Cannes 2012, May 16-27

[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

[Chris Knipp]

Carloe Reygadas' POST TENEBRAS LUX and the omnibus film 7 DAYS IN HAVANA . PAPERBOY makes D'Angelo really mad..

Post tenebras lux (Reygadas): 48, for now. If demystified, could be 84. Tho' the feeling of ultra-super-mega-pretentiousness might linger.

He added:

I will say that the opening rivals SILENT LIGHT's imo (and is not unlike that tour de force crossed with his REVOLUCION short).

Further 'lux' is shed on the 'tenebras' by Variety's Jay Weissberg, whose opeing paragraph is:

Maverick helmer Carlos Reygadas compares "Post tenebras lux" to an expressionist painting, though Dadaist is more accurate. Auds will go for "perplexing," likely to be the kindest word used when describing this challenging non-story about a family living in the grandeur of Mexico's wilds. The director surely doesn't expect auds to attempt a logical piecing together of the shifting elements in this ultra-personal mood piece, which makes Djuna Barnes feel like Dan Brown. Themes from Reygadas' previous pics crop up, and visuals expectedly astonish, yet despite moderate Cannes sales to boutique distribs, "Post" will largely remain in tenebrae. -- Jay Weissberg, Variety.

Weissberg then goes on for several more shorter paragraphs into an admiring description of Reygadas' opening sequence and the director's gift for delineating subtle changes in images of nature, expanding on D'Angelo's tweet. This could turn up at the NYFF and given how much I liked SILENT LIGHT I would look forward to it for the visuals but it sure doesn't sound like one of the exciting films at Cannes. [Note: not true in the jury's view, since it wound up getting the directing prize.]

D'Angelo's tweet on 7 DAYS IN HAVANA:

7 Days in Havana (various): 46. Suleiman's film is typically good, Noé's is scary-sensual, everything else is passable to dreck to Medem.

(Medem is the Spanish director of the lightweight crap film SEX AND LUCIA and other reviewers agree his entry here is also crap, and Suleiman's is the best, Noe's the most provocative. Pleasant but not memorable overall seems to be the verdict, and D'Angelo's 46 puts it well below the "worth watching" category -- unless you happen to be interested in Cuba and even to have visited it, as a friend of mine has, or just are curious, you'd have to watch it anyway.


7 Days in Havana

D'A.'S DAY EIGHT.

Then D'Angelo shows what a range of grades he can give out with Lee Daniels' PAPERBOY. (PRECIOUS, which got included, even featured, at both Cannes and the NYFF, made a strong impression, but didn't show Daniels was a good filmmaker.)

The Paperboy (Daniels): 9. Lee Daniels: Worst filmmaker of our time, or worst filmmaker of all time? Discuss.

He adds, talking to someone:

As a connoisseur of bad movies I'm sure you'll enjoy THE PAPERBOY on some level. One cannot call it bland.

McCaughnahy and Efron in Paperboy

D'Angelo's Cannes '12 Day Eight report is subtitled, "The director of Silent Light drops a bold curiosity and Bernardo Bertolucci makes his first movie in nearly a decade." And his theme is "the honeymoon had to end some time," i.e. the Cannes offerings turned dissapointing with Reygadas. With D'Angelo's Cannes '12 Day Nine, "Cannes 2012, Day Nine: The director of Precious drops another prestige stinkbomb and an unfilmable novel gets filmed," he refers to PAPERBOY and ON THE ROAD.

No film festival is complete without an unmitigated disaster, and Cannes 2012 finally served one up yesterday morning in the form of Lee Daniels’ The Paperboy,the most repugnant and inept movie to be inexplicably treated like high art since…whaddaya know, since Precious (Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire), the last film directed by Lee Daniels. --AV CLUB.

