Nicholas Ray's Final Film to Be Restored; Plus More Awards, UPDATED with Gotham Winners

Via Variety, Nicholas Ray's final (solo-directed, feature) film We Can't Go Home Again, a little-seen "experimental" film he made with his wife Susan and a group of his film students at the time, will undergo a $500,000 restoration funded by the Nicholas Ray Foundation with the Venice Film Festival. The restoration will be supervised by Susan and will bow at the 2011 Venice Film Festival, "to mark the centennial of Ray's birth." Variety also says: "The Ray celebration will include a series of DVDs, an installation, an educational film titled "Nicholas Ray Master Class" and an interactive website." What that means, I have no clue, especially as it relates to the number of Ray films still MIA on DVD in the US: 55 Days at Peking, Johnny Guitar, Bigger Than Life (which is coming from Criterion, reportedly), Born to Be Bad, Hot Blood, Knock on Any Door, The Lusty Men, Run for Cover, The Savage Innocents, Wind Across the Everglades, A Woman's Secret, et al. For those curious, there are a number of clips from We Can't Go Home Again in Wim Wenders' Lightning Over Water, aka Nick's Movie.

Now for some awards from around the world, both national and festival related. Warwick Thornton's Samson and Delilah, which was awarded the Caméra d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, took the top prize at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards, held on 26 November. It's also Australia's official submission in the Foreign Oscar competition. Sergei Dvortsevoy's Tulpan from Kazakhstan was the Best Picture winner last year. The rest of the awards are below:

Best Feature Film: Samson and Delilah, d. Warwick Thornton, Australia
Jury Grand Prize (tie): The Time That Remains, d. Elia Suleiman, Palestine/France/Italy/Belgium/UK; About Elly, d. Asghar Farhadi, Iran
Best Actor: Masahiro Motoki - Departures
Best Actress: Kim Hye-ja - Mother
Best Director: Lu Chuan - City of Life and Death
Best Cinematography: Cao Yu - City of Life and Death
Best Screenplay: Asghar Farhadi - About Elly
Best Documentary: Defamation, d. Yoav Shamir, Israel/Denmark/USA/Austria
Best Animated Feature: Mary and Max, d. Adam Elliot, Australia
Best Children's Feature: A Brand New Life, d. Ounie Lecomte, South Korea/France

Taiwan's Oscar submission, Leon Dai's No puedo vivir sin ti [Not Without You], was the big winner at the Golden Horse Awards, Taiwan's biggest annual award ceremony. Any film, whether from Taiwan, Hong Kong or China, primarily in Chinese is eligible. As the Film Experience Blog reported, Maggie Cheung made a rare appearance to deliver the ceremony's top award. Last year's Best Picture was awarded to Peter Chan's The Warlords (which Magnolia should be releasing soon in the US). The Awards are below:

Best Film: No puedo vivir sin ti, d. Leon Dai, Taiwan
Best Director: Leon Dai - No puedo vivir sin ti
Best Actor: (tie) Nick Cheung - The Beast Stalker; Huang Bo - Cow
Best Actress: Li Bingbing - The Message
Best Supporting Actor: Wang Xueqi - Forever Enthralled
Best Supporting Actress: Kara Hui - At the End of Daybreak
Best Documentary: KJ: Music and Life, d. Cheung King-wai, Hong Kong
Best Cinematography: Cao Yu - City of Life and Death
Best Action Choreography: Sammo Hung - Ip Man
Best Art Direction: Lee Tian-jue, Patrick Dechesne, Alain-Pascal Housiaux - Visage [Face]
Best Original Screenplay: Chen Wen-pin, Leon Dai - No puedo vivir sin ti
Best Adapted Screenplay: Guan Hu - Cow
Best Original Score: Dou Wei, Bi Xiaodi - The Equation of Love and Death

The 20th Annual Stockholm Film Festival finished up today, awarding Yorgos Lanthimos' Dogtooth its top prize; Courteney Hunt's Frozen River claimed that title last year. On a side note, I originally reported that Dogtooth would be representing Greece for the Foreign Oscar category, but that apparently was (not surprising considering its subject matter) false. Instead, Adonis Lykouresis' Slaves in their Bonds was named Greece's official selection. About the prizes below, the Telia Film Award is a newly created award for films without local distribution. Read more about it here. Awards below:

