May 31, 2006
Shorts, 5/31.
Pierre Morel, the cinematographer for Luc Besson whose directorial debut is District B13, picks seven favorite European action films for the Los Angeles Times. In Slant, where Ed Gonzalez reviews his film.
Among the other new reviews in Slant is Nick Schager's take on Coastlines. More from Stephen Holden in the New York Times: "Like its two forerunners in the trilogy, Ruby in Paradise, which pushed Ashley Judd toward Hollywood stardom, and Ulee's Gold, which won Peter Fonda the best-actor award from the New York Film Critics Circle, Coastlines features detailed performances that offer unusually intimate glimpses into its characters' mood swings. But if the acting captures their emotional ebbs and flows, the screenplay has discrepancies and lapses that can't be acted around."
Roger Ebert meets Al Gore; as for An Inconvenient Truth: "You owe it to yourself to see this film. If that sounds overdramatic, I understand. I could not have imagined writing that before seeing the film myself." More from Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly. Related: Jonathan Freedland interviews Gore in the Guardian and Jim Emerson gets a kick out of the Competitive Enterprise Institute's anti-Gore ads.
Panini Wijesiriwardane opens the WSWS interview with Sri Lankan filmmaker Asoka Handagama thusly: "To begin this discussion could you explain the nature of the government witchhunt against you and your film?"
"[Rick] Popko and [Dan] West hope Monsturd's cult notoriety will aid RetarDEAD, which happens to be its direct sequel," writes Cheryl Eddy in her profile of the DIY filmmakers in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Popko describes the new one as Flowers for Algernon meets Night of the Living Dead. Cheryl Eddy (also the author of our Italian Horror primer, by the way) writes on another page: "No San Francisco-set discussion of reanimated corpses should go without mentioning Bad Date, a work-in-progress by locals Sadie Shaw and Alison Childs."
Girish doesn't mind at all admitting that he finds two or three things to admire about A Woman, Her Men, and Her Futon, "a kick-ass little movie that I encountered years ago on cable one insomniac night when the moon was high and the neighbor's mutt wouldn't shut up."
Stop Smiling chats with Richard E Grant.
Amelie Gillette interviews Paul Rudd for the AV Club.
The BBC: "Disney is to start selling films over the internet via CinemaNow, including new films on the day they come out."
Online listening tip. Simon Winder talks about and reads from his book, The Man Who Saved Britain. That man would be Bond, by the way. James Bond.
Online viewing tip. Ron Rosenbaum in the New York Observer on Autism Every Day: "It's less than 15 minutes long, but it's a killer. It will break your heart; it will make you cry - I guarantee it. It's skillfully done, in a low-key way that recognizes there's no need to hype the emotionalism. The matter-of-fact-ness is enough, almost too much. The dailiness is the point."
Online viewing tip #2. 2 Monkeys - interesting show! - review I Am a Sex Addict. Via Caveh Zahedi, naturally.
Posted by dwhudson at 7:01 AM
Fests and events, 5/31.
The Los Angeles Times scans the lineup for the Los Angeles Film Festival (June 22 through July 2).
Bilge Ebiri isn't in Seattle, but will be following the festival via "the ridiculously thorough and prolific musings of film-buff and filmmaker Ken Rudolph. Ken also happens to be a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences - so his opinions matter in all sorts of ways."
In the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Dennis Harvey previews As Sure as My Name is Boris Karloff... at the Balboa, June 2 through 22.
Michael Guillen talks with Mitchell Altieri and Phil Flores, whose The Hamiltons will be screening in the Another Hole in the Head fest (June 8 through 15).
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Wrapping Cannes, 5/31.
Salon's Andrew O'Hehir caught the jury's press conference following the awards ceremony: "It was as if the questions we really wanted to ask Wong, Roth, Jackson, Leconte, Suleiman, Monica Bellucci and company were: Why have you ignored our expert advice? Or: How dare you remind us that all our hard-earned gossip and punditry don't mean anything?"
In the City Pages, Rob Nelson runs through the highlights and then takes a stand: "Pointedly dumb (and deeply, disarmingly poignant), Southland Tales may be the most plausible work of film futurism ever made in the United States. Most Americans here hated it."
Iklimler (Climates) tops Anthony Kaufman's list of favorites; Eugene Hernandez's got a list, too: "On second viewing, Volver is even more emotional."
