By Ray Bennett
TORONTO – At a time when political invective has reached new lows with the media complicit in its extremes, “Hyde Park On Hudson” tells of a time when politics and the press were handled with the greatest subtlety even though the stakes were even higher. Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
TORONTO – Robert Redford returns to political intrigue and newspapers in “The Company You Keep”, which tells of a group of radical activists who have evaded the law for decades under assumed identities and who now face exposure.
Redford directs and stars as Jim Grant, one of a group still wanted for murder during a bank robbery, whose secret existence is threatened when one of them confesses in order to achieve peace of mind. When a young reporter starts to investigate and finds a link to him, Grant goes underground to find his former colleagues and expose the truth of what happened. Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
TORONTO – So many things could go wrong in a comedy drama about mental illness that it’s a credit to writer/director David O. Russell and an excellent cast that “Silver Linings Playbook” is such a winning success.
Touching but very funny, the story of a former teacher’s attempts to get his life back on track after a bi-polar breakdown and his relationship with a temperamental and aggressive young woman works on every level. Masanobu Takayanagi’s cinematography is fresh and vivid and composer Danny Elfman’s score is typically witty. Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
TORONTO – It’s big and bold and sometimes a bit silly but the film that Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer have made of David Mitchell’s ambitious novel “Cloud Atlas” is seldom less than gripping.
The six stories from the novel that spans time and space and attempts to link the passage of the human spirit are painted on a huge scale with scenes ancient, modern and from the future. Characters are drawn and re-drawn as several actors play multiple roles in different eras to underscore the unique connection that human beings can have to one another. Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
TORONTO – David Ayer, whose screenwriting credits include “Training Day” (2001) and “S.W.A.T.” (2003), shows the Los Angeles Police Department in a glowing light in “End of Watch” but it’s still a tense and engaging crime picture.
Jake Gillenhaal, as Brian, and Michael Pena (“The Shield”, “Battle Los Angeles”), as Mike, (pictured) play the tightest of partners as they answer the call to protect and serve in uniform in some of the harshest areas of L.A. Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
TORONTO – Dustin Hoffman has worked with many of the best film directors so it’s no wonder that some of their talents have rubbed off to make his debut film as director such a pleasure.
No question it’s a film for the older generation although youngsters might enjoy the sharp delivery of Billy Connolly and Maggie Smith as two of the retired classical music singers in the title. The others are played by Tom Courtenay and Pauline Collins (pictured with Smith) and along with their director they make up a quintet of among the smoothest and most accomplished stars in the business. Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
TORONTO – Ryan Johnson’s “Looper”, which opened the Toronto International Film Festival, is a time-travel science fiction adventure that has plenty of action but still takes time to deal with human drama and ask existential questions.
It does not strive for spectacular visuals but it looks good and the 2042 settings of squalor and luxury do the trick. It’s intelligent and exciting, and less about new-fangled gadgets and fancy weapons than it is about how to stay alive when the technology for time travel is owned by criminals. Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
TORONTO – With a smart and entertaining script by Tom Stoppard and vital contributions from his creative team, Joe Wright has rendered a sumptuous film version of “Anna Karenina” starring Keira Knightley (pictured) that will cause a rush on sales of Leo Tolstoy 1870’s novel.
The film is so gorgeous and the music so perfect that the Motion Picture Academy might as well give composer Dario Marianelli (Wright’s “Atonement”) his second Oscar now, and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, production designer Sarah Greenwood, and costume designer Jacqueline Durran (all nominated for “Atonement”) will be right there with him.
The tragic love story lends itself to a tale of “Dr. Zhivago” epic proportions but Wright and Stoppard have elected to spin their yarn from the fabric of the theatre. It’s that rare time when budgetary considerations result in artistic triumph as Stoppard stays faithful to the original story in inventive ways.
The early scenes take place within the confines of a theatre including the stage and backstage areas. Soon, like a fireside story that transports a reader, it surges out into wondrous landscapes, impossibly attractive buildings, and lavish halls and ballrooms.
Rooted in theatricality, the film’s use of model trains and sets fuels the imagination so that when a scene cuts suddenly to a close-up of Knightley as Anna on a train, her beauty and the sigh-inducing elegance of her clothes take your breath away.
It’s the third Joe Wright film to star Knightley and the collaboration obviously is very good for them. The actress has never looked more radiantly beautiful than she does in “Anna Karenina” but now she is more womanly where before she always seemed like a girl.
