AtomEgoyan Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The name of the cinematic game is believing what happens on the big screen, and suspending belief when necessary. It's a particular and difficult game -- one that is, of course, pulled off with varying degrees of success. One person's perfectly natural action is another person's highly irregular one, and there's no set line for what will be stomached, accepted, and believed. In the case of Atom Egoyan's erotic thriller Chloe, Amanda Seyfried, Julianne Moore, Max Thieriot, and Liam Neeson toe the line of believability as they sail through the sticky waters of romantic discontent and mistrust.

Seyfried is Chloe, a young prostitute well-versed in the finer points of subterfuge -- embodying everything her clients dream. And Moore is Catherine, a successful gynaecologist -- the established professional, mother, and aging woman desperately wishing for the lust-filled attentions that her husband David (Neeson) used to heap on her. After he avoids her on his birthday, "missing" a plane (and subsequently a surprise party), she becomes wary. And when he continues to flirt with every young woman he meets, Catherine becomes convinced that he is cheating.

Mike Jones over at Variety's The Circuit Blog posted yesterday the first 27 films announced for the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF)and, not surprisingly, most of them hail from previous fest premieres at Cannes, Berlin and SXSW.

The Gala Presentation will be South Korean director Kim Jee-woon's The Good, The Bad and The Weird, which I saw at Cannes earlier this year and loved. Somewhat reminiscent of Tears of the Black Tiger, the film is a crazy, busy Western that centers around a map to a treasure happened upon by a (seemingly) bumbling fool, who ends up being pursued by a good-guy law-enforcement type, a wicked bad guy dressed in black, and, at one point, an entire army. It runs a little long, but it's funny and sharp, with a spectacular chase sequence near the end and a nice final payoff. Toronto film fans should really enjoy this one.

One could say that Atom Egoyan already dipped into seven wonders, considering the risque nature of Where the Truth Lies, and all the flak he received for it. But now he's taking the idea of passion to a much larger canvas. The Hollywood Reporter has posted that the Canadian filmmaker has set up his next project -- "a love triangle that blends reality and fantasy," called Seven Wonders.

This could be one heck of a film. At its simplest, the flick will center on a woman named Pandora who rebounds from a failed relationship by getting involved with a director of commercials and her boyfriend. However, extra layers make the idea unique. It's not simply a romantic triangle -- it will explore the relationships on a much bigger scale as Pandora follows the director while she films commercials at the Seven Wonders of the World. Also, the two women meet online, "leading to ambiguity over whether some of the interactions might be taking place only in Pandora's imagination."

In the meantime, we have Adoration to look forward to, another Egoyan film that explores the world of technology, which Kim highly praised from Cannes.

Adoration, the newest film by critically acclaimed filmmaker Atom Egoyan, is a beautifully evocative film, though some may find its convoluted storyline distracting. In many respects, the film very much evokes one of my favorite films, The Sweet Hereafter, Egoyan's 1997 Palme d'Or and Oscar nominee*. Where The Sweet Hereafter dealt with the impact of guilt and grief in a small community following a tragic school bus accident, in Adoration Egoyan deals with grief and loss on a more personal level, while also blending in ideas about the subjective nature of reality and identity in a technological age. In a world where who we are can be invented, reinvented, and broadcast to the world via chat rooms and virtual reality avatars, can we ever really know another person -- or even ourselves?

A few months ago, it snowed. In the spirit of manifesting your own reality and the perks of positivity, I stomached any ill feelings. In fact, I welcomed the white landscape with open arms, determined to look on the bright side of life. It was a nice change. I made and threw some snowballs, and I smiled through the first few dumpings of snow. Then the snow kept coming -- in record-breaking amounts. Months went by. Now, tonight and tomorrow, my neighborhood is set to get another foot. Good God, this is enough!

I've learned my lesson: never welcome the snow, because the first year you do, the snow will slam into you over and over again for months -- laughing at your positive idiocy while it torments you with sadistic, stinging snowflakes. Now tonight, as I curl up in the safety of my apartment, I could watch some sort of tropical films, but that would just make me angry. Once you get to a certain point, the weather you dream of is more of a low-blow taunt than a nice escape. So, I'm going to give you two films laden with snow, but with enough bad vibes to make a simple, snow-covered night not so bad. I am, of course, talking about Fargo and The Sweet Hereafter.

That whole Juno/Genie thing isn't the only film news making waves in Canada, and I must say -- this round of news is worse. The Globe and Mail reports that the government is looking to increase restrictions on film tax credits to help cut graphic sex and violence, while an evangelist takes credit for the whole crackdown. "Canadian Heritage officials confirmed yesterday they will be 'expanding slightly' the criteria used for denying tax credits to include grounds such as gratuitous violence, significant sexual content that lacks an educational purpose, or denigration of an identifiable group. More details are promised next week." Well, that's certainly vague, worrisome, and really ... BS. But why should you care?

Think about the work created by the likes of David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, Guy Maddin, and the other filmmakers who have made international names for themselves with their cinematic art -- fare which does tap into the flames the government is looking to extinguish. Cronenberg is dead-on when he says: "The irony is that it is the Canadian films that have given us an international reputation [that] would be most at risk because they are the edgy, relatively low-budget films made by people like me and others that will be targeted by this panel." It already looks like Martin Gero's Young People F*cking, which I reviewed at TIFF, is going to be hit by these changes. Hell, it's title is one of the raciest things about it! It's about sex, but it's not some Shortbus sexfest.

