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  • SUNDAY CENTS: Pain in the ‘Shrek’

    *All historical figures cited are adjusted to today’s dollars.

    We did it guys! Collectively, we have decided that the Shrek property, after three dreadful installments, is no longer an untouchable juggernaut, but just a regular old extremely profitable movie. We have also decided that summer 2010 is going to give movie theater owners a lot of headaches, for which the only prescription is to make popcorn $17 and sell ads on the back of the chairs in front of you. Enjoy!

    Let’s clarify. “Shrek Forever After” is the number one movie at the box office with $71.3 million, instantly becoming the most pathetic film ever to make $70 million in three days. Why? Maybe because “Ice Age: The Meltdown” can debut with $82.6 million in March? But mostly because “Shrek the Third” debuted with $140.5 million in 2007. When you factor in the fact that “Shrek Forever After” probably earned most of its coin from inflated 3D prices, you are looking at less than half the tickets sold from one film to the next. That’s an almost unprecedented exodus for an established franchise like this.

    General fatigue with the characters and the universe is the obvious explanation, but that still only takes you so far. We’re three weeks in now and summer 2010 is posting up consistently disappointing numbers. Granted, “Iron Man 2” and “Robin Hood” came in right around expectations, but the lack of an encouraging or surprising box office performer so far this summer is cause for concern.

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  • ‘Uncle Boonmee,’ Bardem, Binoche take gold at Cannes

    No prizes for guessing which award here makes me happiest. I’m quite proud of having semi-called (who sees a tie coming, anyway?) Elio Germano for Best Actor — didn’t hear anybody else mentioning his name. Also got the top two prizewinners, just in reverse order. More discussion later, but for now, I have a dinner appointment to keep. The list of winners:

    Palme d’Or: “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives”

    Grand Prix: “Of Gods and Men”

    Best Actor: (tie) Javier Bardem, “Biutiful” and Elio Germano, “La Nostra Vita”

    Best Actress: Juliette Binoche, “Certified Copy”

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  • CANNES: What will win… and what should

    Okay, so that took longer than I expected. I had hoped to get this post up last night, but instead got quite easily talked into a night on the tiles with a band of merry Film Dweebs led by James Rocchi — not the wisest idea with a morning flight to catch, but by the time we found ourselves in a friendly 3am chat with Atom Egoyan about our respective issues with the ending of “Chloe,” that hardly seemed important. (Name dropped and duly picked up. Apologies.)

    Anyway, after a smooth morning’s traveling, I am now writing to you from my North London living room — not quite as glamorous as the Croisette, though surprisingly, just as sun-splashed.

    In a few hours, Cannes 2010 will come to a close as Tim Burton and his fellow jurors reveal their selections for the best of the fest, perhaps shedding some light on the burning question I’ve asked myself after every Competition screening: “But what does Kate Beckinsale think?”

    (More analysis, and full list of predictions and preferences, after the cut.)

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  • ‘On Tour,’ ‘Of Gods,’ ‘HaHaHa’ take early Cannes prizes

    The big guns, the Competition jury, announce their prizewinners tomorrow night, but ahead of that, there are a host of smaller, independent juries making their voices heard.

    I’ve just returned from the Un Certain Regard award ceremony, a short, sweet tuxedoes-and-sneakers affair presided over by UCR jury president Claire Denis. As delighted as I was to see one of our greatest living filmmakers in the (tiny) flesh, I was less pleased with her team’s selection — by handing their top prize to Hong Sangsoo’s wispy romcom “HaHaHa,” they continued an increasingly disconcerting trend whereby films that I walk out of at major festivals are handsomely rewarded. (Hey, I wasn’t alone: James Rocchi bailed too.)

    The Ecumenical Jury got that memo, too, handing their top prize to another film I didn’t finish, Xavier Beauvois’s “Of Gods and Men.” Of course, that was a gimme — if you don’t know, the Ecumenical Jury Prize was established in 1974 by a group of Christian film professionals to reward expressions of faith and/or humanism in Competition. How was the true-life tragedy of monk massacre in Algeria not going to win?

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  • CANNES: All things being sequel

    I began my final day in Cannes with some dutiful, and not greatly anticipated, ticking of boxes, taking in my last two Competition screenings back-to-back this morning.

    That brings my final tally to an elegantly symmetrical 14 and 1/4 films seen of the 19 selected. (That sneaky fraction represents my fatigue-induced walkout on the bookies’ Palme d’Or favorite “Of Gods and Men.” Quelle dommage.)

    I was shooting for a 100% record when I arrived, but scheduling conflicts and screening shutouts conspired against me. As it stands, of the ones I missed, only “The Housemaid” is really nagging at me.

    I’ll post some thoughts on the runners and riders for the Competition gold later today; tonight, however, brings the Un Certain Regard award ceremony, where Claire Denis (hurrah) and her jury will reveal what they deem the best of the festival’s B-league. I’m doing even less well on the UCR front, having caught only 11 of the 19 selections, though the promising-on-paper lineup has generated surprisingly few talking points across the festival.

