Podcast: Judy's Pain & Glory

with Murtada Elfadl & Nathaniel R

 

Index (58 minutes)
00:01 Pain and Glory - Pedro Almodóvar's career, the moment we fell for the picture, and Antonio Banderas tender dazzling homage/star turn.
14:50 Oscar's Best International Feature competition. How they vote, movies we love, and what might get nominated.
27:27 Renée Zellweger as 'The World's Greatest Entertainer' in Judy. The performance and the film.
43:11 The Best Actress Race: Scarlett, Cynthia, Renee, Alfre, and more...

Related Reading/Listening
Murtada's Pain & Glory Review
Nathaniel's episodes of Las Culturistas
Foreign Submissions you can stream right now

 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? 

Pain and Glory, Judy

Golden Horse Nominations for 2019

by Nathaniel R

A lonely student and his teacher become friendly in "Wet Season"

Usually the Golden Horse nominations are a fun and glamorous mix of all the hot movies and movie stars from various Chinese language countries. This year, however, due to political fallout from a speech last year and a Chinese boycott because of increasing tension between the way China sees Taiwan and the way Taiwan sees itself, no films from Mainland China are competing (which takes out a huge chunk of movies and a lot of the most famous movie stars). So the bulk of the features nominated this year are features from Taiwan with a little Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong thrown in. UPDATED WITH THE WINNERS MARKED BY STARS

BEST NARRATIVE FEATURE 

• A Sun (Taiwan) ★
• Suk Suk (Hong Kong)
• The Garden of Evening Mists (Malaysia)
• Wet Season (Singapore)
• Detention (Taiwan)

You may have noticed that Taiwan's current Oscar submission Dear Ex  (streaming on Netflix) is not nominated here. That's because it was a major nominee last year at these same awards. Curiously Singapore's current Oscar submission A Land Imagined (streaming on Netflix) was not nominated in Best Feature at the Golden Horse Awards. It had to settle for a few craft nominations...

Click to read more ...

International Feature Film Oscar List... we're almost there!

Trine Dyrholm seduces her stepson in Denmark's submission "Queen of Hearts"

Countries have until October 1st to submit their representing film to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. Though there's one week left, we now have practically the whole list with 82 pictures announcing (see the charts and the letterboxd list) Last year the list was  87 pictures long and the record is 92 which was in 2017 so we'll probably see a slightly longer list when the Academy officially publishes it. Usually one or two films will mysteriously drop out or be replaced that were previously announced, too. So it's not official until it's official.

Do we talk about this category too much at TFE? Maybe so but we're into it. After the jump, 10 entries you can see early if you try and the 9 newest submissions.

The latest entries...

Click to read more ...

TIFF Quickie: Crazy White Women!

by Nathaniel R

For this last batch of short TIFF reviews, let's look at three films about mysterious and/or psychologically complex female characters. The post title was glib but the films aren't. 

DISCO (Jorunn Mykelbust Syversen, Norway)
This puzzling drama centers on a champion dancer whose mom and step-dad run some kind of evangelical church. Apparently in Scandivania -- as with America -- conservative faith movements are on the rise. Syversen shows empathy for her characters but chills it with a clinically detached rhythym to the cutting. The lost protagonist Mirjam (Josefine Frida Pettersen) has mysterious physical troubles and vacant psychology that can bring flickers of Todd Haynes' Safe (1995) to mind.

Syversen's strongest skill seems to be in observational mode. In one escalating series of scene at a Jesus camp the choices in camera distance are particularly compelling. In medium shot we observe a group of boys being told to breathe quickly in and out of paper bags to drive out the demons inside them. Cut to a long shot as we watch them comically pass out as they hyperventilate. This is a followed by a not at all comical baptism that is shot more like a drowning. Despite Syverson's obvious skill and a tight running time (94 minutes), Disco is far too repetitive and its point of view remains as opaque as Mirjam's psychology. It's not enough, always, to merely observe. C

EMA (Pablo Larraín, Chile)
The first image is a startling one: a still working traffic light engulfed in flames...

Click to read more ...

"Dear Ex" adds another queer film to the International Feature Oscar Race

by Nathaniel R

UPDATED 09/17
59 films announced thus far for the Best International Feature race at the 92nd Oscars, there are yet more LGBTQ entries...

One recent gay entry is Taiwan's Dear Ex (2018). You might remember the title because it won three Golden Horse Awards last year including Best Actress for the Hsieh Ying-xuan as the widow who realizes her husband had a male lover (Roy Chiu, nominated for Best Actor). It's currently available to stream on Netflix.

The other newest arrival is Memories of My Body from Indonesia which we haven't heard much about but involves male dancers who dress as women. It's kind of a surprising selection since it's been banned in some parts of the country and is under attack by conservative groups for "LGBT propaganda". SOUNDS GREAT, WHEN CAN WE WATCH IT? 

Memories of My Body

That brings the total of LGBTQ films to eight.

• Bolivia - I Miss You 
• Indonesia - Memories of My Body 
• Panama - Everybody Changes 
• Peru - Retablo 
• Spain - Pain & Glory 
• Sweden - And Then We Danced 
• Taiwan - Dear Ex 
• Venezuela - Being Impossible

UPDATE: France did not select the lesbian romance Portrait of a Lady on Fire which would have made this list more high profile and larger.