fiLmsToLoOkOutFoR •• Foreign Film Edition •• 我不是潘金莲 [I AM NOT MADAME BOVARY](2016, CHINA - Mandarin)
FENG XIAOGANG is a commercially successful filmmaker known for his award-winning A WORLD WITHOUT THIEVES (2014), and two other films which won him Best Director at People's Hundred Flower Award in China - ASSEMBLY (2007) & IF U ARE THE ONE (2008). Selected to be screened in the Special Presentations section at the 2016 Toronto International Film festival, Feng's latest I AM NOT MADAME BOVARY, is adapted from LIU ZHENYUN's 2012 novel, I AM NOT PAN JIANLIAN. BINGBING FAN stars in this dark comedy as Xuelian Li, whose plan for a perfect government scam by temporarily divorcing her husband to qualify for singles-only apartment turns against her when her husband goes and marries someone else. Now the angry victim goes on an angry rampage to prove that the divorce is a scam and get her bloody revenge
Swedish director DANIEL ESPINOSA, known for his 2010 thriller film EASY MONEY, is helming an upcoming sci-fi which teams up JAKE GYLLENHAAL and RYAN REYNOLDS as they battle against alien life-form from Mars. The film will also reunite Reynolds with his DEADPOOL writers PAUL WERNICK and RHETT REESE, and centers around a group of astronauts studying a sample from Mars which may be the first evidence of life on Mars, but the alien life-form may not be ready make friendly connections. The film, from Columbia Pictures and Skydance, also featuring REBECCA FERGUSON, ARIYON BAKARE, OLGA DIHOVICHNAYA and HIROYUKI SANADA, and slated to hit theaters May 26, 2017.
BAFTA-winning director FARREN BLACKBURN is bringing a heart-pounding thriller starring NAOMI WATTS as a widowed child psychologist who lives a painful life caring for her paralysed son in an isolated rural location in New England, and when she takes on a new client played by JACOB TREMBLAY, her life sinks deeper into a bigger nightmare when the boy suddenly disappears into a deadly snowstorm, as she begins to suspect that he is haunting her. The film opens in November this year.
Seven years ago, JAMES CAMERON successfully pulled off a romance tale within a sci-fi with his mega-expensive but ridiculously-rewarding AVATAR. Looking to repeat this is Norwegian director, MORTEN TYLDUM, who brought us the Academy Award-nominated historical drama THE IMITATION GAME. What a gem that was, it was in fact my favorite Oscar-nominated film that year. Simply titled PASSENGERS, the film is looking all glossy and spectacular from its trailer, and we have here a pair of studded leading cast, JENNIFER LAWRENCE and CHRIS PRATT, two star travellers who have woken too early from hibernation to discover that their ship and the lives of all 5,259 on board are in grave danger. "For me, it’s a story about what’s important to live a full life. What are the things we need as humans? It’s not afraid to entertain but at the same time it asks big questions about what does it mean to really feel happy. Every generation has its love story. I feel like this is it. I had to do it," Tyldum shared. Co-starring MICHAEL SHEEN, LAURENCE FISHBURNE and AURORA PERRINEAU, the film is slated for a December release this year
fiLmReviEw •• Foreign Film Edition •• DUKHTAR [DAUGHTER][2014, PAKISTAN - Urdu, Pashto] Having directed short films NADAH (2003), TOBA TEK SINGH (2005) and LONG AFTER (2006), Quetta-born AFIA NATHANIEL's debut feature DUKHTAR premiered at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival, turned heads, beat the odds and became Pakistan's official submission for Best Foreign Language Film at the 87th Academy Award. Refusing to acquiesce to Pakistani feature films which tend to cater a lot to Bollywood-themed or "male viewer" dominated preference, Nathaniel went against all odds to tell the story of women's struggles and empowerment. True enough, it took her ten years to source the financing for her film, and being the first female filmmaker in Pakistan certainly didn't help. "In Pakistan itself, what this means is that if your feature film does not have women dancing in it or gyrating on the screen with hardly any clothes on, then no one is going to finance the film. There is no “item number” song in it, so to speak – nothing to cater to the male fantasy. Pakistani feature films are all about catering to the male ego and male fantasy," the forty-two year-old shared. The idea of her film's premise came from a true story she heard in 1999, of a mother in Pakistan who kidnapped her daughters and ran away from her husband to save them from forced marriage. "The story refused to leave me. Her journey of escape was a harrowing tale spread over several years. What remained in my mind was the vision of this one woman and her extraordinary courage. I come from a family of very strong women, women who have endured very tough lives in hopes of a better one for their children," Nathaniel explained.
