Cannes 2012, May 16-27

[Chris Knipp]

http://img196.imageshack.us/img196/5968/cannesfestivalposter1.jpg
The official 2012 Cannes poster

FROM MUBI:

CANNES 2012: THE ANTICIPATION

It’s just a little over two weeks away now, the main event of any year in cinema: The Cannes Film Festival. (http://mubi.com/festivals/cannes?utm_source=digest&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=digest45) With the full lineup (http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/cannes-2012-lineup?utm_source=digest&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=digest45) unveiled, we’ve been tracking advance word on each of the films in the Official Selection, collecting images, the occasional trailer, the works. Abbas Kiarostami, Alain Resnais (http://mubi.com/films/you-havent-seen-anything-yet?utm_source=digest&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=digest45), Hong Sang-soo (http://mubi.com/films/in-another-country?utm_source=digest&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=digest45), Michael Haneke (http://mubi.com/films/love--9?utm_source=digest&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=digest45) — they’re all right here (http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/cannes-2012-lineup?utm_source=digest&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=digest45). Keep up with all the news coming out of the Cannes Film Festival on our Facebook page, too!

As I track a festival at the tail end of the film festival year, the year is about to begin. I may be in Paris for a while, but I won't be at Cannes, and won't be around for the whole time, but I can report on it some. First off Wes Anderson's new movie is the opener, and there is what looks like it may be a serious movie that has Zac Efron in it (Lee 'Precious' Daniels' The Paperboy.) David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis will be featured, and Jean-Pierre Dardenne will preside over the jury. Xavier Dolan, whom Cannes loves, has a new film about a transexual. Jacques Audiard has a new one called Rust & Bone, a smaller quieter one this time, maybe, but with some intense changes, with Marion Cotillard in a key role at the center of the changes. I don't know if I'll like it, but Audiard's films have impressed me so far, each one more than the last. Michael Haneke produces variable results, but he is an awesome director. His new one has at the center of it a couple in their eighties, former music teachers, and their daughter. It stars Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Louis Trintignant, William Shimell (of Certified Copy), and Emanuelle Riva (of Hiroshima Mon Amour).

[Johann]

The Jury is interesting this year. (actually they are MOST years)

Write as much as you can my friend. And post more Parisian photos on Facebook! I love your photography.

[Chris Knipp]

Thank you. I'll do my best.

You can find a selection of my Paris photos from last year on Flickr in two sets Paris (http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisknipp/sets/72157626814559694/)and Paris 2 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisknipp/sets/72157628122110166/)

[Johann]

Awesome.
To twist what Orson Welles once said: A photo is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of an ARTIST.

[Chris Knipp]

Nicely twisted.

[Chris Knipp]

CANNES OPENING DAY, MAY 16, 2012

http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/6640/moonrisekingdomtrailer1.jpg
STILL FROM MOONRISE KINGDOM

Funny thing about Cannes this year, women are well represented in the jury, but there is not a single film directed by a woman in competition.

Wes Anderson is on hand for the first time and his movie opens the festival. Chairman of the jury is Nanni Moretti, whose THE SON'S ROOM won the Golden Palm in 2001. Ladies include Diane Kruger, Emanuelle Devos, Andrea Arnold, and the Palestinian actress/filmmaker Hiram Abbas. There is also Ewan McGregor and the designer Jean-Paul Gautier. Alexander Payne and Haitian director Raoul Peck round out the (main) jury. There is also the Un Certain Regard jury, Tim Roth (chairman), Leila Bekhti, Tonie Marchall, Lucian Montegudo, and Sylvie Pras, members.

Besides the lack of films by women, a complaint is that there are many familiar names in the competition selections. But it's not that they won't be of interest. Some notable ones:

Lee Daniels THE PAPERBOY
Wes Anderson MONRISE KINGDOM
Alain Resnais YOU AIN'T SEEN NOTHING YET/VOUS N'AVEZ ENCORE RIEN VU!
Michael Haneke LOVE
Abbas Kiarostami LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE
Christian Mungau BEYOND THE HILLS
Jacques Audiard RUST AND BONE/DE ROUILLE ET D'OS
Thomas Vinterberg THE HUNT/JAGTER
David Cronenberg COSMOPOLIS
Walter Salles ON THE ROAD
Claude Miller [who recently died] THRÉRÈSE DESQUEROUX
Yousri Nasrallah AFTER THE BATTLE

PRECIOUS was a Cannes prizewinner. Wes Anderson is always distinctive, and featuring his new film for opening night will bring him more French and international attention. Like Woody Allen's opening night film last year MIDNIGHT IN PARIS, MOONRISE KINGDOM opens simultaneiously in Paris and trailers of it are showing all the time in French cinems. Renais is unstoppable; he's now 90.

http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/6293/avezencorerienvubyalain.jpg
YOU AIN'T SEEN NOTHING YET!--RESNAIS

Haneke's LOVE concerns an old couple; a more intimate subject for him. Kiarostami's new one again is set behind the wheel of a car, this time in an odd Japanese setting. Audiard's RUST AND BONE opens in Paris May 17, and it the most anticipated French film of the moment, much advertised in Paris, posters everywhere, trailers in theaters all the time. Cronenberg's COSMOPOLIS opens after I leave but is also much advertised in Paris, posters all over the Metro. Ditto Walter Salles' ON THE ROAD, which opens soon, and has trailers showing in cinemas. Miller's THÉRÈSE DESQUEROUX is from a very dark novel by the classic modern French authoer François Mauriac, and Audrey Tautou stars in it, a big step away from her cuteness and sweetness. Yousri Nasrallah's AFTER THE BATTLE refers to the battles in and around Tahrir Square in Cairo during last year's Egyptian revolution, and is the only political film in competition. It may be a bit premature to do a film about such recent events, but the effort sounds daring.

Robert Pattinson is the star of COSMOPOLIS; this will show if he can make a strong transition from his Twilight overexposure to serious actor status like, say, Brad Pitt. The coldness of Cronenberg's style is suited to the novelist Don DeLillo, from whose work this film is adapted, but that may be a marriage made in heaven or simply too much of a muchness, we'll see.

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FRENCH COSMOPOLIS POSTER

RUST AND BONE combines French megastar Marion Cotillard with the Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts (of BULLHEAD), the latter an intensely physical actor and simply a great new actor. The director dares to cut off the legs of one of the worlds most winning and lovely young actresses: she becomes paraplegic in the film. A bold choice and a bold choice of actors which already promise a challenge to filmmaker and viewer.


SCHOENAERTS AND COTILLARD IN [I]RUST AND BONE

An adaptation of ON THE ROAD has been a long time coming. Salles tackled an iconic road text before with THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES. The result was engaging but a little lacking in depth. Will this be the same? The choices for the female leads are Kristen Stewart, Amy Adams and Kirsten Dunst. Viggo Mortensen as Old Bull Lee is an obvious William S. Burroughs surrogate/clone. Garrett Hedlund gets the key role of Kerouac's idol Dead Moriarity, and Sam Riley plays Kerouac's alter ego, Sal Paradise. I'm guessing this is going to be in the "nice try" category, but it may drum up some evocation of the thrill and innocence of bohemian American Fifties youth, if we're lucky, that could have some moving moments.

http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/5237/ontheroadmovie2600x397.jpg
STILL FROM SALLES' ON THE ROAD

Haneke begins with an amazing choice of actors, Jean-Louis Trintignat and Isabelle Huppert. As still suggests Tritignant has not lost his intensity.

http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/3516/jeanlouistrintignantand.jpg
TRINTIGANT AND HUPPERT IN HANEKE'S LOVE



______________

Apitchatpong Weerasethakul is out of competition with a documentary.

[Johann]

Excellent Chris. Love your postings.

[Chris Knipp]

Thanks, Johann.

As I said my timing in Paris isn't as Cannes-friendly as last year, but it will come about the same, because I will provide two "Cannes reviews": of Wes Anderson's MOONRISE KINGDOM, which I just saw tonight, and of Jacques Audiard's RUST AND BONE, which I expect to see tomorrow afternoon. It looks like despite my saying there was only a mediocre selection of films in Paris this time, I am seeing and writing about slightly more films in my PARIS MOVIE REPORT this year than on previous years or times.

If you want to follow MIKE D'ANGELO's Twitter Cannes thumbnail reviews -- and in my view he's one of the most authentic and accessible American voices on Cannes we have -- as well as through Twitter the most up-to-the-minute -- you will find them here:

https://twitter.com/#!/gemko

He gave MOONDISE KINGDOM A 75, which is very, very high for him. He explained his rating system yesterday thus:
Mike D'Angelo ‏@gemko
(Reminder before Cannes tweet-reviews begin tomorrow: 50=average, not F. 60+ good. 70+ excellent. 80+ phenomenal. 90+ all but unheard of.)