J Hoberman follows up his dispatches in the Voice with a shorter roundup of comments on the awards.
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May 30, 2006
Shorts, 5/30.
Jonathan Rosenbaum segues into a review of Army of Shadows for the Chicago Reader: "Melville is best known for his eight noir features, all of them stylish and artificial in a way that seems utterly foreign to the more physical and neorealistic surfaces of Bresson's work. But these differences are ultimately superficial. What the two filmmakers have in common is much more important: the styles, themes, and philosophical positions of both can be traced directly to their experiences during World War II."
Girish watches two mid-60s Italian debuts, Bernardo Bertolucci's La Commare Secca and Marco Bellocchio's Fists In The Pocket.
Lists are perennial favorites, but at SF360, Jonathan Marlow presents a list you can use: "Ten near masterpieces rescued from the dustbin." Also, Michael Fox interviews San Francisco Cinematheque exec director Caroline Savage.
Paul Thomas Anderson is revving up for There Will Be Blood and posting photos. Via David Lowery.
"The hippie-burnout drama Cisco Pike is a movie in which the optimism of the 1960s slips into the disappointing loneliness that Los Angeles can cultivate like no other city," writes Sean Howe in the Los Angeles Times Magazine.
Robert Towne, who's just completed his latest screenplay, "about a real-life American adventurer in the Philippines during the Second World War," tells the Telegraph's Marc Lee what it is he admires about Renoir's Le Grand Illusion.
Chuck Palahniuk explains why he loves "a certain breed of horror movie. Why we all seem to love them. Movies I'll refer to as 'cycle' movies, which include some of the most popular movies of the past 40 years: The Ring, The Amityville Horror, Carrie, The Stepford Wives. In all of them, an individual is trapped by an established cycle of events that doom and destroy. From their story you can imagine that same cycle or process stretching into the past or future, destroying an endless chain of similar people, all of them denying the dire nature of their circumstances until their fate is inevitable."
Also in the Guardian:
One faction of India's Bharatiya Janata Party is demanding that actor Aamir Khan apologize for remarks he's made criticizing the BJP or else it'll ensure his new film, Fanaa in Gujurat. RK Mishkra reports for Outlook India, which is following the story with daily updates. In other words, it's a big deal in India. Namrata Joshi talks to Khan and finds he's in no mood to apologize. Via Perlentaucher's "Magazinrundschau." Related: Nathan Lee in the New York Times: "The epic Bollywood extravaganza Fanaa goes so far over the top that it reinvents itself halfway and launches on a brand new trajectory of the absurd."
You've heard the stats on Nollywood, Nigeria's film industry: third most prolific in the world, employing 350,000 people, releasing thousands of pictures a year. In Maissonneuve, Jonathan Kiefer writes:
But what’s really remarkable is that, until Nollywood, African filmmaking had been an overwhelmingly colonial enterprise, practised by artists trained in Europe and subsidized by European capital to make sophisticated films, on celluloid, aimed at non-African audiences. (Even the so-called father of African cinema, Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène, served in the French army in Europe and studied film in Moscow.) By sharp contrast, Nollywood movies are usually made by Nigerians who have little training, with minuscule budgets; they’re shot on, and go directly to, video; and their stories consist entirely of homegrown pop-culture pulp. The mere enormity of the Nollywood phenomenon rattles our know-it-all pronouncements about cultural imperialism: Are we to congratulate or rue its market-driven ascendancy? Are we to consider it the truest index of contemporary Nigerian culture?
David Chute passes along an urgent call for help: Save a collection of over 253 feature films and over 390 trailers salvaged from Chinatown cinemas in Toronto.
David Byrne finds An Inconvenient Truth "devastating - and incontrovertible."
Michael Atkinson on The Cult of the Suicide Bomber: "This is not the can't-we-get-along Arab-Persian world we see in most liberal nonfiction films, but a broader and helplessly apocalyptic view of an entire region crazed with anger, frustration, and bloodlust into objectifying death as a weapon, a cause for cosmic glory, and little else." And: "On a strictly experiential level, Deborah Scranton's The War Tapes is remarkable, tactile, and affecting; as a piece of sociopolitical culture with context and ramifications of its own, it's a worthless ration of war propaganda - ethnocentric, redneck, and enabling."
Also in the Voice:
"The camera, and, to a greater degree, all technologies and their possibilities, are the driving force behind Keaton's genius," argues Violet Glaze at PopMatters.
