The Screengrab : charlotte gainsbourg

Cannes Winners Announced

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 25 May 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Lars von Trier caused the biggest stir, but it was Michael Haneke who took the top honors as The White Ribbon was awarded the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival. There was mild controversy over the choice, given that jury president Isabelle Huppert had starred in an earlier Haneke film, The Piano Teacher. Von Trier's Antichrist did pick up a major award, as Charlotte Gainsbourg took Best Actress honors. The full roster of awards follows the jump.

PALME D'OR

The White Ribbon, dir. Michael Haneke

GRAND PRIX

A Prophet, dir. Jacques Audiard

SPECIAL CAREER PRIZE

Alain Resnais

BEST ACTOR

Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds

BEST ACTRESS

Charlotte Gainsbourg, Antichrist

BEST DIRECTOR

Brillante Mendoza, Kinatay

BEST SCREENPLAY

Mei Feng, Spring Fever

JURY PRIZE (shared)

Fish Tank, dir. Andrea Arnold, Thirst, dir. Park Chan-Wook

CAMERA D'OR

Samson and Delilah, dir. Warwick Thornton

BEST SHORT FILM

Arena, dir. Joao Salaviza

Cannes Roundup: Day Seven

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 20 May 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds has finally been unveiled, and now it’s time for all of us to put our expectations in check. Mike D’Angelo at the AV Club calls it “a shambling mass of contradictions that’s likely to divide QT partisans like nothing since Jackie Brown. Conceptually, this is easily the strangest film he’s ever made, as well as the least commercially viable.” J. Hoberman of the Village Voice is a bit more enthused: “Perhaps one should call Inglourious Basterds--a sort of World War II spaghetti western, even more drenched in film references than blood--quintessential Tarantino. A little long, a bit too pleased with itself, it's a movie of enthusiastic performances, terrific dialogue, amoral, surprisingly crude, mayhem, and mind-boggling juvenile fantasy.” Eric Kohn of Indiewire is not: “Basterds lacks the crackly excitement of Tarantino’s other efforts, mainly because he can’t seem to tie the whole package together.”

We’ll all get our chance to experience the..er…wonders of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist for ourselves, courtesy of IFC Films. Per Entertainment Weekly, “IFC will release the same controversial cut of the film that recently screened at the Cannes Film Festival. In the movie, Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg play a couple who retreat to a wooded cabin to overcome the grief of losing their only child.” At the other end of the spectrum, IFC has also acquired Ken Loach’s soccer comedy Looking for Eric.

Alan Resnais is not retired. “Declaring himself 'too lazy' to spice up his famously cerebral films with blood and thunder, the 86-year-old director, who brought Hiroshima mon Amour to the Cannes film festival 50 years ago, nonetheless said he always hoped to win audiences,” per Reuters. “‘If I knew that by putting the camera a bit more to the right or a bit more to the left, moving it about or fixing it in place, there would be more people watching it, I would do it straight away,’ he said after a press screening of his film Les herbes folles (Wild Grass) at the Cannes festival. ‘But it's completely unpredictable.’”

Trailer Review: Antichrist (International Trailer)

Paul Clark — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 16:00:00 GMT

The official competition slate for Cannes is going to be announced tomorrow morning, and a film most are predicting will be included is this, the latest from galvanizing Dane Lars Von Trier. From the looks of this trailer, I’d say this is at least partly a throwback to Von Trier’s earlier films- the theme of hypnosis runs throughout his first three features, as well as his miniseries The Kingdom, and the rigorous style of the visions early in the trailer hearken back to the visual look he often employed in his pre-Breaking the Waves days. At the same time, his more recent style is in evidence here too, not only in the insistent handheld camera shots but also in the deteriorating psyche of his heroine, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg. When I first heard that Von Trier was working on a movie called Antichrist, I wasn’t sure what he was up to, but I have a pretty good idea now, and I’m fascinated. If nothing else, this should tide this long-standing Von Trier fan over until he finally gets around to making Wasington.

Morning Deal Report: George Clooney’s Challenge

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:30:00 GMT

The Cloon is getting political again. According to Variety, George Clooney “has bought the rights to Jonathan Mahler's legal thriller The Challenge, about the long campaign waged by U.S. Navy lawyer Charles Swift and Georgetown law professor Neal Katyal to ensure a fair trial for Salim Hamdan, the bodyguard and driver of Osama bin Laden.” Presumably Clooney will play the lawyer and not the driver.

