PARIS MOVIE REPORT (May 2012) [Archive] - FilmLeaf

Chris Knipp

05-14-2012, 08:50 AM

PARIS MOVIE REPORT (MAY 2012)

Ursula Meier: SISTER/L'ENFANT D'EN HAUT (2011)

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KACEY MOTTET KLEIN, LÉA SEYDOUX IN SISTER/L'ENFANT D'EN HAUT

High and low: life as a hustle

Ursula Meier is a new Swiss director who rejects the glamorous picture of her country as a place of heroic mountain climbers and perfectly functioning watches and rock solid banks. In her world, nothing is particularly certain. In her debut film, ironically called Home, a family (headed by Isabelle Huppert and Olivier Gourmet) lived along an unfinished highway and must make extraordinary accomodations when it's built. In her strong and absorbing second film, Sister, or L’Enfant d’en haut, a skinny blond boy called Simon (Kacey Moette Klein, also in Home), who claims to be 15 but is really 12, squats in an anonymous flat located in an ugly industrial plain with his shapely older sister (Léa Seydoux). They have a roof over their heads, but their lives are catch-as-catch can. Her boyfriends last no longer then her odd jobs. Simon is more the breadwinner, because he has skills. He knows a lot about skis and ski equipment. Saving up enough cash for a pass to get there, can weave his way among rich alpine ski vacationers up above on the snow-covered mountains. There, he steals any of their stuff he can get his hands on, starting with flashy new skies and pricey sunglasses. He sells them to pals or workers. With the money he buys such luxuries as pasta, so they can eat. Nothing finally is stable in their lives, or their relationship either. Or really in the world as we experience it through them. As some said of Home, this may be a prophetic vision with wider implications. But it has a tonic freedom from generalization. Everything is precipitous, kinetic, and compulsively involving. One is dropped into a new world and stays till the last heartstopping moment, which offers a haunting hint of the end of René Clément's Forbidden Games.

Meier is well served in young Klein, who was also in Home and has been said to have learned from Olivier Gourmet, during that shoot, how to embody rather than merely enact his role: when he is on screen, which is most of the time, he is totally absorbed in what he is doing and so are we. He’s slippery as a eel, and you’ll certainly never catch him "acting," a fact that underlines the director's commitment as well as his. His face is both impassive and expressive. Simon hides his feelings. In one astonishing and appalling scene toward the film's end, he e literally buys affection. Earlier, he gloms onto a rich, long-haired blond vacationer (Gillian Anderson), to whom he pretends that his parents are super-busy running a "very big hotel." He wishes she were his mother. He wishes he had one. He grabs her the way Thomas Doret, the orphaned and abandoned boy in the Dardennes’ The Kid with the Bike, grabs Cécile de France and won’t let go. But rejection is something Simon gets a lot of, and from all directions.

L’Enfant d’en haut captures a picaresque life of survival and denied lostness whose specifics we’ve never quite seen before. Like any good film of this kind this one’s spaces and shots stay with you. Simon is always getting dirty or wet and stripping and running his clothes through the washer. Only later you may realize he doesn’t’ have many clothes. Things are always coming and going. There is a row of snappy looking skis along one wall, but soon they’ll be gone. This is almost a world of barter. Simon is a good player of a game he has himself invented. But he hasn’t fully learned the rules of the world’s -- the real world's -- games. His affective life is missing and so is a moral compass. Léa Seydoux, who despite her privileged background keeps taking challenging roles, can just almost keep up with the mercurial Klein. She is cold, distant, childish, and helpless here.

The Swiss don’t often come up with a great director but Meier looks like becoming one. Her debut was the Swiss nominee for the 2009 foreign-language Oscar. Sister/L’Enfant d’en haut won the Silver Bear at the Berlinale. Meier has something social and psychological to say, and they're both related, but when you're watching the film you are in the moment. Sister, which is in French with some English dialogue, achieves something quite fresh. This is the best film I've seen in Paris this time. It debuted at the Berlinale in February, then opened in Paris April 18, 2012. I hope Meier gets the wider international audience she deserves.

Screened for this review at MK2 Hautefeuille, Paris, May 8, 2012.

Released Oct. 6, 2012 in NYC. This has 16 reviews listed on Metacritic and a collective rating of 81.

The official US trailer of SISTER is on YouTube here. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIw2ARdPGmw)

Make every effort to see this great film.

Chris Knipp

05-14-2012, 08:53 AM

PARIS MOVIE REPORT (MAY 2012)

Julie Delpy: 2 DAYS IN NEW YORK (2012)

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Delpy's family problems, from another angle

Julie Delpy has made a companion piece to her 2007 2 Days in Paris, which depicted a couple traveling in the City of Light, and meeting family. The walk-and-talk style owed something obvious to Linklater's two films, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, which constitute Delpy's claim to fame for US viewers, despite the many other films she's been in. Her 2010 directorial and acting excursion into costume drama, The Countess got only a Video on Demand US release. After that her Skylab, a very chatty busy all-French study of a big family on vacation several decades ago, had no US market value.

This time the couple is Julie plus Chris Rock, well established in Manhattan, which the film has some nice, if cursory, tribute shots of. Her character Marion is, as in the Paris episode, an art photographer, now having an opening showing a new series. She's raising the kid she had with her ex-, Adam Goldberg. Mingus (Rock) is a writer for the Village Voice who also has a radio talk show, during which he occasionally comments on what's going on in his life. Her father, sister, and (unexpectedly) her sister's boyfriend with whom she had a brief tumble once, arrive for a visit, and the jokes begin, playing upon surprisingly stereotypical images of French people as gross overeaters with an imperfect notion of privacy or decency.

There are lots of good little details, and Chris Rock adds a helpful detached point of view, a sharpness to contrast with the sloppy edges of the French relatives, but there is none of the ironic bite the Paris entry provided. Delpy as actress has provided an essential element in Richard Linklater's classic pair of decade-apart romantic conversations, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. Why she has preferred a tone of sub-Apatow grossierté for her own work as a filmmaker remains a mystery. Of course 2 Days in New York, which picks up the same female protagonist played by Delpy in a different situation (she has broken up with Jack, of the Paris trip, father of her kid), is a kind of sequel, as Before Sunset was to Before Sunrise, but not as consistently pursued and without the same control of tone.

2 Days in New York debuted at Sundance and played at Tribeca and other festivals, opening in French theaters the end of March and in some other countries in May. It has a limited US release from August 10, 2012. Viewed for this review at a public screening in Paris at the UGC Odéon, May 7, 2012. Delpy is working fast: her documentary look at the life of musician Joe Strummer, The Right Profile is coming shortly.

Chris Knipp

05-14-2012, 09:04 AM

PARIS MOVIE REPORT (MAY 2012)

Dorothée Sebbagh: CHERCHER LE GARÇON (2012)

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CHRISTOPHE CAROTENUTO AND SOPHIE CATTANI IN CHERCHER LE GARÇON

Meet Me, Meet Me, Meet Me...

Chercher le garçon is the feature debut of Dorothée Sebbagh, who has collaborated and co-written with other French directors, Emmanuel Mouret, Serge Bozon, Jean-Claude Brisseau, Valérie Donzelli, the latter on her auspicious, but unseen in America, Queen of Hearts, whose structure into short scenes resembles this one. Chercher le garçon focuses exclusively on the quest of Emilie (Sophie Cattani), a thirty-something designer in Marseille who becomes so obsessed with seeking a boyfriend (the generic "garçon" of the title) via an apparently compulsive Internet dating site called Meet Me that her life is disrupted: she can barely eat, sleep, or work. achieves a certain unexpected depth in spite of, perhaps also through, its seemingly repetious structure. The film is a succession of mostly online-arranged encounters, in which Sebbach narrowly but pretty successfully sidesteps the danger of sinking into the purely novel, cute, or anecdotal. She is neutral toward Internet mate-hunting, neither defending nor attacking it. In the succession of miscellaneous men the director isn't out to create a facile, entertaining arc of contrasts or jokey missteps. The sequence is unexpected and uncalculated. Actors were allowed to improvise freely, and what happens has a casual documentary quality, without seeking extremes. The main thing is, Emilie is a good sport, and keeps on hoping every time, but things keep on not turning out. The brevity of most of the encounters is a limiting factor, but they way the scenes play gives them particularity and depth, while avoiding over-cuteness or sentimentality.

The first guy just smiles after a little conversation and says thanks but no thanks. The next one, without a moment of hesitation, jumps immediately into a romantic, poetic, sexual affair, which the game and flexible Emilie initially accepts, till she is forced to declare that while he may be in love with her, she is not in love with him, and it's over. After that there is a succession of personalities that at the same time are examples of varying male dating-game strategies or syndromes. The "dancing man" who, well, dances. Such initial gambits may be attractive, origial come-ons for some, but not for others. Emilie lets it stop there. She's game and cooperative -- however far-fetched this may seem -- with the kinky but harmless weirdo who poses Emilie semi-nude out of doors with tiny dolls. This is hardly the prelude to a relationship. Then there are the guys who don't show up, or fail to turn up for the second date, or who, like Hicham (Aïssa Bussetta) are so shy they initially send a substitute. Emilie loves Christophe (Christophe Carotenuto), the substitute, and begs him to consider her. Alas, he declines, but she does get to meet Hicham (Aïssa Bussetta).

Importantly, because it changes pace and resets the assumptions, Emilie follows the hint of her girlfriend Audrey (Aurélie Vaneck) that according to "an Arabic proverb" the real rendezvous are those that happen purely by chance. And so what does Emilie do? She sets herself up for a "chance" encounter, of course, by planting herself on a park banch. Finally an overweight jogger collapses in front of her, coughing and choking for air. Well, it's a chance meeting, all right. He turns out to be a very nice married man just abandoned by his wife. They start a friendship, that centers on jogging. Being ouside the online matchmaking loop, it's a relationship that can continue, for a while anyway.

