The Distributors: Cohen Media Group / Circuit Breaker Fall Film Guesses #2 / Telluride History: TFF #23

THE DISTRIBUTORS: COHEN MEDIA GROUP

One of the recent hard chargers at Telluride in terms of distribution firms that have made a splash is the Cohen Media Group.

CMG's history at Telluride:

2012-The Attack
2014-Magician
2015-Hitchcock/Truffaut, Marguerite, Rams
2016-Journey Through French Cinema

And CMG has a number of possible players for the 2017 edition of the Telluride Film Festival:

Francois Ozon's L'amant Double
Michel Hazanavicius' Redoubtable
Christian Carion's Mon Garcon
and even Pappi Corsicato's Julian Schnabel: A Private Portrait.

Of the four, the chances for L'amant Double and Redoubtable are virtually indistinguishable.  Both played Cannes with modset-to-good reviews.  Redoubtable's metascore-67, L'amant Double's 64.  Both directors have made a splash at previuos Tellurides.  Hazanavicius being more notable with Oscar Best Picture winner The Artist in 2011.  Ozon was at Telluride last year with Frantz.

I'm givng Redoubtable a slight edge with a 50% chance to SHOW.  L'Amant Double goes in at 45%.

As to Carion's Mon Garcon, I include it here as CMG is calling it a 2017 release and Carion's 2009 TFF film, Farewell, is enough to make me think it should be considered.  Give it a 30% chance.

FInally, despite the fact that Cosicato's Julian Schnabel documentary has played in the U.S. at Tribeca, it might end up at Telluride anyway.  The inclusion of Tribeca films in the T-ride lineup isn't frequent  but has happened more than once: Peggy Guggenheim in 2015, Keep On Keepin' On in 2014 and My Dior in 2013.

Schnabel's poster for TFF #29

Additionally, Schnabel has had a TFF history as poster artist in 2002 and presenting his fantastic The Diving Bell and the Butterfly in 2007.  So I wouldn't rule this film out even though it played Tribeca.




CIRCUIT BREAKER FALL FILM GUESSES #2

A week ago (June 19) I posted the link to Awards Circuit's Circuit Breaker podcast because they included a rundown of some guesses about where films might be headed to film festivals.

This week;s podcast includes another segment about the same topic.  The nearly half hour segment includes mentions of a couple of dozen films and those that are mentioned as having some possibility for Telluride (by at least one of the participants) are:

The Darkest Hour
Suburbicon
Downsizing
Battle of the Sexes
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
The Snowman
Stronger

The complete podcast can be heard here.  The discussion of fall film fest plays begins approximately at the 47:20 mark.


TELLURIDE HISTORY: TFF #23

Here's another installment of my on-going and fairly sporadic review of the history of the Telluride Film Festival.  Today a look at #23 which occurred  from Aug.30-Sept. 2, 1996.

Guest Director: B. Ruby Rich

Tributes: Shirley MacLaine, Mike Leigh, Alain Cavalier

SHOWS:

Actress
Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life
Beautiful Thing
Ben Johnson: Third Cowboy on the Right

Breaking the Waves
Cardiogram
Carmen's Pure Love
The Cloud Capped Star
Daisies
Drifting Clouds
Fly Away Home
Forgotten Silver
Gabbeh

Irma Vep
Kolya
La Recontre
Le Ciel est a Vous
Le Samuorai
Le Trou
Lillian's Story
Message to Love
Microcosmos
Riot
Secrets and Lies
Self Made Hero

Sling Blade
Swingers
Therese
Twelfth Night
Two Eyes, Twelve Hands
The Unknown

Guests:

Olivier Assasyas
Jacques Audiard
Carroll Ballard
Harry Carey, Jr.
Maggie Cheung
Jon Favreau
Don Hertzfeldt
Werner Herzog
Mike Leigh
Doug Liman
Leonard Maltin
Shirley MacLaine
Trevor Nunn
John Ritter
Stellan Skarsgaard
Billy Bob Thornton
Warwick Thornton
Vince Vaughn
Emily Watson


Of particular note were the short films from Warwick Thornton (Payback, now called From Sand to Celluloid: Payback) and Julie Delpy (Blah Blah Blah) both making their directing debuts and Don Hertzfeldt with his second short (Genre).

That's your Thursday from MTFB.

Come back tomorrow for 2017's first Ten Bets.

EMAIL:  mpgort@gmail.com OR michael_speech@hotmail.com

TWITTER @Gort2 (and follow me there as well)

FACEBOOK Message me on FB MTFB's Facebook Page

COMMENT to the BLOG

Wonderstruck Will Strike in October / First Look at Haneke's Happy End / Redoutable Teaser Gets Meta / The Future for Past Telluriders / Amazon Rewards Manchester

Welcome to Thursday on MTFB...



