In Contention

Tag: Cannes Film Festival

  • CANNES: Starfish and coffee

    “Hey, that’s no way to say goodbye,” you might have thought (or even sang, in gravelly Leonard Cohen tones) after my rushed response to yesterday’s Cannes winners. But having recharged overnight with a hearty curry and a good 13 hours’ sleep, it’s time to properly put a bow on Cannes 2010.

    Perhaps it was quite a Tim Burton-flavored festival after all. Jury presidents at Cannes often seem at pains to choose the last film anyone would associate with their own work — which is partly why I picked the sober ecclesiastical drama “Of Gods and Men” for the Palme — but Burton and his cohorts swung in a quirkier direction. “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” which I flippantly likened to a parallel-universe take on Burton’s own “Big Fish,” becomes the first fantasy film (of a type) to take gold at Cannes since “Miracle in Milan” almost 60 years ago. (More surprisingly, it’s also first Asian winner since 1997.)

    I wish I could personally groove to the film the way almost everyone else does (my C+ grade sticks out like a sore thumb on indieWIRE’s critic score roundup) but objectively speaking, it’s the best choice Team Burton could have made for the Palme: the undisputed critical favorite of the festival, a wholly unique, challenging piece from a distinctive major auteur, and a film that can truly benefit from the award in securing international distribution that could prove elusive otherwise. Plus, it won me £50 on a Palme bet I made weeks before the fest started. I’m liking the film more already.

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  • OFF THE CARPET: Taking the temperature

    Now that we’re on the other side of Cannes, I felt it was a good time to put a finger to the wind, stare into the tea leaves, shake the magic 8-ball and basically just take stock of where we’re at roughly three months away from the start of the 2010-2011 film awards season.

    The festival, covered diligently by Guy Lodge around these parts (we thank him), brought little to write home about where Oscar potential is concerned.  The truth is, it rarely does.  But as the year takes shape, things start to linger.  A film like “Inglourious Basterds” can transform muted if appreciative response on the Croisette into a foaming-at-the-mouth bid for a surprise upset in just a few months’ time.

    The big narrative stand-outs for most were Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Biutiful” and Mike Leigh’s “Another Year.” Perhaps the latter has an easier Oscar path ahead, given that it was more unanimously accepted and could ultimately be a soft lob for Academy types.  Sony Pictures Classics swooped in and nailed down domestic distribution, so I think we’re looking at a bona fide Best Picture nominee to go along with likely bids for Best Actress (Lesley Manville) and the usual expected tip of the hat from Leigh’s fellow screenwriters.  Maybe even a Best Director nod, too.  And yet the film didn’t win a single festival prize.  See how this works?

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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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  • 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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  • 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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  • ‘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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  • 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?

  • The Dark Knight on the Croisette

    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:

  • 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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