Similarly, the film DUKHTAR (Daughter in Urdu) is an emotionally resonant thriller which takes us on a ride through Pakistan as a mother, Allah Rakhi (SAMIYA MUMTAZ), risks everything to save her ten year-old daughter Zainab (SALEHA AREF) from an arranged marriage to a much older chieftain from another clan, Tor Gul (ABDULLAH JAAN). The marriage is set up between Tor Gul and Zainab's father, Daulat Khan (ASIF KHAN) with the hope to end the strife between their two clans. Having endured a life resulting from such conditions which place women in near non-existential power, the desperate mother sets out on foot with her uncomprehending daughter, setting a roiled hunt by her own family and the bridegroom's henchmen. They soon find some protection from a truck driver, Sohail (MOHIB MIRZA), who reluctantly shields them from their pursuers, and together they set off on the vertiginous mountain routes towards Lahore, in the hopes of a new beginning.
Amongst its many virtues, what I personally like most, is that the film depicts a journey which is not just for the daughter, but Allah Rakhi's own passage to self-redemption and fulfilment, after living her curtailed life in servitude. Nathaniel handsomely blends her palette of leaden tones in the film with dashes of bright colors throughout. Amidst the bleak winter and barren landscapes of the mountains, informing the mood of the characters and its storyline, we are somehow constantly reminded of hope and courage through a series of contrasting, lively colors, especially seen in Sohail's elaborately decorated truck. Nathaniel shared, "I think we have such a colorful culture and palette within the country that I wanted to stay true to it. Put the camera anywhere and there’s a burst of vibrancy and color. So even just the truck cutting through these mountainscapes and the roads – the truck itself is a bright symbol of any truck driver’s own sense of culture, poetry and art. In our poetry and in our culture, that symbol means something and people use color and symbols everywhere that they can. I wanted this film to be a celebration, even though the film is about a serious topic. The film celebrates the life and the courage of this mother and to me, the palette speaks very honestly about what’s happening." DUKHTAR manages to convey its strong social overtones of the child marriages practiced in tribal regions of the country within a fairly paced thriller functioning with capable performances especially by forty-six year-old actress Mumtaz, and realistically scripted dialogues.