According to D'A., PAPERBOY is utterly tasteless and exploitative and at the same time pretends to be social significant. ON THE ROAD, he says, it relatively benign, quite watchable, moving along "at a brisk clip," laced with fairly successful cameo impersonations of Ginsberg, Burroughs, et al., with Hedlund moving headlong into stardom with his Dean Moriority performance, but "all that’s missing is Kerouac’s voice—the reason the book is worth reading." D'A. concludes this dispatch with Sergei Loznitsa’s IN THE FOG, "a Competition title that takes a long, slow, and exceedingly bleak and morose look at the moral choices of three Belorussian soldiers during the German occupation of WWII." This new film lacks the formal innovation of Loznitsa's MY JOY, and D'A. found it "frankly wearying."

[Chris Knipp]

Good news of a sort about Salles' ON THE ROAD.

D'Angelo finally got to a screening of ON THE ROAD:

On the Road (Salles): 51. Insert unadaptable-novel boilerplate. Riley's a black hole but Hedlund is tremendous, finally becomes a star.

That's what I'm actually hoping for: that Hedlund, who seems to have given his all, would shine and thereby move up a notch. That is the good news, and I think we can go to see the movie for Hedlund's energetic evocation of Kerouac's muse, Dean Moriority (Neal Cassady).

Bradshaw of the Guardian: "Handsome shots and touching sadness don't compensate for the tedious air of self-congratulation in Walter Salles's road movie." The message is: the women come through better than the men in this -- but we are forced to spend most of our time with the man. My feeling all along has been: you may want to see it if you're a fan of the Beats' era or aura, don't get your hopes up. I'm curious how well Viggo Mortensen does as the William S. Burroughs surrogate "Old Bull Lee," but that's just a vignette, and without originality, judging by the trailer (which I was forced to watch multiple times in Paris).

The D'Angelo tweet comes from here: https://twitter.com/#!/gemko/

[Chris Knipp]

A blog D'A. cites gives the current critics ratings, misc. and French ones, on the Cannes competition films.

From Cannes: Interim Crix Poll Results
This is the last day that the trades put out daily editions, so here's where things stand right now.
Screen (international crix)

Rating system is traditional 4 stars, no half-stars.

3.3: Amour (Haneke)
3.3: Beyond the Hills (Mungiu)
2.9: The Hunt (Vinterberg)
2.9: Killing Them Softly (Dominik)
2.9: Rust and Bone (Audiard)
2.8: The Angels' Share (Loach)
2.7: On the Road (Salles)
2.6: Moonrise Kingdom (Anderson)
2.6: You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet! (Resnais)
2.4: Like Someone in Love (Kiarostami)
2.1: In Another Country (Hong)
2.0: Holy Motors (Carax)
1.9: Reality (Garrone)
1.7: Lawless (Hillcoat)
1.5: After the Battle (Nasrallah)
1.5: Paradise: Love (Seidl)

(As you can see, Holy Motors ain't exactly universally beloved. It gets 4/4 from Dennis Lim and a Danish critic, one 3-star rating ["good"], some "average" (ha!), and four ratings of either "poor" or "bad.")

Le Film Français (French crix only)

Their rating system is totally different, on a 4-star scale but with 2 stars meaning they liked it "beaucoup" (as opposed to "passionnément" for 3 stars and "à la folie," i.e. to the point of madness, for 4). So these numbers aren't comparable to the ones above at all.

3.20: Amour (Haneke)
2.88: Rust and Bone (Audiard)
2.60: You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet! (Resnais)
2.57: Holy Motors (Leos Carax)
2.20: The Angels' Share (Loach)
2.13: Beyond the Hills (Mungiu)
2.00: Moonrise Kingdom (Anderson)
1.93: Reality (Garrone)
1.85: Killing Them Softly (Hillcoat)
1.73: Lawless (Hillcoat)
1.67: On the Road (Salles)
1.63: The Hunt (Vinterberg)
1.53: Paradise: Love (Seidl)
1.43: In Another Country (Hong)
1.29: After the Battle (Nasrallah)
1.27: Like Someone in Love (Kiarostami)

Still some dissension but Carax fares much better at home, as does Resnais. Kiarostami and especially Vinterberg take a massive nosedive. Otherwise pretty much the same ballpark.

