Critics back Atonement for Oscars REEL TIME: Lynden Barber
فيه سبويلر
THE film likely to dominate the next Academy Awards is the British adaptation of Ian McEwan's epic love story Atonement if the breathless critical reaction to its opening screening at the Venice film festival is any indication. Several reviewers compare it with The English Patient, which a decade ago swept the Oscars with nine awards. Directed by Joe Wright (Pride & Prejudice), Atonement "ranks with the best novel adaptations of recent times", The Hollywood Reporter raves, noting the "compelling and charismatic performances by Keira Knightley and James McAvoy as the lovers and a stunning contribution from Romola Garai as their remorseful nemesis" and predicting "rapturous audiences and major awards".
Not to be outdone, Screen International calls it "a textbook example of literary adaptation; breathtakingly beautiful in its craftsmanship, impeccably acted and quietly devastating in its emotional impact", and predicts robust commercial returns as it becomes "the must-see prestige release of the (northern) autumn". Not to mention "the first frontrunner for across-the-board consideration among both Oscar and BAFTA voters". Phew. With reviews like this, expect a backlash to start any second.
VENICE, along with the Toronto film festival (opening tomorrow), has seriously firmed up as a launching pad for the Oscar season in the past few years: Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain and George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck both made their first splashes at the Italian event after being turned down by Cannes. This year, Venice director Marco Mueller has programmed several English-language films in competition (at least 10 out of 22), the prizewinners to be picked by a jury presided over by China's Zhang Yimou and including Australia's Jane Campion, The Netherlands' Paul Verhoeven and Mexico's Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.
AS noted last week, an impressive slate of nine Australian films is screening at Toronto but the one that most intrigues Reel Time is Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts, a documentary on composer Philip Glass by Shine director Scott Hicks, partly because the director has somehow managed to keep news of its production under wraps for the past couple of years. An Adelaide-based spokesman for the film says Hicks has been a long-term friend and fan of Glass (who scored Hicks's latest fiction film, No Reservations) and funded the doco himself. Negotiations have begun for an Australian cinema release for the film, which features interviews with the composer as well as musician Ravi Shankar and film directors Woody Allen, Errol Morris, Godfrey Reggio and Martin Scorsese. While music documentaries are hardly a new genre, they're showing no sign of fading in number or popularity: Toronto's program also includes a hefty slate of rock docos, focusing on Joy Division, the Who, Lou Reed's Berlin and heavy metal in Baghdad.
STILL on festivals, Reel Time notes with a raised eyebrow that the New York Film Festival, which will open in two weeks, has announced the premiere of the "definitive cut" of Ridley Scott's science fiction classic, Blade Runner. So what, pray tell, was that director's cut released at least adecade ago? You mean Scott was pullingour legs with a non-definitive director's cut?
APOCALYPTIC gloom has engulfed the film industry in the past couple of years as executives fret about youngsters - the key market - losing interest in movies or downloading them illegally. It's the same pessimism and uncertainty about the future that has hit the music industry and increasingly, gulp, newspapers. However, it appears the end of movies is not quite as nigh as everyone feared. While there was a decline in box-office earnings during the past two northern summers, this year there has been a reversal of fortunes, with North American earnings hitting a record $US4.2billion ($5.09 billion) thanks in large part to hits such as the comedies Knocked Up and Superbad. The number of tickets sold (as opposed to money earned) is, at 600 million, still below the 650 million peak achieved five years ago. But at least film execs can afford to postpone their retirement plans for a couple of months.
REEL Time wondered about the title of Australian feature The Last Winter, which opened nationally last week, largely because it sounded more like the handle for an environmentally themed science fiction chiller than the you-beaut rugby league melodrama to which it is attached. Our doubts have been confirmed with news of a second new film with the same title, this time from the US. Film Comment magazine describes it as possibly the "first global-warming horror film".
AUSTRALIA'S links with two key Asian film industries - the Chinese and the Indian - have been emphasised with two events: the signing of a co-production treaty with China, and a Bollywood movie shot in Sydney, the peculiarly titled Heyy Babyy, hitting the box-office heights in its home market at the weekend. The Indian film, a remake of Three Men and a Baby (itself a remake) has already become the second most popular Indian film of the year in Britain. Meanwhile, the Australian-Chinese treaty follows three years of negotiations and covers films and telemovies. The first title to qualify under the agreement is an Australian-Chinese-German co-production, The Children of Huang Shi, a drama set in 1937 during Japan's occupation of China and starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Radha Mitchell, Yun-Fat Chow and Michelle Yeoh.
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المشاركات: 3426 | من: .ıllıllı. U.A.E .ıllıllı. | تاريخ التسجيل: أكتوبر 2005
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