Variety's (http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117947550/)DeBruge's MOONRISE KINGDOM reivew comes off as more lukewarm, but still as often with Variety, may provide probably as detailed and accurate a US review of the film likely to come out of Cannes and one that in this case not unfair. He writes:
While Anderson is essentially a miniaturist, making dollhouse movies about meticulously appareled characters in perfectly appointed environments, each successive film finds him working on a more ambitious scale. Co-written by Roman Coppola, "Moonrise Kingdom" may not be set anywhere so exotic as a Mediterranean boat ("The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou") or a trans-Indian train ("The Darjeeling Limited"), but it feels even more finely detailed than any of his previous live-action outings. Still, the love story reads loud and clear, charming those not put off by all the production's potentially distracting ornamentation.

There in fact is a terrific balance between the awesomely intricate orchestration (literally) and the simple direct real quality of the young adolescent actors.

D'ANGELO is adding some photos with a few of his tweets, and I may put up one or two here, because they add to the immediacy of his picture of Cannes.

Here is one (I like night shots anyway, and just took a bunch of them in Paris tonight):

Photo by Mike D'Angelo, Cannes correspondent for Onion AV Club:

http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/646/large2n.jpg
Photo by Mike D'Angelo

His caption for it:
Entrance to Salle Debussy (where Un Certain Regard is screened, plus Comp press screenings) at night, from across st.

See the IndieWire evaluation and description of Mike D'Angelo here: (http://blogs.indiewire.com/criticwire/the-top-10-critics-to-follow-on-twitter-during-cannes). It says he is " is one of the true masters of the 140 character review," and they quote the opening of his "open letter" to Lars von Trier about ANTICHRIST, which is what really made me fall in love with his festival coverage: "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." Such passion and enthusiasm is, of course, not available to VARIETY reviewers, and we need it to remind us why we love movies.

I will put up some of my own current Paris photos on this thread, especially ones relevant to the reviews and Cannes.

[Chris Knipp]

D'Angelo has added MOONRISE KINGDOM to his 2012 top ten list. I've only seen three on it, MOONRISE KINGDOM, BEING FLYNN, AND NEIGHBORING SOUNDS, which latter I like very much. Others also are saying Beast of the Southern Wild, which is at Cannes in Un Certain Regard after Sundance success, is great. It was in the SFIFF but I missed it.


01. Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson, USA)
02. Pursuit of Loneliness (Laurence Thrush, USA)
03. Looper* (Rian Johnson, USA)
04. Young & Wild (Marialy Rivas, Chile)
05. Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin, USA)
06. The Queen of Versailles (Lauren Greenfield, USA)
07. Neighboring Sounds (Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brazil)
08. Wanderlust (David Wain, USA)
09. Compliance (Craig Zobel, USA)
10. Being Flynn (Paul Weitz, USA)
--Mike D'Angelo's website (http://www.panix.com/~dangelo/top12.html)

[Chris Knipp]

ANOTHER MIKE D'ANGELO LIVE FEED CANNES FESTIVAL PHOTO

http://img543.imageshack.us/img543/8128/2kepexu02.jpg
CAPTION: Press mailbox area right after a screening
(in this case MOONRISE KINGDOM) lets out.

Unlike the French critics, who if Allociné is to be trusted have given RUST AND BONE a much higher rating than MOONRISE KINGDOM, D'Angelo gave Audiard's new film a 64 vs. a 75 for Anderson (though he has been known to edit his ratings). His latest tweet on RUST AND BONE:


Judging from my feed so far, people don't quite seem to have understood what RUST AND BONE is up to.

His thumbnail review:

Rust and Bone (Audiard): 64. The story of a horribly disabled person, and also of a woman with no legs. Stealthy reverse schematism! I like.

--https://twitter.com/#!/gemko

[Chris Knipp]

MOONRISE KINGDOM.

I have seen it and will post my review on my PARIS MOVIE REPORT thread here. (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3273-PARIS-MOVIE-REPORT-%28May-2012%29&p=27851#post27851)


http://img405.imageshack.us/img405/1338/moonrisekingdomprog.jpg
KAREN HAYWARD AND JARED GILMAN IN MOONRISE KINGDOM

As I mentioned, Mike D'Angelo gave MOONRISE KINGDOM a 75, which by his system is an "excellent" rating, like an 88 or 90. [

Metacritic (http://www.metacritic.com/movie/moonrise-kingdom/critic-reviews)gives MOONRISE KINGDOM 75 so far but its listed review ratings are 80, 80, 80, 70, Variety's being the lower one. CORRECTION, late on May 17th: it has now gone up to 79, with another 80 and an 88-rated review for Haneke and Carax, shown later..

Metacritic thumbnail quotes:

TODD MCCARTHY (Hollywood Reporter): This is a Wes Anderson film -- more lightweight than some, possessing a stronger emotional undertow than others -- that will strike the uninitiated as conspicuously arch.

PETER BRADSHAW (The Guardian): A very charming, beautifully wrought, if somehow depthless film - eccentric but heartfelt, and thought through to the tiniest, quirkiest detail in the classic Anderson style.

PETER HAMMOND (Box Office Magazine): The director of quirky fare with a rabid cult-like following has made a charming, magical and really funny new work about two unique young kids discovering love over one unforgettable summer, and it's the director's most accessible movie yet.

I'd pay most attention to Hammond.

[Chris Knipp]

RUST AND BONE.

I've posted my second Cannes competition film review on my PARIS MOVIE REPORT here. (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3273-PARIS-MOVIE-REPORT-%28May-2012%29&p=27856#post27856) Audiard has made a powerful and visceral film. After A Prophet he wanted to do something smaller, but moving to a romance has not taken him away from violence -- not with a beautful woman (star of the moment Marion Cotillard) who's rendered legless in a terrible accident and a distant brute of a boyfriend played by the physically intense rising Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts.

http://img443.imageshack.us/img443/4826/rustandboneo.jpg

[Chris Knipp]

Mike D'Angelo's Day One piece, "Cannes '12, Day One: Wes Anderson kicks off the festival in enchanting form," is on AV Club here. (http://www.avclub.com/articles/cannes-12-day-one-wes-anderson-kicks-off-the-festi,75277/)

He lists (and I've highlighted in boldface) some titles or directors in this year's Cannes that I didn't get from the International Herald Tribune article I was relying on above:


Right now, of course, I’m still very much in the drooling stage. This year’s lineup looks sensational on paper, with something for everyone: hardcore art films from international auteurs like Carlos Reygadas (whose Silent Light was my favorite film here five years ago) and Léos Carax (bringing his first feature since 2000’s POLA X); star-studded American genre fare like Killing Them Softly (with Brad Pitt) and The Paperboy (featuring Matthew McConaughey and Nicole Kidman); fascinating change-of-pace efforts by old favorites (Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s Like Someone in Love has a Japanese cast, while In Another Country, the latest from South Korea’s Hong Sang-soo, stars Isabelle Huppert)[/b]; and much more. David Cronenberg is here with his adaptation of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, but I’m arguably even more curious about Antiviral, a film in the Un Certain Regard section written and directed by his son Brandon. Room 237, the conspiracy-theory doc about Kubrick’s The Shining that I missed at Sundance, plays in the Fortnight. (I won’t miss it again.) There are just so many opportunities to be disappointed! -- Mike D'Angelo, AV Club.

He calls MOONRISE KINGDOM "delightful" and writes a paragraph about it, but leaves it to the AV Club's regular reviewer to write about it at more length when it comes out in the US shortly.

[Chris Knipp]

A N|Y Times report has come out on Cannes, and Manohla Dargis, the correspondant, says of MOONRISE KINGDOM that it " is one of Mr. Anderson’s supreme achievements: It’s wondrously beautiful, often droll and at times hauntingly melancholic." I'll settle for that!

She calls the theme of RUST AND BONE "moral awakening", and that works too. There is that aspect, but it's really more Ali's awakening to his emotions.

[Chris Knipp]

Another Cannes selection I didn't know about:

Matteo Garrone, REALITY. Variety review: http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117947568/

Mike D'Angelo's twitter review: Reality (Garrone): 66. Another film w/only one idea, but at least it's a bold one. Feels like something Buñuel would make if he were alive.