Grady Hendrix gets a tip: Johnnie To's Election and Election 2 have been picked up for the US by Tartan Films USA.
New reviews in Midnight Eye:
With what'll undoubtedly be a fairly impressive box set due next week from Warners, the John Wayne/John Ford Film Collection, Universal has rushed out its own this week: John Wayne: An American Icon Collection. Sure, they're the "runts in the Wayne litter," admits John McElwee at Greenbriar Picture Shows, but they're also "the ones that will really educate you about those fabled ups and downs in a career with as many false starts and appalling role selections as any major star ever got away with over fifty long years in the biz. There's not a one of these five that won’t fascinate you - they sure did me."
"Intentionally or not," writes Jared Rapfogel at Stop Smiling, Arkadin the film is as mysterious and out of reach as Arkadin the character." Also, Josh Tyson on two mockumentaries, LolliLove and Buckshot Boys.
New DVD reviews at Slant:
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Fests and events, 5/30.
"If watching the stars at Cannes has made you long for a red-carpet experience of your own, you don't have to fly to the South of France." For Time, Lisa McLaughlin briefs you on ten festivals in the US. Via Movie City News. In a similar vein, New York's Logan Hill.
"Once again this week, New York hosts multiple film festivals, each touting a variety of independent and international movies," writes Ed Halter. "But quantity does not always mean quality, and with increased competition for audiences, press, and sponsorship, it's a question that festival directors would do well to ask themselves: Does this festival need to exist?" Also in the Voice, Elliott Stein previews Open Roads: New Italian Cinema, a series opening tomorrow at the Walter Reade and running through June 8.
Film Forum's B Noir series updates: Ed Gonzalez at Slant and Ryan Stewart at Cinematical.
The New York Asian Film Festival opens the day B Noir closes and runs to July 1. Cinematical's Martha Fischer reviews Linda Linda Linda and A Bittersweet Life.
Meanwhile, Cinematical's Kim Voynar reviews Neil Burger's "darkly magical fairy tale," The Illusionist, which opened the Seattle International Film Festival, and keeps 'em coming: The Proposition and Expiration Date.
Also in Seattle, KJ Doughton reviews A/K/A Tommy Chong for Film Threat. Christopher Frizzelle, part of the Stranger's ongoing coverage of the fest. And of course, the Siffblog is thriving, too.
In you're in LA and enjoy seeing bodies move, you might check the Dance Camera West Film Festival (June 2 through 30).
David Walsh wraps WSWS's extensive coverage of the San Francisco International Film Festival.
Posted by dwhudson at 2:23 PM
Wrapping Cannes, 5/30.
"So: a good Cannes, but not a great Cannes," decides the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "For my money, the best films were out of competition: Paul Greengrass's magnificent United 93, about the passengers who fought back on 9/11, body-slammed every film in the competition. And Douglas Gordon's gloriously funny and audacious Zidane: A 21st-Century Portrait, following the footballer over 90 minutes, was the most purely enjoyable event at the festival." Also, Stephen Moss looks into Ken Loach's clenched fist.
Cahal Milmo has a fine long profile of Loach in the Independent: "[E]xperience shows that efforts to paint Loach as a dour realist with a messianic zeal to raise the portrayal of proletarian toil to an art form often fall on stony ground. For a start, his films are more free-form than many would imagine."
"Every film festival produces its quintessential film," writes J Hoberman. "For Cannes 2006, it was Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel. Maximalist cine-globalism, Babel was shot in four languages on three continents by a Mexican director with an international cast, including Hollywood top dog Brad Pitt.... Cannes's 2006 competition may not have been the strongest in recent years but it was certainly the most relevant." Also in the Voice, Rob Nelson talks to Richard Linklater about his Cannes double bill.
Kenneth Turan looks back in the Los Angeles Times: "Perhaps the best of the slighted films was Pan's Labyrinth, the latest work by the most accomplished fantasist in contemporary film, Guillermo del Toro."
Roger Ebert, too, is evaluating the fest: "But what about another much-touted film, Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette? No other film was so loved by the French critics, although of course they are not the jury. And as the festival came to its close, I found the film growing in my memory and appreciation."
Matt Dentler lists his top 7.
