A few notes on my second day in Toronto while I make coffee and try to figure out what to eat for dinner and which movie to see in tonight’s late slot:

1. The above image was taken last night, about two blocks away from the main festival venue.

2. No one around here seems to be able to talk about The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford without dropping the word “masterpiece.” I saw it this afternoon, and I have to agree that it’s a really beautiful film. I also have to admit that I dozed off for about five minutes right in the middle (two totally inappropriate things that I do really well at afternoon festival screenings: cry, and fall asleep). I walked out wishing I could walk right back in and see it again–which I’m contemplating doing later tonight.

3. There are literally six ads from festival sponsors before every screening–even press screenings. It’s the price of running a festival this big, I guess, but the NBC-Universal ad in particular is really getting on my nerves.

4. Fox Searchlight hired a band of actors to jog around the line for the press & industry screening of Juno, wearing copies of Michael Cera’s track uniform. They posed for photographs and passed out Juno-emblazoned boxes of orange tic tacs. Most of them had the physiques of personal trainers, inspiring more than one catty comment from onlookers regarding how much “better” these guys looked in the outfit than Michael Cera. I, of course, begged to differ. Photographic evidence after the jump.

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Stories from the Telluride Film Festival, 2007. Paul talks to surrogate father figures Leonard Maltin and Werner Herzog (who was showing his Antarctica doc, Encounters at the End of the World). Karina weighs in on Brian DePalma’s divisive Iraq film, Redacted. Kevin eventually gets a chance to ask Sean Penn about directing Into the Wild.

 

 FilmCouch 36 [25:51m]: Play Now | Download

FilmCouch 36

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Encounters at the End of the World, Redacted, Into the Wild

With the Toronto Film Festival beginning tomorrow, we’ve just about concluded our Telluride coverage. Here are some highlights. You’ll find a full guide to our Telluride reportage, minus Friday’s upcoming all-Telluride episode of FilmCouch, after the jump.

Kevin interviews Sean Penn about his Telluride directorial triumph, Into the Wild.

Karina has a detailed preview of Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.

Paul talks to Werner Herzog about “life, risk and how his mom quit smoking.”

“In Superbad, Michael Cera fantasizes about a world in which ‘girls weren’t weirded out by our boners, but actually wanted to look at them.’ Juno takes place in that world.” Karina reviews the Festival’s biggest buzz-getter, and Paul interviews director Jason Reitman.

We love People on Sunday. Paul says the 1929 silent film “contains the most seductive first kiss I’ve ever seen on film. No joke.” Karina looks at the historical context.

“It’s true that I was in a rather fragile, sleep-deprived state at the time, but even now, the morning after, as it were, I still love this film.” Kevin’s talking about I’m Not There. He also talked to that film’s director, Todd Haynes.

“When I was 20 years old, I moved from Chicago to San Francisco, and I did it for George Kuchar.” Karina offers some thoughts on the experimental legend/Telluride honoree.

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Ever since he borrowed the other worldy footage of underwater Antarctica to make The Wild Blue Yonder (2005), Werner Herzog has wanted to make a film there himself. The National Science Foundation invited him to come. As, Herzog narrates in the introduction to Encounters at the End of the World, “I told them I would not make a movie about cute, fluffy penguins.”

Herzog wants exploration, not a story. Among the questions he wants to explore is why do chimpanzees–clearly superior primates–not domesticate lesser animals? “A chimpanzee could climb on the back of a goat and ride into the sunset. But it doesn’t. Why?” Herzog asks in his dry, german accented monotone. Of course, he’s not studying chimpanzees in Antarctica, but he sets the tongue-in-cheek tone for the film. He’s a funny narrator, not nearly so severe as in Grizzly Man. But it is Werner Herzog. So, although he’s funny, he’s constantly reminding us we’re all doomed.

The beauty of Antarctica is so monumental, its study is so fascinating. Herzog’s ambivalence is obvious toward the explorers breaking new ground in studying the origins of life while simultaneously making every spot they touch turn ugly. (McMurdo–a base of 1,000 inhabitants–looks worse than a makeshift coal mining town.) His ambivalence constantly upends the easy agenda. Herzog isn’t asking people to reduce their carbon footprint. He went to Antarctica to see a new world, show it to us in all its splendor and, perhaps, risk death a little. Antarctica is a stark slab of ice so vast and so loaded with dangers it serves as an exclamation point at the bottom of the globe warning us our species is just another one on an ancient planet. The planet can swallow us up and, someday for some reason, it will.

Herzog in Encounters at the End of the World has fun in Alaska, but he’s kind of like the funny guy at a funeral. Everyone’s laughing, but nobody is forgetting the situation we’re in. Herzog makes uncomfortable ideas, like we’re not invincible or as dominant as we like to believe, a little easier to swallow. Maybe with a little more humility we will develop more reverence for a place containing the last remnants of mystery on our planet.

