Venice Film Festival
Ang Lee To Head Venice Film Festival Jury
Director Ang Lee (”Hulk” from 2003, “The Hire: Chosen,” “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon“) will head Venice Film Festival jury this year.
Ang Lee twice won the Venice Film Festival’s prestigious Golden Lion award.
The Taiwanese-born director won the award in 2007 for “Lust, Caution,” and in 2005 for “Brokeback Mountain,” for which he also won a best directing Oscar.
His next movies are “Taking Woodstock” and “A Little Game.”
The festival made the announcement Friday. Last year’s jury was headed by German film director Wim Wenders.
Venice Film Festival will be held September 2-12, 2009.
“The Wrestler” Footage
AP posted a clip from Darren Aronofsky-directed “The Wrestler“, starring Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei and Evan Rachel Wood. This clip features footage from the movie and interviews with Aronofsky and Rourke.
Mickey Rourke plays Randy “The Ram” Robinson who comes out of retirement to try to knock down an old rival.
Mickey is no stranger to knocking people out - he used to be a pro boxer.
“The Wrestler” has won the top award - Golden Lion - at the Venice Film Festival.
Darren Aronofsky’s “The Wrestler” wins Venice’s Golden Lion
Venice Film Festival will be remembered for Rourke’s performance in Darren Aronofsky’s “The Wrestler“, which the actor and critics agree is his best yet.
“The Wrestler” won the coveted Golden Lion award for best movie on Saturday.
“Darren Aronofsky came here a couple of years ago and fell on his ass,” Mickey Rourke told a packed Sala Grande crowd after the award was announced, referring to Aronofsky’s “The Fountain,” which flopped in Venice in 2006. “I’m glad he had the balls to come back. I don’t think he wanted to come back but I told him, “You have to come back’ and he did.”
The award seals his comeback from the Hollywood wilderness, and comments that Rourke is ready to ditch his bad-boy image and cooperate with directors suggest there is more to come.
“A guy like me changes hard, I didn’t want to change, but I had to change,” the star of 1980s hits “9-1/2 Weeks” and “Angel Heart” told in an interview in Venice.
There was controversy at Saturday’s closing ceremony when jury president Wim Wenders criticized rules which prevent the Golden Lion winner also picking up best acting prizes, suggesting Rourke should have won that too.
The Silver Lion for best director was won by Russia’s Alexei German Jr. for “Paper Soldier“, set on the windswept steppes of Kazakhstan and centring on the 1960s Soviet space program.
The best actor prize went to Silvio Orlando for his acclaimed portrayal of an overprotective father in “Il Papa di Giovanna” (Giovanna’s Father).
The best actress prize went to France’s Dominique Blanc in “L’Autre” (The Other One), a haunting tale of a woman who becomes dangerously obsessed with a young ex-boyfriend.
“Teza“, by Ethiopian director Haile Gerima, picked up two prizes, the special jury award and best screenplay.
The story chronicles the life of an Ethiopian intellectual who flees his country during the Marxist “red terror” in the 1980s, only to be attacked in Germany by racist youths.
Jennifer Lawrence of the United States was named best emerging actress for her role in “The Burning Plain“, in which she appeared alongside Kim Basinger and Charlize Theron.
As well as “The Wrestler”, “The Hurt Locker” by U.S. director Kathryn Bigelow impressed critics with its portrayal of the perils faced by a bomb disposal unit in Iraq, while actress Anne Hathaway generated awards buzz in “Rachel Getting Married“.
Venice 2008 - Review
The competition film, “The Wrestler,” which stars Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei and Evan Rachel Wood, packed three Venice screenings Friday and prompted speculation among festival participants that Mickey Rourke could be a candidate for Venice’s best actor prize, which will be announced with the other major awards Saturday.
Mickey Rourke has given what critics are calling the performance of his life in Darren Aronofsky’s “The Wrestler” in which he plays a lonely, washed out wrestler whose story poignantly mirrors the Hollywood outsider’s own troubled past.
“Wrestler,” which centers on an aging former professional wrestler, is the fest’s final premiere at the Sala Grande.
Rourke, who received a rare standing ovation at a press conference, is generating early Oscar chatter. He told in an interview that “The Wrestler” was “the best … movie I’ve ever made.”
The film, the last of 21 movies in the main competition to premiere, is a contender both for the top actor award and the coveted Golden Lion for best picture, critics say. The festival wraps Saturday with its prize ceremony.
