Lebanon picks Labaki pic for Academy awards

'Where Will We Go Ahead Now?'TORONTO -- Nadine Labaki's ''Where Will We Go Ahead Now?,'' receiving its United States preem Saturday in the Toronto film festival, continues to be selected as Lebanon's 2011 entry for top Language Academy Award. ''Where,'' which follows several ladies who unite to safeguard their isolated mining community from outdoors conflict, world-preemed at Cannes' Not Certain Regard program captured. Pathe Worldwide is selling the pic in Toronto. Labaki's feature bow ''Carmel'' tested in the 2007 Toronto fest. Contact the range newsroom at news@variety.com

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'Pure cinema' at Venice?

In Amir Naderi's "Cut," one of the more divisive entries at the 68th annual Venice Film Festival, a Japanese cinephile subjects himself to a steady stream of physical abuse in the name of "pure cinema." Praised by estimable tastemakers like Positif's Michel Ciment and dismissed by my Variety colleague Leslie Felperin as "overweeningly pretentious," Naderi's picture -- surely the first movie to include the dramatic unveiling of the protagonist's list of the 50 greatest films of all time -- was a serving of high-end critical catnip, catering presumably to the most stringent and rarefied notions of what a film should be.I will leave it to Naderi and his self-flagellating alter ego to figure out exactly what is meant by "pure cinema," a concept much loved by Hitchcock but never an easy one to parse. Still, I suspect the "Cut" contingent would have disapproved of much of this year's Venice lineup, given the selection of such mainstream-contaminated specimens as Steven Soderbergh's "Contagion," from that impure well known as Hollywood, and the Wallis Simpson romance "W.E.," from that impure well known as Madonna. (I'm genuinely sad to have missed "W.E.," which seems to have been a hugely enjoyable experience for fans and detractors alike.)Of course, if pure cinema is defined as filmmaking liberated from the classical influences of literature or theater, one would automatically have to rule out some of the highest-profile titles in competition. Countering the conventional wisdom that Hollywood rarely looks to the theater for dramatic inspiration anymore, the play was very much the thing at Venice this year.The first three titles to screen in competition were all drawn from legit sources: George Clooney's political drama "The Ides of March," greatly expanded from Beau Willimon's play "Farragut North"; Roman Polanski's four-way snipefest "Carnage," faithfully adapted from Yasmina Reza's "God of Carnage"; and David Cronenberg's period piece "A Dangerous Method," largely drawn from Christopher Hampton's "The Talking Picture." (Incidentally, it was Hampton who translated "God of Carnage" from French into English, though Polanski's film uses a different interpretation.)Continuing the theater trend was one of the later competition entries, "Killer Joe," William Friedkin's second Tracy Letts adaptation following his cultish "Bug." Out of competition, festival honoree Al Pacino unveiled his "Wilde Salome," a documentary tribute to a play for which he has long nursed a personal passion.These various stage-to-screen adaptations all had their merits, though even the best of them revealed a perhaps inevitable formal tension. If Cronenberg's Jung-vs.-Freud psychodrama struck me as the most successful of the lot, it's largely because the helmer and Hampton have chosen to embrace rather than downplay the talkiness of the material, honing its ideas into a razor-sharp, intellectually bracing text that turns argumentation into potent drama.Novel adaptations, too, had a formidable competition presence, and far from despoiling the Lido's cinematic Eden, most of them found inventive movie solutions to tough literary problems. Tomas Alfredson's "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," which managed the unenviable task of compressing John Le Carre's modern spy classic into just over two hours, surprised everyone by not making a mad dash through the material, but instead moving with the same hypnotic