Fur: An Imaginary Portrait Diane Arbusopens today in limited release, and I have to wonder how many people have even heard of it. I hadn't really planned on seeing Fur at Telluride; at least, it wasn't on my radar as a "must see" film. Then I heard so many people buzzing about it, I decided to add it to my schedule at the last minute. It was one of those polarizing films with very little middle ground: People were either very Pro-Fur or very Anti-Fur -- so I had to see it. About a third of the way into the film, I was thinking to myself, "This film is not going to play well to mainstream movie audiences, but I love it." Then again, I'm the sort of filmgoer who actually likes weird. I enjoy having my expectations turned on their ear, and Fur definitely does that.
Another upcoming artsy film that leans sharply toward the bizarre is Perfume: Story of a Murderer. I caught a screening of Perfume, helmed by Run, Lola, Run director Tom Tykwer, the other night. Perfume opens in limited release at the end of December, with a wider release slated for January. Like Fur, Perfume is a dark, almost hallucinatory film with the air of a fable about it. I thought when I saw Fur that I'd seen the most curious film I was likely to see all year; Perfume managed to surpass it -- in a really good way.
Note: This review originally ran during the Telluride Film Festival. It is being run again in conjunction with the film's release.
Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, is a beautiful, elegant, poem of a film, and yet, like Arbus (Nicole Kidman) herself, it's so strange it almost defies description. Arbus (whose first name is pronounced "Dee-Ann") is simultaneously one of the most celebrated and controversial photographers of our time. Arbus grew up in a wealthy Jewish family, amidst a life filled with privilege that she viewed largely as a prison. Overshadowed by her older brother, who grew up to become the famous poet Howard Nemerov, Arbus chafed against the expectations her family had for her to be an obedient, compliant child and, later, an equally socially acceptable wife and mother.
Fur is not a historical portrait of Arbus; rather, as the title suggests, it is an imagining of what might have been going on inside Arbus' mind at the time she broke free of the constraints of 1950s wife-and-motherhood to fully realize her own potential as an artist. Arbus and her husband Allan (who later became an actor, most famously playing Major Sidney Freedman on M.A.S.H.) owned a photography business, which made much of its income shooting advertising campaigns for the fur company owned by Diane's wealthy parents.
In this follow-up to Secretary, director Steven Shainberg continues his fascination with the dirty thoughts of pretty women, using famed documentary photographer Diane Arbus as the inspiration for a fictional 50s housewife character on the cusp of discovering her inner Bettie Page. When we first see her, 'Diane' is riding a bus down a lonely highway and dreamily scribbling freak-fetish words into a notebook: "Slaughterhouses...albinos..." The newly freak-curious heroine is on a quest to visit Camp Venus, a nudist colony where she will dip her toe, and which is presented to us as some kind of happy, grass-green Brigadoon of free-swinging penises. One man cheerfully mows the lawn au naturel. The film both begins and ends at this camp, and it's in these bookends that you can spot some clear signs of trouble for Fur. Nicole Kidman has never been a shrinking violet when it comes to nude work, but the requisite shots of her during these scenes are noticeably ungenerous and awkwardly shot, strongly suggesting the use of imperfect body doubles and some kind of director-star battle that ended in an editing-room stalemate.
Kidman is also only half-present during key points throughout the rest of the film. She sits stoically quiet and stone-faced during scenes which re-hash the kind of prurient, hand-in-pants question-and-answer sessions that appeared in Shainberg's last film. "Did you ever show your nanny your tits?" she's asked at one point by Robert Downey's upstairs-neighbor character, who guides her into a circus-tent world and who has a hair-face like Michael J. Fox in Teen Wolf. His shedding hair clogs the plumbing of his neighbors, which first causes saintly mother and wife Diane to step away from her domestic bliss one evening to knock on his door. The character, named Lionel, is invented out of whole cloth, like much else in the film and serves as the bridge Arbus the Nice Lady will cross to become Arbus the Artist. Watching Kidman interact with Downey, you ask yourself -- did she think she was signing on to do a real film about Diane Arbus and only too late found herself in this Skinemax interpretation of Beauty and the Beast?