WONDERSTRUCK WILL STRIKE IN OCTOBER

The case for Todd Haynes being a Telluride contender got another supportive piece of evidence yesterday as the peeps at Amazon and Roadside Attractions, who have paired to distribute the film, have announced a limited release date of October 20th.   The film will then proceed to be opened wider in November.

It wasn't long yesterday before journos pointed out that that time frame has served as the launchpad for four of the last five Oscar BP winners: Argo 10/12/12, 12 Years a Slave 10/18/13, Birdman 10/17/14, and Moonlight 10/21/16.  Only Spotlight has broken that pattern opening on 11/6/15.  Of course, all of those films played Telluride on their way to the Best Picture prize.

Honestly, when I get serious about posting a rough first guess at what will make the T-ride 2017 lineup, Wonderstruck might be the film on the top of that list.

Linked below is coverage of the release announcement from:

Variety

Indiewire

Awards Watch

The Playlist

The Wrap



FIRST LOOK AT HANEKE'S HAPPY END

Another film that will be in the hunt for the Cannes' Palme d'Or in a couple of weeks (and it could be an unprecedented third for its director...lots of predictors think that's a very real possibility) is Michael Haneke's Happy End.  Haneke hasn't made a film since his last Palme winner in 2012.  Amour also won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

We got our first photo from the secretive film yesterday as you see above.  The still shows, among others Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Toby Jones.  Further coverage of the image and the film is here from Indiwire and here from The Playlist.



REDOUBTABLE TEASER GETS META

This week we got a new glimpse of Michel Hazanavicius' newest film, Redoubtable, which is set to debut at Cannes this month in the Palme d'Or competition.  The teaser includes some references to the festival that should elicit a chuckle or two.  Check the teaser below (from YouTube):

Redoubtable is based on the life of film pioneer Jean-Luc Godard.

More on the teaser release for Redoubtable is here from Entertainment Weekly as well as here from The Playlist.

THE FUTURE FOR PAST TELLURIDERS

I've mentioned with some frequency the next project for Moonlight's Barry Jenkins which is the multi-part adaptation of Colson Whitehead's National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winning
Underground Railroad for Amazon Studios.

In the last few days we have seen the plans of two other notable and recent past Telluriders come into focus.

Indiewire reports that Oscar winning director Damien Chazelle is lining up another musically oriented project.  The story was originally reported by The Hollywood Reporter.

Titled The Eddy, the story centers around a Paris music club.  As with Jenkins, the project is being set up as an episodic project and is being shopped around to streaming services and networks.  Reports suggest that Chazelle would direct his next feature film project, First Man starring Ryan Reynolds as Neil Armstrong, and then get to work on The Eddy.

The other news of note regarding a new project involving a recent Tellurider and Oscar winner was news yesterday that Laszlo Nemes is set to begin filming Sunset.  Nemes made a huge splash in 2015 with his debut film Son of Saul which played Cannes (winning Nemes the Grand Prix award) and then Telluride.  Son of Saul went on to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Film.

The Playlist reports  that Sunset will begin filming next month and that the plan is that it would play Cannes which would make it a prime TFF #45 possibility.

Stay tuned.


AMAZON REWARDS MANCHESTER

How do you say thank you to a community that serves as the backdrop and title of your Oscar award winning film (and TFF #43 selection)?

Amazon Studios has gifted the citizens of Manchester, Massachusetts a year's worth of free Amazon Prime memberships.  They even threw in the popcorn.

Amazon announced the gift this week according to The Hollywood Reporter.



And that will do it for this Thursday.  Have a good weekend and come back here Monday for more...

EMAIL:  mpgort@gmail.com OR michael_speech@hotmail.com

TWITTER @Gort2 (and follow me there as well)

FACEBOOK Message me on FB MTFB's Facebook Page

COMMENT to the BLOG

Cannes #70 Lineup Revealed / Re-visiting TFF #32

Good morning on this Cannes Thursday.

CANNES #70 LINEUP REVEAL

The announcement came in the very early hours this morning.  The Cannes 2017 lineup...the majority at any point.  Here is what was announced:

OPENING NIGHT FILM

Ismael’s Ghosts (Desplechin)

PALME D’OR COMPETITION FILMS:

Loveless (Zvyaginstev)

Good Time (Safdie and Safdie)

You Were Never Really Here (Ramsay)

A Gentle Creature (Loznitsa)

Jupiter’s Moon (Mundruczo)

L’Amant Double (Ozon)

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Lanthimos)

Radiance (Kawase)

The Day After (Hong Sang-soo)

Le Redoubtable (Hazanavicius)

Wonderstruck (Haynes)

Rodin (Doillon)

Happy End (Haneke)

The Beguiled (Coppola)

