Venice film fest ends on sour note
| Published: Monday, 10
September, 2007, 06:04 AM Doha Time | |
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VENICE: Ang Lee has walked off
with another top award at the Venice film festival, and surprised
critics are wondering how he did it. Lust, Caution (Se, Jie) won the
Golden Lion late on Saturday, two years after the Taiwanese director
scooped the big prize for gay cowboy drama Brokeback Mountain. In
2005 he was a popular winner. In 2007 he was
not.
Reporters
and critics in the press room, watching the closing ceremony beamed
live on a big screen, booed when Lee’s Golden Lion was announced,
and again, more loudly, when Hollywood star Brad Pitt was named best
actor.
“In all of the pre-award speculation, nobody had thought
about Ang Lee’s film, not even for one of the lesser awards,”
Natalia Aspesi wrote in La Repubblica newspaper yesterday.
At a
post-verdict news conference, jury president Zhang Yimou offered no
explanation of the panel’s decision to give the Golden Lion to Lee’s
film.
Reviews of Lust, Caution were generally negative, arguing
that at 156 minutes it was much too long. The slow narrative, set in
World War II Shanghai, is punctuated by explicit and sometimes
violent sex which Lee hinted was real.
The Hollywood Reporter’s
verdict was: “Ang Lee’s lugubrious spy epic ... brings to mind what
soldiers say about war: that its long periods of boredom relieved by
moments of extremely heightened excitement.”
The decision meant
that a festival broadly praised for its film selection and
organisation ended on a slightly sour note.
Although no strong
favourite emerged from the 23 films in competition in Venice,
critics agreed Tunisian-born Abdellatif Kechiche’s The Secret of the
Grain, about an Arab family living in France, would be a worthy
winner.
In the end a disappointed-looking Kechiche walked away
with a jury runner-up prize, as did US film maker Todd Haynes for
his conceptual biopic of Bob Dylan called I’m Not There.
Also in
the frame in the run-up to the awards were two films about the war
in Iraq.
In Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah, Tommy Lee Jones
won praise for his performance as a war veteran whose son is
murdered after returning from Iraq, and Brian De Palma’s Redacted
shockingly recreated abuses in Iraq by US soldiers.
More
controversial than the Golden Lion for Lee was the best actor prize
for Pitt, who starred as the fabled outlaw in The Assassination of
Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
Critics said the decision
was particularly baffling because Pitt’s co-star in the movie, Casey
Affleck, was widely considered to have stolen every scene, while
Jones and Michael Caine in Kenneth Branagh’s Sleuth were also
frontrunners.
More popular were the Silver Lion for best director
to De Palma, whose brutal film stunned audiences, and the best
actress prize for Cate Blanchett.
In a daring piece of casting
that appears to have paid off, the Australian-born actress was one
of six performers to play Dylan in I’m Not There, and arguably the
most convincing.
Zhang sought to soothe one journalist who
challenged the jury’s decisions, saying that “all the force and
power of heaven” would not be enough to guarantee a decision that
kept everybody happy.
But the jury appears to have bent over
backwards to appeal to as many tastes as possible by awarding the
jury runner-up award to two films instead of one, and handing
Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov a special Golden Lion for his
work. – Reuters |
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`Michael Clayton' Premieres at Venice
Friday, August 31, 2007 3:44:26
PM
By COLLEEN
BARRY
![From theRedCarpetofVeniceFilmFestival]()
First-time director Tony Gilroy was more interested in
a story about making peace with how you earn a
buck in his legal thriller "Michael Clayton," rather than some tale about
corporate evil. "All
these corporations that you talk about, they are all inhabited by people. It
is not some other occult superpower that is deciding this," said
Gilroy, who also wrote the script. "Every day, they go back
and make a small paper cut on their
morality."
The film,
about a New York corporate law firm's attempts to settle a
multimillion-dollar class-action suit against one of its clients, stars
George Clooney, who plays a burnt-out, in-house
fixer for the firm, the guy
who cleans up embarrassing and damaging problems for major clients.
After 17
years on the job, he hasn't been made partner, and he's left with mounting
debt from gambling, a divorce and a failed business venture.
Tilda
Swinton co-stars as Karen Crowder, the firm's chief counsel whose career
rests on the settlement. Tom Wilkinson plays Arthur Edens, the lead trial
attorney in the case whose manic episode sets off the crisis, and Sydney
Pollack appears as a commanding senior partner.
Swinton,
whose character takes the greatest moral dive, said she loved the way
Gilroy's script gave her character private moments when she "puts on her
identity."
In the
opening sequence, Karen is pictured in a bathroom, sweating profusely and
as she contemplates the enormity of her actions.
"When I
read the script ... here was this bad guy, woman, and (Gilroy) did the
thing I always wondered about -- that is, how do they face themselves in
the mirror in the bathroom in the morning?" Swinton said.
Clooney
was cautious about getting involved with a first-time director, but said
Gilroy immediately inspired confidence.
"Being a
director is so much like being a general. Are you going to follow this guy
up a hill or not," Clooney said. An
acclaimed scriptwriter who wrote "The Bourne Identity" and its sequels,
Gilroy called Clooney "the bodyguard," whose name gave the picture clout and helped get it
made.
Clooney,
who didn't get paid to make the film but will take a cut of any profits,
waved off his contributions.
"You
gamble on the film making money," Clooney said. "If not, you do it for
free. `The Good German' didn't' make money. In that sense, I'm the
bodyguard. I want to get films made.'
Toward
the end of the movie, Clooney's character speeds away from another mess
he's had to clean up, as if trying to get away from himself. But something
catches his eye. He gets out of his car and climbs a hillside toward three horses, which
stand still and allow him to get close. While the scene has a
nearly divine quality, Gilroy said the movie provides little
redemption.
"I don't think there are
happy days ahead for Michael Clayton," Gilroy said. "The price he pays for
the crippled redemption he has at the end is very, very high."
"Michael Clayton," which made its world premiere Friday at the Venice Film
Festival, is set for worldwide release in October.
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Gere, Theron Bash Bush in
Venice
Tuesday, September 04,
2007 11:04:54 AM
Richard
Gere and Charlize Theron added their voices to a chorus of stars taking
swipes at the Bush administration at the Venice Film Festival. "How did
we elect Bush twice?" Gere asked rhetorically while promoting his new
film, "The Hunting Party." In the
film, Gere plays a reporter determined to track down Radovan Karadizic --
who has been hiding for more than a decade and is charged with genocide
and crimes against humanity for his role as an alleged architect of the
Bosnian war. "What's
interesting to me is how do the bad people among us end up our leaders?"
the 58-year-old actor said at a news conference Monday. In
"The Valley of Elah," Theron plays a New Mexico detective drawn into the
case of a U.S. soldier who disappears just days after returning from a
tour of duty in Iraq. "The
decision-making process for going into Iraq was very hastily done, and I
think the facts weren't there, and I just don't think you go to war for
those reasons," Theron, 32, told Associated Press Television in an
interview. "I think the thing that upset me most was the manipulation that
our government did towards our people, manipulating them to believe that
if they weren't for the war, they weren't patriotic."
George
Clooney has said he made "Syriana" and "Good Night, and Good Luck" out of
anger for being considered a traitor for questioning the decision to go to
war. He told reporters at Venice last week that he believes Americans are
now in the process of fixing the mistakes of the last few
years. The film
festival ends Saturday with the awarding of the top Golden Lion prize.
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