More significantly, someone sees her by chance and takes an interest. A guy called Amir (Moussa Maaskri) runs into her down by the harbor when she's been stood up, holding two ice cream cones. He's mature, lonely, no doubt, seems solid and sincere, and better still, owns a boat. She says no. He will turn up again though, and his lack of connection to any dating game makes him seem authentic to us, and perhaps to Emilie.

Cattani, debuting here in a major role and in a romantic comedy, was previously seen in the late Claude Miller's I'm Glad My Mother Is Alive, Tomboy and Polisse, She has a rubbery quality, a good humor and flexibility that make the rapid sequence of encounters seem possible, even fun, till she confesses to Audrey that Meet Me has taken over her life. . Her many expressions mix hope, determination, innocence and disillusion. Chercher le garçon's postcard landscapes and conventional musical backgrounds don't add much, but the raw material of the encounters and dialogue functions well enough to explain why in a dry season, this film, which emerges is not as lightweight as it seems, has been well received by French critics.

A graduate of the prestigous Paris film school la Femis, Sebbagh reports having been deeply disappointed after repeated efforts to begin features were thwarted at the outset. This first film was the product of a subsequent mood of desperation when she had virtually lost all interest in writing and filming -- Emilie's trying and trying but not giving up may be a metaphor for Sebbagh's efforts to start her career. The film was shot ultra-simply, with a digital still camera. She admits to a great admiration for Eric Rohmer. Screened for this review in Paris at MK2 Hautefeuille May 10, 2012. It opened on a few French screens May 9 to generally favorable reviews (Allociné 3.5). No other information available; further prospects are highly doubtful, though this would not be unworthy of foreign DVD release, at least.

Chris Knipp

05-14-2012, 09:07 AM

PARIS MOVIE REPORT (MAY 2012)

John Madden: INDIAN PALACE (2012)

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JUDI DENCH IN INDIAN PALACE

Old Brits, new place

John (Shakespeare in Love)Madden's Best Exotic Marigold Hotel has an English-language title for its French release, but it's been simplified to Indian Palace. For once a proven director with a good budget and a cast to die for caters to the large over-fifty audiene that buys so many movie tickets, especially for daytime showings. And this is an easy movie for that audience to like, fun, "exotic," touching, but unthreateningly predictable, with strings neatly and satisfyingly tied at the end. Best Exotic is capable of amusing and bemusing most anyone and contains genuinely toucing moments. If you're bent on something edgy and cool, you'd best stay far away; but Madden doesn't let his conventionality stifle his story's rich possibilities. Though this is hardly as subtle and deep, you might even momentarily think of E.M. Forster's Passage to India. Only the Raj is long gone and this is an example of elder Brits being 'outsourced' like services to a place where their savings will go further.

The premise, touching on late life rebirth, living one's dreams, and settling of accounts both literal and figurative, is a simple but resonant one -- a group of senior Brits move to Jaipur. Instead of the usual Italy or Costa Brava they ship off to India, to a large, roomy hotel whose actually pretty shaky condition (the phones don't work, some rooms are missing doors) has been concealed in the hotel's Photoshoped brochure by its compulsively optimistic self-appointed manager, Sonny Kapoor (Dev Patel), whose family owns the place. Sonny is one of Dev Patel's jokey, hyperactive performances. He's charming and deftly articulate in speaking his ornate lines, but quite silly. He was calmed down for Slumdog Millionaire, but observe his goofy mugging in the BBC teen series "Skins" and you'll get an idea of what's in store here. Sonny's family is wealthy but he takes after his late, ineffectual father. His mother wants him to turn the place over to his brothers and let it be sold. He wants to marry a pretty but unsuitable young woman (Tena Desae), not chosen by his Delhi family, who works at an outsourced call service.

But it's what is to happen in the lives of Tom Wilkenson, Maggie Smith, Bill Nihy, and Judi Dench -- which is quite a lot -- that will really matter here. The movie avoids cliches about India by presenting it impressionistically, as a whirlwind of bustle and craziness, bright colors, smiles, and wonderful light. These are the things that Graham Dashwood (Tom Wilkinson), a newly retired judge, remarks upon, has long known, and still appreciates. He grew up here, but left forty years ago. It turns out he's gay and has come back to find the love of his life, a task in which he touchingly succeeds. Evelyn Greenslade (Judi Dench) is a new widow, who let her husband lead in all things and has now learned his mismanagement of finances has forced her to sell their posh house to pay off debts and move elsewhere. Douglas Ainslie (Bill Nihy) is trapped in a combative marriage with the crabby Penelope Wilton, which he has politely accepted these many years. Moreover they too have become poor by investing all their money in their daughter's startup, which hasn't paid off. Muriel Donnelly (Maggie Smith) is a long-time domestic who never had money. She has no use for the exotic, or any food she can't say the name of, but has come along for a quick, low- cost hip replacement. The trick is to juggle all these events and resortings of relationships that the group arrival enables. The hotel holds them together and the acting makes them sing. Best Exotic Marigold Hotel has few longeurs, though it's not the script that's to thank for our amusement so much as the brilliant cast and deft editor Chris Gill, who together achieve a rhythm that makes things go by seamlessly. It may not be till later that the predictability of the script (based on the novel These Foolish Thinkg by Deborah Moggach) begins to sink in.

Wilkinson's character's story, a sort of Brokeback Mountain for the Raj set, is unquestionably sentimental. But it's balanced by an unsentimental English acceptance of aging, handled so well by other cast members, and by the dry, realistic outlooks of their characters. Judi Dench has a different tole here, less feisty and aggressive, more simply honest. Bill Nihy projects a dry, English irony that's not without a willingness to start something new It's Nihy most of all who keeps things light, just as Maggie Smith, with her equally dry negativity, prevents the Indian setting from ever seeming sentimentalized.

Let's not give this movie too easy a pass, though. Too much is crammed into too short a time, and everything is much too easily resolved. As the Variety critic notes, it's one of many examples of how chances are not taken that the one gay character gets killed off before he can do anything to offend the target audience, and the way Maggie Smith "converts from total racist to wise, kindly old dear by the end stretches credibility too far." But did you expect entertainment for a large middlebrow senior audience to be biting and intense?

Indian Palace, AKA Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, out in the UK Feb. 24, went into limited US release May 4, 2012, in France May 9. It was screened for this review at UGC Odéon, Paris, May 9, 2012.

Chris Knipp

05-14-2012, 09:10 AM

PARIS MOVIE REPORT (MAY 2012)

Konstantin Bojanov: AVÉ (2011)

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Angela Nedialkova and Ovanes Torosian in Avé

Bulgarian road movie

This first film from Bulgaria, seen late in the evening in Paris, is a lovely surprise. Why did both Variety and Hollywood Reporter dismiss it with faint praise at Cannes last year? They have seen too many "road movies," and think this is just another one without enough of a new angle. But angle or not, there is a soft, subtle, mysterious edge here that makes this an adventure and an experience not like any other. The dark-eyed art student Kamen (Ovanes Torosian), putting on a wrist watch without hands, starts hitchhiking his way across the country for the funeral of a classmate who has committed suicide. The beautiful Avé (Angela Nedialkova) steps in front of him and a car stops, so as they travel, they become a de facto couple that eventually becomes a real one, but she remains a mystery to him, a siren, and a provocation. Her compulsive lying maddens and angers him. And yet while it causes trouble, it also gives comfort when she pretends to be his late classmate's girlfriend, who in fact doesn't show up. Begin with Torosian and Nedialkova's faces: they illuminate the screen. Till they get to the dead mate's obsequies, it's not so important what other people do or say, though there's a driver who gets violently angry at being lied to and a kinky truck driver who chases them. What matters is the evolving relationship, and a muted nihilism felt by both youths that's echoed in the stark landscapes. Be patient, let this flow at its own speed, and you will experience a gem featuring a handful of budding talents, young stars, writer, and director all included.

Avé debuted at Cannes in 2011 and afterward was shown in many lesser international film festivals throughout the rest of 2011 and the beginning of 201. It opened theatrically in France April 25, 2012 following a Bulgarian opening six weeks earlier. Screened for this review at MK2 Beaubourg, Paris, May 12, 2012.

Chris Knipp

05-14-2012, 09:12 AM

PARIS MOVIE REPORT (MAY 2012)

Pål Sletaune: BABYCALL/THE MONITOR (2011)

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NOOMI RAPACE IN BABYCALL/THE MONITOR

The Dragon Tattoo girl quietly shines in a scary movie from Norway

Terrible psychological and physical suffering lie behind the vision and experience depicted in this quiet horror film that provides proof that Noomi Rapace of the Dragon Tattoo movies is just as remarkable in any project she takes on. Some may find the material slight, and it is. But within its limitations Sletaune's film carries a load of discomfort and a deep sense of how traumatic history can be a prison from which its victims can't escape. Actually done before Rapace's unflattering Sherlock Holmes appearance, this one shows how she can take charge of a screen. Instead of the feisty lesbian-bi computer hacker genius this time she's Anna, a mother who's got somewhat shaky custody of Anders (Vetle Qvenild Werring), her little boy, and moved to a big anonymous block of flats where she hopes to hide away from her abusive husband. Of course, that proves less easy than she hoped.

The social services folks don't appear on her side. They want Anders sent to school, not home schooled, and insist he not sleep in Anna's bedroom. This is why she gets the baby monitor, AKA babycall, to keep close track of her son in the other bedroom. It's when screams and cries for help come mysteriously into the monitor, but not from Anders, that she and the audience, if they'r following along, will get thoroughly weirded out. She appears totally isolated. Her only ally is Helge (Kristoffer Joner), the guy who sold her the gadget. He's a lonely guy too, and starts trying to date her, though she turns out to be a handful. Not so helpful is Ole (Stig Amdam), the male social servie person, who shows predatory tendencies.

