photograph - courtesy
La Biennale di Venezia
# Venice76 –
La Biennale di Venezia - Film Festival
Marriage Story – Noah Baumbach
Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story is an incisive and compassionate portrait of a marriage breaking up and a family staying together.
Starring: Scarlett
Johansson, Adam Driver, Laura Dern, Alan Alda, Ray Liotta, Julie Hagerty.
photograph - courtesy
La Biennale di Venezia
“Movies are what have healed some of my darkest moments and helped me understand what I thought was beyond me. Sitting in a movie theatre, allowing the empathy machine that is cinema work on me. Divorce is the story of so many marriages, and a source of shame and isolation. The legal system of divorce is set up to divide, necessarily. It divides people, family, property and time. It keeps everyone in their own narratives and obfuscates the other person’s point of view. But I wanted to construct another way of looking at it, a more generous offering. I wanted to find the love story in the breakdown. Hope in the middle of courts and documents and rules. Movies are an antidote to divorce. A world not of division but of love.”
Noah Baumbach
Director’s
statement
Contessanally: Too long, a bit boring and a bit funny.
photograph - courtesy
La Biennale di Venezia
# Venice76 –
La Biennale di Venezia - Film Festival
Ad Astra – James Gray
Astronaut Roy McBride, Brad Pitt, also producer of the movie, travels
to the outer edges of the solar system to find his missing father and unravel a
mystery that threatens the survival of our planet. His journey will uncover
secrets that challenge the nature of human existence and our place in the
cosmos.
Starring: Brad
Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga, Liv Tyler, Donald Sutherland.
photograph - courtesy
La Biennale di Venezia
“I’d read this quote from Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote 2001: A Space Odissey: “Either we’re
not alone in the universe, or we are, and both are equally terrifying.” And I
thought, well, I’ve never seen a movie about us being alone. The idea of space
travel is both beautiful and horrifying at the same time. I’m hugely in favor
of space exploration, but sometimes exploration is also just a means of escape.
This led me to a personal place, a father/son story. I hope people understand
that at some point it is incumbent on us both to cherish exploration and to
cherish the Earth. The Earth and the human connection are worth preserving at
all costs.”
James Gray
James Gray
Director
statement
Contessanally: Fast paced thriller, outer space travel,
gripping in parts, solitude, a man’s movie.