My first impression of Margot at the Wedding (which, admittedly, may change after I see it a second time at the New York Film Festival) is that Noah Baumbach’s follow-up to The Squid and the Whale is an intermittently fascinating exercise that barely holds together as a film. It plays as if Baumbach cut together a footage reel of master-class actors (plus Jack Black, who, perhaps emboldened by the company, somehow gives the finest performance of his career) rehearsing without a script. The characters are half-formed and/or disposed of unceremoniously, the themes are haphazardly integrated, the emotional arc is virtually non-existent.

And yet, some of the performances show flashes of magic, so much so that for all its faults, it’s not entirely dismissable.

It did look good on paper, didn’t it? Nicole Kidman plays Margot, a successful short story writer/prolific drinker who has developed a kind of perfect celebrity-literary scam: she projects her own self-loathing outward, and then drains the frustrations of her friends and family directly onto the pages of the New Yorker. It’s not entirely clear why Margot’s husband (John Turturro), son (Zane Pais) and sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh, who is married to the director) keep letting her get away with this, but in the film’s best scene, her sometime-lover very publicly dresses her down for the same.

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Based on Paul’s recommendation, on our last day in Telluride I went to the encore presentation of People on Sunday. Though I wholeheartedly agree with Paul’s endorsement of Sunday’s fully-modern depiction of courtship, I was equally taken with its utopian treatment of working class leisure. People on Sunday is as much a love letter to the proletariat as the films of the Bolshevik giants, but politics are ultimately pushed aside for a celebration of a pursuit of happiness that’s in some way about transcending social class. As a snapshot of the last wave of youthful abandonment before the Hitler era, it’s a heartbreaker.

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The rite of passage into taking responsibility of another life–having a baby–has been the topic of a lot of popular movies. We don’t see very many movies about another rite of passsage, taking responsibilty over death. Specifically, the death of a parent. Prenatal wards are fun, nursing homes are not. The death of a parent brings far more complexity and reflection. So, when I saw the logline for Tamara Jenkin’s new film, The Savages, I thought this is a movie that will either be great or awful.

Wendy (Laura Linney) and Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman)–both struggling playwrites–are unexpectedly given the responsibility to care for a father (who was not much of a father) as he suffers from dementia in his last few months of life. I don’t know if it’s an easy film to connect to if you’re not somebody who has admitted a parent to a nursing home. Or if you don’t have siblings choosing divergent paths in dealing with a tragi-family. But if you fall into one of those two categories, The Savages is a really rich movie, and it’s full of dark humor you have to develop when things aren’t funny. (Linney and Hoffman have unexpectedly amazing chemistry to pull this off.)

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Today’s the hump day between the Telluride and Toronto film festivals. We’ll be rolling out some final coverage of the former as the day progresses, before moving on to a burst of coverage of the latter tomorrow. First, here’s a look at some of the trade news from the past few days that we missed over the long weekend in Colorado:

• Variety’s Pamela McClintock says a super summer for the studios is bad news for smaller/artsier films. “[W]ith the debut of one successful studio pic after the next this summer, indie distribs and studio specialty arms had trouble drawing attention to their pics and keeping even the most successful ones in theaters. How much this pattern will affect future release strategies remains to be seen.” But she has a prescription: “the box office success of horror titles this summer reinforces the notion that studio specialty arms and indie production companies need to balance out their slates with more commercial genre titles.”
• In Telluride, people seemed to either love or hate Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, but Todd McCarthy offers the only lukewarm review I’ve seen. McCarthy says Cate Blanchett’s performance is “electrifying,” but the later section starring Richard Gere “is poorly conceived on every level, as it dramatizes and contributes nothing.” The critic’s assessment of the film’s cross-over appeal is pretty dismal: “In the end, it’s a specialists’ event.”
• A theatrical “spoof” of Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps will hit Broadway this fall.
• Sacha Baron Cohen has finally confirmed a rumor that’s been going around for a year: he’s following up Borat with Bruno, based on the fashion correspondent character from The Ali G Show.
• It’s old news by now, but in light of the recent “horror is dead!” hand-wringing, it’s significant: Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake broke box office records over Labor Day weekend, earning $30.6 million over four days.
• The SXSW Film Festival is still 6+ months off, but Matt Dentler and his team have already announced conversations with two special guests: documentary filmmaker Stanley Nelson, and composer/source cue generator/tea impresario Moby.
• Spike Lee will judge entries in the upcoming Babelgum Online Film Festival. The fest will award about $130,000 in prizes to six short filmmakers.

Palme D’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is such a marvel of cinematic naturalism that as the film plays, director Cristian Mungiu’s hand almost seems to be invisible. I’m certainly not the first to heap critical praise on the camerawork (mostly long takes of un-fussy tableau presented in hands-off medium shots), the acting (as unpretentious as high-quality improv, but with the studied intensity injected by the crutch of a stable script), the pitch-perfect period production design (as the Variety review put it, the film is full of “muted cement tones, capturing the crushing ugliness of life in the Eastern bloc”) and, above all, the incredible suspense created by Mungiu’s refusal to foreshadow or explain. It all adds up to a portrait of a political situation that transforms even the most mundane personal activities into a negotiation process, ranging from frustrating to humiliating, to downright horrifying.

