With a few more days left before the Oscar nominations are revealed, it is time to look at what the non-professionals anticipate will be among those contenders announced Thursday morning. Last Monday, we posted our own predictions for the Academy Award nominees and invited readers to weigh in with their own forecasts. A lot of comments concentrated on what shouldn’t happen, like The Dark Knight shouldn’t be nominated for Best Picture and Dustin Lance Black shouldn’t be nominated for his screenplay for Milk. And apparently The Curious Case of Benjamin Button could be this year’s Dreamgirls. However, there were some interesting trends among the many who chimed in. Check out some highlights after the jump. …Read more
As I hinted at a bit yesterday when I posted about some of the best undistributed films of the year, I have a love/hate relationship with the idea of movie ranking. The idea that any of us––critic, blogger, professional, amateur…to the extent that any of those words mean anything anymore––could be indisputably “correct” in our individual execution of such an activity is insane; and of course, any attempt to draw each of our subjective takes on The Year in Movies into a consensus waters down everything that makes an individual list idiosyncratic and thus interesting. But in the end, I do believe that what’s valuable about these activities is valuable enough to outweigh what’s annoying: if you read this blog regularly and have come to draw a bead on my tastes in relation to your own, maybe seeing a list of my favorite New York theatrical releases of 2008 will help jog your memory about films you meant to see (or avoid), and now that many of these are available on DVD, maybe you’ll make it happen (or not).
My full ballot is posted at indieWIRE now. I chose not to rank the titles from 1-10, but they did reel out of my brain in a particular order, and that has to mean something. Below the jump, my theatrical favorites, with links back to previous coverage, and notes on where/how each film can currently be seen.
Still impossibly gorgeous and chic at age 65, Catherine Deneuve is the ultimate living emblem of the lasting romance of French film. She’s also amongst the busiest international female stars over the age of fifty, and while Deneuve has made the occasional questionable move since hitting that marker of age (dueting with a post-post-post Sex Pistols Malcolm McLaren; playing “herself” in I Want to See, a dramatized document of her visit to war-torn Lebanon), Melissa Anderson is right to note that for the most part, over the last decade and a half, “she has shown a fearlessness in her roles—no matter how small.”
That fearlessness is on display in A Christmas Tale, where Deneuve is at her best rocking a borderline incestuously playful love-hate with her wicked charmer of a son (and potential lifesaver) Matthieu Amalric. With that film hitting theaters tomorrow, here’s a look back at a few iconic Catherine Deneuve moments, all readily available via YouTube.
Danny Boyle’s latest, Slumdog Millionaire, hit theaters this week. The whimsical up-tempo romance is quickly becoming a critical darling, with decent prospects for awards season. The funny thing is, we hated it. We take a look back at Boyle’s work, specifically A Life Less Ordinary. That film, far from a critical darling, has essentially the same core belief as Slumdog, that the combination of love, destiny, and tons of money will never let you down.
I saw Christmas decorations in a storefront Sunday, so I guess it’s already time to break out the holiday movies. And it’s evidently time for distributors to release holiday fare to theaters, even if Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale (Un conte de Noël), which hits theaters this Friday, isn’t exactly the latest crowd-pleasing installment of the Santa Clausefranchise. In fact, with such ingredients as estrangement, mental illness, alcoholism and cancer, it doesn’t seem like a very happy holidays kind of film. Even if it is actually a comedy.
But then how many holiday movies are completely void of depressing themes and scenes? I’m sure to have grown up thinking more about the homeless, suicide and family dysfunction from films set at Christmas and Thanksgiving than I did thinking about the happiness that comes with these holidays. One of the most tearjerking moments for me as a kid was certainly seeing Mickey Mouse crying over his dead son in Mickey’s Christmas Carol. It’s no wonder so many people get sad this time of year. Movies are influential, and for every bit of slapstick we see this season, there’s potentially room for thoughts of abandoned children to go along with it.
Worse for our tearducts are the films that aren’t necessarily thought of as “holiday movies,” which are typically more honest about how much of a bummer holidays can truly be. So get out your hanky and check out our list of ten most depressing holidays in movies:
The holidays are coming, and that either means spending time with your dysfunctional family or escaping them for the movies … where you’re likely to be met by other, fictional dysfunctional families. Already this season, Rachel Getting Marriedintroduced us to the f’ed up faux masala of the Buchman clan, and later this month we get to follow Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon as they’re pulled into their separate quadrants of kin in Four Christmases. Also, for those who think dysfunction is an American tradition, this weekend sees the release of the French film A Christmas Tale (Un conte de Noël), which unites the two major premises of dysfunctional family movies by being set during the holidays and involving an ill family member.
With two more weeks left until Thanksgiving, after which we might not want to think about another family, real or cinematic, for the rest of our lives, it’s a perfect time to celebrate those dysfunctional tribes we love the best. Literally thousands of movies feature such families, though, so we’re sure to have left out some of your favorites. Definitely chime in below, and/or join the discussion currently going on over in our Top 5 group.
Arnaud Desplechin makes movies that play like epic novels built out into live-sized pop-up books. Virtually Cubist in their multi-faceted narrative complexity, they cast such a spell that they’re almost interactive. When you watch a Desplechin film, you can smell perfume and feel bass shaking a room, and you feel the burden of each character’s long-simmering loves and resentments as if they were your own. Beyond surround sound, it’s surround space, surround time, surround life.
