Hofit Golan
Mara Rooney, Naomi Watts, Lupita Nyong’o, and Julianne Moore, all wearing Calvin Klein Collection
Naomi Watts
Blake Lively
Rita Ora
Eva Longoria
Lupita Nyong’o
Aida Yespica
Cheryl Cole Zuhair Murad
Red carpet shots from The
Hollywood Reporter:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/gallery/cannes-2014-photos-nicole-kidman-704065
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/gallery/cannes-2014-photos-nicole-kidman-704065
A collection of pieces from The Hollywood Reporter:
Cannes photos from The
Telegraph:
Vogue guide to
Cannes:
Elle fashion
photos:
E Online photos:
Hollywood Life
photo gallery:
Huffington Post
fashion styles:
Best dressed from Vanity
Fair:
A French site that lists daily galleries of red carpet
photos, by date, offering regular or giant sized photos:
International Business
Times:
Another large gallery of photos:
People magazine hits the Cannes red
carpet:
http://www.peoplestylewatch.com/people/stylewatch/gallery/0,,20700799,00.html,
or more here: http://www.peoplestylewatch.com/people/stylewatch/redcarpet/
Cannes
scandals: 5 most controversial film festival moments Mairi Mackay from CNN, May 16, 2014
Cannes has been a hotbed of controversy since the beginning.
The first festival, organized by the French in 1939 as a response to the Venice
Film Festival -- then a vehicle for Nazi propaganda movies -- had to be
canceled after it launched on the day WWII broke out.
The festival returned in 1946 and has since been a fertile
ground for taboo-breaking films, wannabes disrobing for a shot at fame, public
spats between directors and critics and publicity stunts gone wrong.
The latest rumpus surrounds "Grace
of Monaco," a biopic of Grace Kelly, the Oscar-winning American
actress who subsequently became the princess of Monaco.
The film has been criticized by the Monaco royal family who
said it contains "major historical untruths and a series of purely
fictional scenes." The festival would not comment on whether Prince Albert
and his sisters, Caroline and Stéphanie would attend the gala premiere.
Altercations, scandals and stunts are arguably as much the
lifeblood of Cannes as the films and here, in no particular order, are some of
the greatest.
Robert Mitchum and
the topless starlet
Publicity-hungry starlet Simone Silva took her top off
during a photo shoot with Hollywood star Robert Mitchum and briefly made global
headlines during an infamous incident at the 1954 festival.
The British B-movie actress and glamor model turned up on
the Croisette looking for exposure and was quickly crowned "Miss
Festival" by organizers who set the photo shoot up for her on the beach.
"The photographers got down on their knees to plead
with me to take the top off," she was quoted as saying in Ohio newspaper, The Daily
Reporter.
She did, removing her flimsy scarf top and cuddling up to
Robert Mitchum, in just a grass skirt and covering her breasts with her hands.
In the ensuing scrum three photographers fell into the Mediterranean, a fourth
broke his ankle and another suffered a fractured elbow.
Silva left the festival a few days later, after being asked
to leave, but remained defiant: "As long as sex is box office and I keep
my figure, I'm out to be the sexiest thing on, oh, two legs."
Dead pigeon gag gone
wrong
There are some things you just know are a bad idea, right?
Apparently not if you are the upstart cast of a hot Brit-flick.
In 2001, actors from "24 Hour Party People," which
tells the story of the Manchester music scene in the late '80s, attacked each
other with dead pigeons on a private Cannes beach splattering diners at an
exclusive restaurant with fake blood, feathers and worse.
Security guards threatened the actors with mace and they
were unceremoniously ejected from the beach along with the film crew and
entourage of British journalists who had been watching gleefully.
Actor Danny Cunningham, who played Shaun Ryder the wild lead
singer of Manchester indie band Happy Mondays came up with the ill-judged
publicity stunt. He said it was inspired by an alleged incident from Ryder's
youth shown in the film where he poisoned 3,000 Manchester pigeons with crack
cocaine. The actors brought stuffed pigeons as props for the stunt.