Best Film: Dogtooth, d. Yorgos Lanthimos, Greece
Best First Film: Sin Nombre, d. Cary Fukunaga, Mexico/USA
Best Actress: Mo'Nique - Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire
Best Actor: Edgar Flores - Sin Nombre
Best Screenplay: Eran Creevy - Shifty
Best Cinematography: Christophe Beaucarne - Mr. Nobody
Jameson Film Music Award: Krister Linder - Metropia
Telia Film Award: Miss Kicki, d. Håkon Liu, Sweden/Taiwan
FIPRESCI Prize: Sin Nombre
FIPRESCI Honorable Mention: Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, d. Lee Daniels, USA

I was so busy with the film festival, I didn't even get around to posting the Documentary Short-list for the 2010 Academy Awards. It's now down to 15, with a number of glaring snubs from Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story (though I've heard its omission is justified), James Toback's Tyson, Ondi Timoner's We Live in Public, R.J. Cutler's The September Issue and Kimberly Reed's Prodigal Sons. Someone on another site mentioned Terence Davies' Of Time and the City, but I'm never really sure which films are eligible in terms of year with the Documentary category. The 15 are below:

- The Beaches of Agnès [Les plages d'Agnès], d. Agnès Varda, France
- Burma VJ, d. Anders Ostergaard, Denmark
- The Cove, d. Louie Psihoyos, USA
- Every Little Step, d. Adam del Deo, James D. Stern, USA
- Facing Ali, d. Pete McCormack, USA/Canada
- Food, Inc., d. Robert Kenner, USA
- Garbage Dreams, d. Mai Iskander, USA
- Living in Emergency: Stories of Doctors Without Borders, d. Mark N. Hopkins, USA
- The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, d. Judith Ehrlich, Rick Goldsmith, USA
- Mugabe and the White African, d. Lucy Bailey, Andrew Thompson, UK
- Sergio, d. Greg Barker, USA
- Soundtrack for a Revolution, d. Bill Guttentag, Dan Sturman, USA/France/UK
- Under Our Skin, d. Andy Abrahams Wilson, USA
- Valentino: The Last Emperor, d. Matt Tyrnauer, USA
- Which Way Home, d. Rebecca Cammisa, USA

Cinema Eye also announced their nominees for achievements in non-fiction cinema. The complete list of nominees can be found on their website (last year, Man on Wire took the top honors), but here are the 5 listed for Outstanding Achievement in Non-Fiction Feature Filmmaking:

- Burma VJ, d. Anders Ostergaard, Denmark
- The Cove, d. Louie Psihoyos, USA
- Food, Inc., d. Robert Kenner, USA
- Loot, d. Darius Marder, USA
- October Country, d. Michael Palmieri, Donal Mosher, USA

And, finally, the Gotham Awards will have their ceremony tomorrow in New York City. The Gotham Awards, an extension of the Independent Film Project, recognize the achievements in "independent cinema." I remember a lot of confused reactions to some of their omissions and inclusions when the nominees were announced in October. Courteney Hunt's Frozen River won the Best Picture last year. So, since I didn't post it previously, here are the nominees in the big categories: [UPDATED: The winners are in red; I didn't think a separate blog post was necessary to name them]

Best Feature Film

Amreeka, d. Cherein Dabis, USA/Canada
Big Fan, d. Robert Siegel, USA
The Hurt Locker, d. Kathryn Bigelow, USA
The Maid [La nana], d. Sebastián Silva, Chile/Mexico
A Serious Man, d. Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, USA

Best Documentary

Food, Inc., d. Robert Kenner, USA
Good Hair, d. Jeff Stilson, USA
My Neighbor My Killer [Mon voisin, mon tueur], d. Anne Aghion, France/USA
Paradise, d. Michael Almereyda, USA
Tyson, d. James Toback, USA

