TIFF: "Shame", "Rampart" & the Best Actor Oscar

Amir here, with more coverage from Toronto. Steve McQueen can direct the next Rambo sequel with The Situation in the lead and I’ll be there first in line. Most directors would be lucky to make two films as strong as Shame and Hunger well into their career, let alone in their first two attempts, but McQueen is a rare talent with a knack for visual storytelling that is unmatched by most directors

Shame

In Shame, McQueen’s “regular” star Michael Fassbender plays Brandon, an Irish-born New Yorker whose uncontrollable addiction to sex drives his life, dictates his work and defines his relationships. When his troubled cabaret singer sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) moves in with him, the endless cycle of his sexual routine is broken and things go awry.

On the surface, this might sound like a much lighter subject matter for the director than Hunger, but he approaches the film with the same dazzling formal control. And though he claimed in the Q&A session that he can’t point to specific influences that he’s drawn from his work as a visual artist, one would have to be blind not to notice his fine arts background bleeding into Shame. With the help of Sean Bobbitt (cinematographer) and Joe Walker (editor) who have both done brilliant work – particularly the latter – they create a stunning, rhythmic, heartbreaking and achingly real portrayal of addiction. Addiction is nothing new to the screen. Even sexual addiction has been shown on the screen many times before, but it’s never felt as delicate as it does in McQueen’s hands. Better yet, this film is at once universal and incredibly personal.

Michael Fassbender, Woody Harrelson and Oscar speculation after the jump.

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TIFF: Ludivigne, Fassy and Glenn

Paolo again. Despite some minor screw-ups and nervous breakdowns, here I am to report on TIFF Day 4, which brought more polished kind of movies than the ones that I've seen in the past three days.

I saw Christopher Honore's Beloved as a recommendation by the TIFF Twitter account because I said that my two favourite movies were A Streetcar Named Desire and Do the Right Thing. Now I wonder what they would have said if I wrote that my top two are The Conformist and The Big Sleep.

Beloved begins with a sequence of a Roger Vivier boutique where its customers try out the heels that the shop sells. Different colours, skins, anything a girl wants. A young shop employee named Madeleine (Ludivigne Sagnier, recently interviewed right here) steals a pair and by wearing it she's mistaken for a prostitute. That's only one of the things that are difficult to swallow here, prostitution treated as something that Madeleine can get in and out of. Also incredulous is her daughter Vera (Chiara Mastroianni) turning a gay man (Paul Schenider) straight, the opposite of what happens in Honore's Love Songs where a straight man turns gay. Honore  tackles the fluidity of human sexuality in his films, as characters deal with being guilty of or the victims of infidelity. It's very open to, say, the Freudian nature of love where parents see their lovers within their children. Madeleine embodies that ambivalence and, since this is an Honore film, she occasionally sings these issues out.

The joke, of course, is that the adult version of Madeleine has to played by Mastroianni's real life mother, Catherine Deneuve and thus the younger Madeleine has to copy the older actress's younger self. The scenes set in 1964 make the comparison slightly unconvincing, but the non-linear film fast forwards into the late 70's to better results. It's scary how Sagnier nails Deneuve's essence, and it's not just the former's hair doing all the work. There's this snark that both have, this sexy cynicism that mirrors one with the other. Now if anyone can explain to me what the Prague Spring and 9/11 really have to do with these women's love lives...

Now there's my favourite movie forever this day, Steve McQueen's Shame. His previous work Hunger succeeds in making its audience marvel at his aesthetics in those film's first few minutes. Shame doesn't do this (at first) making the shots and the characters' actions within the frame more cyclical. It almost scares us into thinking that the movie will just be protagonist Brandon (Michael Fassbender) waking up and ignoring his sister Sissy's (Carey Mulligan) needy voice messages for a hundred or so minutes.

It's not until the entrance of the supporting cast that the film is humanized. Shame & Albert Nobbs after the jump.

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One Fassy, Several Cups.

Jose here.

Earlier today the 68th Venice Film Festival came to an end. Awards were given out to what seem to be some strange choices (gotta love when quriky jury members choose the most obscure people, no?)
with the Golden Lion (Best Picture) going to Alexander Sokurov's Faust. 

Just yesterday, our awesome correspondent from Venice mentioned how people expected this one to win and yet it doesn't even show up in the critical consensus. That must've been a dark horse if there ever was one. Apologies to the actual Dark Horse which came out empty handed.

