Battle Royale

When Ella Taylor asked me to rename my top five films of all time, I tattled off the obvious titles. She then asked, "Any since the last 17 years?"

"In my top five?" I asked incredulously.

"Well, okay, top 10," she relented.

"Well, let me think about that."

And upon later reflection, I realized there was one movie released in the last 17 years that I love so much that, yes indeed, it could find its way onto that tough 10 list that constitutes the history of cinema.

That film would be the late Kinji Fukasaku's Japanese masterpiece, Battle Royale.

But upon singling out Battle Royale for all-time honor, I decided to list my top 20 films that came out in the last 17 years, 1992 to 2009. The only limitation I put on the films was they had to be able to withstand many viewings. So some great movies, like Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto, didn't make it because I've only seen them once, and once was enough. Except for Battle Royale at the top spot, the others are listed alphabetically:

Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku)

Anything Else (Woody Allen)

Audition (Takashi Miike)

The Blade (Tsui Hark)

Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson)

Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater)

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The best film to open the Cannes Film Festival in the seven years I've been attending, and just a lovely film all around, the Pixar studios' Up (which opens in wide release next Friday, May 29) suggests what Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino might have looked like if, instead of standing his ground, Eastwood's Walt Kowalski had simply attached a few thousand helium balloons to his ramshackle craftsman and lifted off into the atmosphere. That's precisely the course of action taken by Up's own cantankerous septuagenarian widower, Carl Fredricksen (Ed Asner, channeling Walter Matthau), after a physical altercation with a man half his age threatens to land him in a retirement home for the rest of his days.

Carl even comes complete with his own Asian-American protege in the form of pudgy, diminutive Russell, an 8-year-old Junior Wilderness Explorer who finds himself on Carl's porch at the exact moment of liftoff and ends up accompanying him on his intercontinental journey. That journey winds all the way to the jungles of South America, where Carl plans to deposit his flying house at the edge of the very waterfall he had always planned to visit with his late wife Ellie -- an act of noblesse oblige that recalls the cross-country tractor journey undertaken by the title character of David Lynch's The Straight Story.
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In addition to L.A. Weekly's Scott Foundas, Village Voice's longtime film critic J. Hoberman will be filing regular dispatches from this year's Cannes Film Festival. Day zero: Hoberman plans his schedule, looks for strawberries, equates Quentin Tarantino's proudly misspelled Inglourious Basterds to a bad T-shirt.

Inglourious Basterds a/k/a I'M WITH STOOPID!!!

Things to do: find local strawberries, locate cheap couscous; cluster outside the Palais as several dozen locals seem to be doing a full 24-hours before the opening night film, Pixar's 3-D wonder Up; page jet-lagged through the festival catalogs, pondering the gnomic film descriptions and trying to plan a strategy.

Read more at VillageVoice.com...

In a press release issued this morning, the American Film Institute announced that tickets to all film screenings at this year's AFI Fest (October 30-November 7) will be made free to the public, including a limited number of tickets for the festival's opening and closing night galas. (Paid passes, allowing for priority seeing, will also be available.) This decision, unprecedented for a festival of AFI Fest's size, comes on the heels of the announcement that veteran Variety and L.A. Weekly contributor Robert Koehler will be joining the festival as programming director. It's also the latest sign of the renaissance the city's longest-running, but historically troubled film festival has been enjoying under the stewardship of artistic director Rose Kuo and AFI President/CEO Bob Gazzale, both of whom have come on board in the last two years. Keep up the good work, guys.

It's film festival high season in town at the moment, with the Indian Film Festival and COLCOA French film week just concluded and the 10th Annual Polish Film Festival Los Angeles presently underway. Although space limitations in this week's print edition prevented me from commenting on the latter there, that is by no means intended to diminish the value of this year's program, which includes tonight's overdue local premiere of Four Nights with Anna, the first new film in 17 years by Jerzy Skolimowski.