Top-tier helmer Matteo Garrone proved his talent for slice-of-life realism and visual confidence even before "Gomorrah," but he's never been dull until "Reality." This comes as a surprise due to not only Garrone's track record, but also the material he's tackling, about a Neapolitan fish seller who turns delusional over "Big Brother." Reality-TV addiction is overripe for satire, yet the script here swerves from anything biting, opting for an affectionate look at a family and the rabbit hole this father of three jumps into on his mad quest for celebrity. International sales are likely, though reception will be fuzzy.--Jay Weissberg, Variety.

[Chris Knipp]

Early buzz about Cannes 2012 and the American entries.

There's a big article in today's (Sat. May 19, 2012) NY Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/19/arts/19iht-cannes19.html) about Hong Sang-soo's new film IN ANOTHER COUNTRY with an interview with Isabelle Huppert, who went to Japan with the Korean director to shoot, starting without a script, only a place. Here is the photo from the Times., Yu Jun-Sang, who plays a lifeguard, and Isabelle Huppert, enjoying herself in the rain. Cannes likes Hong (as does the New York Film Festival) and IN ANOTHER COUNTRY is in competition.
She is delighted that Mr. Hong is in competition. “He wants to compete with his different kind of music, and I love the way he filmed me, just like any other woman in the landscape.”--Joan Dupont, NYT, May 18, 2012

http://img137.imageshack.us/img137/5031/huppertforhong.jpg

I will put up some Paris film-related and Cannes-related photos of my own shortly. There are Cannes stories in a lot of the weekend editions of magazines and papers. The stars of Audiard's RUST AND BONE are featured as they have been all week, especially Marion Cotillard. This looks like the most prominent French film in the festival.

What about American films? Besides Wes Anderson's MOONRISE KINGDOM, there is Walter Salles' adaptation of Kerouac's ON THE ROAD (American novel, mostly American actors but Brazilian director, of course) and I don't know if I've mentioned Andrew Dominik's KILLING THEM SOFTLY (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1764234/), starring Brad Pitt, with Ray Liotta and Richard Jenkins.
Jackie Cogan is a professional enforcer who investigates a heist that went down during a mob-protected poker game. Sounds a little like something Joe Carnahan might do. There is also Jeff (SHOTGUN STORIES, TAKE SHELTER) Nichols' MUD. Lee Daniels' PAPERBOY is in competition, though its merits have been strongly questioned; however his PRECIOUS got a 15-minute ovation after being shown in the 2009 Cannes Un Certain Regard category. Out of competition is HEMINGWAY & GELLHORN (a docucrama), which there's a positive buzz about, directed by Philip Kaufman, who directed HENRY AND JUNE and THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING, and wrote the INDIANA JONES movies and THE RIGHT STUFF. MOONRISE KINGDOM is the opening night film, and it also turns out to be superb, one of Anderson's very best films. KILLING THEM SOFTLY got good marks from Mike D'Angelo and MUD almost as good. PAPERBOY got general boos. ON THE ROAD has been super-hyped in France and may be well-promoted in the US, but it turned out not to be a huge success critically.

http://img404.imageshack.us/img404/5302/bradinsoftly.jpg

[Chris Knipp]

OTHER MIKE D'ANGELO CANNES THUMBNAIL ASSESSMENTS. These are in the order they came as tweets. I'll include even ones I've already cited. The following are all from https://twitter.com/#!/gemko and are the words of Mike D'Angelo.

By way of intro, he tweeted this good news:

On the 10-year anniversary of my first Cannes, they've finally upgraded me to the rose press badge. MADE IT, MA! TOP OF THE WORLD!
(Basically this means I don't have to show up an hour-plus early for everything, which will free up my schedule enormously.) I can well imagine how much that rose badge means. And the thing is, D'Angelo is really a free-lancer, an independent voice, even though his daily Cannes dispatches appear on AV Club. He is astute, dedicated, and agenda-free. Hence I think it's worth following him closely during this all-important festival.

Moonrise Kingdom: 75. Balance between pre-adolescent ardor and adult disappointment a bit wobbly, but mostly delightful in RUSHMORE vein. [A week later D'Angelo revisited MONNRISE and raised his rating to 78.]

Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir (Bouzereau): W/O. Utterly banal "interview" (= longtime friend urging RP to tell fave anecdotes) + film clips.

After the Battle (Nasrallah): 38. Plays like a daytime soap that happens to be set during the Arab Spring. Epochal meets insipid.

Rust and Bone (Audiard): 64. The story of a horribly disabled person, and also of a woman with no legs. Stealthy reverse schematism! I like.

Sister (Meier): 68. Surprisingly Dardennes-y, but it's not like that's a bad thing. Seydoux ideally cast. English title not ideal. [Market]

Paradise: Love (Seidl): 47. Two hours of mutual exploitation. Individual scenes crackle, but Seidl has one idea, hammers it relentlessly.

The We and the I (Gondry): 52. In which he remakes GET ON THE BUS as a high-school movie. Enjoyed rowdy energy, not so much the earnestness.

Reality (Garrone): 66. Another film w/only one idea, but at least it's a bold one. Feels like something Buñuel would make if he were alive.

Safety Not Guaranteed (Trevorrow): 56. Winning premise spins wheels, indulges weak subplots straining to reach feature length. [Market]

Mekong Hotel (Joe): 41. Strictly a doodle, and formally drab to boot. Supernatural elements feel shoehorned in. Guitar score is pleasant.

Beyond the Hills (Mungiu): 59. Another accomplished film content to just keep doing one thing from start to finish. Super intense though.

Lawless (Hillcoat): 61. Flavorful turf-war pseudo-Western with two iconic badasses (and Pearce out-intimidating Hardy, incredibly).

Laurence Anyways (Dolan): 53. Yeah, this is way too long. And stars Melvil Poupaud, who I can rarely stomach. Scattered inspired moments.

38 Witnesses (Belvaux): 55. Powerful when purely cinematic, which is about half the time. On-the-nose dialogue sometimes painful. [Market]

CHRIS KNIPP COMMENTS: I was so excited over RUST AND BONE it may seem ironic that the first film I saw in Paris, SISTER (Meier) might be better, as well as Garrone (which I have not seen). Indeed SISTER may be better than RUST AND BONE, in which Audiard may take too many shortcuts and go too soft. Meier doesn't. However RUST AND BONE is still better in D'Angelo's view than most of the others he's seen. I think his rating system is very precise.

I definitely go along with D'Angelo's high rating of MOONRISE KINGDOM.

I can't find the place where D'Angelo explains his numerical ratings, but remember that it is a very harsh system (with a correspondingly good range) in which even a 50 may not be at so bad, and 75 is really excellent, not C+ as in school grades.

I'm curious to see if I think Nasrullah's AFTER THE BATTLE is as unsuccessful as D'Angelo says..

[Chris Knipp]

D'Angelo's AV Club Cannes Day Two (http://www.avclub.com/articles/cannes-12-day-two-the-latest-from-the-director-of,75351/)and Day Three (http://www.avclub.com/articles/cannes-12-day-three-gomorrah-director-matteo-garro,75387/) reports.

Day One gives a full review of RUST AND BONE. I'll give you his concluding section:

Both actors are tremendous—especially Schoenaerts, in an amazingly tricky role—and the special effects are seamless enough to make Forrest Gump’s Lieutenant Dan look like a cheap parlor trick, but it’s mostly the inversion of genre expectations that compels. Rust and Bone does turn out to be the schematic, conventional story of a horribly disabled person who gradually learns how to live again. That the disabled person isn’t who we naturally assume makes it just novel enough to seem somewhat fresh. He also reviews Austrian Ulrich Seidl's PARADISE: LOVE:

Ultimately, Paradise: Love seems interested only in making you wince, not in making you think. Let’s hope the other two chapters—involving a Catholic missionary and a diet camp—are less monotonous.

And he reviews Michel Gondry's Bronx-set amateur improvised school daray THE WE AND THE I, which he says would have made a nice short film.

DAY THREE: D'Angelo reviews Matteo Garrone's REALITY, about a Neopolitan fish dealer who becomes obsessed by a reality TV show, which he calls a "loopy fable," which could not be more different from GOMORRAH.