For Mike D'Angelo at Nerve, "it seems clear that this jury wanted to make a statement about an artist's responsibility to grapple with his or her times." And Bilge Ebiri argues that the Palme d'Or matters more than its currently fashionable to admit. For example, "To say that Tarantino wouldn't have happened without the Palme would be silly, of course. But it would be equally silly to argue that Pulp Fiction's explosive debut at Cannes, capped off with its Palme win, did nothing for its stateside prospects."
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Shohei Imamura, 1926 - 2006.
Japanese filmmaker Shohei Imamura, a two-time winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes, has died at the age of 79....
Imamura, a pioneer of his country's New Wave movement, won the Cannes Film Festival's top award for The Ballad of Narayama in 1983 and The Eel in 1997. His other films include 1989's Black Rain, which depicted the aftermath of the Hiroshima atomic bombing.
The BBC.
In nineteen feature films over 45 years Imamura has probed the lower depths of Japanese society and "the Japanese consciousness." Not for him the tourist-friendly vision of Japan as the post-war economic powerhouse of Asia, the land of kimono-clad elegance, Zen serenity, and harmonious Confucian social hierarchies. Instead he has put onscreen a world populated by prostitutes, pimps, and petty thieves, peasant farmers and middle-class pornographers, serial killers and shamen. This is the irrepressibly "real" Japan of his bawdy, ragged, sensual films.
Nelson Kim at Senses of Cinema.
Updated through 6/2.
As great as Ballad of Narayama is, I've always felt that his true masterpiece is The Profound Desire of the Gods (aka Kuragejima - Legends from a Southern Island). This epic portrait of the near-primitive and incestuous lives of the inhabitants of one of Japan's Southern Islands is Imamura's most powerful and disturbing work, and easily one of the ten greatest (and most unforgettable) films of all time.
Filmbrain.
[T]wo of his early movies, Stolen Desire and Endless Desire, are two of my favorite Japanese movies of all time.
Grady Hendrix.
See also acquarello's reviews and Richard Phillips's interview for WSWS.
Updates, 6/1: Pigs and Battleships "contains most of the seeds of Mr Imamura's mature work: the black-and-white widescreen frames throb with an animalistic vitality, and his protagonists are unabashedly amoral and self-centered, concerned only with personal survival," writes Dave Kehr in the New York Times. "For Mr Imamura, these were the positive traits of an island nation of limited resources."
The Japanese New Wave "explored the link between eroticism and violence, and challenged the moral values of postwar Japanese society," writes Ronald Bergan in the Guardian. "Imamura went deeper and further into these areas than his contemporaries, but took longer to become accepted in the west as the most important director of his generation."
"As far as I know, he's the first major post-humanist to emerge in Japan, getting his feet wet just before the other great rebel of Japanese cinema, Nagisa Oshima, went into feature filmmaking," writes Ryan Wu at Pigs and Battleships. "While his peers busied themselves telling classical humanist tales with such lofty titles as The Human Condition and The Burmese Harp, Imamura picked at our festering scabs."
Update, 6/2: "Like the veteran director Kenji Mizoguchi, he was a champion of women's rights. Many of his films, from The Insect Woman (1963) to The History of Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess (1970), were searching studies of what it meant to be a woman in a society in which she was required at all times to be subservient to her husband and walk several paces behind him," writes the Telegraph. "He tackled subjects the authorities would have preferred to be left undisturbed - such as the fate of atom bomb victims in Black Rain (1989) and, obliquely, suicide in The Eel (1997); and, alone among his contemporaries, he emphasised the unbroken line between modern Japan and its often barbaric past."
Posted by dwhudson at 11:40 AM
Cannes. Index.
As the individual entries on films continue to slip off the front page, I thought a simple, stripped-down index might be helpful. Opening Night:
Posted by dwhudson at 7:33 AM
May 29, 2006
Cannes. Review orphans.
Though a slew of new entries went up throughout the Cannes Film Festival, each devoted to an individual film, I certainly didn't get to all of them. Below the jump: an attempt to find all those missing pieces for you.
Before getting into the actual festival lineup, a few mentions of films that screened either in the Market or were special previews, etc. I've already mentioned the upbeat receptions given to opening sequences of Oliver Stone's World Trade Center and the showreel for Dreamgirls, but perhaps the most spectacular response - if Kevin Smith is to be believed, as we're all sure he is - has to have been the eight-minute standing ovation for Clerks II.
I also found this, from George the Cyclist, worth noting: "My foraging in the market place was amply rewarded with Unknown, an American production starring Barry Pepper, Greg Kinnear and Jim Caviezel.... It was most gripping and exhilarating film-going experience."
