It’s unlikely that Herzog will ever find a partner-in-crime as diabolically suitable as the late, much-missed Kinski, but he’s come pretty close in the last year with first Cage from Bad Lieutenant and Shannon here (indeed, one can only dream of a future sequel that might somehow bring the two characters together) – the performance from the latter, six-foot-odd of sustained, glowering intensity, is quite literally a tour de force.
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Venice 2010 : Golden Lion odds
9-2 Meek’s Cutoff (Reichardt), 7-1 Silent Souls (Fedorchenko), 8-1 Black Swan (Aronofsky), 9-1 Post Mortem (Larrain).
September 2010 briefs : ‘The Expendables’ [5/10] and ‘Piranha’ [7/10] – online. ‘Winter’s Bone’ [6/10] — upcoming
Of the ensemble, Mickey Rourke (ex-mercenary turned tattoo-artist/den-mother), Jason Statham (cocky bullet-headed Brit), Eric Roberts (smarmy besuited villain) and Dolph Lundgren (ubermensch-ish loose-cannon drug-addict) make the best of what they are given, which isn’t very much.
August 2010 briefs (III): ‘The Secret in Their Eyes’ [7/10] and ‘Dog Pound’ [6/10]
By now firmly established as one of world cinema’s great leading men, the magnificiently saturnine Ricardo Darín is predictably excellent in the central role – and he’s matched by Guillermo Francella as his hapless, boozy colleague, whose resemblance to Harold Pinter is, given the sinisterly shadowy paramilitary goings-on, perhaps not entirely coincidental.
AUGUST 2010 (II): ‘Mother’ [6/10] and ‘The Illusionist’ [7/10]‘
Is their relationship fatherly-daughterly? Entirely platonic? Is he an old man making a fool of himself with a sweet-natured but naively demanding young woman? Distracting issues, then, but insufficiently irksome to distrupt the flow of a largely wordless affair overflowing with invention and wit – it means to move us, and it does.
for this week’s TRIBUNE: ‘Cherry Tree Lane’ [7/10]
This is decidedly dangerous, sensitive territory for film-makers, and it’s evidently all too easy for Brits to slip into Daily Mail style hoodie-paranoia – with results that, just to take a couple of movies from last year as an example, range from the breezily opportunistic silliness of Harry Brown to the jaw-droppingly crass chavophobia of Eden Lake.
Big 3 + 1 : awards reference-guide
updated 5th September with FIPRESCI Grand Prix winner for 2009/10
AUGUST 2010 : ‘Knight and Day’ [6/10]; ‘Salt’ [3/10]; ‘The Cincinnati Kid’ (1965) [5/10]
… from Richard Barthelmess to Lew Ayres, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Lionel Barrymore, Victor MacLaglen, John Garfield, James Cagney, Joel McCrea, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Alan Ladd, George Raft, Humphrey Bogart, Charles Laughton, Paul Robeson, Charles Boyer, Orson Welles, James Stewart, Richard Widmark, Glenn Ford, Frank Sinatra, Yul Brynner, Anthony Quinn, Jack Lemmon, Rod Steiger, Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster and Paul Newman.
for this week’s TRIBUNE magazine : ‘The Maid’ [7/10]
South American cinema has long had a ongoing fascination with the relationships – sometimes warm, sometimes tricky – between maids and their employers, not least because residential domestic staff aren’t by any means the preserve of the rich in several of the continent’s societies.
Edinburgh 2010 supplementary : AFTER THE WAVE
all now online : ‘Savage Messiah’ [8/10]; ‘Private Road’ [7/10]; ‘The Squeeze’ [7/10]; ‘The Final Programme’ [7/10]; ‘Saved’ [7/10]; ‘Privilege’ [6/10].
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Bruno S. 1932-2010