[REALITY[ doesn’t belabor the allegory, but he’s not exactly subtle about it, either. Reality opens by descending from the heavens and concludes by re-ascending from a fantastic kitsch-paradise, while the climax is precipitated by Luciano’s participation in a Good Friday pilgrimage. In truth, the movie works better conceptually than it does moment-to-moment, as its luckless hero’s journey into delusion does follow a predictable trajectory (albeit one enlivened by Arena’s winning performance). But it’s still invigorating to see a movie unafraid to make a bold statement, though few seem to have noticed. If Luis Buñuel were alive today, this is roughly what I’d expect him to be up to.
D'Angelo isn't entirely clear here but I guess the "allegory" is about religious fanaticism undercutting normal human kindness?

Next D'Angelo deals with , Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s BEOND THE HILLS, his follow-up to his Palme d’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days, which he says is blunter than REALITY but also much more intensely involving. He suggests it was thematically linked with REALITY because both are about religion, this one concerning two women, one a nun, who were apparently lovers in an orphanage earlier, and again the theme is religion. He found it gripping and explosive, but too dogmatic.
Mungiu has few peers when it comes to formally rigorous nail-biters, but I’d like to see him tackle material he’s more conflicted about.

As for Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s MEKONG HOTEL, D'A reminds readers how he rejoiced at UNCLE BOONMEE'S big Cannes win, but declares that this film "barely even qualifies as a doodle."

This is an example of what i like about D'Angelo, because he never doggedly backs favorites, but goes in to each film without preconceptions or much prior information and judges it on its own individual merits.

[Chris Knipp]

D'Angelo saw Vinterberg's THE HUNT/JAGTER.


The Hunt (Vinterberg): 54. To avoid exasperating @msicism let's just say you've more or less seen this one once you know the premise.

He adds a postscript tweet:

Good to see him back in a CELEBRATIONal mode, but this is very straightforward treatment of a (somewhat dated) hot-button issue.

Is D'Angelo a little more jaded than usual not that he has a rose press badge? I don't think it will look that way when we read all his day-by-day AV Club writeups. Some of his Twitter correspondents have accused D'Angelo of being one-note in his thumbnail critiques this year by accusing a series of the films of themselves being one-note, or good, but just hitting one point over and over.

Awaiting his Cannes '12 Day Four AV Club piece now. Meanwhile he posted on Twitter this interesting new photo of a Cannes crowd. His caption is below:

http://img820.imageshack.us/img820/5183/large1i.jpg
Scrum in front of the Debussy, overlooked (or overignored) by two snooty guards on the stairs.

[Chris Knipp]

D'Angelo now has a higher ratied '12 Cannes film than MOONRISE KINGDOM: Haneke's new one, LOVE.


Love (Haneke): 77. Starts out surprisingly lovely, then turns Haneke-grueling. But always deeply felt & beautifully acted, if singleminded.

He is also seeing Kiarastami and Hang Sang-soo (with Huppert who is in the Haneke) tonight so this is a big day. "It's all coming together," he tweeted.

[Chris Knipp]

D'Angelo saw Hong Sang-soo's new one. I suspect his previous one, THE DAY HE ARRIVES, which I reviewed (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3257-San-Francisco-International-Film-Festival-2012&p=27716#post27716)in the SFIFF, may be better. It really clicked, and it's on home ground.

D'A. has two tweets on this:
In Another Country (Hong): 51. Not sure if I'm tickled or disappointed that he made the same film he always makes, except w/ Huppert in it.
and

Three stories this time, with Izzy in three different roles. Loved the 1st, diminishing returns thereafter. Miscommunication humor abounds.

[Chris Knipp]

D'Angelo is waiting till late this evening (Sunday, May 20, 2012) to see the new Kiarostami because of crowds.


Like Someone in Love (Japanese: ライク・サムワン・イン・ラブ) is an upcoming Japanese-language drama film written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami, starring Rin Takanashi, Tadashi Okuno and Ryō Kase. It tells the story of a young Japanese woman who finances her studies through prostitution. The film is a French-Japanese production. --Wikipedia.

D'A. mentions another competition film I didn't list, by Ken Loach, which he is looking forward to 24 hours from his tweet. So belatedly, below is a complete list of all the official films of the festival in various categories, and the Loach is the first one (why didn't any roundups or predictions mention it?):

In Competition:
The Angels' Share, directed by Ken Loach
After The Battle (Baad el mawkeaa), directed by Yousry Nasrallah
Beyond the Hills, directed by Cristian Mungiu
Cosmopolis, directed by David Cronenberg
Holy Motors, directed by Leos Carax
The Hunt (Jagten), directed by Thomas Vinterberg
Killing Them Softly, directed by Andrew Dominik
In Another Country (Da-Reun Na-Ra-E-Suh), directed by Hong Sang-soo
In the Fog (Im Nebel), directed by Sergei Loznitsa
Lawless, directed by John Hillcoat
Like Someone in Love, directed by Abbas Kiarostami
Love (Amour), directed by Michael Haneke
Moonrise Kingdom, directed by Wes Anderson [Opening night film]
Mud, directed by Jeff Nichols
On the Road, directed by Walter Salles
The Paperboy, directed by Lee Daniels
Paradise: Love (Paradies: Liebe), directed by Ulrich Seidl
Post tenebras lux, directed by Carlos Reygadas
Reality, directed by Matteo Garrone
De Rouille et D'os, directed by Jacques Audiard
Taste of Money (Do-Nui Mat) directed by Im Sang-soo
Vous N'Avez Encore Rien Vu, directed by Alain Resnais

Un Certain Regard:
7 Dias en la Habana, directed by Benicio del Toro, Pablo Trapero, Julio Medem, Elia Suleiman, Juan Carlos Tabio, Gaspar Noe and Laurent Cantet
11.25 The Day He Chose His Own Fate, directed by Koji Wakamatsu
Aimer à Perdre la Raison, directed by Joachim Lafosse
Antiviral, directed by Brandon Cronenberg
Beasts of the Southern Wild, directed by Benh Zeitlin
Confession of a Child of the Century, directed by Sylvie Verheyde
Despues de Lucia, directed by Michel Franco
God's Horses (Les Chevaux de Dieu), directed by Nabil Ayouch
The Pirogue (La Pirogue), directed by Moussa Toure
La Playa, directed by Juan Andres Arango
Laurence Anyways, directed by Xavier Dolan
Le grand soir, directed by Benoit Delepine and Gustave Kervern
Miss Lovely, directed by Ashim Ahluwalia
Mystery, directed by Lou Ye
Student, directed by Darezhan Omirbayev
Trois mondes, directed by Catherine Corsini
White Elephant (Elefante Blanco), directed by Pablo Trapero

Out of Competition:
Therese Desqueyroux, directed by Claude Miller [Closing night film]
Hemingway & Gellhorn, directed by Philip Kaufman
Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted, directed by Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath
Me and You (Io e Te), directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

Midnight Screenings:
Dario Argent's Dracula, directed by Dario Argento
Ai To Makoto, directed by Takashi Miike

65th Anniversary:
Une Journée Particuliere, directed by Gilles Jacob

Special Screenings:
A musica segundo Tom Jobim, directed by Nelson Pereira Dos Santos
The Central Park Five, directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon
Polluting Paradise (Der Mull im Garten Eden), directed by Fatih Akin
Journal de France, directed by Claudine Nougaret, Raymond Depardon
Les Invisibles, directed by Sebastien Lifshitz
Mekong Hotel, directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir, directed by Laurent Bouzereau
Villegas, directed by Gonzalo Tobal

Directors' Fortnight
3, directed by Pablo Stoll Ward
Granny's Funeral (L'enterrement de mémé), directed by by Bruno Podalydès
Alyah, directed by Elie Wajeman
Camille redouble, directed by Noémie Lvovsky [Closing night]
The King of Pigs (Dae gi eui wang), directed by Yeun Sang-Ho
Dangerous Liaisons, directed by Hur Jin-Ho
El Taaib, directed by Merzak Allouache
Ernest et Célestine, directed by Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, Benjamin Renner
Fogo, directed by Yulene Olaizola
Gangs of Wasseypur, directed by Anurag Kashyap
Infancia clandestina, directed by Benjamin Ávila
La noche de enfrente, directed by Raoul Ruiz [Special Screening]
La Sirga, directed by William Vega
No, directed by Pablo Larraín
Opération Libertad, directes by Nicolas Wadimoff
Hold Back (Regaine), directed by Rachid Djaïdani
Room 237, directed by Rodney Ascher
Sightseers, directed by Ben Wheatley [Special Screening]
Sueño y silencio, directed by Jaime Rosales
The We and the I, directed by Michel Gondry [Opening night]
A Respectable Family (Yek Khanévadéh-e Mohtaram), directed by Massoud Bakhshi (Iran)