For his previous feature film, Where the Truth Lies, Atom Egoyan got some fairly big stars -- Colin Firth, Kevin Bacon and Alison Lohman. Sure, it wasn't a blockbuster cast, but it was higher profile than Egoyan was used to working with. And it probably would have appealed to more American moviegoers if it weren't for that NC-17 rating (and all the male anatomy that warranted it). For his next film, the Canadian auteur is going back to working with relative unknowns. He's cast Rachel Blanchard, who also co-starred in Where the Truth Lies, Scott Speedman of the Underworld films and TV's Felicity, teenage actor Devon Bostick and Mrs. Atom Egoyan, Arsinée Khanjian, who has appeared in most of her husband's films. As we learned from Monika last month, this new drama, titled Adoration, will deal with "a high school student who claims to be a figure from recent history." My guess is that Bostick plays the student.

Both in their early 30s, Speedman and Blanchard are too old to play teens yet too young to play parents of a high school student. So, their roles are beyond anything I could guess. I definitely see Khanjian playing Bostick's mother, though. In addition to reporting the cast, Variety also shares some new, yet unspecific info about the plot of Adoration: Egoyan described the film, which we already know has something to do with the internet, as a drama dealing with "this brave new world and how people can invent themselves, or re-invent themselves, through technology." The script for Adoration is "fluid," which I take to mean "open," as we learned last month that Egoyan plans to change things he's written depending on what he learns while shooting. Blanchard, who we last saw in Snakes on a Plane has little in the pipeline before Egoyan's film, while Speedman could become better known to audiences with this fall's The Strangers, in which he stars opposite Liv Tyler. Adoration starts shooting in Toronto next month.

It's been a few years since Atom Egoyan brought us his last feature film -- 2005's Where the Truth Lies. The uber-sexy film followed Alison Lohman as a journalist trying to uncover the long-hidden and mysterious story behind the breakup of a comedy team played by Bacon and Colin Firth, which ended years before when they found a dead girl in their hotel room. Now Egoyan is cooking up another film with Serendipity Point Films-head Robert Lantos, leaving the adult world for some adolescent fare, and straying from the carefully-laid out mystery plot of Truth. The new drama is called Adoration, and it will begin shooting on September 17, right after TIFF wraps up.

According to Playback, the film is a teen drama that "will examine how kids redefine themselves through the Internet," by focusing on "a high school student who claims to be a figure from recent history." Oh, vagueness! Is this kid channeling Lonelygirl15? While she's made waves, I wouldn't quite call her a figure of history, so your guess is as good as mine. The director will look into the ways that the Internet changes relationships between kids, when compared to classroom interaction. That's about all that we know about the film, but there might not be too much more to tell. Egoyan has a script, but it's one he's planning on changing as it goes: "What excites me is that the script...is open enough that I can change and modify based on what we find out as we're shooting it. That, to me, is the ideal kind of structure." Ah, film Playdoh!

[via CBC]

Earlier this month, I posted about a secret film debuting at the Cannes Film Festival. All that was known at the time was that it would be a compilation of 30 shorts, each about three minutes long and directed by an internationally respected filmmaker, and that it wouldn't be shown to the public. Now, thanks to an official press release, we learn that there are in fact 33 shorts from 35 filmmakers (including two pairs of brothers) and that the film, titled To Each his Own Cinema, will air on French television on May 20 following its premiere at the festival. So now I don't have to wish I could attend Cannes; I have to wish I got Canal +.

Also revealed are the names of the 35 participants, all of whom were supposed to be kept secret until the film's unveiling, and a few details about the project. Each director was assigned the task of filming, "their current state of mind as inspired by the motion-picture theater." The only individual specifics mentioned in the press release, which was written by festival head Giles Jacob, are that Wim Wenders shot in the Congo, Tsai Ming Liang shot in Kuala Lumpur and David Cronenberg shot "in the ... toilet!" (probably meaning the bathroom, not the bowl). But anyone familiar with the directors involved can imagine the kind of diversity that will be seen in the film.

See the names of the 35 collaborators after the jump.

Sarah Polley, the wildly talented Canadian actress who I will never be able to think of as anything but the poor little girl in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, is making her feature directorial (and screenwriting) debut at the ripe old age of 27. Based on an Alice Munro short story called The Bear Came Over the Mountain, the film - entitled Away from Her - tells the story of an aging married couple whose warm, comfortable relationship is thrown asunder when the wife is moved into a nursing home that can deal with her worsening Alzheimer’s. When, after two months of "adjustment," her husband is allowed to visit her for the first time, his wife has "forgotten him and turned her affection to...another resident in the home." I'll spare you further details but trust me, it just gets more depressing.

Either a lot of people saw Polley's 2001 short I Shout Love, and were impressed, or faith in her is running rampant, because the cast she's put together for her debut features a pair of pretty big names: Julie Christie will play the afflicted wife, and Olympia Dukakis is also appearing in the film. Atom Egoyan, meanwhile, is executive producing, and Luc Montpellier, who shot both I Shout Love and Guy Maddin's gorgeous The Saddest Music in the World, is on board as cinematographer.

Man alive. I know she's untested and all, but it's clear from that list that if Polley doesn't make it good as a director, a whole lot of knowledgeable people will be awfully surprised.