Cannes 2013

[Chris Knipp]

Rebecca Zlotowski's GRAND CENTRAL
In French
With:
Léa Seydoux, Tahar Rahim, Olivier Gourmet

D'Angelo walked out of Rebecca Zlotkowski's GRAND CENTRAL, which concerns workers in a French nuclear plant. Interestingly, this features Tahar Rahim (of Audiard's prizewinning A PROPHET), the second man in the triangle of Farhadi's THE PAST. He really glowed at the Cannes THE PAST Q&A and it's looking like he's clearly now a star, which was a bit iffy after Audiard made him one so young. With a cast like this (Olivier Gourmet, a Dardennes favorite, so great recently in THE MINISTER is one of the best and Seydoux's filmography is already impressive) it's hard to justify D'Angelo's W/O and there is a positive buzz about GRAND CENTRAL but we'll see. I can see how its class and nuclear issue focuses might seem too earnest and Screen Daily describes it as a fine effort that in the end seems too thin. Plus to be honest others esp. women loved Zlotowski's debut BELLE EPINE (ND/NF 2011), also with Seydoux but I didn't. However, I'll watch anything with Seydoux in it.

Tom Lamong (GUARDIAN) Saturday (May 18) sprightly Cannes roundup like others, headlines the daily heavy rain so far on the Cote d'Azur so far this year.

Thanks for the FEDORA information, cenemabon and for the thumbs up on my (second-hand) Cannes reports.

[cinemabon]

Oh, Cannes... you just can't get enough publicity!

http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2...for-cover?lite

[Chris Knipp]

THE CANNES JURIES

Oh, Cannes... you just can't get enough publicity!

http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2...for-cover?lite

A man perhaps also carrying a grenade fired several shots from a pistol and interrupted a live interview about to begin with Chrstof Waltz and Daniel Auteul at Cannes on the Croisette, an outdoor stage overlooking the water where a lot of stuff happens. It turns out they were blanks, and we can't see it directly but they say he was pointing it at Waltz. In the video the woman declares at the end: "Il y a quequ'un qui tire!" - "There's somebody shooting!" See it on this Youtube video.

In case you're wondering what Daniel Auteuil and Christof Waltz were doing being interviewed together, both are on the Cannes Competition "Longs Métrages" (Feature Films) Jury.

Here's this "main" Cannes Jury:

LONGS METRAGES/FEATURES
Steveen Spielberg, President, USA, director
Ang Lee, Taiwan, director
Daniel Auteuil, France, actor, director
Christof Waltz, Austria, actor
Nicole Kidman, Australia, actress
Lynne Ramsey, UK, director

I might as well give here the other juries.

UN CERTAIN REGARD
Thomas Vinterberg, President, Denmark, director
Enrique Gonzalez Macho Spail, distributor, producer, promoter
Ludivine Sagnier France, actress
Ilda Santiago Brazil, Director of the Rio Festival
Zhang Ziyi China, actress

CAMÉRA D'OR
Agnès Varda President, France, director
Michel Abramowicz, France, cinmeatographer, represenative of AFC
Gwénolé Brunea France, Ficam sales representative
Isabel Coixet Spain, director
Éric Guirado, France, director
Chloé Rolland, France, critic
Régis Wargnier, France, director

CINÉFONDATION AND SHORT FILMS JURY
Jane Campion, President New Zealand, director and screenwriter
Maji-da Abdi, Ethiopia, actress, director, producer
Nicoletta Braschi, Italy, actress and producer
Nandita Das, India, actress and director
Semih Kaplanoğlu , Turkey, director and producer

Sélection Cinéfondation includes 18 films submitted by students at film schools in 13 countries.

The Sélection de la Quinzaine des réalisateurs/Directors Fortnight Films, is 19 films and is a bit like New Directors/New Films (much more globally visible though). There is also Critics Week (La Semaine de la critique), two prizes, seven feature films and ten shorts. These are all ones to watch for new emerging talent. There are three FIPRESCI awards given at Cannes. There is also a youth jury (age 18-25) which often gets overlooked. There are a number of youth awards given from the various categories.

[Chris Knipp]

OTHER CANNES REPORTS

I find Keith Ulrich on TimeOut New York has good early Cannes reviews. You'll find his column on A TOUCH OF SIN, Farhadi's THE PAST, and Alain Giraudie's STRANGER BY THE LAKE here. Ulrich's reviews are more detailed than the Guardian's perhaps, certainly than D'Angelo's, less personal than his but more open minded.

