Festival Circuit
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Toronto, Camden and Venice
TORONTO by Scott Macaulay High Rise has long been considered one of the J.G. Ballard’s most “adaptable” books, with the author’s dispassionate meditations on disassociation, inner and outer space, and the psychologies and paraphilias unleashed by 20th-century life encased within the sturdy confines of a modern apartment building and a class-based tale of survival. Nonetheless, High Rise has taken decades to reach the screen, despite the attachments of numerous directors, including Vincenzo Natali, Bruce Robinson and, revealed producer Jeremy Thomas at a talk at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, interest from Nicolas Roeg. Premiering at the festival in Platform, […]
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Dispatches from Cannes and the Los Angeles Film Festival
Cannes by Aaron Hillis The same way New Yorkers love to bitch about living in what they also proclaim to be the world’s greatest city, the Cannes-accredited can spend nearly two weeks in the south of France watching nothing but prestigiously vetted films and have the nerve to call it a “so-so year.” But if that was a too-common sigh, it’s partly because the festival’s main competition had few unanimous hits, which is neither unusual nor taking stock of the parallel pleasures within the Un Certain Regard, Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week sections, or out-of-competition premieres of innovative multiplex fare […]
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Dispatches from Sundance, Berlin, SXSW, True/False & Thessaloniki
Sundance SCOTT MACAULAY Check it out: the two top prize winners at Sundance this year, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and Crystal Moselle’s The Wolfpack, both feature as central elements teenagers who stage and film their own versions of classic movies. There’s even overlap between the two films, although Moselle’s Manhattan shut-ins incline more towards Tarantino and Freddy Krueger, while Gomez-Rejon’s teen Pittsburgh auteurs shirk the Romero roots of their hometown for deep dives into the Criterion Collection. For film lovers of a certain age, both Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and The Wolfpack […]
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Dispatches from CPH:DOX and Borscht 9
International Copenhagen Documentary Film Festival – CPH:DOX 2014 by Pamela Cohn There is no way by which the events of the world can be directly transmitted or recorded in our brains. They are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way. Our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other, and ourselves, the stories we continually re-categorize and refine. This sort of sharing — this communion — would not be possible if all our knowledge, our memories, were tagged and identified and seen as private, exclusively ours. —from Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi’s film The 50 Year […]
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Dispatches from Toronto & Camden
Toronto Film Festival 2014 By Scott Macaulay Early in Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland’s resolutely unsentimental Still Alice, the eponymous Columbia University linguistics professor (Julianne Moore) visits a neurologist to discuss the memory issues she’s been having. “I’m going to tell you a name and address, and I want you to remember it,” he says. “John Black, 42 Washington Street, Hoboken.” After a few basic cognitive tests, he asks Moore to repeat the address. She stumbles, apologizes; she just got distracted. The doctor smiles and nods. Moore is brilliant in this scene, as she is throughout the film capturing, Kübler-Ross- […]
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Dispatches from Sundance, Berlin, SXSW & True/False
Sundance By Scott Macaulay “Can’t we just try to have a good time?” The plea so often heard when going on a family trip — or an evening out with a couple you don’t like so much, or when indulging your partner on a trip back home — is terrible advice for a journalist attending a film festival, especially Sundance. You see, as long as your tickets are in order, you can quite easily have a good time at the Park City festival. By “good time,” I’m speaking in film festival terms, which means “see good movies.” The destination for […]
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CPH:DOX 2013
“Mission accomplished.” That might have been the motto of the 2013 edition of CPH:DOX. If, at one point, this doc festival’s liberal definition of “reality” roiled nonfiction traditionalists (it was the fest, after all, that gave its 2009 top award to Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers), those days are long since gone. As BBC Storyville’s commissioning editor Nick Fraser commented at a panel on hybrid journalism, there’s almost an expectation by contemporary audiences that documentaries today — not just at CPH:DOX but everywhere — will play with concepts of truth and fiction. “Is there anything left of the tradition of objective […]
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Venice International Film Festival 2013
To get to the Lido — the strip of beachy land upon which the Venice Film Festival is held every year — one must take the vaporetto (or water taxi) from the Marco Polo Airport. While waiting for the transport to arrive, one is stuffed into a rectangular holding pen that sways and jerks with the current, provoking a mild but unmistakable seasickness in the more sensitive among us. Little did I know I was to experience almost exactly the same feeling the following morning while watching festival opener Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón’s first since 2006’s Children of Men. It’s an […]
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Toronto International Film Festival 2013
The Toronto International Film Festival, where mainstream critics stick to premieres, freelance writers look for discoveries, programmers tend to their demographic and harried acquisition agents run from theater to theater. For all, time is key: getting to the show on time, standing in long lines for the latest indie blockbuster, rushing to grab something resembling food and sitting through mediocre films because there’s nothing else playing. Appropriately, several of this year’s films mirrored this emphasis on time and the demands it makes on the viewer. Many of the festival’s most daring films were in the Wavelengths section, which last year […]
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Toronto International Film Festival 2013
With 288 films unfolding over 11 days, the Toronto International Film Festival offers just about every type of viewing experience imaginable, with every viewer becoming their own curator, cherry-picking from within their favorite sections. Business types congregate around the big acquisition titles. Cineastes check out the greats of world cinema, arriving in Toronto after Cannes. Discoverers peruse the Vanguard section searching for new talent. But what’s less often commented upon are the viewing experiences a large festival like Toronto produces for viewers intending to sample from it all. Entering a theater involves, before the lights dim, a mental recalibration, an […]