Breakthrough Director

Cruz Angeles - Don't Let Me Drown
Frazer Bradshaw - Everything Strange and New
Noah Buschel - The Missing Person
Derick Martini - Lymelife
Robert Siegel - Big Fan

Breakthrough Actor

Ben Foster - The Messenger
Patton Oswalt - Big Fan
Jeremy Renner - The Hurt Locker
Catalina Saavedra - The Maid
Souleymane Sy Savane - Goodbye Solo

Best Ensemble Performance

Adventureland - Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Martin Starr, Kristin Wiig, Bill Hader, Ryan Reynolds
Cold Souls - Paul Giamatti, Dina Korzun, Emily Watson, Katheryn Winnick, David Strathairn
The Hurt Locker - Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Ralph Fiennes, Guy Pearce, David Morse, Evangeline Lilly
A Serious Man - Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed
Sugar - Algenis Perez Soto, Rayniel Rufino, Michael Gaston, Andre Holland, Ann Whitney, Richard Bull, Ellary Porterfield, Jaime Tirelli

Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You

Everything Strange and New, d. Frazer Bradshaw, USA
Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, d. Damien Chazelle, USA
October Country, d. Michael Palmieri, Donal Mosher, USA
You Wont Miss Me, d. Ry Russo-Young, USA
Zero Bridge, d. Tariq Tapa, India/USA

The Decade List: Clean (2004)

Clean - dir. Olivier Assayas

[Edited from an earlier post]

Someone over at the Internet Movie Database, a horrible source for user activity and input, has decided to throw around the word "cliché" on the subject of Clean as if it were... yes, going out of style. A drug-addicted mother (Maggie Cheung) has to straighten out her life before getting custody of her son. Yeah, we’ve seen it before, which always begs the question as to whether we need to see it again. No, we really don’t need to. Yet, this “reviewer” (or "reviewers") never really wants to question the intention or whether or not, with these said clichés, the film works.

Well, it does. Approaching melodrama the same way he did with the various genres at work in demonlover, Assayas doesn't wish to breathe new life into tired notions but to find meaning within those confines. Clean's tale is a familiar one, build on pre-established motifs of stylized drug sequences and/or cinema vérité rawness, both problematic in their usual depictions. In cautionary tales of addiction, stylized drug sequences tend to glamourize the lifestyle they wish to condemn. By now, cinema-vérité has become something of a filmic decoration, a spurious creature that no longer suffices. Clean is not a medium between these two, but a longing and observant alternative. Nothing is magnified, glamorized, or exploited; Clean is level-headed and intimate, without sickening us with its closeness or getting so close as to hit the characters, or us, with the lens.

Cheung's performance, which won the Best Actress prize at Cannes, is exactly what you don’t expect it to be. This is not to say she doesn’t cry or stare pensively into the distance, because she does. The magic, however, of her performance is not because of this, but because we don’t register it as a “performance.” It's maybe significant that between Assayas and Cheung's two collaborations, the other being Irma Vep in 1996, the pair had married and divorced, giving their cinematic relationship a separate meaning altogether. Was Clean the last thing the former spouses had to give to one another? Cheung would retire from acting after a double-showing at Cannes in '04 with this and a brief reprisal of her role in Wong Kar-wai's sequel to In the Mood for the Love, 2046. It's been rumored that her scenes in Quentin Tarantino's upcoming Inglourious Basterds were cut (we'll know for sure later this month), so if Clean is in fact Cheung's swan song, I couldn't have hoped for anything more.

With: Maggie Cheung, Nick Nolte, James Dennis, Béatrice Dalle, Jeanne Balibar, Don McKellar, Martha Henry, James Johnson, Rémi Martin, Joana Preiss, Tricky, Dave Roback, Metric
Screenplay: Olivier Assayas
Cinematography: Eric Gauthier
Music: Brian Eno, David Roback, Tricky
Country of Origin: France/Canada/UK
US Distributor: Palm Pictures

Premiere: 21 May 2004 (Cannes Film Festival)
US Premiere: 18 March 2005 (Rendez-vous with French Cinema)

Awards: Best Actress - Maggie Cheung, Technical Grand Prize - Eric Gauthier (Cannes Film Festival)