Critics' Week
Competition
Aqui y alla, directed by Antonio Mendez Esparza
Au galop, directed by Louis-Do de Lencquesaing
Les voisins de dieu, directed by Meni Yaesh
Hors les murs (Beyond the Walls) directed by David Lambert
Peddlers, directed by Vasan Bala
Los salvajes, directed by Alejandro Fadel
I, directed by Ilian Metev

Special Screenings
Broken, directed by Rufus Norris [Opening night]
Augustine, directed by Alice Winocour
J'enrage de son absence (Maddened By His Absence), directed by Sandrine Bonnaire

[Chris Knipp]

D'Angelo has his AV Club Day Four piece up hare. (http://www.avclub.com/articles/cannes-12-day-four-bootleggers-transsexuals-and-fa,75388/) However since it deals with Hillcoat, Vinterberg and Dolan, three he's not too wild about, I won't summarize here. Hillcoat pleased him mainly as an escape into more mainstream entertaining fare as relief from the intense flow of festival art films. He thought Vinteerberg's treatment of a man falsely accused of child sexual abuse was well done and more in CELEBRATION mode, but a bit out of date and also too one-note, lacking ambiguity. Dolan he thought way too long, and Melvil Poupaud happens to be his least favorite well-known male French movie actor. Tomorrow he will review Haneke, and he's coming to Kiarostami, whose new film (in Japanese, remember) he has not apparently seen yet.

By the way I never said that D'Angelo was my favorite film reviewer, only that he's my favorite English language Cannes festival reporter and thumbnail critic of Cannes films. Once in a while he also comes up with something passionate and great, like his letter to Lars von Trier about ANTICHRIST. That doesn't happen every day (and I understand).

June 21, 2012 (in Paris, anyway).

[Chris Knipp]

Yet another competition film that I failed to note and big intro pieces seem not to have mentioned:

MUD (Jeff Nichols) (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1935179/)

He's the director/writer of SHOTGUN STORIES and TAKE SHELTER. MUD stars the improbable new Cannes 'it' boy, Matthew McConaughey, who plays a journalist in Paperboy and a mystery man in MUD. And McConaughey has two more movies coming out soon, as a perverted killer in KILLER JOE and apparently he'll take his shirt off again for MAGIC MIKE, a film by Soderbergh. I was undershelmed by his 'serious' turn in Linklater's BERNIE (and underwhelmed by BERNIE for that matter) but others liked him and thought this a turn to new 'character' roles, and it true, that's great.

MUD debuts at Cannes May 26, 2012.

[Chris Knipp]

Another D'Angelo Twitterr thumbnail and the second highest rated film for him so far.


You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet! (Resnais): 73. His fond farewell, ruminating on the end, his career and the nature of cinema and theater and he adds

So audacious in conception initially that it wasn't quite sustainable, but very much the film I wished PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION had been.

[Chris Knipp]

In France the two most hyped Cannes films have been ON THE ROAD and Audiard's RUST AND BONE. Unlike last year when TREE OF LIFE got early Paris theatrical release, and was also one of the best films and come to think if it, got the Golden Palm. The Grand Prize was shared by THE KID WITH THE BIKE and ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA. What I mean is that I don't think RUST AND BONE deserves the accolades that Audiard's previous two films have gotten, and I'm neutral about ON THE ROAD. It sounds like it may be joyous and exciting. I don't know if it will a great film.

[Chris Knipp]

Monday, May 21, 2012. LIKE SOMONE IN LOVE

D'Angelo has apparently not Tweet-rated Kiarostami's LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE but has said that he is baffled by it --"I honestly never had the slightest idea why I was watching it or what it was trying to convey. And still don't"-- and finds even more baffling the fact that others were not baffled, and someone who hated Haneke's AMOUR loved LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE, "which makes no sense." He may be struggling with his view on LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE, which Variety (http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117947596/)(by Guy Lodge, not a familiar name to me) suggests is somewhat a companion piece to CERTIFIED COPY. Here is the Variety lead summing-up paragraph:
The very title of Abbas Kiarostami's Tokyo-set character waltz "Like Someone in Love" -- named for the jazz standard Ella Fitzgerald croons on the soundtrack -- promises something as woozily romantic as "Certified Copy," his 2010 cat's cradle of lovers' memories. As it turns out, it's the first, not the last, word of the title that's key to this droll, elegant but faintly trying study in emotional artifice. An unofficial twin to "Copy," sharing its playful preoccupation with identities mistaken and assumed, it's a more austere and less intellectual work, certainly less attractive to distribs, though auteur cachet should see it through. D'Angelo says "apparently other people are engrossed by the film's surface level. Whereas its complete banality is what throws me." Some might say watch it again, he's missing something, and he said, " I have so little desire to watch it again, given how enervating it played to me." This was somewhat my own reaction to CERTIFIED COPY, which so many cinephiles seem to love so much. I thought its interest was overrated. It's polished but there's not much there there. Watch Antonioni instead.

[Chris Knipp]

HANEKE'S AMOUR

Todd McCarthy (formerl Variety's chief critic) is covering Cannes for Hollywood Reporter. His online report is here. (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/cannes-todd-mccarthys-analysis-327102) McCarthy describes the festival as getting better as it goes along, and like D'Angelo gives Haneke's AMOUR (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1602620/) 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 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/may/20/amour-haneke-film-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.

http://img198.imageshack.us/img198/6944/amourfilmstill016.jpg
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 (http://www.avclub.com/articles/cannes-12-day-five-get-out-your-hanekechiefs-we-ha,75411/) "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. (http://www.avclub.com/articles/cannes-2012-day-six-alain-resnais-does-his-prairie,75476/) 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.

http://img692.imageshack.us/img692/1102/70422381014322e6dd49z.jpg
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 (https://twitter.com/#!/gemko/).

http://img31.imageshack.us/img31/553/cannesmeyouioete.jpg
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):

http://img443.imageshack.us/img443/2116/atkz06jcaamg93d3mcg.jpg
"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 (http://blogs.laweekly.com/arts/2012/05/cannes_film_festival_the_korea.php). 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 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karin-badt/cannes-2012-in-another-country_b_1535975.html) 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 (http://www.avclub.com/articles/cannes-2012-day-seven-leos-caraxs-bugfuck-masterpi,75534/) 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 (http://www.avclub.com/articles/cannes-2012-day-seven-leos-caraxs-bugfuck-masterpi,75534/) 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. (http://www.cinescene.com/knipp/tokyo.htm)

There's obviously something here. The relatively more staid Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian also has a glowing review (http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/may/23/holy-motors-review?newsfeed=true) 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.

http://img600.imageshack.us/img600/1158/holymotorsdeleoscarax60.jpg
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 (http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117947629/) 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 (http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117947629/).

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.

http://img850.imageshack.us/img850/7961/photo13c2a9fullhousemor.jpg
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.

http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/4532/thepaperboymatthewmccon.jpg
McCaughnahy and Efron in Paperboy

D'Angelo's Cannes '12 Day Eight report (http://www.avclub.com/articles/cannes-2012-day-eight-the-director-of-silent-light,75619/)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 (http://www.avclub.com/articles/cannes-2012-day-nine-the-director-of-precious-drop,75685/), "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 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/may/23/on-the-road-review): "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/

[Chris Knipp]

A blog D'A. cites (http://enchantedmitten.blogspot.com/2012/05/from-cannes-interim-crix-poll-results.html)gives the current critics ratings, misc. and French ones, on the Cannes competition films.


From Cannes: Interim Crix Poll Results
This is the last day that the trades put out daily editions, so here's where things stand right now.
Screen (international crix)

Rating system is traditional 4 stars, no half-stars.

3.3: Amour (Haneke)
3.3: Beyond the Hills (Mungiu)
2.9: The Hunt (Vinterberg)
2.9: Killing Them Softly (Dominik)
2.9: Rust and Bone (Audiard)
2.8: The Angels' Share (Loach)
2.7: On the Road (Salles)
2.6: Moonrise Kingdom (Anderson)
2.6: You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet! (Resnais)
2.4: Like Someone in Love (Kiarostami)
2.1: In Another Country (Hong)
2.0: Holy Motors (Carax)
1.9: Reality (Garrone)
1.7: Lawless (Hillcoat)
1.5: After the Battle (Nasrallah)
1.5: Paradise: Love (Seidl)

(As you can see, Holy Motors ain't exactly universally beloved. It gets 4/4 from Dennis Lim and a Danish critic, one 3-star rating ["good"], some "average" (ha!), and four ratings of either "poor" or "bad.")

