Oscar's International Race Pt 4 - Returning Directors

by Nathaniel R

In the race for this year's Best International Feature Film, Parasite definitely has the lead but Bong Joon-ho is one of only 20 directors trying again with Oscar after previous submissions in this category. None of them have been nominated before except the LEGEND we'll start with...

THE RETURNING GIANT
Spain's most globally celebrated director, Pedro Almodóvar, is back in contention for the seventh time with Pain and Glory, his 21st feature at the age of 72. This finally makes him Spain's most submitted director of all time...

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Untitled Woody Allen Picture Shoots This Summer

by Nathaniel R

Chalamet & Fanning and Woody on the set of the ill-fated "A Rainy Day in New York"

For as long as we've been conscious of the movies, there's been a Woody Allen movie released every single year. That clockwork regularity ended with Wonder Wheel (2017). Amazon refused to release the completed picture A Rainy Day in New York which was meant for 2018 when the bad press kept mounting and some of that film's cast (Rebecca Hall and Timothée Chalamet, among them) disowned the film due to media pressure from the Farrow family's accusations against the director (unchanged since 1992 -- Woody was never officially charged after two separate investigations -- but revived very publicly/frequently since early 2014). The filmmaker and Amazon Studios are, last we heard, still in a pricey legal battle over their broken contract (even if you dislike Woody, one wonders what argument Amazon Studios could possibly come up with that's a winning one since they went into that contract with full knowledge of the accusations)  but Woody has the greenlight from other sources for his 2020 picture, as yet untitled, which will begin filming in July...

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Spain's Three Finalists (and other foreign film Oscar updates)

Time to start updating the Foreign Film Oscar submission charts on the regular! With the Venice/Telluride/TIFF wave about to hit we'll be getting regular news on which international films will be aiming for Oscar this season. Recently Spain announced their three finalists. They are...

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Almodóvar has started shooting his next film!

by Nathaniel R

Pedro Almodóvar has begun shooting his next film which is called Pain & Glory, so we can expect it in 2019. This will be Penelope Cruz's sixth collaboration with one of the world's greatest directors (she previously headlined Volver and Broken Embraces and had supporting roles in Live Flesh, All About My Mother, and I'm So Excited). Antonio Banderas will also co-star, marking his 7th Pedro film. Other Almodóvar regulars appearing will be Kiti Mánver (6th time) and Julieta Serrano (5th time). Though Pedro pictures are usually all about the actresses occassionally he throws gorgeous men into the mix. And this looks like one of those times. In addition to Banderas in what we assume will be the lead role (?), we've got: Raúl Arévalo from I'm So Excited, Leonardo Sbaraglia (Wild Tales) and Asier Etxeandia (Ma Ma).

The movie will also be the feature debut for a young popular singer named Rosalía. She posted the following picture on her instagram...

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The 2017 Animated Contenders: "Birdboy: The Forgotten Children"

by Tim Brayton

For the finale of our five-part tour of some of the more obscure films competing for the Best Animated Feature Oscar, we turn to a film that premiered over two years ago, but has only just opened in the U.S. this very weekend: the Spanish psychological horror cartoon Birdboy: The Forgotten Chidlren. The film is based on the comic Psiconautas by Alberto Vázquez, who co-writes and co-directs with Pedro Rivero; it's the duo's second film based on these characters, following the 2011 short Birdman, which serves as the new feature's backstory (the short is available online).

The basic hook here couldn't be any more direct or nasty-minded. This is a silly talking animal film warped into a portrait of the world as bleak, hopeless hell. "Psychological horror," I called it, because I'd be hard pressed to name any better category, but that's not really enough to communicate the sheer, visceral nastiness of this film. It's a mere 76 minutes long, and even that's almost too long to spend with the film's altogether putrescent depiction of a world that has died, with the survivors still tottering around in the corpse of that world, forced to confront some truly cruel moments. Also, they're fuzzy critters.

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