August 27, 2008
- August is the month that filmmakers trade instruments with the people who run the Tony Awards. It's a big hoot, and the members of the participants' respective guilds look forward to it every year. This year, Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern, Hero) designed the opening of the Beijing Olympics, Ken Burns and Steven Spielberg are dancing Monday and tonight, respectively, at the DNC, and -- here's where I get a little confused -- Slavoj Žižek is directing the Telluride Film Festival which begins Friday. Cuh-razy, man.
- Telluride is odd among the fall festivals -- among all film festivals, actually -- in that it announces its lineup, dramatically, on the day it opens. In the meantime, we can busy ourselves with news from San Sebastian and Venice. Daily Plastic will be reporting from the Toronto festival next week, and since there's a fair bit of overlap across the major August-September festivals, we're following remote dispatches closely.
- We'd point you to the Sydney Morning Herald's overview of the Venice festival, but since they say that Claire Denis' last film "was a slasher," they're disqualified from contention. Even if they mean Trouble Every Day, that was seven years and three feature films ago. And her design for an unusually bloody Tony Awards never saw the light of day, so you can't count that, either.
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