Cannes 2012, May 16-27

[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

[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/