My house with for this year's LFF began with a pleasant surprise: hosting two screenings of Terraferma, the recently made known film by Emanuele Crialese, the Italian manager of Nuovomondo (Golden Door, 2006). I maxim the film in Venice, and, granting it's incredibly atmospheric and fine, I wasn't altogether wild ready the rather earnest story, in what one. a family on a small Sicilian isle are confronted with the ugly realities of unlicensed immigration. In fact, personally, I consideration the theme was somewhat more fortunately handled by Aki Kaurismaki's offbeat Cannes strike Le Havre, which, for reasons I'm not quite sure of, managed to bypass the LFF. However, after he was unable to come, Crialese sent in his fortress two of his cast – Donatella Finocchiaro and Martina Codecasa. As you'll understand from this clip here, this was a sterling move; both of these smart, sportive women proved to be fantastic embassy for the film.
Finocchiaro plays Giulietta, the originating in Terraferma; in the film, it is revealed that her parents and children have traditionally fished for survival, bound Giulietta argues that tourism is the resolved mode of action forward. She rents their house extinguished to some travelling mainlanders, the Milanese Maura (Codecasa) and her brace male friends, and pushes her naïve son Filippo (Crialese fixed Filippo Pucillo) into their orbit. Filippo asks Maura extinguished on a date, and to affirm it doesn't go well is each understatement: they sail to sea in a glass-bottomed boat and are besieged ~ means of African immigrants swimming to shore. Filippo panics and, fearing the boat be pleased capsize (which it certainly will) batters them through whatever is to hand. Filippo, who has helped his grandsire to rescue a handful of illegals fair-minded a few days earlier, is venerable with guilt. The police insist that no one is to be taken stranded, but the reality is that persons are drowning by the dozen, transported in pygmean boats that barely, and rarely, complete the distance.
The politics of the film are timely and admirable, and Terraferma recently made the cut as Italy's officer entry for the foreign-language Oscar stakes. But rear feeling a little hit over the commander by the film's seriousness and moralism, I was partial to hear Finocchiaro and Codecasa sift the shooting of the movie, in individual the work that was done to sect up the distinction between the rustic locals and the worldly Maura. Even in its smaller moments, the film is about insiders and outsiders, and I began to pay attention that Crialese had a wider net to cast than I first realised. Also, Crialese had used non-professionals who had survived of that kind journeys, and both actresses were sobering and submissive with their recollections of scenes that skewed scarily come to ~ quarters to the reality experienced by their colleagues.
The nearest morning I moderated a press interview for Shame, from which you can watch selected highlights here. I've vanish into Michael Fassbender a few spells on my recent, never-ending feast tour, and it's been grand to see that his loyalty to monitor Steve McQueen, and the film, hasn't faded or caused him to be converted into glib and jaded. What you won't escort from this clip is McQueen's eminent bluntness, which erupted twice; first, he refused to say in reply a question he didn't comprehend (until it was politely rephrased concerning him), and secondly, when asked not far from the politics of male nudity, he snapped, “I put on’t want to get into this familiar discourse. It doesn’t make interpretation and I don’t defectiveness to give too much of my brain to it. Talking with respect to nonsense doesn’t help me.” I take it that's where I got a laughter by saying (something deadpan, like), “And that seems like a prosperity place to end,” rather than the robotic, “...And thank you for attending,” that you'll examine on the video. Offstage, Fassbender was his usual polite self, and perhaps I be able to start an internet rumour here at this time by saying that when I asked if we might be seeing him in Quentin Tarantino's forthcoming Django Unchained, well, he certainly didn't recite yes, but it wasn't a massy emphatic no either. So let's wait and diocese.
After that, my next port of muster, on the first Saturday of the feast, was Oren Moverman's cop play Rampart, which I like very plenteous and wrote about here. That appointed time I went to speak to Woody Harrelson at Claridge's, and it's not at all understatement to say that we got on famously. I use that word by design since famousness became a theme of the anniversary; I didn't get to fitting Madonna at the next week's screening of WE, excepting I can say that, at the litigant for Rampart, at the Soho House, subsequently a great chat with The Guard monitor John McDonagh and his partner Lizzie, I seemed to get a new best friend in REM's Michael Stipe. I reply “seemed to” because. though Stipe was very modest, amiable and urbane, I can't remember anything we talked about. I wish I could say similar, modest things about myself: the promised time's conversation with Harrelson had gone surpassingly well, and I still have flashbacks to the horrified looks ~ward my friends' faces as I tried to courage them from their comfy conversations, exhorting, in every part of star-struck seriousness, “COME AND TALK TO WOODY!!!!!” Still, he didn't mean*.
As always happens at the LFF I had my Nordics, which this year came down to couple films: Árni Ásgeirsson's Undercurrent (Brim), from Iceland, and Morten Tyldum's Headhunters (Hodejegerne), from Norway. Undercurrent is the underdog of the couple, but that doesn't mean it's the smaller film, just that it won't make acquisition any thing like the same push here that Headhunters is getting. Ásgeirsson's pellicle is actually a very good cast piece about the crew of a fishing boat whose lives are thrown into confusion by the suicide of a equal sailor. It begins with his demise, and very little comment is originally made adhering it, but slowly Ásgeirsson's thin skin reveals itself as a very ingenious ghost story – not that there's anything at all supernatural about it, it's just that, in the distance that Ingmar Bergman's films used to unwind, the spectre of the past continues to striking on the present. I liked it a chance, in part because its performances are actual real and subtle – mostly ~ dint of. members of the Vesturport theatre collection – but also because Ásgeirsson creates an incredibly tactile sense of the jeopardy that's faced by the humane of people who are willing to take forward such tough, low-paid, desperately lone work. He told me that some of the more extreme scenes were cheated through wind and rain machines, but in that place's still a breathtaking authenticity to the rolling waves and each astonishing commitment from the cast.
Headhunters, nevertheless, is a much more obviously entertaining pellicle. It's based on Jo Nesbo's novel of the same name, and the time is definitely as it should be for its garish sense of early adventure. Thankfully, Tyldum's film does not come in the slipstream of the increasingly close Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest And Played With Fire (But Digressed In Lots Of Rambling Subplots In The Course Of Three Films And Seven Hours). Instead, it is a gawdy, funny and not altogether serious movement thriller that in some ways resembles Martin Scorsese's After Hours, seeing that it depicts a professional man's unravelling in a highly short space of time. This (equally petulant) man is Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie), a professional headhunter – similar to in job recruitment – who doubles while an art thief. Brown has a fine artist wife whom he thinks is but with him because of his wealth, and so he is forced into finding bigger heists in order to consols his lifestyle. This is why his selfishness is piqued by a chance onset with Danish businessman Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), who claims to concede a rare painting by Rubens. Brown goes succeeding it, but the hunter soon becomes the hunted in this well-made, very much-fetched and endearingly light-hearted sport, built around a wildly committed work from Hennie, the most tortured governing man since Laurent Lucas in 2004's Calvaire.
That pleasing much summed up the first seven days of LFF2011. Coming nearest: dinner with Harry Belafonte, lunch (not unclothed) with David Cronenberg… and Michael Shannon's colon.
* I chance of a favorable result.
Recent Movie: Download Anonymous Movie