These lists drive home the point that the French like their own movies, and the high rating they give RUST AND BONE may lead to some ill feeling when the end of Cannes and the prizes and final assessments come along. I tend to agree with French taste more than most non-French, but I'm doubtful that I would put anything but the universally acclaimed AMOUR above MOONRISE KINGDOM. Interesting that Loach's film comes a notch higher in the French list even though they put all those French films up high. I think it's safe to say there are some relative duds toward the bottom of both lists.

[Chris Knipp]

Loznitsa's IN THE FOG and Larraín's NO.

In the Fog (Loznitsa): 50. Much more conventional than MY JOY, and somehow feels simultaneously sparse and bloated. Adaptation issue?

I quoted Mike's review of MY JOY in my similarly mixed review of it as part of the NYFF 2012. Ed Lachman the cinematographer loved its long tracing shots. But it is random and hideous.

One or two people loved Pablo Larraín's NO (shown out of competition) but I can't find a comment by D'Angelo or some others on it. It has been picked up by Sony Pictures Classics and may get Larraín a bigger US audience -- or not. I thought D'Angelo discussed that, but it is hard finding things on Twitter.

Felperin for Variety says of NO

After "Tony Manero" and "Post Mortem," his devastating portraits of how the Pinochet regime psychologically brutalized the people of Chile from 1973-90, Chilean helmer Pablo Larrain satisfyingly completes the trilogy with an affirmative victory for democracy in "No." Tense throughout, even for history-savvy auds, but still rich in the sort of Andean-soil-black humor that made Larrain's previous work so distinctive, the pic stars Gael Garcia Bernal as an adman who helps the opposition fashion a campaign to get people to vote against keeping Pinochet in power in a 1988 referendum. Result will get plenty of yes votes from arthouse distribs worldwide.

Larraín's TONY MANERO and POST MORTEN were both NYFF selections (2008 and 2010, respectively). I admired them both.

NO has Larraín's usual Alfredo Castro, but also Gael García Bernal. Manohla Dargis NYTimes has written an of it in the paper's online "Art Beat - The Culture at Large" blog, with an interview with Larraín. She says its the best of his 'trilogy' and one of the best films at Cannes 'so far' (May 22, 2012). Imprimatur, from her, and hype. Later she wrote in the same place about Salles' ON THE ROAD, politely panning it.

D'Angelo in his AV Club Cannes Day 10 report explains that LARRAÍN'S 'NO', being about the way an ad campaign helped turn the tide against the dictator Pinochet in Chile, is

an uproarious examination of how the methods used to sell soft drinks and soap operas can also be used to sell…not a candidate, understand (the actual election was a year later), but just the idea “freakin’ anybody but this guy.” Deliberately making the film as ugly and tacky as possible, Larraín expertly reproduces the most laughable excesses of ‘80s advertising, which was apparently much the same everywhere. I looked in vain for a hint of contemporary relevance, and couldn’t work up any real interest in García Bernal’s relationship with his semi-militant ex-wife and his young son, but was generally laughing too hard to focus on the flaws

so D'Angelo concludes.




García Bernal in Larraín's No

[Chris Knipp]

David Cronenberg's COSMOPOLIS. DeLillo adaptation 'stillborn'?

(This is another 'big release' of which there have been many big posters all around Paris in the Métro, etc..)

Cosmopolis (Cronenberg): 59. Demands an incredibly precise tone that Cronenberg nails about half the time. Thrilling when he does .

That is D'Angelo's tweet and rating, which is the same as he gave the generally admired Cristian Mungiu's BEYOND THE HILLS tweet. He adds:)

A reductive way of putting it is that the more human the actor opposite Pattinson (who's great) seems, the less effective the scene.

Pushed at calling Pattinson "great" he responded

Maybe "great" is too strong, but he's perfectly in tune with the film's deliberately stilted, almost robotic nature.

Bradshaw (Guardian) is uenthusiastic. He calls it an "agonisingly self-conscious and meagre piece of work."

David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis, adapted by the director from the Don DeLillo novella, is stilted, self-important and dismayingly shallow, featuring an egg-laying cameo from Juliette Binoche, among others — although Paul Giamatti and Mathieu Amalric put some recognisable human life into theirs...(Bradshaw)

Hollywood Reporter:

After a strong run of films over the past decade, David Cronenberg blows a tire with Cosmopolis.Lifeless, stagey and lacking a palpable subversive pulse despite the ready opportunities offered by the material, this stillborn adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel will initially attract some Robert Pattinson fans but will be widely met with audience indifference.

