Cannes Reviews -- Requests?
I didn't find any official confirmation, but normally the closing/awards ceremony starts around 7:30 p.m. local time (which should be 1:30 p.m. EST/10:30 a.m. PST), with the Palme d'Or being announced half an hour later, around 8.Mister Tee wrote:Does anyone know when the presentation is this year? I'm thinking Sunday, around 12-1 PM Eastern, but I'd like confirmation.
I'm quite sure as well that L.A. Confidential was in competition in 1997, a thing I remember that's backed up by imdb.
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Mister Tee
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I don't think so, Okri. My memory can obviously fail me, but I recall watching the presentations and thinking Confidential was in contention, so, at least at the time, I was under the impression it was eligible.Okri wrote:Didn't LA Confidental play out of competition?
Does anyone know when the presentation is this year? I'm thinking Sunday, around 12-1 PM Eastern, but I'd like confirmation.
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Mister Tee
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Okay, I looked at the Mike D'Angelo link Eric provided, and see these two reaction-summaries:
Screen Daily averages
(out of four; Competition only)
3.40 Volver
2.90 Babel
2.80 Climates
2.70 Lights in the Dusk
2.50 Red Road
2.40 The Wind That Shakes the Barley
2.30 The Caiman
2.10 Flanders
2.00 Summer Palace
1.50 Charlie Says
1.50 Fast Food Nation
1.10 Southland Tales
Le Film Français Averages
(out of four)
2.93 Volver
2.80 The Caiman
2.64 Climates
2.60 The Wind That Shakes the Barley
2.50 Lights in the Dusk
1.89 Babel
1.67 Charlie Says
1.60 Ici Najac, à vous la Terre
1.45 Flanders
1.36 Fast Food Nation
1.33 Summer Palace
1.29 Shortbus
1.27 Red Road
1.14 Southland Tales
0.31 The DaVinci Code
Quite the variance on Babel, making one wonder if its shot at the Palme is really all that good. It's my experience Cannes juries tend to shy away from honoring films with a Hollywood tinge that look like they might connect commercially -- preferring European/Asian efforts, or English-speaking works with little box-office hope. Examples: despite wild critical enthusiasm for LA Confidential in 97, the jury -- which gave about four main prizes that year -- shut the film out. They did, however, manage a best actor prize for Sean Penn in the sure-to-flop Isn't She Lovely. And, in 2003, they passed over Mystic River, but gave Elephant two top prizes.
The obvious exceptions are Pulp Fiction in 1994 and Fahrenheit 9/11 ten years later. But were either really expected to be the commercial juggernauts they became? And, were their selections heavily influenced by aggressive jury chairmen Eastwood and Tarantino?
Understand, I'm not saying this as criticism; merely as warning to those who assume Babel is such a strong contender. (Though perhaps Innaritu's non-U.S. provenance will offset the presence of big-star Pitt)
Volver seems the overall favorite, but the favorite never seems to win the Palme (except Dancer in the Dark, which was about the weakest favorite of recent memory). Pedro was thought the favorite in '99, but lost to the Cannes-beloved Dardennes brothers. Perhaps they'll want to make it up to him...as they did to Angelopoulos (sp.?).
Screen Daily averages
(out of four; Competition only)
3.40 Volver
2.90 Babel
2.80 Climates
2.70 Lights in the Dusk
2.50 Red Road
2.40 The Wind That Shakes the Barley
2.30 The Caiman
2.10 Flanders
2.00 Summer Palace
1.50 Charlie Says
1.50 Fast Food Nation
1.10 Southland Tales
Le Film Français Averages
(out of four)
2.93 Volver
2.80 The Caiman
2.64 Climates
2.60 The Wind That Shakes the Barley
2.50 Lights in the Dusk
1.89 Babel
1.67 Charlie Says
1.60 Ici Najac, à vous la Terre
1.45 Flanders
1.36 Fast Food Nation
1.33 Summer Palace
1.29 Shortbus
1.27 Red Road
1.14 Southland Tales
0.31 The DaVinci Code
Quite the variance on Babel, making one wonder if its shot at the Palme is really all that good. It's my experience Cannes juries tend to shy away from honoring films with a Hollywood tinge that look like they might connect commercially -- preferring European/Asian efforts, or English-speaking works with little box-office hope. Examples: despite wild critical enthusiasm for LA Confidential in 97, the jury -- which gave about four main prizes that year -- shut the film out. They did, however, manage a best actor prize for Sean Penn in the sure-to-flop Isn't She Lovely. And, in 2003, they passed over Mystic River, but gave Elephant two top prizes.
