At Graystone Manor, Anna Karenina star Keira Knightley following Arclight premiere — Wednesday, 11.14, 11:15 pm. We shared about five or six spirited minutes.
(l. to r.) Anna Karenina costars Domhnall Gleeson (son of Brendan), Alicia Vikander (star of A Royal Affair), director Joe Wright, star Keira Knightley. (Getty Images — pic stolen from Daily Mail.)
Anna Karenina assistant choregrapher and supporting player Guro Schia and a gentleman whose name I didn’t get…sorry. The film’s brilliant chief choreographer, Navaa ‘Niku’ Chaudhari, is working on a production in Montreal.
“In the intelligently ecstatic new adaptation of Anna Karenina, written by Tom Stoppard and directed by Joe Wright, all the world’s a stage — a 19th-century theater whose ornate confines are the setting for scenes taking place in Anna’s home town of St. Petersburg and in the social and political center of Moscow.
“Steeplechase horses gallop across the boards; a quiet dinner or a military banquet may be staged there. And when Anna (Keira Knightley) and Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) meet, the theatrical intensity of their first moments in each other’s arms makes those around them not fellow performers but mute spectators, awed and aghast.
“Wright’s strategy of setting most of the action on a stage [reps] a bold structure. In a way this is opera, but grand opera, with the emotions running at fever pitch and the actors as likely to dance (choreography by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui) as walk. Vronsky and Anna’s meeting at a formal ball expresses their love through dance, exactly as the classic routines of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers did in their ’30s musicals. As Vronsky and Anna whirl, the other dancers freeze. Everyone can detect the expert passion in their movements; the couple might have been spotted in the act of love.” — from Richard Corliss‘s 9.9 Time review.
David Poland, a fan of Anna Karenina, too often takes things in a glib, chit-chatty, hoo-hoo direction, but this sitdown isn’t too bad. I’m seeing it again next Tuesday night, and after all the fighting I can’t wait to re-encounter.
People who are putting down Joe Wright‘s Anna Karenina for being stylistically outside the box and therefore not approval-worthy are pedestrian-minded philistines. They’re saying “whoa, this is different and audacious and so it sucks!” There’s no lamer response to artistic experimentation than this. These people need more than scolding, I’m afraid. They need to be taken outside, bent over the woodpile and — no offense — spanked.
At least MCN’s David Poland gets it: “I am not, generally, a Joe Wright fan,” he wrote yesterday. “I think he’s gotten some nice performances from actors in the past, but has lost me on efforts at big style. Here, it’s big style from start to finish and I bought into it. Not everyone will. But I think there are enough people who will be pleased that it could well find a Best Picture slot at year’s end.” Thank you!
Joe Wright‘s Anna Karenina (Focus Features, 11.16.12) will have its detractors (in my screening today five or six people were actually chuckling at it during a high-emotion scene in the late second act) but for me it’s a serious, drop-your-socks knockout — the first truly breathtaking high-style film of the year, a non-musical successor to Moulin Rouge and a disciple of the great ’70s films of Ken Russell (and by that I mean pre-Mahler Russell, which means The Music Lovers and Women In Love) as well as Powell-Pressburger’s The Red Shoes.
You either go with the proscenium-arch grandiosity of a film like Anna Karenina or you don’t (and I was just talking in the Bell Lightbox lobby with a critic who didn’t care for it) but if you ask me it has all the essential ingredients of a bold-as-brass Best Picture contender — an excitingly original approach, cliff-leaping audacity, complex choreography, the balls to go classic and crazy at the same time, a wild mixture of theatricality and romantic realism, a superbly tight and expressive script by Tom Stoppard and wowser operatic acting with a special hat-tip to Keira Knightley as Anna — a Best Actress performance if I’ve ever seen one.
The brazen idea behind Wright’s film is that he’s presenting a completely theatrical environment, and therefore defined by and subject to the terms of live theatre. The film literally takes place in a 19th Century theatre with the orchestra seats removed, and yet it’s a special kind of theatre that dissolves and opens up from time to time — regularly, literally — and thus allowing Wright and his players to run out or zoom into a semi-naturalistic world. But one is mostly aware that we’re watching a play that is choreographed like a musical or a ballet with broad but delicious acting and some magnificent dance sequences and killer production design and break-open walls and actors sometimes freezing in their tracks and becoming tableau.
