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Sunday 28th, May. 2006
CANNES – It turns out the old girl can still surprise us.
You could actually see Pedro Almodovar's face sag a bit when the award was announced. Best screenplay, Pedro Almodovar, Volver. Volver had already won Best Actress, a collective prize to its female cast and with screenwriter, that made two prizes, and under Cannes' arcane Barton Fink rule, instituted after Barton Fink won actor, director and the Palme D'Or, at that moment it became highly improbable that Volver would win the Palme.
In the Salle Debussy, where the press watched the awards on simulcast, there was much rumbling and buzzing. We...
Sunday 28th, May. 2006
Saturday 27th, May. 2006
RE-CYCLE (Danny and Oxide Pang) – is a fantasy/horror story about a young woman writer who decides to follow up her best selling series of romances with a tale of the...
Friday 26th, May. 2006
CANNES – All major film festivals are two days too long.
It has to do with how festivals want to structure their own coverage, of course. They want two weekends, which they all get, but increasingly, they don't get much coverage on the closing weekend -- the English language dailies at Cannes have either shut down (Screen) or ran their post-mortems today (Variety), with a day and a half to go before the awards are given and a couple of major films still to be screened.
The papers here are running off economic reality rather than the grandiose plans of the festival...
Thursday 25th, May. 2006
CANNES – Day Nine, the sun is up, and Screen International has just published its last daily edition of the Festival, with four days left to go. I'm debating this evening's competition screening, Colossal Youth, a 154 minute film from Portugal about a Cape Verdean guest worker whose wife dumps him and who, after 34 years in a run down slum, moves to a housing project. And I'd sort of like to still be awake to hit the Festival's one public screening of Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly, which had a press screening...
Wednesday 24th, May. 2006
CANNES, FRANCE -- In the "What the hell were they thinking?" category, Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette screens tonight in Competition, and opens in France.
Let's see, take a director who's made a couple of small films based on a naturalistic treatment of contemporary behaviour, and give her $40 million to recreate the court of Louis XV (Rip Torn) to tell the story of the Austrian Princess who would become the Queen of France as wife of Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman).
The mind wobbles -- and I have a lot of admiration for Read More...
Tuesday 23rd, May. 2006
CANNES – According to the books, Richard Linklater is 45. I arrive for the interview at the Villa d'Estelle, just off the Croisette, and find that he still has the look of a slacker -- he may be the worst dressed filmmaker in the Cannes competition. Certainly the worst dressed filmmaker who's had a considerable commercial hit in the last five years.
In an era when a younger generation of filmmakers seems to take forever to make a new movie, Linklater seems to work all the time, moving back and forth between Hollywood studio pictures like School...
Monday 22nd, May. 2006
By interview, I mean that 40 critics and interviewers were spread out among four tables, with empty seats left for the stars, who’d drop by for about half an hour each, with one table left empty, though the fallow table was never mine.
Oh, and by interview I also mean that the session was dominated by couple of people who had a whole bunch of...
Sunday 21st, May. 2006
CANNES – Print and save on the off chance these films show up at a theatre near you. And if you think that'll happen, you may want to spend part of the day relining your tinfoil hat.
Read More...
Saturday 20th, May. 2006
A couple of people have emailed saying, “So, John, you just jumped right in to your Cannes stuff. It’s easy for you, having been there more times than a responsible human would consider it, but what about the rest of us? Give us a handy dandy pocket guide.”
So, and since I’ve not written one in three or four years….
You’d better get a coffee. This could take a while
The Festival...
Friday 19th, May. 2006
SUMMER PALACE (Le You) -- Or as I think of it, Girls Gone Wild: Tiananmen Square Edition. Small town girl Yu Hong gets into Beijing University, starts having a lot of badly lit sex with her new boyfriend, Then, it being 1989, everybody goes to Tiananmen Square, which is treated kind of obliquely. Of course, the film still hasn't passed the Chinese censors. I'm not sure what's going to give the censors more problems, the sex or the politics, even though the politics is really only glancing -- we're never told why the students went...
Thursday 18th, May. 2006
Wednesday 17th, May. 2006
CANNES -- Arrived Monday after a week in Amsterdam, which I realized was perhaps not the best training for the Cannes Film Festival, which more and more comes to feel like two weeks of climbing stairs and that hill to my hotel. I probably should have gone to Rome. I was in Rome last fall after Venice and realized why all those guys in Renaissance paintings have overdeveloped calves. It would have been better training than a city where everything is flatter than The Da Vinci Code. (See my review of the DVC in tomorrow's paper.)
Went down...