It appears quite proper that she should succeed former screen sirens Greta Garbo and Vivien Leigh in the title role of a wife and mother who succumbs to the temptation of a young man whom she finds wildly romantic.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson (“Kick-Ass”) plays the handsome soldier Count Vronsky, who encounters Anna at a snowy train station and is smitten instantly, and Jude Law plays Anna’s sedate older husband. Taylor-Johnson is barely into his 20s and in this, Wright has opted to follow the 1947 Leigh film in which Vronsky was played by a very young Kieron Moore.
Garbo had Fredric March, who was in his late 30s, as was Sean Bean in the 1997 version that starred Sophie Marceau in the title role. But with Knightley not yet 30 and the 40-year-old Law playing much older, it seems reasonable that Anna would be attracted to a dashing soldier even if he is callow, as Tolstoy wrote.
Matthew Macfadyen steals every scene he’s in as Anna’s cheerfully unrepentant hedonist brother and Kelly Macdonald portrays his wife’s sadness and forgiveness effectively. Domhnall Gleeson and Alicia Vikander grow increasingly appealing as an earnest young landowner and the young beauty he wishes to wed.
Wright contrasts cleverly Knightley’s remarkable stillness in many shots with her sudden energy as her passion takes hold. It’s an impressive performance as Anna’s willfulness does not always inspire sympathy.
Movement is an integral part of the story-telling whether it’s people and things or the camera that’s on the move. There’s a horse race, horses and carriage in the snow and a train accident, and they are all done with flare. The credits mention Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and that is worth a note because the ballroom dances of the period are made to look not just lavish and fluid but also great fun and devilishly sexy.
Marianelli’s music matches the film’s mix of spectacle and intimacy with lush orchestrations and delicate solos from the likes of celloist Caroline Dale. If the film gains the box office traction it deserves, then “Anna Karenina” will be well in the running when the awards come along.
Opens: Sept. 7 UK (Universal) Nov. 15 US (Focus Features)
Cast: Keira Knightley, Jude Law, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Kelly Macdonald, Matthew Macfadyen, Domhnall Gleeson, Ruth Wilson, Alicia Vikander, Olivia Williams, Emily Watson; Director: Joe Wright; Screenwriter: Tom Stoppard, based on the novel by Leo Tolstoy; Producers: Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Paul Webster; Executive producer: Liza Chasin; Director of photography: Seamus McGarvey; Production designer: Sarah Greenwood; Music: Dario Marianelli; Costume designer: Jacqueline Durran; Editor: Melanie Ann Oliver; Production: Working Title. 130 minutes. Rating: UK: 12A / US: R.
By Ray Bennett
The 37th annual Toronto International Film Festival gets under way on Sept. 6 with the world premiere of “Looper” and a slate that will include several new British movies including an animated tribute to Monty Python’s Graham Chapman titled “A Liar’s Autobiography”.
With 150 films due for release in Q4, the major film festivals in Toronto and London set the scene for the awards season and the home entertainment slate for months to come.
TIFF’s opening film “Looper” is a time-travel action thriller directed by Rian Johnson and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt (“The Dark Knight Rises”), Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, Jeff Daniels and Piper Perabo (pictured above). Entertainment One will release it in the UK on Sept. 28.
TIFF Artistic Director Cameron Bailey says he saw Johnson’s debut feature “Brick” at the Sundance festival and was able to premiere his second, “The Brothers Bloom”, in Toronto. “I was impressed by his ability to engage both the mind and the heart. Now, with “Looper”, Rian has taken his filmmaking to a new level. This is a new kind of Opening Night: an exciting, thinking-person’s action film from a director who really understands the genre.”
Walt Disney’s “Frankenweenie 3D” will open the 56th BFI London Film Festival on Oct. 10 with a gala screening at the Odeon Leicester Square in London that will go live to BFI Imax and 30 screens across the UK.
The Tim Burton animated film about a boy and a very strange dog named Sparky was made in the UK and has a voice cast that includes Catherin O’Hara, Martin Short, Martin Landau, and Winona Ryder.
BFI Exhibition Head Clare Stewart called the film from “one of cinema’s great visionaries” a “gloriously crafted stop-motion 3D animation that revels in the magic of movies”. She said, “Tim Burton has chosen London as his home city and hundreds of talented British craftspeople have contributed to this production.”
