Cinematical

TITLE: I've Loved You So Long
DIRECTED BY: Phillipe Claudel
STARS: Kristin Scott Thomas, Elsa Zylberstein, Laurent Grevill, Serge Hazanavicius, Frederic Pierrot

WHAT IT'S ABOUT: After being estranged from her family by and act of violence for 15 years, Juliette (Kristin Scott Thomas) returns to move in with her younger sister, Lea (Elsa Zylberstein), her husband, father-in-law, and two young daughters.

WHY WE'RE EXCITED ABOUT IT: Always a solid actress worth watching, Thomas is already getting end-of-season awards buzz for her performance in this French-language film. The intriguing trailer promises a intelligent, suspenseful film with a focus on character and relationships, and Thomas's performance looks to be outstanding.

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How do you follow-up a broad comedy starring the biggest names in Hollywood, George Clooney and Brad Pitt? If you're the Coen brothers, you apparently hit the car in reverse and make your next effort a darker story and cast relative unknowns. Variety reports that the newly minted Oscar winning directors Joel and Ethan Coen have cast Tony-nominated stage actor Michael Stuhlbarg (The Pillowman) and TV's Richard Kind (Mad About You; Spin City) for the two lead roles in A Serious Man, their next film after this fall's Burn After Reading. The actors will play brothers in the 1967-set black comedy, which returns the Coens to Fargo territory by placing the story in their home turf of Minneapolis.

In fact, when we first learned of A Serious Man, more than a year ago (and almost a year before the Coens each won 3 Academy Awards, for writing, directing and producing No Country for Old Men), the script was described as being "in the vein of Fargo." Now we get a little inkling more about the plot of Serious: Stuhlberg will play a professor named Larry Gopnik, whose wife is leaving him and whose "socially inept" brother (Kind) won't leave the house. Hopefully, to further repeat the analogy to their double-Oscar-winning 1996 film, the Coens can cast Frances McDormand as the wife, she can then win another Academy Award and Kind (pictured above) can, like William H. Macy before him, finally go from near-obscurity to well-known, well-respected supporting actor within the next decade.

To be eligible for the Academy Awards, a documentary feature must play theatrically, at least two showings a day, for at least a week in both Los Angeles County and the borough of Manhattan. (For documentary shorts, it only has to play in one location or the other.) And they have to do it by the end of August to be eligible for next year's Oscars, too -- which means time's a-wastin'!

That's where the International Documentary Association's DocuWeek comes in, screening more than a dozen worthy features and shorts in L.A. and New York so they'll be eligible for Oscar consideration (and so audiences can enjoy them, too, of course). Some of the films didn't get distribution deals when they played at film festivals, so they had no chance of earning Oscar eligibility without something like this.

New York's DocuWeek is happening now, running all day every day through Thursday at Village East Cinema and IFC Center. L.A.'s DocuWeek will be Aug. 22-28 at the ArcLight in Hollywood and Sherman Oaks. The films are more or less the same in both cities (four features and four shorts play in L.A. but not New York), and there are some real gems here.

Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (pictured) has already emotionally devastated about half the Cinematical staff (including myself, Will Goss, Monika Bartyzel, and Erik Davis), and you should take advantage of any opportunity you have to see it. An Unlikely Weapon tells the story of the photographer who snapped that famous shot of a Saigon policeman shooting a Viet Cong guerrilla in the head, and the aftermath of the photo. Glass is about love-him-or-hate-him film composer Philip Glass. War Child profiles a Sudanese refugee who has become an international rap star.

The list goes on. Check out the links for the full programs -- and if you're in New York or L.A., go see some docs!

An editorialist named Eric P. Lucas says in Friday's Los Angeles Times that since Heath Ledger's death was the result of his own recklessness, he therefore should not win an Oscar for his performance in The Dark Knight.

"It's time to stop the canonization of Heath Ledger," Lucas begins. "He's just a pretty good actor who did away with himself and broke the hearts of his family and friends, and he shouldn't get an Academy Award to memorialize his death. ... Each year more than 100,000 Americans die of alcohol or drug abuse. It would be madness to commemorate one such death with the greatest honor in cinema. Please give the Academy Award to someone who's had the courage to stick around."

Lucas asserts that Ledger's performance isn't all that great anyway -- "a can-can dance of snuffling pseudo-psychopathia," he calls it -- but that's irrelevant to his larger point. It would seem that even if Ledger's Joker truly did represent the finest acting of the year, his personal behavior should disqualify him from Oscar consideration.

To Lucas I say this: Wanna watch me make this pencil disappear?

I actually agree with a lot of what he writes about how certain people's drug- or alcohol-fueled deaths make them more iconic than they would have been otherwise. Did Kurt Cobain's suicide rob my generation of its greatest poet? Nah. I think the only group that really suffered a major loss when Cobain died was the heroin industry. And I think it's silly when people talk about getting emotional when they see Ledger in The Dark Knight, as if the death of someone they never met still makes them misty-eyed all these months later. So let it not be said that I am not a heartless bastard.