The obvious exceptions are Pulp Fiction in 1994 and Fahrenheit 9/11 ten years later. But were either really expected to be the commercial juggernauts they became? And, were their selections heavily influenced by aggressive jury chairmen Eastwood and Tarantino?
Understand, I'm not saying this as criticism; merely as warning to those who assume Babel is such a strong contender. (Though perhaps Innaritu's non-U.S. provenance will offset the presence of big-star Pitt)
Volver seems the overall favorite, but the favorite never seems to win the Palme (except Dancer in the Dark, which was about the weakest favorite of recent memory). Pedro was thought the favorite in '99, but lost to the Cannes-beloved Dardennes brothers. Perhaps they'll want to make it up to him...as they did to Angelopoulos (sp.?).
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Sonic Youth
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Sonic Youth
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Mister Tee wrote:Sonic usually posts Cannes reviews as they pour in, but he seems to be incommunicado at the moment. I have access to Variety, but I'm too busy at work to post everything. Howver...anyone wants to see particular films reviewed, let me know, and I'll try to accommodate.
I assume everyone who's following it has heard that Richard Kelly's anticipated Southland Tales has been generally judged an ungainly disaster. This will obviously fracture his career, but two things to note: Donnie Darko was considered a disappointment at Sundance, but still achieved cult status; and, it usually takes a director of real talent to make a film people respond to this negatively.
One more thing to note. The studio cut of Donnie Darko was far superior to the director's cut. Maybe the guy has talent, even vision. But he also has no judgement or discipline.
Hello everyone, for ten minutes. Bye.
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler
From The New York Times:
Cannes Journal
One Auteur's Bumpy Trajectory Through a Decade of Cannes Festivals
By MANOHLA DARGIS and A. O. SCOTT
Published: May 24, 2006
CANNES, France, May 23 — Consider the strange case of Bruno Dumont. In 1997 Cannes showed that French filmmaker's feature debut, "Life of Jesus," outside the main selection in the parallel program, Directors' Fortnight. The film, which follows a group of unemployed young people in a desolate town in Normandy, received a special mention and subsequently hit the festival rounds. Like critics, festival programmers tend to have a proprietary relationship with directors they feel they have had a hand in discovering, so when Mr. Dumont was invited back to Cannes two years later with his second film, "Humanity," it was no surprise that this time he was welcomed into the main competition.
During its first press screening "Humanity" suffered a fair share of critical derision, telegraphed with choruses of giggles, but nonetheless picked up three major awards. Cannes understandably passed on Mr. Dumont's follow-up film, "Twentynine Palms," a violent folly about two Europeans tooling around the California desert in a symbolically overloaded Hummer. Now Mr. Dumont is back in competition at Cannes with "Flandres," about a young French farmer named Demester who goes off to fight in some unnamed war in an unspecified Arab country. Once again, the filmmaker's favorite themes and tropes are mostly present, notably the narcoleptic pacing, human faces as cragged as landscapes, ritualistic rutting and, regrettably, allusions to Robert Bresson, one of the art's holy men.
His Bressonian aspirations are evident in the film's uninflected performance style (by nonprofessionals), the unadorned yet carefully framed compositions and a lack of melodramatic incident. Unlike Mr. Bresson, however, Mr. Dumont seems uninterested in spiritual journeys or in representing how the ineffable equally touches the human face, a donkey's ear, a crown of flowers. The only mystery here is how Mr. Dumont has gone so quickly from promising young director to such an unsteady, unhappy talent.