Manchester-based puppet designers and fabricators Mackinnon & Saunders contributed to the film and their work along with props, sets and Burton’s original sketches will be on display at “The Art of Frankenweenie Exhibition” that will run Oct. 17-21 at BFI Southbank Centre’s Festival Village.
Sponsored by American Express, the BFI London Film Festival runs from Oct. 10-21. The full programme will be announced on Sept. 5.
Before that, however, comes TIFF, which has established itself as the driving force for Hollywood, independent and world cinema and as an event more attractive to producers and distributors than the Venice International Film Festival, which began Aug. 29 and runs through Sept. 8.
Festival de Cannes has honoured many films in its history but “The Artist” last year was only the second Palm d’Or winner to go on to win the Academy Award for best picture and Oscar-winning director Michel Hazanavicius says the buzz really kicked off when it screened at TIFF.
The festival announced 20 galas and more than 60 special presentations with around 50 world premieres across its various strands that include Masters, Mavericks, Rising Stars, Contemporary World Cinema and Midnight Madness.
TIFF CEO and Director Piers Handling says it will have the most diverse gala programme to date: “This year’s festival is looking particularly strong with bold, adventuresome work coming from established and emerging filmmakers.”
World Premieres from the UK will include Mike Newell’s “Great Expectations” with Holiday Granger, Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham Carter and Jeremy Irvine (“War Horse”); Roger Michel’s “Hyde Park On the Hudson” with Bill Murray and Olivia Williams as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Samuel West and Olivia Colman as King George VI and Queen Elizabeth; Deepa Mehta’s “Midnight’s Children”; Dustin Hoffman’s “Quartet” with Maggie Smith, Tom Courtenay, Billy Connolly and Pauline Collins as squabbling retired opera singers; Paul Andrew Williams’s “Song For Marion” with Gemma Arterton as a choir director plus Terence Stamp and Vanessa Redgrave; and “A Liar’s Autobiography – The Untrue Story of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman”, an animated 3D depiction of the late comedian’s rich life.
Ben Timlett, one of the producers and directors of “A Liar’s Autobiography”, says that TIFF is “absolutely the best place to introduce this film”, which he says reflects Chapman’s writing, which was the most anarchic of Monty Python’s comedy. He says, “The Toronto cinemagoing audience is steeped in Python, as really the first to discover it in that part of the world coupled with their link to the British colonial past. It means that Python has very much become part of their DNA.”
Timlett says he’s excited but “if I’m honest a little apprehensive to see if the Toronto audience will recognise and enjoy his return to the screen: “After Michael Palin saw the film a couple of weeks ago, he said Graham has been given a second chance to shock and disturb everyone, I can’t see a better place to start this off but Toronto.”
As producer, Timlett also has a film called “Theatre of Dreams” screening to buyers at Toronto. It’s a fictional football story about how legendary Manchester United manager Matt Busby helps a wayward lad find his dream. He says, “Toronto is very much made up of a diverse audience led, filmgoers market. This film is funny and touching but also quirky and I think Toronto audiences will respond to it.”
He’s not alone among producers who praise the Toronto audience. Informant Producer Judy Cairo’s film “Writers”, directed by Josh Boone and starring Liana Liberato (“Truth”), Jennifer Connolly, Greg Kinnear, Lily Collins and Kristen Bell, will have its world premiere there. There was a gala screening of Informant’s film “Hysteria” last year and Cairo says, “The TIFF audiences are famously warm and accepting. They didn’t just applaud at the end, they roared and we had multiple offers for the film. Sony Pictures Classics bought it after SPC President Michael Barker heard our second public audience’s laughter. It’s a combination of amazing venues in convenient proximity to each other, the smart, vocal Toronto audience and the TIFF team’s expertise that makes it all work.”
Producer David Miller (“Amal”) whose film “Blackbird”, directed by Jason Buxton, will have its world premiere at TIFF this year, says: “Toronto is one of those benchmarks, one of those amazing opportunities that we all hope for, one of those seals of approval that we all strive to achieve.”
Toronto-based producer Lewin Webb, whose film “I Declare War”, directed by Jason Lapeyre and Rob Wilson, will have its debut, says: “TIFF understands mainstream cinema, commercial cinema, as well as the vibrant indie. It isn’t just a sophisticated festival, it is a smart festival and attracts amazing audiences. It knows how to present films and how to support the films it presents.”
