In Contention

Author: Guy Lodge

  • Letters from Cannes

    Today’s Cannes schedule has only allowed for one-and-a-quarter films, which at least means I’ll be able to catch up on yesterday’s review backlog later. For now, though, it’s off to one function I didn’t have to work very hard to get invited to — the London Film School (my alma mater) reception, with Mike Leigh as guest of honor.

    Then it’s a dip into the Edinburgh Film Festival party — which can be counted on for good chat and free whiskey — before I get myself all tuxed up and hit the red carpet for tonight’s gala screening of “Certified Copy.” (Yes, I’m seeing it twice in two days — it’s that good.) So I’m afraid there won’t be more reviews for a good few hours, though you can catch my Twittered thoughts on Sundance-to-Cannes indie hit “Blue Valentine.”

    Two things to plug before I go, however. One disadvantage about being on the ground at Cannes is that I haven’t the time to read and round up fellow critical reactions, so indieWIRE’s criticWIRE Cannes Guide, collecting the scores of a wide range of critics and bloggers, is something of a godsend.

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  • CANNES: ‘Certified Copy’ and other adventures

    By the halfway-mark of the festival, Cannes can do irrational and frankly cruel things to your head. Having slunk back to my apartment at 3am after a merry night of wine and pizza some fellow bloggers — only to find myself locked out of said apartment in a cheap sitcom twist — I planned to treat myself to a lie-in while my roommates, Slant’s Matt Noller and the A.V. Club’s Mike D’Angelo, dutifully rose for the 8.30 press screening of Xavier Beauvois’s Competition title “Of Gods and Men.”

    Minutes after the door clicked shut behind them, however, I found myself sitting bolt upright in bed: what if was making a terrible mistake? What if “Of Gods and Men” turned out to be the unforeseen “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”-style masterwork of the festival, and I the one dumb schlub who missed it? What if I was forever frozen out of Film Dweeb Nation for not having an opinion on “the Beauvois?” What if?

    Suitably panicked, I leaped out of bed, tore through a breakneck shower-and-dress routine and ran — ran — down to the Palais so I could settle into a nosebleed seat, panting and bleary-eyed, with one minute to spare.

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  • Dweebs vs. Hot Dog Eaters

    (UPDATE: While he’s good and fired up, Jeff takes the opportunity to slam the “effete critics” who don’t like “Biutiful” as “coming from a stifled and constipated place.”)

    Hot dog eaters? Hey, you asked for more double entendres, though I’m guessing Jeff Wells doesn’t quite mean it that that way.

    I’ve been a fan for many years of Hollywood Elsewhere’s energetic, unguarded and often unhinged Cannes coverage, even — no, especially — when I suspected I’d eventually disagree with him on the films, once I saw them. Actually being at the fest, however, affords me the chance to disagree with him both immediately and in person — as we did last night, on Abbas Kiarostami’s rapturous Competition standout “Certified Copy.” (More on that anon.) What I like about Wells is that he’ll cheerfully join you for a drink mere minutes after posting this:

    Abbas Kiarostami’s Copie Conforme (a.k.a., Certified Copy) is what most hot-dog-eating humans on the planet earth would call a “dead movie” … However, if you’re a member in good standing of Film Dweeb Nation, a presumably human but possibly alien culture which tends to favor and in some cases worship the imaginations of sunlight found in anal cavities, you’ll stroll into the Orange press cafe just after the screening of Copie Conforme, like a certain British journalist did 20 or 25 minutes ago, and go “oh, I loved it!” I looked at this guy incredulously and said, “Hold up, let me get this straight. You didn’t like the Inarritu [i.e., Biutiful] but you liked Copie Conforme?”

    I can’t imagine which journalist he’s talking about … any ideas?

  • SHORT TAKE: “Biutiful” (**1/2)

    Cannes Film Festival

    “How much does life weigh?” asked Alejandro González Iñárritu’s sophomore feature “21 Grams” – and while the literal answer was there in the title, it’s been clear from the rich buffet of human suffering in his films thus far that he believes it weighs rather a lot indeed.

    Brace yourselves, then, for “Biutiful,” an effortfully solemn amalgamation of personal crises and social concerns from the director’s previous films that might consider going by the tagline: “Life’s about to get heavier.”

    If that’s an overly glib response to an evidently considered and compassionate personal statement on González Iñárritu’s part – it’s his first feature to spring from his own (co-written) screenplay, after all – I apologize. There’s nothing like bleary-eyed festival fatigue to shorten one’s patience with films that fall a little short of either potential or expectation.

    But it takes more than undisputed sincerity to make a film that resonates, and “Biutiful” paints from too limited an emotional palette for its high-stakes story of parental duty, in the face of hovering mortality, to hit home the way it should.