A week ago, I pointed to Rob Sharp's piece in the Observer on the controversy kicked up by Provoked. When Kiranjit Ahluwalia, the Sikh woman whose story the film tells, and Aishwarya Rai, who plays her, arrived in Cannes, Karl Rozmeyer had a talk with them for Premiere.
Variety's Derek Elley caught one you probably want to hear about: "South Korean maverick Kim Ki-duk takes a scalpel to the local obsession with appearances in Time, in which a young couple resort to plastic surgery to perk their relationship - with unexpected results. Though typically centered on a high-concept idea, film is more of a conversation piece than Kim's usual pics, recalling recent works by fellow Korean helmer Hong Sang-soo, with its coffee shop meetings and ironic playfulness." The film will open the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival on June 30.
All the films in Competition got entries, and of those screening Out of Competition that didn't, I'm primarily sorry I missed Ici Najac, A Vous la Terre (Najac Calling, Over to You Earth) and Chlopiec Na Galpopujacym Koniu (The Boy on a Galloping Horse) since they're the ones most of us know the least about. I did point to Bernard Besserglik's in the Hollywood Reporter, but without mentioning that he wrote, "As the title suggests, Najac purports to be a call to arms against globalization. In fact it is a celebration rather than a manifesto, a wry shrug at the contradictions involved in living off the land in the digital age, and all the more enjoyable for that."
As for The Boy, it's only just yesterday that Anne Feullère's brief review appeared at Cineuropa - the only one I've seen so far: "Filled with silence, lengthy still shots and close-ups, dreamlike sequences and dialogue that frames two characters at a time, The Boy is a film deeply inspired by the cinema of Ingmar Bergman."
Looking at the list more closely now, I'm only just now realizing that Wenders's Chambre 666 was screened this year.
You might already know about the set-up: Cannes, 1982. Wenders placed a camera in a hotel room and gave a series of directors a question: "Is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?" Most directors were left alone with the camera and the question, though some, as you see up there, were in pairs (Fassbinder, who would die in just a few months, and Herzog, whom death might be too scared to bother with). You can see the full list of interviewees here. As for seeing the film itself, I'd certainly like to again; I'm guessing it's been a good 15 or 20 years since I have. A DVD is available here in Germany, so I'll see to that soon enough. As for Region 1, there was supposed to have been a second Wenders collection with this one in there over a year ago, but I don't know what's come of those plans.
Then there's Eugène Green's Les Signes, and here, I eagerly point you to an entry by Scott Foundas, who was silent throughout much of the fest, but suddenly blogged up a storm right at the end there: "Like all of Green's films, this one is a fable, about a group of characters who find themselves at a crossroads, and how they come to choose which of many possible paths upon which to shine their symbolic candles. 'How does one search?' one character asks, only to be answered 'By looking at the world.' And there are few greater pleasures to be had in Cannes this year than looking at the world through the eyes of Eugène Green."
Signs was part of a program of shorts that included Jane Campion's The Water Diary (see "Cannes. Shorts and shorts."), Gaspar Noé's SIDA, François Ozon's Un Lever de Rideau (A Curtain Raiser) and Monte Hellman's Stanley's Girlfriend. Click the titles for more.
"With Nouvelle Chance, presented out of competition at Cannes, Anne Fontaine continues the adventures of Augustin Dos Santos, played by her brother Jean-Chrétien Sibertin-Blanc, after Augustin (1994) and Augustin, Roi du Kung Fu (1999)," explains Cineuropa's Anne Feullère. "Fontaine returns to a style that suits her very well, to make an unusual, slightly offbeat, tender and crazy comedy."
Variety's Todd McCarthy: "A French homage to the American Old West that comes at a time when it is unusual to see much Gallic enthusiasm expressed for the cowboy mentality, Requiem for Billy the Kid advances a curious parallel between the famous outlaw and the contemporaneous poet Arthur Rimbaud." Hm! He does mention that it's "ultra-French from top to bottom" and features "a new version of Dylan's 'Knocking on Heaven's Door' sung by musician Claire Diterzi in sexy hush-whispered style."
