John Cusack’s got shit to promote. So he recalls his terrible ’80s and tripping on LSD at the Super Bowl. (NYT)
Robin Hood is set to open this year’s Cannes Film Festival. With Russell Crowe, William Hurt, Danny Huston and Max von Sydow in the codpieced cast, assume the red carpet will be a little testosterone-heavy. (Cineuropa)
“Anti-christ” James Cameron wants to smash “f*cking asshole” Glenn Beck with one of those Avatar exo-skeletons. He calls it “dialogue.” (Vulture)
Son of No One, the new cop drama from Dito Montiel, casts both Juliette Binoche and Tracy Morgan–surely the WTF pairing of the year. The 30 Rock star does have something of the young Gerard Depardieu about him. (Vulture)
Families take the center stage in the second part of our New Directors New Films preview. In the Netherlands, a couple comes undone thanks to a new arrival. In Italy, a concubine dares to wander outside a brood’s closed ranks. In Canada, mother and son make like a WWE production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? And you don’t even want to know what they’re doing to each other in Greece. It’s a line-up so gripping that film fans won’t even be able to turn from the screen to tell that elderly couple behind them to shut up. Hit the linked titles for more goodies.
Tako and Sandra oughta be poster children for the Netherlands good life. Successful in both work and in life, the childhood sweethearts are the envy of all their friends. Sandra’s pregnancy should be cause for further celebration. In Sander Burger’s domestic horror, however, the blessed event is the very thing that causes their bourgeois bliss to spectacularly deflate. Don’t stand too close to the canal!
Luca Guadagnino takes a few frames from Visconti in this fragrant family saga, garnished with plenty of love, Italian style. Tilda Swinton is the beautiful Russian odalisque who marries into a fashion dynasty. Her second-class spousal existence is upended when she falls for a humpy young chef. Problem is Swinton’s surging libido might bring down the rest of the clan with her.
Like the Jesuits, the Berlin Film Festival understands that you need to get ‘em while they’re young. To that end, the Generations sidebar features films about and aimed at youth. This year’s selection of 56 features and shorts looks at every aspect of growing up, from unappreciative single parents to freaky flights of fancy. In the first part of our preview, we start out on a Mexican fishing trip and end up running away with an Italian circus.
Alamar
Three Mexican generations convene on the Chinchorro reef in Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio’s acclaimed “documentary fiction” of fathers and sons. Daniel Kasman wrote, “a sojourn of a film, getting the simplicity and details of a wonderful but limited experience down to their most honest, most untroubled, most tender, and often most beautiful essences.”
This Norwegian children’s film from director Christian Lo combines young friendship, the Christmas season and the threat of deportation. When their friend Naisha flees to Oslo, Julie and Mette pack up their knapsacks and give chase. Expect heartstrings to be hammered like Jerry Lee Lewis attacking a piano.
A film producer and father (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) slowly cracks up under the strain. Fortunately, he is surrounded by plenty of very good-looking citoyens. Mia Hansen-Love’s film won a special jury prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
In 1994, director Dev Benegal served notice that there was more to Hindi film than Bollywood with his prize-winning English, August. His first dramatic feature in a decade is a tribute to a life spent in the cinema. Abhay Deol plays a young man who agrees to drive a mobile cinema across the desert to an automotive museum. He discovers the projectors on the old banger still work and soon we’re looking at Cinema Paradiso on wheels. Benegal’s film impressed the selectors at both Cannes and Toronto this year.
Ajami is a tough neighborhood in the Israeli city of Jaffa. It provides the backdrop for this debut from the Israeli-Arab filmmaking team of Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani. Several stories are wound around each other, using The Wire‘s methodology to show how criminal, class and racial tensions make up the Israeli fabric. Copti himself has a role as a man dying to leave the precinct. First, though, he must dispose of his brother’s packet of drugs. The film received a Camera d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Young Hubert’s tortured life is made all the more unbearable by mother. Sounds like a familiar story. Except that Hubert and mom’s contentious relationship almost verges on a mutually-assured-obsession. Outside the family warzone, Hubert endures growing up gay and Canadian. With its fantasy sequences, dramatic strings and overall histrionics, the trailer suggests a Savage Nights for the 21st century. The overheated achievement is all the more impressive considering that writer-director-star Xavier Dolan is a mere 20 years old. Roll over Orson Welles and tell Harmony Korine the news! The plum role of mother Chantal is played by Anne Dorval, who has won a pair of Gemeaux awards for her work in the Zone 3 TV show Le coeur a ses raisons. Due to screen at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
After winning several awards for his short films, Australian filmmaker Warwick Thornton has written, directed and photographed his feature debut. It’s a love on the run tale that takes place deep in aborigine territory. As the trailer indicates, dialogue takes second place to emotions writ large in the teenage manner. Screening at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Chris Chong Chan Fui’s film is the first Malaysian feature to play the Cannes Film Festival since 1995. It’s hard to tell what it’s about from the trailer, but the theme of a Malaysian paradise succumbing to industrialisation is certainly there and there’s a Weerasethakul vibe to it. Karaoke itself is usually a symbol for dreams that never make it out of the bar. We await with interest.
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