Le Film Français (French crix only)

Their rating system is totally different, on a 4-star scale but with 2 stars meaning they liked it "beaucoup" (as opposed to "passionnément" for 3 stars and "à la folie," i.e. to the point of madness, for 4). So these numbers aren't comparable to the ones above at all.

3.20: Amour (Haneke)
2.88: Rust and Bone (Audiard)
2.60: You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet! (Resnais)
2.57: Holy Motors (Leos Carax)
2.20: The Angels' Share (Loach)
2.13: Beyond the Hills (Mungiu)
2.00: Moonrise Kingdom (Anderson)
1.93: Reality (Garrone)
1.85: Killing Them Softly (Hillcoat)
1.73: Lawless (Hillcoat)
1.67: On the Road (Salles)
1.63: The Hunt (Vinterberg)
1.53: Paradise: Love (Seidl)
1.43: In Another Country (Hong)
1.29: After the Battle (Nasrallah)
1.27: Like Someone in Love (Kiarostami)

Still some dissension but Carax fares much better at home, as does Resnais. Kiarostami and especially Vinterberg take a massive nosedive. Otherwise pretty much the same ballpark.

These lists drive home the point that the French like their own movies, and the high rating they give RUST AND BONE may lead to some ill feeling when the end of Cannes and the prizes and final assessments come along. I tend to agree with French taste more than most non-French, but I'm doubtful that I would put anything but the universally acclaimed AMOUR above MOONRISE KINGDOM. Interesting that Loach's film comes a notch higher in the French list even though they put all those French films up high. I think it's safe to say there are some relative duds toward the bottom of both lists.

[Chris Knipp]

Loznitsa's IN THE FOG and Larraín's NO.


In the Fog (Loznitsa): 50. Much more conventional than MY JOY, and somehow feels simultaneously sparse and bloated. Adaptation issue?

I quoted Mike's review of MY JOY in my similarly mixed review (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2875-New-York-Film-Festival-2010&p=25119#post25119) of it as part of the NYFF 2012. Ed Lachman the cinematographer loved its long tracing shots. But it is random and hideous.

One or two people loved Pablo Larraín's NO (shown out of competition) but I can't find a comment by D'Angelo or some others on it. It has been picked up by Sony Pictures Classics and may get Larraín a bigger US audience -- or not. I thought D'Angelo discussed that, but it is hard finding things on Twitter.

Felperin for Variety (http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117947569?refcatid=31&printerfriendly=true) says of NO

After "Tony Manero" and "Post Mortem," his devastating portraits of how the Pinochet regime psychologically brutalized the people of Chile from 1973-90, Chilean helmer Pablo Larrain satisfyingly completes the trilogy with an affirmative victory for democracy in "No." Tense throughout, even for history-savvy auds, but still rich in the sort of Andean-soil-black humor that made Larrain's previous work so distinctive, the pic stars Gael Garcia Bernal as an adman who helps the opposition fashion a campaign to get people to vote against keeping Pinochet in power in a 1988 referendum. Result will get plenty of yes votes from arthouse distribs worldwide.

Larraín's TONY MANERO and POST MORTEN were both NYFF selections (2008 and 2010, respectively). I admired them both.

NO has Larraín's usual Alfredo Castro, but also Gael García Bernal. Manohla Dargis NYTimes (http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/22/cannes-film-festival-from-chile-pablo-larrains-no/?ref=movies) has written an (http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/22/cannes-film-festival-from-chile-pablo-larrains-no/) of it in the paper's online "Art Beat - The Culture at Large" blog, with an interview with Larraín. She says its the best of his 'trilogy' and one of the best films at Cannes 'so far' (May 22, 2012). Imprimatur, from her, and hype. Later she wrote in the same place about Salles' ON THE ROAD, politely panning it.

D'Angelo in his AV Club Cannes Day 10 report explains that LARRAÍN'S 'NO', being about the way an ad campaign helped turn the tide against the dictator Pinochet in Chile, is
an uproarious examination of how the methods used to sell soft drinks and soap operas can also be used to sell…not a candidate, understand (the actual election was a year later), but just the idea “freakin’ anybody but this guy.” Deliberately making the film as ugly and tacky as possible, Larraín expertly reproduces the most laughable excesses of ‘80s advertising, which was apparently much the same everywhere. I looked in vain for a hint of contemporary relevance, and couldn’t work up any real interest in García Bernal’s relationship with his semi-militant ex-wife and his young son, but was generally laughing too hard to focus on the flaws so D'Angelo concludes.



http://img545.imageshack.us/img545/6907/22larrain2blog480.jpg
García Bernal in Larraín's No

[Chris Knipp]

David Cronenberg's COSMOPOLIS. DeLillo adaptation 'stillborn'?

(This is another 'big release' of which there have been many big posters all around Paris in the Métro, etc..)


Cosmopolis (Cronenberg): 59. Demands an incredibly precise tone that Cronenberg nails about half the time. Thrilling when he does .
That is D'Angelo's tweet and rating, which is the same as he gave the generally admired Cristian Mungiu's BEYOND THE HILLS tweet (https://twitter.com/#!/gemko). He adds:)
A reductive way of putting it is that the more human the actor opposite Pattinson (who's great) seems, the less effective the scene.Pushed at calling Pattinson "great" he responded
Maybe "great" is too strong, but he's perfectly in tune with the film's deliberately stilted, almost robotic nature.

Bradshaw (Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/may/25/cosmopolis-review?newsfeed=true)) is uenthusiastic. He calls it an "agonisingly self-conscious and meagre piece of work."

David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis, adapted by the director from the Don DeLillo novella, is stilted, self-important and dismayingly shallow, featuring an egg-laying cameo from Juliette Binoche, among others — although Paul Giamatti and Mathieu Amalric put some recognisable human life into theirs...(Bradshaw)

Hollywood Reporter: (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/cosmopolis-review-robert-pattinson-cannes-329230)

After a strong run of films over the past decade, David Cronenberg blows a tire with Cosmopolis.Lifeless, stagey and lacking a palpable subversive pulse despite the ready opportunities offered by the material, this stillborn adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel will initially attract some Robert Pattinson fans but will be widely met with audience indifference.


http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/9148/cosmopolisclip.jpg
Pattinson in Cosmopolis

COSMOPOLIS of course has a US release coming, though the date seems unannounced; the UK release date is June 15. The presence of Robert Pattinson will draw in some young audience members to this adaptation of Don DeLillo's chilly, hip novel in which a young Wall Street multi-billionaire is slowly going across Manhattan in a limo to get a haircut.

Personally I was unable to get through DeLillo's book, as I was unable to even get started on Ballard's similarly chilly and conceptual 'Crash,' which also inspired a Cronenberg adaptation. I would hope this one offers more to the eye and mind.

It did. And the book was better than I thought. Review of COSMOPOLIS (https://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2170).

[Chris Knipp]

Jeff Nichols' MUD.

This by the still-young maker of SHOTGUN STORIES and TAKE SHELTER was one of the last two Cannes competition films not yet seen and rated by Mike D'Angelo (the other is Im Sang-soo’s THE TASTE OF MONEY). He reports
Successfully got into a screening of MUD via the sophisticated ploy of not leaving town before the festival actually ended. D'A. rated and described MUD in a tweet (https://twitter.com/#!/gemko) thus:
Mud (Nichols): 62. Ripping yarn with some iffy gender politics, though I give Nichols credit for strenuous efforts to cover his ass. He added "I slightly prefer KILLNG THEM SOFTLY," and in fact he gave the latter a 63. Peter Bradshaw wrote of KILING THEM SOFTLY "Andrew Dominik's immensely gripping and brutal world of recession-hit criminals, starring Brad Pitt, is smart and nasty, with a political dimension, too." Jeff Nichols' excellent TAKE SHELTER (with its resonant screenplay and stroung cast) screened in Un Certain Regard at Cannes last year; this year he moved up to competition level with MUD.