Cliquot

Otto; or Up with Dead People – dir. Bruce LaBruce – 2008 – Germany/Canada
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Boarding Gate – dir. Olivier Assayas – 2007 – France
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Paranoid Park – dir. Gus Van Sant – 2007 – France/USA

A while back, I wrote a snarky post about Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, in which I likened my relationship with the auteur theory with those of close intrapersonal relationships. What resulted was a tongue-in-cheek mockery of my own cinematic solidarity. Do I relate with cinema more than I do with real life? It’s a scary thought, but certainly not one that hasn’t crossed my mind before. I also alluded to a particular experience in which the film Amèlie “clouded my nihilism and filled me with a destructive sense of idealism and romance.” Said experience was no exaggeration, and yet as I’m contemplating my current personal state, particularly in relation to the films I’ve viewed recently, three films, from director’s who’ve thrilled me in the past, have sincerely moved me, in ways completely unexpected and unprecedented (maybe).

Let’s start with the sleaze. Who would have thought that “reluctant pornographer” Bruce LaBruce’s Otto; or Up with Dead People and deconstructive Eurotrash artist Olivier Assyas’ Boarding Gate would have swelled up my insides (in the good, non-sexual way)? With Otto, LaBruce sets aside his usual fetishism for skinheads and infuses the film with the gentler side of a zombie film. Otto (Jey Crisfar) is discovered by Medea Yarn (Katharina Klewinghaus), who could best be described as a science experiment meshing Gudrun from The Raspberry Reich, Maya Deren and Anne Rice gone wrong. Really, Otto; or Up with Dead People is LaBruce’s remake of his own Super 8½, his self-serving satire of a porn star named Bruce (played by himself) and the documentary filmmaker (Stacy Friedrich) who’s embarking on a “Brucesploitation film” about his rise and fall in the porn industry. With Otto, LaBruce steps away from himself, instead focusing on Medea’s intended exploitation of Otto, a lost, homeless boy who believes (whether it’s true or not) that he’s a zombie, for the purpose of her political zombie porn epic Up with Dead People.

To say that LaBruce is for an acquired taste would be an understatement, but there’s a central issue in understanding why he detracts so many people. On the surface, his explicit, unsimulated (gay) sex would be a deterrent for most audiences, but there’s also his political agenda, fiercely leftist and patronizing. The leftist “activists” of his films take their agenda as if they were on the right, using tactics of violence and manipulation to overthrow the government which has bred their wrath. It is here, in LaBruce’s depiction of these individuals (and really all others that appear in his films), where audiences just can’t penetrate (sorry for the pun) why LaBruce’s films piss them off so much. LaBruce works under the similar guise as Gregg Araki, masking appreciation with condemnation that makes his films that much more “radical.” LaBruce admires, champions, scorns and criticizes the individuals that fill his screen. For Otto, LaBruce has made evident that his take on the zombie film is best understood as a visual metaphor for consumerism and political ambivalence. Yet where Otto hits home is in the way Otto stands for so much more: the crippling ennui, disillusion and de-habilitation of the contemporary youth. Not to stretch things too far, but Otto’s conception as a zombie (to his credit, LaBruce never reveals whether it’s in Otto’s mind or not) recalls the silence of Liv Ullmann in Persona or the escapism of Juliette Binoche in Mary (two films I’ve already compared). And, strangely, Otto becomes more heartbreaking than I could have expected.

Olivier Assayas continued to send chills down my back with his latest Boarding Gate, a film, not unlike Otto, that’s proved to part audiences and critics alike like the Red Sea (there’s your Charlton Heston reference, it’ll be your last). As Otto proved to be parallel to Super 8½, Boarding Gate serves as the mirror to Assayas’ own demonlover, the salacious, Sonic Youth-scored corporate thriller that brought attention back to the director, five years after Irma Vep. I think Boarding Gate is best understood in the context of Assayas’ recent career than it is stand-alone; in fact, most of Boarding Gate’s detractors have no clue who the director is or what he stands for. Many were struck with the amoral attitude of demonlover, in which hot women (Connie Nielsen, Chloe Sevigny, Gina Gershon) in the business world delved into the underground, backstabbing, murdering and deceiving to climb that ladder. In many ways, the women’s active roles were as fetishized as the women in a Russ Meyer film, but I can’t say whatever Assayas was doing didn’t work. The director raised eyebrows with his follow-up Clean, a stark melodrama without the forced sentiment about a woman’s (Maggie Cheung) grappling with kicking drugs and rekindling her relationship with her estranged son. Clean had heart but didn’t wear it on its sleeve. Instead, it worked more as Assayas’ examination of humanism, in all its imperfections. Thus, Boarding Gate stands as the medium of demonlover’s glossy amorality and Clean’s unsentimental humanism, blending itself surprisingly well.