One answer may lie in his characters. As uncommunicative as the animals he keeps, Demester is one of Mr. Dumont's false Everymen, a man whose thick brow and silences are meant to reveal an interior state that the filmmaker has no interest in beyond the decorative and entomological.
If nothing else, Mr. Dumont's nearly 10-year Cannes trajectory from triumph to disappointment indicates that the burden of the auteur hangs over European directors as heavily as it does any digital savant hungry for Sundance. In an interview about 1970's cinema, Francis Ford Coppola once suggested that an auteur was a filmmaker who wrote the scripts he also directed, rather than a filmmaker with a personal vision. It's hard not to wonder how many generations of young filmmakers have been similarly mistaken, not understanding that in cinema the Mac that writes the script is less important than the camera that is wielded as freely as a pen. Mr. Dumont may have something to say off camera, but on camera all he can offer now are fine technical skills and recycled gestures. MANOHLA DARGIS
Speaking in Many Tongues
About 90 minutes into the 8:30 a.m. press screening of Alejandro González Iñárritu's "Babel" on Tuesday, something strange happened. There had already been plenty of startling images and scenes in the movie, which, like Mr. González Iñárritu's previous films "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams," splinters time and leaps across space as it tells four parallel yet connected stories. But at this moment the audience was thrown jarringly backward, as a scene we had witnessed some time earlier seemed to be occurring all over again.
Was this another example of Mr. González Iñárritu playing with chronology? No, it was something much more shocking and, at the same time, fairly banal. At a festival that prides itself on fastidious attention to technical detail, someone in the projection booth had mixed up the reels. The lapse was soon noticed, the audience began to make noise, and the house lights came up briefly before the movie resumed, in proper sequence.
A glitch like this is every director's worst nightmare, literally so in Mr. González Iñárritu's case. "I had this dream three days ago that exactly this kind of thing had happened," he said in an interview later on Tuesday. "I called my friend Guillermo del Toro" — whose own Cannes competition entry, "Pan's Labyrinth," is to be shown on Saturday — "and he said he'd had the same dream." When Mr. González Iñárritu mentioned his premonitions at a technical check the day before the screening, he said that the projectionists assured him that such a mishap was impossible. "They acted like I was insulting them by bringing it up."
But now it was over, the screening had ended with applause, and Mr. González Iñárritu seemed to be in good spirits. He was making the rounds at a poolside press luncheon, along with Gael García Bernal, Cate Blanchett and other cast members, speaking ebulliently about the ideas and emotions that inform "Babel," perhaps his most ambitious film. In each of his movies (all written by Guillermo Arriaga), the scale and scope of the action has expanded, from Mexico City in "Amores Perros," to the United States in "21 Grams," and now to the world. "Babel" takes place in four countries — Morocco, Mexico, the United States and Japan — and, as the title suggests, it speaks in many tongues, including Berber, Spanish and sign language.
The characters are connected in ways not always perceptible to themselves or the audience. A deaf Japanese teenager (Rinko Kikuchi) contends simultaneously with her emerging sexuality and her grief over her mother's death. A Mexican nanny (Adriana Barraza) takes her young American charges to a wedding in Tijuana. A calamity befalls an American couple (Ms. Blanchett and Brad Pitt) traveling in North Africa, and, in general, dire forebodings are borne out.
