Victoria’s Secret Angel Doutzen Kroes
Chinese director Jia Zhangke and his wife actor Zhao Tao
Carina Lau carries off gold lamé
While the town is still buzzing over the audacious million
dollar jewel theft at Cannes, that feels like the opening of a Brian de Palma
film, namely Femme Fatale, or a
job for Monte Carlo and the French Riviera con artists Freddy and Lawrence in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, the show must
go on, and the festival continues, though panic set in on the Croisette
when gunshots broke out, by Martin Williams from The Guardian:
Cannes 2013: panic as shots fired during TV broadcast
Man fires shots from starting pistol during live TV
interview with Christopher Waltz and French actor Daniel Auteuil
Actors ran for cover at the Cannes film festival
on Friday after a man fired shots from a starting pistol during a live TV
broadcast.
Oscar winner Christopher Waltz and French actor Daniel
Auteuil were being interviewed by French TV station Canal+ on a beach-front set
when two shots were heard.
"The bodyguards jumped over the barriers into the crowd
and pulled him [the suspect] to the ground. The police arrived and told
everyone to run because there was a grenade in his hand," one eyewitness
told Reuters.
French authorities, who arrested the man at the scene,
confirmed he was carrying a dummy grenade and a knife. A police source said:
"It really appears to be a crazy guy."
Live footage showed actors and film crew scrambling from the
seaside stage. The programme was taken off air temporarily, but continued
minutes later after the programme's producer said: "The show must go
on."
The host, Michel Denisot, said the shots had been blanks and
that there were no injuries.
Waltz won a best supporting actor Oscar this year for his
role as a bounty hunter in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained.
The incident is the second security hitch to disrupt the
12-day film festival, after the theft of $1.4m worth of Chopard jewellery in the early hours of
Friday morning.
A safe containing the jewellery was unscrewed and taken out
of the Suite Novotel hotel in central Cannes.
Chopard later claimed the value had been exaggerated and
added that items were not set to be worn by actors.
An Australian journalist who was at the festival said the
sound of shots was completely unexpected. She said: "One minute everybody
was happy and the next there was panic."
"People didn't know what was going on, many girls were
rushing away crying, it was really scary. No one was sure what was going
on."
also a video of the incident may be seen here from The Hollywood Reporter:
Bérénice Bejo on the red carpet from The Guardian:
Red carpet photos from The
Guardian:
More Gatsby fashion photos from the era of the 1920's, from Vanity Fair:
How about movie posters that never made it, that missed the
final cut, from The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/gallery/2013/may/17/classic-film-posters-cut-in-pictures
More on Spielberg's yacht, by the way, from the Sun-Sentinel:
Dwarfed by the blue-hulled behemoth docked at Fort
Lauderdale's Hyatt Pier 66, Mike Terry gave vent to his stupefaction.
"Absolutely fantastic," he said. "I'm
awestruck, really."
The seasonal Pompano Beach resident and his wife, Tara,
were gazing wide-eyed Tuesday at the Seven Seas, the massive megayacht owned by
Oscar-winning film director Steven Spielberg. And the specifications of the
vessel, which resembles a floating hotel, are sufficiently awesome.
At 282 feet long, it would soar 28 stories tall if set on
end. Its cost: $200 million. It boasts luxury amenities for 12 guests,
with a crew of 26. There is a large master stateroom with a study and private
deck, a helipad, indoor cinema and an infinity pool with a 15-foot glass wall
that converts to a movie screen so the director and his guests can take in a
film while swimming.
The interior is adorned in walnut, teak and rosewood. The
Cayman Island-flagged vessel can travel at 20 knots, and a special stabilizing
system in the hull reduces seasickness, from which Spielberg reportedly
suffers.
While other boaters said the Seven Seas has been docked
along the Intracoastal Waterway for months, crew members loading supplies kept
mum.
"I can't tell you anything about it," said a
marina worker. "All details are private."
But reports from Los Angeles said Spielberg, his wife,
actress Kate Capshaw, and some of their children are taking the summer off to
cruise the Mediterranean, Indian Ocean and Pacific. They depart from Cannes,
France, in May, after the annual film festival there. Their itinerary includes
the locations of some of Spielberg's films: North Africa, Sri Lanka, Shanghai
and Hawaii.
Tourists and locals dining at the marina's Pelican Landing
bar gaped at the multi-leveled megayacht. "They think it's a cruise
ship," said Nicholas Chapman, crew member of a nearby yacht.
"It's a monster."
Sonny and Neecie Robbins, honeymooners from St. Louis, watched
as crew members in white shirts and khaki shorts loaded dozens of boxes of
produce. Sonny Robbins joked that the boat's $200 million price tag is just a
tad out of his range.
"I could write a check," he said, "but he
better not cash it."
Spielberg bought the vessel, custom built by a Dutch
shipyard, about two years ago. And he's happy to share. If you crave the
lifestyle of a Hollywood movie mogul, charters on the Seven Seas are available
— for a modest $1.3 million a week.
Cannes: Ultra-Violence
Peppers Competition Selection, by Scott Roxborough and Patrick
Brzeski from The Hollywood Reporter: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/cannes-ultra-violence-peppers-competition-524062
Spiked liberally with brutality, the festival preview
trailer draws gasps at the "Gatsby" premiere and has many wondering
whether this year’s line-up is inordinately grisly.
Before the pageantry got into full swing Wednesday at the
opening-night screening of Baz Luhrmann’s The
Great Gatsby, the A-list festival crowd in the Grand Lumiere was subjected
to a jolt: scenes of shockingly graphic violence.
