Venice is First. And Opens with "First Man"

by Nathaniel R

First Man star Ryan Gosling and living legend Vanessa Redgrave were the toasts of Venice at the opening of the 75th annual Venice Film Festival...

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Four More Foreign Film Oscar Submissions

by Nathaniel R

Four more official entries to the Foreign Language Film Oscar race.

• Birds of Passage -Colombia
  This is from the director Ciro Guerra (who has a co-director this time) the man behind Colombia's only Oscar nominee and TFE favorite Embrace of the Serpent.  The new film is a crime/family drama.
  Opening in the US in February. Orchard distributing
• Border -Sweden
  Un Certain Regard winner at Cannes this year. It's based on a novella by the author of Let the Right One In (!) and is a reportedly strange tale of a woman with the ability to sense and smell how people feel.
  Opening in the US October 26th. Neon distributing.
• Donbass -Ukraine
  From the acclaimed Sergey Loznitsa (My Joy, A Gentle Creature). This one is a cheerful tale (he said sarcastically given Loznitsa's filmography) about the degradation of Ukranian society in our post-truth world
• La Familia -Venezuela
  A father son drama about a violent neighborhood.
  Played in the US earlier this month. Film Movement distributing. 

UPDATE HOURS LATER - TWO MORE ENTRIES

• Never Look Away - Germany
  From Florian Henckel von Donnersmarch (The Lives of Others) comes this story of a romance between two art students (Tom Schilling and Paula Beer) and her father (Sebastian Koch) who fights against the relationship
• Ghost Hunting - Palestine
  A documentary about a former interrogation center in which the inmates reenact their interrogations inside a replica of the center built to scale

Related:
Updated Oscar charts for foreign film
First 10 official contenders for foreign film
49 suggested European Film Awards contenders
Spain's Finalists
Israel's Finalists

Soundtracking: "Mulholland Drive"

by Chris Feil

I’ve talked a good deal in this column about filmmakers whose music is an essential piece of their cinematic identity, but seldom are they as elusively so as David Lynch. Blue Velvet took a classic sound to mirror the rot underneath the suburban American veneer. Eraserhead’s lady in the radiator. The immaculately perfect, “but-of-course” match of song and content of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” to Wild at Heart. And then of course, perhaps most definitive for Lynch, the polluted Americana of his magnum opus Mulholland Drive.

Drive’s musical landscape is rooted in a twisting of 1950s American perfectionist optimism, a staple of the Lynchian top to bottom aesthetic. Aided by the original score by Lynch’s frequent collaborator Angelo Badalamenti, its music is drowning in an innocuous wrongness, critiquing the American “ideal” as it plays as something just left of center of that very image. It turns the uplift of midcentury doowop pop and polka sensibility into something vaguely sinister before its underpinnings, and with it the fallacy of the American dream, swallow us whole. We’re meant to feel uneasy that we sing along.

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Bully, Brad & Bijou

by Nathaniel R

Remember Larry Clark? He was one of the chief provocateurs of American indies of the 90s and early Aughts who first broke through with the controversial and popular youth drama Kids (1995). One would assume no one would be eager to revisit his filmography at this point in time given that people are more riled up than usual about sex scenes, the male gaze, and actors placed in sexually compromising positions. But surprise -- local rep house The Metrograph just held a Larry Clark retrospective.

A friend wanted to see Bully (2001) so I went along, solely because it's so rare that it's someone else and not me who is all "let's see this movie!". Though the themes were familiar (sex, drugs, dead end lives, and 'the kids are not all right' amorality), as was the leering camera, I'd forgotten nearly everything else about it other than that I had preferred it to Kids (1995), which I just couldn't stomach at the time...

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Doc Corner: 'Hot to Trot'

Returning from an impromptu break in order to move to a new city, start a new job, and move into a new place without internet. We're definitely hoping to be back on the weekly schedule looking at documentaries as we head into awards season. I'm exhausted already! - Glenn Dunks

The strangest thoughts can go through your head as a movie plays in front of you. As I was watching Gail Freedman’s affectionately-made Hot to Trot about competitive same-sex ballroom dancing, I began to think about the evolution of documentary and the representation of gay stories in it. There isn’t anything in the film that really justifies such lofty thoughts, but I couldn’t help wondering what audiences 20 years ago would have made of it and how simple stories are done a disservice by expectations placed on non-fiction moviemaking...

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