Besides Matthew McConaughey, MUD includes Reese Witherspoon, Michael Shannon, and Sarah Paulson. A subject summary reads: "Two teenage boys encounter a fugitive and form a pact to help him evade the bounty hunters on his trailer and to reunite him with his true love. (135 mins.)." A detailed description will be found here. (http://thefilmstage.com/news/first-look-the-tree-of-life-star-tye-sheridan-goes-south-with-matthew-mcconaughey-in-jeff-nichols-mud/) McCanaughey is the fugitive.

http://img801.imageshack.us/img801/9059/mud2t.jpg
Still from Jeff Nichols' Mud

D'Angelo's AV Club Cannes '12 Day Eight piece (http://www.avclub.com/articles/cannes-2012-day-eight-the-director-of-silent-light,75619/)is subtitled "The director of Silent Light drops a bold curiosity and Bernardo Bertolucci makes his first movie in nearly a decade.." He discusses Reygadas' POST TENEBRAS LUX in some detail, introducing it as his "big disappointment" of the festival and gives it a rating of C+.
Reygadas has never been afraid to go for the grandiose, opening him up to charges of pretension; I found his first two features, Japón and Battle in Heaven, painfully self-conscious in their determination to provoke, but Silent Light seemed like a giant leap forward into—as much as I hate this word when applied to artists—maturity. With Post tenebras lux (a Latin phrase meaning “After darkness, light”), he continually veers back and forth between the magnificently evocative and the willfully obscure, with the latter ultimately prevailing. Bertolucci's ME AND YOU he also gives a C+ to, again repeating the assessment that it's "pleasingly inconsequential" and "feels like a warm-up exercise." He calls the omnibus film 7 DAYS IN HAVANA a "waste of time" but also gives it a C+. (The AV Club letter grades D'angelo must use in these longer Cannes dispatches are perforce much less refined and precise than his personal 1-100 rating system.)

D'Angelo discusses MUD in his Day 10 piece (http://www.avclub.com/articles/cannes-2012-day-10-cronenberg-meets-delillo-matthe,75718/). The reason all this information doubles back on itself is that the AV Club pieces don't correspond chronologically at all with the actual viewings of the films that D'Angelo reports immediately on Twitter, or with the Variety and other reviews, which generally come out closer to the time of the first Cannes screenings of the films -- I think. I was not there, remember.

[Chris Knipp]

All Mike D'Angelo's tweet ratings of the films he saw, arranged from highest rating down to lowest (as of May 26, 2012).

Obviously these rankings aren't gospel, just a good point of reference for now. But as I said D'Angelo's rating system has a nice range to it and his lack of preconceptions and biases is admirable. And I think you can trust him enough to assume his top 6-10 are ones you would want to see, if you got the chance. Actually six or seven below D'Angelo's top ten are also worth a look considering they're by Cronenberg, Vinterberg, Bertolucci, Ruiz, Hong, from Kerouac, and by Reygadas. Next we will see what the Cannes juries say.

Each line below quotes D'Angelo's entire tweet including his comment on the film he's rating right after seeing it.

http://img571.imageshack.us/img571/2048/realitymoviegarronee133.jpg
Still from Matteo Garrone's Reality

HOLY MOTORS (Carax): 88. Holy shit.
LOVE (Haneke): 77. Starts out surprisingly lovely, then turns Haneke-grueling. But always deeply felt & beautifully acted, if singleminded.
MOONRISE KINGDOM (Anderson): 75 [later re-watched and raised to 78]. Balance between pre-adolescent ardor and adult disappointment a bit wobbly, but mostly delightful in RUSHMORE vein.
SISTER (Meier): 68. Surprisingly Dardennes-y, but it's not like that's a bad thing. Seydoux ideally cast. English title not ideal. [Market]
NO (Larraín): 68. Honestly, I think this mostly fails in every way except being funny. But it's the funniest movie I've seen all year.
REALITY (Garrone): 66. Another film w/only one idea, but at least it's a bold one. Feels like something Buñuel would make if he were alive.
RUST AND BONE (Audiard): 64. The story of a horribly disabled person, and also of a woman with no legs. Stealthy reverse schematism! I like.
MUD (Nichols): 62. Ripping yarn with some iffy gender politics, though I give Nichols credit for strenuous efforts to cover his ass.
LAWLESS (Hillcoat): 61. Flavorful turf-war pseudo-Western with two iconic badasses (and Pearce out-intimidating Hardy, incredibly).
BEYOND THE HILLS (Mungiu): 59. Another accomplished film content to just keep doing one thing from start to finish. Super intense though.
COSMOPOLIS (Cronenberg): 59. Demands an incredibly precise tone that Cronenberg nails about half the time. Thrilling when he does .
SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED (Trevorrow): 56. Winning premise spins wheels, indulges weak subplots straining to reach feature length. [Market]
LA NOCE DE ENFRENTE (Ruiz): 56. "Actually he has always been leaving us, and yet here he still is." Another dryly moving farewell.
38 WITNESSES (Belvaux): 55. Powerful when purely cinematic, which is about half the time. On-the-nose dialogue sometimes painful. [Market]
THE HUNT (Vinterberg): 54. To avoid exasperating @msicism let's just say you've more or less seen this one once you know the premise.
LAURENCE ANYWAYS (Dolan): 53. Yeah, this is way too long. And stars Melvil Poupaud, who I can rarely stomach. Scattered inspired moments.
THE WE AND THE I (Gondry): 52. In which he remakes GET ON THE BUS as a high-school movie. Enjoyed rowdy energy, not so much the earnestness.
ME & YOU (Bertolucci): 52. Pleasantly inconsequential tale of half-sibs hiding out in a basement storage room feels like a warm-up exercise.
IN ANOTHER COUNTRY (Hong): 51. Not sure if I'm tickled or disappointed that he made the same film he always makes, except w/ Huppert in it.
ON THE ROAD (Salles): 51. Insert unadaptable-novel boilerplate. Riley's a black hole but Hedlund is tremendous, finally becomes a star.
IN THE FOG (Loznitsa): 50. Much more conventional than MY JOY, and somehow feels simultaneously sparse and bloated. Adaptation issue?
POST TENEBRAS LUX (Reygadas): 48, for now. If demystified, could be 84. Tho' the feeling of ultra-super-mega-pretentiousness might linger.
PARADISE: LOVE (Seidl): 47. Two hours of mutual exploitation. Individual scenes crackle, but Seidl has one idea, hammers it relentlessly.
MEKONG HOTEL (Joe): 41. Strictly a doodle, and formally drab to boot. Supernatural elements feel shoehorned in. Guitar score is pleasant.
AFTER THE BATTLE (Nasrallah): 38. Plays like a daytime soap that happens to be set during the Arab Spring. Epochal meets insipid.
THE PAPERBOY (Daniels): 9. Lee Daniels: Worst filmmaker of our time, or worst filmmaker of all time? Discuss.
ROMAN POLANSKI: A MEMOIR (Bouzereau): W/O. Utterly banal "interview" (= longtime friend urging RP to tell fave anecdotes) + film clips.
OUR CHILDREN (Lafosse): W/O. I saw 40 mins & this is what happened: Two pretty young people got married and had 3 kids. That's literally it.
MANIAC (Khalfoun): W/O. Had I known it's a first-person-camera slasher film I wouldn't have bothered. You can't even *see* Elijah Wood!
[W/O= Walked Out, so no rating, but if there were one, it would not be high.]

-- Mike D'Angelo @gemko (Mike D'Angelo
@gemko).

[Chris Knipp]

http://img688.imageshack.us/img688/828/cannes65bandeau2.jpg

The big Cannes '12 prizes are coming May 27. These came the day before.

Before the big prizes, these awards in the satellite festivals of Cannes have already been announced (partial list; top prizes highlighted in red):

Un Certain Regard (Jury chaired by Tim Roth)
AFTER LUCIA, Michel Franco - Un Certain Regard Prize
Special Jury Prize: LE GRAND SOIR, Benoit Delepine and Gustave Kervern
Best Actress (tie): Émilie Dequenne, AIMER À PERDRE LA RAISON (Joachim Lafosse) & Suzanne Clement), LAURENCE ANYWAYS (Xavier Dolan)
Special Jury Mention: DJECA (CHILDREN OF SARAJEVO), Aida Begic

Directors' Fortnight Awards/La Quinzaine des Réalisateurs
NO, Pablo Larrain - Art Cinema Award (International Confederation of Art Cinemas and Test)
Price SACD (Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers): CAMILLE REDOUBLE, Noémie Lvovsky
Special mention SACD: ERNEST AND CELESTINE, Benjamin Renner , Stephane Aubier , Vincent Patar
Cinemas Label Europea (Awarded by a jury of farmers to a feature film in Europe): AL TAAIB, Merzak Allouache
Illy Prize (award given to a short film): THE CURSE, Fyzal Boulifa

Critics' Week Awards
HERE AND THERE, Antonio Mendez Esparza - Nespresso Grand Prix
Price Jury Revelation France 4 (Presented by four young international critics): SOFIA'S LAST AMBULANCE, Ilian Metev

FIPRESCI Awards (International Federation of Film)
IN THE FOG, Sergei Loznitsa - FIPRESCI Prize Official Competition
BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD, Benh Zeitlin - FIPRESCI Prize Un Certain Regard
HOLD BACK, Rachid Djaïdani - FIPRESCI Prize for Directors' Fortnight

http://img29.imageshack.us/img29/2058/southernwilda.jpg
Beasts of the Southern Wild

[Chris Knipp]

The big prizes.