As for the other films screened Out of Competition - Over the Hedge, United 93, X-Men: The Last Stand and Sketches of Frank Gehry - have already gotten plenty of coverage, with the possible exception of that last one. Michelle Devereaux has one of the most recent reviews in the San Francisco Bay Guardian: "Yes, Frank Gehry is the People's Architect, so it's no surprise an admitted architecture novice has created the first filmic retrospective of his work. Actually, Sydney Pollack probably knows more than he lets on... The relationship between the two men - their professional jealousies, the push-pull of commerce in their respective muddied art forms, and how that tension has been realized in their work - is probably the most interesting aspect of Sketches of Frank Gehry. Unfortunately, it's barely explored, perhaps because the incessantly safe Pollack refuses to insert himself into the narrative in any meaningful way." Also, Rebecca Epstein talks with Pollack for the LA CityBeat and you may remember that David D'Arcy turned in a long, thoughtful review from Toronto last fall.
The review orphans from the Un Certain Regard section:
And then there's the film that closed the fest, Transylvania, which Cineuropa's Fabien Lemercier calls a "fiery masterpiece"; Variety's Leslie Felperin is a tad less enthusiastic.
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Wrapping Cannes, 5/29.
"This year he got lucky"? Surely Manohla Dargis and AO Scott, reporting on Sunday night's awards ceremony in Cannes for the New York Times, mean that only in the best sense. Regardless, they do conclude, "Coupled with Mr Loach's victory, Ms Arnold's made this an unusually strong year for British filmmakers, though their harsh portrayal of their country's past and present are not likely to please the tourist board."
An "exceptional year for the British film industry," write Charlotte Higgins and Mark Brown, who go on to quote Loach in the Guardian:
In Britain we have a really rich film culture which rarely gets on to cinema screens. Our writers, dramatists and visual culture are much stronger than people think. We are limited by what the Americans want us to do. We need film distributors, and especially exhibitors [cinemas] to put our films on the screen. We need to be seen as part of European and world cinema, not as an extension of America.
"Was Loach a compromise choice?" asks Peter Bradshaw. "Or a 'lifetime achievement' award for a Cannes favorite who has been in the running for the big prize on seven previous occasions? Such speculation is by the way, and perhaps churlish. Loach has made a fine and powerful film... [and] has toughly pursued an unfashionably political, engaged cinema."
"What does this tell us?" asks the Telegraph's David Gritten. "Well, it's not that 'the French adore Ken Loach,' as one report put it this morning," he blogs, referring to Hugh Davies's report in his own paper, the Telegraph. No, "what this victory tells us is that Loach is hugely respected in the world's film community, but a prophet with insufficient honour in his own country. He has a niche following in Britain who admire his work, but he has found it hard to reach a broader audience with his left-of-center films, most of which are outstanding."
Exactly. "Lucky"?!
Roger Ebert calls Loach's win "a surprise and a delight in about equal measure."
"We can't begrudge the Palme d'Or," blog Mary and Richard Corliss at Time. "If only Loach's movie had been as sharp and powerful an his acceptance speech."
Cineuropa's Fabien Lemercier gathers quotes from all the winners.
Meanwhile, the Australian reports on the winner of the Jury Prize handed out as part of the Un Certain Regard section, Ten Canoes.
Mike D'Angelo, blogging at Nerve, compares this year's Competition lineup with those of years past - and finds it wanting. Jonathan Romney, writing in the Independent, agrees.
If you had other things on your mind this past couple of weeks, the Telegraph runs Sukhdev Sandhu's diary, a fine and quick way to snap up the gist and move on, if you're so inclined. There you'll also find David Gritten arguing: "Big-bucks movies are killing quality at Cannes."
"Cannes can turn all that attention into a harsh red glare when a movie does not deliver," warns Anne Thompson in the Hollywood Reporter. "With the speed of the Internet, movies are declared winners and losers within moments of their final closing credits." David Poland responds.
"[T]o look at the American movies represented in Cannes is to see politics everywhere," wrote AO Scott in the NYT a few days ago.
Anthony Kaufman: "Of the nine films I most anticipated seeing at Cannes, two exceeded expectations (Volver, Red Road), another three delivered about what was expected (Taxidermia, Climates, Babel), a couple fell short (Fast Food Nation, Flandres)."
From Jason Solomons's overview in the Observer: "The stylistic tics of Italy's Paolo Sorrentino in The Family Friend drove me barmy; Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Climates, from Turkey, is self-obsessed art cinema at its most cold; Nanni Moretti's The Caiman was over-reliant on the director's self-regarding charm. Richard Kelly's Southland Tales was so bad it made me wonder if he'd ever met a human being." And he decides that "the new hotbed of cinematic invention is Belgium."