Pattinson in Cosmopolis

COSMOPOLIS of course has a US release coming, though the date seems unannounced; the UK release date is June 15. The presence of Robert Pattinson will draw in some young audience members to this adaptation of Don DeLillo's chilly, hip novel in which a young Wall Street multi-billionaire is slowly going across Manhattan in a limo to get a haircut.

Personally I was unable to get through DeLillo's book, as I was unable to even get started on Ballard's similarly chilly and conceptual 'Crash,' which also inspired a Cronenberg adaptation. I would hope this one offers more to the eye and mind.

It did. And the book was better than I thought. Review of COSMOPOLIS.

[Chris Knipp]

Jeff Nichols' MUD.

This by the still-young maker of SHOTGUN STORIES and TAKE SHELTER was one of the last two Cannes competition films not yet seen and rated by Mike D'Angelo (the other is Im Sang-soo’s THE TASTE OF MONEY). He reports

Successfully got into a screening of MUD via the sophisticated ploy of not leaving town before the festival actually ended.

D'A. rated and described MUD in a tweet thus:

Mud (Nichols): 62. Ripping yarn with some iffy gender politics, though I give Nichols credit for strenuous efforts to cover his ass.

He added "I slightly prefer KILLNG THEM SOFTLY," and in fact he gave the latter a 63. Peter Bradshaw wrote of KILING THEM SOFTLY "Andrew Dominik's immensely gripping and brutal world of recession-hit criminals, starring Brad Pitt, is smart and nasty, with a political dimension, too." Jeff Nichols' excellent TAKE SHELTER (with its resonant screenplay and stroung cast) screened in Un Certain Regard at Cannes last year; this year he moved up to competition level with MUD.

Besides Matthew McConaughey, MUD includes Reese Witherspoon, Michael Shannon, and Sarah Paulson. A subject summary reads: "Two teenage boys encounter a fugitive and form a pact to help him evade the bounty hunters on his trailer and to reunite him with his true love. (135 mins.)." A detailed description will be found here. McCanaughey is the fugitive.


Still from Jeff Nichols' Mud

D'Angelo's AV Club Cannes '12 Day Eight piece is subtitled "The director of Silent Light drops a bold curiosity and Bernardo Bertolucci makes his first movie in nearly a decade.." He discusses Reygadas' POST TENEBRAS LUX in some detail, introducing it as his "big disappointment" of the festival and gives it a rating of C+.

Reygadas has never been afraid to go for the grandiose, opening him up to charges of pretension; I found his first two features, Japón and Battle in Heaven, painfully self-conscious in their determination to provoke, but Silent Light seemed like a giant leap forward into—as much as I hate this word when applied to artists—maturity. With Post tenebras lux (a Latin phrase meaning “After darkness, light”), he continually veers back and forth between the magnificently evocative and the willfully obscure, with the latter ultimately prevailing.

Bertolucci's ME AND YOU he also gives a C+ to, again repeating the assessment that it's "pleasingly inconsequential" and "feels like a warm-up exercise." He calls the omnibus film 7 DAYS IN HAVANA a "waste of time" but also gives it a C+. (The AV Club letter grades D'angelo must use in these longer Cannes dispatches are perforce much less refined and precise than his personal 1-100 rating system.)

D'Angelo discusses MUD in his Day 10 piece. The reason all this information doubles back on itself is that the AV Club pieces don't correspond chronologically at all with the actual viewings of the films that D'Angelo reports immediately on Twitter, or with the Variety and other reviews, which generally come out closer to the time of the first Cannes screenings of the films -- I think. I was not there, remember.

[Chris Knipp]

All Mike D'Angelo's tweet ratings of the films he saw, arranged from highest rating down to lowest (as of May 26, 2012).