As per tradition on the Croisette, a trailer showcasing the
year’s official selection preceded the main screening, but according to several
attendees — who asked not to be named — this year’s promo reel was spiked with
ultra-violence and elicited as many gasps as smiles of anticipation.
First came a scene from Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives, showing Ryan Gosling
smashing a glass in the face of a bargoer. Later was an explosive sequence of
execution-style shootings from Johnnie To’s Blind
Detective. Wrapping up the promo reel with a bang: Forest Whitaker getting
stabbed through the ear and pinned to a wall in a choice segment from Jerome
Salle’s closing film Zulu.
The Cannes higher-ups were quick to distance themselves from
the trailer Thursday. Asked to comment, organizers said festival director
Thierry Fremaux “deplored” the impression the trailer gave that this year’s
lineup is excessively violent, saying it does not reflect the spirit of the
selection. Laurent Rivoire, deputy director of the festival film department,
said the trailer was “done in a hurry due to some very late deliveries” by
Canal+, which produced the opening ceremony.
The films’ production companies themselves provided the
clips.
Cannes has never been shy about scheduling the artfully
bloody and brutal — festival favorites Quentin Tarantino and Lars von Trier
come to mind — but this year’s lineup does seem to offer more than the usual
allotment of onscreen viciousness. Early reviews of Amat Escalante’s Heli noted its torture sequences,
including one scene that involves a male character having his private parts set
on fire. Japanese genre master Takashi Miike promises plenty of bloodshed in
his competition entry Shield of Straw.
And even Chinese director Jia Zhangke, known for his slow-paced social realism,
appears to have indulged his dark side in A
Taste of Sin, the online trailer for which surfaced this week, hinting at a
bloody stabbing and shooting.
Pushing the envelope furthest is Atrocity Exhibition, showing in the Short Film corner, which its
director Ebadur Rahman has described as “Cannes’ first snuff film.” Says
Rahman: “Cannes has been showing fake ‘extreme content’ for ages: Any film by
Tarantino, Takeshi Miike, or Kim Ki Duk is at least as violent as mine. What’s
different about Atrocity Exhibition
is, I didn’t fake it.” Asked whether viewers might have to look away during
screenings, Rahman says: “I would hope so.”
While the sales potential for Atrocity always was going to be minimal, the abundance of blood in
the official selection could present marketing challenges. When it comes to
selling internationally, violence can be a mixed blessing, say veteran buyers.
Broadcast regulations in Europe mean films with graphic violence can only be
shown after 11pm, reducing their commercial potential. “For video sales it can
actually be a positive, the bloodier the better,” says Dirk Schweizer, managing
director of German distributor Splendid Films. “But for TV it’s different.
Anything that has an FSK 16 [R rating equivalent] or worse is almost impossible
to sell to television unless you have huge stars attached.”
One of the two films I am most looking forward to
seeing this year at Cannes, the other being the Clair Denis film, The Bastards (Les Salauds), neither one
playing In Competition, another all male affair with one exception, and even
that choice is questionable due to the director's family lineage with the
former French first lady. Her previous film Love
Like Poison, a tender French coming of age drama seen at the Film Festival
and never screened anywhere afterwards, which featured a drop dead amazing
Belgian women's choir version of the Radiohead song Creep over the end credits (Scala and the Kolacny
brothers), the same group played another chilling version of Metallica's Nothing Else Matters in the trailer
to Kathryn Bigelow's Zero
Dark Thirty, but was not in the actual film. This time the aptly
titled Leonard Cohen song from the 60's plays over the end credits,
last heard in a movie (other than concert footage) during Lars von
Trier's Breaking the Waves
(1996). The film is reviewed by Catherine Shoard from The Guardian:
This up-tempo drama from a young French woman director is
acutely observed and at times almost unbearably moving
There may be only one female director with a film in
competition at Cannes this year, but new work from women opened both the Un
Certain Regard and Critics' Week sidebars. Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring (which kicked off the former) was all swag and
slebs; Suzanne could hardly be less
concerned with shopping. The second feature from 33-year-old Katell Quillévéré,
it's the sort of woozily shot, remorselessly emotional, acutely observed
socio-realist soap that both confounds and confirms chick-flick prejudice.
Baldly recalled, it sounds like a telenovela: Suzanne and
her elder sister, Maria, live with their widowed father in the Languedoc. We
see them first in primary school, then as Suzanne (Sara Forestier) is about to
leave secondary and announces she's pregnant. Flash forward five years and
Charlie is part of the family (his father is never seen or spoken of) and
Suzanne works in the office of the trucking company that employs dad. Then she
falls in love, with Nicolas (Paul Hamy) who feels the same, but he's a
small-time gangster, and when he must leave, Suzanne must choose between him
and her family.
It weighs in at just 90 minutes, but Quillévéré crams in 25
years of life, with chiming between the early and late scenes; it takes time to
absorb. The rapidity of the jumping between years cuts both ways: the pace is
kept tight, but you're often left reeling, not given space for events to settle
before their repercussions have already become bread-and-butter to the
characters. It's a device that lends the film unusual oomph but after a few too
many slaps can feel manipulative.
Yet the brilliance of Quillévéré's direction is in the
performances she coaxes from her cast, and the clear-eyed, non-judgmental way
she presents them. François Damiens, a Belgian actor previously seen bumbling
about in the likes of Heartbreaker and Delicacy, is brilliant as the father: almost unbearably moving in
a courthouse scene in which a roll-call of minor charges are levelled at his
daughter, whom he hasn't seen for years. As the sister who moves from tearaway
to matriarch, Adèle Haenel is terrific, too; but Sara Forestier is just
indelible in the lead, brimful of feeling and sympathetic stupidity, now
depressed, now quixotic, never obvious or vain.