As he left a few days ago, the Guardian's Xan Brooks reflected on the highlights: "In the cafés and bars people have been raving about titles such as The Host (a Korean monster movie), John Cameron Mitchell's sexed-up Shortbus and the Raymond Carver adaptation Jindabyne." More highs, more lows from Dave McCoy at MSN Movies.
Matt Dentler's got pix.
The latest indieWIRE L'Atelier du Festival interview: Buick Rivera director Goran Rusinovic.
"Cannes is a curious thing," writes Caveh Zahedi. "It's vulgar, it's phony, it's rubbish, and yet, it is the still the highest honor that a filmmaker aspires to."
Via They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, Simon Haupt scopes his highs and lows in the Globe and Mail, Geoff Pevere finds the Americans talking politics and the AP's Angela Doland admires the Latin American entries.
Movie City News gathers takes on the fest from Gautaman Bhaskaran in the Seoul Times, Simrat Ghuman for India's IBN and Turkey's Zaman.
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Seattle Dispatch. 1.
The segue from obsessing over Cannes to obsessing over the Seattle International Film Festival now begins in earnest with this first dispatch from Sean Axmaker, whose latest interview over at the main site is with screenwriter and storyteller extraordinaire, Stewart Stern. Here, Sean presents his takes on the opening night film, The Illusionist, as well as on A Prairie Home Companion, The Proposition, Conversations with Other Women, The Death of Mr Lazarescu and special presentations of silent classics, The Scarlet Letter and Au Bonheur des dames.
The Seattle International Film Festival is a brambly garden of delights and frustrations for local audiences, a festival so determined to be all things to all people that you have to search for the adventurous and the challenging amidst the crazy-quilt programming, and 2006 is no different. Good, bad, whatever, it's SIFF, the most well-attended film festival in North America, and I guess we wouldn't have it any other way.
Case in point: SIFF audiences lulled into a false sense of opening night delights with last year's uncharacteristically shaggy and individualistic opening night film, Miranda July's idiosyncratic and unpredictable Me and You and Everyone We Know, were brought back down to earth on Thursday, May 25, with this year's gala opening film, The Illusionist. Crafted with a budget-minded luscious sense of period detail to distract from the rudimentary direction and clumsy screenwriting (both from Neil Burger), the film was apparently chosen for its art-house star power (Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti) and pleasant visuals (sets, costumes, Jessica Biel caressed by soft lights).
The story of a battle of wits between an enigmatic magician (Norton) and a decadent and corrupt Austrian Prince (Rufus Sewell) plotting his way to the throne with the marriage to a beloved Duchess (Biel), who just happens to be the magician's childhood love, is historical intrigue at its silliest, a 19th century game of political and personal brinksmanship played out as a long con royale. Thank the crown for Giamatti as the Chief Inspector, a poor-born opportunist with an interest in conjuring and showmanship and a nascent morality rekindled by the magician's theatrical sleight of hand. His twinkling eyes and theatrical smiles offering everything from cagey mistrust to professional appreciation (often at the same time) gives him the flamboyance the rest of the film so desperately needs in the face of Burger's contrivances, all of which he telegraphs with creaky pieces of misdirection that stick out like a digital effect in a show of 19th century stage illusion.
It's soon to be released, along with the opening weekend's other spotlight offerings. The Robert Altman/Garrison Keillor collaboration A Prairie Home Companion should be a marriage made in ensemble heaven. The frenzy of Altman films of old is now slowing down with age and easing up with the certitude that things will work out and everyone will find their place. And if they don't, then they'll just wing it and everything will be fine. He's at his best when working from a script with a strong, well-structured story, which maintains its shape while he colors outside the lines and doodles in the margins, but Keillor's script is too meandering to hold it up. Altman enjoys the company of the characters and their swirl of sweet-and-sour chemistry but has little luck creating any drama from the situation or any bite to the character collisions. The lolling little comedy is pleasing and good company and decidedly inconsequential.
The Proposition, a jagged Australian frontier western in the key of Peckinpah (the opening scene is a magnificent reworking of the siege of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid), is the savage opposite, a family drama with a psychopath at the head of the clan. Nick Cave's sinewy script looks austere and stripped down but echoes with a rich set of characters and conflicts while slowly revealing an entire colonial culture built on institutional racism, and