after the wedding Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Her first Hollywood production (Things We Lost in the Fire) didn't pan out so good, but perhaps Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier will do better with romantic comedy than with serious drama. She's set to direct Lost for Words, a Universal Pictures release that may star the bumbling Brit Hugh Grant and Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi. With such diverse international talent , it's easy to imagine that the movie's title will also be a good description of the set between takes.

The plot of Lost for Words actually has to do with film set communications. Grant is in negotiations to play a movie star appearing in a film directed by a Chinese woman (Zhang). He develops feelings for her, but unfortunately he initially becomes involved with her flirtatious translator. So, if he's to confess his love for the non-English-speaking filmmaker, he must do so through this other woman, whose heart he must first break. I guess he isn't aware that love is a universal language and he could simply just point to his heart and then to her and then they can have a perfect, wordless affair.

Lost for Words was scripted by Jamie Curtis (Spice World) and Oscar nominee Dan Mazer (Borat). Bier is also kind of an Oscar nominee; her last Scandinavian production, After the Wedding, was up for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2007 Academy Awards.

In case you haven't noticed, I can get pretty vocal about my skepticism. One thing I often complain about is the immigration of talented foreign filmmakers, who come over and make disappointing English-language debuts. I won't name names this time around, but you know it is common. Now, the great Dane Susanne Bier announced her own debut long ago, and the film, Things We Lost in the Fire, is actually due next month and it could actually be decent (even with Halle Berry). Then there's her English-language screenplay debut (co-written with Jeffrey Hatcher), The Duchess, which is being directed by Saul Dibb and which stars Keira Knightley and Ralph Fiennes. That will probably be pretty good, too. But her newly announced second film in English, well, that could be awful.

According to Variety, Bier has signed to helm Lost for Words, a romantic comedy or something about a movie star who falls in love with a Chinese actress and her female translator. I'm not sure if its a love triangle thing or a threesome thing or what, but it was scripted by Jamie Curtis, who co-wrote Spice World, so it is sure to be hokey. Now, I make no secret of the fact that I love Spice World. Doesn't matter, I still think this is going to be bad, if only because of my skeptical prejudice. The movie has some more British talent involved, too; it will be produced by Love Actually writer-director Richard Curtis, along with Mr. Bean's Holiday (and Hot Fuzz) producers Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner.

In her native Danish language, Bier last gave us After the Wedding, which was nominated for an Oscar earlier this year. She's also the director of festival hits Open Hearts (aka Dogme #28) and Brothers, both of which are being remade into English. Zach Braff (Garden State) is tackling the former while Jim Sheridan (In the Name of the Father) is helming the latter. We'll just have to wait and see what translates better, her films or her filmmaking skills.

My pick of new indies out on DVD this week (July 10) is Japanese filmmaker Shunji Iwai's Hana and Alice. The bare bones of the plot are bare indeed: two teenage girls who have been lifelong friends find a boy coming between them. As with all such adolescent dramas, though, it's the characters that separate the wheat from the chaff. I can't put it better than this review by luna6: "This film is packed with moments that will stay permanently etched in your mind." True enough; it's been three years since I've seen it and I can still recall the gorgeous visuals and the warm, very recognizably human interplay, both dramatic and humorous, between the three teens coming of age. Look for the DVD from Homevision.

Another notable release this week is Danish director Susanne Bier's After the Wedding, about a man coming to grips with family issues after an unexpected invitation to a wedding. Cinematical's Jeffrey M. Anderson called it "fairly middlebrow and melodramatic," though he had kind words for the "unique and charismatic star Mads Mikkelsen." (Jeffrey really nailed down why this extraordinary actor is so good.) Other critics rated the film much higher; Rotten Tomatoes certified reviews as 86% positive. IFC is the distributor.

When Robinson Devor's Police Beat played at the Seattle film festival in 2005, Cinematical's Kim Voynar wrote that it "isn't your typical cop movie, not by a long shot. There are no prolonged gun battles, no drawn out car chases ... It's a story about lovesickness, and jealousy .. played out, almost distantly and distractedly, amidst a cacophony of crime scenes." Kim's conclusion? "Judging Police Beat on its own merits, though, I have to say that overall I enjoyed the film. I like it when a director has the chutzpah to try something different." Devor went on to make the controversial documentary Zoo. Police Beat hits DVD this week, courtesy of Homevision.