Anne Hathaway also impressed in her unusually dark role in “Rachel Getting Married,” Jonathan Demme’s touching wedding drama that has been lauded in Venice.
A third late entry, Thursday’s premiere, “The Hurt Locker” by U.S. director Kathryn Bigelow, leads an informal poll of Italian critics who were impressed by its portrayal of the perils faced by a bomb disposal unit in Iraq led by a reckless sergeant.
Venice 2008 - Natalie Portman’s “Eve”
Natalie Portman presented her debut as a director at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday with a short movie “Eve” about a young woman who is dragged along to her grandmother’s romantic date.
A young woman, Kate, goes to visit her grandma Lola for a private dinner. She is surprised to find she is instead the third wheel at her grandma’s date with Joe.
“Eve” (17 minutes), screening out of competition in the Venice short film section, star Lauren Bacall, Ben Gazzara and Olivia Thirbly.
Portman, 27, said she had always had a fascination with the older generation, and drew inspiration for Bacall’s character from her own grandmother.
Getting Bacall on board was like fulfilling her “wildest dream”, Portman said.
“It’s so exciting to see someone with that much experience and that much wisdom on screen. It’s rare. The film was definitely inspired by personal experience and also all my friends, female friends, starting to define themselves in relation, and in reaction to, their mothers and their grandmothers”
Having started her acting career as a child, she said that she had long wanted to be on the other side of the camera and will present a second short work at the Toronto film festival which starts later this week.
“I have been working now in films for 16 years…it was exciting to know what a director goes through and also to create something completely on your own. When you are an actor of course you are creating something but you are serving someone else’s vision and ultimately it’s someone else’s creation. To have authorship is … and feels like a more adult job.”
Early reviews have been positive.
Venice 2008 - “The Burning Plain”
“The Burning Plain” is a drama that explores the mysterious connection between several characters separated by time and space: Mariana (Jennifer Lawrence), a 16-year-old girl trying to put together the shattered lives of her parents in a Mexican border town; Sylvia (Charlize Theron), a woman in Portland who must undertake an emotional odyssey to burnish a sin from her past; Gina, Sylvia’s mother (Kim Basinger) and Nick (Joaquim de Almeida), a couple who must deal with an intense and clandestine affair; and Maria (Tessa Ia), a young girl who helps her parents find redemption, forgiveness and love.
The film is the first of five U.S. entries to appear in the main competition at the Venice Film Festival.
“The Burning Plain” is the directorial debut by acclaimed Mexican screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga who is best known for his scripts that include well received dramas “Amores perros“, “21 Grams” and “Babel“, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award. Arriaga also wrote “The Burning Plain.”
“I enjoyed every single moment of it. I can tell you that directing was maybe the happiest moment of my professional life. Just arriving on set I had a smile … and it hasn’t vanished until now”
he told reporters.
As well as time, the film explores the elements, each storyline represents either earth, air, fire or water. Landscape is central to the movie which Arriaga initially had titled, “The Four Elements.” Water, earth, wind and fire are present as the story moves back and forth from the searing dryness of New Mexico to the nonstop rain in Portland, Ore.
“We experienced the desert and the sun and the extreme cold in the desert to the nonstop rain in Oregon. I think the weather and the landscape also influences the character.”
“We never in real life tell stories in a linear way. We tell it always in a decomposed way. I think that cinema is a very young medium and it’s beginning to find its own language and among these languages is the deconstruction of time”
Arriaga said.
Venice 2008 After Burning
“Burn After Reading” (George Clooney, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand) finally had its long awaited premiere at Venice Film Festival.
The movie re-unites Joel and Ethan Coen with George Clooney, who appeared in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and actress Frances McDormand (Joel’s wife) who won an Oscar for her role in their 1996 film “Fargo“.
“I’ve done three films with them and they call it my trilogy of idiots”
Clooney told reporters after a press screening (”O Brother, Where Art Thou?”, “Intolerable Cruelty” and “Burn After Reading”).
He plays a nervous, twitchy federal marshal whose extra-marital affairs bring him into contact with a gym instructor, played by Pitt, desperately seeking to extort money from a sacked CIA analyst whose memoirs go missing.
“After reading the part, which they said was hand-written for myself, I was not sure if I should be flattered or insulted”
said Brad Pitt, whose character the directors describe as a “knucklehead”.
Brad was asked how the chosen ones are doing.
