Get out your scoresheets and see how they compare with those of Venice Film Festival jury boss Darren Aronofsky, whose group today awarded the fest’s top prize, the Golden Lion, to Aleksandr Sokurov’s film Faust . The heavily favored Michael Fassbender won the fest’s Best Actor award for Shame , while Deanie Ip earned Best Actress for the Stephanie Zacharek-endorsed Hong Kong effort A Simple LIfe . Other big winners included People Mountain People Sea and Terraferma ; congrats to all! [ AP ]
Lionsgate just announced that Joe Wright, the director of Pride & Prejudice and Atonement , will helm a new adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina written by Tom Stoppard (who wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay of Shakespeare in Love , as well as countless revered plays). I think we’re owed an oversize Tolstoy treat in 2011, don’t you? We can’t subsist on The Last Station for much longer. And wait until you hear who’s set to star.
Hurray! Today begins the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival. We’ve already predicted the five films most likely to ignite a bidding war up north, but what about the titles that will really get the red carpet TIFF treatment this week? Ahead, Movieline briefs you on the nineteen films that will be spotlighted with special premiere events as well as addresses from the directors and cast.
At first glance, the formidable cast of Main Street appears to have gathered for a chance to work off the final original script from Horton Foote, the Pulitzered playwright and two-time Oscar-winning screenwriter (for 1962’s To Kill a Mockingbird and 1983’s Tender Mercies ) who passed away in 2009. But as the film creeps along with few signs of life, one begins to suspect the real reason they’re all there is to show off that most treasured item in any actor’s toolkit — the Southern accent. Main Street is an ensemble drama that functions as a display case for a range of regional drawls, from the authentic to absurd. Patricia Clarkson, playing Willa, a divorcee who’s returned to her hometown of Durham, North Carolina, easily walks away with best in show, but coming from Louisiana she’s in slightly more familiar territory than Colin Firth, who, as Gus Leroy, a representative of a toxic waste management company, is a sorely unconvincing Texan.
It’s that time again — time for actors and filmmakers to cross their fingers, for studios and distributors to get out their checkbooks, for bleary-eyed audiences to get their running shoes on, and for all of them to meet up north for the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival. As always, their confluence will yield a handful of big-screen surprises, some bitter disappointments, and the usual all-night wheeling and dealing for the best of the fall crop premiering in the week ahead.* Per annual TIFF custom , let’s have a browse through the catalog (and a listen to the buzz) at five particular titles you should expect to hear about early and often.
If last year’s opening night was a favorite festival memory for AFI Fest director Jacqueline Lyanga, one can only imagine the blast she’s going to have on Nov. 3: The 25th annual incarnation of the festival has announced the world premiere of Clint Eastwood and Leonardo DiCaprio’s hugely anticipated biopic J. Edgar as this year’s opener.
Venice is a city of lions. There’s the ubiquitous winged lion, the symbol of Saint Mark, seen everywhere in statuary and on banners. Last night, outside the Casino, one of the main buildings of the festival complex, I saw a winged lion statue, about 12 feet off the ground, with a single wine glass perched delicately if a bit precariously atop one of his meaty paws, left behind by some meticulous reveler. Other lions have no wings but appear not to mind much, standing guard at church entrances, outside restaurants or at the center of neighborhood squares. And everywhere you look, there are smaller lion faces gazing back at you: Some have important and obvious jobs to do, holding door-knockers or doorbells in their mouths. Others are free to simply be themselves, but all seem intent on keeping an eye on things.
Two hours after seeing Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights , screening here in competition, I’m still fighting my way across this rugged moor of a movie, a vast, wild place where Arnold’s vision and Emily Brontë’s meet eye to eye and claw to claw. Arnold’s reading of Bronte’s weird, unabashedly sick novel is daring for sure: This is a film filled with interesting choices that, in the end, may not be all that interesting — it’s more self-conscious than Arnold’s other films, Red Road and Fish Tank , perhaps partly because, unlike those movies, it’s based on familiar source material.
When Steve McQueen’s Hunger debuted at Cannes in 2008, Michael Fassbender — playing Irish hunger-strike activist Bobby Sands — was a revelation. Now he’s ubiquitous, potentially to the point of overexposure, appearing in comic-book blockbusters ( X-Men: First Class ) and tony literary adaptations ( Jane Eyre ) alike. Yet each performance, and each project, is so different from the last that it’s still a joy to watch him. He has one of the gifts that great actors need, the ability to be focused and unselfconscious at the same time. He knows when to surrender and when to call every muscle and brain cell to attention. I fear someday he’ll win an Oscar and risk losing it all.
Because of an early-morning badge snafu, I was unable to catch the press screening of Roman Polanski’s Carnage , the movie I was most looking forward to seeing here in Venice. Add that to the fact that I arrived here too late to see The Ides of March , and it’s a double bummer. But my consolation prize was not bad — at least in a so-bad-it’s-almost-good kind of way: I did get to see Madonna’s W.E. , which is in some ways just the kind of movie you’d expect from an artist who once, with a delightful lack of irony, declared herself a material girl.
