With Fall Festival season about to kick off, this week The Rocchi Review features James chatting with Cinematical's Film Festivals Editor Kim Voynar about the strange splendor of the Telluride Film Festival, what the most-anticipated movies will be at this year's Toronto Film Festival and much, much more. Will Zack and Miri Make a Porno make a splash? Will Rachel Getting Married get Anne Hathaway some respect? And does one of the most-anticipated films for Toronto really star Jean-Claude Van Damme? Cinematical's podcast is now available through iTunes; you can subscribe at this link. Also, you can listen directly here at Cinematical by clicking below:



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He grew up in terrible conditions; he directed great movies; his wife was murdered; he fled the country; he made some more good movies. Roman Polanski's life story sounds like it would make a great film, and Marina Zenovich focused on one aspect to make her documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. The film had its World Premiere at Sundance on Friday night, and instantly sparked a bidding war. The Weinstein Co. won, according to Variety.

Anne Thompson's article says that The Weinstein Co. nabbed all international rights and is still on the hunt for domestic rights. You'd think they would have the inside track, but evidently Focus Features is still dueling with the Weinsteins for the US distribution deal.

Zenovich's doc "reveals that justice may not have been served when Polanski was convicted of unlawful intercourse with a minor." Zenovich actually re-opened the case by talking to all the principals, including Polanski's attorney and the trial judge. The director has been in exile from the United States for 30 years. Based on the notoriety of the case, Variety speculates that the doc "will certainly generate media coverage." That may help the doc to break through in the currently-gloomy theatrical market for documentaries. Look for a review of the doc shortly, right here at Cinematical.

UPDATE: Anne Thompson at Variety reports that HBO Documentary Films has secured North American rights in a separate deal that was closed on Saturday night. However, the movie may not get a theatrical release after all; more details in her story.

(Since Juno is now screening in limited release, we're re-publishing Kim's review of the film from Telluride. We'll also publish a new review of the film when it goes wider later this month.)

I've been waiting to see Juno for a long, long time now. I first heard that Jason Reitman was going to be working with Ellen Page on this film shortly before Sundance this year, and I talked briefly to the young actress about Juno at Sundance. At the time, Page was promoting An American Crime; that film, in which she played Sylvia Likens, a young girl brutally murdered while under the care of a foster family, was emotionally wrenching for Page, and she told me then she was looking forward to taking on some lighter fare with Juno, and especially to working with Reitman, who was still riding the waves of success from his feature debut, Thank You for Smoking.

I was lucky enough to get to see Juno at a jam-packed sneak preview here at Telluride today; it was utterly charming in every possible way, and is getting the most positive buzz I've heard about any film so far at the fest. Page stars as Juno, a smart, quirky, 16-year-old girl who, after a sexual encounter with her best friend, Bleeker (Michael Cera), finds herself pregnant. Right from the start, we know this isn't going to be your average "after-school-special" film about a teenager getting knocked up and facing Big Decisions. Scribe Diablo Cody (aka Brooke Busey-Hunt) sets the tone from the opening scene, with tiny Page chugging a gallon of Sunny Delight while she looks at an abandoned easy chair and tells us, "it all started with a chair." Three pregnancy tests later, Juno accepts that she is, in fact, pregnant, and from there has to decide how to handle it.

The ever-astute Anne Thompson, over on her Thompson on Hollywood blog at Variety, has an analysis up of the Oscar buzz around Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood. I've not yet seen the entire film though I did see a 20-minute sneak-peek at Telluride that was more than enough to whet my appetite for the film (Cinematical's Scott Weinberg saw it at Fantastic Fest, much to the jealousy of the rest of our reviewing team) Thompson has seen the film twice now and recommends highly that people see it twice in order to fully digest it.

Thompson recently went to a WGA screening of the film, where the audience gave a standing ovation to director Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis afterward. Day-Lewis is looking like a cinch for an Oscar nom for Best Actor, and I'd be pretty surprised not to see the film get a Best Picture nod as well. What I'm really more interested in is whether Paul Dano gets a nod for his dual role as twins Eli and Paul Sunday. Dano was one of the best parts of Little Miss Sunshine, and in the part of his performance in There Will Be Blood that I caught at Sundance, he more than held his own playing opposite Day-Lewis -- and that's saying something.

