Brooks, who makes invaluable contributions to the movie as a neighborhood guide and storyteller, and Margaret Prescod, tireless spokesperson for the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders. Broomfield deftly redirected audience questions about the victims, miscarriage of justice, and the apartheid in L.A. to Margaret and Pam. 

Lonnie Franklin's public defender, a minor presence in the documentary who came off as a sloppy, hapless suit, emerged from the audience to make a tone-deaf bid to co-opt the Q&A, talking over Margaret and Pam and offering unsolicited advice. This tasteless move only served to underline the film's point about invisibilization of the affected community, and the importance of supporting their voices.

Someone in the audience asked, "What can we do?" Nick Broomfield deferred again to Margaret Prescod. "This film should be shown all over this city. Make sure people see it. Make sure city officials see it. How many black women died, were murdered? We're still waiting to find out. It took a British filmmaker to come here and tell this story... We are not done here."

So, what can we do? We can think about who gets to tell these stories, and try to listen and respect the people who are telling their own.

AFI Fest: Weta Digital Celebrates 20 Years with New Technology

Anne Marie here at the AFI Fest with another special event. Weta Digital, the pioneering VFX company behind some of the biggest blockbusters, including the Marvel franchise, Avatar, and The Hobbit, is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. In  “State of the Art: The Evolution of Weta Digital," Visual Effects Supervisor Dan Lemmon gave audiences a peek behind the digital curtain of Weta Digital’s latest film, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, to show how the company develops performance capture to assist and augment cinematography.

 Weta Digital is probably best known for its motion capture process (dubbed “performance capture” by James Cameron "because they also capture emotions"). Dan Lemmon explained that this evolved from Andy Serkis filming scenes as Gollum twice for The Lord of the Rings, into a sophisticated system called a “Capture Volume,” a cube of space surrounded by infrared cameras that record the actors’ movements. For Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, director Matt Reeves wanted to shoot the apes on location, so a new “portable” version was developed. The result had a profound effect not only on the technology of performance capture, but also on the look of the film--both digital and real.

Serkis in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Since Avatar won the Oscar for Best Cinematography in 2009, each subsequent winner has been a VFX-heavy film, so the unspoken question was how Weta Digital interacted with Michael Seresin, the cinematographer of Dawn. Shooting on location allowed Seresin to light the ape actors as he would real characters. Then, Weta Digital could match that lighting on the pixelized primates. In addition, Seresin and Reeves developed a look book, pulling images from The Godfather and grittier 70s films. Dan Lemmon explained that Weta’s job was to mimic Seresin’s intentions, for instance digitally creating the vertigo-inducing helicopter shot for the climax. However, Lemmon also proudly pointed out how Weta Digital improved on Seresin’s vision, whether it was by manipulating the light to capture a digital ape’s eyes, or by adding fake “flaws” to the helicopter shot in order to make the synthetic image more real. 

The result of Weta Digital’s collaboration with Seresin is undoubtedly remarkable, and pushes VFX to be accepted as an art, rather than a gimmick. Still, Weta's additions to Seresin's work mark a definite change in the visual landscape of moviemaking. As VFX are integrated from pre-production to filming to post-production and digital effects get clearer, the line between cinematography and visual effects is going to get increasingly muddy.

AFI Fest's Young Hollywood Panel on Superheroes, Punching, and Queen Latifah

Margaret and Anne Marie here, reporting from AFI Fest ("presented by [corporation]!"). 

Last night the AFI and the LA Times kicked off a series of panel discussions with its "Young Hollywood Roundtable," whose panelists ranged widely in age and perspective but are all of whom making their mark on the movie business. Jenny Slate, writer/star of critical hit Obvious Child and former SNL castmember, was joined by Jena Malone (Inherent Vice, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay), Logan Lerman (Fury, The Perks of Being a Wallflower), and Joey King (Wish I Was Here, FX's Fargo).

Here are 8 lessons we learned from the Young Hollywood Roundtable:

Anne Marie:

1. Queen Latifah's royal legacy is enduring and eternal. When asked who her inspiration was, Joey King informed the audience that Queen Latifah is underrated. What followed was a 5 minute Latifah love-fest where Jenny Slate promised a detailed list of reasons why Queen Latifah is amazing ("on my personal stationary") and Logan Lerman revealed that his biggest inspiration is... Queen Latifah.

2. Jena Malone has a lot of very intelligent but frustratingly vague things to say about superhero movies. No confirmation from the newly-redheaded actress as to what her role is on Batman vs. Superman, but when Kaufman asked her about the pros and cons of working on a major superhero flick, Malone was frank: "We're artists, but we're also businesswomen." But working on a blockbuster isn't just about money. It has to tell a story as well.

I'm not saying Jena Malone is Robin, but I am saying she's being really evasive and her hair is red. #AFIFEST #YoungHollywood #Batman

— Anne Marie (@WeRecycleMovies) November 8, 2014 

Ruminations on Twitter, higher education, and punching Brad Pitt after the jump.

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