In Contention

Blog

  • Kaurismäki, Sorrentino among early Cannes winners

    The Cannes Film Festival closes up shop tomorrow with the announcement of the Competition awards — the final competing film, Radu Mihaileanu’s “The Source,” screened this morning to a tepid reception. Before we get to that, however, a wide array of smaller juries have their own trophies to dish out, and a number of them did so tonight.

    I’ve just returned from the tuxes-and-sneakers affair that is the Un Certain Regard awards ceremony, followed by a screening of one of their prizewinners, Andrei Zvyagintsev’s stunning “Elena.” (I’ll review the film later, but for now, allow to express my bafflement that this remarkable work wasn’t in Competition, particular when the director’s previous film, no more impressive a work, was.)

    There, a jury led by previous Palme d’Or winner Emir Kusturica (choice quote in opening speech: “I was the darling of this festival, and I did not behave myself very well”) infuriated critics across the Croisette by handing half their top prize (in a tie) to one of the festival’s worst-reviewed films: Kim Ki-duk’s documentary on himself, “Arirang.” It’s a handy reminder that critical response should never be the key consideration when predicting festival awards.

    (more…)

  • No rapture for you

  • Shut up and ‘Drive’

    Those of you who follow me on Twitter already know how I feel about wild-card Palme d’Or contender “Drive,” but I’ll have a review up a little later. For now, though, I can’t resist posting this shot of Ryan Gosling, his awesome royal-blue tux and director Nicolas Winding Refn at last night’s red carpet premiere — handily the sweetest photo of this year’s Cannes fest. Long live bromance.

  • SHORT TAKE: “The Skin I Live In” (***)

    Cannes Film Festival

    Pedro Almodóvar’s new feature opens with a pause: a beautiful young woman holds a tricky yoga position, her already fine-lathed physique vacuumed into a nude body stocking, stretched across a couch like a pale side of meat hung out for curing. So so taut, so fragile, it seems a simple tap on the shoulder will splinter her perfect form into a chandelier’s worth of glass shards — and that’s an apt note of tension on which to begin “The Skin I Live In,” a coldly kinky thriller in which Almodóvar’s career-long concern with the manipulation and violation of the human body is bent back so far it has nothing left to do but break.

    The girl is actress Elena Anaya; who she’s playing is a question the film keeps in play for far longer than you’d think feasible in a narrative that deftly splits and reshapes identity across a pair of linked tragedies in the life of Antonio Banderas’ demented genius of a plastic surgeon. Adapted — rather liberally, I understand — from Thierry Jonquet’s novel “Tarantula,” the film’s dense structure plays Snakes and Ladders with chronology (a late-film title card that reads “back to the present” drew chuckles in the audience for its apparent self-exasperation), staggering major twists across its running time that makes it a challenge to discuss in any narrative capacity. (It hardly flatters the reviewer’s role to say this, but audiences are better off reading as little about the film as possible before entering the theater: ignorance really is bliss here.)

    (more…)

  • Inevitable

  • New ‘Green Lantern’ trailer

    Summer movie season is just heating up. We’ve already seen “Thor” delight and annoy with equal measure. “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” stinks up cinemas this weekend. I’m beginning to get nervous about “X-Men: First Class,” right around the corner, but mainly I’m holding out hope for “Green Lantern,” which could go either way at this point. Yahoo! Movies has debuted a trailer that got a lot of people excited. I’m trying to keep my hopes in check. Give it a look by clicking the image below or watch an embed after the jump.

    (more…)

  • Bane

    Since a reader already tried to veer off-topic in another thread with this, I might as well get it out of the way. A shot of Tom Hardy as Bane from “The Dark Knight Rises,” revealed through viral marketing that will no doubt be as annoying (if not more so) as it was during the run-up to “The Dark Knight.” The official press release announcing the beginning of shooting went out yesterday, cuing hit-grabbing on every morsel of “information” that will find its way out of the set. Hope you’re all geared up for iPhone videos of production and blurry shots of Gotham police department logos out the Yin Yang!