I'd not disagree too strongly with Variety critic Jay Weissberg's assessment that this film "needs more time in script kindergarten." This indeed is the film's Achilles heel -- that some of the plot devices are too slapdash and arbitrary, and the Shutter Island analogy is not too far off. But it doesn't matter very much, because there is much reliance on closeups of Rapace's face, which by itself modulates the mood from nervous to frantic so subtly that it creeps right up on us. A minor effort from most points of view, this is nonetheless both an excellent little film for fans of claustrophobic psychological horror and a showcase of Noomi Rapace's mastery of character. it's really nice to see a thriller that doesn't rely at all on loud noises or special effects, that keeps us aware that the trouble is inside its protagonist's head.

Babycall debuted at the Rome Film Festival in November 2011, when Rapace understandably received the acting award, and was shown at some other festivals, then opened theatrically in the UK March 30, 2012 and France May 2. It is scheduled for US release July 24. Millennium and psych thriller fans should be very pleased. Others need not apply.

Screened for this review at MK2 Hautefeuille, Paris, May 11, 2012.

Chris Knipp

05-14-2012, 09:16 AM

PARIS MOVIE REPORT (MAY 2012)

Matthieu Delaporte, Alexandre De La Patellière: LE PRÉNOM (2012)

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PATRICK BRUEL AND GUILLAUME DE TOQUEDEC IN LE PRÉNOM

It's all just talk, but such good talk

In What’s in a Name?/Le Prénom, an adept entertainment that’s all talk in a French drawing room, four people gather to talk and eat and later are joined by a fifth. What happens is that they are provoked, first by a discussion of the naming of a child, then by revelations about a love affair several key players did not know of, involving someone very close. Though feelings get pretty intense, none of this really matters very much. But the reason why you’d want to watch this movie is to enjoy, with close-ups, a really well-written, acted, and directed example of Gallic theater. It’s all in the dialogue, the adeptness of the acting (four out of the five are the original stage cast), the deft sense of pacing both in the writing and the performances. These people really are at the top of their game. And that includes the film (and original play) directors, Mathieu Delaporte and Alexandre de la Patellière.

This is much the same kind of job Roman Polanski was doing in Carnage, his accomplished filmed version of Yasmina Reza's Le Dieu du carnage, except these are people who have known each other since childhood, or thought they did. That presumably explains the extent of the leg-pulling about the baby-naming, though the mistake about someone’s sexuality and involvement with someone near and dear may seem a bit far fetched. Remember, it doesn’t matter. It’s all about twists and turns and surprises and well-delivered speeches.

The film begins energetically with a Jeunet-esque set of thumbnail intros with short scenes, accompanied by tongue-in-cheek voiceover, showing who the people are. From then on we are in the comfy Paris flat of a popular Sorbonne professor, Pierre (Charles Berling, not in the stage cast), as he and his schoolteacher wife Elisabeth (Valérie Benguigui) get ready for two guests. These are Elisabeth’s highly successful (and right wing) real estate agent brother Vincent (the great actor singer-songwriter Patrick Bruel) and their friend Charles (Guillaume de Toquedec), a classical trombonist who plays with a French radio orchestra.

Vincent’s wife, who’s to arrive later, is expecting. It’s to be a boy. And the name Vincent proposes is a long, long, wry, provocative joke. The discussion of names this occasions is lively and funny, then violent and incredulous, rich in teasing references to history, politics, and culture. It’s not an accident that Vincent’s sister and in-law are on the left, and it’s relevant that some family members (and one of the key actors) have Jewish blood, i.e. Patrick Bruel (an Algerian Jew) and the character of Elizabeth’s mother Françoise (Françoise Fabian), who is designated as Jewish. More than that we can’t reveal. What one can definitely say is that it’s all because this is pure contrivance and so over-the-top that it’s so enjoyable to watch worked out. The arrival of Vincent’s significant other Anna (Judith El Zein) comes when everyone is on edge, and brings things to a head.

And after Vincent has attempted with limited success to apologize, attention turns to Charles, who despite being everybody’s but Anna’s friend since childhood, they seem not to have known much about. He has been agreeable to everyone, and understood my no one. This second story line seems less engaging than the first. It relies too much on information brought in from nowhere, and on a sixth character who never actually appears till a tacked-on final sequence of the childbirth, which offers another cute surprise.

In a way this is better than Polanski’s (or Reza’s) filmed drawing-room drama. It doesn’t strive so simplistically for significance. It’s about things that matter – child-naming, love, friendship, conventions, prejudices – but it never forgets that it’s playing a dramatic game. Its object is to make the time pass both provocatively and enjoyably. The filmmakers, of course, don’t attampt to “open up” the play (Polanski didn’t either). Neither play goes really deep. For a similar structure that really does, you’ll want to go back to Edward Albee’s classic nightmare evening, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

What’s in a Name?/Le Prénom came out in Paris around the same time as the Marvel Avengers film in France, as did The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel in America. Both are examples that there’s more to life than tights and superpowers. And Le Prénom has done pretty well with both the public and the critics (Allociné: press 3.2, public 4.0) coming in second for box office returns that week. But Avengers did better (Allociné: press 4.0, public 4.3). In the US according to Metacritic Avengers rated a 69, Best Exotic Marigold Hotel a 62.

Screened for this review at UGC Danton, Paris, May 13, 2012.

Chris Knipp

05-14-2012, 09:21 AM

PARIS MOVIE REPORT (MAY 2012)

Jonathan Caouette: WALK AWAY RENÉE (2012)

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JONATHAN CAOUETTE AS SEEN IN POSTER FOR WALK AWAY RENEE

Burdens cheerfully assumed

Jonathan Caouette caused a sensation with his 2004 debut film, Tarnation. It was a documentary of his life, strewn with disasters and composed by a collage of snapshots and old videos. He had been shooting himself and his family from the age of eight. You may say he is as natural born a filmmaker as they get. Whether he will move on from his life to other topics is hard to say.* What we can say of Caouette's life is that he has survived it. Renée Leblanc, his beautiful young mother, fell off a roof, and as a result was given a lengthy series of electric shock treatments (don't ask). Apparently due to the damage these caused, she began having psychotic episodes. A Hollywood Reporter review describes her diagnosis as " acute bipolar and schizoaffective disorder." Her uncertain mental condition continues to this day and requires care and medication, neither of which has ever been adequate, at least for long. Young Jonathan was turned over to his grandparents, Rosemary and Adolph Davism who by his own report, knew "nothing about raising a child," and the treatment he got, from them directly and when placed in a succession of foster homes, was both neglectful and cruel. I called (http://www.cinescene.com/reviews/tarnation.htm) Tarnation "a distasteful and distressing experience." I didnùt like being subjected to this painful and sordid life. But I could not forget it, or deny that Caouette accomplished his purpose. This was one of the best documentaries of the year, and there were some good ones.

Caouette is a survivor. Now he emerges, nancy boy poses in the past, as a really nice guy, and maybe a bit of a saint. Though this new film, despite more professional cinematography and editing facilities, is not as interesting artistically as Tarnation, or as much of a surprise, it is a portrait of love and kindness. Details are still missing -- the reliance on cryptic intertitles remains a limitation when life changes are indicated -- but there is enough to show Jonathan's extraordinary patience in caring for his mother, their affection for each other (in her lucid moments), and the warm home he has made in New York with his longtime boyfriend David Paz.

If you've seen Tarnation, Walk Away Renée provides no new information. It outlines the information in the earlier film, with less about Jonathan's youthful rebellion -- referred to only in passing when he talks to his 15-year-old son Joshua -- or his growing up gay -- and more about the struggle to find a comfortable living situation for his mother and doctors who will give her the best meds. Despite fantasmagoric interludes designed to illustrate the world of Renée's intermittent madness, which are more hi-tech but no better or more necessary than the eye-popping Mac tricks built into Tarnation, this is a simple road movie, with explanatory interruptions. And -- again partly because of the reliance on telegraphic intertitles -- the time sequence is not always very clear. The focus is on a time in 2010 when things had gone wrone with Renée's meds in Texas and he decided to set her up at an assisted living facility for mental patients in Rhinebeck, NY, closer to Jonathan's home.

Only along the way -- and this happened once in the years recounted in Tarnation -- all the meds needed to care for Renée and keep her stable during the weeks before she can enter Rhinebeck, disappear. Some of the most intense moments involve Jonathan's calls to doctors or other medical personnel trying in vain to persuade them to prescribe new meds. And as the trip progresses, we see Renée's mental state deteriorate.

It never ends, because once his mother is installed at Rhinebeck, it emerges that she's been taken off lithium and put on a succession of anti-psychotic drugs (also nothing new) that are making her agitated and incapacitating her physically.

Both Jonathan and Renée, however, remain mostly loving and good humored. It is not as an innovative documentary but a portrait of family loyalty and affection that this film is memorable. Efforts to add sci-fi elements and link madness to the fourth dimension or some cosmologists' (such as Michyo Kaku, seen in a brief TV excerpt) theory that our cosmos may be a bubble linked to others, are not organic with the vérité doc elements, and don't add anything much. Similar divagations marred Tarnation, but their handmade quality, plus their tie-in with the young Jonathan's experiments with sexual identity and explorations of filmmaking, made them fit in better with the earlier film.

Adoph, the grandfather, is also woven in and out of the story. He too was taken to Jonathan and David's place in New York for a while, having become confused and senile; he eventually dies. At one point Renée and Adolph are sleeping in the same room. They don't get along very well. Later, at 15, Joshua has come to live with Jonathan and David, and pronounces himself happy there. The sequence of all this is not entirely clear to me. Renée is allowed to go back intermittently on lithium, which Jonathan thinks the only thing that stabilizes her, but doctors have declared that it is causing major liver damage and will kill her. The film ends with all this up in the air. And what has Jonathan been doing in between films? Walk Away Renée, though less innovative technically, less comprehensive, and less surprising, is almost as claustrophobic as the previous film. But though we couldn't imagine living his life, we emerge feeling that he has lived it with a surprising amount of grace and kindness. I hope Caouette makes more films, perhaps about totally different aspects of his life, such as what he was doing between 2003 and 2010, left a black hole here.

