In Contention

Tag: Chloe

  • FIRST-HALF FYC: Best Actress

    The fifth column in our new seasonal series — if you haven’t got the drill by now, we’re rounding up the most Oscar-worthy work from the oft-overlooked first half of the year — wraps up the performance categories with by far the most competitive race of all. Conventional wisdom has it that Best Actress is the most crowded field of this year’s awards derby, and as I looked over the January-to-June release schedule, I realized that’s just as true of the early birds.

    Where I admit I had embroider a little to make up five-strong fields in one or two other categories, this week’s task found me scratching my head over who to leave out. Many of the year’s most lavishly acclaimed performances jostled for position: Kim Hye-ja may have taken the Los Angeles critics’ honors, but as much as I love the demented commitment of her performance in “Mother,” I was surprised to find myself leaving her on the sidelines. Tilda Swinton is on near-peak form in “I Am Love,” and yet she too finds herself in the honorable mention category.

    I was all prepared to court controversy by citing Julianne Moore’s exemplary work in Atom Egoyan’s otherwise negligible “Chloe,” but there just wasn’t room to be that playful; in a regular year, “Father of My Children” star Chiara Caselli would easily have figured in at the halfway mark. Others might make cases for Noomi Rapace or Giovanna Mezzogiorno, and I’m still hamstrung by not having had access to “Everyone Else.” The bottom line is: there was a lot to sift through before arriving at the five names below. May future years also be this good to the ladies.

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  • Underdog ‘Dagenham’ may have the AMPAS touch

    In Friday’s Oscar Talk, Anne and I pondered the Oscar potential of Sony Pictures Classics’ typically robust stable of contenders.  So far the best bet to have already hit theaters is Aaron Schneider’s “Get Low,” which could be a below-the-line play as well as a Best Actor possibility for Robert Duvall.

    Films from Rodrigo Garcia, Atom Egoyan and Jean-Pierre Jeunet all came and went, while Woody Allen’s didn’t inspire much at Cannes.  And that’s fine, by the way.  The business isn’t all about awards, obviously, and Sony Classics knows how to make money.  (There’s a reason the dependent is still standing tall.)

    If we properly assume “The Illusionist” will have its day in the animated feature category, while “Inside Job” will be relegated to the documentary field, that leaves three possibilities for Oscar success: Mike Leigh’s “Another Year,” the recently acquired “Barney’s Version” and Nigel Cole’s “Made in Dagenham.” The latter is perhaps the one to watch out for.

    This isn’t a revelation, of course.  Guy’s first stab at predicting this year’s Oscar set noted that “the Academy frequently likes its Britpics chirpy and digestible” and that Cole’s film was “getting ‘next Full Monty’ buzz on its way to a prominent launch at Toronto.”  Having seen the film last week, I have to say, I see his point.

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  • FRIDAY FORECAST: ‘Dragon’ art

    *All historical figures cited are adjusted to today’s dollars.

    Years of frustration over how to precisely train my dragon will be resolved today as Paramount has released the informative documentary, “How to Train Your Dragon.” There’s one of these bawdy animated titles every March and they usually do pretty damn well. “Monsters vs. Aliens” debuted with $60.5 million last year and “Horton Hears a Who!” snagged $47.7 million the year before.

    I think “Dragon” will fall closer to the latter than the former since it has no famous source material and failed to put the one word in its title that would have excited young boys:  Vikings! Hello? Who makes an animated movie about Vikings and doesn’t put that in the title? It’s like naming “Toy Story” “Escape From the Room.”

    Now, the movie is in 3D and on over 4,000 screens so it’s almost impossible for it not to be huge. I’m just thinking somewhere around $45 million for this one.

    The only other movie opening wide is “Hot Tub Time Machine” from MGM. The studio hasn’t released a movie since “Fame” and is more or less dead and bankrupt. They’d like you to think that this is the new “The Hangover,” but the concept is way more wacky and esoteric.

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  • LONDON: ‘Chloe,’ ‘Leaving’

    Julianne Moore in ChloeI realize I’ve dropped the ball somewhat with my festival updates — between the to-and-fro of festival business, other writing tasks and the occasional impulse to have a personal life, a backlog longer than I care to count has accumulated of films yet to be discussed. Expect that to be partially rectified over a quieter weekend … even if I resort to “100 words or less” games.

