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Venice filmfest ends on high note
2008-09-06
VENICE, Italy (AFP) - The Venice film festival was set to announce its winners on Saturday after late-running US entries helped it recover from harsh early criticism of the lacklustre line-up. The final day of screenings saw US veteran actor Mickey Rourke score a knock-out blow in his title role as "The Wrestler" by Darren Aronofsky. Rourke, who plays a has-been professional wrestler pitifully loath to throw in the towel, said he drew on his real-life experience as a boxer in the early 1990s as well as regrets over an acting career that he says he "threw away" 15 years ago. Talk of a comeback began with Rourke's role as a hardened ex-con in the 2005 crime thriller "Sin City." The 65th edition of the world's oldest movie festival, directed by Marco Muller at the start of his second four-year term, had critics fuming over the quality of the films on offer. Many panned the much-anticipated thriller by Iranian-born French director Barbet Schroeder, "Inju, the Beast in the Shadow," set in Japan, and a gangster movie set in Brazil, "Plastic City" by Hong Kong's Yu Lik-wai. After the festival opened August 27 with the glam duo George Clooney and Brad Pitt in the out-of-competition comedy by Joel and Ethan Coen "Burn After Reading," most of the films in this year's line-up "seemed like plain porridge without sugar," in the words of Guardian film critic Andrew Pulver. Mueller defended the 21 films before the jury headed by German director Wim Wenders, saying they were "the best that are out there." Two other US films shown late in the event and winning high marks were family drama "Rachel Getting Married" by Jonathan Demme and Iraq war gut-wrencher "The Hurt Locker" by Kathryn Bigelow. Anne Hathaway stars in "Rachel Getting Married" as a recovering drug addict who shakes up her sister's wedding with an overdose of honesty about their dysfunctional family. In "The Hurt Locker," US director Kathryn Bigelow offers a stunning portrayal of the harrowing work of a bomb disposal team in Iraq. "My interest was to give this conflict a human face, to enable an audience to actually experience what a soldier experiences," she said. "There's accuracy and truth and realism that underscores all the images." In the film, daredevil Sergeant James, played by Jeremy Renner, leads the unit with chilling nonchalance as he dons an 80-pound "bomb suit" in Iraq's searing heat to approach homemade explosive devices packing terrifying payloads. While US films have dominated the closing days of the festival, other standouts include Argentine-Italian director Marco Bechis' "BirdWatchers," exposing the plight of Brazil's Guarani Indians in the face of the biofuels boom, and "Teza," in which Ethiopia's Haile Gerima revisits his homeland under the dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam. Another potential winner is Russian director Aleksei German Jr.'s "Paper Soldier," a recreation of the Soviet effort to put the first man in space in 1961 -- Yuri Gagarin -- which centres on the cosmonaut squad's chief doctor. Two Japanese films are also in with a chance -- Takeshi Kitano's whimsical "Achilles and the Tortoise" and Hayao Miyazaki's latest animated children's fantasy "Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea." In a ceremony set to begin at 1700 GMT, a Golden Lion will be awarded for best film and a Silver Lion for best director. Rourke appears set to pick up the Volpi Cup for best actor, while other awards include best screenplay and a jury prize.
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