The fifth and final 2006 Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film finally arrives in American theaters, and it's a serious case of too little, too late. Susanne Bier's After the Wedding, from Denmark, is fairly middlebrow and melodramatic, not as bloody awful as Rachid Bouchareb's Days of Glory or Deepa Mehta's Water, but equally unmemorable. It's a testament to how badly the Academy needs to revamp this category: instead of taking a single submission from each of a list of countries, why not simply nominate the best foreign language films that played in American theaters during a calendar year? That way we could have enjoyed such nominees as Hou Hsiao-hsien's Three Times, Claude Chabrol's The Bridesmaid, Park Chan-wook's Lady Vengeance, Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Patrice Chéreau's Gabrielle, or perhaps even Jean-Pierre Melville's resurrected 1969 film Army of Shadows.

Fortunately, there's another reason for After the Wedding to exist, and that's the unique and charismatic star Mads Mikkelsen, with his impossibly pointy cheekbones, beady eyes and reptilian lips that look as if they're about to slide right off his face. In this country, he's best known as James Bond's nemesis in Casino Royale, or as Clive Owen's scrungy sidekick in King Arthur (2004), basically a sadistic badass. But in his native Denmark, he's capable of all kinds of things, from black comedies (Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, The Green Butchers) to weepy melodrama (Open Hearts). After the Wedding definitely falls into the latter category (otherwise, it wouldn't have been an Oscar nominee).

With only a week away from announcing the Oscar nominations, and with no apparent need to do so, the Academy has pared down its list of eligible foreign-language films from 61 to nine. This is the first time the Academy has shortlisted the category, but the decision to do so falls in line with a number of other changes pertaining to the category.

Those changes, which I told you about last summer, are a good thing for at least two of the nine films. Water and Black Book each would have been disqualified in previous years, but now their language issues are in full compliance with the rules. Of course, had they not made the cut, there might have been some happier countries in Asia or Australia, the two continents not represented (Antarctica may get some love from Happy Feet's animation nomination). It is too bad that Japan couldn't claim Golden Globe winner Letters From Iwo Jima and also too bad for Oz that Ten Canoes wasn't chosen.

Norway announced yesterday that it would be submitting Reprise as their country's entry for the best foreign language film Oscar. The movie is about "life's realities intruding on youthful assumptions." It joins Sweden's entry Falkenberg Farewell and Denmark's After the Wedding, which were announced earlier in the week.

The foreign language film category in the Oscars often feels tacked on haphazardly, and is frequently paid little attention. Which is exactly how I treated foreign films until I took a cinema history course in college. That was probably the first time I watched a film with subtitles (I think it was Raise the Red Lantern), and opened my eyes to world cinema. Frequently, American cinema seems to be all Boobs and/or Explosions IV at the box office, while films with real stories and characters go unnoticed.

Foreign films are almost always lower in budget than our mid-range films, yet they have more heart and story than our films do. Why is that? U.S. big-budget blockbusters usually perform very well overseas, so if they like those types of films, why aren't they producing them? Is it a problem of budget, or of storytelling? Heck, even Shaun of the Dead was much better than the non-stop stream of bad horror movies on this side of the pond.

Anyhow, while I think about what makes foreign films so good, I'm off to go see The Guardian to put it all in perspective.

There are few surprises in the initial slate of submissions for Best Foreign Picture. Last year's submissions were fraught with controversy, as Austria's French-language entry, Caché was deemed ineligible by the Academy along with Italy's entry, Private, which was dinged for featuring Arabic and Hebrew but no Italian. This year a rule change has gone into effect that allows foreign picture submissions to feature any combination of languages (not just the dominant language of the submitting country) so long as the primary language is not English.

Canada's submission, the first to take advantage of the new rule, is Deepa Mehta's Water, a Hindi-language film starring Canadian-born actress Lisa Ray. Mehta, though born in India, is herself a Canadian resident. Water was the third in Mehta's controversial and political "elements" trilogy that started with Earth and Fire, and features a story centered around the plight of widows in India, who are often relegated to life of poverty. The tale of what Mehta went through just to make this film could be a movie in and of itself. Initially set to film in India, the set was shut down after numerous death threats when the Indian government determined it could not ensure Mehta's safety, and didn't start filming again for over three years.