The A.V. Club - Cannes Film Festival

Film: Cannes Film Festival:Cannes '09: Day 11

Sun, 24 May 2009 07:06:00 -0500

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 can say with absolute confidence that none of the above will be talked about 20 years from now the way we still talk about Do the Right Thing and sex, lies and videotape, to name just the two most prominent films from Cannes ’89. At best, Antichrist and Enter the ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival:Cannes '09: Day Ten

Sat, 23 May 2009 12:53:00 -0500

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.” In terms of sheer mindblowing formal astonishment, Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void is the movie I’ve been waiting for the entire festival. It wouldn’t be quite accurate to say it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen, because you may have seen Noé’s Irreversible, which he ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival:Cannes '09: Day Nine

Fri, 22 May 2009 12:02:00 -0500

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 here in the home stretch. Certainly there’s no good reason why In the Beginning, which received this year’s coveted slot reserved for a little-known French director (Xavier Giannoli), needed to feel potentially endless, especially since the real-life story that inspired it, for all its huh-fancy-that appeal, has a ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival:Cannes '09: Day Eight

Thu, 21 May 2009 09:31:00 -0500

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 being briefed by Lance on the adrenaline shot. LANCE: And then you press the, uh, the plunger. VINCENT: Okay, and then what happens? LANCE (with a half-shrug): I’m curious about that myself. That feeling of curious uncertainty, I submit, is what’s missing from Tarantino’s latest. The reason ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival:Cannes '09: Day Seven

Wed, 20 May 2009 14:04:00 -0500

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 credit was the inane Cats & Dogs. (I’m pretty sure the IMDb even had the Coen Brothers down as uncredited script doctors for a while, though it doesn’t anymore; they did serve as executive producers and are said to have thought up the basic premise.) Five minutes into Requa ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival:Cannes '09: Inglourious Basterds

Wed, 20 May 2009 10:35:00 -0500

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 long-awaited WWII epic turns out to be nothing like what I’d expected—a shambling mass of contradictions that’s likely to divide QT partisans like nothing since Jackie Brown. Conceptually, this is easily the strangest film he’s ever made, as well as the least commercially viable. Its multi-chapter ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival:Cannes '09: Day Six

Tue, 19 May 2009 12:49:00 -0500

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 of mind for Ken Loach’s atypically lighthearted Looking for Eric, in which a stressed-out Manchester postal worker (newcomer Steve Evets) receives cryptic advice on life and love from retired soccer legend Eric Cantona. Judging from the warm, affectionate laughter with which this largely European crowd greeted Cantona’s every ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival:Cannes '09: Day Five

Mon, 18 May 2009 13:27:00 -0500

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 give you a giant bear hug. I’m pretty sure I kind of despised your new movie, Antichrist, but that doesn’t remotely matter. Thank you. Thank you for having the guts to make something as insane and offensive and wholly uncompromising as this. Thank you for not caring whether ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival:Cannes '09: Day Four

Sun, 17 May 2009 10:17:00 -0500

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 something bold and visionary remains unsated. From the moment we’re introduced to Malik El Djebena (played with an impressive mix of vulnerability and flint by newcomer Tahar Rahim), it’s obvious that his six-year stretch will see him gradually metamorphose from terrified new fish to intimidating kingpin—the only ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival:Cannes '09: Day Three

Fri, 15 May 2009 15:09:00 -0500

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 accurately observed, 90% of everything is crap, and that’s as true at Cannes as it is everywhere else on the planet; I’m perfectly happy if just one or two movies knock me on my ass each year, and there’s still plenty of time for that to happen ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival:Cannes '09: Day Two

Thu, 14 May 2009 15:21:00 -0500

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, I see it’s already time for some mild contrarian grumbling from yours harshly. Not that I have anything terribly much against Fish Tank, the sophomore effort by rising British talent Andrea Arnold (Red Road). I’m just having trouble comprehending the fuss being made in other quarters, because this ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival:Cannes '09: Day One

Wed, 13 May 2009 16:27:00 -0500

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 the most perversely withholding Eastern European anomie-fest seemed like a comparative breath of fresh air. So when the brass announced some time ago that the new Pixar movie, Up, would kick things off in ’09, I’m afraid I immediately assumed that it must be more Cars than WALL·E ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival:Cannes '09: Anticipatory Salivation

Wed, 13 May 2009 09:00:00 -0500

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 my head around it, frankly. Usually, it works like this: Sometime in late February or early March, Variety and the other trades float a bunch of potential Cannes titles, based on which major directors are known to have films in post-production. Invariably, it's a list to make any cinephile ...