grace and ease of the director's earlier "Let the Right One In."Working further outside the safety net, Andrea Arnold fashioned something raw and vital with her revisionist, racially charged "Wuthering Heights." Though the film could be about 15 or 20 minutes shorter and is marred by some inexpert performances from its largely non-pro cast, its real star, d.p. Robbie Ryan, captures images of such wild, untamed beauty as to justify this umpteenth stab at Emily Bronte's novel. (It was certainly scheduled on the right day, as those of us rushing to see it found ourselves caught up in a brief but decidedly Bronte-esque windstorm.)But no literary reinvention proved more experimental or challenging than Alexander Sokurov's nearly 2 1/2-hour "Faust," an uncategorizable oddity that served as this year's designated high-art endurance test (every fest needs one). A willfully eccentric reading of the Goethe text, the Russian auteur's latest opus was by turns tedious and transporting, alternating passages of exquisite beauty with spasms of grotesque imagery that seemed closer to old-school Cronenberg than the actual Cronenberg film in competition. Pure cinema? Not exactly; there wasn't a wordier, more exhaustingly subtitle-heavy film in competition.At the risk of being called a cinema purist myself, my own personal favorites happened to have no associations with preexisting texts, and indeed played outstandingly to their directors' visual strengths. The strongest film I saw in Venice, "Shame," is a wrenching drama of sexual addiction in which the bold, muscular compositions are as powerfully expressive as the kudo-worthy performances of Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan. And Greek helmer Yorgos Lanthimos didn't disappoint me or other "Dogtooth" admirers with "Alps," a bizarre, disquieting tale of deceit and psychological transference that feels less shocking and out-there than its Oscar-nominated predecessor but demonstrates even more formal command.A mastery of mise-en-scene also distinguished "People Mountain People Sea," a strikingly composed second feature from Chinese helmer Cai Shangjun, who took this year's surprise-film slot. Good as the movie was, "surprise" took on a new and unwelcome meaning after the film's first screening was canceled due to subtitling issues and the second screening was interrupted for a full 30 minutes after a false fire alarm sent viewers running for the exits. Of the numerous technical glitches that plagued Venice this year, from the frequent schedule changes and screening delays to the improper 3D projection at Shimizu Takashi's "Tormented," the "People Wait People Worry" incident was by far the most embarrassing; that it befell a talented new director making his debut on a prestigious international stage merely compounded the indignity."People Mountain People Sea" served to point up the unevenness of this year's Asian selection, usually one of Venice's strong suits. Ann Hui's tender, moving "A Simple Life" was a lovely choice for the competition; rather less so were Wei Te-sheng's bombastic "Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale," a sort of Taiwanese "Apocalypto" crippled by sprawling overlength (and that was the short version), and Sion Sono's "Himizu," one of the busy Japanese maverick's less enthusiastically received entries. Elsewhere in the program, the practice of slotting Asian films simply for the sake of slotting Asian films reached an arguable nadir with "The Sorcerer and the White Snake," a CGI-clogged bore that had no real business premiering at a major festival.Still, as of this writing, we have yet to see "Life Without Principle," the anticipated new film from Hong Kong genre master Johnnie To. Will it make the "Cut" cut? Who knows, but my own personal pick in that department would be "Inni," the latest concert film from the popular Icelandic group Sigur Ros. Shot in black-and-white and running a haunting, emotion-drenched 75 minutes, it's as pure an experience of the cinema as I've had, and one of many reasons for Venice audiences to be grateful. Contact Justin Chang at justin.chang@variety.com

