TIFF: Fonda Plays a Hippie, Jennifer Sculpts "Butter", Viola Talks "Dark Girls"

Paolo here again to discuss three new films.

Peace Love and Misunderstanding
Bruce Beresford's new film begins with a table full of stuffy bourgeois lawyers taking down Pulitzer-winning playwrights. They seem like the kind of people the audience would like to become when they're older, having real opinions about theatre and the other high arts. This party takes place despite the Reaganite hostess, Diane Hudson (Catherine Keener) considering a divorcing from her husband (Kyle McLachlan). She takes her kids Zoe (Elizabeth Olsen) and 'documentarian' Jake (Nat Wolff) to the legendary Woodstock, New York to see their hippie grandmother (Jane Fonda). Fonda's character's presence thus questions one's notion of adulthood, as she is older yet free as the grandmother we wish we had.

Divorce and the other conflicts pop up one after another only to be resolved, a tricky comic tone to maintain. This light freedom is also evident in one scene when a chicken practically blocks our view of a character adding to the chaotic yet natural energy in this home and town. Every member of the household gets to hook up, Diane with a local musician (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), vegetarian Zoe's surprise match with a butcher named Cole (Chace Crawford) and Jake with a barista.

Fonda was the master of modern American elocution and we still hear that when she fires off the script's great one liners. But even Fonda can't help when her character turns into a Kristen Wiig caricature. Chace Crawford, capably evokes the heavy air that comes with a young man who has grown up in a rural area. And since I might not get to catch Martha Marcy May Marlene at the festival, watching Olsen's supporting work here is a decent consolation prize. She performs Zoe just as intelligent and emotionally sound as the script suggests.

Butter
This comedy about the world of butter sculpture competition in Iowa centers around Laura Pickler (Jennifer Garner), a sculptor's wife who takes on her husband Bob's (Ty Burrell) job after he is forced into retirement. Quirk topic with the strangest case of a joke bombing in a movie... (more on Butter and the documentary Dark Girls with Viola Davis after the jump.)

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Oscar Submissions: Spain, Iran, Lebanon, Portugal, The Phillipines and Finland

This just in... well, actually it's been burning a whole in my inbox for a day or two. SPAIN, no stranger to Oscar glory with 19 nominations and 4 wins behind them, have narrowed their Oscar list down to 3 films.

It's a fairly standard choice facing Spain. They've got a Pedro Almodóvar film (The Skin I Live In), which automatically assures high profile discussions and viewers in the States even if the film isn't particularly Oscar-ready competing with a lesser known film which is more loved at home (Agustí Villaronga's Pa Negre or Black Bread) and a new film that not a lot of people have seen that hasn't even been released yet (Benito Zambrano's La voz dormida). The latter film is based on a novel and about women who were jailed during the Franco years. 

I'm guessing they go with Pa Negre (which translates to Black Bread) since it made such a very impressive showing at the Goyas this year taking Best Picture and eight more trophies along with it. The film is set in rural Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War and features Sergí Lopez (Pan's Labyrinth) and I hear that the child actors, one of whom discovers a dead body in the forest, are just great in it. I posted the trailer some months ago. [UPDATE 09/28/11: Yes, it was selected. See the Oscar Charts]

UPDATE: In confusing official and then not official but maybe possibly official eventually news...

IRAN (1 nomination) supposedly submitted Asghar Fahradi's A Separation, (pictured left) which is already an award winning film, a marital drama with a high international profile. Sony Pictures Classics will distribute. I immediately put it in my prediction list. But supposedly Iran wasn't happy that this news rushed out and it wasn't official official. Distinctions! So it might be A Separation but they're now considering Ahmad-Reza Motamedi's Alzheimer's, Bahram Tavakkoli's Here without Me, Ali-Reza Davoudnejad's Salve and Rambod Javan's No Men Allowed as well.

In more official news

FINLAND (1 nomination) has gone with Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre as everyone suspected wish is about a shoe shiner who befriends an immigrant. Kaurismäki gave Finland its only nomination with the dry funny The Man Without a Past some years back. 

LEBANON (never nominated) has submitted the musical that's now playing at TIFF, Nadine Labaki's Where Do We Go Now? which is from the director of Caramel.

PORTUGAL (never nominated) will submit José & Pilar, which is a documentary by Miguel Gonçalves Mendes about the bestselling novelist José Saramago (Blindness) and his wife as well as the friction between private artists and their public lives. Sounds interesting. Guess what? Actor Gael García Bernal and director Fernando Meirelles (who were of course both involved in the Blindness film adaptation) also appear in the film.

This just in...

THE PHILIPPINES (never nominated) are submitting Woman in a Septic Tank which sounds really interesting. I'm also in love with the poster.

It's a comedy about the making of a movie as three filmmakers meet in Starbucks, call on their lead actress (played by Eugene Domingo as both herself and the character in the movie) and plan their poverty drama's shoot which will take place in a garbage dump. The movie gets reinvented several times over and changes genres and form in their imaginations.

TIFF: Shedding Light on "Urbanized."

