Being the Bat-geek that I am, I couldn’t resist posting this image, stolen from The Film Experience’s Cannes correspondent, Julien. I guess this is one of the advert stills being used before screenings? Guy? Either way, love it:
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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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‘Biutiful’ reactions reflect a tale of two movies
Guy hasn’t pulled his full review of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Biutiful” together yet, though he will shortly. Directly after this morning’s Cannes screening, he Tweeted that the film was “critically unfocused and emotionally muted,” and that “Inarittu clearly needs to kiss and make up with Arriaga.” And judging by some of the reactions coming out of the theater, he wasn’t alone.MSN’s James Rocchi, always a tough sell on films of the Iñárritu breed, mind you, called the film “[m]oving, yes, but I’m unsure about what it’s moving for; Bardem superb, but morally murky melodrama’s depression lacks direction,” while Variety’s Justin Chang wasn’t that far behind: “The grinding arthouse equivalent of ‘The Pursuit of Happyness,’” he called it.
Chang has one of only three full reviews I’ve come across so far. The other two come from Sukhdev Sandhu at London’s Telegraph (a pan), and Kirk Honeycutt at The Hollywood Reporter (a rave).
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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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SUNDAY CENTS: Taking ‘Hood’ stock
*All historical figures cited are adjusted to today’s dollars.Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott helped steal $37.1 million from the poor on behalf of the rich as “Robin Hood” enters the chart in second place this week. The humorless duo courted the older adult audience, and in that respect, this is a solid enough debut. Not quite up to the snuff of “Gladiator,” but a better start than the $22.7 million summer 2005 launch of Crowe’s “Cinderella Man,” a film which is often cited as the one that killed big budget adult dramas being released in the heart of summer.
Where the film goes from here is up to the word of mouth which, from what I can gather, is mediocre. It’ll need a healthy push to reach $100 million, but I think we’re looking at another “Public Enemies” situation where the film stalls out just under the mark around $95 million. But before you bring Universal some hankies to cry in, you can expect that number to be almost tripled in overseas territories. Crowe lives to leave another interview!
So that means that “Iron Man 2” is the number one film again this week. Good job Iron Man. The comic book superhero dropped a perilous 59% and continues to do the absolute bare minimum to avoid being called a disappointment. These grosses are perfunctory and little else and it’s sad that we’ve reached a point that a possible $350 million finish is blasé. Again, the film has already topped the $200 million mark overseas as well so this is a very profitable venture for Marvel. The third film is already in pre-production and Martin Lawrence has entered negotiations to replace Don Cheadle.
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LaBeouf on dropping the Indy ball
I have a new special place for Shia LaBeouf after reading his fearless ribbing of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” at Cannes.Via 24 Frames, the money quote:
I’ll probably get a call. But he needs to hear this. I love him. I love Steven. I have a relationship with Steven that supersedes our business work. And believe me, I talk to him often enough to know that I’m not out of line. And I would never disrespect the man. I think he’s a genius, and he’s given me my whole life. He’s done so much great work that there’s no need for him to feel vulnerable about one film. But when you drop the ball you drop the ball.
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‘Nottingham’: How a hot script became a forgettable film
Screenwriter blogs can often reward with a refreshing take on the film industry, even if they are at times flavored by the requisite misanthropy of those of us with visions of slug lines dancing in our heads. Josh Friedman’s I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing was a good read for a time, though it hasn’t been updated in a while. John August also has a nice outlet that can be a good resource as well.I only happened upon William Martell’s Sex in a Submarine today, as his recent post, “Robbing From The Poor (Writer),” caught my eye. In a nutshell, it’s a thorough look at the development of Ridley Scott’s “Robin Hood” from a hot Hollywood property into a likely money-losing snooze of a film (with its champions here and there). And if you’re a fan of smart, unique stories having a place at the table in Hollywood, it’s a bona fide horror story.
I don’t track projects like some of the other film/fan sites out there, so I wasn’t aware of the fact that Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris’s “Nottingham” was a “C.S.I.”-style look at the classic tale from the point of view of the Sheriff of Nottingham using period forensics. Sherlock Holmes in Sherwood Forrest, if you will. But I can’t believe an idea that fresh was squandered so absolutely, even if it is par for the Hollywood course.
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‘Inception’ TV spots
Something else I happened across while playing web catch-up this morning. You’ve probably seen them on the tube plenty of times by now, but since it’s a hotly anticipated summer title, I thought I’d offer them up for commentary here. Two more after the jump.
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‘Another Year’ clips
Guy really set the tone for Mike Leigh’s “Another Year” for me when he reviewed the Competition title out of Cannes yesterday. (Though he seems to be catching some friendly flack for not going the full four-star route. Why the pulled punch, Guy?) Anyway, suffice it to say, the film appears to be a masterful deconstruction of a certain melancholy, the rhythm in which Leigh finds most success, in my opinion. And we could be looking at a supporting actress contender in Lesley Manville, given the blanket approval of her work.
