Cannes 2012, May 16-27

[Chris Knipp]

In France the two most hyped Cannes films have been ON THE ROAD and Audiard's RUST AND BONE. Unlike last year when TREE OF LIFE got early Paris theatrical release, and was also one of the best films and come to think if it, got the Golden Palm. The Grand Prize was shared by THE KID WITH THE BIKE and ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA. What I mean is that I don't think RUST AND BONE deserves the accolades that Audiard's previous two films have gotten, and I'm neutral about ON THE ROAD. It sounds like it may be joyous and exciting. I don't know if it will a great film.

[Chris Knipp]

Monday, May 21, 2012. LIKE SOMONE IN LOVE

D'Angelo has apparently not Tweet-rated Kiarostami's LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE but has said that he is baffled by it --"I honestly never had the slightest idea why I was watching it or what it was trying to convey. And still don't"-- and finds even more baffling the fact that others were not baffled, and someone who hated Haneke's AMOUR loved LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE, "which makes no sense." He may be struggling with his view on LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE, which Variety(by Guy Lodge, not a familiar name to me) suggests is somewhat a companion piece to CERTIFIED COPY. Here is the Variety lead summing-up paragraph:

The very title of Abbas Kiarostami's Tokyo-set character waltz "Like Someone in Love" -- named for the jazz standard Ella Fitzgerald croons on the soundtrack -- promises something as woozily romantic as "Certified Copy," his 2010 cat's cradle of lovers' memories. As it turns out, it's the first, not the last, word of the title that's key to this droll, elegant but faintly trying study in emotional artifice. An unofficial twin to "Copy," sharing its playful preoccupation with identities mistaken and assumed, it's a more austere and less intellectual work, certainly less attractive to distribs, though auteur cachet should see it through.

D'Angelo says "apparently other people are engrossed by the film's surface level. Whereas its complete banality is what throws me." Some might say watch it again, he's missing something, and he said, " I have so little desire to watch it again, given how enervating it played to me." This was somewhat my own reaction to CERTIFIED COPY, which so many cinephiles seem to love so much. I thought its interest was overrated. It's polished but there's not much there there. Watch Antonioni instead.

[Chris Knipp]

HANEKE'S AMOUR

Todd McCarthy (formerl Variety's chief critic) is covering Cannes for Hollywood Reporter. His online report is here. McCarthy describes the festival as getting better as it goes along, and like D'Angelo gives Haneke's AMOUR very high marks. He looked on MOONRISE KINGDOM as being finely made but very lightweight; I guess he would not give it a D'Angelo-style 75. AMOUR was for him when the festival "finally kicked into gear," and he describes it as "an unflinching yet supremely elegant examination of the final stages of life, unerringly acted by French greats Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva." McCarthy describes RUST AND BONE AS "surprisingly conventional but resourcefully made and very well acted." He sees much the same limitations in Vinterberg's HUNT that D'Angelo did.

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian of London's Cannes correspondent, wrote a rave review of AMOUR. He calls it "intelligent filmmaking of the highest order"

Michael Haneke's new film in the Cannes competition is everything that could have been expected from him and more: a moving, terrifying and uncompromising drama of extraordinary intimacy and intelligence.
--Peter Bradshaw.

Peter Debruge's Variety review points out AMOUR was acquired by Sony Picture Classics before for US distribution before Cannes.


JEAN-LOUIS TRANTIGNANT AND EMMANUELLE RIVA IN AMOUR

[Chris Knipp]

May 22, 2012. D'Angelo has a lot more tweet thumbnail reviews.

The Angels' Share (Loach): 56. Puckish light commercial comedy with some big laughs and a Hollywood-ready contrived plot. Mild fun.

Room 237 (Ascher): 58. Really wish he'd structured it w/each interview as a self-contained unit. But most of the evidence is amusingly wack.

Killing Them Softly (Dominik): 63. Subtext, Andrew. *Sub*text. Sub.