  • Tell us what you thought of ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides’

    I’ve already warned you to stay away. Guy spared himself in Cannes. But plenty of you will nevertheless take in “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” (I’m so sick of these gigantic titles) this weekend. So, if you can stomach thinking about it afterward, please come back and let us know what you thought. Need a prompt? I’ll kick off the discussion. How about that awful 3D (as indicated in the above still), eh?

  • OSCAR TALK: Ep. 56 — Special Edition! — Cannes so far, ‘Tree of Life,’ Von Trier, taking the 2011 awards pulse

    Oscar TalkWelcome to Oscar Talk.

    In case you’re new to the site and/or the podcast, Oscar Talk is a weekly kudocast, your one-stop awards chat shop between yours truly and Anne Thompson of Thompson on Hollywood. The podcast is weekly, every Friday throughout the season, charting the ups and downs of contenders along the way. Plenty of things change en route to Oscar’s stage and we’re here to address it all as it unfolds.

    It has been nearly three months since we last got on the horn to talk the film wards landscape. We promised another dip during Cannes, so here we are. Today Anne and I are joined by Guy Lodge as the two of them have been working the Croisette all week. Let’s see what’s on the docket today…

    (more…)

  • ‘Take Shelter’ takes first award at Cannes

    Nine days in, the Cannes Film Festival is winding down. Many of the US journos are flying home, and with Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Skin I Live In” having premiered this morning — review coming tomorrow — the superstar auteurs have all shown their hand. (That’s not to say Nuri Bilge Ceylan or Paolo Sorrentino can’t alter the shape of the festival, however.)

    But with the drop in energy comes the scent of gold, as we prepare for the annual Cannes parlor game of loudly criticizing the jury’s decisions. We’re still three days away from the Competition awards — though Aki Kaurismäki’s broadly liked comedy “Le Havre” (which I frustratingly still haven’t seen after three attempts) has emerged as the sizeable Palme d’Or favorite, while I hear rumors that Olivier Assayas is the lone “Tree of Life” fan on the jury — but the trophy run began tonight with the winners of the Critics’ Week sidebar.

    (more…)

  • How do you solve a problem like Von Trier?

    It couldn’t last. As the closing credits began rolling on Wednesday morning’s 8.30am Cannes press screening of “Melancholia,” Lars Von Trier’s elegant rumination on anxiety, the apocalypse and all those other swell things, I was stunned by how civil the atmosphere in the vast Lumiere theater was.

    Enthusiastic applause greeted the film — more surprisingly, so did a distinct absence of boos. Soaking up the post-screening chatter in the foyer, I didn’t once hear the words “misogynist,” “perverted” or “clitoridectomy,” but I did pick up a bushel apiece of “moving” and “beautiful.” A number of critics disliked it, of course, but it rather seemed as if Lars Von Trier had pulled off the (for him) impossible: a film that touched many and upset no one.

    And then came this.

    (more…)

  • Greatest. Marriage. Proposal. Ever.

    This bit of hopeless romanticism ought to be enough to douse the controversial flames today, if just for a moment:

  • Persona non whateva

    Guy is on his way to a screening of Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Drive” at Cannes right now, but he will eventually get around to addressing Lars Von Trier’s spanking by the festival, which now considers him persona non grata.

    In the meantime, however, I’ll align myself with this statement from David Poland’s assessment:

    Is von Trier an ass at times? Absolutely. Aggressive provocateur? Absolutely.

    But he is one of the few high profile filmmakers who pushes audiences to Think. You can hate what he makes, but you can’t deny that he is skilled and alive with ideas. Who will stand for this in a homogenized, instant-news-cycle culture if Film Critics and Festivals will not?

    (more…)

  • REVIEW: “Melancholia” (***1/2)

    Cannes Film Festival

    It’s the end of the world as we know it, and Lars von Trier feels fine. Well, not “fine,” exactly: he feels as despairing and sceptical and faithless as he usually does, but that’s clearly where he’s comfortable, and where his creative faculties thrive most actively.

    They’re certainly in rude health in “Melancholia,” a ravishing arthouse blockbuster that extends the self-therapy he began in 2009’s bracingly unhinged horror film “Antichrist,” but with more thematic cohesion and tonal restraint. The sensation-hungry, who label any new von Trier film ‘controversial’ before seeing a shred of footage, will likely be disappointed — that is, if they’re not appeased by some tame shots of Kirsten Dunst rutting on a golf course. (Luckily for them, as if realizing the deficit, the director compensated with some trademark shenanigans at the press conference.)