I can imagine some people saying “whoa…this is too much” but like I said, either you understand the concept and accept it…or you don’t. I loved every minute of it except for a portion in the third act when it seems to run out of gas. But it revs up again at the finale.
I’m being kicked out of the Bell Lightbox press lounge as we speak so I guess I’ll have to add to this later on this evening, but I couldn’t feel more excited and elevated.
Those snide bitches who chuckled during this afternoon’s screening needed to be hauled out by the collar and slapped around. If they had been watching Wright’s film as a literal theatrical presentation (and it could be presented that way with modifications), they wouldn’t have dared to laugh at any projection of tragic intensity. No one who understands and respects theatre would do that.
I didn’t mean to suggest that Anna Karenina is as good or almost as good as Moulin Rouge but without the music — it’s a much tonier and classier production than Baz Luhrman‘s film, in my view, although it’s coming from the same general ballpark. And of course it’s a much darker thing than Moulin Rouge, given the Leo Tolstoy source material.
I hate having to stop writing but I’m really being kicked out of here…eff me.
The author is Jessica Crispin, who runs a Substack blog called “The Culture We Deserve.”
It reminded me of a 2012 Toronto Film Festival screening of Joe Wright‘s Anna Karenina. I was sitting in the seventh or eighth row, and during the third act some uncouth animals began chuckling at an emotional scene that wasn’t in the least bit funny. I distinctly recall whipping around and glaring.
I generally hate groups of people who laugh loudly in any context outside of watching comedies. I can tolerate laughter but only in short bursts, and that means no shrieking. I can be walking down a Manhattan street and if a group of younger people start to shriek-laugh at something, I’ll immediately flinch and snarl to myself “those fucking assholes,” etc.
The second-to-last paragraph in Crispin’s piece mentions that during a presumably recent screening of Blow-Up, people in the audience were cackling “at the mimed game of tennis, a group of people playing with an imaginary ball. It doesn’t get past me that [this is a] representation of atomization and isolation, the absolute inability to connect. The whoop of laughter is a signal to say ‘not me.’ And it’s pathetic because it suggests exactly the opposite.”
If I’d been at that Blow-Up screening I would’ve…okay, I wouldn’t have gotten up and thrown the remainder of my soft drink into the laps or faces of the chucklers — way too aggressive — but I definitely would’ve followed the chucklers into the lobby after it ended and politely asked, “Sorry to bother but if you don’t mind answering, what did you guys find funny about the silent tennis ball scene? I’m just curious because I’ve never heard a group of people laughing at it and I’ve seen Blow-Up several times. I mean, are you guys a new breed of some kind?”
UPDATE: The "Aaron Taylor Johnson being offered the James Bond role" rumor is untrue. This comes straight from 007 producer BarbaraBroccoli. E! is saying the same thing.
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The two finest films I saw at last month’s Telluride Film Festival were Joe Wright‘s exquisitely made Cyrano (UA Releasing, 12.31) and Reinaldo Marcus Green‘s King Richard (Warner Bros., 11.19). As things currently stand, these are also the most deserving Best Picture contenders…no question. Here, at long last, is the Cyrano trailer:
Posted on 9.2.21: “I’ve been watching filmed adaptations of Edmund Rostand‘s Cyrano de Bergerac for decades (Jose Ferrer‘s 1950 version, Steve Martin‘s Roxanne, the1990 Gerard Depardieu version, and Michael Lehmann‘s The Truth About Cats and Dogs). Wright’s newbie — an inventively choreographed musical, fortified by first-rate production design and wonderfully lighted cinematography — is arguably the most spiritually and poetically buoyant version of them all.
The acting is top-tier, the musical numbers are arresting, the dialogue is as good as this sort of thing gets, and it’s a truly authentic time-tunnel experience (save for the presentism in the casting, which is par for the course these days).
Peter Dinklage has absolutely hit the jackpot with his titular performance — he’ll definitely be Best Actor-nominated. The film will almost certainly end up being Best Picture-nominated, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the year-end consensus is that Cyrano is a “better” musical than Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story and Jon Chu‘s In The Heights combined.