Obviously these rankings aren't gospel, just a good point of reference for now. But as I said D'Angelo's rating system has a nice range to it and his lack of preconceptions and biases is admirable. And I think you can trust him enough to assume his top 6-10 are ones you would want to see, if you got the chance. Actually six or seven below D'Angelo's top ten are also worth a look considering they're by Cronenberg, Vinterberg, Bertolucci, Ruiz, Hong, from Kerouac, and by Reygadas. Next we will see what the Cannes juries say.

Each line below quotes D'Angelo's entire tweet including his comment on the film he's rating right after seeing it.


Still from Matteo Garrone's Reality

HOLY MOTORS (Carax): 88. Holy shit.
LOVE (Haneke): 77. Starts out surprisingly lovely, then turns Haneke-grueling. But always deeply felt & beautifully acted, if singleminded.
MOONRISE KINGDOM (Anderson): 75 [later re-watched and raised to 78]. Balance between pre-adolescent ardor and adult disappointment a bit wobbly, but mostly delightful in RUSHMORE vein.
SISTER (Meier): 68. Surprisingly Dardennes-y, but it's not like that's a bad thing. Seydoux ideally cast. English title not ideal. [Market]
NO (Larraín): 68. Honestly, I think this mostly fails in every way except being funny. But it's the funniest movie I've seen all year.
REALITY (Garrone): 66. Another film w/only one idea, but at least it's a bold one. Feels like something Buñuel would make if he were alive.
RUST AND BONE (Audiard): 64. The story of a horribly disabled person, and also of a woman with no legs. Stealthy reverse schematism! I like.
MUD (Nichols): 62. Ripping yarn with some iffy gender politics, though I give Nichols credit for strenuous efforts to cover his ass.
LAWLESS (Hillcoat): 61. Flavorful turf-war pseudo-Western with two iconic badasses (and Pearce out-intimidating Hardy, incredibly).
BEYOND THE HILLS (Mungiu): 59. Another accomplished film content to just keep doing one thing from start to finish. Super intense though.
COSMOPOLIS (Cronenberg): 59. Demands an incredibly precise tone that Cronenberg nails about half the time. Thrilling when he does .
SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED (Trevorrow): 56. Winning premise spins wheels, indulges weak subplots straining to reach feature length. [Market]
LA NOCE DE ENFRENTE (Ruiz): 56. "Actually he has always been leaving us, and yet here he still is." Another dryly moving farewell.
38 WITNESSES (Belvaux): 55. Powerful when purely cinematic, which is about half the time. On-the-nose dialogue sometimes painful. [Market]
THE HUNT (Vinterberg): 54. To avoid exasperating @msicism let's just say you've more or less seen this one once you know the premise.
LAURENCE ANYWAYS (Dolan): 53. Yeah, this is way too long. And stars Melvil Poupaud, who I can rarely stomach. Scattered inspired moments.
THE WE AND THE I (Gondry): 52. In which he remakes GET ON THE BUS as a high-school movie. Enjoyed rowdy energy, not so much the earnestness.
ME & YOU (Bertolucci): 52. Pleasantly inconsequential tale of half-sibs hiding out in a basement storage room feels like a warm-up exercise.
IN ANOTHER COUNTRY (Hong): 51. Not sure if I'm tickled or disappointed that he made the same film he always makes, except w/ Huppert in it.
ON THE ROAD (Salles): 51. Insert unadaptable-novel boilerplate. Riley's a black hole but Hedlund is tremendous, finally becomes a star.
IN THE FOG (Loznitsa): 50. Much more conventional than MY JOY, and somehow feels simultaneously sparse and bloated. Adaptation issue?
POST TENEBRAS LUX (Reygadas): 48, for now. If demystified, could be 84. Tho' the feeling of ultra-super-mega-pretentiousness might linger.
PARADISE: LOVE (Seidl): 47. Two hours of mutual exploitation. Individual scenes crackle, but Seidl has one idea, hammers it relentlessly.
MEKONG HOTEL (Joe): 41. Strictly a doodle, and formally drab to boot. Supernatural elements feel shoehorned in. Guitar score is pleasant.
AFTER THE BATTLE (Nasrallah): 38. Plays like a daytime soap that happens to be set during the Arab Spring. Epochal meets insipid.
THE PAPERBOY (Daniels): 9. Lee Daniels: Worst filmmaker of our time, or worst filmmaker of all time? Discuss.
ROMAN POLANSKI: A MEMOIR (Bouzereau): W/O. Utterly banal "interview" (= longtime friend urging RP to tell fave anecdotes) + film clips.
OUR CHILDREN (Lafosse): W/O. I saw 40 mins & this is what happened: Two pretty young people got married and had 3 kids. That's literally it.
MANIAC (Khalfoun): W/O. Had I known it's a first-person-camera slasher film I wouldn't have bothered. You can't even *see* Elijah Wood!
[W/O= Walked Out, so no rating, but if there were one, it would not be high.]