    For the rest of von Trier’s fans, however, the film’s lack of overt audience-baiting serves to place his formal gifts in starker relief. A subdued, even elegant, vision of the apocalypse that begins as a waking dream and continues in an actuality no less feverish, “Melancholia” represents the natural culmination of the depressive doubt in self and society that has needled most of von Trier’s features. As a statement on the spiritual bankruptcy of the human race, it may well prove unfurtherable: after destroying the world we live in — a spoiler only to the most tone-deaf of viewers, I assure you — where does the man have left to go?

    (more…)

  • Harris is McCain

    I had to stop and take a second to point this out. The Julianne-Moore-as-Sarah-Palin production still from in Jay Roach’s “Game Change” seemed about right, nothing to write home about, etc. But this still, courtesy of Entertainment Weekly, stopped me in my tracks. THAT’s Ed Harris? I saw McCain straight away and had to search for the actor in there. Brilliant transformation.

    Is that a fat suit or did Harris bulk up considerably? He’s a guy who loves to get way under the skin of a role, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he crammed some Twinkies and Ho-Hos and cupcakes and pizza and ice cream. Then again, last time we spoke (in January), he was as sinewy as ever, so I guess it’s doubtful. Then again…

    “Game Change” is scheduled to air on HBO later this year. Check out the full still after the jump.

    (more…)

  • Thoughts on Malick’s ‘Tree of Life’

    I decided to sleep on Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life.” After a full day of jury duty, a few moments for dinner and then a trip to West Hollywood for the 7:30 screening — which let out near 10pm — it seemed foolish to jump right in to such a dense piece of work. I shutter at the thought of instant Tweet reactions from Cannes (and the one blogger who surely had little more than one-upmanship in mind when he decided to fill his brain with the film twice in Los Angeles yesterday).

    But I guess the unfortunate fact is, this is a film met with more inflated cinephile anticipation than any in recent memory. So clamoring to express thoughts on it is to be expected. Much of this is owed to Malick’s self-imposed aura of awe, retreating from the press experience in the wake of a tough “Days of Heaven” production over 30 years ago. It is seclusion as understandable as it is not. (I recall a frustrated New Line publicist in 2005: “Even Kubrick did phoners!”)

    (more…)

  • CANNES: ‘The Kid With a Bike,’ ‘House of Tolerance,’ ‘Michael,’ ‘Footnote’

    Perhaps lulled by the twin effects of the Côte d’Azur sun and copious amounts of cheap rosé between screenings, I’ve fallen behind somewhat on the reviewing front — but lest you think I’ve only seen one film a day before heading back to the swimming pool at Villa Romance, it’s time for a bit of a Competition catch-up. (I’ll get round to a handful of Un Certain Regard and Critics’ Week titles — a couple of them very strong — as soon as I can.) Tomorrow brings another of my most anticipated titles of the festival, Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia,” which should steer Croisette conversation forward after a low-level day of screenings, over which talk of “The Tree of Life” has remained the dominant hum.

    “The Kid With a Bike” (***)

    “More of the same, but less,” I tweeted immediately after seeing the latest finely-honed study in urban realism from Belgium’s two-time Cannes champs, the Dardenne brothers. It’s a statement I stand by — it’s difficult not to think that after the muted acclaim for “Lorna’s Silence,” their 2008 flirtation with higher-concept storytelling, they’ve retreated to a safe space — even as I admit it doesn’t factor in some subtle novelties in the new film. “The Kid With a Bike” is literally their brightest film to date, for starters, shot mostly in crisp summer sunlight and poppy primary hues, which may also be why it feels like their most uncomplicatedly redemptive.

    (more…)

  • ‘The Adventures of Tintin’ teaser trailer

    So, Steven Spielberg’s “The Adventures of Tintin” has a lot of people excited. I can’t summon that kind of enthusiasm for some reason. I’m not getting that event-of-the-year vibe others seem to be getting, but this just-released teaser trailer (courtesy of Apple) is enough to at least pique the interest. Check it out by clicking the image below or watch an embed after the jump.

    (more…)