I’m fascinated by the dynamic between the film’s two female leads, so much so that I think I need to see 4 Months a second time before writing a full review; luckily, I’ll be able to do just that next month at the New York Film Festival.

In the meantime, check out Paul’s interview with Mungiu. Paul met the director at Telluride’s opening night feed, and the two talked about 4 Months and why there is a larger renaissance happening in Romanian film right now.
Cristian Mungiu interview

The surprise hit of the Telluride Film Festival, Juno is not quite the unqualified masterpiece that the breathless buzz might lead you to believe: its high-concept slanguage sometimes feels over-written, its visual style can get a bit too twee, and there are two or three bridge scenes in the third act that feel like imports from a much stupider movie. But in a year heavy on halfway-decent studio-supported sex comedies, Juno stands out for successfully plumbing the subversively bittersweet depths that Knocked Up strove for but mostly missed. It’s a crowd pleaser, it’s a tear jerker, and even if it doesn’t completely reinvent the genre, it does move a few fairly familiar sitcomish situations in exciting directions.

Juno’s one truly revelatory element stems from screenwriter Diablo Cody’s apparent intention to have her title character serve, at least in part, as a device through which to examine the sexual desires of teenage girls. Juno (played by Ellen Page) is a boyish, foul-mouthed, kitsch-steeped, irony-packing, hoodie-wearing, Iggy Pop-worshiping smart-ass. She’s savvy enough to understand that the bully who mocks her does so to disguise his crush, but she lacks the self-awareness to truly comprehend her power over men and boys.

In a burst of genuine passion disguised as boredom, Juno swaps virginities with her best friend Bleeker, a lithe, brainy track star played by Michael Cera. We see their single sexual encounter through Juno’s gaze, in brief, golden-hued flashbacks which allude to Juno’s deeper feelings, but when the teenager discovers she’s pregnant, she knee-jerk plays it cool. She arranges to give the baby up for adoption to a couple of grunge-nostalgic yuppies (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman), and almost unwittingly distances herself from Bleeker the baby daddy. A horribly inappropriate love triangle ensues.

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This weekend in Telluride, I recorded an audio interview with experimental filmmaker George Kuchar. We talked about YouTube, the trickle down economics of DIY filmmaking, and Telluride’s history as a haven for criminals and whores. Somehow, someway, the audio file got corrupted and the interview is unusable. Which is really depressing, because this interview was kind of a big deal to me. When I was 20 years old, I moved from Chicago to San Francisco, and I did it for George Kuchar.

(That’s not entirely true, but it might as well be. Years later the other factors that led to the move–petty relationship problems, an intolerance for Midwest winters, a foolish youthful faith in the power of geographical change to correct deep-seated emotional issues–seem far less significant.)

I was already skipping classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to watch George Kuchar’s movies at the Video Data Bank. Shot first on Super 8mm, then 16mm, then prosumer video, sometimes aided by his brother Mike, the Kuchar films were cheap and intentionally schlocky, but the best of them were somehow funny, poignant, and even beautiful. They were exactly the kind of movies I wanted to make! The idea of finishing my final three semesters of art school in a sunny clime, where I would take classes with Kuchar and surely in no time convince him to take me under his wing–it was like an actionable fantasy.

Of course, the reality of it was nothing like I fantasized. …Read more

It took a lot of persistence (more on that in this week’s FilmCouch), but I managed to get an interview with Sean Penn. Penn is here with Into the Wild, which he directed. Based on a book of the same name, the film follows the real life story of a young man’s journey into the heart of the Alaskan wilderness. We chatted about what it took to get the film made (Penn spent 10 years securing the rights), and what a relief it is to be behind the camera rather than playing extremely tortured individuals.

 

 Sean Penn interview [2:50m]: Play Now | Download

Sean Penn Interview

Into the Wild

I got five minutes to talk to Werner Herzog (it felt like an hour at the time). He’s here with his new documentary on Antarctica, Encounters at the End of the World. But when you get five minutes with a living legend, you don’t want to spend it on a movie synopsis you can read online. So, we talk about life, risk and how his mom quit smoking.

Note: I reference Dieter Dengler of Herzog’s Rescue Dawn and Little Dieter Needs to Fly as well as a panel discussion he was on regarding Sean Penn’s Into the Wild.

Werner Herzog interview

John Krakauer, Sean Penn, Werner Herzog and moderator on a TFF 2007 panel discussion

Werner Herzog, Encounters at the End of the World

When a short student film described by the director as “an exercise for school” wins the Palme d’Or at Cannes, you can be sure this is someone to watch. Elisa Miller’s Ver Llover (translated Watching it Rain) was featured with a host of other shorts by Mexican directors in this year’s Great Expectations program. The lineup was dominated by hard-hitting dramas with more than their share of gritty sex and death (taking a cue from Iñárritu?). In contrast, Miller’s ode to young love reads like a deceptively simple haiku.

She told me how the true drama is often in the little things, and we talked about the exciting new crop of young Mexican directors, supported by the more established “Tres Amigos” (Iñárritu, Cuarón and Del Toro).

 

 Elisa Miller Interview [3:02m]: Play Now | Download

Elisa Miller Interview

Ver Llover