There's good news and bad news, Soderbergh fans: The bad news is that the director's two-part, Benicio Del Toro-starring Che Guevara biopic Che, as noted in a recent piece in The Hollywood Reporter, still doesn't have a U.S. distributor. Gregg Goldstein's piece (which also looks at the similar challenges faced by Cannes '08 films Synedoche, New York and Two Lovers) notes that there are four offers on the table from independent distributors, but no deal has yet been signed.

For many who saw Che at Cannes (including myself), this is vexing news. Goldstein also relates that one distributor's hopes to purchase Che as a single film with a three-hour running time has been roundly rebuffed. However, in case anyone would like to see what all the fuss is about -- albeit in blurry, bootleg fashion -- a grainy, blurry bootleg of the trailer (in all Spanish with no subtitles) for the first half of Che, The Argentine, has hit YouTube (see above) -- and while the bootlegged trailer may lack clarity and definition, it also gives a great sense of the look and the feel of the film.

Does The Argentine's trailer make you hunger for all of Soderbergh's Che? Or does it just make you appreciate how hard it's going to be to get a distributor to back a four-hour long historical drama in Spanish?

Were you aware that when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences presented the Oscars every year, the results were being determined without considering the opinion of Jet Li? It's hard to believe, I know. They haven't been consulting Diablo Cody (pictured), either! Well, that egregious oversight is about to be remedied, as Li, Cody, and 103 others have been invited to join the AMPAS and become voting members.

Among those whom you'll be able to blame the next time something dumb like Crash wins Best Picture are Gore Verbinski, Doug Liman, Allison Janney, Judd Apatow and Sacha Baron Cohen -- assuming they all accept the invitation, of course. Almost everyone who's invited is grateful for the honor, but a few do decline, and a few more simply fail to respond to the invitation before the deadline.

After enduring a moderate amount of fuss, our devoted readers can now click here for the Apple-exclusive English-language trailer for Brad Pitt and David Fincher's long-in-the-works The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Apparently made available only in the HD format to correspond with Fincher's expectedly demanding standards, the trailer is indeed that much more striking for it. To borrow my own words for it:

"...while the sparse dialogue clues us in on the surreal nature of the events unfolding, the bigger selling point is the scope with which director Fincher and star Brad Pitt find themselves working. It's as if Fincher tapped into his inner Jeunet, and as for Pitt... well, between this and that Burn After Reading trailer, the man's looking to have one hell of a year, and with any luck, so will audiences."

Benjamin Button is scheduled to hit theaters this Christmas, and when the next trailer for it comes around, we'll be sure to make mention of it once we're certain that everyone can actually watch the thing.

Well, well. Here's some welcome news. After this year's much balleyhooed disaster with the Best Foreign Film Oscar noms -- recap: lauded Romanian Cannes winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days somehow didn't even make it onto the Oscar shortlist -- The Envelope's Mark Olsen reports that a rule change has been voted in for next year's event. Now, I don't like to get too worked up about the Oscars -- it's such an insidery, backpatting schmoozefest of the "You're great!" "No, you're great!" variety -- but last year's foreign noms really pissed me off.

I wasn't as enarmored of 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days as many of my fellow critics were, but even so, it's a masterful, tensely drawn piece of filmmaking, it won the Palme d'or and gave critics worldwide a collective cinematic orgasm, and it damn sure deserved not just to be shortlisted, but to make the final cut of nominees. That it wasn't nominated was a travesty, and confirmed the ongoing suspicion of many in the film community that many of the people in the Academy who are charged with making decisions around foreign film noms are a pack of drooling idiots.

I guess we won't be seeing the first female President of the United States in 2009, but we could at least see the first female cinematographer nominated for an Academy Award (in the cinematography category, that is). In the 80 years of the Oscars there hasn't been one female nominee for Best Cinematography. Shocking, isn't it? But fortunately there's a chance for next year's ceremony: Mandy Walker, who shot Baz Luhrman's war epic Australia, could be a shoo-in for one of the five nomination slots if the film is Oscar-worthy in general.

The Oscar blog In Contention points out the possibility in a recent post celebrating Walker's reception Tuesday evening of the Kodak Vision Award at the Women in Film's Crystal + Lucy Awards (other honorees included Salma Hayek, Sherry Lansing, Ginnifer Goodwin, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Diane English and the ensemble of The Women). Clearly we only need to look at the trailer to see that Walker's work on the film is gorgeous and might have a shot. In Contention also notes Walker's previous achievements, such as her Independent Spirit Award nomination for Shattered Glass.