"Pakistan is a very difficult country when it comes to telling stories about women, especially about female protagonists. For the longest time nobody was interested in financing a film with two women in the lead – a mother and a child – and no conventional hero, so to speak. Which is very different for a conventional Bollywood-driven industry. Also, the whole idea of doing a road trip film without a song and dance routine on top of it was something very difficult to fight for in our local industry"
- AFIA NATHANIEL, independent Pakistani writer-director, on the challenges faced in financial sourcing for her debut feature DUKHTAR [DAUGHTER], a 2014 film which was selected as Pakistan’s official submission for the 87th Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (not nominated). In this thriller which took Nathaniel ten years to gather her resources, the story centres around a woman in the mountain regions of Pakistan who flees her home with her ten year-old daughter, in order to save her from a forced child marriage. Nathaniel finally won the Norwegian film grant (the SØRFOND), which was a brand new production grant set in 2012, given out by the Films from the South Festival. Being one of the seven grantees who received €100,000 helped her to kick start her production, which she went on to receive other post-production grants from Netflix and the Adrienne Shelly grant
"Films stumble into me, and they arrive uninvited, like burglars in the night. There are some films I can see so clearly that it’s as if I’m watching it in a theater. This is why I can write a screenplay so fast. I never spend more than a week writing a screenplay"
- WERNER HERZOG, during an interview with the Washington City Paper, on his filmmaking. The German-born acclaimed director also explained that the pace at which young filmmakers work bums him out, adding “I see young filmmakers who come at me exuberantly, saying something like, ‘I shot 650 hours of footage and have been editing for a year and half!’ This makes my heart sink, because the market itself does not allow this kind of time and energy”
The first project under ALICIA VIKANDER's production company, VIKARIOUS PRODUCTIONS, has actually started rolling. An English-language directorial debut for award-winning Swedish writer and director LISA LANGSETH, the film EUPHORIA will star Vikander herself and EVA GREEN. The film tells the story of two sisters meeting up again after many years apart and the profound journey that they undertake together. Supporting cast includes CHARLOTTE RAMPLING (45 YEARS), CHARLES DANCE (GHOSTBUSTERS), ADRIAN LESTER (PRIMARY COLORS) and MARK STANLEY (STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS)
"Anybody calling for more accurate representation of the diverse world we live in has got me standing right beside them. I think when people see this film, they're going to see that it comes from a very diverse place, in all sorts of ways. Maybe this misunderstanding around this film has been an opportunity for that voice to be heard, and I'm not against that at all. But I do think that when people see the film, they'll see that it's not necessarily a target for that voice”
- TILDA SWINTON, in response to the controversy over her casting as The Ancient One in the upcoming Marvel Comics superhero film DOCTOR STRANGE. Her character who is Asian in the comics, has been one of the recent examples of outcry over Hollywood often choosing white actors to lead blockbusters regardless of the lack of Asian representation in the business, whether it's going against source material
One just can't review Alenjandro G. Iñárritu's latest epic adventure film The Revenant without touching on (or rather as I'd prefer to put it - appreciating) the laborious eight months of intense and moiling shoot the entire cast and crew endured while filming in remote locations in British Columbia and Alberta. Iñárritu's insistence on doing things for real, making the cast go through conditions not so different from those faced by the film's characters, has had the entire team spending two hours everyday to travel to the filming locations, and working under subzero temperatures that could drop as low as -40C. The ambitions of the Oscar-winning director has extended to a grit commitment of having the story filmed chronologically, using only natural light. In other words, it only gave them shooting windows of two hours’ adequate sunlight each day. Iñárritu has shared that a film like this “is a homage to the original cinema tradition", where directors go places and risk challenges. Budget inevitably ballooned, with initial sum of $60m rising to $90m, then finally $135m.
DiCaprio plays Hugh Glass, experienced frontiersman guiding a fur-trapping expedition through the wilderness of the Dakota territory in 1823. The team is led by Captain Henry (Domhnall Gleeson), with team members including Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), Bridger (Will Poulter) and Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), Glass’s son by a Native American woman. Following a massive attack by hostile Native Americans which operates as the brilliantly beautiful opening scene, and a gruesome bear attack that leaves Glass on the brink of death, the remaining men decide to abandon Glass in order to increase their own chances at making their way back to the barracks safely. The film then moves on detailing Glass’ turbulent throe, in precise anecdotes of his painful fight for survival, which eventually transforms into a compelling quest for revenge.
The film is as real as it can get, with every scene and every expression depicted in such organic presence and pure visceral energy, audience is placed right into the scene with the characters. Iñárritu wants to make you uncomfortable, so savage in some of the scenes that you will be left gawking or twitching. That is the only way to allow audience to be totally immersed in the experience. And what an experience it was for me. Coupled with Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography and Iñárritu’s fluid long takes (effectively applied though not exactly and extensive like what we saw in Birdman), the entire journey is transformed into a cinematic spectacular. Already bagged the Oscars for Best Cinematography twice consecutively for his work on Gravity and Birdman, I am not surprised at all that the Mexican cinematographer will be getting his third in February this year. In fact, it will be my wish as well for Iñárritu to bag the Best Director again after his triumph with Birdman last year.