Walk Away Renée was produced with a number of French film aid grants, and debuted at Cannes 2011, showing also at Moscow and some other festivals. It entered Paris cinemas May 2, 2012. It has gotten respectful reviews (Allociné press rating: 3.4), which tend to agree as I would that Caouette and his mother are "engaging," and that this film is uneven but still shows undeniable talent.

_______________________

*Caouette has made one 82-minute feature documentary between his two autobiographical ones: the 2009 All Tomorrow's Parties, "A kaleidoscopic journey into the parallel musical universe of cult music festival" of that name. His musical sense is also shown in appropriate songs at certain key moments of Walk Away Renée.

Chris Knipp

05-16-2012, 02:07 AM

PARIS MOVIE REPORT (MAY 2012)

Wang Xiaoshuai: 11 FLOWERS (2011)

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Zhang Kexuan, Zhong Guo Liuxing, Liu Wenqing and Lou Yihao in 11 Flowers

Growing up at the end of the Cultural Revolution

This conventional and somewhat predictable film about China in 1975, a year before the deaths of Mao Tsedung and Zhou Enlai signaled the end of the Cultural Revolution, made with French funding, has a delicacy and subtlety due to its crabwise approach. Rather than dealing with crowds rushing around, it follows Wang Han (Liu Wenqing) an 11-year-old boy living up in a mountainous region alongside a river in Guizhou province with his mother (Yan Ni), younger sister (Zhao Shiqi), and his actor father (Wang Jingchun). It achieves some genuinely touching moments. Needless to say, director Wang Xioshuai is very good with children, which isn't easy, though he's obviously helped by the youthful professionalism of the boys playing the main character's pals, Zhang Kexuan, Zhong Guo Liuxing and Lou Yihao. The effect of the film is to represent how events might look on the periphery, and to people a little too young to fully understand them. There are times when Wang approaches greatness here, and he is apparently basing the story on his own rural upbringing as a Sixth Generation director. This is a very absorbing watch whose sedate pace doesn't keep it from achieving a quiet intensity.

The first episode establishes the family's poverty, and that leads into the main episode, which underlines the unrest and underlying violence, even in this rural area. Trouble comes when Wang Han (Liu Wenqing) is chosen to be the gym leader, the boy who does the exercises everyone follows up on a platform, and he needs a new shirt. but his mother can't seem to manage: it would take a year's worth of fabric coupons. His father works in the local factory, though he inspires Wang Han with dreams of being a member of the intelligentsia, encouraging him to learn to be a painter, and speaking of his former identity as a theater person.

We can see what's coming when Wang Han nonetheless gets a new shirt but passes out at the river. When he's revived, it's disappeared, and it turns out to be grabbed by Jueqiang (Wang Ziyi), a young man on the run from police, wounded, after trying to set fire to the factory. He is hiding in the forest, and Wang Han is the one who knows the secret. This bond somehow ties in the central experiences of the boy with the travails of his father and another man, who feels he is a non-person because his intellectual status has been destroyed and he has been exiled here. The relationship between Juegiang and Wang Han, though established only in a fleeting scene. changes everything, and the director's handling of every scene shows a sure touch.

In an enthusiastic review for Variety (http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117946183/), Justin Chang describes how the film develops a dreamlike quality visually and otherwise from the moment when Wang Han passes out in the water, and the unfolding of events shows "a rich sense of time." The actual Chinese title, Chang points out, means "I am 11," but the "Flowers" in the English and French titles refer to a still life Wang Han's father sets up for him to draw and paint. A particularly nice scene is of his father showing him cherished reproductions of Impressionist paintings and sharing his love of them, thus conveying that the Cultural Revolution has not destroyed awareness of western culture.

Derek Elley, who provides more details in his Film Business Asia review, (http://www.filmbiz.asia/reviews/11-flowers) makes a goos point when he concludes that the film is primarily about the experiences of childhood rather than "some kind of oblique commentary on the period." And the story "is basically about a family living in a town where the children feel at home but their parents feel displaced. " This is best shown, as Elley notes, in the scene where "Wang Han and his father meet Wang Han's female schoolmate Juehong and her father in the countryside: while the men are bemoaning their relocation to the countryside, the boy is transfixed by being so physically close for the first time to a girl he's admired from afar."

11 Flowers, French title 11 fleurs, Chinese title 我１１ (Wo 11), was screened for this review at MK2 Beaubourg, Paris, May 14, 2012. The film , which is in Mandarin, with French subtitles in the print shown here, debuted at Toronto September 2011 and was shown at a number of other festivals including Pusan, Tokyo, and Deauville. It opened theatrically in Paris May 9, 2012, to generally positive reviews (Allociné 3.4). It is scheduled to open in the Netherlands June 21, 2012.

Chris Knipp

05-17-2012, 02:44 AM

Francis Ford Coppola: TWIXT (2012)

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VAL KILMER AND BEN CHAPLIN IN TWIXT

Dreaming horror, finding a story

A beautiful, if slight, pastiche on the horror and vampire film is Coppola's latest experiment, following Youth Without Youth and Tetro, this features Val Kilmer as Hall Baltimore, a failed and drunken detective story writer who has grumpy Skype conversations on the road with his impatient wife (Joanne Whalley) and his editor (David Paymer). The wife wants a $25,000 advance, and the editor, who won't go over $10,000, wants "a great twist ending, with tons of heart." Baltimore fumbles and goes in and out of drunken reveries and dreams, but comes out with a cracking good tale that his editor likes.

At a humiliating book signing in a hardware in a little town, our author is approached by the local sheriff Bobby LaGrange (a typically hammy and wild-haired Bruce Dern), with the proposal of a story idea of a prosecution of young girl vampires linked to a long-ago series of local murders. If this sounds like a rehash of a rehash, with some elements from the recent middling British costume horror piece The Woman in Black , it certainly is. Except that an autobiographical element is added, that of the blocked or no longer high-functioning artist. Along with that, Baltimore has frequent imaginary consultations with the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe (Ben Chaplin). Another personal element is Baltimore's weighty and guilty memories of the tragic loss of a child in a boating accident. He lost his daughter, and Coppola lost his son Gio this way in 1986. The daughter is played by Elle Fanning, who played the daughter in his daughter's film, Somewhere.

This weighty material aside, this is nonetheless a playful and at times willfully silly divagation, though one whose slightness does not mean a loss of quality in tech elements. What makes this film worth watching and shows a master's hand are the beautiful images. D.p. Milhai Malaimare Jr.'s cinematography includes colors in the dull waking passages that evoke early Seventies detective movies, while Baltimore's dreams come in sharp black and white with dashes of color, à la Coppola's Rumble Fish. Some of the treatment of young girls is disturbing. But Kilmer keeps things light, yet dignified. One goofy bit is his immitation of Brando in Apocalypse Now, and a closing citation of "The End" sung by Jim Morrison, whom Kilmer played in The Doors. And Bruce Dern is an in-joke in himself, with many creepy self-references, some serious and some silly.

Twixt debuted at Toronto September 2011 and was included in the San Francisco International Film Festival in Coppola's home turf of the Bay Area. It was released in France April 11, 2012 where it received a fairly good Allocine 3.0 rating. This involves mixed reviews, high from Cahiers du Cinema and Les Inrockuptibles, low from Telerama, generally good from some of the more "sophisticated" publications. Screened for this review May 16, 2012 at MK2 Hautefeuille, Paris.

Chris Knipp

05-17-2012, 02:45 AM

PARIS MOVIE REPORT (MAY 2012)

Francis Ford Coppola: TWIXT (2011)

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VAL KILMER AND BEN CHAPLIN IN TWIXT

Dreaming horror, finding a story

A beautiful, if slight, pastiche on the horror and vampire film is Coppola's latest experiment, following Youth Without Youth and Tetro, this features Val Kilmer as Hall Baltimore, a failed and drunken detective story writer who has grumpy Skype conversations on the road with his impatient wife (Joanne Whalley) and his editor (David Paymer). The wife wants a $25,000 advance, and the editor, who won't go over $10,000, wants "a great twist ending, with tons of heart." Baltimore fumbles and goes in and out of drunken reveries and dreams, but comes out with a cracking good tale that his editor likes.

At a humiliating book signing in a hardware in a little town, our author is approached by the local sheriff Bobby LaGrange (a typically hammy and wild-haired Bruce Dern), with the proposal of a story idea of a prosecution of young girl vampires linked to a long-ago series of local murders. If this sounds like a rehash of a rehash, with some elements from the recent middling British costume horror piece The Woman in Black , it certainly is. Except that an autobiographical element is added, that of the blocked or no longer high-functioning artist. Along with that, Baltimore has frequent imaginary consultations with the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe (Ben Chaplin). Another personal element is Baltimore's weighty and guilty memories of the tragic loss of a child in a boating accident. He lost his daughter, and Coppola lost his son Gio this way in 1986. The daughter is played by Elle Fanning, who played the daughter in his daughter's film, Somewhere.

This weighty material aside, this is nonetheless a playful and at times willfully silly divagation, though one whose slightness does not mean a loss of quality in tech elements. What makes this film worth watching and shows a master's hand are the beautiful images. D.p. Milhai Malaimare Jr.'s cinematography includes colors in the dull waking passages that evoke early Seventies detective movies, while Baltimore's dreams come in sharp black and white with dashes of color, à la Coppola's Rumble Fish. Some of the treatment of young girls is disturbing. But Kilmer keeps things light, yet dignified. One goofy bit is his immitation of Brando in Apocalypse Now, and a closing citation of "The End" sung by Jim Morrison, whom Kilmer played in The Doors. And Bruce Dern is an in-joke in himself, with many creepy self-references, some serious and some silly.

Twixt debuted at Toronto September 2011 and was included in the San Francisco International Film Festival in Coppola's home turf of the Bay Area. It was released in France April 11, 2012 where it received a fairly good Allocine 3.0 rating. This involves mixed reviews, high from Cahiers du Cinema and Les Inrockuptibles, low from Telerama, generally good from some of the more "sophisticated" publications. Screened for this review May 16, 2012 at MK2 Hautefeuille, Paris.