There Will Be Blood continues to stand firmly in fifth place on the Oscar watch list for Best Picture over at Movie City News' Gurus o' Gold, with Atonement still pretty firmly in the top slot. Beneath Atonement, the Gurus have No Country for Old Men, American Gangster, and Charlie Wilson's War. Gurus 2.0, in which our own James Rocchi is participating, has four of the five same top films, but has There Will Be Blood up in second place right behind Atonement, followed by No Country for Old Men, American Gangster and Into the Wild.

For some reason (well, partly because I skipped out on going to Toronto this year) I've not seen any of these films save Into the Wild yet, but I'll be catching them all over the next couple weeks as the For Your Consideration screeners flood the mailbox ( I think my DHL guy is convinced I'm into something illegal here -- every day when he brings me yet another package he gives me a weird look -- he just ought to be glad no one is delivering me packages of sexy panties and pigs-head masks like some people).

Cinematical Reviews of Oscar Watch films:

Atonement
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
American Gangster
Into the Wild -- Kim Voynar's Telluride Review
Into the Wild -- James Rocchi's TIFF Review

The Savages, starring Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman as a brother and sister who must deal with their aging, estranged father, Lenny (Philip Bosco) who suffers from dementia and has no memory of the sibs' unhappy childhood. I first caught The Savages back in January at Sundance, and I've seen Jenkins speak about the film a couple times, at Sundance and again at Telluride, when she had in intimate early-morning Conversation with Juno director Jason Reitman. As Jenkins has noted, the storyline of The Savages is a challenging pitch to sell -- there's nothing sexy or alluring about dementia and incontinence.

But for folks like myself who are facing the possibility of caring for our own aging parents (and it will be your turn eventually too, younglings), this honest, often funny look at the issues surrounding elder care, brought to life by actors of the caliber of Linney and Hoffman, makes for a great film.

In the scene shown in the above clip, Jon and Wendy Savage have just walked into a support group for dementia ... where they find themselves feeling more than a little uncomfortable ... watch and enjoy. You can also check out Moviefone's great Unscripted session with Hoffman and Linney and read Cinematical's Sundance review of The Savages, to whet your appetite for the film. The Savages opens November 28 in limited release.

One of my favorite films of the entire year (so far), Juno, just got a bumped up release date of December 5 the other day, and now it has a spandy-new poster, too (click on the image above for an even bigger view of what tiny Ellen Page would look like with a big old pregnant belly. The poster nicely captures the quirky feel of the film (I just LOVE those dorky yellow gym shorts on Michael Cera, don't you?), especially the character of Juno, who's very much a kid in spite of the baby growing inside her.

We've talked a lot about Juno here on Cinematical, and when we pimp a film this much, it's because we think it's something special. If you don't live in NYC or LA, where Juno opens in limited release on December 5, keep an eye out for its arrival in a theater near you. If I could only recommend one film this whole fall season, it would be definitely be Juno. I'm looking for the film to score some Oscar noms -- if I don't see screenwriter Diablo Cody, director Jason Reitman, and Page with noms for this film (and while we're at it, how about a supporting nod for Jennifer Garner?), I'm gonna be seriously annoyed with the Academy come Oscar day,

While you're anxiously pacing the waiting room, kill some time watching the Juno trailer again, or read our Telluride interviews with Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody.

Okay, is this not one of the coolest posters you've seen all year? I simply love the color scheme for this film, and since I'm seeing it tomorrow -- and interviewing writer-directors Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi on Friday -- this poster just totally puts me in the mood for, what some are calling, a shoe-in for an Oscar nod in the Best Foreign Language category. Persepolis, which won the Jury prize at Cannes earlier this year (where our own James Rocchi called it a "masterpiece"), was France's Oscar submission, and rightfully so -- those of us in the Cinematical camp that have seen it will not stop raving. Sony Pictures Classics has sent over the exclusive poster for Persepolis (click on the image for a larger version), which is based on Satrapi's own autobiographical best-selling graphic novels featuring an outspoken Iranian girl who finds her unique attitude and outlook on life repeatedly challenged during the Islamic revolution.

In her Telluride review of the film, Cinematical's Kim Voynar had this to say: "Marjane's story could have been told in a live-action dramatic narrative film, or a documentary, but the choice to stick with this highly stylized animation approach works very well, and has the effect of removing a layer of ethnicity, thereby making the story more universal. This isn't the story of an Iranian girl, it's the story of a girl who lived through eight years of war and societal changes, who happens to be Iranian." Apart from also screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, Persepolis was chosen as the closing night film for this year's New York Film Festival. The film arrives in theaters on Christmas Day.