    However, once more a pair of films seen in relatively close succession demand to be reviewed together. Atom Egoyan’s “Chloe” and Catherine Corsini’s French-language “Leaving” overlap in a number of ways.

    Both are slickly accessible thrillers revolving around marital infidelity, both use that as cover for a less mainstream investigation of middle-aged female sexuality, and both are anchored by formidable actresses — Julianne Moore and Kristin Scott Thomas, respectively — in full possession of their powers.

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  • TORONTO: ‘The Road,’ ‘Bad Lieutenant,’ ‘Chloe’

    Chloe(Please note, as opposed to Kris and Guy, I tend to grade films on a 5-star scale.)

    Loads to catch up on today and some interviews still to write up. First off, I have to confess that I disagree with Kris’s review of “The Road,” respectfully of course, and I think I have a reason why I might have viewed and appreciated the film in a very different light than he.  I also saw Werner Herzog’s “The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans,” which features a hugely entertaining performance from Nicolas Cage, and the latest from Atom Egoyan, “Chloe,” which features a splendid performance from Amanda Seyfreid.

    Let’s dig in…

    “The Road” (****)

    This was a dark and unsettling film based on the brilliant book by Cormac McCarthy about a father (Viggo Mortensen) and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) journeying to the south after the world has essentially seen its end of days. We are never really given a clear explanation as to what happened, but the vague description we do get sounds like nuclear war finally came, and the planet is dying a slow death.  Trees are dead, there is nothing alive or growing anymore, the world is a gray and dreary place, as though hell had suddenly burst forth from the bowels of the earth.  The south brings warmer weather, which is what the man and his son need, he believes, to survive, and survivial is what the film is about.

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  • ‘Young Victoria’ to close TIFF, Egoyan’s ‘Chloe’ added

    Rupert Friend and Emily Blunt in The Young VictoriaToronto is obviously digging the corsets this year. Weeks after Jon Amiel’s Charles Darwin biopic “Creation” was announced as the opening film of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, fest organizers have revealed that Jean-Marc Vallée’s “The Young Victoria” will close proceedings.

    This choice of bookends gives an odd symmetry to the festival schedule: both films are (or appear to be, since I haven’t seen “Creation” yet) old-fashioned Anglocentric period biopics with minimal buzz.

    The choice of “Victoria” is an unsurprising one, given that Vallée is a hometown boy whose last, considerably more interesting, effort “C.R.A.Z.Y.” won the Best Canadian Feature award at the 2005 festival. But it’s a disappointingly stiff choice for such a prime spot.

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  • The professional

    Liam NeesonIt’s not as if we were short of reasons to admire Liam Neeson in the first place. The man is a remarkable actor, by all accounts an intelligent, decent human being, and even in the face of his wife’s untimely passing, has always managed to keep his private life laudably, well, private.

    But even by his own stand-up guy standards, Neeson went above and beyond the call by returning to the set of Atom Egoyan’s new thriller “Chloe” to complete his scenes, a mere week after Natasha Richardson’s death. A deeply impressed Egoyan says:

    “He was very committed to the film and finishing his role, and he didn’t need to come back that soon … But he really thought it would be best for the film, and it was just such an unspeakably generous thing for him to do. And he’s an extraordinary, extraordinary person.”

    As for the film itself, I must say I’m intrigued. Egoyan, Neeson (who co-stars with Julianne Moore and Amanda Seyfried) and ultra-left-field scripter Erin Cressida Wilson (“Secretary”) occupy very different artistic spheres in my mind — given the auteur’s patchy form of late, the combination could get messy. Still, together with Sundance winner “Five Minutes of Heaven” (in which he does sterling work), it indicates a move into the kind of gutsy arthouse territory Neeson hasn’t entered much in recent years.

    In any case, Neeson’s recent mini-comeback has been one of the more pleasantly surprising developments of the past year. “Taken,” for all its sleeper success, was a rote effort, while you may recall I was none too impressed with “The Other Man” — but it’s encouraging to see a 56 year-old thesp (and one who has always seemed more comfortable as an actor than a star) getting major leading-man roles. Meanwhile, “Lincoln” and “Clash of the Titans” await him. Score one for the good guys.