Cannes. Mister Lonely.

Harmony Korine gets Premiere's Glenn Kenny "thinking about Mister Lonely as an experiment in the extremes of bathos, even though it is really a comedy of sorts." Ach, it's tough pulling any single quote from that entry; it's too fun. Go, read.

Gregg Goldstein talks with Korine about his Un Certain Regard entry for the Hollywood Reporter.

Updated through 5/29.

Updates, 5/23: "The most puzzling film I've seen so far has got to be Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely," writes Matt Dentler. "On the surface, it feels sort of like Tod Browning's 1932 classic, Freaks, as made by Harmony Korine. It's a bewildering film, equal parts frustrating and engaging, and reminded me a lot of Todd Solondz's Palindromes. And, like that underrated film, this one will be very divisive. As a storyteller, it's easily Korine's most mature work and he's put the harsh textures and disturbing imagery of his early work, more or less on hold. More or less."

"Mister Lonely is by turns idiotic, over-extended, childish and half-baked," writes the Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu. "But when it's not those things, and sometimes even when it is, the results are brilliantly bold, moving and tenderly, rhapsodically beautiful."

Novelist Dennis Cooper has been following this film for a while and presents a series of statements from Korine. For example: "What type of human being looks at a celebrity icon and not only admires them like fans, but takes it a step further? For them, it's not enough to just enjoy the celebrities they admire. They take a decision: 'I am going to live through that person. I am going to take that character's identity for myself and somehow sustain a living by pretending to be that person at different functions, like retirement homes or car shows.'"

Updates, 5/24: "As a Catholic priest in a Latin American country, [Werner] Herzog leads a band of nuns on an airplane to drop bags of rice on the impoverished below," notes Anthony Kaufman at indieWIRE. "But one of the nuns accidentally falls out of the plane. To say more would spoil the fun. Suffice it to say that Mister Lonely actually has something meaningful to say about the folly of chasing dreams and miracles and the various paths to self-discovery. But there are too many narrative indulgences and twisted disharmonious scenes to make it gel."

"The story of a lonely Michael Jackson impersonator who finds a fleeting tenderness with a Marilyn Monroe impersonator seems to bring out the lighter side of the erstwhile enfant terrible and possesses reserves of offbeat, goofball charm," writes Allan Hunter for Screen Daily. "Charm can only take you so far, however, and by the halfway point it becomes obvious that the film has little else to offer. The mixture of the eccentric and the grotesque grows increasingly tiresome."

"Like the Reygadas, Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely could be considered the first self-consciously mature work by a onetime enfant terrible," writes Dennis Lim at IFC News.

Update, 5/29: Matt Singer at IFC News: "The nun sequences might sound like an elaborate gag but they take on unexpected spiritual dimensions and the footage of those nuns falling through the air might be the most uplifting of this year's festival."

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Cannes @ 60. Index.

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Posted by dwhudson at May 22, 2007 4:07 PM