Mostly, Quillévéré manages to match her lead (there's a
brilliant shot from a window of Suzanne and her boyfriend parting), but from
time to time the switchback tempo and on-the-button music cues (the Leonard
Cohen song is reserved for final credits) highlight Forestier's brilliance by
comparison.
Another film you may not have heard about, Mark Cousin's A Story of Children and Film, review by Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/may/17/story-of-film-and-children-cannes-review
This has to be one of the most beguiling events at Cannes,
appropriately presented in the Cannes Classics section. Mark Cousins's personal
cine-essay about children on film is entirely distinctive, sometimes eccentric,
always brilliant: a mosaic of clips, images and moments chosen with flair and
grace, both from familiar sources and from the neglected riches of cinema
around the world. Without condescension or cynicism, Cousins offers us his own
humanist idealism, as refreshing as a glass of iced water.
He presents movie texts which illuminate and challenge what
we imagine to be the "performance" presented to the camera by a
child, what we take to be the nature of childhood and by implication the
unexamined "adultness" of those grownups variously appearing in,
making or watching the film. He suggests that as an artform, cinema has paid
more attention to children than any other, perhaps because it is itself in its
infancy. Using extracts from movies as diverse as ET: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Jane Campion's An
Angel at My Table (1990), Yasujiro Ozu's An Inn
in Tokyo (1935) and Ken Loach's Kes (1969) –
and many more – Cousins creates light-flashes of insight by the hundred which
amount to a pointilliste work of scholarship.
Just as in his colossal documentary TV series The
Story of Film, Cousins takes ideas and runs with them, bobbing and weaving,
hopping lightly from movie to movie, free-associating and bopping around but
without ever seeming slick or glib. Cousins coolly repudiates parochial
Anglo-Hollywood bias; he juxtaposes contemporary films with ones from the
distant past, and places emphasis on cinema from Iran, India and Africa. Just
as Puck put a girdle around the world in forty minutes, Cousins zooms happily
around the circumference of world cinema in an hour and 40.
Taking as his starting point a meditation on the artistic
gaze of Vincent van Gogh, and then artlessly showing us a film of his niece and
nephew Ben and Laura mucking about with toys, he embarks on a subject whose
impossible vastness never daunts him. His approach moves away from the
conventional idea that movie kids are either horribly mannered, beribboned
child stars or saintly simple souls, luminous with non-professional purity and
authenticity. The truth is more complex: kids on screen are often wary, blank
and guarded – it is their reserve which creates the electrical charge of drama.
But they are often "performative" (as Cousins phrases it), simply
showing off and acting out, and it is this entirely natural tendency which can
be harnessed for the camera.
Elegantly, Cousins gives us a clip of Shirley Temple in Curly Top (1935), singing "When I
grow up in a year or three …", and instead of taking the Graham Greene
line of acidly knowing irony, he gently juxtaposes Temple with the theatrically
minded children in Bergman's Fanny
and Alexander (1982) and then brings in Vincente Minnelli's Meet
Me in St Louis (1944) and Judy Garland (so recently a child star) singing Under the Bamboo
Tree with Margaret O'Brien, and suggests that O'Brien is believably out of
tune and that this famous scene is very much like a wedding video. I'd never
thought of it like that before.
Some of the most powerful or debatable moments are when
Cousins shows us children under threat, or themselves offering a threat. In a
rather remarkable-looking Polish film called Wrony, or Crows (1994),
directed by Dorota Kedzierawska – another hidden gem which I now feel the need
to experience in its entirety – a 10-year-old child is effectively kidnapped by
an older child. Another type of film-maker in the Anglo-Saxon journalist
tradition might have decided at this point to discuss the darker themes of
exploitation, maybe bringing in the Bulger case (itself partly triggered by a
horror movie called Child's Play 3).
But this is not Mark Cousins's style. It arguably opens him to charges of
naivete, but perhaps it is also that his affirmative insistence is a corrective
to our 21st-century news-junkie reticence and fear.
Either way, this film is a treat. I have only one modest
footnote to offer. Mark Cousins shows us his nephew Ben smashing things up and
wonders if this is a boyish trait. Well, I wonder: Ben is squaring his
shoulders and shoving his fists down into the ground in a very familiar way.
Surely he is impersonating cinema's most destructive and brattish green child,
the Incredible Hulk?
UK's Clio Barnard's film The Selfish Giant played in the Director's Fortnight, reviewed by Charlotte Higgins from The Guardian:
also Peter Bradhsaw from The
Guardian:
One of the perennial questions at Cannes, why are women so underrepresented in the movie industry? The Backlash Continues: Women Onscreen Falls to a Five Year Low, by Melissa Silverstein from indieWIRE: http://blogs.indiewire.com/womenandhollywood/the-backlash-continues-women-onscreen-falls-to-a-five-year-low
Make no mistake about it, no matter what you read or what
people try and make you believe, things are not all roses and candy for women
onscreen or behind the scenes in hollywood. In a brand new five-year
study from Dr. Stacy L. Smith, Marc Choueiti, Elizabeth Scofield, & Dr. Katherine
Pieper at the USC Annenberg Center, they found that "females are grossly
underrepresented on screen in 2012 films. Out of 4,475 speaking characters
onscreen, only 28.4% are female." And it also should be no surprise
that when a female is present, she is usually younger than the male character.
Overall, for every single female character we see onscreen we see 2.5
male characters.