Based on Schmidt’s 2018 stage musical of the same name (in which Dinklage and Haley Bennett costarred before moving onto the film version), Cyrano is easily Wright’s best film since Anna Karenina. Seamus McGarvey‘s exquisite cinematography reminded me of David Watkins‘ lensing of Richard Lester‘s The Three Musketeers (’73) — it’s a real trip just to watch and sink into on a visual level alone.
Kudos to Cyrano costars Kelvin Harrison Jr., Bashir Salahuddin and Ben Mendelsohn.
Feinberg was completely correct in doing so for a simple, undeniable reason. Of all the contenders seen so far King Richard is the only one that is (a) exceptionally well made, (b) perfectly acted and (c) makes you feel good in an honest, fully earned, non-pandering way.
There are no other Best Picture hopefuls that have even come close to managing this feat. No other 2021 film so far has delivered this kind of effectiveemotionalpizza. Plus it’s a mostly all-black sports film** (the saga of tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams) about a super-competitive family from Compton, and in particular about a thorny, whip-cracking dad (i.e., Smith’s Richard Williams) who was far from perfect.
Smith is a Best Actor lock; ditto Aunjanue Ellis as his combative wife + mother of phenomenal daughters.
King Richard delivers a metaphor that everyone will understand and relate to — if you want to win, you have to be hardcore.
There are several films I haven’t seen, but I can still tell (or make a very good guess about) which ones will meet these three criteria.
Using Feinberg’s list as a template, here are my no-bullshit assessments as things currently stand. The boldfaced titles are the only ones that stand a fraction of a chance of beating King Richard. (I’ve also boldfaced King Richard for emphasis.)
1. King Richard (Warner Bros., 11.19) — The only Best Picture contender right now that looks like a real winner.
2. Belfast (Focus, 11.12) — Sentimental, cloying and manipulative family drama — an Irish Roma with an overly cute central kid character + wall-to-wall Van Morrison.
3. AHero (Amazon) — Brilliant Asghar Farhadi film that will most likely be slotted in the Best Int’l Feature category.
4. The Power of the Dog (Netflix. 11.17) — Exceptionally well made, skillfully acted period drama about Montana ranchers writhing in denial and misery with a little touch of anthrax — makes you feel really, really bad. All hail Jane Campion, but the only time you feel good about The Power of the Dog is when it ends.
5. Dune (Warner Bros., 10.22) — Torture to sit through for some; delightful for genre geeks. Not a prayer of being nominated for Best Picture.
6. C’mon, Cmon (A24) — Haven’t seen it, but for years my basic motto has been “beware of Mike Mills.”
7. CODA (Apple, 8.13) — Appealing but not good enough — a feel-good sitcom about a hearing-impaired Massachusetts family in the fishing business, and a high-school age daughter who wants to sing.
8. Spencer (Neon/Topic, 11.5) — Not a chance. Agony to sit through. Strictly a platform for Kristen Stewart‘s Best Actress campaign.
9. The Lost Daughter (Netflix, 12.31) — Haven’tseenit but I’m told it’s somewhere between okay and not that great.
10. Cyrano (MGM/UA, 12.31) — Brilliant musical. Joe Wright‘s finest effort since Anna Karenina. Exquisite Best Actor-calibre lead performance by Peter Dinklage.
On 9.7 I posted a short riff about the ending of Sydney Pollack‘s The Way We Were, which I’ve always regarded as one of the saddest ever. The scene also contains one of Robert Redford‘s finest acting moments.
A friend has forwarded five of her saddest ending picks — Letter from an Unknown Woman (d: Max Ophuls>) with Joan Fontaine;Waterloo Bridge (d: Mervyn LeRoy) with Vivien Leigh; Madame Bovary (d: Vicente Minnelli) starring Jennifer Jones; Anna Karenina (d: Clarence Brown) with Greta Garbo; and Dr. Zhivago (d: David Lean) w/ Julie Christie and Omar Sharif.
Please forward titles of films that measure up in your own regard. Extra points if your submissions are outside the usual realm.
Joe Wright and Erica Schmidt‘s Cyrano (UA Releasing, 12.31) had its first-anywhere screening Thursday night at the Palm, and when it ended around 9:25 pm a few things were obvious.
First and foremost, this poignant romantic tale about unrequited love “works,” and that the audience (composed of the usual mixture of press people and wealthy Colorado liberals) was deeply moved.