A Christmas Tale (Un Conte de Noel), Desplechin’s latest, is a darkly comic dysfunctional family fairy tale, more Meet Me In Saint Louis than The Royal Tenenbaums, with a healthy dose of A Midsummer Night’s Dream thrown in. With its whimsies and excesses playing out under the oddly liberating spectre of expected death, the whole thing is infused with a fin de siecle sensibility. While ailing matriarch is Junon Vuillard (Catherine Deneuve) infuriatingly matter-of-fact regarding what may be her own last holiday (she explains the seriousness of her condition to her husband in their warmly-lit budoir, backed by the strains of cafe jazz), her grown-up kids reflexively take the reminder of the ticking clock as an opportunity for boozy, reckless revelry, as an excuse to fight and to stop fighting repressed desires. Weird, warm, gleefully funny and unavoidably heartrending, this grand tale of a family reunited by mortality is, in it’s most impressive trick, not a bit morose. To borrow a line from Desplechin himself, speaking after a screening at the New York Film Festival, the Vuillards “don’t have time for melancholy”; to borrow a line from his script, “suffering is a painted backdrop” for the business of getting through the day.
In the middle of Tom Hall’s interview with Arnaud Desplechin, director of my current favorite film of the year A Christmas Tale, indieWIRE has embedded a clip from the film, which I’ve in turn stolen and embedded above. This scene, in which Catherine Deneuve’s ailing (but still gorgeous) matriarch Junon goes shopping with her son’s new girlfriend (played by Emmanuelle Devos), incorporates the film’s running joke about Angela Bassett.
A Christmas Tale opens in New York and L.A. on November 14, but in the intervening 11 days the IFC Center is hosting a mini-retrospective of Desplechin’s films. I’m hoping to make it out to see L’Aimee, Desplechin’s personal documentary about his own family, andMy Sex Life (…Or How I Got Into An Argument), which stars Christmas‘ Mathieu Almaric, and which I’ve somehow never seen. Check out the full details on the program here.
As you can see above, Floridian turned Brooklynite Holly Herrick knows a thing or two about flowers, but this is just where her expertise begins. The programmer of Sarasota’s quickly emerging film festival has taken up programming duties at the Hamptons Film Festival, which kicks off on Wednesday. We spoke recently about why Agnes Varda’s new film shook her up, the new record from The Walkmen and why she’s looking forward to Examined Life so much. …Read more
I was pleased to be asked to participate in indieWIRE’s post-TIFF critics poll, through which consensus selected Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s Still Walking as Best Film, Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler) as Best Performance, and Les Plages d’Agnes by Agnes Varda as Best Doc. Unfortunately, I didn’t see any of those movies, but the three titles I named as my favorite films of the fest all made the poll’s top ten: Summer Hours, Rachel Getting Married, and Treeless Mountain.For Best Performance, I named Treeless‘ Hee Yeon Kim, Mathieu Almaric from A Christmas Tale (maybe technically a Cannes film, but he still blows most of the competition out of the water, as far as I’m concerned) and Matthew Newton, director/writer/star of Three Blind Mice. I didn’t see as many docs as I would have liked (I guess I’m saving them for the fall season of Stranger Than Fiction, programmed, like TIFF’s Reel to Reel, by Thom Powers), but by far my favorite was Blind Loves.
We still have a bit of TIFF coverage in the can for posting over the next few days, BTW. Look for interviews with Jonathan Demme, Anne Hathaway, Ari Folman and more by the end of the week.
For all the talk about how this was a mediocre year at the Cannes Film Festival, I think I personally saw a higher ratio of good to garbage than is my festival norm. Maybe I’m being Pollyanna-ish; maybe I just went in with lower expectations. Regardless: though certainly I saw films too mediocre to merit mention, it seemed like every day brought at least one new movie that deserved to have the living hell championed out of it. The following list is thus not ranked necessarily by absolute quality, but by how fervently I feel the need to shout the praises of the film in question––in some cases, in opposition to overwhelming derision or indifference.
1. Everything is Fine (above) — This French-Canadian drama, about a suicide pact between four teenage friends and the enigmatic boy left behind, was the true undiscovered gem of this year’s Market. Both cautiously romantic and devastatingly sad, its greatest achievement is the way in which it naturalisticaly depicts a teenager’s personal tragedies (those legitimately large and those that just seem that way) without condescension nor nostalgia. As far as I know, it left the Marche without any form of U.S. distribution.
2. Frontier of Dawn –– It wasn’t the most maligned film in competition––nothing could top the press corps’ universal disdain for Wim Wenders’ The Palermo Shooting––but Philippe Garrel’s richly-layered story of the ultimate doomed romance may have been the most misunderstood. Those who complain of the supernatural turn taken by Garrel’s epic in its third half (and, particularly, the silent-era effects used to achieve it) mostly refuse to engage with the film on its own terms. See my full review here.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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As I hinted at a bit yesterday when I posted about some of the best undistributed films of the year, I have a love/hate relationship with the idea of movie ranking. The idea that any of us––critic, blogger, professional, amateur…to the extent that any of those words mean anything anymore––could be indisputably “correct” in our individual execution of such an activity is insane; and of course, any attempt to draw each of our subjective takes on The Year in Movies into a consensus waters down everything that makes an individual list idiosyncratic and thus interesting. But in the end, I do believe that what’s valuable about these activities is valuable enough to outweigh what’s annoying: if you read this blog regularly and have come to draw a bead on my tastes in relation to your own, maybe seeing a list of my favorite New York theatrical releases of 2008 will help jog your memory about films you meant to see (or avoid), and now that many of these are available on DVD, maybe you’ll make it happen (or not).
I was pleased to be asked to participate in 