With Babel opening today, we at Cinematical thought we'd provide links to two seperate festival-circuit reviews of Babel -- one, from Cannes, by Editor-in-Chief James Rocchi; the other, from Telluride, by Managing Editor Kim Voynar. Kim's Take:
"There are filmmakers who make good films, even great films, and then there are filmmakers who take making a movie to a whole new level of artistry, so far above the mean as to be incomparable to anything else. Alejandro González Iñnáritu is such a filmmaker, and with Babel he tells his story with such power and control that by the end of it you are at his cinematic mercy, utterly exhausted and spent. ..."
Just like Amores Perros and 21 Grams, Babel is gorgeously shot and made with real filmmaking talent; at the same time, while Iñárritu's working on a worldwide canvas here, he is making very similar strokes to those in his prior films. Part of me watched Babel with a feeling of apprehension -- is Iñárritu in a groove, or a rut?
(Note: This review previously ran during our TIFF coverage, and is rerunning again because the film opens this weekend. - ed)
What lies beneath the surface of life in a picturesque town, where mothers gather with their children at a neighborhood park, the town pool is the center of summer social life, and married couples lead what appear to be perfectly normal, happy lives with their families? What secrets hide beneath the facade of these seemingly idyllic lives? In Todd Field'sLittle Children, adapted with author Tom Perotta from his novel of the same name, people's lives intersect in unexpected and even dangerous ways, and nothing is quite as it seems.
Sarah (Kate Winslet) is a stay-at-home mom with an almost-PhD in English Lit. She is mired in deep unhappiness, almost an extended case of postpartum depression. Sarah chose to stay home with daughter Lucy, who is about three when we meet them, and she refuses to even consider child care; she's doing the stay-at-home mom thing, it seems, because it's the "right" thing to do, not because it's what she really wants. Sarah's depression and misery over the life she's found herself trapped in prevents her from really connecting with Lucy, this "unknowable little person" who is looking to her for love and nurturing. Sarah, to be blunt, is not good at the art of being a stay-at-home-mom -- and the other moms at the park let her know it in those subtle and insidious ways women use to attack each other.
I have a lot of admiration for screenwriters. They are the unsung heroes of the film business; without their stories, no film would ever be made. Being a writer is hard, anxious and often lonely work. You stare at the blank screen. It waits to be filled, it must be filled, and so you start to write, praying that the end result is worth the effort you give to it. I've started and not finished countless screenplays whose stories just wouldn't go anywhere, written and completed eight full drafts of an absolutely dreadful romantic comedy and, through various writing groups I've belonged to over the years, read a lot of developing screenplays that will, thankfully, never see the light of day. I'm such a geek, in fact, that I often read the scripts for films I love, over and over again, just to feel rhythm of the words on the page, and to get a sense for how those words translated into the finished film on the screen.
As so often happens, Anne Thompson at The Hollywood Reporter has written an astute piece on screenwriting that is so obvious it seems it should be carved into granite above the entrance to every studio in Hollywood: Great writing makes for great movies. The film with which Thompson explores this hypothesis is Stranger Than Fiction, which debuted at Toronto (sadly, I missed it there), and she makes her point about great writing by enumerating how many big stars wanted to be in the film based on the script alone. Some truly great films have come out of a script that speaks its truth to actors so purely and loudly that they simply must see the film get made. They'll work for scale, drop other projects, shuffle their schedules around, all for the sake of that golden opportunity to be in a film so good that it demands to be made, whatever the sacrifice. When critics and cinephiles bemoan the dismal quality of so many films sludging their way out of Hollywood, very often what we are really bemoaning is the lack of originality in storytelling, the lack of passion in penning that story, and mostly, the lack of truth that seems to permeate so many films.
Jindabyne, starring Laura Linney and Gabriel Byrne, is about what happens when four men on a fishing trip find the body of a murdered young woman, and decide to leave her in the water, tethered to a tree, until their fishing weekend is over. Their decision has wrenching ramifications both within their personal relationships, and in their relationship with their entire community. Laura Linney very graciously sat down with Cinematical at the Toronto International Film Festival to talk about Jindabyne and her character, Claire. You can download the interview here (31.1MB, five minutes) or watch it over on Netscape. For more on Jindabyne, you can read our review of the film from the Telluride Film Festival.
