Things wound up in Gothenburg with a bang — the awarding of the Dragon Award, a cash prize for the best of eight Nordic films entered in the competition in a closing ceremony at the Clarion Hotel Post (just renovated in the hip W style across from the central train station) that felt more like Bette Midler at the Continental Baths circa 1974 than it did the ho-hum attempts at grandeur usually reserved for these things.
The cash prize--1, 000,000 Krona, or about $150,000—one of the largest anywhere, went to Kompani Orheim (Orheim Company), directed by Arild Andresen, the third installment in a trilogy about its hero, Jarle Klepp, your basic depressed Norwegian victim of family incivility, who came up during the 1980s and is now reflecting upon the emotional fjords of the journey. Of course, like many another household since the invention of mead, Jarle’s father is an alcoholic, so we endure with Jarle a well documented, nicely crafted, if pretty straightforward child’s eye view of the hazards of the raging Norwegian alcoholic father who eventually undoes them all almost completely. We have been this way before.
The Big Chill has descended on Gothenburg and all over Europe. This week may have seen Groundhog Day back in the States, but in Gothenburg it was Dragon day at the Gothenburg Film Festival. The Festival’s icon is a red dragon, which they‘ve turned into a statuette to give annually to a filmmaker. Charlie Kaufman was the first recipient last year, and Michael Winterbottom this year.
Gothenburg, Sweden is a beautiful European city, a seaport on Sweden’s west coast. As I arrive, Gothenburg is midway through its 35th film festival, and a recent film market initiative meant to promote Scandinavian films more effectively into the world marketplace. The city is particularly beautiful at night, softly lit, each block old and gracious and for the most part at 19th century height.
PARK CITY, Utah — Two full production years following the market collapse in the third quarter of 2008, the tonal zeitgeist of films on display at the Sundance Film Festival — a reliable snapshot of independent filmmaking — has shifted from dark to light. The scripts that found financing in 2010-11 certainly refer to the world we live in now — money and jobs and nature all in a tizzy — but see no reason for their characters to become undone.
Red Light
It's at about this point, midway through the festival, that one begins to regress to the level of adolescent behavior.
But first, some movies.
Yesterday I walked out of a film that was a phone sex comedy and into a film that was, by sheer serendipity, a phone sex tragedy.
Red Light
"Boston Phoenix" stalwart correspondent Harlan Jacobson is busy watching movies and breathing thin air at the Sundance Film Festival. Here's the first of his dispatches from the event that will be the arbiter of the year's independent movies:
It's raining in Park City, which only has snow and Sundance to recommend coming here, the way Palm Springs only has the sun and no dance, or Tombstone only has a graveyard. One full day in, and I'm wet behind the ears. In terms of pictures worth crossing the continent to see, all of them so far in the US dramatic competition, I'm one, maybe a little more, for four.
French director Maiwenn wins the Jury Prize for Polisse (Photo: EPA/Christophe Karaba)
Cannes cut its characters loose this year, both onscreen and off, in a restless assemblage of films and filmmakers that ended Sunday night with the crowning of The Tree of Life, by the reclusive Terence Malick, as the Palme D’Or. [*Prize winners, see below]
In Habemus Papam, Papam (We Have A Pope), Past Palme D’Or winning director Nani Moretti lets the new Pope slip out of the Vatican and take the bus around town as he searches his soul to see whether he’s up to the job. In Paoli Sorrentino’s This Must Be The Place, Sean Penn plays a mentally fried, cross-dressing glam rock star refugee of the 1980s who leaves his Irish castle to hunt down a Nazi camp guard in Utah. And the world begins in Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life, and ends in Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia.
And then the festival tossed Von Trier out of town and declared him Persona Non Grata. Effective immediately
The Tree of Life
All the waiting is over. Cannes’ big coup, The Tree of Life, the long awaited fifth film from Terence Malick finally landed on planet Earth—and divided the strange life form known as the press into three parts: the pretty, the profound and the spiritual claptrap camps.
No one outside the New Age wavy gravy class of directors like Godfrey Reggio of Koyanisqaatsi fame back in the 80s, or the commercial, fantasy elite of George Lucas and James Cameron, has tried anything as philosophically planetary since Stanley Kubrick back in 1969 threw a bone in the air in 2001 and turned it into a space station run by a computer aboard with sympathy for the devil.
Canne Film Festival 2011
Cannes--In the never ending search that all film festivals go through to find an opening night film that will make nice with an audience that is dressed up to party, it’s probably fitting that Cannes this year opened Wednesday night with Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. It’s Woody’s umpteenth return to Cannes— he was here last year with You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, and before that with Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Cassandra’s Dream, Match Point, Hollywood Ending, and on and on. They could’ve bought him an apartment, already, across from the red carpet.
Score
It’s rare that the festival itself is as much the story as the films in it . But the 35th Toronto Intl Film Festival, or TIFF as it’s called locally, settled into its new home, the Bell Lightbox complex of theatres, shops and restaurants at the base of a new skyscraper addition located on Reitman Square in the downtown Fashion district.