HBO Picks Up Aaron Sorkins Pilot To Series

It’s official: HBO has picked up Aaron Sorkin’s hourlong cable news network pilot to series. The now untitled drama (formerly More As This Story Develops), which has been a virtual lock for a series order, centers on a cable news anchor (Jeff Daniels), his new executive producer (Emily Mortimer), his newsroom staff (Alison Pill, John Gallagher, Jr., Olivia Munn, Dev Patel, Thomas Sadoski) and their boss (Sam Waterston). Together they set out on a patriotic and quixotic mission to do the news well in the face of corporate and commercial obstacles and their own personal entanglements. Sorkin wrote the pilot after lengthy research during which he spent time at Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews MSNBC shows as well as behind-the-scenes of Fox News Channel and CNN programs. Sorkin executive produced the pilot, which was directed by Greg Mottola, with Scott Rudin and Alan Poul. This is Sorkin’s fourth series after Sports Night, the Emmy-winning The West Wing and Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip and the first one on cable. Sorkin, who won an Academy Award in March for penning The Social Network, is now the second writer-creator to do an HBO series right after winning an Oscar. Alan Ball followed his Academy Award for American Beauty with HBO’s Six Feet Under.

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Kolirin asks big questions

For Eran Kolirin, helmer of "The Exchange" (HaHithalfut), which preems in competition at Venice today, filmmaking of late is a case of art imitating life.Kolirin's sophomore effort follows 2007's "The Band's Visit" (Bikur ha-tizmoret), which won eight Ophir awards from the Israeli Film and Television Academy and widespread critical acclaim, thrusting the helmer-scribe into the international spotlight.In the publicity whirlwind that followed, Kolirin found himself often alone on the road, spending weeks at time in indistinguishable hotel rooms, away from home and the people and things he was used to."You start to lead this kind of life where you're mostly in transition," Kolirin said. "You're staying in hotels and landing at big airports. You have all the time in the world and nothing really to do."In the midst of that vacuum, Kolirin put his life under a microscope. From the ensuing big questions -- of the "what-does-this-all-mean?" variety -- "The Exchange" was born.Pic traces the existential crisis of an ordinary man, Oded (newcomer Rotem Keinan), who arrives home early one day to find that the banalities of his life look entirely unfamiliar."This is a horror movie without the horror," said Kolirin with a chuckle. "In a very strict, boring movie, a man comes home one day to find his wife having an affair with another man. Which for some people may be horrifying, but it's much more horrifying to find that you are living in an apartment, and you have a wife, and you go to work every day, and you have a refrigerator, and you have a TV, and this is the way you live and this is the way you're going to die."Kolirin cast another unknown, Sharon Tal, as Oded's wife Tami. Tal trained as a stage actor and was new to the Tel Aviv film scene when she met Kolirin. "I am from Jerusalem," she said by way of explanation. "I was not used to going on auditions."Filming, she said, which took place in central Israel with studio shoots in Germany, often felt like making music. "The scenes, and the movie itself, are built like movements," she said. "The beginning is very much like an overture."Kolirin's first film, of course, was all about music, and he hopes auds will keep their comparisons at bay. "In many ways I can see the connection, but on the other hand I would like to put up a big sign saying This Is Not 'The Band's Visit!' " Kolirin said.The movie draws its strength from its unconventionality, Kolirin said, and even though some viewers may struggle with its style, he is immensely proud of what he has created."People have unfortunately been trained by cinema that there has to be a body, there has to be a bad guy. In this movie, it's not the way it is. The absence of the reason is the reason," he said. Contact the Variety newsroom at news@variety.com

KCET nabs $50 million investment

Independent pubcaster KCET has received a commitment of $50 million in financing from Eyetronics Media and Studios in a five-year deal to create and acquire series directly related to Southern California. To kick off the arrangement, KCET plans to launch production on five new series before year's end designed to air on the station. Eyetronics, headed by CEO Dominique Bigle, will package and distribute these and ensuing programs domestically and internationally. Southern California people, places, culture, innovation and history -- both celebrated and little-known -- will be featured. "These are programs ... that will resonate with the local community," KCET prexy/CEO Al Jerome told Variety, adding that "Dominique is convinced there will be strong international appeal for this, and there historically has been." Bigle, a former Walt Disney Co. exec and son of Walt Disney Europe co-founded Armand Bigle, cited the strength of public television stations in Europe and the global importance of Southern California as motivation for the Eyetronics investment, calling the deal with KCET "a chance to create in the U.S. a new way of television" that will emphasize production (in both fiction and nonfiction) but also include acquisition. "New production," Bigle told Variety, "is the most important ... but because California is a multicultural state, we will import from Asia, from Europe," and so on. Jerome said that "in the next couple of weeks," KCET would begin rolling out specific program announcements about the initial programs going into production. "We're still working on the mix of the shows," Jerome said. "It's there, but we have more to choose from than we're going to commit to up front." He noted that with the investment in increased production would come new hires at KCET. "That will essentially be a self-contained unit that will work with the rest of our staff to produce these programs," Jerome said. "There are other things we produce at KCET that are outside of this, so we want to make sure we have the firepower." Encino, Calif.-based Eyetronics will also make available TV movies, series, documentaries, cartoons, serials, newsreels and other rare footage from its so-called "Classic Cool Library." "There are a lot of interesting things that we can take advantage of as we do programming about the history of the entertainment industry, the history of technological innovation," Jerome said. "Just the newsreels and movie trailers alone are fantastic." Asked about the state of KCET, Jerome said that after the initial dip in viewership when the split from PBS went into effect Jan. 1, the station has had audience increases in every daypart. "On a sign-on to sign-off basis, we are actually 6% ahead of the PBS primary station (KOCE, rebranded as PBS SoCal) in the months of April-May-June." Jerome said. Contact Jon Weisman at jon.weisman@variety.com

New Adventures of Tintin Poster Washes Ashore With Floating Heads

Ah, the floating, disembodied head; a staple of many movie posters — apparently even ones without flesh-and-blood stars with heads to disembody. The lastest artwork for The Adventures of Tintin has arrived, ready to take on complaints about the uncanny valley head-on. (Mini-groan.) Does it work? It certainly helps that Snowy might be the cutest dog this side of Marley & Me. Click through for a look. [via Coming Soon]

'The Change-Up' Review: Insanely Crude, Totally Unoriginal and Absolutely Hilarious