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  • CANNES: ‘Outrage,’ ‘The Princess of Montpensier,’ ‘Black Heaven’

    Nothing quite clicked into gear today, I’m afraid – the one screening I really wanted to make, Xavier Dolan’s warmly received sophomore feature “Heartbeats,” filled up before I could get in the door, while the films I did see made for a pretty uninspiring day’s viewing.

    I’m usually quite a stickler for taking notes during festival screenings – overlapping and psychotically askew, given my minimal mastery of night-writing, but notes nonetheless – but today the notepad stayed largely unblemished. That usually means one of two things: I’m too lost in the film to keep jotting, or it simply provokes no thoughts from me whatsoever. Guess which one applies today.

    I’m afraid it was with a mostly clear conscience that I sacrificed an early evening screening of Jia Zhang Ke’s “I Wish I Knew” in order to attend the swish London Film Festival shindig at the Palais Stephanie Hotel. (Yes, any big festival teems with parties for other festivals – just drink your champagne and go with it.) I confess I didn’t get on that well with Jia’s previous feature “24 City,” and guessed the new film would be in a similar vein – friends’ reports suggest that was a good guess.

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  • CANNES: ‘You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger,’ ‘Kaboom,’ ‘Inside Job’

    Apologies for yesterday’s scarcity of Cannes updates: a bumper day of back-to-back screenings cut unavoidably into my writing time, particularly as “Another Year” — widely agreed, among those I’ve spoken to, to be the standout film of the Competition so far — merited a more substantial take than most. One day and several films later, Mike Leigh’s latest and its rich, teasing ambiguties are still foremost in my thoughts, and some inside Twitterers have suggested that the jury is similarly impressed.

    My day could have been even busier, but I blew off an early evening screening of Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan’s “Heartbeats” to finish my Leigh review — only to pay the price this afternoon as I was shut out of the repeat screening. You can’t have (much less do) it all. I fully intended to make up for it with the late show of Chadian Competition title “A Screaming Man” … but if you can refuse when USA Today’s delightful Anthony Breznican offers to treat you to a steak-and-bouillabaisse dinner on the Croisette, you’re a nobler cinephile than I.

    Moving on to yesterday’s decidedly mixed bag of American movies…

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  • REVIEW: “Another Year” (***1/2)

    Cannes Film Festival

    “On a scale of one to ten, how happy are you?” asks one character of another in Mike Leigh’s new film “Another Year.” “One,” is the doleful reply, as if Leigh himself is swearing off the sunnier skies of his previous feature, “Happy-Go-Lucky.”

    He needn’t have made the point so emphatically. For a director who has worked, across his career, with a thriftily light bag of oft-used themes, milieus and even actors, Mike Leigh has remarkably never settled for making the same film twice.

    His detractors paint much of his oeuvre with the broad brush of kitchen-sink miserablism, ignoring the considerable tonal and structural differences between a “Naked” and, say, an “All or Nothing” – but then overestimating the radicalism of a “departure” like the aforementioned “Happy-Go-Lucky,” a tarter and more searching film than the feel-good breeze many pretended it was.

    Detractors and admirers alike will probably label Leigh’s latest a return to normal service for the prickly Brit: a leisurely character study, sober-sided but flecked with streaks of broad humor, dwelling on the personal insecurities of London’s tea-swilling middle classes. A cast peppered with familiar faces from past Leigh works – Jim Broadbent, Lesley Manville, Ruth Sheen, Imelda Staunton and so on – will further the impression of business as usual, but “Another Year” turns out to be one of the filmmaker’s most structurally ambitious and emotionally expansive works.

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  • CANNES: ‘Chatroom,’ ‘Aurora’

    Far be it from me to tell Thierry Fremaux et al how to run a festival – though I’ve programmed some pretty wicked DVD marathons in my time, I’ll have you know – but the scheduling at Cannes this year has been haphazard, to say the least. Today, for example, served up no Competition titles whatsoever, with only two Un Certain Regard titles to keep “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” (which I hardly expected to emerge as my favorite film of the day) company on a Friday night.

    Cut to me drawing up my viewing schedule for tomorrow, frantically calculating the pros and cons of around eight different titles I want to see, and I can’t help wishing they’d spread the weekend wealth a little. Mike Leigh’s “Another Year” and WoodyAllen’s “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” are the two major attractions, of course, but I’ll be sorry to miss Cam Archer’s “Shit Year” in Director’s Fortnight. That’s just the morning menu: later on, we get buzzy new titles from Gregg Araki, Xavier Dolan, Charles Ferguson and Mahamet-Saleh Haroun … there will be, if not blood, some heavy-hearted cross-outs.

