Meanwhile in Venice...

While I struggle to keep up at TIFF (good lord what a learning curve) the Venice Film Festival wrapped up and announced its awards. We didn't share them in a timely fashion. My apologies. The winners were...

Stray Dogs

Golden Lion: Sacro GRA (Gianfranco Rosi)
This surprise winner is a documentary about a famous highway in Rome. Sometimes non-sexy subject matter translates into great films.
Grand Jury Prize: Stray Dogs (Tsai Ming-liang)
From the sounds of twitter this was the sensation of the festival though it doesn't screen at TIFF until after I leave town. *snifffle*
Silver Lion (Best Director): Alexandros Avranas, Miss Violence
Best Actor: Themis Panou, Miss Violence
I have a terrible habit of skipping films which then become winners at festivals. This is also playing Toronto but descriptions make it sound like a Greek version of The Virgin Suicides and I didn't bite. In hindsight and with awards under its belt a Greek version of The Virgin Suicides sounds tempting.
Best Actress: Elena Cotta, A Street in Palermo
Luckiest Gown: "Versayce" on Scarlett Johansson
okay that's not a real award but it should be. because dayum...

Marcello Mastroianni Award (Best Young Actor): Tye Sheridan, in Joe
Between this and his wonderful work in Mud, quite an arrival, huh
Best Screenplay: Philomena (Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope)
Dench was rumored to be the frontrunner for Best Actress but the jury thought otherwise... which might be telling since they obviously liked the film.
Special Jury Prize: The Police Officer's Wife (Phillip Groning)
Luigi de Laurentiis Award (Best Debut Feature): White Shadow (Noaz Deshe)
This one is a Tanzanian film (!) about an albino on the run from witch doctors.  

Theres another set of awards called "Horizon" and they chose...

Eastern Boys

Best Film: Eastern Boys (Robin Campillo)
A film about Eastern European young male immigrant hustlers in Paris's Gare du Nord station. 
Best Director: Still Life (Uberto Pasolini)
Special Jury Prize: Ruin (Michael Cody)
Award for Innovative Content: Fish and Cat (Shahram Mokri)
Best Short Film: Kush

Have you ever been to Venice or Toronto? Are they way up on your dream festival list or are you all about Cannes?

Queer or "Queer": Newfest hits New York City

Glenn here discussing queer cinema. Or should I say “queer cinema”? The term has kind of lost its meaning these days where those words are used to describe anything with homosexuality at its core. Gone are the days of directors like Gregg Araki, Todd Haynes and Tom Kalin making confronting, even angry films about sexuality that were heralded under the banner of “New Queer Cinema”. As I discussed just last week, there appears to be less of a need for that type of transgressive filmmaking anymore in our culture (although I’d certainly take it over some of the films discussed below) so if society’s going to change then I guess cinema has to change with it. 

Beginning tomorrow in New York City is Newfest, the city's “premier LGBT film festival”. Just as an aside, wasn’t one of Gayby’s (mini-reviewed here) best jokes the one about the ever-expanding acronyms of gay culture? I think it was. Anyway, let’s take a look at a selection of titles screening for local audiences and which may be arriving at a queer film festival near you over the next 12 months (if not already). 

James Franco, Elizabeth Taylor (er) and Terrence Malick (umm) after the jump...

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Interior. Link Post.

AV Club what if you could hit "pause" on pop culture -- what would you catch up on?
Daily Beast an uninhibited interview with the stars of Blue is the Warmest Colour on working with "fake pussies" and watching the movie with their families
Glenn Dunks enters Interior. Leather Bar 
Cinema Blend on Zach Snyder's continued defense of Man of Steel's insane body count -- which ruined the movie for a lot of people, my friends at Panel Culture included, because... seriously, what kind of hero is that?
Pajiba wants to get away from The Getaway 

The New Yorker on the list as the signature form of our time "a comic nightmare of futile enumeration"
Ultra Culture on an important underreported piece of info from that Lars von Trier Uma Thurman Nymphomaniac clip 
Awards Daily Sasha reviews Gravity which she calls a masterpiece. Here's the thing about festivals. They are both a blessing and a curse on the world. One wants to avoid the movies that have upcoming release dates but then you end up being the last person to see them -- i haven't read this for fear of spoilers I'm just saying a lot of reviews are out there now floating in space. How to resist seeing it at TIFF when there are movies that I'm much less likely to get the chance to see next month? 
In Contention on a Marilyn Monroe Bruce Dern prophecy that's coming true with Nebraska
LA Times Jason Reitman's Labor Day premieres - sucks that it isn't in theaters now during, uh, Labor Day.

Oooh, Maggie is staring at you.

That's one version of the new poster for the 50th annual Golden Horse Awards. It looks like a delicious VIP ticket, yes? Basically Maggie Cheung's eyes are the selling point on each poster. The Golden Horse Awards are Asia's oldest film awards and still its most competitive. Nominations will be announced on October 1st and will see how well this year's hot titles like Stray Dogs, A Touch of Sin, and The Grandmaster do. The awards ceremony will be held in late November. Ang Lee, who has won two Golden Horses as Best Director (Lust Caution, The Wedding Banquet) and two Oscars for Best Director (Brokeback Mountain, Life of Pi), is president of the jury this year.

Wanna Help Me Plan My TIFF Schedule?

I am pleased to report that I'll be covering TIFF for the first time since (gulp)... I don't even want to talk about how long it's been though I love that city dearly. TIFF has been kind enough to grant me accreditation but because the news came so late i've only been able to carve out about 4½ days for movie watching. I'll cram in as many movies as I can. Amir will also be there to help bring you TIFF festivities. If it goes well this year, we'll carve out 7 to 10 days next year. How's that? Have you looked at their massive slate? Which movies are you most excited to read about? 

Notes on the NYFF Main Slate

The full lineup of the New York Film Festival's Main Slate was released today. Though the film festival is famously curated and thus exclusionary (I still haven't forgiven them for thinking Rachel Getting Married, the best movie of 2008, was beneath us) this year's lineup is quite a bit larger than usual. Are their standards loosening or was there just too much quality to deny? In honor of the bigger than usual lineup, I thought I'd attempt 35 thoughts on the lineup but I ran out of time. Herewith 29 bullet points...

• Can The Wind Rises save this year's sure-to-be-dismal Best Animated Feature race that Oscars? It's been over ten years since the Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki won the Oscar for Spirited Away (2001). His newest film is a biopic, excuse me a "visionary poem", about Jiro Hirokoshi, the man who designed the Zero fighter. 

• Some titles just roll off the tongue. Consider... When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism, a film from the director of Police, Adjective, which is about the life of a film director when the cameras aren't rolling. Except, we hope, the camera filming this movie because staring a blank screen wouldn't do.

• They describe that one as "fascinatingly oblique" which could well be film festival speak for "__________" (that's for you to fill in in the comments)

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