Cunningham, who received a cut to the head in the scuffle,
told the BBC: "I think Shaun would have been proud of us. We came to
Cannes to be wild and now we are going home."
New Wave on the beach
It was May 1968 and revolution was in the air. Students were
marching in the streets and workers were participating in the biggest strike
France has ever seen. It was, perhaps, inevitable that some of that fever would
infiltrate the rarefied movie theaters of Cannes.
Politics burst into the festival when a group of filmmakers
led by New Wave directors Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut demanded it
close in solidarity with the strikes.
"We're talking solidarity with students and workers and
you are talking dolly shots and close-ups," Godard memorably shouted from
behind a pair of Ray-Bans. "You're assholes!"
Godard and Truffaut stopped the next screening by hanging
off the curtain as it was being pulled back and the festival was canceled
shortly after, five days before its scheduled end. No prizes were handed out.
Over the next few years, counterculture also invaded the
content of the festival with films like "Easy Rider" and
"M*A*S*H."
Vincent Gallo vs Roger
Ebert
When cult film director and actor Vincent Gallo turned up to
Cannes in 2003 with "The Brown Bunny," an incoherent road movie with
a graphic, unsimulated oral sex scene, the critics booed in boredom and disgust
and Roger Ebert called it "the worst film in the history of the
festival."
A humiliated Gallo returned to the U.S. and began a new edit
of the film but found the time to embark on a vicious war of words with Ebert,
calling him "a fat pig," who "had the physique of a slave
trader," topping it off by putting a hex on his colon and saying he hoped
he got cancer.
Ebert retorted, tartly: "I had a colonoscopy once, and
they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than "The Brown
Bunny."
And added, in a twist on late UK Prime Minister Winston
Churchill's immortal line: "It is true that I am fat, but one day I will
be thin, and he will still be the director of 'The Brown Bunny.'"
Amazingly, the spat ended in a truce. Gallo finished his
re-edit and showed "The Brown Bunny" at Toronto where Ebert saw it
again, this time awarding it three out of a possible four stars.
Lars von Trier: 'Ok,
I'm a Nazi'
In 2011, famously eccentric Danish director Lars von Trier
told onlookers at a press conference that he was a Nazi, that he understood
Hitler and that his next film could be The Final Solution.
"I understand Hitler. I think he did some wrong things,
yes absolutely, but I can see him sitting in his bunker in the end. I think I
understand the man," said Von Trier while Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte
Gainsbourg, stars of his sci-fi drama "Melancholia," looked on in
helpless disbelief.
"How do I get out of this? Ok, I'm a Nazi," he
added shortly after in what could kindly be described as an ill-judged joke.
Festival officials condemned his statements, which he retracted shortly after,
but officials still took unusual step of banning him from the festival.
Von Trier has been a one-man scandal factory since he
started showing films at Cannes in the '80s. Incensed at being passed over for
the top prize in 1991, he called Jury President Roman Polanski a
"midget," while Icelandic musician Bjork, who won Best Actress for
her starring role in his 2000 film "Dancer in the Dark" said she
would never act again.
But perhaps his greatest scandal (apart from the Nazi joke)
was in 2009 when there were reports that some audience members fainted from
shock after watching a scene in his grotesque art-horror "Antichrist"
in which Charlotte Gainsbourg mutilates her genitals. The ecumenical jury at
Cannes called it "misogynistic" and awarded it a special anti-prize.
The 'journalist' who just sexually harassed America Ferrera on
the red carpet Alyssa Rosenberg from
The Washington Post, May 16, 2014
The weirdest part of a story the New York Post just
published about an incident on the red carpet at Cannes is not that it happened
at all. Sadly, the news that a man tried to get under America Ferrera’s dress
is not actually shocking in a media moment where paparazzi regularly take, and
sell, crotch shots of female celebrities. It is that the Post is referring to
the guy who did this, Ukranian Vitalii Sediuk, as a journalist, saying “a
reputation for putting celebrities in comprising positions as part of his
shtick.”
