There’s not a whole lot in this first official domestic trailer for Lars von Trier‘s Melancholia that we haven’t seen in previous trailers and clips. (Such as the great UK trailer we just saw a few days ago.) But what the hell, the film is among our most-anticipated of the year, and this trailer offers up a great HD look at the gorgeous and subtle cinematography from Manuel Alberto Claro.
So hit the jump and get one more look at the ways in which sisters played by Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg deal with the possibility of the impending end of life on Earth. Read More »
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It’s been a big, loud year for Lars von Trier, thanks in part to his new film Melancholia, and more so to the Cannes press conference comments that saw the director banned from the festival. But getting beyond that controversy, there’s the fact that Melancholia is one of the best-reviewed films of the director’s career, and remains one of my most-anticipated films of the fall.
We’ve seen one trailer for the film, in which Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg play sisters with very different dispositions who are staring down the end of the world on the eve of Dunst’s character’s wedding. Now here’s the UK trailer, which nicely shows off the ensemble cast (which also includes Kiefer Sutherland, Charlotte Rampling, John Hurt, Alexander Skarsgård, Stellan Skarsgård and Udo Kier) and opens on a surprisingly upbeat note before settling into the anxious mode that you’d expect from a film about the end of the world. Read More »
The name Lars von Trier is nearly synonymous with controversy. His films are polarizing, and his public statements often run to the dramatic. And, at times, the foolish, as when he referenced Hitler this year at Cannes.
But his work — even his most deliberately provocative work — stands on its own. Antichrist, arguably his most button-pushing film to date, may unravel late in the game, but much of the film is a harrowing and perceptive account of the intersection between ego, sanity and love. Thanks to the scenes of full-on penetration and extreme violence you may not like it, but it is a film that should be seen.
His next film will likely be Nymphomaniac, which the director is now researching in preparation for a summer 2012 shoot. And, because the film is meant to follow “the erotic life of a woman from the age of zero to the age of 50,” it will be just as sexually explicit as Antichrist. So much so, in fact, that the director will likely release two cuts of the film. Read More »
If you’re more interested in the typical fall slate of festival entrees than summer’s glut of tentpole action fare, this is a great week. The Toronto International Film Festival announced the first wave of films that will play the fest in September. This is a batch of about 50 titles, which makes up only a small chunk of the programming. Usually TIFF features between two and three hundred films. But these are some of the highest-profile entries.
Below you’ll find rundowns on the new films from George Clooney, Bennett Miller, Jay & Mark Duplass, Todd Solondz, Francis Ford Coppola, Cameron Crowe, Sarah Polley, Fernando Meirelles, Lars von Trier, Marc Forster, Steve McQueen, Alexander Payne, and Lynne Ramsay. No announcement yet of the Midnight Madness programming choices, always some of my faves, but this is a great start. Read More »
This week, Dave, Devindra, and Adam discuss the transcendence of Tree of Life, delve into some television season finales, and debate the hypocrisy of the Cannes film festival. Special guest C. Robert Cargill joins us from Ain’t It Cool News.
You can always e-mail us at slashfilmcast(AT)gmail(DOT)com, or call and leave a voicemail at 781-583-1993. Join us for our next live broadcast on Monday, May 30th at Slashfilm’s live page where we’ll be discussing Kung Fu Panda 2.
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The Cannes jury, headed by Robert De Niro, has selected the winners of this year’s competition slate, and the results are slightly surprising. In the early days of the fest two films quickly emerged as seeming front-runners for the top prize, Lynne Ramsay‘s We Need to Talk About Kevin and Michel Hazanavicius‘ silent black and white film The Artist, but the Palme d’Or went instead to Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life.
The slate of winners was surprisingly tipped towards American films and talent, or films that played very specifically towards American tendencies in a way that isn’t quite typical for a Cannes awards slate. The full list of winners is after the break. Read More »
Early this morning, the Cannes Film Festival declared Lars Von Trier “persona non grata, with effect immediately,” effectively expelling him from this year’s festival. This was in response to Von Trier’s remarks about Nazis, despite the fact that said remarks were made jokingly, specifically intended to provoke, and apologized for after the fact.
It is unclear if the ban will extend to future festivals, or if it will affect the prize-winning chances of Von Trier’s well-received festival film, Melancholia. According to the The New York Times, the film will still be in contention but if it wins any awards, von Trier will not be there to accept them.
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You can say this for Lars Von Trier: he doesn’t believe in treading lightly. If today wasn’t so busy I’d spend a few hours digging up the director’s old comments from Cannes press conferences and correlating their level of pseudo-outrage to the quality of the film he’s promoting. His latest movie, Melancholia, premiered at Cannes today and the reviews are (perhaps predictably) mixed, with some of the most telling comments coming in the form of negative reviews from normally sympathetic fans. (There are also some significant raves.)
‘Sympathetic’ is the byword for LVT today, as the press conference for Melancholia featured the director baiting the press with statements about feeling that he understands Hitler and being a Nazi. Depending on how you look at it, press-baiting may not even have been his goal — it is more like the Nazi comments grew out of an attempt at a joke that, like a poor SNL routine, went on too long and wound down into an awkward sort of ‘oops’ conclusion. (A conclusion that proved perhaps appropriately apocalyptic, given the context of promoting a film about the end of the world.) The discourse about him today is dominated this current provocation, but we’ve also got early reviews of Melancholia and a few more upcoming career details. Read More »