For Love's Sake (Miike): 55. Batshit-goofy musical gradually gets bogged down in convoluted high-school gang plot. Should run 90, not 137.

Holy Motors (Carax): 88. Holy shit.

Time will tell what this Carax tweet means. D'Angelo's approval of KILLING THEM SOFTLY (going against some other reviewers) is hopeful, since it is one that will be generally available to American movie-goers in September. It's a Weinstein release. Variety's Justin Chang describes it as "low-octane" but "cooly distinctive" and admits Brad Pitt's presence will add caché.

All those tweets are fro https://twitter.com/#!/gemko/

[Chris Knipp]

D'Angelo AV Club Cannes '12, Day Five: Get out your Haneke-chiefs, we have a Palme D'Or favorite "Grade: B+ (but to put that in perspective, this is my favorite film not just here at Cannes but of the entire year so far; I’m just ridiculously stingy with A’s)."

D'Angelo AV Club Cannes 2012, Day Six: Alain Resnais does his Prairie Home Companion, and amateur sleuths comb obsessively through The Shining. He means that Resnais' YOU AIN'T SEEN NOTHING YET! may be Resnais' 'natural swan song' like Altman's.

The sticking point for many appears to be Eurydice itself, though I found Anouilh’s pragmatic take on the nature of romantic love eloquent and bracing. Admittedly, Resnais has trouble sustaining his ambitious conceit for the entire running time, and the film’s second half comes closer to being a straightforward theatrical adaptation, concentrating mostly on Arditi and Azéma as Orpheus and Eurydice. But the sight of mostly middle-aged (and older) actors performing roles intended for the blush of youth; the intense emotion with which Resnais’ stable relives their work with an artist who’s just passed away; the tension between the theatrical and the cinematic (a longtime Resnais obsession) as refracted through the juxtaposition of Resnais’ classical mise-en-scène with the rehearsal footage’s more modern, freewheeling visual style (the latter having been shot entirely separately by Bruno Podalydès)…it all unmistakably suggests a fond farewell, providing the source material with a deeply moving extra-textual undercurrent. That Resnais gives one of the young actors the final shot speaks volumes. Grade: B+

To explain the second part of D'Angelo's Day Six title:

I was also eager to watch a feature-length documentary about various folks’ bizarre theories regarding what Stanley Kubrick was really up to when he made The Shining, and Room 237,playing in the Fortnight after premiering at Sundance earlier this year,delivered the sincere insanity I’d hoped for and then some.

He also reviews the Ken Loach competition film THE ANGEL'S SHARE, which he calls "weightless" but describes as enjoyable and gives a B- to.


PAUL BRANNIGAN IN THE ANGEL'S SHARE

[Chris Knipp]

Salles' ON THE ROAD. Bertolucci and Hong Sang-soo. Plus more talk about Hong's IN ANOTHER COUNTRY.

More from Mike D'Angelo. If I have time I'll put together all his tweet reviews in one post when he's done. I still don't know what the 88 meant, but he has not seen Leos Carax's HOLY MOTORS yet, or Reygadas or Salles or various others he intends to see. He might skip Salles' ON THE ROAD if the screenings conflict with times of others he wants to see, given that ON THE ROAD has US distribution (IFC).

I might add that though Kerouac's book On the Road is considered an iconic work of the Beat Generation, it is not necessarily a great book or even his best book (Darma Bums, maybe? But was he not more a spokesman of the generation than a great writer?). Remember that Truman Capote famously said of the long semi-diaristic verbal outpouring onto a single long strip of paper that is On the Road, "That's not writing, it's typing." Of course that doesn't mean you can't make a good movie out of it, only nobody including Coppola, who owns the rights, managed to come up with a way to do so. NAKED LUNCH is an example of what you might call the great Beat novel that also was unfilmable and Cronenberg in my view did a brilliant job of filming it. If somebody like Cronenberg, not somebody soft like Salles, had gotten hold of On the Road we might have something complex and interesting. Something cutting back and forth between stasis and movement, writing and traveling, fantasy and life. Don't expect Salles' film to be that. However however ill matchd Riley, Stewart, Hedlund et al. may be, their youthful enthusiasm (particularly Hedlund's which would be essential for the story to work) might make ON THE ROAD be touching and thrilling and fun (I hope)/.