Chris Knipp

05-17-2012, 06:40 AM

This review also appears on Cinescene (http://www.cinescene.com/knipp/moonrisekingdom.html) and Flickfeast.uk (http://flickfeast.co.uk/feature/moonrise-kingdom/).

PARIS MOVIE REPORT (MAY 2012)

Wes Anderson: MOONRISE KINGDOM (2012)

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KARA HAYWARD AND JARED GILMAN IN MOONRISE KINGDOM

A runaway adolescent romance that's brilliant fun

Mike D'Angelo, who saw Wes Anderson's new movie at Cannes, where it opened the festival, called it "easily the most Rushmore-y film he's made since," and gave it a 75, or "excellent" rating in his harsh system, putting it at the top of his top-ten list for the year. Peter Debruge of Variety is more reserved, perhaps eying the challenge to mainstream audiences, but notes that this is a high accomplishment. "While Anderson is essentially a miniaturist, making dollhouse movies about meticulously appareled characters in perfectly appointed environments," Debruge says, "each successive film finds him working on a more ambitious scale" and this one "feels even more finely detailed than any of his previous live-action outings." And yet, and yet, there is a wonderful balance, which Debruge also notes: "Still, the love story reads loud and clear, charming those not put off by all the production's potentially distracting ornamentation."

For me, watching the film in a vicarious Cannes opening night public showing in Paris, where it got applause at the end and people stopped in their tracks to watch the closing credits and applaud again, as for a concert encore, the elaboration was self-conscious, but also both dazzling and enjoyable from the first frames, and the invention and orchestration were continually jaw-dropping. "This is going to be a classic," I kept saying to myself. Moonrise Kingdom is wonderful fun, a genius film. The script co-authored with Roman Coppola is rich and satisfying. If Debruge is right, the whole story and its setting constitute a "poignant metaphor for adolescence itself," of the isolation of childhood and first love, and this film, regardless of the decidedly sui generis oddity of Anderson's style, tells "a universally appealing tale of teenage romance."

The premise stated on IMDb is simple enough: "A pair of young lovers flee their New England town, which causes a local search party to fan out and find them." Let's add that the time is 1965, the town is on an island, the boy at a scout camp led by the foolish but earnest Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton). The island's history, geography, and notable meteorological events (a huge electric storm comes at a climactic point) are periodically noted for us by Bob Balaban, the absurdly costumed presiding narrator. This is a consciously constructed self-sufficient world. Let's note also that the young lovers are only twelve (the girl) and eleven (the boy). And both independent misfits.

Suzy (Kara Hayward) lives with her three little brothers and her parents, Walt and Laura Bishop (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand) in a house attached to a lighthouse on this island of New Penzance (maps of adjoining islands are repeatedly shown). A series of sliding pans explores Suzy's house at the opening as a record is played giving a lesson on the orchestra. The whole thing is a lesson in orchestration, and Anderson (or Balaban) is the orchestra leader, unseen. Meanwhile there are the Khaki Scout Campers, in their rows of little tents elsewhere on the island. Scout Master Ward finds one boy missing ("Jiminy Cricket, he's flown the coop!"). It's Sam (Jared Gilman), a bespectacled, methodical outcast. Most of the other scouts don't like him, and he turns out to be an orphan, whom, when they learn of his running away, his foster parents refuse to accept back.

Sam has discovered Suzy the year before (as explained in an orderly flashback) where she played a blackbird in a (droll and elaborate) play, they've been pen pals, and their runaway idyll was carefully planned. Each comes complexly prepared, he with scout camping equipment -- and he is a master of Khaki Campers' methods Master Ward has taught, she less practically with a valise containing hardcover children's library books and a battery-powered record player with discs including a French pop song, and a pet kitten in a basket with canned cat food. She has forgotten to bring a comb, but says she will just use her hands.

To find the runaways, the scouts team up with the island cops headed by Captain Sharp (a bespectacled and bewigged Bruce Willis); he has been having an affair with Laura Bishop, whose marriage to fellow lawyer Walt is tired and miserable. (Adult relationships are otherwise sketchy.) The search becomes more and more elaborate -- and at some points violent, when Suzy and Sam fight off their pursuers -- as the storm comes on more and more. Eventually a Social Services lady of severe mien arrives (Tilda Swinton) and a higher level scoutmaster is involved, the stern Khaki überfüher, Commander Pierce (an elderly looking Harvey Keitel)

The direction of the movie is toward indulgence and bending of rules, revival, acceptance, and hope -- he classic goals and outcomes of comedy. Sam and Suzy are symbolically married, Sam survives a violent meteorological event and is saved from Tilda Swinton's clutches and adopted by Captain Sharp. Scout enemies become scout friends. Walt and Laura become reconciled to each other. Much is destroyed by the storm (the most challenging feat of staging in the film, involving Anderson's first notable use of CGI), but the next year's crops are the richest and best in memory.

Anderson's use of 16mm makes for a washed out look at times, but it fits with the Sixties timeframe. This isn't his most handsome film, but it's his most beautifully and clearly coordinated one, and as Debruge makes clear, the filmmaker achieves the remarkable feat of making his most elaborate work also his most intimate and touching. The dialogues and exchanges of kisses of Sam and Suzy are not only cute and sweet, but unlike any other such scenes. Though many viewers may find this not their thing (when is that not true?), it's a brilliant film, a triumph of individual (and yet quintessentially American) vision, and surely, as D'Angelo says, one of the best of the year. It did not rock me to the core, but it awed, delighted, and touched me.

Moonrise Kingdom debuted at Cannes May 16, 2012 as the festive opening night film. It was screened for this review on the same night at UGC Odéon, Paris. It has received a high Allociné press rating, 3.9; however The Avengers receieived 4.1 and Audiard's Rust and Bone (which has also opened in Paris) received a 4.8 (higher than his Cannes and César-winning previous film A Prophet, which has a 4.6).

The film begins UK and limited US release (US distributor Focus Features) on May 25, 2012.

Chris Knipp

05-18-2012, 04:59 AM

PARIS MOVIE REPORT (MAY 2012)

Jacques Audiard: RUST AND BONE (2012)

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MARION COTILLARD AND MATTHIAS SCHOENAERTS IN RUST AND BONE

An intense, testosterone-charged love story from Audiard

"Rust and Bone is an impressive film," Serge Kaganski, critic of the French weekly Les Inrockuptibles wrote (http://www.lesinrocks.com/cinema/films-a-l-affiche/de-rouille-et-dos/) this week in praise of Jacque Audiard's new title in Cannes competition and simultaneously opening in Paris, "a film of mastery, intensity and, finally, simplicity. . . Each shot is impeccably composed, lit, and cut," he went on, "while still serving the story and characters." This is an important point to make because there is no prettiness about most of the images: they rarely call attention to themselves. And Kaganski adds, "Because the largest share of success of the film lies in the characters, so all attention is on the actors: their bodies, their phrasing, their interactions, their looks, their range of feelings."

These are the key points: this is an actor's film, harsh, brilliant, hard to take. Rust and Bone is, as one would expect from Audiard, a remarkable, challenging movie. But it's different from the noirish stories he has done before, It's a love story, but it's also a kind of action movie, bursting with energy and hitting the viewer with a succession of physical and emotional shocks. Its hero is a brute of great physical intensity but terribly out of touch with his emotions. The arc leads him finally to acknowledge them. And so this is an action movie that is simultaneously (and less visibly much of the time) a slow-developing romance. It's loosely adapted from a similarly-titled short story collection by Canadian writer Craig Davidson, and we feel the expansion, pushing the limits of some story elements, so a few details seem fudged, the movie's most evidnet flaw. While packing a wallop and likely to please audiences looking for rough naturalistic elements combined with romance, this film isn't quite the wholehearted success Audiard achieved in his previous two films, the great frustrated-artist noir The Beat My Heart Skipped (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0411270/reviews?start=0)and the breathlessly absorbing prison making-of-a-crime-boss epic A Prophet.

Simplly put, this is the relationship of a beautiful handicapped woman and a brutish fighter. Marineland orca-trainer Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard) is rendered legless by a terrible accident during a performance. While still whole, she is rescued from a fight in a bar by Ali (the up-and-coming Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts, whose breakthrough was the intense Flemish picture Bullhead (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3249-BULLHEAD-%28Michael-Roskam-2011%29&highlight=BULLHEAD)) . After her accident, before rehab and prosthetics, she calls up Ali and a relationship begins. Ali has come from the north to the south coast to Antibes with his 5-year-old son Sam (Armand Verdure) after his mother has involved the boy in drug smuggling. He is so brutish (and out of touch with emotion) that he seems either super-human or subhuman, and it's only Stéphanie's handicap that makes their union believable.

The relationship is just friendly at first, pals, then later fuck-budies. Ali takes Stéphanie swimming, carrying her into the water. This experience gives her a kind of physical release and revival from the depression of losing her legs. Later he suggests sex. That doesn't keep this testosterone brute from having sex with other women. Meanwhile he engages in the brutal illegal fights staged by his shady employer Martial (ace Belgian actor and filmmaker Bouli Lanners), also working for him in security at a business wehre Martial has installed illegal devices to spy on employees. This leads to the firing of Ali's hard-faced sister Louise (Céline Sallette), with whom he has been living since he came south. She has him thrown out of her house at gunpoint, with Sam.

There is another terrible accident, pointing to Ali's carelessness and violence, even to himself, but this ordeal finally leads him to acknowledge his feelings for those close to him, and a surprisingly soft ending, considering the extreme harshness of most of what has come before. The Variety (http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117947557?refcatid=31) reviewer at Cannes, Peter Debruge, links this film both with Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, and the tradition of French movies following the American genre of down-and-out lowlife fighters struggling vainly to get back up. He also suggests Audiard's blend of romance (and controlled script) and gritty almost Dardennes-style realism (and the Dardennes lend their imprimatur as producers here) is a canny choice because it satisfies audiences' lust for something new and fatigue with the flabby Nicholas Sparks kind of love story. However he points out this is a "massive undertaking" by French standards with its complex roles, allowing big star Cotillard dignity in a harsh role, introducing the remarkable Schoenaerts in a French-speaking part, not to mention the mixture of soothing music by Alexandre Desplat and American pop songs, gritty hand-held scenes and grand spectacles at Marineland (and underwater photography). All this is in addition to skillful F/X alteration of images to show Stéphanie's amputated limbs repeatedly in multiple situations to the point where we come to accept them. Audiard chose something smaller after the huge challenge of his big prison epic, yet it turns out not to be so small after all. Maybe he should have down-pedaled some of the plot elements. Though he based this on a whole story collection, the parts still seem fragmentary -- though the impact of every scene is so great, audiences won't notice.