In the '60s and '70s, Skolimowski created an international stir with his early directorial efforts Walkover and Barrier, before moving on to a series of highly original English-language films, including the 1970 Deep End, which traced the ill-fated romance between a shy teenage boy working in a London bathhouse and the female co-worker he admires, obsessively, from afar. But following the critical and commercial disappointments of Torrents of Spring (1989) and 30 Door Key (1991), Skolimowski settled into a self-imposed filmmaking hiatus, during which he painted and took occasional acting work (including as Naomi Watts' uncle in David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises). "I had the feeling that the movies were making me instead of me making the movies," Skolimowski said at the opening press conference of last year's Directors Fortnight in Cannes, where Four Nights with Anna had its world premiere, before impishly adding: "To my friends, I'm back. And to my enemies, I'm back." 

There's no question that Skolimowski is fully in the driver's seat for Anna, a meticulously realized bookend of sorts to Deep End in which an introverted hospital morgue worker (played by the superb Polish stage actor Artur Steranko) expresses his growing affection for a beautiful nurse by breaking into her apartment while she sleeps and spending four successive nights by her side. That potentially creepy scenario is brought off by Skolimowski with surprising tenderness and perverse humor. Not soon to be forgotten: the image of a dead cow floating down a river under a bleak midwinter's light. Four Nights with Anna screens tonight at 9 PM at Laemmle's Sunset 5 theater, with Skolimowski and co-screenwriter Ewa Piaskowska in person.

Actress Zabou Breitman, whose directorial debut Try to Remember (Se souvenir des belles choses) screened at the 2002 City of Lights, City of Angels French film festival, opens this year's festival tonight with the international premiere of her third feature, Someone I Loved (Je l'aimais), an immensely satisfying romantic melodrama based on the 2002 novel by bestselling author Anna Gavalda. Daniel Auteil is excellent as the middle-aged businessman telling his distraught daughter-in-law (whose husband has just left her for another woman) the story of his own extramarital affair from two decades before with a woman he claims was the love of his life. That relationship then plays out in flashback, featuring The Diving Bell and the Butterfly's Marie-Josée Croze as the beautiful Hong Kong translator Auteuil falls for during a business trip and proceeds to see clandestinely over the next several years. The affair ultimately puts the inevitable strain on the lovers themselves and on Auteuil's marriage, but Breitman eschews high-pitched histrionics in favor of a sophisticated understanding of adult relationships and the reasons why people do or don't stay in bad marriages, making for exactly the sort of smart, grown-up weepie Hollywood is forever attempting but hasn't pulled off nearly this well since The Bridges of Madison County. For those unable to score a ticket to tonight's gala, the film screens again on Saturday, April 25 at 2:15 PM at the Directors Guild.

Much as I am loathe to give any further wind to the orgy of self congratulations and poor taste that was this year's Academy Awards, given that it has been something of an ongoing discussion on this blog I do feel obliged to offer a few words to the outcome of the Best Foreign Language Film contest. That much-maligned category, which has undergone nearly as many cosmetic makeovers in recent years as the previous Best Actress winners seen on the Kodak Theatre stage last night, drew a fair amount of unwanted attention earlier this season when, despite all the reforms spearheaded by current Foreign Language nominating committee chair Mark Johnson, Matteo Garrone's widely acclaimed mafia drama Gomorrah failed to secure a nomination despite being Italy's official submission for the award.

Still, many (including Johnson) argued that the eventual five nominees were nothing to scoff at, since they managed to include French director Laurent Cantet's The Class (winner of the Palme d'Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival), Austrian director Götz Spielmann's superb revenge drama Revanche (an audience favorite at least year's Telluride and Toronto festivals) and Israeli director Ari Folman's animated documentary Waltz with Bashir, a film that rivaled Gomorrah in terms of its torrential acclaim from critics and audiences alike from Cannes up through its commercial release in U.S. cinemas last December. Given that Folman's film was also in the running for, but failed to secure, a nomination in the Academy's Best Animated Feature category, it had generally been considered the favorite to win in the Foreign Language category. But alas, when the envelope was opened, the Oscar instead went to Japanese director Yojiro Takita's relentlessly medicore tearjerker Departures, about an unemployed cellist who takes a job as an "encoffinment" specialist, preparing dead bodies for cremation. (As if that weren't enough, Waltz with Bashir was also omitted from the Oscar telecast's montage of animated features from 2008, having evidently been deemed a less significant achievement than Space Chimps and Star Wars: The Clone Wars.)