Phillip Noyce's political-apartheid thriller, Catch a Fire, tells the tale of real-life hero Patrick Chamusso (Derek Luke), a foreman at an oil refinery, falsely accused of sabotage amid the political heat of the rise of the African National Congress (ANC). After he and his wife are interrogated and tortured at the hands of Nick Vos (Tim Robbins), a colonel in the Police Security Force, and his men, the previously apolitical Chamusso, who had always toed the line of apartheid, leaves his beloved family to fight against apartheid with the ANC. Noyce sat down with James Rocchi during the Toronto International Film Festival to discuss his film. You can download the video here ( 20MB, 9:49 minutes) or watch it over on Netscape.
Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, is a beautiful, elegant, poem of a film, and yet, like Arbus (Nicole Kidman) herself, it's so strange it almost defies description. Arbus (whose first name is pronounced "Dee-Ann") is simultaneously one of the most celebrated and controversial photographers of our time. Arbus grew up in a wealthy Jewish family, amidst a life filled with privilege that she viewed largely as a prison. Overshadowed by her older brother, who grew up to become the famous poet Howard Nemerov, Arbus chafed against the expectations her family had for her to be an obedient, compliant child and, later, an equally socially acceptable wife and mother.
Fur is not a historical portrait of Arbus; rather, as the title suggests, it is an imagining of what might have been going on inside Arbus' mind at the time she broke free of the constraints of 1950s wife-and-motherhood to fully realize her own potential as an artist. Arbus and her husband Allan (who later became an actor, most famously playing Major Sidney Freedman on M.A.S.H.) owned a photography business, which made much of its income shooting advertising campaigns for the fur company owned by Diane's wealthy parents.
On my way out of Telluride back to Gunnison Wednesday, I stopped at the Office Depot (hooray for civilization!) and bought myself a USB cord, and, 'lo! I am now able to actually download the pictures from my camera and into my trusty laptop! I was driving the three-plus hours to Gunnison, in case you're curious, because all the flights into Telluride and Montrose were booked, and Gunnison was as close as I could get. Fortunately, it was a nice drive.The pic above is of the amazing Colorado sky, taken near Blue Mesa Lake.
If you're hoping for lots of cool celeb shots, sorry. Telluride is a laid-back festival where stars come to relax and feel normal, and honestly, although I saw a few, I just didn't want to intrude on their privacy and fun at the fest. I suppose that makes me a lousy paparazzi. No doubt we'll get plenty of celeb pics for you at Toronto, but Telluride is all about the beauty and the films. There are a few more pics after the fold.
I posted the other day about the panel discussion led by The Hollywood Reporter's Anne Thompson on "The New Media Future: The Impact of Broadband on the Creative Process and Content Distribution." The panel included Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of WIRED, Josh Goldman from Akimbo Systems, Yair Landau, President of Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment, director Kevin MacDonald (Touching the Void) and Dan Scheinman, SVP of Corporate Development for Cisco Systems, which sponsored the event. Cisco has the entire panel discussion up in a podcast now, for your listening pleasure. This was a great discussion with lots of interesting points of view on the impact digital and broadband will have on the future of film. If you're a geek for that kind of stuff, or you were at Telluride and didn't make it to the panel, be sure to check it out.
Today was the last day of the festival, and I was lucky to be able to catch two films that had been eluding me all weekend: Jindabyne, starring Laura Linney and Gabriel Byrne (both in top form) and Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, with Nicole Kidman and Robert Downey, Jr. I'd heard lots of good buzz around Jindabyne all week that, well, I really wanted to see it. The film is about Claire and Stewart, a couple struggling to overcome the effect on their marriage of Claire's nervous breakdown following the birth of their son several years before. The couple's marriage, their friendships, and their relationships with everyone in their small community are challenged when Stewart and three friends find the body of a dead girl in the river on a fishing trip, and decide to leave her in the river until their boys' weekend is over.
"Therefore is the name of it called Babel because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth." Genesis 11:9
There are filmmakers who make good films, even great films, and then there are filmmakers who take making a movie to a whole new level of artistry, so far above the mean as to be incomparable to anything else. Alejandro González Iñnáritu is such a filmmaker, and with Babel he tells his story with such power and control that by the end of it you are at his cinematic mercy, utterly exhausted and spent, and yet fulfilled on a soul level in a way that is almost indescribable. Babel represents the final third of the trilogy that Iñnáritu began with Amores Perros and 21 Grams. With each film Iñnáritu has grown as a filmmaker, and Babel represents his most difficult and complex undertaking to date. Iñnáritu himself said when he introduced the film at Telluride for its North American premiere, that he was profoundly personally affected by the filming of Babel, which took place over the course of a year in Tunisia, Morocco, Mexico and Japan.
