10th Anniversary: The Young Victoria

by Cláudio Alves

It's difficult to follow the Oscar race each year without developing a prejudice against prestige biopics. At times it seems its the genre where creativity goes to die, where formulas thrive and the appearance of respectability is more important than genuine artistic merit. These words are perchance, too harsh, because specific qualities do manage to shine through the baseline of expected mediocrity on numerous occassions. Take The Young Victoria, Jean-Marc Vallée's perfectly serviceable retelling of Queen Victoria's early years and marriage to Prince Albert. Rewatching it ten years after its initial release, the film isn't as despairingly dry as you may have remembered. The Young Victoria is one of Emily Blunt's lesser efforts, but she's luminous nonetheless, bringing a sense of modernity that rubs abrasively against the historical setting. She never convinces as a 19th-century ruler, but that manages to feel more like a feature than a fault. As for Rupert Friend's Albert, he remains a charming romantic ideal, establishing great chemistry with Blunt.

And then, of course, there are Sandy Powell's Oscar-winning costumes…

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101 days til Oscar. How will Disney's fare fare?

by Nathaniel R

Glenn Close actually dressed up as Cruella for the movie's premiere!Remember Glenn Close's Globe nomination for 101 Dalmatians (1996)? In retrospect it's kind of fascinating that greedy Disney didn't start fully committing to live-actioning and spinning off all their animated properties until recently because that early example was a huge hit, the sixth most popular film in the US that year. It also grossed $320 million globally well before the days when billion dollar worldwide grosses became common for Disney blockbusters.

Close's broadly comic diva turn didn't cross over to an Oscar nomination but its sequel managed one (for Costume Design). With Disney quadrupling down this year with four options for voters to look at (Dumbo, Maleficent 2, The Lion King, Aladdin) one wonders how the Mouse House will fare come nomination morning. After the jump a list of exactly how previous remakes have fared and how 2019 might shake out...

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Interview: Nadav Lapid on 'Synonyms' and who gets to tell which stories

by Murtada Elfadl

Using his own experiences as a blueprint Nadav Lapid (The Kindergarten Teacher) made a furious, kinetic and altogether astounding film about being disaffected and seeking a new life, ideals and country. In Synonyms (opening today in limited release) Tom Mercier plays Yoav, a young Israeli who flees Tel Aviv for Paris and tries to completely erase his former identity. The movie is not easy to describe, it’s better to dive in and enjoy the experience. It won numerous accolades around the world this year starting with the Golden Bear at the Berlinale. While in New York to present his film in the main slate of the New York Film Festival, we got the chance to talk to Lapid about his film, his powerful lead actor and who owns the rights to tell which stories. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity

Murtada Elfadl: Can you talk about the beginning of the film. The first 10, 15 minutes are hypnotic, confusing, and disorienting, throwing the audience into the story with no introduction.

NADAV LAPID: I felt that the movie should start with a vibration, with movement. In a way the biggest challenge of the filmmaking was to create this movie that doesn't have a clear narrative line. I didn't want the film to become a series of anecdotes. We had to have something attached to that feeling, that vibration. It's a movie that's based on compulsion, on an urge. You cannot imagine an introduction to such a movie...

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The costumes of “Judy”: Fantasy vs Reality

by Cláudio Alves

When dressing a real-life story, there’s always a complicated relationship going on between a designer and History. The balance of fact and fiction, raw reality and cinematic fantasy, must be achieved and thought through. Depending on the project, the scales might tip towards one or the other, but both are always dancing hand-in-hand. Such sartorial dynamics might reflect the production’s relationship with fact or even contradict that preoccupation, either supporting an idea of History or silently challenging it.

For Judy, costume designer Jany Temime helped transform Renée Zellweger into Judy Garland, a process that was much more complex than simply looking at archival material and reproducing past fashions…

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The Look of "Joker"

by Cláudio Alves

In 1989, Tim Burton envisioned Gotham City as an Expressionistic nightmare, something necessarily unreal. Three years later, Batman Returns showed a different sort of urban reverie, one tainted by quasi fascistic imagery, an appropriate dark meaning for a darker film than its predecessor. Joel Schumacher's sequels would see Gotham go through another transfiguration, from a gloomy nightmare into a candy-colored hallucination. This process of growing artificiality would end when Christopher Nolan revitalized Batman for a 21st-century audience.

Nolan's trilogy shows us a Gotham that's a foreigner's idea of an American metropolis and one can almost chart, throughout the films, how the city goes from being a dream of Chicago to New York City 2.0. Todd Phillips' Joker perpetuates this configuration of Gotham as DC Comics' version of Manhattan, but he isn't looking to the real contemporary city for inspiration. The film is set in a New York of yore, a fantasy built from nostalgia and the cinematic legacy of New Hollywood's urban dramas. Gotham is never just a city, rather the idea of one…

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