There's a decent chance that you've seen a body-swapping movie at some point. It doesn't matter how many times they beat this premise into the ground, there will always be someone in Hollywood to finance a script about a rebellious kid and his uptight parent switching skins with (hopefully) comedic results. So when we first heard about 'The Change-Up,' we about put our heads through the wall. Then, however, we actually saw the movie. Before we knew it, we were laughing -- hard -- right on through to the end. We didn't expect much from something we could've written while sleeping, but color us stunned: This ended up being one of the year's funniest movies. What's It About? 'The Change-Up' is about two guys -- a workaholic family man who's too busy climbing the ladder at his law firm to be there for his wife and kids, and his 30-something best friend who fills his days as a bachelor with copious amounts of sex and avoiding any kind of responsibility. On one fateful night, they hit the bar, get drunk, go relieve themselves in a magic public fountain, and say, simultaneously, "I wish I had your life." The following morning, they wake to find that they have swapped bodies and can't switch back because the magical fountain is gone. To prevent either of their lives from spiraling into total chaos, they must take on their newfound responsibility/irresponsibility. And wouldn't you know it? They end up growing along the way. What Sets It Apart From All the Other Body-Swapping Movies? For starters, it's aware of the fact that we've already heard this story a million times. It doesn't try to reinvent the wheel and, partially because of that, it feels relatively fresh. It's also consistently entertaining thanks to solid writing and a killer cast. As far as the script goes, sure, you already know how the plot's going to play out, but it is surprisingly sharp, shamelessly rude and really quite funny from beginning to end. It's packed with tons of quotable one-liners and memorable scenes, and much of it is stuff we haven't heard or seen before because a lot of this stuff was pretty taboo up until now. The other thing that sets it apart is that this is no PG-13 family-friendly movie about a kid and his parent changing bodies and getting into wacky hijinks; rather, this is a very R-rated comedy about two grown men changing bodies and getting into some jaw-droppingly dirty situations that involve lots of swearing and nudity, plus some pretty foul poop gags that get just as many laughs as cringes. This is not a movie for the whole family to enjoy -- this is the movie that Mommy and Daddy go to after they give the babysitter 30 bucks and start doing shooters at the bar next to the theater. This is a seriously hard R, especially for a comedy, that walks a fine line between bad taste and flat-out repulsive -- which works in its favor because we've never seen it in a body-swap movie. After all, it's directed by the guy who did 'Wedding Crashers' and written by the guys who penned 'The Hangover.' That should give you an idea of what to expect. The character development here feels genuine and the movie ends up being pretty heartfelt, which balances out all the gag-reflex-inducing stuff. We do care about these two guys, their friendship and their families, elevating this from just another gross-out comedy. How Are Bateman and Reynolds? If you've seen 'Arrested Development,' then you'll understand why we're such big fans of Jason Bateman. He's a seriously funny guy, as likable as they come, but he's also been playing the straight-laced, likable, funny guy for a long time now and we've been waiting to see him branch out a bit. So when the movie starts out and he's in his own body as Dave, he's typical Bateman good, but he's somewhat overshadowed by the crazy things coming out of Ryan Reynolds' mouth. But then the switch happens, Bateman starts channeling his inner Van Wilder, and for the rest of the movie he absolutely steals the show. This is the role we've been waiting for Bateman to take, and he runs away with it like he's just been waiting just as long. It's thrilling to see him play a shamelessly crass, often unlikable guy for a change, and he throws himself into the role like he's having the time of his life. Which isn't to say that Reynolds takes a backseat. Whether he's playing himself as Mitch or channeling his inner Michael Bluth post-switch, the guy nails it. It's been a while since we've seen Reynolds strut his comedic chops, and now that he has free reign to do just that, we're hoping the Hollywood fat cats take notice and start recognizing him for his stellar comedic timing rather than just his handsome mug and washboard abs. The chemistry between Bateman and Reynolds really couldn't be better, and these may very well be the funniest roles of their careers thus far (and that's saying something). Backing them up with a much-needed feminine touch are Olivia Wilde as Dave's secretary and Leslie Mann as Dave's wife. Much like Reynolds, Wilde is far more famous these days for her looks than her sense of humor, but she does a bang-up job of combining both by baring all and bringing the laughs. She should really do more comedies. Then there's Leslie Mann, and we couldn't believe how good she was. She's had her moments in movies like 'Knocked Up' and 'The 40-Year-Old Virgin,' but this is the first time she's really held her own with the leading men and had us busting a gut. Is It Worth Seeing? The only other movie that's made us laugh this hard all year is 'Conan O'Brien Can't Stop,' and for a sub-genre that really needed a breath of fresh air to make it work, 'The Change-Up' delivers and then some. It barely avoided getting slapped with an NC-17 rating, so it might be a struggle for some to get past all the envelope-pushing. But as gross as it can sometimes get, we were laughing too darn hard at it all to really pay that any mind. VERDICT: 8/10 Sleazebag Switcheroos Photos courtesy of Universal.