UPDATE: Scratch that, folks. According to JoBlo.com, the trailer has been taken down at the request of the studio and "Fincher himself." Paramount has then assured the site that the trailer will be officially posted - in all its HD glory - on Apple's trailer site in the very near future. Sorry about that, guys, but we'll keep you posted once they get it posted.

Previously available in either en Español or attached to prints of Indiana Jones..., we can now (cannot quite) bring you the English-language trailer for David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, courtesy of JoBlo.com.

Naturally, it still stands that, while the sparse dialogue clues us in on the surreal nature of the events unfolding, the bigger selling point is the scope with which director Fincher and star Brad Pitt find themselves working. It's as if Fincher tapped into his inner Jeunet, and as for Pitt... well, between this and that Burn After Reading trailer, the man's looking to have one hell of a year, and with any luck, so will audiences.

It 's also worth noting that adapting this F. Scott Fitzgerald story for the big screen is screenwriter Eric Roth, whose own Forrest Gump similarly chronicled the life of a man whose presence managed to manifest itself across several eras of American culture and history.

In what is perhaps a fitting sense of time, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button doesn't open until this Christmas, and yet it suddenly can't seem to get here soon enough.

Oh look, a Clint Eastwood movie with an Oscar-friendly release date. That's new. Actually, it is relatively new, if you look over the man's directorial career. Sure, he's had a number of films come out in the fall time, but not with the same consistency we've seen since 2003, when Mystic River arrived in a few theaters on October 8 then went on to receive six Academy Award nominations the following winter.

Then in 2004, his Million Dollar Baby opened in limited release December 15 and went on to win four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. Finally, in 2006, two of his films were released in the fall, Flags of Our Fathers in October and Letters from Iwo Jima in December. Both went on to receive Oscar recognition, the latter garnering major noms, such as Best Picture and Best Director.

The Changeling press conference the other day was, not surprisingly, a packed affair, with throngs of journalists crowding in to get a look at Clint Eastwood, Angelina Jolie, and the Jolie baby bump. Honestly, I've never seen so many people so fascinated with the silhouette of a pregnant woman -- the Jolie frenzy here has been interesting to watch. She looked, also not surprisingly, glowingly fantastic. Also on hand to field questions were producer Brian Grazer and his famously spiky hair, and screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski.

We just walked in the door after the four-and-a-half hour screening of Steven Soderbergh's Che, one of the most anticipated films at the Cannes Film Festival, and I just had to bang out a quick post to say ... wow. The film is just amazing, in every possible way. I went into it a bit trepidatiously; four-plus hours of guerrilla warfare was either going to be awesome or very, very bad. I walked out feeling like I'd just had the cinematic equivalent of winning the Lotto, and I'm still on a high from the film.

James will have a full review up soon (yeah, he won the coin toss on that one), but for now, here's my immediate reaction. Consensus among many of the very smart people I know here at Cannes (well, except for Variety, apparently) is that Che will almost definitely win the Palm d'Or, and if Benecio del Toro doesn't win the Best Actor Oscar come January, there's something wrong with the world.

Darned politics! It's always getting in the way of our entertainment. This year, there were Oscar worries due to the writers strike. Next year, there is going to be some presidential interference. Unless you've been living on a remote island under a rock, by now you should have caught on that there's a presidential race a-brewing to figure out who is going to replace Dubya in the White House. Whatever person gets picked will have their inauguration on January 20, 2008.

That's the day that the 81st Annual Academy Award nominees were going to be announced, like they are every year, on a Tuesday in mid-January. To completely avoid a showdown, The Hollywood Reporter posts that the Academy will ignore tradition next year and announce the nominees two days later -- Thursday, January 22 at 5:30 am, PST.

So, the Oscar schedule for next year is as follows:

December 1 - Credit forms are due.
December 26 - Nomination ballots are mailed.
January 12 - Ballots are due back.
January 22 - Nominees are announced.
January 28 - Final ballots mailed.
February 2 - Annual nominees luncheon.
February 7 - Scientific and tech achievement awards given.
February 17 - Final ballots due.
February 22 - Fancy-garbed actors and notables flock to the Kodak Theatre for the awards.

Okay. It's time to get down to brass tacks. I'm going to get up on my soapbox and hope that the right Academy members read the column this week, because it's time to re-do the rules of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar category. Do you know how long it has been since a great film, a truly great film, won in this category? I'm talking about a film made by a genuinely great artist of the cinema, a film for the ages, and not just a perfectly good film, or a film about one of the great world wars. Here's your answer: twenty-five years ago. Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander (1983) was the last great one. That leaves 25 years of pretty good, just OK, forgettable, or flat-out awful winners (mostly forgettable). This year's winner, The Counterfeiters (41 screens) had to be one of the worst movies I saw all year; at it's center is a perfectly good (true) WWII concentration camp story, but it's warped by an entirely inept director, responsible for one of the worst movies I've ever seen, All the Queen's Men (2001). How did it win? How did it get past all the truly great films of 2007?