Jan. 25, 2012 - Issue #849: Blind Date
Fall films, and beyond
A final preview of 2012's cinematic schedule
Michael Haneke's Amour gazes at the relationship between an older couple and their daughter (Isabelle Huppert) after the mother suffers a stroke. Walter Salles goes On The Road with Jack Kerouac's Beat-Generation novel, starring Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart and Kirsten Dunst. Salman Rushdie helped with the screenplay for his seemingly unfilmable magnum opus Midnight's Children, co-written and directed by Deepa Mehta (Water). And not only Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) but the Wachowski brothers are piloting the big-screen version of David Mitchell's six-era, nested-story novel Cloud Atlas.The third film from Rian Johnson (Brick) is the sci-fi Looper, where a hitman (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) from our present, killing people in the future, recognizes one target as his older self. Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men) launches himself into sci-fi, and 3D, with Gravity, starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock as two astronauts fighting to get back down home from their destroyed space station. After the cosmic wondering of Terrence Malick's Tree of Life, the super-auteur unearths a film still untitled—a story probably set in Oklahoma and possibly deconstructing an architect's love triangle. From Twylight Zones comes Sopranos creator David Chase's debut, a '60s New Jersey rock-band film, with James Gandolfini.
December brings Ang Lee's Life of Pi, adapting Yann Martel's famous tale of a zookeeper's son adrift on a lifeboat with a hyena, Bengal tiger, orangutan and zebra. David Cronenberg's take on Don DeLillo's New York City-crossing limo odyssey Cosmopolis (shot in Toronto) is due late in the year.
There are some films without clear release dates yet, but they should see light of disc or screen in 2012. Sarah Polley's Take This Waltz twirls about in Toronto's Annex neighbourhood, where Michelle Williams and Seth Rogen are a couple drifting apart. Xavier Dolan's Laurence Anyways is a tale of impossible love, post-sex change. Guy Maddin's Keyhole is the odyssey of a gangster's homecoming, one room at a time.
Chan-wook Park (Oldboy) slakes his bloodlust with the horror story Stoker, about a girl (Mia Wasikowska) strangely drawn to her mysterious uncle. Wong Kar-wai (In The Mood For Love) turns to martial-arts with his look at Bruce Lee's teacher, The Grandmasters, while a young American maestro, Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood), has finished post-production on his picture about '50s new-religion leader, The Master.
Yorgos Lanthimos follows Dogtooth with Alps, a deadpan drama wherein a company arrives with stand-ins for your dearly departed. The Dardenne brothers send The Kid with a Bike, about a fierce-willed boy (Thomas Doret) rejected by his father but taken in by a hairdresser (Cécile de France).
Jafar Panahi, forbidden from making films for years by the Iranian regime, smuggled his latest, This Is Not A Film, out of the country last year. Michael Winterbottom's film about UK prisons, Seven Days, has been shot a few weeks at a time over the past five years; also released this year is Trishna, Winterbottom's set-in-modern-India take on Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, about a woman (played by Freida Pinto) imprisoned by the social values of her time.
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