It is true that Sediuk’s career — or at least, his place in
the headlines — mostly consists of sexually harassing celebrities, male and
female alike. Just because some people think that Will Smith is gay and
closeted does not mean that it is in any way reportage to try
to plant a kiss on him at a movie premiere. And I have no idea what it is
supposed to be when Sediuk puts
his face on Bradley Cooper’s crotch on the red carpet.
These are not only totally unrevealing stunts, if that is
what they are supposed to be. They are assault. Just because they happen to men
as well as well as women does not mean they should be treated as examples of
puckishness or pranksterism.
It is true that much of the time, Sediuk is crashing the
events where he causes a scene. He apparently
had a credentials pass in Cannes, though it is not yet clear if any
organization actually granted it to him directly, or if Sediuk got his hands on
someone else’s badge. When he tried to ruin Adele’s Grammy’s acceptance speech,
it was
just as a crasher. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences took
steps to legally bar him from the 2013 ceremony.
It is not particularly clear who Sediuk is working for at
any given time. In 2012, he
was affiliated with Russia Life News. In 2013, he
was apparently presenting himself as a Eurovision correspondent. At other
times, he
has apparently worked for 1+1, based in Ukraine. That rotating roster of
employers, or at least of assignments, seems in keeping with Sediuk’s actual
professional seriousness. But it gets at a larger problem for entertainment
journalism.
It is a wonderful thing that there is a global market for
American movies, and the global press attention for American actors that comes
with it. That interest, coupled with the founding of a dizzying number of
Web-based publications, creates both opportunities and dilemmas for American
networks, studios, and entertainment festivals and conferences.
This means that the entertainment industry can prioritize
smaller friendly outlets, giving them opportunities and denying them to more
established, and critical, organizations. It also means studios and networks
have to pay more attention to foreign journalists who help ensure an
ever-bigger part of their box office or advertising. These pressures are one of
the reasons the Golden Globe Awards, the ceremony run by the Hollywood Foreign
Press Association, is such a big draw despite the often-odd choices made by its
voting pool. The lines between reporting and stenography can get blurred, given
these pressures — as can the lines between reporting and pranksterism.
Big organizations like the Academy and the Grammys seem to
have figured out that Sediuk, at least, is not a journalist, refusing him
credentials and alerting security to his tactics, even if those briefings are
not always successful. Outlets like the Post and the Hollywood Reporter, which
has emerged as both buzzy and serious under the leadership of Janice Min,
should make the same call, naming Sediuk for what he is.
The entertainment industry and the journalists who cover it
are not always going to be on the same page about who should get credentials
and what constitutes reporting. Journalists, who have a range of assignments,
will not always agree on these questions either. But I hope we can reach a
basic consensus that Vitalii Sediuk does not deserve the title that still
gets attached to him, and that harassing and assaulting stars may be vigorous,
but it is not reporting.
Cannes Review: Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s ‘Winter Sleep’ Jessica Kiang from The Playlist, May 16, 2016
Impenetrably dense, extravagantly wordy and very, very long,
safe to say Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Winter Sleep,” before this afternoon’s Cannes
screening the bookie’s favorite to take the Palme, won’t be winning him many
new fans from the general public. And in its deliberate, almost mischievous
delight in eschewing any kind of conventional narrative structure (one in which
things occasionally happen), it may even lose him a few, especially among that
number (this writer included) inclined to goodwill based on his last film,
“Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” which, in its embrace of certain genre elements,
felt like a breath of fresh air and, strangely, a liberation from the
occasionally stultifying vibe of his prior films. But judging by the ovation
that followed, for the benefit of the film team who were in attendance as this
press screening doubled as the film’s gala premiere (forcing VIP guests into
the daft-looking position of having to wear full evening dress in the middle of
the day), those already fully on board the Ceylan train will rally around it,
maybe, we could cattily suggest, because they simply don’t want to see a hard
afternoon’s work (and this film is work) go to waste.