OK we also need to talk about the bear scene. Iñárritu’s insistence on minimal use of CGI is admirable, limiting computer imagery to almost exclusively to create animals (including the bear). Watching how DiCaprio is pummeled and virtually torn into pieces by the beast will leave audience aghast. He was in fact really thrown around with the use of wires and other apparatus, with the bear being digitally added later. And suffice to say, this is not the only shocking (and amazing) scene involving animals that is in store with this 156-minute drama.
The plot is left thin and scarce, intendedly. However that would be the only missing piece for me to conclude it as a true masterpiece. I’ve never had issues with one-note films and don’t get me wrong, The Revenant is rich in emotional grit (making you root fervently for the antagonist’s fight and survival) and carries a rather strong, positive underlying message about the exploitation on the indigenous communities. I just wished they could have included a tad more of delving into Glass’ past, how his roots intertwined with his demised Native American wife. After all, the film is helmed by few but strong actors. Hardy gives one of his best performance I’ve seen so far, and of course DiCaprio drags us along in his excruciating journey. You can almost feel every thud, every blow he takes, his heavy breaths fogging the screen at close-ups, the strained vocals through his drenched agonizing facial expressions and dribbling and frosting beard. This man went to hell and back for his performance, it’s time they gave him the much deserved Oscar that has eluded him throughout his two decades of great acting.
The Hollywood Reporter polled hundreds of Academy members and asked them to recast their votes on previous Oscar races. The revamped results unearthed 5 films which they would've casted differently as the Best Picture
1977
What Did Win: Rocky
What Would Win Now: All the President’s Men
1990
What Did Win: Driving Miss Daisy
What Would Win Now: My Left Foot
Driving Miss Daisy was indeed a good film, but I'll definitely pick the film that introduced me to the amazing talents of Daniel Day-Lewis, who remains until today one of my most respected actors. The film about a man who was born with cerebral palsy and had to learn to paint and write with his left foot, was thoroughly moving, and well, we needn't say more, it's Daniel Day-Lewis
1995
What Did Win: Forrest Gump
What Would Win Now: The Shawshank Redemption
It was tough competition in 1995 as Forrest Gump was up against not just The Shawshank Redemption, but two other strong films Pulp Fiction & Four Weddings and a Funeral as well. Agreeing with the pick of Frank Darabont's The Shawshank Redemption, which remains until today as one of the most compelling stories of perseverance and redemption. Brilliant performances by both Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman
1999
What Did Win: Shakespeare in Love
What Would Win Now: Saving Private Ryan
Shakespeare in Love's win over Saving Private Ryan is widely considered to be one of the most stunning upsets in Oscar history, and I can still recall defending it amongst my friends who had more adoration for Stephen Spielberg's war drama. I personally liked the star-studded romantic comedy, with Joseph Fiennes, Gwyneth Paltrow, Judi Dench, Geoffrey Rush, Ben Affleck & Colin Firth; the twist of witty and playful Shakespeare tale did it for me. My pick will still be Shakespeare In Love
2006
What Did Win: Crash
What Would Win Now: Brokeback Mountain
I've always fancied films with overlapping stories and intertwining characters, and Paul Haggis made such an impressive directing debut with Crash. The ensemble cast is a treat, with Don Cheadle, Sandra Bullock, Matt Dillon, Thandie Newton, Ryan Phillippe, Terence Howard and Brendan Fraser. Haggis moves seamlessly across the multi-layered stories and manage to structure them so well that the characters all culminate to a simultaneous boiling point. Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain was a favorite as well that year, and the loss was considered one of the most controversial Oscar snub. Whilst I really loved the cinematography and gripping performances by Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway & Michelle Williams; I wasn't as convinced on how the main characters' relationship developed. Nevertheless, the Oscar-winning director has created nothing less of a masterpiece. My final pick - still sticking with Crash
