Eyes Wide Open, Heart on Hold

As we wilt from the summer heat, a cool autumn breeze flows through the cinematic community by way of the major film festivals that have announced the movies they will showcase. The 71st Venice International Film Festival takes place from August 27th to 6th September 2014; the 39th annual 2014 Toronto Film Festival takes place September 4 to the 14^th; and the 52nd New York Film Festival follows on September 26 to October 12th.

Michael Keaton in Birdman - Willem Dafoe in Pasolini - Isaac & Chastain in A Most Violent Year 

Just reading the titles, directors, actors and topics covered by the films showcased in these festival gives us film lovers the air we need to make it through the doldrums produced by the summer blockbusters!  The films are a little tilted towards parading famous late forty to early seventy year old male actors, but otherwise, there seems to be a bit every type of genre lover.  Here’s a taste of the goodies (we hope) to come:

Title	Director	Featuring	Plot
Big Eyes	Tim Burton	Amy Adams, Christopher Waltz, Jason Schwartzman	The story of painter Margaret Keane
Pasolini	Abel Ferrara	Willem Dafoe	A look at the final days of director Pier Paolo Pasolini
Inherent Vice	Paul Thomas Anderson	Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Benicio del Toro	The investigation of a former girlfriend.
Miss Julie	Liv Ullman	Colin Farrell and Jessica Chastain	Adaptation of the Strindberg play
The Equalizer	Antoine Fuqua	Denzel Washington	Kidnap drama
Birdman	Alejandro González Iñárritu	Michael Keaton	An actor who once played a superhero mounts a Broadway play
A Most Violent Year	JC Chandor	Oscar Isaacs, Jessica Chastain, David Oyelowo	Thriller set in NY in 1981.
A Little Chaos	Alan Rickman	Alan Rickman, Kate Winslet and Stanley Tucci	Period piece about King Louis XIV
The Reach	Jean-Baptiste Léonetti	Michael Douglas	A thriller about a ruthless businessman who tries to cover up a homicide while on safari
The Drop	Michaël R. Roskam	James Gandolfini, Tom Hardy and Noomi Rapace	A robbery gone awry and entwined with the past of a neighborhood
The Humbling	Barry Levinson	Al Pacino, Greta Gerwig	Relationship between an aged, suicidal actor and a younger woman
Time Out of Mind	Oren Moverman	Richard Gere	A homeless, drunken man tries to reconnect with his daughter
Love & Mercy	Bill Polhad	Paul Dano	A Beach Boys biopic
Good Kill	Andrew Niccol	Ethan Hawke, January Jones	A soldier questioning his work dispatching drones to Afghanistan
This Is Where I Leave You	Shawn Levi	Rose Byrne, Jason Bateman	A husband juggling bereavement and infidelity
The Judge	David Dobkin	Robert Downey Jr., Robert Duval	A man trying to clear his father of a homicide
Black and White	Mike Binder	Kevin Costner and Octavia Spencer	A custody battle over their grandson
Nightcrawler	Dan Gilroy	Jake Gyllenhaal	A crime drama set in LA
Pawn Sacrifice	Edward Zwick	Live Schreiber, Peter Sarsgaard, Tobey Maguire	A movie about chess master Bobby Fischer
While We’re Young	Noah Baumbach	Ben Stiller, Amanda Syefried	A documentary filmmaker and his wife who befriend a younger couple
The Theory of Everything	James Marsh	Eddie Redmayne	A Stephen Hawking biopic
The Imitation Game	Morten Tyldum	Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley	A biopic about enigma code breaker Alan Turin
Samba	Olivier Nakache	Charlotte Gainsbourgh	Senegal
Men, Women and Children	Jason Reitman	Adam Sandler and Emma Thompson	A sexually frustrated father
Still Alice	Richard Glatzer	Julianne Moore and Kristen Stewart	A movie dealing with early onset Alzheimer’s
Cake	Daniel Barnz	Anna Kendrick and Jennifer Aniston	A chronic pain support group
Mangelhorn	David Gordon Green	Al Pacino	A locksmith and love
Trash	Stephen Daldry	Martin Sheen, Rooney Mara	Set in the third world, three children discover something in a garbage dump.
Fury	David Ayer	Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf	World war II
Into the Woods	Rob Marshall	Johnny Depp, Emily Blunt	A witch
Unbroken	Angelina Jolie (written by Joel and Ethan Coen)	Jack O’Connell	Louis Zamperini, an Olympic runner who was taken prisoner by Japanese forces during World War II.
Far from the Madding Crowd	Thomas Vinterberg	Thomas Hardy, David Nichols	Remake of 1967 movie
Gone Girl	David Fincher	Ben Affleck	Based on the best-selling crime novel