Ordinarily, I probably wouldn't write about a PBS series on Cinematical, but Ken Burns' The War deserves an exception. The lengthy documentary, which has seven episodes, first caught my attention at Telluride last year, where one of the episodes was shown as a sneak peek. I knew who Burns was, of course -- his previous documentary series -- The Civil War, Baseball, and Jazz -- are noted for their exceptional quality. But still, The War being added to the Telluride schedule seemed to catch folks by surprise.

And then, on the gondola and in line, I started hearing buzz about The War. When I asked people what they'd seen that they liked at the fest, The War was mentioned over and over (usually preceded by, "Well, it's long, but ..."). So when I heard that the DVD set of The War was coming out, I knew I wanted to write it up.

Even if you're not familiar with Ken Burns' work, or you think you're not into war movies, this documentary is so extraordinarily well done that you're bound to find value in it. It is long. Very long. As in, it takes about 14 1/2 hours to get through all seven episodes, and by the time you're done, you're likely to feel like you've been through a war yourself. Burns notes on the 36-minute "Making of" featurette that the production team filmed hundreds of hours of interviews, looked at hundreds of photos, and culled through thousands of hours of archival foootage in pulling together this remarkable project. It's hard to imagine a more comprehensive view of one of the most cataclysmic events ever to impact the world.

The Toronto International Film Festival is over, we have a couple months respite before Sundance, so naturally thoughts turn to the Oscar race. While I'm as curious as anyone else which films will end up garnering the big nod (and I will be really surprised if Juno doesn't get a few noms, especially for screenwriting), as an indie girl I'm most interested in the docs and foreigns. I'm a documentary dork, and one of the things I most look forward to covering at any given film fest is the doc slate -- which, as both David Poland and Anne Thompson have noted in post-Toronto columns, have been weak this year relative to the past couple years. No one really seems to be sure why this is, exactly, although the surprising success of March of the Penguins in 2005 fueled an interest in documentaries that led, perhaps, to a bit of a glut.

The trouble with documentaries is that, penguin love aside, docs are not something your average person is going to go out of their way to shell out ten bucks to see at a theater. Rent from the video store or add to your Netflix queue, perhaps, but when you're looking for a film to see on date night, the depressing topics that tend to make up much of the available documentary fare are not really the first thing that comes to mind. When's the last time you said, "Hey, honey, I know what to do tonight -- let's get dinner at that place over in Little Italy we like, and then let's go see that new Iraq war doc!" Given a choice between a bummer doc and, say, Superbad, most folks are going to opt for the laughs over the conscience-pricking dose of reality.

I first saw Babel at Telluride last year, and I remember how nervous director Alejandro González Iñnáritu was as he introduced the film for one of its first (it may have even been the first) screenings. He talked in his intro about how he set out with Babel to make a film about the ways in which we are different, and ended up making a film about the ways in which we are alike, and how the borders that separate us are less about physical borders between countries, and more about the borders we create within.

Babel's Paramount Vantage 2-Disc Collector's edition comes out today, so if you missed seeing what all the fuss was about during the film's theatrical run (it was nominated for a bevy of Oscars as well), now's your chance to see the film in the comfort of your own home. Babel follows four stories tied loosely together through the common thread of a woman shot by a sniper on a bus in a remote part of Morocco. The woman, Susan (Cate Blanchett) and her husband, Richard (Brad Pitt) are in Morocco taking a trip together in an attempt to heal their marriage, which has fallen apart in the wake of the death of their infant son. They've left their two young children, Mike (Nathan Gamble) and Debbie (Elle Fanning) back home in California in the care of their loving Mexican nanny, Amelia (Adriana Barazza).

Amelia is wholly devoted to her young charges, and has made many personal sacrifices for the sake of the family she works for, but when Susan is shot and their return home is delayed, Amelia faces a wrenching choice: She cannot leave Mike and Debbie, but her only son is getting married in Mexico and she wants to go to his wedding. When Richard's back-up plan for Susan's sister to come and relieve Amelia doesn't pan out, Richard, distraught over his wife's life-threatening injury, commands Amelia to miss her son's wedding and stay with his children. Faced with having to miss the wedding, Amelia makes a decision that will have profound consequences: She takes the children with her into Mexico to attend her son's wedding.