Festivals & Awards
Tilda Swinton’s Ebertfest dance-along
Tilda Swinton leads 1,500 people in a dance-along to Barry White’s “You’re the First, the Last, My Everything” during Roger Ebert’s Film Festival in the Virginia Theater on April 26, 2013.
Seduced by Sonoma
As Roger Ebert noted in February, film festivals have become so ubiquitous that there’s almost certainly one within driving distance of most film fans in the US. And lots of them are sprouting world-wide. Three years ago, I’d pitched Roger with an “FFC” piece on the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. He advised that I provide a sense of the town and its atmosphere, the people, as well as what the festival itself was like.
Follow the official Ebertfest blog
Follow the goings on at Ebertfest (April 17 – 21, 2013) with the official festival blog by RogerEbert.com contributor Steven Boone.
Hot Tickets: “Lovelace” and “Before Midnight”
Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s “Lovelace” tells the story of the eponymous porn star who stunned the world with her sexual talents in “Deep Throat” (1972), only to pay a dear price for her brief flash of celebrity. Linda Lovelace, as played by Amanda Seyfried, was a love-hungry, innocent young girl led astray by Chuck Traynor, a manipulative pimp of a husband, whose affection quickly turned into exploitation.
Dancing the Sundance sadhu dance
Why is it that the culture surrounding art is so far removed from the process of making that art? I suspect this week is hell for many filmmakers here. The world you have to exist in as a great artist (one that values the interior over the exterior, the spiritual over the corporeal) is directly opposed the world you have to exist in to get your movie made. I wonder how many other people here are wondering what’s wrong with them. How many people are pretending they love partying in order to not feel like a weirdo.
All hooked: Porn addiction and computer chess
The goodies are in! After a slow start, Sundance Film Festival 2013 has begun to offer real discoveries, even if the wait for that elusive game-changing masterpiece is by no means over. Still, there’s stuff to enjoy in Park City and appetites seem pleasantly whetted.
Fresh cinematic air at 7,000 ft.
Today at Sundance I wandered aimlessly around a supermarket picking up different cheeses and putting them back down. I can never decide on a brie.
Cheese-less I journeyed to a bustling main street (a very steep hill) where altitude-acclimated rich ladies breezed by me in furry hats and sunglasses. They were having a good time.
Slippery Slopes in Park City
At night, the ski slopes of Park City, Utah, are lit so beautifully they look like screens awaiting a projection from the sky. A moviegoer attending Sundance Film Festival couldn’t wish for a better backdrop for a long trek home after the final movie of the day is over. Even if the film happened to be lousy, those huge mid-air patches of white seem to hint that the good stuff is yet to come.
A couple too frail to last?
At Sundance, going to the movies is a way of taking shelter from the surrounding snow and cold, and I find it amusing to see scores of cinephiles arguing about movies in their full winter attire. It’s as if skiing wasn’t enough: the real fun over here is to slide down the slopes of filmmakers’ visions — even if every now and then pain and bruises may result.
A comedy beyond time and space
Paul Rudd walked by me on Main Street in Park City wearing reflective sunglasses so I couldn’t see if his eyes could see that my eyes saw him and were staring. I knew it was him from the way he walked. I can recognize a gait a mile away. But I didn’t know yet that “Prince Avalanche” was a masterpiece or I could’ve had a good conversation starter.
Disney magic: The terror of constant entertainment
The Disney mystique is a secular religion so global, powerful and self-contained — not to mention litigious — that it practically courts desecration. Randy Moore’s “Escape from Tomorrow,” which just premiered at Sundance and is unlikely to come to a theater near you any time soon, is the boldest act of cinematic violation at least since the “Mickey Mouse Club” finale of Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” (in which scores of American soldiers in Vietnam adopted the show’s anthem as a deranged battle cry).
Sundance New Frontier: The Volcano
“Eyjafjallalokull” is a stunning and moving video art installation that played at Sundance in the “New Frontier” art exhibition space. I visited the piece several times. Nicolas Boritch, director of the AntiVJ visual label and producer of “Eyjafjallalokull” (“The Volcano” for short) wants to put viewers in a space where “they just forget where they are and they forget about understanding anything because we want to leave a lot of space for the audience to create their own story or to find whatever they want to find.”
Getting antsy for amazement
As I approached the Festival Palais early this morning, a light breeze wafted down the fabric of the immense billboard-size banner of this year’s festival poster over the facade. The glamorous photo of a leggy Faye Dunaway, by director Jerry Schatzberg from his 1970 film “Puzzle of a Downfall Child,” was rippling and creasing in a way that made the sleek legs appear to be covered by a pair of ill-fitting tights. Little did I suspect that Faye’s wardrobe malfunction was a bad omen for a seemingly promising day on which three out of the only four films by women selected for this year’s Cannes competition were scheduled to screen.
British actress Tilda Swinton, who gravitates to daring roles, plays Eva, a conflicted New York mother “We Need to Talk About Kevin” by Scottish director Lynne Ramsay, based on the novel by Lionel Shriver. Eva’s son Kevin is portrayed as having a deep animosity toward his mother, virtually from the moment of his birth. As an infant, he shrieks hour after hour when alone with her. As he grows, he exhibits a fierce, focused inclination to evil, and that bent will ultimately make him a Columbine-style killer. Kevin might have been a demon child in another kind of movie, but this is not a supernatural story. “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” is a psychological drama centered on Eva’s guilt.
For me, this was a one-note film. Kevin is thoroughly bad; Eva is thoroughly angry, self-hating and stoic. I longed for some shades of subtlety, but this is a story that relies on blood-red coding in dreams and flashbacks, and a soundtrack that emphasizes grating irritants. Ramsay, who acquitted herself very well with films including “Ratcatcher” and “Movern Callar,” seems an ill match for an American setting, letting raucous bluegrass numbers and stereotyped characterizations of Eva’s small town neighbors and co-workers stand in for insight.
“The Tree of Life” takes the Palme d’Or
The Closing Ceremony of the 64th Cannes International Film Festival took place today in the Grand Theatre Lumiere in the Festival Palais at 7:15 pm French time.
Since I had already left the festival on Friday, I was watching online as Jane Fonda slithered up to the microphone to present the Palme d’Or, looking like a
