Oscar-nominated feature No by director Pablo Larraín starring Gael García Bernal are among the ten Galas that will screen at the 30th Miami International Film Festival. The ten-day fest will host 117 features and 12 shorts from 41 countries with an emphasis on films from Latin America.
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Is the influx of advertising necessarily bad for democracy? The Chilean film No suggests the answer is a qualified, well, no. And damned if the new trailer doesn't make you feel stuff, and junk, about the right of the people to self-government.
In 1988, Augusto Pinochet had ruled Chile as a dictator for 15 years and was, for the first time, facing an actual election. Of course, the Chilean constitution (drafted by the ruling junta in 1978) was largely an ex post facto justification for Pinochet's continual power; it provided for an 8-year long 'transition' beginning in 1980, during which Pinochet would help the country prepare to resume 'democratic' rule, at the end of which the junta would select a candidate to officially run for the office of President. When '88 rolled around, the junta magically decided that Pinochet was the right man for the job, and the plebiscite held in accordance with the constitution was worded in a way that almost guaranteed he would win.
The ballot asked only if the proposed candidate be rejected or accepted. Yes meant 8 more years of Pinochet and the Junta, 'no' meant new elections in early 1989, including the reestablishment of a national parliament. This wording made it easy for the junta to portray keeping Pinochet as the positive choice. Amazingly, the Chilean people voted against Pinochet's clumsy attempt to play Emperor Augustus anyway, and because the US wasn't interested in interfering in local politics anymore, he was forced to accept the results and step down. 'No', Chile's official selection for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, chronicles the battle to convince Chile to vote Pinochet out of office, using modern advertising techniques in lieu of impassioned populist rhetoric.
The last year of the 1980s is largely remembered for the revolutions of 1989, when the end of the Cold War became a fait accompli with the sudden rash of (mostly) nonviolent uprisings that ended the Soviet-backed dictatorships of eastern Europe. Less widely commemorated, but no less important, was the end of a particularly brutal Western-backed dictatorship the year before. No finally sheds a light on success. It's directed by Pablo Larrain, and stars Gael Garcia Bernal, Alfredo Castro, Antónia Zegers, Luis Dnecco, Marcial Tafle, Nastor Cantillana, Jaime Vadell, Pascal Montero.
No opens in wide release on February 15, 2013.
Aviation and music tycoon Sir Richard Branson and his son Sam Branson are no fans of the War on Drugs and they're hoping a new film that they launched on YouTube will do for their cause what An Inconvenient Truth did for the issue of global warming.
Produced through the younger Branson's production company, Sundog Pictures, Breaking the Taboo features a host of notables including former U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter and Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, other former world leaders as well as experts and other household names in a doc hoping to change hearts and minds about the global war on drugs.
Clinton is shown in the trailer saying the War on Drugs, which has cost billions and jailed thousands in the U.S. alone, "hasn't worked."
Morgan Freeman narrates the English version of the pic, the trailer of which opens with Richard Nixon's proclamation ushering in the U.S. War on Drugs. Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal narrates the Spanish version of the film, which has its trailer available on YouTube. The site indicated the full-length Breaking the Taboo will bow December 7th.
"I am hoping in the same way that Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth opened people's eyes to global warming issues…, Branson told The Guardian. This film will open people's eyes on the war on drugs and the failed war on drugs and make it easier for people who want to be brave and do something about it."
Sam Branson said the film will head to YouTube because of its "potential to reach millions. Both Branson look to countries such as Portugal and Spain where drug users receive treatment as opposed to jail time as providing an example. Sir Richard calls the legalization of marijuana as "inevitable" and added that most in power secretly agree with him.
"I have hardly ever come across a politician that won't say – off the record – what needs to be done...in the end they just need to be brave."
Washington and Colorado voted to legalize marijuana in the most recent election and the U.N. general assembly voted to hold a special session on drugs in 2016. Obama is also seen in the film before being elected saying that a change is needed, though he has held the line on decriminalization earlier this year.
"We would be hopeful that in a second term Obama intends at the very least to start treating drugs as a healthcare problem, not a criminal problem," said Sir Richard Branson.
Check out the trailer below:
[Source: The Guardian]
In Julia Loktev's The Loneliest Planet, Gael García Bernal and relative newcomer Hani Furstenberg (Yossi & Jagger) play a young engaged couple backpacking through the Caucasus Mountains in the former Soviet republic of Georgia the summer before their wedding. Their stunning journey is guided by a local villager, but the vast terrain crowds an emotional upheaval that threatens to tear down their promising life together. Loktev spoke with ML about her own visit to the country that inspired the film which has won praise at festivals this year and is headed into theatrical and VOD release this weekend. The making of The Loneliest Planet was a journey unto itself though everyone on board was determined to make it all happen.
