Search results for: Todd Solondz

Solondz does arrested development.

Road to Prison is also Paved with Good Intentions

Today's announcement for the 2011 Venice Film Festival lineup basically crosses off plenty of sure bets we had been anticipating and makes us circle a bunch of titles we thought had a chance for a 2011 showing but now become hot items for the 2012 campaign. Films such as Juan Diego Solanas' Upside Down, Rodrigo Cortés' Red Lights, Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Headshot, Brillante Mendoza's Prey look more and more like Cannes 2012 items, while acquisition titles such as Antonio Campos' Simon Killer and Nick Cassavetes' Yellow wouldn't be out of place for a Sundance showing.

TIFF's co-directors Cameron Bailey and Piers Handling have got us salivating with the smorgasbord list of world premiere offerings for next September. Opening film comes as a surprise, as we've haven't heard much about it, but seeing that doc filmmaker Davis Guggenheim has a great relationship with the festival, From The Sky Down a doc about U2 (20 or so years after Phil Joanou's U2: Rattle & Hum) will take centre stage. Doc-programmer guru Thom Powers makes sure that the fest will be a rocking good edition by also adding Pearl Jam Twenty from fanboy Cameron Crowe.

"But just when audiences unravel the first couple of knots – and congratulate themselves on their cleverness – they realize the gnarled mess at their feet has somehow grown larger, with twisting narrative threads that angrily recoil and wrap around themselves. Religion is jumbled with politics, childhood innocence melds with kinky sexuality and supreme beings cruise singles bars, all while the living freely mingle with the dead. Any effort to find the end of the ongepochkit cord is useless; it’s vanished into a new plane of existence."