-- Mike D'Angelo @gemko.

[Chris Knipp]

The big Cannes '12 prizes are coming May 27. These came the day before.

Before the big prizes, these awards in the satellite festivals of Cannes have already been announced (partial list; top prizes highlighted in red):

Un Certain Regard (Jury chaired by Tim Roth)
AFTER LUCIA, Michel Franco - Un Certain Regard Prize
Special Jury Prize: LE GRAND SOIR, Benoit Delepine and Gustave Kervern
Best Actress (tie): Émilie Dequenne, AIMER À PERDRE LA RAISON (Joachim Lafosse) & Suzanne Clement), LAURENCE ANYWAYS (Xavier Dolan)
Special Jury Mention: DJECA (CHILDREN OF SARAJEVO), Aida Begic

Directors' Fortnight Awards/La Quinzaine des Réalisateurs
NO, Pablo Larrain - Art Cinema Award (International Confederation of Art Cinemas and Test)
Price SACD (Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers): CAMILLE REDOUBLE, Noémie Lvovsky
Special mention SACD: ERNEST AND CELESTINE, Benjamin Renner , Stephane Aubier , Vincent Patar
Cinemas Label Europea (Awarded by a jury of farmers to a feature film in Europe): AL TAAIB, Merzak Allouache
Illy Prize (award given to a short film): THE CURSE, Fyzal Boulifa

Critics' Week Awards
HERE AND THERE, Antonio Mendez Esparza - Nespresso Grand Prix
Price Jury Revelation France 4 (Presented by four young international critics): SOFIA'S LAST AMBULANCE, Ilian Metev

FIPRESCI Awards (International Federation of Film)
IN THE FOG, Sergei Loznitsa - FIPRESCI Prize Official Competition
BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD, Benh Zeitlin - FIPRESCI Prize Un Certain Regard
HOLD BACK, Rachid Djaïdani - FIPRESCI Prize for Directors' Fortnight


Beasts of the Southern Wild

[Chris Knipp]

The big prizes.

Cannes. Les palmarès.


Palme d'or : Amour de Michael Haneke

Grand Prix : Reality de Matteo Garrone

Prix d'interprétation féminine : Cosmina Stratan et Cristina Flutur (Au-delà des collines/Beyond the Hills)

Prix d'interprétation Masculine : Mads Mikkelsen (La Chasse/The Hunt)

Prix de la mise en scène : Post Tenebras Lux de Carlos Reygadas

Prix du scénario : Au-delà des collines (Beyond the Hills) de Cristian Mungiu

Prix du jury : La Part des Anges (The Angels' Share ) de Ken Loach

Caméra d'Or : Les Bêtes du sud sauvage (Beasts of the Southern Wild) de Benh Zeitlin (présenté à Un Certain Regard)


Haneke and Trintignant go up to receive the Golden Palm. Emmanuelle Riva was there too.

[cinemabon]

Chris, did you post a review of "Amour" the Palme d'or winner? I tried to find it but couldn't. Also, incredible coverage. Bravo. You must have stubbles for fingers.

[Chris Knipp]

Thanks for the kind words.
No, I didn't see AMOUR -- it didn't come to Paris while I was there. It has a US distrib and either may come out in the fall or be in the NYFF so I'll review it then. In other countries too its release dates are Sept.-Nov.
I did cover three Cannes competition films in my PARIS MOVIE REPORT -- SISTER (Ursula Meier), RUST AND BONE (Jacques Audiard), and MOONRISE KINGDOM (Wes Anderson). All excellent. And MOONRISE KINGDOM is showing in US theaters now.