Sandra, played by your favorite screen siren Asia Argento, needs to pick up the pieces of her life. Her relationships with businessman Miles (Michael Madsen) and a contract killer (Carl Ng) have crumbled, and like Otto, she seems to have entered a state of detachment, unsure of herself or her own place within her understood world. I may be a little harsh on Ms. Argento from time to time, but her style of acting (mumbled dialogue, hazy-eyed, pain killer-fueled) is the true haunting aspect of Boarding Gate. It’s her gameness for shedding clothes while shielding the inner-self that keeps the film on its rails. Where the human and moral aspects collide is through her, because unlike Connie Nielsen’s Diane in demonlover, Sandra actually has a conscience. Diane’s freak-out after murdering someone is more a result of her shock than it is her morality. Sandra, instead, actually reacts to what she’s done with a flicker of a soul, as seen through Argento’s misty eyes.

The big difference between Paranoid Park and the other two is the placement of the emotional resonance. Paranoid Park doesn’t have an Otto or a Sandra, it has an Alex (Gabe Nevins), a teenaged skateboarder who accidentally kills a security guard while train-hopping. Though I didn’t go into detail on the other two, Paranoid Park is flawed just like the others, but the other two films’ faults seemed out of the way of my general appreciation. With Paranoid Park, it took two sittings to look past Van Sant’s poor casting decisions. Enlisting teenagers from Myspace, the film reeks of amateurishness, something that Van Sant likely wanted to convey as youthful awkwardness and naturalness. It didn’t work, and perhaps the lousy performances from the cast, particularly Nevins, make the film’s reverberation shift elsewhere. Though Boarding Gate and Otto both reflected a personal change in their directors, Paranoid Park did the best job of illuminating the man behind the camera.

Though I usually don’t care what he thinks, Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman perfectly remarked upon the separation Paranoid Park has between Van Sant’s Death Trilogy in stating, “it’s the first of Van Sant’s blitzed-generation films in which a young man wakes up instead of shutting down.” It’s within this understanding that Paranoid Park cut deep inside me. Aided by Christopher Doyle’s dazzling cinematography, Paranoid Park is a mood piece, both grainy and sublime, but most of all, buoyant. It becomes a strange case of auteurism when three respected (and personally affecting) filmmakers expose their growth in humanity through their latest films, all within the same year. Back to my Bergman reference, the glimmer of hope shone through his later films, particularly Fanny & Alexander, opening up, in a sense, his entire career. I hope none of the three films I’ve spoke about mark the end of any of the filmmakers’ respective careers (I doubt it will), but I can’t speak higher of these men’s profound impact on my own self at this time, shrugging away ambivalence and ennui in lieu of the startling emergence of significance.

Considerations

The Oscar nominations are coming soon, so I thought I'd run down a few of my dark horses -- likely none of which will get nominated. I'm not mentioning some of the more probable nominations that would please me, like Abigail Breslin and Steve Carell for Little Miss Sunshine, Mark Wahlberg for The Departed, Jackie Earle Haley for Little Children, Penélope Cruz for Volver, Sergi López for Pan's Labyrinth, etc.

Best Picture & Director
Alfonso Cuarón - Children of MenPaul Greengrass - United 93Best Actor
Nick Nolte - CleanMelvil Poupaud - Time to Leave (Le temps qui reste)Nolte reminded us that he was a good actor and perfectly complimented Maggie Cheung's instability with a surprising tenderness. Clean wouldn't have worked without him or Cheung. Le Temps qui reste also owes its success to Poupaud, who wonderfully expresses the confusion and denial of a man diagnosed with terminal cancer. It would have been easy for Ozon to cast someone just as attractive, but likely with lesser results.

