Podcast: El Angel, The Front Runner, Oscar's Screenplay Race

Nathaniel R and Murtada Elfadl talk new films and the Oscar race

Index (58 minutes)
00:01 The story of Gary Hart in The Front Runner starring Hugh Jackman
16:25 El Angel starring Lorenzo Ferro and Chino Darín which is Argentina's Oscar submission
27:22 Sidebar: My Fair Lady on Broadway
34:24 Best Adapted Screenplay: Bradley Cooper, Barry Jenkins, Gillian Flynn, Nicole Holofcener, Spike Lee, Armando Iannucci, Paul Dano & Zoe Kazan could all compete here but which of them will?
45:23 Best Original Screenplay: Roma, The Favourite and Green Book and...?
54:40 Beck claims he's recording a score for Roma... which has no score.

 References / Further Reading
• The horror of Beck's Tweet about Roma
• Chris's review of The Front Runner
• Foreign Language Film Submission Chart 
• Screenplays Oscar Chart

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you? 

El Angel and The Front Runner

TIFF: The Quietude

Nathaniel R reporting from the Toronto International Film Festival

Martina Gusman (Carancho) and Oscar nominee Bérénice Bejo (The Artist) are exceedingly well cast as loving sisters reunited when their wealthy father has a stroke in this sexy family melodrama from Argentina. The sisters are tight despite years of separation but they have dramatically different relationships with their mother (a commanding turn from Graciela Borges) who clearly favors one and disdains the other. Despite the capable and supremely sexy cast (Edgar Ramirez and Joaquín Furriel are the male love interests for the sisters... and, well, who wouldn't be interested?) and a few witty visual moments and firecracker scenes, the movie is a mixed bag. The character arcs don't fully land given the erratic quality of the screenplay.

And I'm not one to normally harp on "the male gaze," a triggering complaint now so frequently overused it's beginning to lose  meaning, but here we have a textbook example...

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TIFF: Euphoria and Zama disappoint

We've got a a few more adventures from TIFF to get through. Here are two pictures Euphoria and Zama that I was greatly looking forward to for disparate reasons (the lead actors and the director, respectively). But neither one did it for me and I sincerely hope other future eyeballs will enjoy them more...

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TIFF Discovery: A Shirley Henderson Master Class and a Wild Argentinian Family

by Sean Donovan

The films featured in TIFF’s ‘Discovery’ section are sometimes given short shrift by the festival at large. Already arriving with the disadvantage of being announced last, and thereby with the least amount of time for anticipation to brew, these small modest productions (many of which are debut features for their directors) are easily buried underneath the hype of awards season giants and glitzy red carpets. If that’s the macro view of things, in micro the audiences that find their way to ‘Discovery’ films are incredibly eager and excited, anxious for the chance to look at films that may never find healthy distribution outside of festival spaces. Here are two of the absolute highlights of TIFF’s ‘Discovery’ program:

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Tribeca 2017: Nobody's Watching

We've still got some Tribeca reviews to catch up on, so here's Jason Adams again.

I know you're going to be shocked to hear this about someone who writes on the internet for a living, but I'm a bit of the solitary type. 'A loner, a rebel,' in Pee-wee parlance. I was an only child, a gay only child, and never learned how to make friends all that well, so I spent a majority of my teenage years wandering. I grew up in a small town but one big enough to wander, and when I moved to New York City after college I carried the habit with me. And New York rewards the hell out of such instincts; there's nowhere more comfortable for solitary wandering than in the middle of a great big oblivious crowd...

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