Me & You (Bertolucci): 52. Pleasantly inconsequential tale of half-sibs hiding out in a basement storage room feels like a warm-up exercise. --Mike D'Angelo, Twitter.

Still from Bertolucci's Me and You (Io e te)

[Note D'Angelo skipped ON THE ROAD -- for the moment; he will see it later -- to see the first Bertolucci in nine years. He learned Bertolucci is unable to walk now.]

Images from Reygadas' POST TENEBRAS LUX look striking. D'Angelo photographed the cover of the press -book (I cropped it down to the image alone):


"Press-book cover for Reygadas' POST TENEBRAS LUX, photographed on press-
room carpet. Not sure how 'legible' it'll be." pic.twitter.com/ZzQ8UuV0-D'Angelo.

Karina Longworth (of the Village Voice) reviews Hong Sang-soo's IN ANOTHER COUNTRY (with Isabelle Huppert) along with Abbas Kiarostami's LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE in an LA Weekly blog entry here. In Longworth's opinion Huppert's presence makes Hong's new one unusually enlighening about what he's usually up to, and she is much more enthusiastic about the new Kiarostami than D'Angelo. Longworth describes Hong as working out certain personal "issues" in his films by repeating certain stories, a rather simplistic view, I should think. In describing his usual story content, she seems to rely a bit too heavily on his last one or two films, and her linking him with Woody Allen in this regard doesn't seem to shed much light on either filmmaker. Longworth's reviews can be astute though. She has written helpfully on American indie films.

It seems a logical idea that Hong's use of a "foreign" actress might be helpful for highlighting his usual themes. But conversely I think Hong's almost hermietically Korean last film, THE DAY HE ARRIVES, which I reviewed as part of the SFIFF 2012, is particularly fine fine, and don't feel his one set in France was particularly successful. I love to watch Huppert in action though, even if a Huffington Post correspondent called Karen Badt claims this one caused her an unexpected Huppert "burn-out."

[Chris Knipp]

Leos Carax's HOLY MOTORS. Why D'Angelo likes it so much.

D'A.'S DAY SEVEN.

D'Angelo's AV Club Cannes '12 Day Seven report is out, and it explains his 88 score for Léos Carax's HOLY MOTORS was not a misprint. The original tweet from May 22 when D'Angelo saw Carax's new film again was:

Holy Motors (Carax): 88. Holy shit.

Now he has elaborated on that in AV Club Cannes Day Seven report. His title for this report is "Cannes 2012, Day Seven: Leos Carax's bugfuck masterpiece strikes Cannes like a lightning bolt." I am dubious about how I will take this "bat-shit crazy" film (to quote another writer) but I was able to take the "Merde" Carax segment from the 2008 omnibus trilogy film Tokyo! perfectly seriously in a review.

There's obviously something here. The relatively more staid Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian also has a glowing review of the new Carax. He gives HOLY MOTORS five stars out of five and heads off with "Leos Carax's experimental odyssey is barking mad, weightless and euphoric – it's what we have all come to Cannes for."

Leos Carax's Holy Motors is weird and wonderful, rich and strange – barking mad, in fact. It is wayward, kaleidoscopic, black comic and bizarre; there is in it a batsqueak of genius, dishevelment and derangement; it is captivating and compelling. This film may or may not be a prizewinner here – although I think it may actually get the Palme d'Or – but really this is what we have all come to Cannes for: for something different, experimental, a tilting at windmills, a great big pole-vault over the barrier of normality by someone who feels that the possibilities of cinema have not been exhausted by conventional realist drama. Some may find it affected or exasperating; I found it weightless and euphoric.--Peter Bradshaw, THE GUARDIAN.

Still from Holy Motors