The study goes on to say that women make up only 16.7% of
the 1,228 directors, writers, and producers across the 100 top-grossing films
of 2012. Women accounted for 4.1% of directors, 12.2% of writers, and 20%
of producers. (Keep in mind that these numbers differ from the statistics
from the Center for Study of Women in TV and Film at San Diego State as
they calculate the top 250 grossing films and add more behind the scenes
positions in their data.) The grim news is that for every woman working behind the
scenes in 2012, five dudes were employed.
And the worst news is that these numbers are not improving,
in fact they are getting worse. 2012 was the lowest year for women in
front of the camera, and there was very little change at all in the numbers
over the study. They started out pathetic and stayed there.
And to piss me off even further, as if I needed any push
over the edge, girls and young women onscreen are becoming more and more
hypersexualized with a HUGE jump in 2012. Females from 13-20 are more
likely to be hypersexualized ie (exposing at least some skin in the
breast, midriff, or high upper thigh area) than older women in all demographic
groups. Teenage girls wearing sexy clothes increased 22% between 2009 and
2012. So if you were thinking that girls and young women looked barely
dresses in the movies you were right. It's not just in your mind. It's
right there on the screen.
However, there is some good news in the study. When
there are more women behind the scenes, there are more women onscreen and they
are less objectified. So women hire women. (Not to diminish this
very positive statistic, but we need to keep in mind that in Hollywood, women
are given opportunities to write and direct certain kinds of films and those
have a tendency to skew towards women.) But the numbers are clear, when
there is a woman director, 40% of the films have women onscreen compared with
30% when there is no female director. And when there is a female writer,
women characters appear onscreen 37% of the time compared with 29% of films
without a female writer.
Here's the takeaway. Things are not moving in the
right direction for women onscreen. The numbers are stuck at around 30%,
yet remember, we buy 50% of the tickets. The numbers continue to show
that Hollywood doesn't care enough about women. They believe that
sexualizing girls and women sells tickets. And they are right. Because
the hypersexualization is going up. It is up to us to take control of
this situation. it's up to us to make sure we buy tickets for films where there
are women onscreen in strong roles not just for the purpose of looking like eye
candy. Empower yourself. Know what you are going to see. But
also know if you see a film written and directed by a woman that the film will
probably have a female character and there is a better chance that she will be
less sexualized.
By the way, our own illustrious Gabe Klinger, cinema
wunderkind from days of yore, recalled as a 16-year old kid passing out
hand designed Hou Hsiou-hsien pamphlets at a Film Center screening of The Puppetmaster, has made his own first
film, and has generated a kickstarter campaign to help pay for the expenses: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1337112764/james-benning-and-richard-linklater-cinema-de-notr
Gabe writes:
You may have heard by now that I've directed my first
feature-length film, a documentary portrait of Richard Linklater and James
Benning -- together! -- for the French "Cinema of Our Times" series.
I shot last month, using my own personal savings to rent
gear and hire a crew, hoping that a distributor or sales company would take the
project on and assume some or all of the expenses.
Unfortunately, funding possibilities haven't surfaced so far
(one of my producers, André S. Labarthe, is negotiating with French TV), and in
the meantime I've resorted to a shameless Kickstarter campaign:
Please pitch in, if you possibly can.
My God, I'll have to make a space for him as a filmmaker at my forever
developing mammoth website (cranes
are flying online film project). More can be seen over here at Mubi: http://mubi.com/films/cinema-de-notre-temps-james-benning-and-richard-linklater
While Les Etoiles de la critiques is up and running as well:
also Ioncinema's Critics' Panel 2013:
While Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge maintains the odds for winners:
to win the 2013 Palme d’Or
nb: films which have been shown to press in Cannes are in
bold
4/1 Kore-eda, Hirokazu – Like
Father, Like Son
5/1 Farhadi, Asghar – The Past
6/1 Haroun, Mahamet Saleh — Grigris
6/1 Gray, James – The Immigrant
8/1 Payne, Alexander -- Nebraska
- – - 11/1 Jia, Zhangke – A Touch of Sin
12/1 Soderbergh, Steven – Behind the Candelabra
12/1 Coen & Coen – Inside Llewyn Davis
16/1 Kechiche, Abdellatif – Blue is the Warmest Colour
16/1 Sorrentino, Paolo – The Great Beauty
- – -
20/1 Ozon, Francois – Young and Beautiful
20/1 Winding Refn, Nicolas – Only God Forgives
25/1 des Pallières, Arnaud – Michael Kohlhaas
25/1 Desplechin, Arnaud – Jimmy P.: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian
25/1 Escalante, Amat – Heli
33/1 Bruni-Tedeschi, Valeria – A Castle in Italy
33/1 Van Warmerdam, Alex — Borgman
