• Jeffrey Wells reports from a MOMA Q&A with “127 Hours” star James Franco. [Hollywood Elsewhere]
• Amy Kaufman talks with “Conviction” star Hilary Swank. [Los Angeles Times]
• Add Polaroid photography to Julian Schnabel’s list of artistic pursuits. [The Guardian]
• Jeffrey Wells attempts to sum up the season’s beginnings with his own nuggets of insight regarding Venice and Telluride. [Hollywood Elsewhere]
• Kelly Reichardt compares “Meek’s Cutoff” to the Iraq War. [The Hollywood Reporter]
• Reports of paramedics assisting folks stricken by the intensity of “127 Hours.” (Though I’ve heard it was just altitude sickness.) [Thompson on Hollywood]
I’m just settling in here in the Colorado mountainside as the Telluride Film Festival prepares to draw the curtain on its 37th dance tomorrow afternoon.
As I look over the schedule (I Tweeted the films earlier this morning), I’m seeing plenty to chew on. For starters, the world premiere of Peter Weir’s “The Way Back” is slated for tomorrow night. I was crushed, though, to see it slotted at the exact same time as the world premiere of Mark Romanek’s “Never Let Me Go.” But both will screen plenty throughout the fest, as a tribute to Weir is in store to go along with the former, while Romanek and actress Carey Mulligan are in town to promote the latter. Author Kazuo Ishiguro will also be here to sign copies of his novel.
Telluride is preempting Toronto on Romanek’s film, as well as the new Errol Morris documentary, “Tabloid.” Meanwhile, Sylvain Chomet’s animated “The Illusionist” has been playing the festival circuit all year and is definitely near the top of my must-see list.
This afternoon I received a copy of Posy Simmonds’s graphic novel “Tamara Drewe,” which has been adapted as a film by director Stephen Frears. A nice bit of promotion, though I must admit, this has been way off my radar all year. Guy was no fan at all when he saw it at Cannes, but it’s set to hit the festival circuit in the coming weeks. The trailer just launched via Yahoo! Movies. Check it out by clicking the image below or watch the embed on the jump.
This trailer has been hanging around for a few days, but since Stephen Frears’s countryside romp was recently tapped for the Toronto Film Festival, it seems appropriate to feature it now. I reviewed the film out of Cannes and found it singularly strained and irritating — the kind of thing described as “quintessentially English” by those who think “That’s Amore” quintessentially Italian. Nonetheless, it found a number of credible admirers on the Croisette, and will likely continue to do so in Toronto. See what you think. Click on the image below to check it out at Momentum Pictures, or watch the embed after the cut.
Sadly, this is looking like a second consecutive day of minimal film viewing — thanks to the scheduling of my morning roundtable interview with the “Blue Valentine” team of Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams and director Derek Cianfrance, I had to forgo this morning’s screening of Lee Chang-dong’s “Poetry,” of which I have rather high expectations — I hope to catch the repeat tomorrow.
Meanwhile, the interviews ran late enough to ensure I missed today’s hottest ticket: Olivier Assayas’s five-and-a-half hour “Carlos.” On the one hand, I’m obviously disappointed. On the other, 330 minutes is a pretty lavish gift of time, and it’s thanks to that that I’m able to write this very piece.
So, to every cloud a silver lining and all that — and there are a lot of clouds doing the rounds on this uncharacteristically damp and chilly day in Cannes. Perhaps the sun saw that monk-massacre movie everyone’s raving about, and couldn’t see the point in continuing.
On with the review catch-up.
Okay, so you’ve combed through the 19 films in the Competition lineup for Cannes 2010, and you still haven’t found much to get excited about? Fret not. You wouldn’t know it to read most media coverage of the festival, but the Competition is only one course at the Cannes buffet – and not necessarily the most filling.
Surrounding it are a host of alternative sidebars, both competitive and simply exhibitory, ranging from glossy out-of-competition Hollywood premieres to independent strands yielding more familiar names than the casual festival-watcher might expect. In today’s preview, I’ll pick out some potential highlights from the non-Competition hinterlands.
The ones you’ll hear the most about, of course, fall into the Out of Competition category, a refuge both for arthouse attractions that fell between the cracks in the selection process (chief among them, Olivier Assayas’s five-hour Carlos the Jackal study “Carlos”) and big-budget studio pictures seeking the prestige of a Cannes stamp without the risk of actually competing.
Here you’ll find the star-laden pair of Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” and Woody Allen’s “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” – both projects that have me worried for different reasons, but neither of which you really need me to remind you about.