Each story is full of the intensity of feeling — an unsettling and often potent combination of naturalism and melodrama — that is one of Mr. González Iñárritu's hallmarks. What links them are themes of disconnection, miscommunication and the sometimes catastrophic failure to express love. The vision of "Babel" is a kind of tragic universalism, which its director summed up by revising Tolstoy. "What makes us happy is different," he said, "but what makes us miserable is very, very similar." A. O. SCOTT
Cannes Journal
One Auteur's Bumpy Trajectory Through a Decade of Cannes Festivals
By MANOHLA DARGIS and A. O. SCOTT
Published: May 24, 2006
CANNES, France, May 23 — Consider the strange case of Bruno Dumont. In 1997 Cannes showed that French filmmaker's feature debut, "Life of Jesus," outside the main selection in the parallel program, Directors' Fortnight. The film, which follows a group of unemployed young people in a desolate town in Normandy, received a special mention and subsequently hit the festival rounds. Like critics, festival programmers tend to have a proprietary relationship with directors they feel they have had a hand in discovering, so when Mr. Dumont was invited back to Cannes two years later with his second film, "Humanity," it was no surprise that this time he was welcomed into the main competition.
During its first press screening "Humanity" suffered a fair share of critical derision, telegraphed with choruses of giggles, but nonetheless picked up three major awards. Cannes understandably passed on Mr. Dumont's follow-up film, "Twentynine Palms," a violent folly about two Europeans tooling around the California desert in a symbolically overloaded Hummer. Now Mr. Dumont is back in competition at Cannes with "Flandres," about a young French farmer named Demester who goes off to fight in some unnamed war in an unspecified Arab country. Once again, the filmmaker's favorite themes and tropes are mostly present, notably the narcoleptic pacing, human faces as cragged as landscapes, ritualistic rutting and, regrettably, allusions to Robert Bresson, one of the art's holy men.
His Bressonian aspirations are evident in the film's uninflected performance style (by nonprofessionals), the unadorned yet carefully framed compositions and a lack of melodramatic incident. Unlike Mr. Bresson, however, Mr. Dumont seems uninterested in spiritual journeys or in representing how the ineffable equally touches the human face, a donkey's ear, a crown of flowers. The only mystery here is how Mr. Dumont has gone so quickly from promising young director to such an unsteady, unhappy talent.
One answer may lie in his characters. As uncommunicative as the animals he keeps, Demester is one of Mr. Dumont's false Everymen, a man whose thick brow and silences are meant to reveal an interior state that the filmmaker has no interest in beyond the decorative and entomological.
If nothing else, Mr. Dumont's nearly 10-year Cannes trajectory from triumph to disappointment indicates that the burden of the auteur hangs over European directors as heavily as it does any digital savant hungry for Sundance. In an interview about 1970's cinema, Francis Ford Coppola once suggested that an auteur was a filmmaker who wrote the scripts he also directed, rather than a filmmaker with a personal vision. It's hard not to wonder how many generations of young filmmakers have been similarly mistaken, not understanding that in cinema the Mac that writes the script is less important than the camera that is wielded as freely as a pen. Mr. Dumont may have something to say off camera, but on camera all he can offer now are fine technical skills and recycled gestures. MANOHLA DARGIS
Speaking in Many Tongues
About 90 minutes into the 8:30 a.m. press screening of Alejandro González Iñárritu's "Babel" on Tuesday, something strange happened. There had already been plenty of startling images and scenes in the movie, which, like Mr. González Iñárritu's previous films "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams," splinters time and leaps across space as it tells four parallel yet connected stories. But at this moment the audience was thrown jarringly backward, as a scene we had witnessed some time earlier seemed to be occurring all over again.
Was this another example of Mr. González Iñárritu playing with chronology? No, it was something much more shocking and, at the same time, fairly banal. At a festival that prides itself on fastidious attention to technical detail, someone in the projection booth had mixed up the reels. The lapse was soon noticed, the audience began to make noise, and the house lights came up briefly before the movie resumed, in proper sequence.
A glitch like this is every director's worst nightmare, literally so in Mr. González Iñárritu's case. "I had this dream three days ago that exactly this kind of thing had happened," he said in an interview later on Tuesday. "I called my friend Guillermo del Toro" — whose own Cannes competition entry, "Pan's Labyrinth," is to be shown on Saturday — "and he said he'd had the same dream." When Mr. González Iñárritu mentioned his premonitions at a technical check the day before the screening, he said that the projectionists assured him that such a mishap was impossible. "They acted like I was insulting them by bringing it up."