    Not that I was much in the mood for further screenings after today’s slightly gruelling back-to-back triple-bill, one-third of which found me hunched on the stairs of the Salle Debussy theater as press packed out this afternoon’s screening of Hideo Nakata’s “Chatroom.” (They’d regret their enthusiasm before long.)

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  • SHORT TAKE: “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” (**1/2)

    Cannes Film Festival

    “Is greed good?” Gordon Gekko asks near the beginning of Oliver Stone’s glib, gleaming and endearingly trashy sequel to his 1987 corporate morality tale. Delivering the line, a looser-haired but stiffer-skinned Michael Douglas can barely resist licking his lips and winking; this is his earlier, Oscar-winning performance turned inside-out, emerging as lascivious pantomime, and he wants us to be certain he’s in on the joke.

    Provided you are, too, “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” is one of the more pleasantly surprising studio pictures of the year thus far, and a significant improvement on its po-faced (and, 23 years on, now fearsomely dated) predecessor. If the sequel could never have been deemed “necessary,” it’s certainly as handily timed as can be. As the original served as dumb but not ineffective allegory for the coke-fuelled iniquities of 1980s capitalism, the new film not only does the same for credit-crunch sobriety in the post-2000s, but allows Stone his “Toldja!” moment to boot.

    Not that the film is nearly as concerned with socio-economic commentary as it is with smirking self-parody: it arguably blew its best gag in the trailer, as Gekko’s bread-loaf-sized cellphone is returned to him on his exit from prison, but there’s plenty more idle fun where that came from, culminating in a slithery cameo from the original film’s star, a bronzed glamazon on either arm, that may as well have been credited: “and starring Charlie Sheen as himself.”

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  • CANNES: ‘Chongqing Blues,’ ‘The Strange Case of Angelica,’ ‘Tuesday, After Christmas’

    Regret to inform that my second day at Cannes was not an especially satisfactory one: three films that all fell short in one way or another and my first shutout (owing to my dingy yellow-card status) from a Competition screening – despite queuing 45 minutes in advance. (That’d be Korean genre piece “The Housemaid,” by the way, which doesn’t appear to have set the Croisette alight, to go from colleagues’ reactions.)

    Two upsides exist to this turn of events. First, I’m managing to catch up on plenty of reading while in the screening queue, so can confidently inform you that the latest Kazuo Ishiguro volume is a thorough disappointment, even if I can tell you nothing of “The Housemaid.” Second, it freed up time for a commiserating drinks session with Sasha Stone and Jeffrey Wells, winding up on the beach at an open-air screening of “From Here to Eternity.” At festivals, there’s always a plan B.

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  • CANNES: ‘Robin Hood,’ ‘On Tour’

    I spent a good long time trying to think of some glib, pithy way to link the pair of titles served up on the first day of the Cannes Film Festival, but must admit defeat — they have no common points whatsoever, apart from the fact that they both, like, feature French people. In lieu of such an intro, then: two films screened today. This is what they were.

    “ROBIN HOOD” (**1/2)

    It’s a fairly rote critical bitchslap to say that the closing credits are the best part of a movie, but that’s quite literally the case in Ridley Scott’s “Robin Hood.” I say this not in snark, but in praise: it’s a genuinely remarkable credit sequence, animated in rich-hued, painterly style, presumably by the same artists behind the Scott Free company logo (a personal favorite). It’s rather a shame it couldn’t be stuck at the front of the film instead. Perhaps Scott thought its color palette would show up the actual film’s symphony of camouflage tones.

    Okay, that’s 100 words spent on the credits. If you think I’m stalling before delivering a damning verdict on the film, you’d be wrong, but I can’t find much of substance to say about it either. For the second summer blockbuster in a row, I must part ways with my esteemed editor in finding “Robin Hood” a sturdy if resolutely unfashionable entertainment, one crafted and performed by A-grade talent with more commitment than passion – but enough of the former to keep things on the rails.

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  • When the stars go blue

    It’s a quiet first day at Cannes, with only two films screening and little besides a pair of unremarkable press conferences (which, dingy yellow-carder that I am, I couldn’t directly attend anyway) to report on — the highlight of which was Cate Blanchett’s curt answer to a dim-bulb journalist asking her how heavy the film’s chainmail costumes were to wear. “It’s all plastic,” she said drily, before waving on the next question.

    “Robin Hood” served as this morning’s entertainment — Kris has spared me having to review it at any length, but I’ll gather a few thoughts later this evening. (Hint: I like it more than Kris and less than Empire.) Tonight offers Mathieu Amalric’s burlesque-troupe comedy “Tournée (On Tour)” which I’m rather looking forward to. However the film turns out, at least, it plainly boasts the best poster of any film in the festival this year. Or out of it, for that matter.