The adjective “Chekhovian” is already being bandied about by
the film’s supporters in an effort to convey the film’s claustrophobic
theatricality (helpfully, Ceylan includes a “thanks to Chekhov” note in the closing
credits to point potentially floundering viewers in the right direction). And
the comparison is somewhat apt as until its last third it's largely a
three-hander, and really amounts to a series of long, involved and frequently
fractious conversations between the three principals, Aydin (Haluk Bilginer),
his wife Nihal (the gorgeous Melisa Sozen) and his sister Necla (Demet Akbag).
Together as a threesome or in pairs, curled up in the warren-like hotel that
Aydin and Necla own, their various relationships all start to fray as winter
closes in, and they progressively rip shreds from each other’s perceived
vanities and follies (intellectual arrogance, moral naivety, misanthropy, to
name a few). The theatrical parallels are clear, but as unforgivingly dialogue-driven
as it is, often with ten-minute-plus scenes in which there’s not a single
moment of hush as the protagonists alternately pontificate and sling barbs at
each other, for anyone relying on the wall-to-wall subtitles it feels more like
a novel—it’s a film we spent three-and-a-quarter hours reading. In fact, there
are ideas and attitudes outlined here that may even have made for a pretty good
novel, so it's unfortunate that the experience is like reading that book only
with someone else turning the pages at a speed you can’t control. And you can’t
just skip the boring bits.
Of course, Ceylan can’t be accused of lacking skill as a
director or intelligence as a writer—there certainly is psychological insight
into the character of Aydin, an ex-actor who rules his sprawling hotel, has a
handy lackey to drive him around and carry his bags, and collects rent from
nearby tenants in the manner of a feudal lord. Less so, however, the female
characters who seem to exist solely to be alternate mouthpieces for some long
and self-contradictory quasi-intellectual tirade, just so the camera can point
at someone other than Bilginer. That said, the performances are strong (bar a
scene between Aydin and Nihal in which Bilginer suddenly plays Aydin as so
one-note patronizing and condescending toward his young wife that we just
wanted to punch him) and Ceylan’s and DP Gokhan Tiryaki's way with composition
and cinematography is in evidence even in the interior scenes (which are most
of them), lighting faces warmly and designing shots richly, which needs to
happen when almost everything takes place in shot-reverse-shot,
he-says-then-she-says format.
But the unpleasantness of being constantly trapped in the
middle of conversations of increasing resentment and bitterness starts to take
its toll less than halfway through this marathon-length film as we start to
realize that just as the characters all seem defined by the overweening desire
to have the last word in every discussion (the “and one more thing” syndrome
reaches epic, almost comical, proportions later on when scene after scene seems
to have ended only for Aydin to chime back in with a another lengthy bit of
speechifying), it’s a foible of Ceylan’s too. The overwriting of every single
discussion smacks less of realistic debate than of a writer/director in the
throes of a fit of didacticism who simply never trusts his audience to get his
meaning without it being iterated and reiterated to the point of white
noise.
