Venice Diary #05 - Bad Journalists, bad-ass lapdancer and a french pearl

by Elisa Giudici

"Ridacece i soldi" (give us our money back) is a bizarre event that takes place every year at Venice Film Festival. It's a sort of award for the festivalgoers. In this picture, you can see the wooden prize awarded to the author of the funniest joke about a movie seen during the festival or a joke about a stereotypical situation that can be experienced only during Mostra. Everyone can write (or draw) an entry on a simple white piece of paper. There is a big wooden board in front of the official cafeteria. If you are early for the next screening, you can stop by and read some entries. The kind of humor most appreciated in this peculiar competition is the dry kind: you have to be biting wit to have a chance of winning.

Okay let's talk about three of the main Competition films: Lost Illusions, Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon, and L'Evenement...

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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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Horror Actressing: Sheila Vand in "A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night"

by Jason Adams

Watching A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night one's immediate thought might be of a shark, of a Jaws fin splitting the surface, as The Girl (Sheila Vand) skateboards down the inky Iranian streets of Bad Town, her chador trailing behind her like a nighttime tidal-wave no one can escape. A bit of Mephisto in Murnau's Faust too, whose sky-wide wings blot out the sun above that small smoky German village, rooftops only ankle-high, cartoonish and akimbo. There's Caligari brushed over this Bad Town -- the smokestacks and power stations, train cars, flat as a painted flap of cardboard. Sin City Expressionism against which our ageless hunter swerves, preys on all manner of beast, man, fat cat alike. 

But there's so much more to The Girl and how Vand brilliantly paints her -- she might be an Instant Icon of Neo-Western Horror but she's also kind of just a girl, standing in front of a boy...

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Link on, Pete

• Vanity Fair Johnny Depp still having legal/financial woes. Being sued again
• IndieWire very thorough wide ranging interview with Vincent Maraval of the French movie production company Wild Bunch and how the arthouse market and Cannes have changed
• IndieWire from the sounds of this article on the visual FX work in Infinity War, the Oscar campaign is already in effect!
• MUBI Notebook a reprint of a 1972 essay about Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows when it was being reevaluated
• Film School Rejects Black Panther blu-ray review

• Gr8er Days awww, i missed this news about Carol Burnett's would be new sitcom, she backed out when the suits wanted a less unique show
• THR Jeffrey Tambor's first interview since being fired from Transparent
• /Film In unneccessary sequels with bad titles news: The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard is coming
• Dread Central Ana Lily Armirpour (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Bad Batch) has annnounced her next film: Blood Moon set in New Orleans
• NYT Ermanno Olmi, director of Cannes-winner Tree of Wooden Clogs dies
• The Guardian an interview with Chloe Sevigny about her 'Queen of the Scene' past, being in her 40s now, why she didn't name names with the Me Too movement, and her new role in Lean on Pete
• IndieWire CinemaScore gets super touchy about Martin Scorsese saying that their polling devalues cinema
• The Hollywood Reporter on CW's renewed and cancelled shows

Offscreen
• The Atlantic "I'm not Black, I'm Kanye" a devastating piece by Ta Nehisi Coates on all sorts of things including: Michael Jackson, Kanye West, the 1980s, and American history.
• Deadline Olivia de Havilland trying to keep her Feud lawsuit alives. Has appealed the ruling against her
• Playbill Meet the cast of Broadway's Moulin Rouge!

A Not-So-Bad Trailer for "The Bad Batch"

Chris here. Despite the largely negative response (including Nathaniel's take) that met Ana Lily Amanpour's The Bad Batch on 2016 festival circuit, color me still excited for the director's follow-up to A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. At the very least, I've been quite eager to get a look at how her visual and tonal stylings have evolved for this next creepfest - one of our many 2017 forays in cannibalism. However, glimpses at what Amanpour (reuniting with Girl cinematographer Lyle Vincent) has crafted have been scant until this just-released trailer.

The trailer promises ample grimness and Jason Momoa chest gazing between some pretty transfixing visuals. While the trailer focuses on its own star wattage (exciting Keanu Reeves character choice alert!), surprisingly it omits mentioning Jim Carrey's WTF role in the film. Or is that basically the film's worst kept secret? The Bad Batch opens on June 23!