cannes film festival
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Cannes '09: Day 11
Well, the lineup did look awesome on paper, you must admit. Pity about the actual films, for the most part, but some years simply have no towering masterpiece to offer. Even if most other critics liked Bright Star and A Prophet and The White Ribbon more than I did, I ...
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Cannes '09: Day Ten
Okay, I see where I goofed now. Easily remedied for next year. “Won’t somebody please show up with a film that’s truly bold and audacious and visionary and unprecedented?” I’ll once again plead. But from now on, I’ll make sure to add “and not utterly stoopid ...
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Cannes '09: Day Nine
Scrambling to write up yesterday’s films during a brief window between screenings—a window that’s so brief because the movie I just saw ran nearly three hours. Almost every film in Competition this year is needlessly long, frankly, which has reduced most of the press corps to zombies ...
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Cannes '09: Day Eight
As you’ll recall, today’s morning screening was Inglourious Basterds, which wound up getting its own separate advance report. Thinking more about the film last night after talking about it with friends and colleagues, I kept flashing on perhaps my single favorite moment in Pulp Fiction, when Vincent is ...
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Cannes '09: Day Seven
And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Mainstream American comedies don’t come much blacker than Bad Santa, a chunk of congealed eggnog so gleefully nasty that some refused to believe it could have been written by its credited screenwriters, John Requa and Glenn Ficarra, since their only previous ...
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Cannes '09: Inglourious Basterds
Still planning a roundup from my somewhat abortive Day 7, but here’s breaking news from Day 8, as I’m sure many of you would prefer not to wait 24 hours to hear about Inglourious Basterds just so that I can stick to my predetermined coverage plan. Tarantino’s ...
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Cannes '09: Day Six
After surviving the gynocidal assault of Antichrist—and its combative press conference, in which Lars von Trier declared himself to be the greatest filmmaker in the world and coldly reminded the press corps that they were his invited guests rather than vice versa—critics were apparently in the right frame ...
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Cannes '09: Day Five
AN OPEN LETTER TO LARS VON TRIER
Dear Lars,
I love you, man. Not in a lame, hokey Rudd-and-Segal bromance way, but deeply and profoundly. If our paths cross over the next couple of days while you’re in town, don’t be surprised if I walk up unannounced and ...
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Cannes '09: Day Four
Well, we have a frontrunner. Jacques Audiard’s epic prison drama A Prophet, which screened early Saturday morning, received the most sustained applause I’ve heard for any film thus far and now sits atop both of the daily trade polls (about which more below). And yet my hunger for ...
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Cannes '09: Day Three
There’s a tiny part of me that dreads coming to Cannes every year, and it’s because of days like today. Not that I much mind sitting through four or five interesting failures, though that can start to get a tad demoralizing after a while. As Theodore Sturgeon once ...
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Cannes '09: Day Two
Frankly, to hell with Cannes. WHAT HAPPENED ON LOST?!? I don’t think I can get away with eating up two hours here in the press office streaming the finale, as the monitors are pretty large and I’m stationed nearby and in plain view of the info desk.
Anyway ...
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Cannes '09: Day One
Despite the apparent prestige involved, films selected to open Cannes tend to be clunkers, as if the festival seeks to dampen expectations right off the bat. Three years ago, for example, jetlagged journalists were forced to endure Ron Howard’s leaden adaptation of The Da Vinci Code, after which even ...
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Cannes '09: Anticipatory Salivation
I am not supposed to be here.
Howdy all. My name is Mike D'Angelo, and I'll be reporting daily from this year's Cannes Film Festival, which we can only hope will be half as mindblowingly awesome as it looks on paper. I'm still trying to wrap ...