Rust and Bone (the original story title), French title De rouille et d'os, with a screenplay by Audiard and Thomas Bidegain, was shown at Cannes in competition and simultaneously released in Paris cinemas May 17, 2012. Screened for this review at Gaumont Opéra Paris May 17. Allociné press rating: 4.8 (but based on only 8 reviews). Sony Pictures Classics will release the film in the US.

Chris Knipp

05-19-2012, 08:15 AM

PARIS MOVIE REPORT (MAY 2012)

Hitoshi Matsumoto: SCABBARD SAMURAI (2010)

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Shaggy samurai story

This odd mixture from Japan went into French release (as Saya Zamuraï , a transliteration of the Japanese title) May 9, 2012 and, perhaps because it reads sort of like a conceptual piece, received enough enthusiastic reviews to give it a 3.4 Allociné "press" rating. If you ask me, the Variety critic Leslie Felperin's suggestion that this "could provide a plausible vehicle for a remake for someone like Terry Gilliam, albeit on a bigger budget," is crazy, or at the least a bad idea. How this series of visual jokes that fizzle could make a successful movie eludes me.

Hitoshi Matsumoto is a former TV comic turned director and this is his third film. The setting is historical, and the protagonist is yet another run down samurai. This one, a prune-faced and bespectacled chap called Kanjuro Nomi (Takaaki Nomi) is wandering the country with his feisty little daughter Tae (Sea Kumada). After the death of his wife in an epidemic he has become so despondent he can no longer fight and has abandoned his sword, carrying only the scabbard of the title.

At the outset the jokey nature of most of the proceedings becomes evident when Nomi is unsuccessfully attacked by a series of comical enemies who seem pasted-on apparitions -- a Shamisen Player (Ryo), Pakyun the Pistol Boy (Rolly), and Gori Gori the Chiropractikiller (Fukkin Zen-Nosuke). The latter swoops down from above and tries to twist Nomi's neck around. There's a call out for Nomi's arrest (what for? disgracing the samurai code?) and he's arrested and put into the custody of the Lord of the Tako Clan (Jun Kanimura). The Lord locks up Nori and gives him a job. He has 30 days to try to make his son, gloomy since the death of his mom from the same epidemic that killed Tae's, crack a smile. If Nomi succeeds, he'll be set free. If he fails, he mus commit seppuku.

Tae and Nori's two jailers (Itsuji Itao and Tokio Emoto) act as coaches as Nori makes up a long series of gags or stunts, ranging from sticking vegetables up his nose to inhaling a noodle to being shot from a cannon.

There is an obvious link between the Taki clan Lord's son and Tae, and Tae eventually sneaks in and visits the son and tells him he's also like her father.

There is a tradition of prune-faced bespectacled Japanese characters; I recall one as a colleague of Watanabe at the city hall office in Kurosawa's Ikiru. Mark Schilling of <a href="http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/ff20110617a1.html">Japan Times</a> compares him to Buster Keaton. [/i] Nomi's deadpan doggedness must have something very Japanese about it. The trouble is that the daily stunts, which as Felperin puts it have a certain "Rube Goldberg" quality -- if of a somewhat flabby quality level, aren't necessarily funnier to us than they are to the Clan Lord's son. Schilling, who as usual provides knowledgeable insight, suggests the stunts' progression "cleverly illustrate what might be called the history of comedy in Japan," basically just from the simple to the more complex now seen on Japanese TV variety shows today. Tae is a stern critic of her father at first, but as she bends to the task she starts being more on his side, as is a growing public audience at his stunts. Tae may be symbolic of how the samurai moral code is passed from generation to generation and inspires even the weak.

Aside from the slowness and unfunniness of the gag progression, the other big trouble with this film is that things turn grim, bloody, and eventually sentimental and preachy toward the end of this long ordeal, which in itself we hardly know how to take. This doesn't seem quite sufficient material for a feature movie.

Since Matsumoto's films have popular routes but fail to appeal particularly to the popular audience, it might be interesting to compare him to Kitano. But Kitano has a wild imagination and an original style, even when his movies don't work. Despite decent production values, costumes, sets, etc., Saya-samurai is basically a pretty stupid and boring film.

Scabbard Samurai, billed as Saya Zamuraï, debuted at the Tokyo Downtown Cool Media Festival, having its western fest start at Locarno, followed by other fests. France is the only country where it has been released theatrically other than Japan.

Screened for this review at MK2 Beaubourg, Paris, MAy 18, 2012.

Chris Knipp

05-19-2012, 04:08 PM

Jacques Audiard 2005, revisited

What I did today (Saturday May 19, 2012) in Paris:

Since there were no new films I felt like seeing, I went to MK2 Hautefeuille's morning rep-style showing of Audiard's THE BEST MY HEART SKIPPED, AKA DE BATTRE MON COEUR S'EST ARRÊTÉ, which stars Romain Duris in a breakout serious role, Neils Arestrup (of A PROPHET, later) as his father, and Emmanuelle Devos as the father's girlfriend, among others. This is a "re-make" (as Audiard called it) of James Toback's debut film, FINGERS, about a young guy who's an enforcer for his crooked real estate dad who tries to become a concert pianist. Audiard adds details like an Asian piano teacher when Tom is preparing for an audition who can't speak any French, and a relationship that flowers between them later, as well as a Russian mafia boss who destroys his father, and a lot that is not in Toback, besides which the ending is not nihilistic like the one with Harvey Keitel.

What stuck me this time is how visceral Audiard's filmmaking style is and how much he relies here as in A PROPHET and the new RUST AND BONE on wildly contrasting scenes. He thrives on and seems almost addicted to harsh hard-soft contrasts. I was greatly enamored of THE BEAT MY HEART SKIPPED and it still seems an extremely impressive film but I think I like A PROPHET better: it's bigger and richer in every way, despite the fact that people tend to type-cast it as more strictly genre and not their thing. RUST AND BONE has the same kind of contrasts, but I will need to see it again to tell if I really think it works. But RUST AND BONE'S visceral quality is as powerful as the other two's. Audiard works on a very high level. And he's a fabulous director for actors. Observe the difference between Niels Arestrop in THE BEAT and in A PROPHET and you'll realize what a very great actor he is and how Audiard gave him twice the opportunity to show it.

It is almost unbearable to watch not so much Tom's failed audition, but the night before when his cohorts make him go out to the horrible rush on squatters to maintain control of a dubious real estate holding, the image of low level human violence trumping an attempt at peace and art. Audiard reallly took Duris and molded him here (into a more serious actor) much as he took and molded the less formed Taher Rahim for A PROPHET.

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ROMAIN DURIS IN THE BEAT MY HEART SKIPPED, 2005

Chris Knipp

05-20-2012, 01:51 AM

Cannes magazine display
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MK2 Hautefeuille
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Chinese film festival poster
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Les femme du bus....
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Rust and Bone poster
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On the Road "Colonne Morris"
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La Pagode
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Cine Images

Chris Knipp

05-21-2012, 10:26 AM

PARIS MOVIE REPORT (MAY 2012)

Tim Burton: DARK SHADOWS (2012)

PARIS MOVIE REPORT (MAY 2012)

Vampires in Seventies Maine?

Johnny Depp again, and Burton's wife Helena Bonham Carter again, but not in one of Tim's better projectst. A vampire imprisoned in a coffin for two hundred years emerges to his family estate. Michelle Pfeiffer as a wife, Jackie Earle Haley as a housekeeper, both rather wasted. Eva Green in a strong role in a weak picture. Because what is Burton doing here? Well, this is a vampire picture, about an undead chap who falls in love with normal young women. Such things bring unfailing delight to a certain kind of fanboy or fangirl, but in general haven't we had just about enough of them at this point?

What's not wrong is the special effects, which are excessive but lush and occasionally would have delighted Salvador Dali (blood turning into insects, a pulsing heart in a hand, a face that cracks apart like an eggshell). What's wrong is the writing, which has no focus or interest. What's best is the trailer, which prominently features Depp's absurdly ornate language and his amusingly pseudo-English accent. Green, who is French, does a funnily crude American one.

Depp is Barnabas Collins, of Collinwood, in Maine. His family built a fishing empire and an enormous castle. the better to stage vampire scenes and a disco party in, with Alice Cooper performing. Collinwood is in disrepair now, and Barnabas' enemy, Eva Green AKA Angelique Bouchard, has taken over the local fishing indusutry. She is a vampire too. She has always been in love with Barnabas. Question: if so, why did she keep him locked up underground for so long? But the rules of the undead are not much respected here, and for much of the movie, Barnabas shows off few of his vampire tricks. Then he shows off too many as this very diluted versioin of Burton's talents goes into general violent finale mode.

"Dark Shadows" was a US TV series that ran from 1966 to 1971, which explains why Barnabas wakes up in the early Seventies. There are comic possibilities here that are mostly squeezed into the few minutes of the trailer. In the ungovernable teenage girl, Carolyn (Chloë Grace Moretz) and the crazy subteen boy, David (Gully McGrath), the slightly vampirish matriarch Elizabeth (Pfeiffer) and Elizabeth's klepto brother (Jonny Lee Miller), did someone have inklings of a Addams family here? Julia Hoffman (Carter) is a shrink kept on board to tend to David. She is alcoholic and concerned about losing her looks (and she puts on a funny American accent too, but more neutral than Green's). Some weird doings go on about switching blood with Barnabas. He wants to become "normal" but she steals his blood hoping that by becoming immortal she'll avoid the need for a facelift.