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This just over the wire from the Sundance Institute:

"Sundance Institute today confirmed that effective February 28, 2009, Geoffrey Gilmore is resigning his position as Director, Sundance Film Festival.
 
Gilmore joined Sundance Institute in 1990. As Director of the Sundance Film Festival he has worked as part of a team of programmers who select films for the annual event, the preeminent showcase for independent film. From its early days Gilmore nurtured the Festival's world cinema program, recognized the importance of independent producers and expanded the Sundance Industry Office. He was also an early force for innovation, growing the Festival's use of state-of-the-art presentation technology.
 
"I have both a personal fondness for Geoff that comes from working together for two decades, as well as a deep respect for his encyclopedic knowledge of and total commitment to independent film," said Robert Redford, President, Sundance Institute and Founder, Sundance Film Festival. "Our Festival's 25th anniversary has been a time of candid reflection. I support completely his decision. The timing is right to move on. We wish Geoff only the best as he embarks on the next phases of his life and career."
 
In addition to his work with Sundance Institute, Gilmore has served on numerous international film juries, including the Sarajevo Film Festival, the Locarno Film Festival, the Berlin International Film Festival and the Shanghai Film Festival, and on committees ranging from the National Endowment for the Arts to the California Arts Council.
 
Prior to joining Sundance Institute, Gilmore served for 15 years as head of the UCLA Film and Television Archive's Programming Department. He has served as a Visiting Professor both to UCLA and to Florida State University in Tallahassee."

Meanwhile, as our own Nikki Finke is reporting, Gilmore will be heading on to serve as Chief Executive Officer of Tribeca Enterprises, the presenting entity of the annual Tribeca Film Festival.

Jeffrey Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere also has a detailed report.

As earlier noted, the 2009 Berlin Film Festival opened with a Hollywood movie (The International), directed by Germany's own Tom Tykwer and filmed in a half-dozen countries around the world, then continued with a French movie (In the Electric Mist) made in the U.S.A. with dialogue spoken in regional Louisiana dialects that begged the need for subtitles. In addition, this year's official Berlinale competition has included Storm, German director Hans-Christian Schmidt's docudrama about the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Netherlands, featuring a cast of Brits, Romanians and New Zealanders speaking a mix of English, Bosnian and Serbian; and Mammoth, Swedish director Lukas Moodysson's stab at a Babel-style cross-cultural jigsaw, set between New York, Thailand and the Philippines. Still to come is The Dust of Time, the latest from master Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos, here reportedly working in English, Russian, German and Greek, with Willem Dafoe in the lead.

Meanwhile, for the last two weeks, the North American box office has been dominated by Taken, a French movie made in France with an English-speaking, Irish-born star (Liam Neeson) that had already been released in most of the rest of the world before it ever crossed the Atlantic. Qu'est-ce qui se passe?


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Not many films in the 60 years since Robert Flaherty's immortal Louisiana Story have evoked the atmosphere of the Bayou State as strongly as Bertrand Tavernier's In the Electric Mist, a movie that doesn't seem to have been filmed so much as distilled, on a creaking porch beset by mosquitos and summer heat, with the rumble of a gathering storm in the distance. Adapted from the novel by James Lee Burke, the film stars Tommy Lee Jones as Burke's popular detective character, Dave Robichaux, here investigating the murder of one Cherry LeBlanc, a "fatally beautiful" 19-year-old prostitute whose mutilated corpse washes up on shore in the film's opening scene. Not long after that, another body -- this one belonging to a lynched black man dead and gone some 40 years -- surfaces deep in the swamp, loosed by Hurricane Katrina's churning tide.

Since it was first announced, In the Electric Mist has sounded like an ideal project for Tavernier, combining two of the veteran French filmmaker's great passions: the American South (previously explored in his 1985 documentary, Mississippi Blues) and American pulp fiction (the basis for 1981's Oscar-nominated Coup de torchon, which transposed Jim Thompson's Pop. 1280 to French colonial Africa). But it's been a long road to Berlin for In the Electric Mist, which was shot on location in 2007 only to become entangled in post-production disagreements between Tavernier and the film's American producer, Michael Fitzgerald (The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada).


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