This story appeared in Cue Entertainment.
By Ray Bennett
John Williams celebrates his 80th birthday this year with concerts at The Hollywood Bowl on Aug. 31 and Sept. 1 and the Royal Albert Hall on Oct. 19.
He is celebrated rightly for his extraordinary work with Steven Spielberg but in an interview in 2000, I asked him about the many other movie directors he worked with such as William Wyler, Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, Robert Altman, and Alfred Hitchcock.
On William Wyler:
That was for “How to Steal a Million” back in the middle ’60s and it was quite a delicious comedy with Peter O’Toole. What I remember about Wyler was that was he was a very, not a gruff person, but very direct and also very quiet. I don’t recall playing any music at the piano before we scored. At the scoring sessions he was very friendly and appreciative. The dubbing went extremely well. My recollection of him is of a very focussed professional. I think he was the kind of person that relied on musicians to compose and interpret and record his music. I don’t know this for a fact, whether he was a concert-goer or a particular music lover, but I don’t remember him being specific about the details of the musical score. We got on very well and that’s about it. Anecdotes about Wyler don’t come to mind particularly beyond that.
On Frank Sinatra.
I conducted several times for Frank singing at shows and appearances, but I had the privilege of composing the score for the only film he ever directed, “None But the Brave.” Again, along the lines of my continued good fortune, I mean, Frank Sinatra had the reputation of being a very difficult guy, but he couldn’t have been sweeter to me. We discussed the music a little bit. He came on the recording stage briefly when we recorded the music. He sent thank you notes and beautiful gifts and was very attentive and very friendly. It was a very good experience. That score, incidentally, was conducted by Maurice Stoloff. It was done at Warner Bros. but Stoloff was a very good and longstanding friend of Sinatra. It might have been Stoloff who convinced Frank to ask me to do the score. I was very surprised about that because Frank Sinatra knew all the musicians in Hollywood and could have had anyone he wished. I felt at the time, and still do, that I was a very lucky person to have that assignment. I had known him slightly before. I never played the piano for Frank because he always had his own pianist; but later I conducted some shows for him, many years later. We would reminisce about “None But the Brave.” He was then, as he was earlier on, very grateful and appreciative of what I tried to do for him.
On Gene Kelly:
Williams: Yes, yes. “A Guide for the Married Man.”A good experience also. Gene was very demanding. In contrast to Wyler, for example, he was very hands-on, so to speak, where music was concerned. He would stand over the moviola and talk about tempo, where it should increase where the comedy does this and that and almost kind of directing the composition of the music the way that a choreographer would do, dealing principally with aspects of speed and dynamics. He was very good and very experienced and very helpful. I also had known Gene before. My wife was a friend of his wife and while we’d never worked together before it seemed as though I’d known him for quite a few years. I found him a very hard working guy. He could be a tough taskmaster where music was concerned. I enjoyed it. We got on very well. I felt instructed by him.
On Robert Altman:
We did a television series called “Kraft Theater.” Bob was the director and I did many shows at Universal with him. I did several shows for Altman on the “Kraft Theater” and several pictures for him and he has been a close personal friend through the years. I will also say that indirectly through Stanley Wilson, and through Jennings Lang, being the vice president of the company, these two fellows introduced me to Steven Spielberg, and that was one of the more important connections in my professional and personal life. They also introduced me to Alfred Hitchcock, for whom I did “Family Plot,” which was the last film he made.
On Alfred Hitcock:
We could have another whole conversation on that relationship because it was filled with wonderful stories. I used to have lunch with him alone and we’d talk about the film for about five minutes and then he would speak to me, knowledgeably about the state of British music. He was enormously interested in British music from between the wars, of Vaughn Williams, Benjamin Britton, William Walton, and others. He knew their work and knew what was happening in British music and was greatly interested in it. He knew British theater as well. He was a man full of marvelous stories and history. It was a great experience being in his presence. He was a lover of Elgar, I think, more than anything. He talked about Elgar and Holst all the time and was very interested in Walton. He had such detail at the tip of his fingers of all things theatrical in London in that particular period. As well as musical. He paid attention to all of this, and retained it all. Very impressive.
© Ray Bennett