40/1 Polanski, Roman — Venus In Fur
50/1 Jarmusch, Jim – Only Lovers Left Alive
80/1 Miike, Takashi – Shield of Straw
5/1 Farhadi, Asghar – The Past
6/1 Haroun, Mahamet Saleh — Grigris
6/1 Gray, James – The Immigrant
8/1 Payne, Alexander -- Nebraska
- – - 11/1 Jia, Zhangke – A Touch of Sin
12/1 Soderbergh, Steven – Behind the Candelabra
12/1 Coen & Coen – Inside Llewyn Davis
16/1 Kechiche, Abdellatif – Blue is the Warmest Colour
16/1 Sorrentino, Paolo – The Great Beauty
- – -
20/1 Ozon, Francois – Young and Beautiful
20/1 Winding Refn, Nicolas – Only God Forgives
25/1 des Pallières, Arnaud – Michael Kohlhaas
25/1 Desplechin, Arnaud – Jimmy P.: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian
25/1 Escalante, Amat – Heli
33/1 Bruni-Tedeschi, Valeria – A Castle in Italy
33/1 Van Warmerdam, Alex — Borgman
40/1 Polanski, Roman — Venus In Fur
50/1 Jarmusch, Jim – Only Lovers Left Alive
80/1 Miike, Takashi – Shield of Straw
Best
Actor
4-1 Grigris: Souleymane Démé
9-2 Nebraska: Bruce Dern
….. (solo, or with Will Forte and/or Stacy Keach)
11-2 Borgman: Jan Bijvoet 7-1 Like Father, Like Son: Masaharu Fukuyama
9-1 The Great Beauty: Toni Servillo (solo or with others)
- – -
10-1 Behind the Candelabra: Matt Damon and/or Michael Douglas 10-1 The Past: Ali Mosaffa and/or Tahar Rahim
12-1 The Immigrant: Joaquin Phoenix and/or Jeremy Renner
12-1 Mathieu Amalric and/or Benicio Del Toro*
16-1 Michael Kohlhaas: Mads Mikkelsen
18-1 Shield of Straw: Takao Osawa and/or Tatsuya Fujiwara
- – -
20-1 Inside Llewyn Davis: Oscar Isaac
22-1 Only God Forgives: Ryan Gosling and/or Vithaya Pansringarm 22-1 A Touch of Sin: male ensemble
33-1 Only Lovers Left Alive: Tom Hiddleston 33-1 Heli: Armando Espitia
40-1 Blue is the Warmest Colour:
….. Jérémie Lahuerte and/or Aurélien Recoing
40-1 A Castle in Italy: Louis Garrel
—–
* any combination of Amalric and/or Del Toro in Jimmy P. and/or Amalric in Venus In Fur
4-1 Grigris: Souleymane Démé
9-2 Nebraska: Bruce Dern
….. (solo, or with Will Forte and/or Stacy Keach)
11-2 Borgman: Jan Bijvoet 7-1 Like Father, Like Son: Masaharu Fukuyama
9-1 The Great Beauty: Toni Servillo (solo or with others)
- – -
10-1 Behind the Candelabra: Matt Damon and/or Michael Douglas 10-1 The Past: Ali Mosaffa and/or Tahar Rahim
12-1 The Immigrant: Joaquin Phoenix and/or Jeremy Renner
12-1 Mathieu Amalric and/or Benicio Del Toro*
16-1 Michael Kohlhaas: Mads Mikkelsen
18-1 Shield of Straw: Takao Osawa and/or Tatsuya Fujiwara
- – -
20-1 Inside Llewyn Davis: Oscar Isaac
22-1 Only God Forgives: Ryan Gosling and/or Vithaya Pansringarm 22-1 A Touch of Sin: male ensemble
33-1 Only Lovers Left Alive: Tom Hiddleston 33-1 Heli: Armando Espitia
40-1 Blue is the Warmest Colour:
….. Jérémie Lahuerte and/or Aurélien Recoing
40-1 A Castle in Italy: Louis Garrel
—–
* any combination of Amalric and/or Del Toro in Jimmy P. and/or Amalric in Venus In Fur
Best
Actress
2-1 The Past: Bérénice Bejo
9-2 The Immigrant: Marion Cotillard
5-1 Only God Forgives: Kristin Scott Thomas
- – - 10-1 Young and Beautiful: Marina Vacth
11-1 Venus In Fur: Emmanuelle Seigner
14-1 Blue is the Warmest Colour:
….. Adèle Exarchopoulos and/or Léa Seydoux
18-1 Only Lovers Left Alive: Tilda Swinton and/or Mia Wasikowska
20-1 The Great Beauty: Sabrina Ferilli
22-1 A Castle in Italy: Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi 25-1 A Touch of Sin: female ensemble
- – -
28-1 Inside Llewyn Davis: Carey Mulligan
33-1 Grigris: Anaïs Monory 40-1 Like Father, Like Son: Machiko Ono (and/or others)
40-1 Shield of Straw: Nanako Matsushima 40-1 Heli: Andrea Vergara
2-1 The Past: Bérénice Bejo
9-2 The Immigrant: Marion Cotillard
5-1 Only God Forgives: Kristin Scott Thomas
- – - 10-1 Young and Beautiful: Marina Vacth
11-1 Venus In Fur: Emmanuelle Seigner
14-1 Blue is the Warmest Colour:
….. Adèle Exarchopoulos and/or Léa Seydoux
18-1 Only Lovers Left Alive: Tilda Swinton and/or Mia Wasikowska
20-1 The Great Beauty: Sabrina Ferilli
22-1 A Castle in Italy: Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi 25-1 A Touch of Sin: female ensemble
- – -
28-1 Inside Llewyn Davis: Carey Mulligan
33-1 Grigris: Anaïs Monory 40-1 Like Father, Like Son: Machiko Ono (and/or others)
40-1 Shield of Straw: Nanako Matsushima 40-1 Heli: Andrea Vergara
The round-up of various links covering Cannes:
Screendaily still has paywalls, but if you click on the
reviews, they are open to the public:
The Hollywood Reporter at Cannes:
David Hudson does all the links for each review at Fandor:
Matt Zoller Seitz and Kevin B. Lee at Press Play from
indieWIRE
the indieWIRE Playlist:
indieWIRE reviews, with grades listed:
Robert Koehler from Filmjourney:
Daniel Kasman, Adam Cook, and likely others at Mubi:
The House Next Door at Cannes:
Drew McSweeny and Guy Lodge from HitFix:
Mike D'Angelo at The
Onion AV Club:
Keith Uhlich offering rival reviews from Time Out New York (Mike D'Angelo's
former employer):
Cannes Fest at Time
Out London:
Cannes Diary from Film
Comment:
The Guardian
Cannes commentary:
The Envelope, the Cannes Blog from The LA Times:
The Film Center's Barbara Scharres and Michał Oleszczyk from
the Roger Ebert blog:
Richard Corliss (though there may be a paywall) from Time Magazine:
Karina Longworth at LA