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Compact and athletic in their identical cargo pants, Alex (Gael García Bernal) and Nica (Hani Furstenberg) are almost the same size, a pair of well-traveled pixies making their way through Georgia (the country, not the state). They're engaged to be married, but in the meantime they're backpacking, a journey that, when The Loneliest Planet begins, is about to take them into the Caucasus Mountains on a multi-day hike for which they've hired a guide named Dato (Bidzina Gujabidze). They look so happy and free, Nica and Alex, trying out the few phrases of Georgian they've picked up and partaking of local street food after a minor investigation as to what kind of meat it involves. They're the opposite of ugly Americans (Alex might not actually be American at all), ready to try anything and quietly confident that they'll be welcomed, that the world is meant to be explored.
The third film from Julia Loktev (Day Night Day Night) and, by this critic's reckoning, one of the finest of the year, The Loneliest Planet is based on a short story by Tom Bissell that's itself inspired by a famous Hemingway work, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. That earliest incarnation of this narrative is about a wealthy couple on a hunting trip in Africa lead by a professional guide, the wife a beautiful, emasculating figure who punishes her husband for a recent display of cowardice out in the bush. Bissell offered up a less toxic, contemporized take on the characters, but Loktev's version is something else again, a profoundly cinematic exploration of the way a single incident completely unsettles the way this man and woman think of each other and themselves.
The Loneliest Planet is primarily a three-person drama, and its eventual deep emotional turmoil and the power shifts that come with it play out not in speech but in behavior, submerged in everything from the withholding of physical contact to the formation in which the trio of hikers walks. The splintering incident, which takes place at the midpoint of the film, is in fact never discussed, though it reverberates throughout everything that follows. It's a frightening but relatively minor thing that comes complete with a punchline, the kind of story you'd get mileage out of at a dinner party, but what it reveals about Alex and, eventually, Nica, is such that the couple stumbles through the hours after in a state of shock.
The Loneliest Planet was made with an intoxicating and precise faith in the ability of images to convey feelings that words would be too clumsy and blunt to appropriately delineate. Its sophistication in its storytelling isn't minimalism, exactly - the film never feels like it's making a gimmick of its stretches of silence or choosing them over exchanges of dialog, but rather makes it clear that speech is unnecessary or inadequate. The film's giant in scope, set against gorgeous wilderness, pulling back for periodic long shots in which the characters are tiny beside the splendid scenery. But its dramas are claustrophobic, defined in part by the presence of Dato as the outsider witnessing this implosion, the three always in each other's company as they make their way over rocky and grassy terrain and break to camp for the night.
Loktev, working with cinematographer Inti Briones, allows the film to flow out in long takes, the camera another impassive observer, sometimes still and other times tracking alongside the trio as they walk. The unbroken shots demand very intimate performances - Bernal and Furstenberg both have interesting, mobile faces that are allowed to occupy the frame for unhurried beats. Furstenberg, with her bright red hair and gap teeth, is a goofily unconventional beauty, and Bernal's at his best like this, when he allows his handsomeness to be accompanied by a note of shiftiness. He and Furstenberg suggest their characters' whole history together in easy shorthand, from the game they make of conjugating verbs in Spanish to the way they settle in to read Knut Hamsun at night in their tent.
They aren't smug, but a halo of bohemian sophistication illuminates many of their actions, from Nica's insistence that she doesn't need help navigating a tricky crossing to Alex noting that he doesn't have a car, only a bicycle. As it's put to the test several times in the latter half of the film, it's revealed as a surface quality covering up underlying expectations neither Nica nor Alex may have realized they harbored. Non-pro Gujabidze brings both a dry humor and an almost frightening soulfulness to his character. As Nica drifts to his side, a cowed Alex trails after them, seeking out penance by insisting they needn't stop when he hurts his leg and going out into the rain without a jacket.
Dato's otherness becomes evident and a kind of test, the life he's led so different and so marked by tragedy that he dwarfs Nica and Alex in the privilege they've been able to enjoy, in the existences that have left them unscarred, fresh and unaware. They are, for all their curiosity and adventurousness, just visitors, passing through and taking in these sites and experiences before heading home. For all the film's long silences, it's the opening up and talking that becomes the loneliest moment of them all, a sharp and the sudden reveal of the distance that can exist between two people.