Cinema, we’re often told, is a dialogue between audience and
filmmaker, a two-way street in which meaning is constructed in space between
the words and pictures the director presents, and the mind of the viewer. But
Ceylan’s film is a monologue and a relentless one, leaving no room for us to
interpret or engage with the material he presents. That material may indeed be
rich with ideas and replete with insight, but you have to be a very dedicated
viewer not to feel a bit cheated at the paltry return on the investment of so
much time and effort into a film that is at best disinterested in, and at worst
disdainful of its audience. [C]
The Cannes Criterion Forum is up and running:
While Les Etoiles de la critiques is up and running as well:
While Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge maintains the odds for
winners:
to win the Palme d’Or
(titles in bold have been screened at the festival)
3/1
Winter Sleep (N.B.Ceylan)
9/2 Leviathan (A.Zvyagintsev)
11/2 The Wonders (A.Rohrwacher)
- – -
7/1 Maps to the Stars (D.Cronenberg)
9/2 Leviathan (A.Zvyagintsev)
11/2 The Wonders (A.Rohrwacher)
- – -
7/1 Maps to the Stars (D.Cronenberg)
8/1 Timbuktu (A.Sissako)
11/1 Mr Turner (M.Leigh)
- – -
16/1 Goodbye to Language (J-L.Godard)
16/1 Two Days, One Night (Dardenne & Dardenne)
16/1 Still the Water (N.Kawase)
20/1 Clouds of Sils Maria (O.Assayas)
22/1 The Homesman (T.L.Jones)
22/1 Foxcatcher (B.Miller)
- – -
16/1 Goodbye to Language (J-L.Godard)
16/1 Two Days, One Night (Dardenne & Dardenne)
16/1 Still the Water (N.Kawase)
20/1 Clouds of Sils Maria (O.Assayas)
22/1 The Homesman (T.L.Jones)
22/1 Foxcatcher (B.Miller)
25/1 Wild Tales (D.Szifrón)
- – -
33/1 The Search (M.Hazanavicius)
- – -
33/1 The Search (M.Hazanavicius)
33/1 Saint Laurent (B.Bonello)
40/1 Jimmy’s Hall (K.Loach)
40/1 Mommy (X.Dolan)
- – -
40/1 Jimmy’s Hall (K.Loach)
40/1 Mommy (X.Dolan)
- – -
150/1 The Captive (A.Egoyan)
BEST ACTRESS
6/4 Two Days One Night – Marion Cotillard
5/1 The Wonders – Maria Alexandra Lungu
10/1 Maps to the Stars – Julianne Moore (solo or with Mia Wasikowska)
12/1 Still the Water – Makiko Watanabe
14/1 Timbuktu – Toulou Kiki
14/1 Mommy – Anne Dorval (/Suzanne Clement)
16/1 Leviathan – Elena Lyadova
20/1 Clouds of Sils Maria – Juliette Binoche (/ K.Stewart and/or C.G.Moretz)
22/1 The Homesman – Hillary Swank
22/1 The Search – Bérénice Bejo
25/1 Winter Sleep – Demet Akbag (/Melisa Sozen)
25/1 Wild Tales – Erica Rivas (/female ensemble)
25/1 Mr Turner – Dorothy Atkinson
BEST ACTOR
3/1 Mr Turner – Timothy Spall
9/2 Winter Sleep – Haluk Bilginer
5/1 Leviathan – Alexey Serebryakov (/ Vladimir Vdovichenkov)
7/1 Timbuktu – Ibrahim Ahmed
10/1 Foxcatcher – Steve Carell (/ C.Tatum and/or M.Ruffalo)
12/1 The Search – Maksim Emelyanov
14/1 Jimmy’s Hall – Barry Ward (/ Jim Norton)
16/1 Mommy – Antoine-Olivier Pilon (/Patrick Huard)
16/1 Wild Tales – Ricardo Darín (/ male ensemble)
20/1 Two Days One Night – Fabrizio Rongione
20/1 Saint Laurent – Gaspard Ulliel
22/1 Maps to the Stars – Robert Pattinson (/John Cusack and/or Evan Bird)
25/1 Still the Water – Hideo Sakaki
28/1 The Wonders – Sam Louwyck
28/1 The Homesman – Tommy Lee Jones
3/1 Mr Turner – Timothy Spall
9/2 Winter Sleep – Haluk Bilginer
5/1 Leviathan – Alexey Serebryakov (/ Vladimir Vdovichenkov)
7/1 Timbuktu – Ibrahim Ahmed
10/1 Foxcatcher – Steve Carell (/ C.Tatum and/or M.Ruffalo)
12/1 The Search – Maksim Emelyanov
14/1 Jimmy’s Hall – Barry Ward (/ Jim Norton)
16/1 Mommy – Antoine-Olivier Pilon (/Patrick Huard)
16/1 Wild Tales – Ricardo Darín (/ male ensemble)
20/1 Two Days One Night – Fabrizio Rongione