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  • CANNES: ‘Life, Above All,’ ‘Tender Son,’ ‘Cameraman’

    “It is finished so soon?” asked the chipper French festival volunteer manning the theater doors as I slunk out of Hong Sangsoo’s “Hahaha” just before 11pm. No, I explained — it had a good hour left to go.

    “Is it that boring?” he asked. No, I explained — it wasn’t that boring. Modestly boring. Sweetly boring, if you will. But it wasn’t making any effort to grab me, even gently.

    So, as my bum knee began to twinge in protest at yet another couple of hours locked at a 90 degree angle, I realized that what I really needed was to be outside a movie theater for the rest of the night, to buy a Grand Marnier ice-cream cone from the excellent gelateria by the Grand Palais, and to go eat it barefoot on the beach. I told the volunteer as much, minus a few extraneous details. He nodded sympathetically.

    “I understand,” he said. “I’ve watched some of the films. What you’re saying is that they have no … no balls, you mean?”

    Ladies and gentlemen, a great critic is born.

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  • FRIDAY FORECAST: Is it ogre yet?

    *All historical figures cited are adjusted to today’s dollars.

    That fat, green face to the right is the most successful animated character in the history of film. You guys have made him an icon of cinema greater than Don Corleone, Marty McFly and Jack Sparrow as far as box office receipts are concerned. Whatever hilarious adventure he undertakes with his wise-cracking donkey sidekick, you are game for. His latest batch of hijinks comes with the laziest pun title ever and a general feeling of distaste from the third installment.

    “Shrek Forever After” is the big debut this week and will easily win the weekend. There hasn’t been a big family film released in eight weeks (Sorry Brendan Fraser) and the market is ripe for a new blockbuster. The thing is opening in every theater across the country with 3D prices ballooning up to $20 in some places. All the ingredients are there for the film to best the $140.5 million opening of “Shrek the Third.” Except that people generally thought “Shrek the Third” was terrible. How these discerning viewers found anything different at all from film to film in this series is beyond me, but I gave up after the wretched first so what do I know?

    Any time a franchise entry disappoints, the next film takes a hit and so I’m thinking that “Shrek Forever After” will hover around the $100 million mark for the weekend. Could do $95 million or could do $105 million, but nowhere near that $140.5 million. Regardless, the film will make oodles of money for DreamWorks and Mike Myers will continue to confuse doing a Scottish accent for funny in more films.

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  • CANNES: Machinists, masochists and monkey ghosts

    “Are you eating at all? Are you sleeping? You don’t look like you are,” observed our good friend Anne Thompson yesterday afternoon, her face etched with motherly concern, before whisking me off for a hearty al fresco meal.

    I wanted to tell Anne that I tend to cut a pretty gaunt figure even on my best days — but having just read someone on AwardsDaily noting my allegedly striking resemblance to Christian Bale in “The Machinist,” I had to concede that festival fatigue may have hit me pretty hard.

    But hey, the Mayor of Cannes is holding a Provençal lunch for the festival press tomorrow afternoon in the old town quarter, so I won’t keel over just yet. If there’s one lesson I’ve learnt at the festival, it’s that there’s always such a thing as a free lunch.

    If you weren’t tipped off by the fact that I’ve spent 150 words musing on matters of alimentation rather than movies, Cannes 2010 is beginning to wind down. Much of the U.S. press contingent (including Anne, Jeff Wells and Sasha Stone) have gone home, the hot movies — such as they were — have been unveiled and the crowds have thinned out to the extent that even a lowly yellow-badger like me can rock up two minutes before a screening and enter without hassle.

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  • One more round

    Megan Fox may be an airhead and Shia LaBeouf may be a lightweight, but when it comes to speaking the truth, they deserve credit for having far more bracing honesty than most of the suck-ups who rule the business. Only in Hollywood is calling a lousy movie a lousy movie considered an act of sedition.

    From Patrick Goldstein’s most recent Big Picture post.

  • SHORT TAKE: “Fair Game” (***)

    Cannes Film Festival

    The presence of Doug Liman’s name in the Cannes competition lineup has inspired many an unkind crack from an idle critic — this writer couldn’t resist a couple himself. There can’t have been many filmmakers to enter that lofty club immediately after a film as uniformly reviled as “Jumper,” an inept high-concept blockbuster that drowned Liman’s flip, clever-clever personality in lumbering effects and noise.

    Coming to Cannes, then, he has a dual point to prove: not only that he can hold his own among arthouse titans, but that he can even stand up against his own previous (now rather distant) best work.

    Has he succeeded? Well, yes and no. Liman has chosen something of a lazy shortcut back to respectability: a biopic, of an honorable-lefty martyr figure, with just enough Washington-thriller varnish not to frighten the horses. It’s certainly a curious choice as the lone representative of U.S. cinema in the world’s foremost international film contest, but it’s oddly appropriate, too: this is down-the-middle Hollywood craftsmanship, short on innovation and revelation, but effective and engrossing with it. For better or worse, there’s nothing else like this in Competition.

