Shame, the sex addiction drama from director Steve McQueen that wowed audiences at the Telluride, Toronto, and New York Film Festivals (where we somehow managed to miss every single screening), has been officially branded with an NC-17 by the MPAA. The application of the rating, which prohibits anyone under the age of 17 from seeing the film (whether with an adult guardian or not), doesn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who has seen the picture; star Michael Fassbender reportedly spends a healthy percentage of the film’s running time in his birthday suit, and without the artful and careful coverage of his man-parts that is required to get the R. (Co-star Carey Mulligan goes full-frontal as well, but that, of course, is perfectly acceptable within the R rating, so hi double standard, how ya doin.)
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Well readers, with Labor Day here, another new school year is upon us — and, frankly, it makes us feel old. Now that it’s been over a decade since our last first day of high school, we no longer have any excuse to stock up on pencils and notebooks or spend hours agonizing over the perfect outfit. So, to make ourselves feel a bit better about our lost teen years, we’re following up our roundup of TV’s oldest high schoolers with a list of film’s oldest high schoolers. To our great relief, some of them even have a few years on us.
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Today at Flavorpill, we learned to expect weird and heavy tunes from M.I.A.’s new album. Vague, but we’ll take any information at this point. We thought these clocks would be perfect space savers for our tiny New York City apartments. We were amused by Dame Edna’s take on “Single Ladies” — fantastic sequined dress and back-up dancers. We quickly placed our orders for a copy of Sherman Alexie’s book War Dances, which just won the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. We did our best to ignore the Sarah Palin TV wars, and we’re hoping we’ll at least get some Tina Fey out of the situation. We salivated over Steve McQueen’s record collection in the Life archives. We were disappointed to hear that Frances McDormand and John Malkovich signed on for Transformers 3 (really guys?), but at least we’ll officially have our weekly dose of Alan Cumming on The Good Wife. And finally, we were prepared to die happy with the news that Steven Klein will be directing Lady Gaga’s “Alejandro” video. Bring on the next phase of Gaga!
What works did international art dealers, curators and collectors consider the most impressive at the 53rd Venice Biennale? It was surprising how consistently the same names came up. The US Pavilion (images here) ranked high, even before it was voted best pavilion of this year. And Elmgreen & Dragset’s “The Collectors” (images here) was another favorite. And everyone was impressed with Francois Pinault’s Punta della Dogana (images here). Read More »
More than a year in the making, the 2009 Venice Biennale kicks off this week with high expectations. The ailing art world needs a shot in the arm right now, and everyone is looking to the 53rd International Art Exhibition, which runs through November 22, to provide it. Some 6,000 members of the international press and 30,000 museum directors, curators, collectors, artists, and dealers descend on “La Serenìsima,” the serene city, to view proud national pavilions and special exhibitions — turning the three days of previews and openings into one continuous party.
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Steve McQueen is, without question, one of Her Majesty’s finest artists — he collected the isle’s illustrious Turner Prize in 1999 and will represent the Union Jack at this year’s Venice Biennale. But a feature-length filmmaker too? Now that deserves an in-depth interrogation. We sat down with the amiable, bear-like gentleman a few days back to discuss the naked truth about Hunger, his commanding, critically-acclaimed study of Northern Ireland’s notorious Maze prison and, in turn, its most notorious resident: IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands. (See our review of the film here.)
Flavorwire: Can you recall your first encounter with Bobby Sands and his hunger strike?
Steve McQueen: I was 11 years old when I saw this image of a man on the television — I didn’t know who he was. Underneath his image, there was a number. And every evening on the news, that number would increase. I thought it was his age. It wasn’t; it was the amount of days this person had been on hunger strike. In some strange way, it was the beginning of the end of my childhood. The idea that someone stopped eating in order to be heard — this made a big impression on me as an 11-year-old kid. I didn’t know what the situation was about exactly, but, as I got older, I found out.
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The many accolades for British artist Steve McQueen and his elliptic debut Hunger line up like happy-to-harp witnesses to a history lesson: The Camera d’Or (or Best First Feature) at Cannes; a Golden Hugo Award here, a BAFTA there; and, for just one more round of applause, Best Picture of 2008 according to go-to film glossy Sight and Sound.
But all the laudatory fuss that surrounds this muscular, viscera-shifting film about Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), the IRA hunger strike leader who passed away in 1981 after 66 days of starvation, doesn’t prepare you for the jarring, sensory ordeal in store — a steady, force-fed diet of bare-knuckled sights and bumped-up sounds. There’s plenty of martyr-or-maniac discourse to parse after the fade to black, but the ascetic 96-minute march towards emaciation and emancipation is spellbinding, uneasy, and — yes — essential viewing.
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