20/1 Saint Laurent – Gaspard Ulliel
22/1 Maps to the Stars – Robert Pattinson (/John Cusack and/or Evan Bird)
25/1 Still the Water – Hideo Sakaki
28/1 The Wonders – Sam Louwyck
28/1 The Homesman – Tommy Lee Jones
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: http://www.screendaily.com/, also: http://www.screendaily.com/festivals/cannes/reviews
The Hollywood Reporter
at Cannes: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/cannes/2014
David Hudson does all the links for each review at
Fandor: http://www.fandor.com/blog/?s=Cannes+2014
The Film Center's Barbara Scharres and Michał Oleszczyk from
the Roger Ebert blog: http://www.rogerebert.com/festivals-and-awards
Kevin Jagernauth, Oliver Lyttelton, and Jessica Kiang the
indieWIRE Playlist: http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/tag/cannes-film-festival
Drew McSweeny and Guy Lodge & others from HitFix: http://www.hitfix.com/movies/cannes-film-festival
a round-up of indieWIRE reviews: http://www.indiewire.com/reviews/,
with everything consolidated here: http://www.indiewire.com/article/the-2014-indiewire-cannes-bible-every-review-interview-and-news-item-posted-during-run-of-festival
Andrew O'Hehir from Salon: http://www.salon.com/topic/cannes_film_festival/
Daniel Kasman, Adam Cook, and likely others at Mubi: https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/tag/Cannes%202014
The House Next Door at Cannes: http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/tag/cannes-film-festival/
Mike D'Angelo at the Dissolve: http://thedissolve.com/features/postcards-from-cannes/
Cannes Diary from Film
Comment: http://www.filmlinc.com/blog/cannes
Keith Uhlich offering reviews from Time Out New York: http://www.timeout.com/newyork/film/cannes-film-festival
Cannes Fest at Time
Out London: http://www.timeout.com/london/film/cannes-film-festival
The Guardian
collection of reviews: http://www.theguardian.com/film/cannes-2014
The Guardian
Cannes commentary: http://m.guardiannews.com/film/cannesfilmfestival
David Jenkins from Little White Lies: http://www.littlewhitelies.co.uk/features/festivals
Eric Lavallee and Nicholas Bell from Ion Cinema: http://www.ioncinema.com/category/news/film-festivals
Fabien Lemercier at Cineuropa: https://storify.com/cineuropa/festival-de-cannes-2014
Richard Porton and others from The Daily Beast: http://www.thedailybeast.com/features/2014/05/cannes-film-festival-2014.html
Richard Corliss from Time
Magazine: http://entertainment.time.com/category/movies/cannes-film-festival/
Various writers at Twitch: http://twitchfilm.com/festivals/cannes/
Sukhdev Sandhu and Robbie Collins from The Daily Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/cannes-film-festival/
Julie Miller at Vanity
Fair: http://www.vanityfair.com/archive/cannes-film-festival
And, of course, George is back at Cannes this year, where he finds off the beaten track film fare: http://georgethecyclist.blogspot.com
Though none were on cycling, I had a nice string of three
sports films today--soccer, running and hockey. Gerald Depardieu plays Jules
Rimet, a Frenchman who served as president of FIFA, the Federation International
de Football Association, for thirty-three years up to 1954 in "United Passions," an aptly
named French film that traces the history of soccer's governing party from 1904,
when it was established, to present day.
Rimet was president when the World Cup was inaugurated in
1930 in Uruguay and was also at the helm when the the greatest game in the
history of the sport was played in Rio de Janeiro in 1950, recounted in a
documentary I saw yesterday. Both events receive extra emphasis.