Weekly:
Movieline Cannes Coverage:
Various writers at Twitch:
Melissa Anderson at ArtForum:
Julie Miller at Vanity
Fair:
Sukhdev Sandhu and Robbie Collins from The Daily Telegraph:
Alex Billington from First Showing:
Michael Phillips at Cannes (though there may be a
paywall) from the Chicago Tribune:
The Huffington Post:
Emanuel Levy:
Eric Lavallee Ion Cinema:
Brad Bevet from Ropes of Silicon:
http://www.ropeofsilicon.com/category/film-festivals/cannes-film-festival/2013-cannes-film-festival/
Fabien Lemercier at Cineuropa:
Charles Ealy at the Austin Movie Blog:
David Jenkins from Little White Lies:
We have another on-the-ground viewer at Cannes this year,
Robbie Miller, a film student taking classes at Columbia College, where his
reports will be added as well when they come in:
Greetings from Cannes,
I'll keep this brief as I'm exhausted. Here are my
reviews thus far; I've gotten into every competition film screened plus Un
Certain Regard, market screenings, Fortnight and classics (no critics' week
films seen yet). I still need to write about FRUITVALE STATION (I'm not
really too sure just how I feel about it), Asghar Farhadi's pensive
post-divorce drama THE PAST, Jia Zhangke's bizarre and uneven film A TOUCH OF
SIN (which I don't know if I can write about after one viewing), extremely
sexually explicit homoerotic thriller THE STRANGER BY THE LAKE (a
groundbreaking film that was compared to LA GRANDE BOUFFE in its introduction,
received a 6 minute or so ovation and is quite remarkable in its own right),
and Marcel Ophuls' fascinating trip down memory lane UN VOYAGEUR, from the fortnight,
which also received about a 4 minute ovation. Tomorrow I'll (hopefully)
be seeing JIMMY P., Desplechin's English debut, and Hirokazu Kore-eda's LIKE
FATHER, LIKE SON, among others of which I am not yet certain. I'll keep
you informed.
Robbie
5/15/13
KISS OF THE DAMNED (Xan Cassavetes, Marché du Film)
Written and directed by the daughter of John Cassavetes,
considered by many to be the father of independent film, this vampire film is
in sync with the popularity of that genre in recent years and is purportedly
inspired by the extremely low budget erotic vampire movies of Jean Rollin.
However, while the movies of Rollin are improvisational in style and have
a purposefully controlled, artful sublimity to their sleaziness, always
maintaining some degree of ironic self-recognition, Cassavetes' film seems to
exist solely for the purpose of showcasing sex and graphic vampiric bloodlust.
Overlooking the fantastic premise of the film, every element from the
acting (the performances are mostly unconvincing and uncomfortable, to say the
least) to story and setting (the portrayal of vampires as embedded in the upper
crust of society is laughable) seems contrived. Where the films of Rollin
implicitly present themselves as ridiculous and campy from the opening frame,
KISS OF THE DAMNED seems to take its own premise a bit too seriously for its
own good. Where the sex in Rollin is humorous, the sex in this film is
gratuitous and serves no purpose other than the ability to show sex on screen.
Nothing here is organic to the story, and this is what damns the film to
a cinematic trash heap - or at least the dollar bin at the video store. C
74
5/16/13
YOUNG AND BEAUTIFUL (JEUNE ET JOLIE) (Francois Ozon, Main
Competition)
The second film within one year from Francois Ozon, whose IN
THE HOUSE won the top prize at the San Sebastián International Film Festival in
September 2012, the story follows an apparently discontented 17 year old high
school girl from a wealthy background who decides to prostitute herself. Reminiscent
of BELLE DE JOUR and somewhat tangentially of JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU
COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES, the lead of Isabelle is played by 23 year old model
Marine Vacth, who brings an emotional detachment to the role that reinforces
the character's distance from her actions, an apathy that becomes all too
apparent when a sudden event disrupts her self-prostitution and forces her to
face the humanity of her relationships with her johns. Strong
psychosexual themes penetrate the entire film, from vaguely implicit questions
about Isabelle's relationship with her absent father to the opening shot of
Isabelle lying topless on the beach - seen through the binoculars of her
younger brother. Obviously close with her brother, there is a sense of
attraction between them, seen, for example, in the personal interest in each
other's sexuality that is just a bit too prying and uncomfortable. At one
point in the film, Isabelle asks her brother if he masturbates, and later when
their stepfather walks in on him masturbating, one cannot help but wonder who
he might have been fantasizing about. Slightly emotional music provides a
light melodramatic, almost operatic, touch to the story, which spans one year
and is divided up into four seasons (beginning and ending in the summer, around
the time of the protagonist's birthday). Overall, the film provides a
compelling story of Isabelle's adolescent turmoil with a strong screenplay that
provides subtlety and a rich but not overbearing psychology for the characters.