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Also in Wednesday evening's round-up of news briefs, Toronto winner Silver Linings Playbook makes its U.S. move. Christopher Lloyd, Robert Vaughn, and Jerry Stiller set for a fete. And Focus Features unveils its winners for an African film program.
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Rising filmmaker Julia Loktev won the Prix Regards Jeune at Cannes in her first feature, 2006's Day Night Day Night, and nabbed the AFI Grand Jury Prize with her sophomore follow-up, the thriller The Loneliest Planet (in theaters October 26 via Sundance Selects). After the jump, check out Movieline's exclusive debut of the poster for The Loneliest Planet, about a couple (Gael García Bernal and Hani Furstenberg) touring the wilds of the former Soviet Union who find their relationship tested by a random, irrevocable incident.
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Also in Thursday's round-up of news briefs, Tim Robbins is set to take on the director role after long absence. Montreal's genre event the Fantasia Film Festival hands out its awards. And Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal honored at European film event.
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He's made dozens of films since his 2001 breakout Y Tu Mamá También charmed audiences not only at home in Mexico, but also north of the border. Since then he played a priest in The Crime of Father Amaro, acted with the likes of Brad Pitt and Cate Blachett in Babel, a footballer (soccer player) in Rudo Y Cursi and even the revolutionary Ernest "Ché" Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries. But now Gael García Bernal, the Mexican actor/director/producer and even festival founder (he and fellow actor Diego Luna co-founded Mexico's Ambulante Documentary Festival), is playing a more conventional revolutionary of sorts in Pablo Larraín's No, which debuted last May in Cannes and will screen at the Locarno Film Festival, which opens Wednesday.
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Also in Thursday morning's round-up of news briefs, the upcoming Locarno Film Festival will honor Mexican actor Gael García Bernal. Is Warner Bros. taking on Instagram in the photo-sharing race? Also, some analysis offered up on today's Emmy noms and Gwyneth Paltrow takes on a foodie indie.
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Also in Wednesday morning's news round up, Warner Bros. is taking a cue from Marvel's Avengers with its own superhero lineup, a J.D. Salinger adaptation is in the make for the big screen, a Frozen thriller pick up for North America and the rising fortunes of non-U.S. actors as big budget films target international markets.
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Also in Tuesday morning's news round up: Icon will produce Lee Daniels' next project, James McAvoy and Jessica Chastain team for a double-feature, Zac Efron and Seth Rogen will pair for a new project, and more...
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The old-fashioned cancer weeper — a genre that includes pictures like Love Story, Brian’s Song, and the gold standard of chemocathartic melodrama, Terms of Endearment — has been in short supply these days, maybe because nakedly manipulative tearjerking is a hard sell with modern audiences. Jonathan Levine tried to freshen the genre with last year’s 50/50 and pulled it off with reasonably effective results, thanks largely to the unassuming charisma of his star, Joseph Gordon-Levitt: You don’t want to see anyone get cancer, but you particularly don’t want to see Joseph Gordon-Levitt get cancer. You may not want to see Kate Hudson get cancer, either, as her character does in A Little Bit of Heaven. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to like her. The tiniest bit of Hudson’s wrinkly-crinkly cuteness goes a long way, and in A Little Bit of Heaven, watching her waste away becomes slow torture. She’s like an adorbs Camille.
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For a movie with a comedic premise this simple – essentially: can you believe we made a movie with a premise this simple? – Casa de Mi Padre can feel pretty exhausting. Its comic arsenal is laid bare by the end of the credits sequence: There is Will Ferrell playing a Mexican ranchero and speaking Spanish; Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal as narco peacocks; telenovela melodrama played absurdly straight; self-conscious B-budget goofing; and plenty of guns and flames for ambiance. Are you not entertained?
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Maybe I'm still annoyed nearly ten years after I saw Anchorman in theaters and was so angry with its juvenile, unfunny, dude-baiting humor that I'm sour to any movie whose theme is "Will Ferrell is a hilariously alpha dimwit!" -- but I'm pretty sure Ferrell's new jam Casa de mi Padre with Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna is downright moronic for real. In fact, the sophisticated-sounding title isn't a good fit for the film (though it is written entirely in Spanish) and ought to be replaced. Here are nine titles we'd consider, along with the movie's new teaser trailer.
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