That first World Cup was actually the brain child of a wealthy Uruguayan,
who fully funded it, even paying for the transportation of all the teams and
constructing a new 100,000 seat stadium. Sam Nell plays a later president
from Brazil and Tim Roth a fundraiser for the organization when it was
struggling. He brought Coca- Cola in as a sponsor.
The running movie, "Back
on Track" from Germany, centered on an 80-year old guy recently
sentenced to a nursing home by his flight attendant daughter. He's not
happy there at all. He is a former champion marathoner who was said to
have won Boston and Berlin and the 1956 Marathon at the Melbourne Olympics,
making him a national hero in Germany, although he is a fictional character.
He resumes running in frustration against the wishes of the
administrators of the nursing home, hoping to run in the Berlin marathon once
again. This movie has already had a successful commercial release in
Germany.
The real-life charismatic captain of Russia's Red Army
hockey team, Slava Fetisov, was on hand to introduce "Red Army," an American documentary produced by
Werner Herzog, an Out of Competition selection. The team was the most
dominant team in all of sports history going two years at one stretch
without defeat. The film had the flair and fast-pace of the sport it
covered. If it had been produced a year earlier it would have been an
ideal opening film for the new Herzog Theater at Telluride in the town's indoor
ice rink. It could well play there this year.
The Austrian documentary "The Great Museum" on Vienna's Art Museum lacked any
strong characters to center on and to give it a sense of life. This was
an uninspired, standard point-and-shoot documentary that failed to do justice
to its subject. I would have been spared it if Ralph and I hadn't fallen
five people short of gaining entry into Atom Egoyan's Competition entry to start
the day. Although the general consensus was that we were lucky to miss
it, we will both make an effort to judge for ourselves, committed as we are to
see everything in Competition.
Ralph went straight to the Debussy for the eleven o'clock
screening of Mathieu Amalric directing himself in "The Blue
Room" in Un Certain Regard. I arrived too late from "The Great
Museum" to gain entry falling way short. Ralph said I didn't miss
much. But if I gotten in I would have been spared of even less, the
utterly inane American feature "May
the Best Man Win," a pale imitation of the Jackass movies. Two
young guys compete against each other to get the most YouTube views for various
infantile pranks, including each trying to seduce their own mother. The
pranks are meant to be funny, but only one or two raised much more than a smirk
from the handful of us subjecting ourselves to it.
It's not Cannes without a Isabelle Huppert movie.
Rather than waiting for her in Olivier Assayas' Competition entry at the
end of the festival, I gave her a look in "Paris
Follies," a gentle, feel-good French commercial film. Huppert is
bored as a housewife on a cattle ranch. She goes to Paris for a weekend
to revive herself. She takes a boat ride down the Seine and does all the
things a tourist would do other than taking advantage of any of the thousands
of rental bikes scattered around the city. She also has a fling with a
Danish guy that is as sweet and inconsequential as the movie before returning
to her husband.
As usual Ralph and I ended our day at the Debussy at ten
p.m. with an Un Centain Regard entry. This one was "Amour Fou" from Germany, another directed by a woman.
It was a plodding period piece taking place in the early 1800s with a
character loosely based on the morose poet Heinrich von Kleist trying to seduce
a woman into ending her life with him. He has two candidates.
After the screening we returned to the Palais complex after
midnight to see if anyone had returned Ralph's iPhone that he lost at the
afternoon screening of Ceylan's much acclaimed Competition entry. No
luck, so Ralph will have to replace it as it is instrumental in acquiring
Invitations to the Palais the instant they are made available. We've both
had some success, lessening the stress of waiting in line sweating out whether
we'll get in or not, though it is no guarantee. Ralph had initially been
turned away in the balcony to Ceylan's film, but made an attempt on the first
floor, though his ticket was for the balcony. But if he hadn't gotten in,
he'd still have his phone. Though it will cost him 350 euros to replace,
it was almost worth seeing this movie that is fulfilling the predictions that
it could win the Palme d'Or.
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