120 Battlements Par Minute (Campillo)

Okja (Bong Joon-ho)

In the Fade (Akin)

The Meyerowitz Stories (Baumbach)

UN CERTAIN REGARD SECTION:

Barbara (Amalric)

The Desert Bride (Atan and Pivato)

Closeness (Balagov)

Beauty and the Dogs (Ben Hania)

L’Atelier (Cantet)

Lucky (Castellitto)

April’s Daughter (Franco)

Western (Griesbach)

Directions (Komanderev)

Out (Kristof)

Before We Vanish (Kurosawa)

The Nature of Time (Moussaoui)

Dregs (Rasoulof)

Juene Femme (Seraille)

Wind River (Sheridan)

After the Road (Zambrano)

OUT OF COMPETITION

Blade of the Immortal (Miike)

How to Talk to Girls at Parties (Mitchell)

Visages Villages (Varda)

SPECIAL SCREENINGS

An Inconvenient Sequel (Cohen and Shenk)

12 Jours (Depardon)

They (Ghazvinizadeh)

Clair’s Camera (Hong Sang-soo)

Promised Land (Jarecki)

Napalm (Lanzmann)

Demons in Paradise (Ratman)

Sea Sorrow (Redgrave)

SPECIAL SCREENING EVENTS

Twin Peaks (Lynch)

24 Frames (Kiarostami)

Come Swim (Stewart)

Top of the Lake: China Girl (Campion and Klieman)

Carne y arena (Inarritu)

MIDNIGHT SCREENINGS

The Villainess (Jung Byung-Gil)

The Merciless (Byun Sung-Hyun)

And the Telluride implications...

A number of Palme competition titles jump out as potential T-ride crossovers:

Todd Haynes Wonderstruck

Lynne Ramsay's You Were Never Really Here

Andrey Zvyasinstev's Loveless

Michel Hazanavicius' Redoutable

Michael Haneke's Happy End 

Noah Baumbach's The Meyerowitz Stories

Among the other categories few titles are catching my eye.  Maybe Mathieu Amalric's Barabra and Laurence Cantet's L'Atelier among the UCR section.  AMong the Special Screenings The Vanessa Redgrave directed Sea Sorrow interests me as does Alejandro Inarritu's Carne y arena.

Other titles will be added soon.

As regular readers know, the Cannes/Telluride crossover averages between seven and eight films each year.  Last year there were seven titles that played both fests including Graduation and Toni Erdmann.

Here is Cannes election coverage from:

The Film Stage

Indiewire

Variety

 RE-VISITING TFF #32

I started this with my last post and here is the promised continuation with detail of the 2005 32nd Telluride Film Festival.  It's my first stab at creating a more detailed history of the festival using programs that I have just recently acquired.

Guest Director:

Don DeLillo

Shows:

Army of Shadows
Be With Me
Bee Season
Breakfast on Pluto
Brokeback Mountain
Cache
Capote
Chang
The Child
The Comedian
Conversations With Other Women
A Cottage on Dartmoor
Edmond
Everything is Illuminated
Fateless
I'm King Kong
Iron Island
Johanna
King Kong
Lemming
Live and Become
The Lost City
The Moon and the Son
Le Monde Vivant
Paradise Now
The Passenger
Les Pont des Arts
The President's Last Bang
Sisters in Law
Spirit of the Beehive
Touts les Nuits
Three Times
Walk the Line
Wanda

Tributes:

Charlotte Rampling
Mickey Rooney
Luc Dardennes
Jean-Pierre Dardennes


Guests:

William H. Macy
Michael Haneke
Liev Schreiber
Bennett Miller
Philip Seymour Hoffman
Catherine Keener
Helena Bonham-Carter
Aaron Eckhart
Andy Garcia
Leonard Maltin
Neil Jordan
James Mangold

The Student Prints section included a 14 min. film entitled Victoria Para Chino from a young director named Cary Fukunaga.



More on Monday...

EMAIL:  mpgort@gmail.com OR michael_speech@hotmail.com

TWITTER @Gort2 (and follow me there as well)

FACEBOOK Message me on FB MTFB's Facebook Page

COMMENT to the BLOG

A Tease for Redoubtable / Larrain's Next Project / Oscar Takes a Week Off

It's the first Thursday in April and welcome my friends...

A TEASE FOR REDOUBTABLE

There seems to be a lot of buzz prior to a possible Cannes announcement for Michel Hazanavicius' Redoubtable.  The film tells the true story of the love affair of a young Jean-Luc Godard.  The film stars Louis Garrel as Godard and Berenice Bejo (as you might expect in a Hazanavicius film) as well.

Here' the teaser with English subtitles from YouTube:

Additionally, here is The Playlist post that covered the release of the trailer as well as additional coverage from The Film Stage.   StudioCanal is distributing the film in France and as yet it has no U.S. distribution.