The complete list of winners:

Golden Lion - Faust (Alexander Sokurov, Russia)
Silver Lion for Best Director - Shangjun Cai for Ren shan ren hai/People Mountain People Sea (China)
Special jury Prize - Terraferma (Emanuele Crialese, Italy)
Volpi Cup for Best Actor - Michael Fassbender for Shame (Steve McQueen, UK)
Volpi Cup for Best Actress - Deannie Yip for Tae jie (A simple life) (Ann Hui, China, Hong Kong)
Osella Award for Best Screenplay - Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou for Alps (Greece)
Osella Award for Best Technical Contribution - Robbie Ryan's Cinematogrpahy from Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold, UK)
Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Acting Newcomer -  Shôta Sometani in Himizu (Sion Sono, Japan)

Perhaps the most significant thing about this festival, besides having given Fassy his first big acting award (he's just been around in the maninstream for a couple of years but it feels like decades, no?) might be that it probably won't line up in any way with Oscar. After all, when's the last time the little golden guy paid any attention to a two and a half hour long reimagining of Faust with Russian subtitles? In the festival's long history only two Golden Lion winners got into the Oscars' Best Picture lineup - Brokeback Mountain and Atlantic City - both of them lost.  The most "influential" awards here might be the Volpi Cups; in the past decade we've seen the likes of Julianne Moore (Far From Heaven), Helen Mirren (The Queen), Imelda Staunton (Vera Drake) and Colin Firth (A Single Man) repeat their nominations during the long awards season.

Dear readers across the ocean, should we be on the lookout for any of these movies when they are released here? How did you like our Venice coverage this year? How many acting awards did you think Fassy had won by now?

Links: Fiennes' Shakespeare, Moviegoer's Etiquette, Freddy's Bio?

So EDDIE MURPHY it is for Oscar host. I said a few words about that here but it is now confirmed. The one time nominee (Dreamgirls) and legendary standup star will be your host for the Oscars in February. 

Ralph Fiennes © Alastair MuirYour Movie Buddy Kurt unloads about bad theater etiquette springboarding from a recent incident at the Alamo Drafthouse. Seriously, what is wrong with people these days in movie theaters? Don't come if you don't wanna be there!
Playbill Guess his directorial debut Coriolanus (coming to movie theaters soon) is not enough Shakespeare for star actor Ralph Fiennes this season. He's currently playing Prospero in The Tempest in London (pictured left).
The Lost Boy Michael Fassbender talking about Shame in Venice. 
Alt Screen looks at modern critical takes on the brutal gay film Cruising (1980).  
Kenneth in the (212) 'Correction of the Year' from a scandalous book about Vanessa Redgrave and that acting dynasty.

Cinema Blend Lars von Trier wants his frequent actor Stellan Skarsgård for the male lead of his upcoming pornographic epic. 
IndieWire on the top ten hit box office indies this summer season: Midnight in Paris, The Tree of Life, and Beginners lead the pack. (They'll all fight it out for Oscar nominations, too, obviously.)
Clothes on Film on Patricia Norris's amazing character-exposing and era-milieu-specific work on Scarface (1983). Since it's not even close to being one of my favorite 80s movies you may wonder why I link to every good piece on Scarface. And my answer is...

 Duh! Any excuse, you know.

Screen Rant Hawkeye and The Black Widow in their Avengers costumes. Did Joss Whedon set every sequence in the great outdoors for this movie? I bet the actors miss the privacy of soundstages.
My New Plaid Pants Xavier Dolan seven times 
Nick's Flick Picks Nick's annual check list of fall film anticipation. This one with Mariah Carey as theme.
Awards Daily Sasha on A Dangerous Method's Oscar hopes. 

I kind of loved Knightley in this ultimately, even though she might be off-putting to some.  That is precisely what makes it a Cronenberg-strange movie.  Her facial expressions represent the grotesque. 

Finally...

 Did you see today's Google Doodle celebrating the late Freddie Mercury's birthday? Here it is below. It begs the eternal question: why does his biopic never get made? Wasn't it supposed to be a Sacha Baron Cohen project at one point. When was the last time we heard any news on this one? The Show Must Go On filmmakers.

Venice: "Shame" Is a Masterpiece

My favourite movie of the Venice Film Festival was undoubtedly, Shame by British video-artist Steve McQueen, which screened yesterday and met with universal acclaim. A desperate, gloomy tale of sex-addiction, urban-desolation and self-mortification, Shame is directed with such powerful, astonishing visual style by McQueen and acted with such raw, full commitment by Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan (vulnerable, sassy and fascinating), that it’s all but impossible that it will be ignored by the Venice jury.

Care Mulligan and Michael Fassbender are siblings in SHAME

McQueen and his cinematography Sean Bobbit (who also lensed Hunger) capture a ghostly, liquid New York City, which sets the perfect atmosphere of loneliness and despair for Brandon’s (Fassbender) compulsive acts of sexual abjection. Shame is uncompromising bleeding cinema. It’s also deeply moving and compassionate in the depiction of the relationship between Brandon and his sister Sissy (Mulligan) who unexpectedly breaks into his apartment asking for help and forcing him out of his shell of frozen emotions.

Continue for more on Shame and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis follow-up.

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