It is an understated film whose impact slowly grows stronger after one
has left the theatre. A- 94
HELI (Amat Escalante, Main Competition)
Co-produced by Escalante's mentor and compatriot, Mexican
director Carlos Reygadas, whose last three films have all won prizes at Cannes
(most recently, POST TENEBRAS LUX won Reygadas the Best Director prize at last
year's Festival), HELI presents the story of a Mexican family that becomes the
victim of a drug cartel by a combination of unlucky happenstance and judgment. Before
that, however, Escalante presents a uber-realist portrayal of the family's
life, always keeping his camera static and trained on his subjects and filming
in a style reminiscent of the uncompromising portraits of Ulrich Seidl's
PARADISE trilogy and of Seidl's compatriot and fellow
"sado-modernist" Michael Haneke. While there are some moments
memorable for their brutality (one instance had most of the 2,300-seat Lumière
theatre in a collective gasp of horror), others are memorable for the sheer
curiosity and creativity of imagery. These include a 12 year old girl
being lifted like a barbell by her 17 year old boyfriend and car lights behind
a car in which the camera is placed creeping up closer and closer in suspense.
Also of note is some of those credited with thanks, including Buñuel
collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière and director Bruno Dumont, whose bare,
naturalistic and also uncompromising style could easily have server as a source
of Escalante's inspiration. Finally, the film fills a void of cinematic
portrayals of the iron-fisted rule of the drug cartels of Mexico, at some
points terrorizing the audience with cringe-worthy imagery to drive home the
terror of the Mexican people's experience of the unflinching oppression they
face. A- 90
SPIRIT OF '45 (Ken Loach, Film Market)
This documentary explores the collective enthusiasm of the
British people after the end of World War II to fully provide for each
citizen's basic needs, exploring life for the impoverished before the war
through talking head interviews and archival footage, moving through time to
the rise of Thatcherism and Thatcher's massive government cutbacks and
privatization of public goods. An interesting and worthwhile film from
Loach that nevertheless does not stand out as anything more than that. B-
80
THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (Jacques Demy, Cannes Classics)
I won't rehash this one as it's already been written about
many times and I am already behind on writing about the new movies I've seen.
This screening, though, was the premiere of the 2K restoration, and for
the occasion Demy's widow (and Camera d'Or jury prez) Agnès Varda was present (sitting a row behind and three
seats over from me) as was Demy and Varda's son Mathieu, composer Michel
Legrand (sitting directly behind me), and competition juror Christoph Waltz.
And, of course, George is back at Cannes this year, where he
finds off the beaten track film fare:
I was turned away from only one film today, the least so
far, and it wasn't the Tour de France film that the program stated was for
Buyers only. It only took some minor convincing to talk my way into the
screening. I told the film's representative that I was an avid fan of The Tour
and that I had ridden The Tour route the last few years and planned to do it
again this year. I showed her a photograph of me with The Devil at The Tour and
told her that this was the film I was most looking forward to seeing in the
festival. I'm not sure which impressed her the most, but she said to wait a few
minutes until she was sure the theater didn't fill with buyers and she would
let me in. There weren't any non-buyers such as me hanging around and there was
no rush of buyers either, so my day, and maybe the festival, was made.
I has a similar experience at the Berlin film festival nearly fifteen years ago
with "Phantom Pain," a German film that is one of the best bicycle
movies ever, right up there with "Breaking Away" and "Two
Seconds.". It was buyers only the too, but there weren't a great number of
them so I was allowed in. If this movie, "Tour
de Force," (the French title is more appropriately, "La Grande
Boucle," the French euphemism for TheTour de France) was in its class, it
wouldn't matter how good the films were the next nine days, the festival would
be a great success. That was a tall order to fill. Unfortunately, this film was
more like "Premium Rush," last summer's hokey bicycle messenger
movie, than "Phantom Pain." Like "Premium Rush" it had some
authentic bicycling footage and understood the sport, but deflated the movie
with a nonsensical plot.
The premise showed promise. A 40-year old guy who works for a large chain of
sporting good stores that sponsors a The Tour de France team is offered the
dream assignment just before The Race starts of driving one of the team cars
during The Tour. At the team presentation he accidentally bumps into the team's
star and ruins his lucky necklace. The star is infuriated and demands that he
be fired. To compound the guy's misery his wife is quite angry that he didn't
tell her that he had just been given the driver assignment, as they had
vacation plans, and once again allows The Tour to take precedence over her. She
disappears with their teen-aged son and leaves him a note not to call.
He decides to fulfill a life-long dream of riding The Tour route on his own
ahead of the racers. So far this is somewhat plausible other than the star
throwing such a fit over his lucky talisman. At the team presentation, he is
befriended by a former great team director, someone known as a
"cycle-whisperer," a cycling version of "horse-whisperer."
It is said that he whispered something into Greg LeMond's ear when he was
struggling in the 1986 Tour, and that was how he won The Race. This crusty old
character has just served two years in prison, taking the fall for a team
owner. He offers to help this guy ride The Tour route. On the first stage the
rider is befriended by a Dutch husband and wife and their 20-year old daughter
who are following The Tour in an RV with a course marker in their front window
as they have done for many years. They are such tour fanatics that their
daughter was conceived as they followed The Tour one year. They feed him and
give him massages and theirs daughter occasionally rides along with him. All
good.
After a few stages the former team director arranges a TV crew to do a story on
this guy's efforts and also arranges some sponsorship. His exploits become a
national story covered on the Tour broadcast every day. It upsets the star and
owner of the team who fired him that he is getting more attention than they
are. The star challenges him to a personal race as he's being interviewed. The
touring cyclist makes no pretense that he is competing with the riders, but on
a rest day they square off in a mini-team time trial, something that would be
utterly preposterous. Even more so, the fired guy enlists the help of Bernard
Hinault and Laurent Jalabert, two retired great French riders who are part of
The Tour entourage every year, to be his teammates in this showdown.