[Chris Knipp]

ABOUT URSULA MEIER'S 'SISTER' -- not in the regular Cannes festival program, nominated for a special award to be judged in June.

Because of D'Angelo's enthusiastic tweet review from Cannes and rating of 68, I thought Meier's SISTER was a competition film, but then I couldn't find the title in any of the official Cannes listings. It turns out it was nominated for a special prize, the European Film Academy's inaugural Young Audience Award.. This must explain how D'Angelo saw it at Cannes, but he didn't state the category or context. Tweets have their limits.

Young audiences across Europe will vote for the inaugural prize on June 10.

CANNES - Sister from French director Ursula Meier, Belgian drama Blue Bird from director Gust Van den Berghe and Boudewijn Koole's Dutch feature Kauwboy are the nominees for the European Film Academy's inaugural Young Audience Award.

The prize, initiated for the 25th anniversary of the Academy's European Film Awards, is intended to honor European features that appeal to younger audiences, without necessarily being made exclusively for them.
All three nominees come with a strong awards pedigree. Sister won the runner-up Silver Bear for best film at the Berlin Film Festival this year; Kauwboy picked up the best first movie honor from Berlin's Generation Kplus sidebar and Blue Bird won special mention at the Ghent International Film Festival last year.
A European Film Academy jury, made up of Berlin Generation director Maryanne Redpath, Florence Dupont, artistic director of the Sancy Film Festival for Young People and Jerzy Moszkowicz, director of Poland's International Young Audience Film Festival Ale Kino, picked the three nominees.
The Academy will screen all three films to a young audience of 10-13 year-olds on June 10 in the European cities of Amsterdam, Belgrade, Copenhagen, Erfurt, Norrköping and Turin. The audience will act as jury and vote for the winner right after the screenings. The award ceremony will be held the same day in Erfurt, Germany.--HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

[Chris Knipp]

MIKE D'ANGELO'S 2012 TEN BEST LISTS.

EIGHT of the "pure" list as of now (June 9) D'Angelo saw last month at Cannes. His approach is to keep a running pair of lists open for everybody to check out as it develops, instead of being coy and precious about his process. D'Angelo's lists are of interest for all the reasons I've been enumerating on this thread, besides which his assiduous attendance of Cannes and Toronto makes his lists glimpses into our future.

THE "PURE" LIST (2012 premiere)
01. Holy Motors (Leos Carax, France/Germany)
02. Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson, USA)
03. Amour (Michael Haneke, France/Germany/Austria)
04. You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet! (Alain Resnais, France/Germany)
05. Pursuit of Loneliness (Laurence Thrush, USA)
06. Looper* (Rian Johnson, USA)
07. Sister (Ursula Meier, Switzerland/France)
08. NO (Pablo Larraín, Chile/USA/Mexico)
09. Reality (Matteo Garrone, Italy/France)
10. Rust and Bone (Jacques Audiard, France/Belgium)

THE "POLLS" LIST (2012 commercial release)
01. The Loneliest Planet (Julia Loktev, USA/Germany)
02. Miss Bala (Gerardo Naranjo, Mexico)
03. Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson, USA)
04. Amour (Michael Haneke, France/Germany/Austria)
05. The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, UK)
06. This Must Be the Place (Paolo Sorrentino, Italy/France/Ireland)
07. Haywire (Steven Soderbergh, USA)
08. You Are Here (Daniel Cockburn, Canada)
09. Looper* (Rian Johnson, USA)
10. Sister (Ursula Meier, Switzerland/France)

P.s. I am no particular advocate of these films but I like the ones on the lists that I've seen except for HAYWIRE and THE LONELIEST PLANET, which I don't see the point of listing. The other Cannes ones of course I'd think are must-sees. The asterisk was to a note saying FOOTNOTE was in very far from finished form when he saw it and if finishing went well it could move to the top of the list. It costars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis, with Emily Blunt. "Hunted by your future" is its slogan, and its release date is September 28, on the poster below.