A few clips have popped up online. The first one is below. Three more after the jump.
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‘Pictures at a Revolution’ makes its way to the big screen
When I read Mark Harris’s “Pictures at a Revolution” last summer, an amazing history of the American filmmaking revolution through the lens of the 1968 nominees for Best Picture, one of my first thoughts was, “This would make a great film.”I was thinking narrative, though, mainly because key figures like Rex Harrison and, of course, Warren Beatty stuck out as such vibrant characters. And the circumstances are so dramatic — or, at least, Harris really found the right dramatic rhythms when he pulled all the information together. If anyone was willing to sit down and attempt the thankless task of streamlining his dense work into a script, it could make a hell of a film.
Well, that’s not happening, of course, but the inevitable is. Oscilloscope Laboratories has announced plans to produce a documentary based on the volume with “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired” director Marina Zenovich tapped to head up the project. It’ll be fun and it’ll hopefully be revealing. And if you haven’t read the book yet, do yourself the favor.
There aren’t any quotes from Harris in the press release, so I thought I’d reach out and get his quick perspective on things. Check out his response, as well as the full release, after the jump.
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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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Russell Crowe wins radio’s Dick of the Year award
You might recall last year’s prestigious honor for showing one’s ass across the radio waves went to Billy Bob Thornton. This year’s award goes, in a landslide, to Russell Crowe:
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Au revoir ‘Law & Order’
Even though there are probably seven or eight other iterations of the show on NBC, the network’s decision to cancel the flagship “Law & Order” program this week is, nevertheless, the end of an era. I felt it shouldn’t pass without some commentary.Most interesting for me was this AP story, which serves as a love letter to the show’s depictions of New York over the past two decades. Writes Melissa Raysworth:
Some shows depict a New York that simply doesn’t exist (try and find two struggling Manhattan twentysomethings with a “Friends”-sized apartment). Others offer a window into a single corner of New York life: Fashion-obsessed women really do sip cocktails in trendy bars, just like on “Sex and the City.”
But most TV fare offers up a mere sliver of New York City. For two decades, until it was canceled Friday, NBC’s “Law & Order” did something different. It showed the world not just one New York but hundreds.
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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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FRIDAY FORECAST: ‘Robin’ of schlocksley
*All historical figures cited are adjusted to today’s dollars.Fresh off a tepid debut at Cannes, Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe have unleashed their fifth collaboration upon the world. Forget Scorsese and DiCaprio, these guys are taking actor-director bromance to another level. Together, they’ve given us Oscar winning hits (“Gladiator”), non-Oscar winning hits (“American Gangster”) and non-Oscar winning non-hits (“A Good Year” and “Body of Lies”). Which category will “Robin Hood” fall under?
The one comparison everybody can’t stop making is to “Gladiator” so let’s start there. The sword and sandals epic also launched in May, of 2000, and slashed up a $51.4 million debut. That was at the very beginning of May with no other summer movies out in competition it should be noted. Both director and star have become much more prolific and popular since then so maybe we should assume that “Robin Hood” could do a little better.
Not so fast! Medieval/historical epics have had a torrid last few years at the box office. Scott’s own “Kingdom of Heaven” was supposed to kick off the 2006 summer season with a bang but only managed a $24.4 million debut and $58.8 million finish. Oliver Stone gave it the old college try with “Alexander” and found $17.5 million to start en route to a $43.9 million total. Granted, people hated that thing.
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Tell us what you thought of ‘Robin Hood’
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Of notes and diaries on the Croisette
While Guy is doing a bang-up job handling Cannes for us this year, I thought I’d poke around and see what some of the other usual suspects of the Oscar season are covering things on the ground. When I clicked over to Awards Daily, I wasn’t the least bit disappointed.Sasha Stone, attending the fest for the first time in the 11 years she’s been on the film awards beat, has charted her experience in a series of diary entries that uniquely — and smartly — aims to assess the psychology of a place so wonderfully bizarre as a cosmopolitan film festival. Her coverage is armed with cheeky barbs such as this:
There are obscure screenings and high profile screenings and many variations therein. But it does give one a warped sense of things when you see crowds begging for tickets to Wall Street 2. If it were any ordinary Friday in the states you’d be thinking, “do I really want to go see another sequel?” Maybe you would and maybe you wouldn’t, but it is pressing here. It is a must-do.
Pete Hammond, meanwhile, kicked the tires on his Notes on a Season column over at The Envelope to piece together one of his typical “Notes on the Town” features from the fest.