But now it was over, the screening had ended with applause, and Mr. González Iñárritu seemed to be in good spirits. He was making the rounds at a poolside press luncheon, along with Gael García Bernal, Cate Blanchett and other cast members, speaking ebulliently about the ideas and emotions that inform "Babel," perhaps his most ambitious film. In each of his movies (all written by Guillermo Arriaga), the scale and scope of the action has expanded, from Mexico City in "Amores Perros," to the United States in "21 Grams," and now to the world. "Babel" takes place in four countries — Morocco, Mexico, the United States and Japan — and, as the title suggests, it speaks in many tongues, including Berber, Spanish and sign language.
The characters are connected in ways not always perceptible to themselves or the audience. A deaf Japanese teenager (Rinko Kikuchi) contends simultaneously with her emerging sexuality and her grief over her mother's death. A Mexican nanny (Adriana Barraza) takes her young American charges to a wedding in Tijuana. A calamity befalls an American couple (Ms. Blanchett and Brad Pitt) traveling in North Africa, and, in general, dire forebodings are borne out.
Each story is full of the intensity of feeling — an unsettling and often potent combination of naturalism and melodrama — that is one of Mr. González Iñárritu's hallmarks. What links them are themes of disconnection, miscommunication and the sometimes catastrophic failure to express love. The vision of "Babel" is a kind of tragic universalism, which its director summed up by revising Tolstoy. "What makes us happy is different," he said, "but what makes us miserable is very, very similar." A. O. SCOTT
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
From Varuety (not a review):
Drama queen
Gauls build buzz for cheeky 'Antoinette'
Mon., May 22, 2006,
By ALISON JAMES
The French despised the real Marie-Antoinette, sending their frivolous Austrian-born queen to the guillotine without a second thought.
More than two centuries later, will they be kinder to Sofia Coppola's celluloid version?
Gallic distrib Pathe is convinced it has a hit, spending a generous $3 million on marketing, including on the red-carpet preem of "Marie Antoinette" here Wednesday.
Flying in the face of current day-and-date doctrine, Pathe is releasing the film in Gaul Wednesday, long before its October Stateside bow and its even-more-distant U.K. release, slated for next February.
U.S. backer Sony is yielding to Pathe on the Cannes event; Sony is spending a fraction of what it did on drubbed Cannes opener "The Da Vinci Code" and many Sony execs have already left the Croisette.
The pic will bow on around 300 prints, most of them subtitled. That's a relatively modest number for a high-profile pic in France. But it's a luxury that Pathe, owner of Gaul's biggest theater chain can allow itself, gambling that word of mouth will help build the film.
Pathe took a similar tack with "Volver," which came out on 250 prints day and date with the Competition screening last Friday and has been playing to packed theaters ever since.
Whether the French end up loving "Marie Antoinette," they are already talking about it a lot, and opinion is divided, naturellement.
Pathe's efforts have been helped by extensive Gallic press coverage, with most magazines, ranging from popular to highbrow, giving the film (based on Antonia Fraser's biography), rave reviews -- and plenty of front covers.
Some, however, carp. There are complaints Coppola has taken too many liberties with the facts -- for instance the queen's on-screen roll in the hay with Count Axel Von Fersen -- and others that she has ignored the bigger picture.
"This is not our history," complained Thierry Gandillot, of the weekly magazine l'Express. "The Revolution only gets 10 seconds at the end."
But more believe Coppola's modern touch, complete with rock music, is a masterstroke that will revitalize and influence historical actioners.
Jean-Michel Frodon, editor of the highfalutin Les Cahiers du Cinema, is an unconditional fan.
"It's very elegantly and generously directed and it has an energy that goes beyond the obstacles that hinder and slow down most historical films," Frodon said.
He added, "I still don't like the Marie-Antoinette who had her head chopped off, but I like Sofia Coppola's. She makes us love the character."