  • ‘Twas the night before Cannes

    … and while plenty of creatures are stirring along the Croisette — not least some grim-faced papparazzi camping out overnight for their red carpet spot — there’s a palpable sense of a town collectively holding its breath, waiting for the crazy to hit.

    As such, I have little to report from my first day in Cannes; I could regale you with tales of queuing for my press pass, haggling with PR folk for interview time and, more pleasantly, taking a time-out to eat cherries on the beach, but I don’t want to use up all my “A” material already. I can’t even fall back on epic stories of harrowing ash clouds and flight delays, unlike many of my American colleagues — indeed, I’m one of the few who can claim his plane landed in Cannes ahead of schedule.

    Still, my journey did not pass entirely without hardship: it was raining heavily when I touched down in Nice this morning, and I got a little bit wet on exiting the plane. Such are the trials I endure for your sake, readers.

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  • CANNES PREVIEW: The best of the rest

    Okay, so you’ve combed through the 19 films in the Competition lineup for Cannes 2010, and you still haven’t found much to get excited about? Fret not. You wouldn’t know it to read most media coverage of the festival, but the Competition is only one course at the Cannes buffet – and not necessarily the most filling.

    Surrounding it are a host of alternative sidebars, both competitive and simply exhibitory, ranging from glossy out-of-competition Hollywood premieres to independent strands yielding more familiar names than the casual festival-watcher might expect. In today’s preview, I’ll pick out some potential highlights from the non-Competition hinterlands.

    The ones you’ll hear the most about, of course, fall into the Out of Competition category, a refuge both for arthouse attractions that fell between the cracks in the selection process (chief among them, Olivier Assayas’s five-hour Carlos the Jackal study “Carlos”) and big-budget studio pictures seeking the prestige of a Cannes stamp without the risk of actually competing.

    Here you’ll find the star-laden pair of Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” and Woody Allen’s “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” – both projects that have me worried for different reasons, but neither of which you really need me to remind you about.

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  • Loach’s ‘Route Irish’ joins Cannes Competition lineup

    I told you on Friday that a 19th title was going to be added to the selection of films vying for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and lo and behold, here it is. Variety reports that “Route Irish,” an Iraq War drama from festival habitué Ken Loach, has joined the lineup — just one year after Loach brought football-themed comedy “Looking for Eric” to the Croisette.

    It’s probably not the film that most people were hoping to see as a last-minute addition, but it does bump up the number of English-language titles in Competition to three, while also boosting the “venerable auteur” count.

    This marks the tenth Competition entry of the British director’s career — he won the Palme on his eighth attempt, with “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” in 2006 — and if that’s not a record, it confirms him as one of the festival’s true pets.

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  • Oops…

    I have Tim Robey to thank for drawing my attention to this classic subbing fail in David Carr’s recent New York Times profile of Ridley Scott:

    Scott Free, with headquarters in both London and Los Angeles, has a lot of Scotts … Sons Jake (“Welcome to the Rileys” with James Gandolfini and Kristen Stewart) and Jordan (“Cracks” with Eva Green) are in the mix as working directors.

    Spot the problem? A picture of Sir Ridley with his son Jordan after the cut.

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  • First images, teaser poster for ‘Biutiful’

    As I mentioned in my Cannes preview, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Biutiful” is the director’s first Spanish-language effort since his 2000 debut “Amores Perros.” That, combined with the star power of Javier Bardem, means more eyes on this one than most of its Competition rivals. Thanks to D*Hollywood for the film’s Cannes poster. Two stills after the cut.

    (By the way, the third and final part of my Cannes preview will go up tomorrow. Apologies for the delay.)

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  • CANNES PREVIEW: Sizing up the Competition, part two

    Continuing the breakdown of the 18 titles in contention for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, which begins Wednesday. (Catch up with yesterday’s preview here.) Among them is the film I’ve put a sneaky wager on to take the gold — though given the foolhardiness of predicting festival awards, I don’t encourage you to do the same.

    As we learned this morning, one additional title will be added to the Competition lineup over the course of the weekend; I will update accordingly. Let’s get back into it:

    “ON TOUR” (Mathieu Amalric)

    The pitch: Better known to most audiences as one of France’s finest actors, sometime filmmaker Amalric brings some lighter fare to the lineup, directing himself as the down-at-heel manager of a touring group of American burlesque dancers. Christina Aguilera does not star.

    Past form: Though his 2003 feature “Public Affairs” played Cannes in 2003, this is Amalric’s first brush (as director, that is) with a major festival competition.

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