It's a lot to take in but there is more, because there are two young ladies centuries apart that Barnabas is interested in, but Angelique gets in the way, both times. There also is a bunch of hippies, traveling in a VW van, of all things, whom for some reason Barnabas feels obliged to murder en masse after pumping them for info about what young people like nowadays. (Burton & Co. are great at staging fires and surreal transformations, but the joint doesn't look right.) This posse in a van in a vampire movie reminds me of Kathryn Bigelow's terrific early film, the 1982 Near Dark, about a working class vampire family who travel -- in a van. Such simplicity, originality, and authentic horror and scariness as you get in Near Dark did not, alas, attend upon the making of Dark Shadows. Bigelow was young and fresh then. Burton has made a lot of movies, some great, some better forgotten, and he's turned into an industry or a brand now. This is not one of his products that you need to go out and buy.

Metacritic's rating is 55, "mixed or average reviews," and that makes sense. One cannot really hate this movie but one cannot love it either. It's pretty to look at, and it has good people in it, even if they're wasted. As Mike D'Angelo commented they are working hard but with mixed success to raise inferior material to a higher level. They succeed only momentarily because the writing by Seth Grahame-Smith working from a story by John August based on the TV series written by Dan Curtis, is too diffuse, too scattershot. Too many threads are dropped, but to begin with there are just too many threads. The music is terrible and Alice Cooper's presence inexplicable. Has he been resting in a coffin too?

The specter of aging vs. not aging threads through this view of the undead. Have Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Michelle Pfeiffer sold their souls to stay so sculpted and beautiful? Or do such efforts really matter in Burton's artificial-looking movies where everything is altered with makeup, prosthetics, and computer processing? A lot of talent is thrown away here.

Dark Shadows was released May 9 in France, May 11 in the US and UK. Screened for this review at UGC Danton, Paris, MAy 21, 2012.

Chris Knipp

05-21-2012, 11:06 AM

My Best of Paris May 2012 Movies

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It was easy to see which the best ones were, but there were interesting things throughout my movie-going these two weeks. No real duds or wastes of my time. I was surprised at how enjoyable and well made the boulevard or drawingroom comedy LE PRÉNOM was -- and at how well I understood it, since I expect a talky play to be challenging to my knowledge of French. I may have overrated CHERCHER LE GARÇON a bit. I don't think I'll remember it very well, may confuse it with other vignette dating films. There are so many. Including QUEEN OF HEARTS, which the director co-authored. BABYCALL is a small film, but it is an indispensable example of the art of Noomi Rapace, before she started working in Hollywood blockbusters, as she is now. 11 FLOWERS is a lovely little Chinese memoir film. WALK AWAY RENEE showed me what a really nice guy Jonathan Caouette is. TWIXT is a somewhat inexplicable Coppola project, and TETRO is much more interesting, but it's Coppola: you have to see what he's doing. DARK SHADOWS and SCABBARD SAMURAI, both inexplicable, but in very different ways. I probably won't forget SCABBARD, though I might as soon do so. No, I'm kidding: it adds a small key to my knowledge of Japanese culture and in particular Japanese humor. I did not like 2 DAYS IN NEW YORK. But I will some day enjoy arguing about it with somebody. INDIAN PALACE was bland, a mainstream crowd-pleaser for seniors, but it's continually enjoyable to watch Bill Nihy et al. deliver their zingers.

Now for the best ones. As I say, it was not hard to pick them.

SISTER/L'ENFANT D'EN HAUT This Swiss-French study of a boy who lives by stealing ski equipment among posh Swiss vacationers and his clueless older sister is harsh, intense, and riveting. It is probably the best of the lot and it was the first film I saw. The young actor Kacey Mottet Klein, is exceptional (the film was created for him), and Léa Seydoux is perfectly cast. I hope that people in the US will get a chance to see it, though I know of no current likelihood of that. I want to see Ursula Meier's prevous HOME, with Olivier Gourmet and Isabelle Huppert, very much now. Meier is a director to watch.

AVÉ is a somewhat mysterious Bulgarian road movie of a nihilistic art student and a girl from a rich family who's a compulsive liar. Compare it to ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA. The latter may be more complex and original-seeming but AVÉ seemed a more real experience in every way, and the two have points in common. I think this captures a certain anguish that 20-somethings can feel sometimes, and also a readiness to go someplace new. There's something raw and exciting about this story. Let's hope Walter Salles' ON THE ROAD is half as good. Konstantin Bojanov is another director to watch.

MOONRISE KINGDOM by Wes Anderson, a big Cannes competition film, shown opening night, is a delight from start to finish and a work of sheer genius, a wholly original auteur working at top form. I loved it. It's not visceral like SISTER, of course. That's not what Anderson is. But such mastery must be enjoyable to anybody who takes pleasure in seeing an original filmmaker at work. Certainly Anderson has his limitations, his hermetic worlds that may seem cut off from the "real" one, but this seems to me a film I could enjoy watching over and over and will still find funny and keeny observed.

RUST AND BONE is such an intense experience and pushes so many buttons I need to see it again (with subtitles--some of the language was difficult for me to follow), but Audiard works at a very high level and this adds a piece to the puzzle of who he is, by being a different kind of subject, basically a tale of recuperation, only as D'Angelo, my Cannes point of referennce (and this may be the most hyped French film at Cannes) says the person who is handicapped and recovers is not the obvious one. Todd McCarthy called this "surprisingly conventional," and certain elements, like the Marineland scenes and the music, bear that out, but it's not quite as conventional as it may seem.

Chris Knipp

05-22-2012, 03:52 PM

PARIS MOVIE REPORT is officially concluded. I am back in New York (May 22, afternoon). I might post a few more photos though.

Johann

05-23-2012, 02:49 PM

Excellence all around Man!

Wasted talent in Dark Shadows?
Who knew?

Johann

05-23-2012, 02:51 PM

Near Dark is Awesome. A cult classic. I have it on DVD- had it for years.

Chris Knipp

05-23-2012, 02:58 PM

Thanks for the support, Johann. My pleasure.

In DARK SHADOWS the writing is not as good as the cast, I'm sure. Like a lot of Hollywood movie scripts today, it's a little of everything, instead of being one good thing.

I was introduced to NEAR DARK by Ralph and Mike in Chicago--way back when, on a rented video. Then I got my own. Original. Talent.

Chris Knipp

05-27-2012, 04:52 PM

The Red.

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Entrance to the classic Thirties Paris cinema, La Pagode--showing Audiard's RUST AND BONE

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Cinephile shop near La Pagode

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Pattinson again: coming attraction poster in Paris cinema (Odéon)

Chris Knipp

05-29-2012, 06:19 PM

And the Black.

MK2 Odéon cinema facade

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Sorry, I had to delete a few of the photos because of file size problems.

Johann

05-31-2012, 09:20 AM

Good eyes for posters and images!
Many thanks for sharing your photos and reviews from Paris.
A boon for us to have you here ;)

Chris Knipp

05-31-2012, 10:00 AM

My pleasure. I love doing the photos.

For more go to my FLICKR Photostream. It's the set called Paris 3 (May 2012)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisknipp/

By the way on the LOUNGE section I put up a thread about Obama that may interest you. The Times article it's based on is quite devastating. Much of it was known but the way Obama says the decisions to kill were "easy" is chilling and we learn who is really in the white house now.

Chris Knipp

06-02-2012, 01:05 AM

COMING ATTRACTIONS IN PARIS THIS WEEK

I said Paris was over and I'm back in California, but UGC, the big French distributor, sends me notices of the week's new releases in Paris because I have a discount card, which they call a "carte de fidélité", and you might be interested in what the new releases are by UGC in Paris this week. I wish I were back there now. DE ROUILLE ET D'OS, RUST AND BONE, came out during Cannes and I reviewed it above. The Woody Allen doc looks really interesting. The movie about women on Cairo busses I reviewed as part of New Directors, and it's definitely worth seeing and well made. Are they getting PROMETHEUS a little before we are? 7 DAYS IN HAVANA was at Cannes, and Mike D'Angelo wasnt very enthusiastic, but it would still be better than AMERICAN ANIMAL, if you ask me. WELCOME TO GERMANY (ALAMANYA) by Yasamin Sanderelli is a good natured comedy about Turkish immigrants in Germany, nothing pretentious, but favorably reviewed by Alissa Simon in Variety as "well-crafted" and "A breezy, colorfully styled comedy suitable for family viewing" that provides historical background on Guest Workers in Germany.

UGC vous recommande !
Voici notre nouvelle Découverte UGC : un film qui aborde avec courage et avec punch la situation de la femme en Egypte. Seulement en Egypte ?

À l'affiche cette semaine...
PROMETHEUS (3D) ALLOCINE 3.4
de Ridley Scott
Le grand retour de Ridley Scott à la SF et à l'ADN d'Alien. Un des films les plus attendus de l'année.
WOODY ALLEN : A DOCUMENTARY ALLOCINE 2.9
de Robert B. Weide
Avant la sortie de son nouveau film (le 4 juillet), une rencontre chaleureuse avec l'un des cinéastes les plus attachants et les plus prolifiques. Rappel d'une carrière exceptionnelle.
7 JOURS A LA HAVANE ALLOCINE: 1.9
de Benicio del Toro
7 réalisateurs filment La Havane, un jour chacun : Laurent Cantet, Gaspar Noé, Julio Medem, Elia Suleiman, Juan Carlos Tabio, Pablo Trapero, Benicio del Toro. Cuba, librement.
ALMANYA
de Yasemin Samdereli
Comment évoquer l'immigration de façon décomplexée et sans ressentiment, sans contourner les problèmes culturels mais au contraire en s'en amusant. Un film utile et décrispant.
DE ROUILLE ET D'OS (UGC M) ALLOCINE: 4.3
de Jacques Audiard
Et pour finir, nous vous rappelons ce film magnifique. Une histoire d'amour percutante et une interprétation bouleversante - UGC M et le public aussi !

