In Contention

Tag: Attenberg

  • Greece and Poland first to enter foreign Oscar race

    The Oscar race for Best Foreign Language Film — or, to use its formal title, Most Inoffensively Socially Conscious Non-English-Language Feature To Pass Through The Academy’s Narrow Qualifying Hoops Whilst Remaining Sufficiently Low-Profile For Voters To Feel Like They Discovered It For Themselves — is truly the gift that gives all year round.

    Scarcely have the previous year’s nominees finally trickled out to US theaters, to a chorus of polite indifference, than countries begin formally submitting their chosen contenders for the next year’s award — and the baseless speculation and generally befuddled head-scratching begins anew. In the past few weeks, Greece and Poland have become the first countries to enter the race ahead of the Academy’s October 1 deadline — and while such early birds are rarely heard from again in the game, these two films (both from female directors, and one of which I’ve seen) are rather higher on the radar.

    Poland, in particular, appears to have intensively focus-grouped the Academy’s foreign-language branch and subsequently created their Oscar entry in a purpose-built lab: Agnieszka Holland’s “In Darkness” is a true-life Holocaust drama about a Leopold Socha, a reformed petty criminal who heroically helped numerous Jewish refugees hide in the sewers of Nazi-occupied Lvov.

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  • ‘Meek’s Cutoff,’ Franco top Toronto critics’ poll

    “The King’s Speech” may have come out on top with Toronto Film Festival audiences, but the critics — at least, the broad cross-section surveyed by indieWIRE in their annual post-festival poll — have other ideas. Kelly Reichardt’s period western “Meek’s Cutoff,” my own pick of the Venice fest, was voted film of the festival by a sizable margin, with 76 points to 58 for runner-up “127 Hours.”

    Of course, regular audiences will have to wait until 2011 to see what the fuss is about, but expect critical reaction to be as breathless when Oscilloscope eventually open Reichardt’s film. It’s too rarefied an arthouse item to get the awards attention it merits, of course, but no matter: I sense a future classic is being born.

    Higher-profile awards-season fare comes next on the list, with “Black Swan” and “The King’s Speech” all but tied for third place, while foreign-language titles finding their way into the top 10 include Palme d’Or champ “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” Venice prizewinners “Attenberg” and “Silent Souls.” and Canada’s probable Oscar submission “Incendies.”

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  • VENICE: Arrivederci, and notes on the winners

    (Updated list of Venice award winners here.)

    If you were on the Lido to the bitter end of the festival — and closing with “The Tempest” made it a very bitter end indeed — last night’s Golden Lion win for Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere” didn’t come as the shock it did to everyone else. In the closing days of the festival, a Chinese-whispers style rumor started circulating that Quentin Tarantino and many of his fellow jurors were besotted with the film from the get-go; at Friday night’s party for Tom Tykwer’s “Drei,” word that Coppola had been asked to stay in town for the awards ceremony spread fast. (I tweeted as much — don’t say I left you out of the loop.)

    But even if some of us got wind of it earlier than others, the news was still surprising when it landed. On the one hand, Venice has long been more receptive to more mainstream arthouse names than Cannes or Berlin — recent winners of the top prize include Darren Aronofsky, Ang Lee (twice) and Mike Leigh. On the other, “Somewhere,” which screened on the festival’s third day, didn’t seem to have much staying power in the critical mindset: I appreciated the film more than most, but the general consensus was that it was a likeable marking-time effort that seemed more likely to be recognized for Stephen Dorff’s breakout performance than the filmmaking itself.

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  • VENICE: Sofia Coppola’s ‘Somewhere’ wins Golden Lion

    Festival jury president Quentin Tarantino announced that Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere” was the unanimous choice for Venice’s top honor.

    The full list of festival winners (with commentary to follow later):

    Golden Lion (Best Film): “Somewhere” (review)
    Silver Lion (Best Director): Alex de la Iglesia, “A Sad Trumpet Ballad” (review)
    Special Jury Prize: “Essential Killing” (review)
    Coppa Volpi (Best Actor): Vincent Gallo, “Essential Killing” (review)
    Coppa Volpi (Best Actress): Ariane Labed, “Attenberg” (review)
    Osella (Best Screenplay): “A Sad Trumpet Ballad” (review)

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  • VENICE: Jury duty – award predictions and preferences

    The Venice Competition lineup officially wrapped today with one of its lightest and most mainstream selections, “Barney’s Version” (reviewed this morning).

    With only the out-of-competition closing film “The Tempest” left to screen before I head back to London tomorrow evening, allow me a moment to sift through the runners and riders for the festival prizes – at the same time as Quentin Tarantino and his (hopefully) merry band of jurors much be contemplating the same thing.

    They have good reason to be merry: as a friend and I agreed this morning, festival director Marco Mueller has assembled a truly outstanding Competition field this year – thoughtfully balanced in terms of highbrow and middlebrow, genre and esoterica, veteran auteurs and younger ascending talents.

    (More thoughts, plus Golden Lion predictions and wishes, after the cut.)

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  • VENICE: ‘Black Venus,’ ’13 Assassins,’ ‘Attenberg,’ ‘A Sad Trumpet Ballad’

    On my way to Tom Tykwer’s latest, so no time for an intro. Further rounding up highlights (and lowlights) of the Venice competition lineup:

    Expectations were appreciably high, and the press screening queue consequently doubled back on itself, for Abdellatif Kechiche’s historical drama “Black Venus” (**1/2) – after all, Kechiche had a hit on the Lido three years ago with the excellent “The Secret of the Grain,” and for those who know it, the story he’s working with here seemed overdue for screen treatment. By the time the credits rolled on this hard, dense, 165-minute slap of a movie, however, applause was more scattered than one might have expected for a display of such voluminous craft and ambition; the silence, one suspects, was that of an audience assessing which lines had and hadn’t been crossed.

    For my part, I remain stuck in a halfway house between immense appreciation that Kechiche has brought the extraordinary story of Saartjie Baartman, the black South African maid whose unusual physique (and genitalia) briefly made her the toast of the European vaudeville circuit in the 19th century, to the screen; and regret that he’s chosen to tell it in such a way that the film becomes complicit in the objectification it claims to decry.

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