The Errant Æsthete

Attendees cite high-water mark for Venice films
VENICE, Italy — As the Venice Film Festival starts its second week it begins its transition into a more Italian fest as high-profile execs make the leap from the Lido to the Toronto International Film Festival, which gets under way Thursday.But even as that shift starts, much of the buzz in Venice remained centered on the high-quality lineup Venice artistic director Marco Mueller and his team assembled for this year’s edition, with most attendees united in the opinion that the in- and out-of-competition selection this year delivered a slew of films likely to be on next year’s Academy Awards nomination list. MORE

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Internet ‘killing cinema’, says director Scott
VENICE, Italy — The Hollywood director, Ridley Scott, warned yesterday that new technology is killing off the big-screen experience. The Oscar-winning County Durham-born movie mogul said mobile phones and computers threatened movie-making on an epic scale.He insisted that the best way to experience great film was still in a cinema with a big screen and state-of-the art acoustics.

Scott launched the attack at the prestigious Venice Film Festival, where he unveiled a newly remastered version of his 1980s sci-fi classic Blade Runner. MORE

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De Palma puts Iraq on Venice agenda
VENICE, Italy — The Iraq War got chins wagging on the Lido on Friday. Brian De Palma’s “Redacted,” the account of a squad of U.S. troops in Iraq and the rape and murder of a 15-year-old Iraqi girl and her family, was a welcome shot of adrenaline in the arm for the festival as it entered its first weekend.

Also on Friday, “Michael Clayton” star George Clooney briefly lost his world-renowned cool when an Italian journalist asked him how he could star in a movie that shows the sinister side of corporate America while taking paychecks to promote products from various companies. MORE

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Nice Films, Shame about the Food
Anyone wanting to lose weight could do worse than try and blab their way into covering the Venice film festival. The area around the Casino building, the nerve center of the festival as far as the press is concerned, has just one restaurant that we know of, a small pizzeria which is invariably packed to the rafters and not that good.

Sure, there are a few food stalls set up for festival goers, but the grub is by and large grim and it requires bravery and patience to negotiate long queues jostling for their slice of pizza. Discarded paper plates, tins and the rest of it mean the area outside the festival looks like Leicester Square on a Saturday night — i.e. a crowded dump. MORE