There was a kind of a hush outside the theatre — people were talking in groups, whispering praise, sifting through their emotions. (Me included.) Cyrano will probably do well with the Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic gang, but it will surely become a hit or at least develop an ardent following among ticket-buyers and streamers. Because it gets people where they live…soul, passion, exquisite ache.
I’ve been watching filmed adaptations of Edmund Rostand‘s Cyrano de Bergerac for decades (Jose Ferrer‘s 1950 version, Steve Martin‘s Roxanne, the1990 Gerard Depardieu version, Michael Lehmann‘s The Truth About Cats and Dogs) and the newbie — an inventively choreographed musical, fortified by first-rate production design and wonderfully lighted cinematography — is arguably the most spiritually and poetically buoyant version of them all.
The acting is top-tier, the musical numbers are arresting, the dialogue is as good as this sort of thing gets, and it’s a truly authentic time-tunnel experience (except for the “presentism” in the casting, which is par for the course these days).
Peter Dinklage has absolutely hit the jackpot with his titular performance — he’ll definitely be Best Actor-nominated. The film will almost certainly end up being Best Picture-nominated, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the year-end consensus is that Cyrano is a “better” musical than Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story and Jon Chu‘s In The Heights combined.
Based on Schmidt’s 2018 stage musical of the same name (in which Dinklage and Haley Bennett costarred before moving onto the film version), Cyrano is easily Wright’s best film since Anna Karenina. Seamus McGarvey‘s exquisite cinematography reminded me of David Watkins‘ lensing of Richard Lester‘s The Three Musketeers (’73) — it’s a real trip just to watch and sink into on a visual level alone.
Kudos to Cyrano costars Kelvin Harrison Jr., Bashir Salahuddin and Ben Mendelsohn.
I have to get up early so that’s that. Four films — Belfast, TheVelvetUnderground, TheFrenchDispatch, KingRichard — slated for tomorrow. I might even fit in a fifth — SpeerGoestoHollywood at 1 pm.
During the first 45 to 50 minutes of The Woman in the Window (Netflix, now streaming) I was saying to myself “hey, this isn’t all that bad…it’s smart, absorbing, carefully composed, shot and cut in fine style and generally kinda nifty.”
Right from the get-go you can feel the presence of Joe Wright, the clever British director who also delivered the audacious Anna Karenina, along with the propulsion of what seems at first like a well-jiggered script, mostly written by Tracy Letts and later tweaked by Tony Gilroy.
There’s also a delicate but highly charged lead performance by Amy Adams, and a dishy one-scene cameo by Julianne Moore. Plus the Hitchcockian references (Rear Window, Spellbound) and hallucinatory flickerings. It’s really quite the package. Until it changes into something else.
I was troubled, I admit, by a weird early scene in which Adams, a wine-sipping, pill-popping, 40something agoraphobic therapist named Anna who lives in a three-story townhouse, is visited by a troubled teenager, Ethan (Fred Heichinger).
Ethan is the son of a bickering, tempestuous couple, Alistair and Jane Russell (Gary Oldman, Julianne Moore), who’ve just moved in across the street, and Anna watches them rant and rave right through their undraped windows. Once Ethan, bearing a small gift from his mom, introduces himself and starts talking jibber-jabbering with Anna, you’re asking himself “is this kid some kind of psycho nutjob? Why’s he so fucking hyper? There’s something Norman Batesy about this guy.”
You’re also asking yourself why Moore is (seemingly) playing a character named Jane Russell. Is there another across-the-street neighbor named Gary Cooper and one around the block named Bob Mitchum? Letts plays Anna’s therapist…what’s his name, Cary Grant?
Spoilers: Anyway I sat up in my seat and began to imagine that the critically panned WomanintheWindow might have been misjudged and was actually kinda trippy, as it is during the first 45 or 50.
But then it falls through a trap door when everyone gangs up on Anna/Adams and she folds and confesses to being a delusional fantasist. Another way of putting it is that TheWomanintheWindow suddenly jumps off a cliff. It goes NUTS. And the climactic third-act scene when a steely-eyed Ethan returns with a knife is CRAY-CRAY.
The problem, in short, is not how Joe Wright directed it — it’s the crazilyshiftingscript. I know Gilroy’s work fairly well, and I know he’s fairly incapable of writing cray-cray so I guess he was stuck between a rock and a hard place and had no choice. It must have been rough on the poor guy.