Drama queen
Gauls build buzz for cheeky 'Antoinette'
Mon., May 22, 2006,
By ALISON JAMES
The French despised the real Marie-Antoinette, sending their frivolous Austrian-born queen to the guillotine without a second thought.
More than two centuries later, will they be kinder to Sofia Coppola's celluloid version?
Gallic distrib Pathe is convinced it has a hit, spending a generous $3 million on marketing, including on the red-carpet preem of "Marie Antoinette" here Wednesday.
Flying in the face of current day-and-date doctrine, Pathe is releasing the film in Gaul Wednesday, long before its October Stateside bow and its even-more-distant U.K. release, slated for next February.
U.S. backer Sony is yielding to Pathe on the Cannes event; Sony is spending a fraction of what it did on drubbed Cannes opener "The Da Vinci Code" and many Sony execs have already left the Croisette.
The pic will bow on around 300 prints, most of them subtitled. That's a relatively modest number for a high-profile pic in France. But it's a luxury that Pathe, owner of Gaul's biggest theater chain can allow itself, gambling that word of mouth will help build the film.
Pathe took a similar tack with "Volver," which came out on 250 prints day and date with the Competition screening last Friday and has been playing to packed theaters ever since.
Whether the French end up loving "Marie Antoinette," they are already talking about it a lot, and opinion is divided, naturellement.
Pathe's efforts have been helped by extensive Gallic press coverage, with most magazines, ranging from popular to highbrow, giving the film (based on Antonia Fraser's biography), rave reviews -- and plenty of front covers.
Some, however, carp. There are complaints Coppola has taken too many liberties with the facts -- for instance the queen's on-screen roll in the hay with Count Axel Von Fersen -- and others that she has ignored the bigger picture.
"This is not our history," complained Thierry Gandillot, of the weekly magazine l'Express. "The Revolution only gets 10 seconds at the end."
But more believe Coppola's modern touch, complete with rock music, is a masterstroke that will revitalize and influence historical actioners.
Jean-Michel Frodon, editor of the highfalutin Les Cahiers du Cinema, is an unconditional fan.
"It's very elegantly and generously directed and it has an energy that goes beyond the obstacles that hinder and slow down most historical films," Frodon said.
He added, "I still don't like the Marie-Antoinette who had her head chopped off, but I like Sofia Coppola's. She makes us love the character."
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
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HarryGoldfarb
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It seems a pretty interesting year indeed. I just read that Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation emerged as a front runner too... so it seems, so far, that it comes down to Almodóvar's Volver (it seems that every new premiere brings out a film that becomes a strong contender so it might loose some of its initial steam), Iñarritu's Babel and Linklater's Fast Food Nation. It strikes me that all three films are in spanish or have a lot of spanish dialogue. We'll have to wait for news about Coppola.
"If you place an object in a museum, does that make this object a piece of art?" - The Square (2017)
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Eric
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Of course, there's always Mike D'Angelo's ratings updates over at his blog. If you want to see ratings from someone who doesn't act like he's being actively insulted by the festival committee, go see the ratings of Theo Panayides instead. (I admit I'm teasing a little bit... actually, this would appear to be a fairly strong year at Cannes for M'DA... Comparatively, I mean.)
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Mister Tee
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Sonic usually posts Cannes reviews as they pour in, but he seems to be incommunicado at the moment. I have access to Variety, but I'm too busy at work to post everything. Howver...anyone wants to see particular films reviewed, let me know, and I'll try to accommodate.
I assume everyone who's following it has heard that Richard Kelly's anticipated Southland Tales has been generally judged an ungainly disaster. This will obviously fracture his career, but two things to note: Donnie Darko was considered a disappointment at Sundance, but still achieved cult status; and, it usually takes a director of real talent to make a film people respond to this negatively.
I assume everyone who's following it has heard that Richard Kelly's anticipated Southland Tales has been generally judged an ungainly disaster. This will obviously fracture his career, but two things to note: Donnie Darko was considered a disappointment at Sundance, but still achieved cult status; and, it usually takes a director of real talent to make a film people respond to this negatively.