Of course if you want to get an idea of a festival film's US distribution possibilities and mainstream potential, you generally are better off going to Variety or Hollywood Reporter first. They provide a lot of good detail on films too, only sometimes they jut write them off because they think they're not commercial, or alternatively write publicity for them rather than a real critique. More to come. As I write this Cannes day five hasn't even started yet.

[Chris Knipp]

DAY FIVE: Sunday 19 May

UPDATING MIKE D'ANGELO TWITTER REVIEWS
These remain the most up-to-the-minute reports on Cannes screenings I'm aware of, in English... D'Angelo today, Sunday 19 May 2013, notes the general ratings of competition films thus far shown. (Note where it says "Market" below those are not competition.)

D'Angelo: "Screen ratings as of today (out of 4): Jia 3.0, Farhadi 2.8, Kore-eda 2.5, Ozon 2.4, Desplechin 2.0, Escalante 1.6. No Coens 'til tomorrow." He added about the French responses: "No time to compute Le Film Français avgs but they collectively love Farhadi, Jia, and (much more divisively) Guiraudie." And to that he adds: "Also the French haaaate FRUITVALE STATION. Good job the French." I think he may think the English-speakers positive response to FRUITVALE STATION is some kind of rote PC thing. We might need to be open to that possibility. However, he should not have walked out of GRAND CENTRAL or FRUITVALE in my view. (He watched 40 mins. if he's following his usual MO).

D'ANGELO'S LATEST TWEETS (as of 19 MAY):

Borgman (Van Warmerdam): 52. Basic anti-bourgeois surrealism, with little real-world resonance that I can detect. Forgettably intriguing.

Seduced and Abandoned (Toback): 52. Totally incoherent—is it about Cannes, financing, "the magic of the movies," death, what? But fun.

Bends (Lau): W/O. Never even really got a sense of what this is, to be honest. Totally enervating.

_________________


TAHER RAHIM AND BÉRÉNICE BEJO AT CANNES
WITH THE KIDS IN THE PAST

D'ANGELO'S PREVIOUSLY POSTED CANNES 2013 TWITTER REVIEWS:

The Past (Farhadi): 82. Farhadi may be the best pure dramatist in the world right now. Theme's a bit blunt here (The Past!); still superb.

The Selfish Giant (Barnard): 68. Had you shown this to me blind I'd have bet the farm it was Shane Meadows. Like SOMERS TOWN as tragedy.

Young & Beautiful (Ozon): 66. Character study of teen hooker inititally seems banal, but banality proves to be its secret weapon.

Go for Sisters (Sayles): 61. I've been saying for yrs he should do something trashy and this comes pretty close. Possibly too close.[Market]

A Touch of Sin (Jia): 59. Big chance of pace, 4-parter w/loads of explicit violence. Individual stories compel; juxtaposition a bit tract-y.

Inside Llewyn Davis (Coens): 57. A close cousin to O BROTHER, not just musically but in its picaresque semi-randomness (+ Goodman ogre).

Touchy Feely (Shelton): 51. Dismayingly inorganic, w/lots of writer's heavy hand. Great cast still finds moments of authenticity. [Market]

Stranger by the Lake (Guiraudie): 50. Might be too straight for this, as it's pretty close to being gay porn w/an unusually hefty plot.

Heli (Escalante): 44. When bad things happen to made-up people. Like his previous films, as formally impressive as it is pointless.

Like Father, Like Son (Kore-eda): 42. Imagine a film abt parents who learn they were given the wrong baby 6 yrs earlier. This is that film.

Jimmy P.: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian (Desplechin): 35. I was not expecting to leave this film thinking fondly of GOOD WILL HUNTING.

The Bling Ring (Coppola): 32. Two words: Who cares?

Grand Central (Zlotowski): W/O. I'm 0-for-2 on Ms. Z so far. Details of working in a nuclear power plant are fascinating; nothing else is.

Fruitvale Station (Coogler): W/O. Because I was totally fine w/cops killing civilians until I saw what a super-nice guy the victim can be. . . . LATER TWEET ON THIS: @b_wolo Bitch to my face, pal. And lol to @Power_Lloyd suggesting I have some moral obligation to endure crappy films about black people.
THE GUARDIAN gave FRUITVALE STATION two favorable reviews with three out of five and a four out of five ratings.