Conan (the Barbarian, not the O’Brien) dons his loincloth again for Lionsgate. Dirk Blackman and Howard McCain, who have written an Amazon warrior vehicle for Scarlett Johansson, will pen the return of Robert E. Howard’s creation. (Presumably the governor of California is unavailable to reprise his role.) The Hollywood Reporter quotes producer Fredrik Malmberg as saying “We all want this movie to go into production as soon as possible,” so you know quality is priority number one.

Willem Dafoe is a versatile fellow, isn’t he? He played Jesus in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, and now he’s set to star in Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist. It doesn’t sound like he’s necessarily taking on the title role, however. Variety describes it as a “psychological thriller that evolves into a horror film,” in which “Dafoe and [Charlotte] Gainsbourg will play a couple who retreat to an isolated cabin in the woods following the death of their child.” That Von Trier, he’s a million laughs.

Related:
George Clooney Leans In and Other Insights
Face/Off: "Breaking the Waves"

New Holiday Classics: "Comfort and Joy" (1984), "La Buche" (1999) and "Morvern Callar" (2002)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Christmas-themed comedies come in two basic flavors, the warm family plum pudding and the more recent development of the anti-Christmas raspberry, represented by the likes of Scrooged, The Ref, and the mighty Bad Santa. There are also mutants that fall between the two stools, such as Bob Clark's A Christmas Story, a nostalgic family comedy from the director of Porky's, in which gross-outs are part of the simpler times towards which the viewer is expected to look back on longingly. Both the reassuring family films and the movies in which a Bill Murray or a Denis Leary plays a rude, aggressive sort with no interest in good will to man are in denial over what Christmas means to so many of our fellow citizens: holiday depression. Luckily, a few brave filmmakers have chosen to seize that topic and run with it.

The Scottish film Comfort and Joy (1984), written and directed by Bill Forsyth, is the Bringing Up Baby of holiday depression comedies. It stars the resourceful and engaging Bill Paterson as Alan, a fortyish control freak who works as a radio D.J. The movie opens on Christmas Eve, with Alan and his beautiful girlfriend (Eleanor David) making love beside the decorated tree; when they're done, she announces that she's been meaning to tell him that it's all over and that the guys are on the their way to help her move out. The movie spans the week between Christmas and New Year's, a period during which Alan, in despair over the loss of his girl and convinced that his life is in a rut, seems in danger of melting and vanishing down a storm drain with the rest of the slush. The movie has a plot; Alan, flailing about for a way to make his life mean something, decides to become a serious radio news guy and, looking for a story to cover, gets mixed up in the tribal warfare between competing ice cream vendors. But the movie's special glory is in its graceful, poeticized comic atmosphere, which manages to make depressive stupor seem rather lyrical. The cinematography by Chris Menges is a major factor in this, as is Bill Paterson's performance and Eleanor David, too. When Alan dreams about her coming back to him, you can completely relate to his not wanting to ever wake up.

La Buche, a 1999 French film directed by Daniele Thompson from a script she wrote with her son Christopher, opens four days before Christmas and deals with the various messes that three sisters, played by Sabine Azema, Emmanuelle Beart, and Charlotte Gainsbourg, are trying to sort out while preparing for the inevitable family gathering. The tone is established in the opening scenes, when Thompson gradually cuts from images of nightmarishly crowded, noisy Paris streets crammed with holiday shoppers to a funeral, which seems like a comparatively restful scene until the deceased's cell phone goes off inside his coffin. La Buche isn't as soulful as Comfort and Joy, but it is pretty funny, and unlike the Forsythe movie, it's readily available on DVD. And besides, the season hasn't been made yet that couldn't be made a little more festive by the addition of Charlotte Gainsbourg.

No discussion of all that you dismay would be complete without a mention of the opening of Morvern Callar. Directed by Lynne Ramsay from an adaptation of Alan Warner's novel by the director and Liana Dognini, the movie opens with the title character (Samantha Morton) waking on Christmas morning to find her boyfriend's dead, bloody body beside the Christmas tree; he has committed suicide during the night, and left behind the manuscript of his completed novel for her to print out and solicit to a publisher. In shock, Morvern submits the novel under her own name, then takes off for a holiday in Spain with her best friend (Kathleen McDermott) in tow, equipped with her dead boyfriend's money and credit cards and a mix tape he made for her to act as soundtrack to her new adventure. Morvern Callar isn't a comedy (to put it mildly), and it leaves its connection to the holidays in the dust, along with the twinkling, lighted tree and the blood on the kitchen floor. But in its chilly, gripping way, it is the story of someone who leapt at the chance to light out and make a new life for herself, just like that whiny bastard George Bailey was always insisting, unconvincingly, that he wanted to do. Truly Santa works in mysterious ways.