Pacino in The Humbling and Manglehorn

Endless Journey

It’s really not difficult to understand why movies that deal with abysmal social and economic inequalities take place in a dystopian future and are surrounded by fantasy. Would a billion dollar industry as happily question its own if this wasn't the case? And who would pay to see what is easily and increasingly visible in our own backyard?

Snowpiercer is a movie that joins a growing number of sci-fi films that address the power and privilege of the extremely wealthy at the expense of the many lost in a day-to-day struggle for survival within their grim and violent lives. It is more Elysium, Brazil or Soylent Green in its darkness and graphic violence than The Hunger Games, but the story is the same: the “revolutionary” born of despair and deprivation, in this case Curtis, surprisingly well played by an unrecognizable Chris Evans (none other than he who played Captain America) and his quest for social justice. In most cases, the anti-hero is overpowered by the inhumane system, unless it is a PG13 movie in which case the heroine succeeds, but still at an enormous cost.

Chris Evans, Luke Pasqualino, Ah-sung Ko in Snowpiercer

They may be science fiction, but these are cautionary tales for those willing to listen. Snowpiercer takes it one step further because it adds the environmental warning to that of social injustice. In our despair to address global warming, the film tells us, humans have engineered a planetary catastrophe that creates a second ice age and the only human survivors that aren't frozen to death are trapped on a train that has also been engineered to never stop moving.

The fact that this implausible story grasps our attention and creates an enormous amount of breath-holding tension is due to the very skilled directing of Bong Joon-ho. This is the South Korean director’s first English language film, but he is known to American audiences for two of his eleven films, The Host and Mother. A light director he is not.

The movie is based on a French graphic novel called Le Transperceneige. The human survivors on the train are divided according to class, with the very poor living in nightmarish squalor and violence in the back of the train and, many, many carriages away, in the front live the privileged few in all their wealthy excess.

The amazing set design is part of what glues us to the screen, but only because we are also held there by the actors in this film. Chris Evans, we've already mentioned, holds his own as he purposefully leads the charge to take the engine room, carriage by bloody carriage. He is joined by a remarkable Tilda Swinton, the spokesperson for the very wealthy, who to the teeth and accent reminds us of another voice of the rich, Dame Margaret Thatcher.  Interesting to note that in Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium the “keeper of the rich” is also a woman, Delacourt, played by Jodie Foster. Evans and Swinton are joined by John Hurt, Jamie Bell, Ed Harris, Go Ah-sung, Kang-ho Sung, Octavia Spencer, all noteworthy actors who take us for the nightmarish ride on this ghastly train.

Tilda Swinton - Jodie Foster

I sometimes find it hard to recommend such a movie as this because it is not a pleasant film to watch, in this case also because of the violence, but, as always, more so because we are able to recognize that we are seeing a thinly veiled representation, masked in science fiction, of a very real and growing global divide between the very wealthy and the despairing poor. This movie is not easy to walk away from untouched. Neither was Terry Gillliam’s Brazil in 1985, Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green back in 1973, or Fritz Lang’s Metropolis way back in 1927. Are we forever trapped in this never ending tale of woe?

 

Brazil - Metropolis