In Contention

Tag: The Skin I Live In

  • ‘Tinker, Tailor’ joins the December club

    American viewers already frustrated about waiting two months longer than the Brits to lay eyes on Tomas Alfredson’s “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” — welcome to our world, guys — won’t be pleased by Pete Hammond’s revelation in a recent column that the wait has been extended by three weeks.

    Yes, Focus Features has pushed the film back from its original November 18 release date to December 9, a move that some will interpret as indicative of bolshy awards-season hopes for the star-studded John Le Carré adaptation — though the pre-Thanksgiving berth wasn’t exactly Oscar-unfriendly either.

    That said, Focus might have picked a date with less intimidating high-end competition: originally set to precede “The Artist,” “The Descendants” and “Hugo” by only a few days, the film now need only stare down limited releases of Madonna’s “W.E.” and Jason Reitman’s “Young Adult.”

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  • Telluride guessing game

    (UPDATED: 8/29)

    Now that the Toronto and Venice line-ups have been unveiled (though we have a few more Toronto announcements to come), I figured I’d take a few stabs at sussing out the Telluride crop this year. I haven’t been a good journalist and called around or anything. Just spinning my wheels.

    One studio that always has a big presence at Telluride is Sony Pictures Classics, and this year, honchos Michael Barker and Tom Bernard have a full plate once again. Of that stable, David Cronenberg’s “A Dangerous Method” is hitting both Venice and Toronto. It’s very possible, then, that it will kick things off in the Rockies.

    Roman Polanski’s “Carnage,” meanwhile, was announced as a Venice play this morning. It would be easy enough for the team to bring the film there and not worry about getting the filmmaker in town (seeing as he can’t legally step foot in the country), saving his press run for Venice. (7/28 UPDATE: The film has been set for New York fest, so it seems unlikely we’ll see it in Telluride.)

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  • CANNES: What will win… and what should

    It’s a funny thing. For 10 days at Cannes, the Croisette hums with stimulating discussion and debate about movies; for the final two, all that chatter dissolves into a single blunt question: “What will win the Palme d’Or?” It’s a little like the Oscars, except without the initial stage of stimulating discussion and debate about movies. Let’s do it.

    On the one hand, I kind of want the beautiful, punishing 160-minute anti-procedural epic of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” to win, since there’s £140 waiting for me in London if it does. (Gamble responsibly, kids.) On the other, I can make more convincing cases for a number of titles. Unlike last year, when it was easy to single out “Uncle Boonmee” and “Of Gods and Men” for the top two spots, this year’s lineup has been higher in terms of median quality, as well as more contentious — which allows for a wider range of hypothetical jury-room arguments.

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  • SHORT TAKE: “The Skin I Live In” (***)

    Cannes Film Festival

    Pedro Almodóvar’s new feature opens with a pause: a beautiful young woman holds a tricky yoga position, her already fine-lathed physique vacuumed into a nude body stocking, stretched across a couch like a pale side of meat hung out for curing. So so taut, so fragile, it seems a simple tap on the shoulder will splinter her perfect form into a chandelier’s worth of glass shards — and that’s an apt note of tension on which to begin “The Skin I Live In,” a coldly kinky thriller in which Almodóvar’s career-long concern with the manipulation and violation of the human body is bent back so far it has nothing left to do but break.

    The girl is actress Elena Anaya; who she’s playing is a question the film keeps in play for far longer than you’d think feasible in a narrative that deftly splits and reshapes identity across a pair of linked tragedies in the life of Antonio Banderas’ demented genius of a plastic surgeon. Adapted — rather liberally, I understand — from Thierry Jonquet’s novel “Tarantula,” the film’s dense structure plays Snakes and Ladders with chronology (a late-film title card that reads “back to the present” drew chuckles in the audience for its apparent self-exasperation), staggering major twists across its running time that makes it a challenge to discuss in any narrative capacity. (It hardly flatters the reviewer’s role to say this, but audiences are better off reading as little about the film as possible before entering the theater: ignorance really is bliss here.)

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  • OSCAR TALK: Ep. 56 — Special Edition! — Cannes so far, ‘Tree of Life,’ Von Trier, taking the 2011 awards pulse

    Oscar TalkWelcome to Oscar Talk.

    In case you’re new to the site and/or the podcast, Oscar Talk is a weekly kudocast, your one-stop awards chat shop between yours truly and Anne Thompson of Thompson on Hollywood. The podcast is weekly, every Friday throughout the season, charting the ups and downs of contenders along the way. Plenty of things change en route to Oscar’s stage and we’re here to address it all as it unfolds.

    It has been nearly three months since we last got on the horn to talk the film wards landscape. We promised another dip during Cannes, so here we are. Today Anne and I are joined by Guy Lodge as the two of them have been working the Croisette all week. Let’s see what’s on the docket today…

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  • CANNES CHECK: ‘The Skin I Live In’

    [This is the first in a daily series of posts, wherein I size up the 19 films–pending further additions–in the Competition at next month’s Cannes Film Festival. We’re running through them alphabetically, by director, so it just happens that we start with a biggie: the length of the entries will vary according to the availability of information.]

    The director: Pedro Almodóvar

    The talent: The star, as you surely know by now, is Antonio Banderas, a one-time Almodóvar regular who hasn’t collaborated with the director in 21 years. When Penelope Cruz proved unavailable, Spanish star Elena Anaya (who previously appeared in “Talk to Her”) stepped into the female lead. Meanwhile, the names of cinematographer José Luis Alcaine, composer Alberto Iglesias and actress Marisa Paredes will all be familiar to the Almodóvar faithful.

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  • Almodóvar and Banderas, together again

    Speaking as we just were of actors returning from the wilderness, when was the last time Antonio Banderas starred in a film you had any interest in seeing? (Talk to the hand if your answer contains the word “Shrek.”)

    From strained paycheck jobs like “My Mom’s New Boyfriend” to gruesomely botched prestige projects like “The Other Man” and “Imagining Argentina,” it’s been a lean couple of years for Melanie Griffith’s better half.

    But things are looking up for the Spaniard, who rather improbably hits 50 this year. A role in a Woody Allen film is a pretty hit-or-miss proposition these days, but “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” is easily the toniest thing the actor has been attached to in years — we’ll find out next week at Cannes if the film has the goods.

    More promising, however, is news of a reunion with the director who launched him to stardom in the 1980s — one Pedro Almodóvar.

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