LARRAIN'S NEXT PROJECT

Pablo Larrain (via Variety)

Pablo Larrain has had a good Telluride run over the past few years with the selections of No for the lineup in 2012 and Neruda last year.  Larrain also produced the Sebastian Lelio film Gloria which screened in Telluride's 2013 edition.   He also produced Lelio's A Fantastic Woman which played to acclaim at Berlin earlier this year winning the prize for Best Screenplay and is a hot prospect, in my estimation, to make the TFF #44 lineup.

As a consequence, if you're a Telluride watcher, you should probably pay attention to any news about him.  So when I saw this week that he has signed onto his next directing gig, I took notice.  

Larrain is set to direct The True American.  It's a true story based on events that transpired immediately after 9/11.  The film has had Tom Hardy attached and was, at one time, a project that Kathryn Bigelow was to direct.

The film is being produced by Megan Ellison's Annapurna Pictures.

Can you say "TFF #45"?

Here are the details from Variety, as well as Indiewire and from ComingSoon.net.

OSCAR TAKES A WEEK OFF

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have announced that Oscar will show up a week later in 2018 than it did this year.  The Oscars will be presented on Mar. 4, 2018.  Nominations will be announced Tuesday, Jan. 23rd.

The Academy also announced Oscar dates for 2019, 2020 and 2021 with the ceremony reverting back to the last weekend in February for each of those years.

The date change for 2018 is being done so as not to conflict with the conclusion of the Winter Olympics in South Korea.

Here's links to coverage of The Oscar announcement from Awards Daily and from Indiewire.

There's your Thursday post from MTFB.  Come back Monday for more.

EMAIL:  mpgort@gmail.com OR michael_speech@hotmail.com

TWITTER @Gort2 (and follow me there as well)

FACEBOOK Message me on FB MTFB's Facebook Page

COMMENT to the BLOG

Downsizing and Suburbicon at CinemaCon / Cannes #70 Poster Features Claudia / Will Hazanavicius Return? / And from the Hopes and Dreams Dept.

Good Thursday to you.  Here's some film stuff that may or may not have anything to do with TFF #44:


DOWNSIZING AND SUBURBICON AT CINEMACON:  REACTIONS AND RELEASE DATES

George Clooney and Matt Damon at CinemaCon this week (via The Hollywood Reporter)

Both Alexander Payne's Downsizing and George Clooney's Suburbicon have been well received after the Paramount presentation at CinemaCon in Las Vegas this week.

Check here for the reactions coming out of Vegas for these two films which both feature Matt Damon and which could both find the Telluride program in September.

Suburbicon will be released Nov. 3rd.  Downsizing will be released Dec. 22nd.

Variety

The Hollywood Reporter


Here are reactions to the footage of both films that was screened at CinemaCon:

The Hollywood Reporter

The Playlist

The Wrap

Indiewire

CANNES #70 POSTER FEATURES CLAUDIA CARDINALE

There it is.  The official poster for the 2017 edition of the Cannes Film Festival.  The poster features Cannes favorite Claudia Cardinale.  Telluride fans may remember that Cardinale was a tribute recipient in T-ride in 2010.

Here's coverage of the poster selection and reveal from The Film Stage.

Cardinale in Telluride in 2010 (via Getty Images)

WILL HAZANAVICIUS RETURN?

Louis Garrel as Jean-Luc Godard in Redoubtable

His last film, The Search, played Cannes and was drubbed critically and resulted in a rather quiet disappearance and certainly no berth at Telluride but his latest, Redoubtable, which focuses on a real life love story from the life of film pioneer Jean Luc-Goddard has been getting significant pre-Cannes buzz.

Just this last couple of days, we began seeing stories focusing on the film, including some pics (see above).  That indicates to me that Redoubtable is a likely Cannes selection.  We'll find out, in all likelihood, on April 13th when the bulk of the Cannes lineup is announced.


Check out the french teaser  and other details here from Indiwire and here from The Playlist.


AND FROM THE HOPES AND DREAMS DEPT.

PTA via The Film Stage

Here's the latest...Paul Thomas Anderson's new film set in the world of high fashion and starring Daniel Day Lewis has been dated for release on Dec. 25th.  The Film Stage reports that its working title is Phantom Thread.

Insert obligatory note here about its unlikelihood for Telluride (for a number of reasons) as well as the expected wish that it would magically screen there.

Here's the story from The Film Stage.


That's a wrap for this Thursday.  Have a good weekend and come back for more on Monday.


EMAIL:  mpgort@gmail.com OR michael_speech@hotmail.com

TWITTER @Gort2 (and follow me there as well)

FACEBOOK Message me on FB MTFB's Facebook Page

COMMENT to the Blog