Maurice (Peter O'Toole) and Ian (Leslie Phillips), veteran actors and lifelong friends, are getting on in years, so Ian is having his grand-niece come to live with him and help take care of him. When the young lady arrives, however, Ian finds himself in a state of shock. Far from the demure young woman of his imagination who would fawn over his every needs, Jessie (newcomer Jodie Whittaker) is a rude, sullen girl who never seems to stop eating junk food, pours milk into his lemon tea, and can't even cook a nice piece of halibut to save her life. Maurice, meanwhile, has just been diagnosed with prostrate cancer -- a fact he conceals from his friends -- and he views Jessie in an entirely different light. Maurice likes Jessie in spite of -- perhaps, one suspects, because of -- her rough edges, and takes her under his wing, escorting her to the theater and the museum and encouraging her to read classic literature.
In The Italian, by director Andrei Kravchuk, six-year-old Vanya lives in the dilapidated Russian orphanage he has always called home. The orphanage is run by the Head Master, a broken-down man who, in spite of being occasionally drunk and frequently flustered, does the best he can to care for the many children abandoned by their parents to his care. A formidable woman known to the children only as Madam arranges for the children to be adopted by foreign couples seeking international adoption -- for a considerable profit. The children more or less fend for themselves, working at odd jobs, or as thieves and prostitutes for the gang of older teens living in the basement of the orphanage. One day Madam brings to the orphanage Claudia and Roberto, an Italian couple who have come to look for a child to adopt, and Vanya is chosen to be introduced to them. They immediately fall in love with Vanya and decide to adopt him, but it takes two months for the paperwork and court date to finalize matters. The other orphans consider Vanya lucky to have been chosen for adoption, and so does Vanya -- at first.
Here we are at Day Three of Telluride already. Only one more day of fun and film at 10,000 feet to go before I'm off to Toronto. Today was beautiful in Telluride, absolutely perfect for sitting outside to interview Venus director Roger Michell during an afternoon screening of his film. Michell was every bit as delightful in person as he seems in his Q&As. He was due to take off right after the post-show Q&A to get his kids back to London in time for school tomorrow, before heading to Toronto himself to promote the film there. I'll have the interview up as soon as I have enough spare minutes to get it transcribed.
After the interview, I had a little time before I needed to queue up for the screening of Infamous at the Galaxy, so I headed down to Main Street (aka Colorado Street), the heart of Telluride, to score a sandwich to eat in line. On my way back to the Galaxy, I found a nice little coffee shop, where I got a lovely triple-shot latte -- just what I needed to boost me through the afternoon and evening. Finally got into the Galaxy after waiting in the queue forever. It's a neat theater: They convert the elementary school gymnasium into a full-fledged theater by covering everything in black velvet drapes and bringing in lots of cool neon galaxy-themed art. I enjoyed Infamous more than I expected to. I wasn't sure the world needed two films about Truman Capote in as many years, but the film was well-done and well-acted, with Sandra Bullock putting in a particularly strong performance as Capote's childhood friend, Pulitzer prize-winning author Nelle Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird). I love To Kill a Mockingbird, but I had no idea that Lee based the character of Dil on Capote. I know, I'm probably the only person on the planet who didn't know that. That's okay. You learn all kinds of unexpected things at film festivals.
Fur: An Imaginary Portrait Diane Arbus opens today in limited release, and I have to wonder how many people have even heard of it. I hadn't really planned on seeing Fur at Telluride; at least, it wasn't on my radar as a "must see" film. Then I heard so many people buzzing about it, I decided to add it to my schedule at the last minute. It was one of those polarizing films with very little middle ground: People were either very Pro-Fur or very Anti-Fur -- so I had to see it. About a third of the way into the film, I was thinking to myself, "This film is not going to play well to mainstream movie audiences, but I love it." Then again, I'm the sort of filmgoer who actually likes weird. I enjoy having my expectations turned on their ear, and Fur definitely does that. 
I posted the other day 