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  • LIFE WITHOUT OSCAR: 1947 and 1948

    Catch up with the idea behind this series here.

    1947 kept the preachy, socially conscious train rolling at the Oscars with “Gentleman’s Agreement” taking the top prize. Anything exposing anti-Semitism was going to be hard to beat in the post-World War II period and the fact that it was actually well-made didn’t hurt either. More impressive is the fact that the Original Screenplay category that year featured both Charlie Chaplin and Vittorio De Sica as nominees.

    1948 saw the Brits take over and “Hamlet” becoming the first non-Hollywood production to ever take Best Picture. It also saw the debut of the Best Costume Design category and the first of thirty-four nominations for Edith Head. The Academy was at last, thinking a bit more globally, but they still missed out on some great titles. Such as….

    1947 – “One Wonderful Sunday” (Akira Kurosawa)

    Three years before “Rashomon” would make him an international celebrity and Academy Award recipient, Kurosawa was honing his craft with small, contemporary stories that focused on post World-War II Japan and its inhabitants. This small gem is exactly what it says on the tin, a wonderful Sunday in the life of an engaged couple. The man has only 15 yen to his name and the woman only 20, but they conspire to make the best of their day in any way they can.

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  • Tension between Scott and Crowe on ‘Robin Hood’

    We’ve already pointed out the long, destructive development process of “Robin Hood” and how it yielded a Frankenstein assemblage due to multiple rewrites.  So it’s a full nine graphs into this Vulture “exclusive” before you get to the actual exclusive material: the film apparently almost splintered Crowe and Scott’s relationship forever.  Writes Claude Brodesser-Akner:

    With a Screen Actors Guild strike looming, and the release date blown, real tension began to mount between Crowe and Scott. Their familiar bonhomie had been replaced by frosty, terse exchanges. “There was a feeling of ‘Get it right already!” recalls one insider. “They were always speaking, but barely.” Said another source who watched the relationship deteriorate, “There were a lot of forces who all believed they were trying to do the right thing.”

    Then again, there’s not a lot of meat there, so who knows how serious the situation really was. Anyway, more grist for the mill.

  • ‘Another Year’ goes to Sony Pictures Classics

    Mike Leigh’s latest, easily the consensus critical darling of Cannes thus far, was never going to have trouble finding a U.S. distributor — the only question was whether it would be the equally plausible candidates Focus or Sony who got there first. As ScreenDaily reported earlier today, it’s the latter:

    Sony Pictures Classics has acquired North American rights from Focus Features International (FFI) to Mike Leigh’s much fancied Palme d’Or contender Another Year.

    FFI chief Alison Thompson concluded the deal with the Sony Pictures Classics team of Tom Bernard, Michael Barker and Dylan Leiner at around midnight on Tuesday [18].

    Another Year will open towards the end of the year and Bernard and Barker are likely to give it an awards push.

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  • CANNES: ‘Blue Valentine,’ ‘Tamara Drewe,’ ‘Film Socialisme’

    Sadly, this is looking like a second consecutive day of minimal film viewing — thanks to the scheduling of my morning roundtable interview with the “Blue Valentine” team of Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams and director Derek Cianfrance, I had to forgo this morning’s screening of Lee Chang-dong’s “Poetry,” of which I have rather high expectations — I hope to catch the repeat tomorrow.

    Meanwhile, the interviews ran late enough to ensure I missed today’s hottest ticket: Olivier Assayas’s five-and-a-half hour “Carlos.” On the one hand, I’m obviously disappointed. On the other, 330 minutes is a pretty lavish gift of time, and it’s thanks to that that I’m able to write this very piece.

    So, to every cloud a silver lining and all that — and there are a lot of clouds doing the rounds on this uncharacteristically damp and chilly day in Cannes. Perhaps the sun saw that monk-massacre movie everyone’s raving about, and couldn’t see the point in continuing.

    On with the review catch-up.

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  • AMPAS will vote on expanding visual effects category to five

    Expansion is the thing these days.  And after last year’s shift from five Best Picture nominees to 10, it’s looking like the wheels are in motion to finally cough up another two slots in the category of Best Visual Effects, a move I think many will agree is a long time coming.

    But we’re not there yet, mind you.  Variety’s David Cohen reports that the VFX branch’s executive committee voted “yay” on the proposal and that it now must be approved by the Academy’s Awards Rules Committee.  If they’re on board, we get five.

    Cohen tries to use the old “move would help the Oscars’ efforts to bring popular pics to the show” line, but we all know Best Visual Effects is generally a haven for critically dismissed cotton candy.  Still, given the rise of effects wizardry over the years, a limited slate of three has left more than a few eyebrow-raising bridesmaids.  I’m fully in favor of this and hope it passes.  But cui bono?

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  • 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?