Update on FRUITVALE STATION: reviews are generally positive (Metacritic 72, Rotten Tomatoes 88), but VARIETY's isn't: [Wiipedia] 'Geoff Berkshire of Variety called it "a well-intentioned attempt to put a human face on the tragic headlines surrounding Oscar Grant."' Though he praised Michael B. Jordan's performance, he critiqued the "relentlessly positive portrayal" of the film's subject: "Best viewed as an ode to victim's rights, Fruitvale forgoes nuanced drama for heart-tugging, head-shaking and rabble-rousing." But various reviews clearly state this is a strong directorial debut with good performances; that was the reaction at Sundance, apparently.

P.S. on the CANNES WEBSITE: All the post-screening Competition Q&A's are in videos on the site and are usually lengthy, and available in French and English if you like that sort of thing, and it's usually fun to see and hear actors and filmmakers one admires even if very often not much is added to what you get, in information, otherwise, from the films themselves.

THE PAST opened in Paris 17 May and has gotten raves: Allociné press rating 4.4 out of 5 based on 19 reviews. If you watch its trailer you'll find a warm and intense piece of work, belying its described "overwritten" and control-freak-direction qualities. I think I'm going to like at better than A SEPARATION.

[Chris Knipp]

More...

This was the one Rian Johnson rave-tweeted about. Lowery definitely is an indie director. But D'Angelo added later a compliment on Lowery's editing on UPSTREAM COLOR.

Mike D'Angelo ‏@gemko 40m
Ain't Them Bodies Saints (Lowery): W/O. I have apparently lost all touch with what most people consider first-rate indie filmmaking.

[Chris Knipp]

MID-POINT



D'Angelo has a mid-point summary (Sunday, 19 May 2013). Considering all the many selections in the whole of Cannes, it''s a thin offering:

Mike D'Angelo ‏@gemko 2h [>Twitter]
Favorite Cannes films at roughly the halfway point: 1. The Past, Farhadi (by far); 2. The Selfish Giant, Barnard; 3. Young & Beautiful, Ozon

If you look at the Le Film Francais daily collation of French reviews, you'd add A TOUCH OF SIN (Jia) and the Un Certain Regard one he said he might be too heterosexual to appreciate, THE STRANGER BY THE LAKE (Alain Guiraudie), which also have good reviews.

D'Angelo has pleaded that his walking out of four movies doesn't mean he doesn't like movies, he takes an aisle seat, but Just every movie I see by fledgling filmmakers. I don't walk out of films by established auteurs[>Twitter]. The justification for so many W/O's is that this keeps him more sane and rested to see what he considers the good stuff, and just gives him time, if he has a badge allowing him to walk in to ones he didn't originally commit to, to attend more screenings. That's me saying this. It is wise to take an aisle seat and be able to escape, for an "iffy" screening.

Anyway, it may be midpoint at Cannes (though it isn't quite -- he said "roughly"), but a lot of that "insane lineup" Johann remarked on still remains to be seen, I believe:

James Gray
Jim Jarmusch
Adelletif Kechiche
Takaishi Miike
Alexander Payne
Roman Polanski
Steven Soderbergh
Nicolas Winding Refn
Arnaud de Pallières
Paolo Sorrentino
Valentina Bruni Tedeschi

That's from the Competition slate, not including Director's Fortnight and Un Certain Regard. Plus these titles Out of Competition:

ALL IS LOST (J.C. Chandor)
BLOOD TIES (Guillaume Canet)
THE LAST OF THE UNJUST (Claude Lanzmann)

[Chris Knipp]

The Coen brothers' INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS
With
Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Justin Timberlake, John Goodman, Garrett Hedlund, F. Murray Abraham

D'Angnelo's tweet:

Inside Llewyn Davis (Coens): 57. A close cousin to O BROTHER, not just musically but in its picaresque semi-randomness (+ Goodman ogre).

He again seems grumpy and out of tune, since Peter Bradshaw of the GUARDIAN in his "first look" review gives it five out of five stars and says it's the best of the fest so far and Hollywood Reporter and Variety reviews are also glowing. I value D'Angelo for his independent mindedness, so I can't have it both ways, but his linking LLEWYN DAVIS with O BROTHER sounds dubious, since it's about the folk singing scene in NYC in the Sixties, a far cry from country music in the Thirties deep south.

NOTE: Also shown Saturday or by Sat. were Alejandro Jodorovsky (who's in his 80's) La Danza de la Realidad/THE DANCE OF REALITY and David Lowery's AIN'T THEM BODIES SAINTS, which I'll look for responses to further tomorrow. Bradsaw gives REALITY four out of five stars, and filmmaker Rian Johnson tweeted of AIN'T THEM BODIES SAINTS "Still reeling. Pretty incredible."