The movie was filmed during The Tour two years ago. There is much footage taken
from that race and others, shown on TVs in the background and also simply as
part of the story. Since he is riding a day ahead of the racers, stage starts
and finishes that have been set up are included in the movie. It is full of
authentic detail. It also captures the superlative French scenery. Like
"Phantom Pain" there is a dramatic cresting of the Tourmalet. One of the
more grievous faults of the movie though is the pathetic double they used for
The Devil, rather than including the real one.
Despite its many faults and the missed opportunity for another great cycling
movie, I couldn't help but be pleased to see The Tour being showcased in a big
budget movie with the story line of someone fulfilling the dream countless Tour
fans of riding The Tour route. The movie is worth seeing if only for its
opening, beginning with a toddler getting a bike for Christmas, then tracing
his early career as a racer from a young tyke in home video type footage up
through his teen-aged years. There is even a quick shot of a kid stopping along
the road during a race to take a leak just like the professionals do. Another
small delight was a French rapper by the name of Ame Strong. He takes the name
because Armstrong was a bad mother-fucker. The son of the touring cyclist is a
big fan of the rapper and runs away from his mother to attend one of his
concerts. She calls her husband during the mock time trial worried about their
son. He suspects where he has gone, so takes a beak from his Tour ride to go to
the concert. The rapper is of course an ardent cycling fan and knows all about
the touring cyclist following The Tour. That impresses his son and they have a
reconciliation. He joins his dad for the rest of his ride to Paris. And there
comes the final great great insult to the plausibility of this tale. The
touring cyclist infiltrates the peloton, even though there is a squadron of
gendarmes trying to catch him, and he is welcomed by the rider he had the
rivalry with, who happens to be in the yellow jersey. There is some authentic
race footage on the Champs Élysées mixed in with some credible footage of the
guy racing along. The rider in yellow allows him to win the stage. His wife is
awaiting him with open arms. A great movie could have been made of a touring
cyclist following The Tour. It did not need all this brainless hocum.
This wasn't the only movie of the day with a rebelliousness teen-ager who flees
her parents, causing them great consternation. The other was in the superb
Competition entry "The Past,"
by Ashgar Farhadi, whose last film "A Separation," won the Oscar for
best foreign film. This film has an almost equally intricate plot, tho on the
service it just seems to be the simple story of the end of a marriage and the
beginning of another. The Iranian husband of an Iranian couple returns to Paris
after a four-year absence to finalize their divorce so his wife can remarry.
The film is rich in bickering between the three principles. The wife is played
by the star of "The Artist," and her boy friend by the star of
"A Prophet," both Cannes award winners. The ten-aged girl isn't happy
at all about her mother's new boy friend who has moved in with her. This was
another movie with a pregnancy that has a strong bearing on the plot, as the
woman is pregnant by her new boy friend, one of the reasons why they wish to
marry. At 130 minutes, it may have been a trifle long, but it was a richly engrossing
drama that could be worthy of best acting or script or more awards.
My only other feature of the day, along with four very mediocre documentaries,
was the Un Certain Regard "Miele."
The best part of this movie was the lead character getting around on her
bicycle. She is a young woman who assists the terminally ill to commit suicide.
The film takes place in Italy but she has to fly to Mexico periodically to get
the barbiturates used to kill dogs for her clients. She is greatly upset when
she discovers one of her clients isn't terminally ill and is just depressed.
She tries to recover the poison she has sold him. Not much of this movie rang
true.
When I was turned away from a repeat screening of the Competition film
"Young and Beautiful" within eight people of getting in I greatly
regretted having stayed to the end of the utterly stupid documentary "Shooting Bigfoot." This
English production featuring several idiotic Americans who claim to have seen a
Bigfoot and take the director for another citing was a complete waste of time.
These Bigfoot fanatics were more moronic than conspiracy theorists, but there
is enough interest in Bigfoot that these guys have websites and one has
actually made four movies himself on his search. These guys were all so lame-brained
not even Werner Herzog or Errol Morris could have made them interesting.
When I couldn't get into "Young and Beautiful" I filled in the time
slot with a documentary on a town's recovery from the Japanese tsunami, "The Radio of Hope: After Tsunami 3.11."
It had the noblest of attentions, but was very average film-making. It did more
to represent the ways of the Japanese and their culture, than it did to she'd
much light on its subject. The German documentary "Breath of the Gods," also did as much to show how it is
in India as it did to elaborate on its subject, yoga. This movie would be a
contortionist's delight with a considerable amount of archival footage of
Indians twisting their bodies into extreme positions.
It is a shame that Spike Lee hadn't directed the documentary "Linsanity," as he would have
certainly elevated this remarkable story to the heights it deserved, and gone
easy on the religious angle, which was one of the prime thrusts of this effort.
The movie seemed to have the full cooperation of Lin and his family. There are
interviews with his parents and his brothers and home videos of Lin as a
toddler and footage of his playing from youth leagues through high school and
college and of course the pros. It is a conventional by-the-numbers documentary.
His rise to prominence was certainly phenomenal. Before he burst into
international fame with the Knicks he had been cut by two teams that year and
was about to be cut by the Knicks. He was only given a chance to play because
the Knicks in that strike-shortened year we forced to play three games in three
nights and were greatly depleted. Lin knew it was his last chance and he gave
it his all. The 89 points he scored in his first three starts, including 38
against the Lakers and Kobey Bryant, were the most any NBA player had scored in
his first three games in the modern era. As mediocre as this movie was, it was
still nice to relive this incredible story that ended up earning Lin a three
year 25 million dollar contract with the Houston Rockets.
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