Cannes. Les palmarès.


Palme d'or : Amour de Michael Haneke

Grand Prix : Reality de Matteo Garrone

Prix d'interprétation féminine : Cosmina Stratan et Cristina Flutur (Au-delà des collines/Beyond the Hills)

Prix d'interprétation Masculine : Mads Mikkelsen (La Chasse/The Hunt)

Prix de la mise en scène : Post Tenebras Lux de Carlos Reygadas

Prix du scénario : Au-delà des collines (Beyond the Hills) de Cristian Mungiu

Prix du jury : La Part des Anges (The Angels' Share ) de Ken Loach

Caméra d'Or : Les Bêtes du sud sauvage (Beasts of the Southern Wild) de Benh Zeitlin (présenté à Un Certain Regard)

http://img854.imageshack.us/img854/5193/972977.jpg
Haneke and Trintignant go up to receive the Golden Palm. Emmanuelle Riva was there too.

[cinemabon]

Chris, did you post a review of "Amour" the Palme d'or winner? I tried to find it but couldn't. Also, incredible coverage. Bravo. You must have stubbles for fingers.

[Chris Knipp]

Thanks for the kind words.
No, I didn't see AMOUR -- it didn't come to Paris while I was there. It has a US distrib and either may come out in the fall or be in the NYFF so I'll review it then. In other countries too its release dates are Sept.-Nov.
I did cover three Cannes competition films in my PARIS MOVIE REPORT (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3273-PARIS-MOVIE-REPORT-%28May-2012%29) -- SISTER (Ursula Meier), RUST AND BONE (Jacques Audiard), and MOONRISE KINGDOM (Wes Anderson). All excellent. And MOONRISE KINGDOM is showing in US theaters now.

[Chris Knipp]

ABOUT URSULA MEIER'S 'SISTER' -- not in the regular Cannes festival program, nominated for a special award to be judged in June.

Because of D'Angelo's enthusiastic tweet review from Cannes and rating of 68, I thought Meier's SISTER was a competition film, but then I couldn't find the title in any of the official Cannes listings. It turns out it was nominated for a special prize, the European Film Academy's inaugural Young Audience Award.. (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/sister-blue-bird-kauwboy-European-youth-audience-award-324543) This must explain how D'Angelo saw it at Cannes, but he didn't state the category or context. Tweets have their limits.


Young audiences across Europe will vote for the inaugural prize on June 10.

CANNES - Sister from French director Ursula Meier, Belgian drama Blue Bird from director Gust Van den Berghe and Boudewijn Koole's Dutch feature Kauwboy are the nominees for the European Film Academy's inaugural Young Audience Award.

The prize, initiated for the 25th anniversary of the Academy's European Film Awards, is intended to honor European features that appeal to younger audiences, without necessarily being made exclusively for them.
All three nominees come with a strong awards pedigree. Sister won the runner-up Silver Bear for best film at the Berlin Film Festival this year; Kauwboy picked up the best first movie honor from Berlin's Generation Kplus sidebar and Blue Bird won special mention at the Ghent International Film Festival last year.
A European Film Academy jury, made up of Berlin Generation director Maryanne Redpath, Florence Dupont, artistic director of the Sancy Film Festival for Young People and Jerzy Moszkowicz, director of Poland's International Young Audience Film Festival Ale Kino, picked the three nominees.
The Academy will screen all three films to a young audience of 10-13 year-olds on June 10 in the European cities of Amsterdam, Belgrade, Copenhagen, Erfurt, Norrköping and Turin. The audience will act as jury and vote for the winner right after the screenings. The award ceremony will be held the same day in Erfurt, Germany.--HOLLYWOOD REPORTER (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/sister-blue-bird-kauwboy-European-youth-audience-award-324543)

[Chris Knipp]

MIKE D'ANGELO'S 2012 TEN BEST LISTS.

EIGHT of the "pure" list as of now (June 9) D'Angelo saw last month at Cannes. His approach is to keep a running pair of lists open for everybody to check out as it develops, instead of being coy and precious about his process. D'Angelo's lists are of interest for all the reasons I've been enumerating on this thread, besides which his assiduous attendance of Cannes and Toronto makes his lists glimpses into our future.


THE "PURE" LIST (2012 premiere)
01. Holy Motors (Leos Carax, France/Germany)
02. Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson, USA)
03. Amour (Michael Haneke, France/Germany/Austria)
04. You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet! (Alain Resnais, France/Germany)
05. Pursuit of Loneliness (Laurence Thrush, USA)
06. Looper* (Rian Johnson, USA)
07. Sister (Ursula Meier, Switzerland/France)
08. NO (Pablo Larraín, Chile/USA/Mexico)
09. Reality (Matteo Garrone, Italy/France)
10. Rust and Bone (Jacques Audiard, France/Belgium)

THE "POLLS" LIST (2012 commercial release)
01. The Loneliest Planet (Julia Loktev, USA/Germany)
02. Miss Bala (Gerardo Naranjo, Mexico)
03. Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson, USA)
04. Amour (Michael Haneke, France/Germany/Austria)
05. The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, UK)
06. This Must Be the Place (Paolo Sorrentino, Italy/France/Ireland)
07. Haywire (Steven Soderbergh, USA)
08. You Are Here (Daniel Cockburn, Canada)
09. Looper* (Rian Johnson, USA)
10. Sister (Ursula Meier, Switzerland/France)

P.s. I am no particular advocate of these films but I like the ones on the lists that I've seen except for HAYWIRE and THE LONELIEST PLANET, which I don't see the point of listing. The other Cannes ones of course I'd think are must-sees. The asterisk was to a note saying FOOTNOTE was in very far from finished form when he saw it and if finishing went well it could move to the top of the list. It costars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis, with Emily Blunt. "Hunted by your future" is its slogan, and its release date is September 28, on the poster below.

http://img812.imageshack.us/img812/958/looperposter.jpg

[Chris Knipp]

FILM COMMENT for July/August has some Cannes pieces available online by

JOUMANE CHAHINE (http://www.filmcomment.com/article/festivals-cannes-2012-beyond-the-hills-mungiu-review) who goes into detail about Cristian Mungiu's hard-to-watch BEYOND THE HILLS. She thinks its roughness on the psyche is a good thing, making you really ask questions long after you've left the auditorium. Point well taken: if one good movie really shakes you up, a festival may have done' it's job..

MARCO GROSOLI, (http://www.filmcomment.com/article/festivals-cannes-2012-me-and-you-bertolucci-review)who talks about Bertolucci's ME AND YOU. I'd forgotten about it. Now I remembe D'Angelo called it pleasingly inconsequential" and said it "feels like a warm-up exercise." Such is the fate of so much Italian cinema today. But this one may not look that way to the Italian Grosoli, who points out to begin with that this is Bertolucci's first Italian language film in 30 years. I'm afraid this longer description doesn't disprove D'Angelo. This sounds claustrophobic and beautiful, like THE DREAMERS.

RICHARD PEÑA (http://www.filmcomment.com/article/festivals-cannes-2012-richard-pena)talking about Latin American films supplanting Asian ones for the new source of energy at the festival. Larraín's NO is the most important one this year, he feels. He's probably got a very good point there. I respect Larraín. Peña also has appetizing descriptions of films from Colombia (newcomer William Vega) and Argentina (a Cannes regular by now, Pablo Trapero).

AMY TAUBIN (http://www.filmcomment.com/article/festivals-cannes-2012-amy-taubin)discusseing COSMOPOLIS, AMOUR, OUR CHILDREN, BEYOND THE HILLS, and other high-profile films of the festival. She loved COSMOPOLIS and liked it even better watching it a second time bck in the States.

GAVIN SMITH, (http://www.filmcomment.com/article/festivals-cannes-2012-gavin-smith) who comes off as pretty blasé and bored by the whole festival, which he reviews, concluding that Cannes didn't have such a "lucky" year this time. But his focus seems to be on choice rather than luck, and he found there wasn't enough "risk-taking," though the acknowledgedly most in that category, Leos Carax's HOLY MOTORS, he decided was "barely there as a film." You can't win with this guy.