August can be a dreary month for Hollywood glamour, but the Venice Film Festival is on the horizon to kick off the busy fall film festival season in style.
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August can be a dreary month for Hollywood glamour, but the Venice Film Festival is on the horizon to kick off the busy fall film festival season in style.
August can be a dreary month for Hollywood glamour, but the Venice Film Festival is on the horizon to kick off the busy fall film festival season in style.
There will be plenty of stars gracing the red carpets when the 83rd edition of the festival kicks off Wednesday on the Lido: Noel and Liam Gallagher, Robert Pattinson, Rooney Mara, George Clooney and Penélope Cruz are among those expected to attend. Some of the films may even become Oscar nominees.
But the mood feels a little different this year. There will always be a spotlight for the Hollywood contingent and the awards hopefuls posing on boats and docks in designer duds. Yet, in a lineup featuring Pattinson as “To Catch a Predator” host Chris Hansen, Dakota Johnson as Marilyn Monroe, Guy Pearce as Rupert Murdoch and Clooney as, well, himself (he’s getting a lifetime achievement award, as is Ellen Burstyn), it’s possible that much of the attention will be on a man who (probably) won’t be there: Elon Musk.
Alex Gibney’s nearly four-hour documentary about the world’s richest man has been in the works for almost four years. The Oscar-winner wasn’t sure about taking it on at first, but a good friend convinced him it would be a worthy portrait of 21st-century power — and this was before the 2024 presidential campaign and DOGE.
When the documentary was announced, Musk called it a “hit piece” on social media. Gibney replied, “How would you know?”
In fact, Gibney told The Associated Press he started off as a kind of admirer — as well as a Tesla owner — and sincerely wanted to talk to Musk for the film.
“Ultimately, he didn’t want to talk to me,” Gibney said. “But then you start, you know, digging into the facts and you follow them where they lead. And where they led, for me, was to a place that upended the myth, I would say, of Elon Musk as a kind of modern Leonardo da Vinci … I think that the news in this film is that Musk isn’t an inventor. He’s a confidence man.”
The filmmakers talked to hundreds of people on and off the record to compile a sweeping picture of the Tesla and SpaceX CEO who, Gibney said, is not dissimilar to the guys at Enron or Elizabeth Holmes. He was most surprised by how many people seemed to be afraid to be on camera talking about Musk — even his admirers wanted permission first.
“I thought, wow, for such a big and powerful person, that seems awfully weak,” Gibney said.
But while it’s a “dark and dangerous topic,” Gibney said, the film is also a “fun ride.”
The same could be said of “My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile,” in which Julia Loktev continues her sprawling portrait of independent Russian journalists after the invasion of Ukraine.
Source: Read the original article on www.winnipegfreepress.com