The best way for a film audience's eyes to light up is to produce vivid images on the screen. Gary Hustwit, director of documentaries like Helvetica and Objecitified now brings us Urbanized about urban planning around the world. It has an opening montage, despite being at least four shots long, that absolutely rivals or even betters the ones in Woody Allen's movies, because it depicts different and more rustic angles on certain landmarks. The Kremlin as seen on the background from a nearby bridge, the foreground populated by young people including one wearing an I ♥ NY shirt. A close-up of the St. Louis Gateway Arch, as silver and white as the rising moon. Unlike Allen, these visions are devoid of tourist-y romantic schmaltz.

The movie took me on a grand tour. It concentrates less on the touristy areas and more towards where the residents live and move around, these spaces depicted more magnificently than any monument. It brought out my nerd-like fascination of watching how Bogota has chosen buses over subways and trains or where Copenhagen has arranged the city's old streets to accommodate certain types of vehicles. It also shows how the depopulation and devastation of certain American cities can break the audience's heart more than the squalor in third world slums like those in Rio. This film isn't just composed of shots of city streets and the structures that line them, as the camera shows interviews of mayors, urban planners and advocated who are candid about their predecessors and each other.

Too bad it doesn't keep this momentum throughout the film but it does stick to its mission. Like most documentaries about worldwide trends, it inevitably has to show statistics about populations flocking to different cities throughout history and its effects on those areas with this kind of alarmingly increasing density.

The movie can also be criticized with heavy-handed leftist leanings. I saw it with an insufferably liberal audience that clapped whenever bikes or Jane Jacobs were mentioned. It tries to be more fair and balanced by including the voices that advocate 'unpopular' city building like the neglect in Mumbai, Niemeyer's 'spacious' method that he used in Brasilia, the sprawl in Phoenix and the anti-environmental renovations in Stuttgart. The film runs the risk of preaching to the choir, despite its beautiful realism.

Oscar Submissions: Japan, Sweden and Germany's "Pina"

Three more films have been announced for this year's foreign film Oscar competition, and all are from countries with a fairly large degrees of success with Academy's foreign nominating committee. Though the Academy always has a veritably orgy of films to choose from (usually sixty-plus) for its five-wide profile boosting arguably hit-making honors, they do tend to prefer European pictures. They also tend to prefer Japanese films to other countries when it comes to Asian cinema. Will they choose any of these three pictures?

JAPAN (12 noms, 1 win, and 3 honorary awards before the foreign category existed)
Postcard, an anti-war film about a soldier (Etsushi Toyokawa) returning home from World War II to see his family devastated, comes from the 98 year old director Kaneto Shindo. He has already stated that this will be his last film. 

SWEDEN (14 noms, 3 wins)
Beyond is the directorial debut of the actress Pernilla August (More and more actresses are making the leap: see also Vera Farmiga and we're loving it. Why shouldn't they?) The actor-centric heavy drama stars Noomi Rapace as the adult survivor of alcoholic parents in the 1970s. Noomi's real life husband Ola Rapace co-stars. Beyond opened at last year's Venice Film Festival but didn't premiere in Sweden until December 2010, placing it safely within the eligibilty period for this year's submission.

Wim Wender working on his documentary homage "Pina"

GERMANY (18 nominations, 3 wins)
Pina is a high profile 3D documentary on the work of the influential German dance artist Pina Bausch who died two years ago -- it was not intended, originally, to be a posthumous film. Dancers convinced the acclaimed filmmaker Wim Wenders to continue with the project which is now an homage to Bausch featuring several of her most acclaimed pieces performed by dancers onstage and outdoors.

Honestly dance is a great use of 3D if you must use 3D at all. Unfortunately the dance movies that have used it previously have rarely understood that to get 3D to work its spatial relations magic and what that means to choreography (a lot), you need to actually not cut every second to a different camera angle so that the eyes can observe the physicality, distance, and depth. I haven't yet seen Pina (very soon I hope) but I'm assuming Wim Wenders understands this in a way, say, the makers of Glee the 3D Concert Movie would not. Just a hunch.

This is not the first time a filmmaker has been inspired by Pina or used that inspiration to really heartbreaking affect. Remember the way Pedro Almodóvar used Pina to set the stage for the ineffable emotional pull of Talk To Her?

My guess right now is that the documentary Pina may have enough acclaim and novelty interest to make the finals (at least). But documentaries have a tough road for Oscar acclaim in any category other than Documentary. To my knowledge no documentary -- and at least one is submitted each year in this category -- has ever been nominated for Best Foreign Language Film. (Unless you count Waltz With Bashir which you could; it strikes me more as an uncategorizable hybrid film.)

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TIFF Begins... Tonight

The Venice jury hasn't even handed out their prizes yet (Will Shame win the Lion?) but Toronto kicks it off tonight with their opening presentation of Davis Guggenheim’s From the Sky Down, a rock documentary on U2. It's actually the first time a documentary has opened the 36 year old film festival. I'm personally going to be incommunicado this weekend. Perhaps it sounds like bad timing but I knew I'd need to be away from NYC this weekend (can't take all the 9/11 obsessing). More importantly, it's my last breather / eye rest (begone computer screens!) for the next six months until the post-Oscar ceremony wrap-ups. 

Paolo and Amir. The Film Experience correspondents for TIFF 2011

Just as with Venice, I've enlisted some correspondents. You'll be hearing from Paolo (who you've already met) and Amir (of Amiresque) as they hit the fest. That's them above so stay tuned!

I'm here until tomorrow and I'll be back Monday late night. You won't even miss me.