Best Actress
Maggie Cheung - CleanAbbie Cornish - SomersaultBryce Dallas Howard - ManderlayCheung already won the Best Actress prize at Cannes two years ago (yes, that's how long it took Clean to come stateside), so an Academy Award nomination would probably mean less. Cornish is dazzling as a runaway teenage girl, and Howard made the difficult decision to fill Nicole Kidman's shoes as Grace in Lars von Trier's sequel to Dogville.

Best Supporting Actor
William Hurt - The KingDanny Huston - The PropositionHurt's performance in The King is probably his finest to date, a direct counter to last year's Oscar nomination for his tongue-in-cheek role in A History of Violence. When the plot of The King takes a turn from expectations, it's really Hurt that allows you to stick with the film. Huston, as Guy Pearce's outlaw brother, gives one of the more haunting performances I've seen this year.

Best Supporting Actress
Vera Farmiga - The DepartedGong Li - Miami ViceFarmiga, also wonderful in Down to the Bone, somehow emerges as the most fascinating character in The Departed. As the sole female in the main cast, she's fully believable as a professional woman on the exterior with a taste for bad boys outside of the office. Gong Li, despite not knowing how to speak English or Spanish, is both sexy as hell and genuinely effective. Both Farmiga and Li redeem their unnecessary love interest characters by proving more interesting than their male counterparts.

What's Cookin'?

Allow me to be completely shallow for (at least) one post. I'm hopped up on cold medication, can't sleep, and have been listening to too much Vincent Gallo - so I decided to dedicate a post to twenty-five cinema-type people that tickle my fancy. I've browsed endlessly for suitable photos and hope that you can find out that - hey - we have a crush or two in common. Naturally, I didn't include people who are just simply easy on the eyes as that would be boring. I have varying degrees of admiration for these people and not just aesthetically. So enjoy my first blog where I finally just shut up (or, shut up more than usual).

Melvil Poupaud

(Time to Leave, Time Regained, Le divorce)

Chloë Sevigny
(The Brown Bunny, Boys Don't Cry, Dogville)

Rossy de Palma
(Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, The Loss of Sexual Innocence, Kika)

Maggie Cheung
(In the Mood for Love, Irma Vep, Clean)

Lior Ashkenazi
(Walk on Water, Late Marriage)

Liv Ullmann
(Persona, Scenes from a Marriage, The Passion of Anna)

Takeshi Kaneshiro
(Chungking Express, House of Flying Daggers, Returner)

Eduardo Noriega
(Open Your Eyes, Novo, Burnt Money)

Eloy Azorín
(All About My Mother, Warriors, Juana la loca)

Michelle Reis
(Fallen Angels, City of Lost Souls, Flowers of Shanghai)

Sook-yin Lee
(Shortbus, Hedwig and the Angry Inch)


Justin Theroux
(Mulholland Drive, The Baxter, Six Feet Under)

Bryce Dallas Howard
(Manderlay, The Village, Lady in the Water)

Alain Delon
(Purple Noon, L'eclisse, Le samouraï)

Jennifer Connelly
(Little Children, Dark City, House of Sand and Fog)

Samantha Morton
(Morvern Callar, Sweet and Lowdown, In America)

Tilda Swinton
(Orlando, Teknolust, Female Perversions)

Jason Statham

(The Transporter, The Transporter 2, The Italian Job)

Monica Vitti
(L'avventura, Red Desert, L'eclisse)

Nicolas Duvauchelle
(Trouble Every Day, À tout de suite, Eager Bodies)

Asia Argento
(The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, Scarlet Diva, Queen Margot)

Isabelle Huppert
(The Piano Teacher, Time of the Wolf, Madame Bovary)

Romain Duris
(The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Exiles, The Crazy Stranger)

Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi
(Cote d'Azur, Time to Leave, It's Easier for a Camel)

Béatrice Dalle
(Betty Blue, Clean, Trouble Every Day)