Chris Knipp

06-13-2012, 01:56 PM

Paris movie releases June 13-20, 2012.

Allociné lists 18 film releases in France this week -- but this includes several revivals of old films that I will omit. With the title of each I will give Allociné's "Press" evaluation (1-5).
My rough translations of the opening part of the blurbs.

These from the big distributor UGC:

À l'affiche cette semaine.../Coming this week
JOURNAL DE FRANCE (France Journal) Allociné: 3.9
de Raymond Dupardon
Du grand photographe et documentariste Raymond Depardon. Un road-movie d'un type particulier.
From great photographer and documentarian Raymond Depardon, a unique road movie.
BIENVENUE PARMI NOUS (Welcome Among US) ALLOCINé: 1.0
de Jean Becker
Regular as clockwork master Jean Becker provides a 2012 edition, adapting a novel by Eric Holder. Two people on a nice escape, two generations who rediscover each other
Régulier comme un métronome, le maître Jean Becker nous propose en cru 2012 une adaptation d'un roman d'Eric Holder. Une belle échappée à deux, deux générations qui se retrouvent.
QUAND JE SERAI PETIT (When I Get Small) ALLOCINE: 3.0
de Jean-Paul Rouve
À l'occasion d'un voyage, Mathias, 40 ans, croise par hasard un enfant qui lui fait étrangement...
While traveling, Matthias, 40, meets by chance a child who strangely resembles him...
Un film délicat, qui aborde de manière inhabituelle la paternité. Premier film d'un Jean-Paul Rouve étonnant de fragilité, qui retrouve ici son partenaire de "Podium", un Benoît Poelvoorde aux antipodes du "Grand soir" vedette de la semaine dernière.
A delicate film that approaches the paternity theme in a fresh way. Astonishing fragility from Jean-Paul Rouve directing his first film, partnering with Benoit Poelvoorde working at the opposite extreme from LE GRAND SOIR (film released with him starring in it last week -- ALLOCINE: 3.7).
This co-stars actor/director Xavier Beauvois, who directed LE PETIT LIEUTENANT and OF GODS AND MEN
LA PETITE VENISE (Little Venice) ALLOCINE: 3.4
de Andrea Segre
Sur une île de la lagune vénitienne, un pêcheur fait la connaissance d'une jeune chinoise...
On an island of the laguna of Venice, a fisherman meets a young Chinese girl...
Pour les amateurs de cinéma poétique, cette belle évocation de l'exil et du déracinement, par un cinéaste au regard généreux.
For the lovers of poetic cinema this lovely evocation of exile and separation by a film artist of generous sensibility.
DIAS DE GRACIA (Days of Grace) ALLOCINE: 2.6
(Described now in Filmleaf CANNES 2011 thread here (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3060-CANNES-2011-%2811-22-May%29/page2#post27985))
de Everardo Gout
Une mise en scène explosive qui rappelle les débuts d'Alejandro Inarritu ! Une vraie révélation, qui dribble entre trois coupes du monde de football pour nous renvoyer une réalité sociale mexicaine très très chaude...
Explosive filmmaking that recalls the early work of Alejandro Inarritu! A real revelation that dribbles between three soccer world cup competitions to reveal a very, very hot Mexican social reality.

MK2, the other theatrical distributor, lists these June 13, 2012 releases:

SOIRÉE COURTS MÉTRAGES : QUÉBEC GOLD 2011 (Quebec Gold 2011): Short Film Evening
de avec ...
Québec Gold 11, programme composè par l’association "Prends ça court !", réunit une sélection..
SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN ALLOCINE: 3.3
(We know this one.)
MARLEY (Kevin Macdonald) ALLOCINE: 3.5
(This already released in the US.)
EL CAMPO ALLOCINE: 2.9
de Hernán Belón
Elisa et Santiago achètent une maison de campagne et s'y rendent avec leur fille de 2 ans pour...
Elsa and Santiago buy a country house and go there with their two-year-old daughter to....
STUDIOPHILO : SPÉCIAL BAC (Philo Studio: Graduation Special)
de Ollivier Pourriol
Mettez toutes les chances de votre côté, en assistant aux séances spéciales de révision du.
Put all chance aside while attending special exam cramming sessions. (This is a series of presentations by a TV personality with film clips shown in movie theaters for students preparing for their final exams in philosophy.)
LA GRAMMAIRE INTERIEURE (Intimate Grammar) ALLOCINE: 2.3
de Nir Bergman avec Yehuda Almagor Orly Silbersatz BanaiRoee Elsberg...
Un quartier de Jérusalem au début des années 60. Aharon Kleinfeld, est un garçon de onze ans, à à l’imagination débordante et dont l’esprit aspire au raffinement et à l’art. ..
A Jerusalem neighborhood in the early Sixties. Aharon Kleinfeld is an 11-year-old boy with a rich imagination and a spirit incluned to delicacy and art..
(2010 film by the Israeli director of BROKEN WINGS. Has been in fests but no US release.)
JE SENS LE BEAT QUI MONTE EN MOI (i Feel the Beat Rising in Me) ALLOCINE: 4.2
de Yann Le Quellec avec Véronique Hervouet Rosalba Torres GuerreroSerge Bozon...
Rosalba, jeune guide touristique, souffre d’une affection étrange : la moindre mélodie provoque chez elle une gesticulation et elle se met à danser, de façon aussi subite qu’incontrôlable. Malgré ses ruses pour cacher son excentricité, ce corps indomptable pourrait bien séduire son surprenant collègue Alain
Young tour guide Rosalba suffers from a strange affliction: any hint of a tune sets her in motion and she begins dancing fast and incontrollably. Despite her efforst to hide this oddity this indomitable body seduces her surprised colleague Alain.
This is a musical. .

Other releases listed on ALLOCINE:

Trishna ALLOCINE: 2.3
De Michael Winterbottom
Avec Freida Pinto, Riz Ahmed
This is a contempo adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d"Urbervilles set in India.
"The story of the tragic relationship between the son of a property developer and the daughter of an auto rickshaw owner."
Bangkok Renaissance NO ALLOCINE PRESS RATING.
De Jean-Marc Minéo
Avec Jon Foo, Caroline Ducey
A French-Thai martial arts actioner in which a kids witnesses the killing of his parents and then becomes an action hero to avenge them, or just because a bullet to the brain causes ataraxia, and he feels no emotion. This is shown with an English soundtrack and French subtitles. Very contemporary.
80 jours (80 Days) ALLOCINE: 3.
De Jon Garaño, José Mari Goenaga
Avec Itziar Aizpuru, Mariasun Pagoaga
In the Spanish and Basque languages.
Axun, une femme de 70 ans se rend à l'hôpital pour s'occuper de l'ex-mari de sa fille. Elle découvre que la femme qui s'occupe du malade du lit voisin est Maïté, sa meilleure amie d'adolescence. Elles profitent de leurs retrouvailles jusqu'à ce que Axun s'aperçoive que Maïté est plutôt attirée par les femmes... Chacune devra alors affronter des sentiments divergents.
Axun, a 70-year-old woman, goes to a hospital to care for her daughter's ex-husband. She discovers that the woman tending to the patient in the next bed is Maïté, who was her best friend when they were in their teens. The two of them will have to deal with conflicting feelings.
et noter
CASSOS ALLOCINE: 3.0
De Philippe Carrèse
Avec Didier Bénureau, Simon Astier
A provincial insurance investigator wants to kill off his ball-buster wife, gets coaching from a gangster and becomes a dangerous individual.
THE SITTER ALLOCINE: 1.3
David Gordon Green
Previous US release.

Chris Knipp

06-13-2012, 03:41 PM

Other recent Paris releases. ALLOCINE ratings.

COSMOMPOLIS (Cronenberg, Cannes competition) was released in Paris May 25 and received an ALLOCINE rating of 3.6.
SUR LA ROUTE (On the Road, Salles, Cannes competition)) was released May 23 and received an ALLOCINE rating of 3.
MOONRISE KINGDOM has an ALLOCINE RATING OF 3.7.
BUS 678, the Egyptian film reviewed in New Directors, was released May 30 and received an ALLOCINE rating of 3.2
THE AVANGERS (April 25) got ALLOCINE 4.
MARGIN CALL was released May 2 (whowing while I was there) and got an ALLOCINE rating of 4.0
L'ENFANT D'EN HAUT/SISTER got an ALLOCINE rating of 3.6.

tabuno

06-23-2012, 12:16 AM

Just saw Moonrise Kingdom about an hour ago and it's easily my top movie of the first half of 2012! Refreshing and reminiscent of A Christmas Story (1983), Stand By Me (1986), and Juno (2007). This movie really stands out for its use of visuals, stylish acting and comedy, and storytelling, this decade's contemporary fairy tale.

Chris Knipp

06-23-2012, 02:07 AM

Glad to hear that you liked it, tabuno. For me now MOONNRISE KINGDOM and OSLO, AUGUST 31 (also showing, unfortunately in far fewer venues) are my top choices of the moment. ROCK OF AGES seemed too bad even to review. I enjoyed SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED, which just opened in this area today, and which I think shows real originality and charm, though it may just be that it's so much better than the incredibly lame and boring SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD and the stupid, incoherent ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER. SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED is a true indie film, avoiding the more obvious crowd-pleasing clichés. I will publish a review of it very shortly.

Johann

07-03-2012, 08:57 AM

I also watched Moonrise Kingdom. Great movie. A classic.
Funny, with mesmerizing sets and beautiful camerawork.
You don't see movies like this too often.
Too in-your-face for some but for me it was great.
Ed Norton, Bill Murray, Harvey Keitel, Bruce Willis and 2 amazing kids in the lead roles.
Great cast- par for the course for Wes Anderson.
RUN to see this one.

Chris Knipp

07-03-2012, 09:23 AM

Glad you got to see -- and loved -- it. I agree with you. I think it will stand as a classic and one of Anderson's best.

The Amazing Spider-Man begins today -- in Canada as well as the US & eight or nine other countries, apparently. Looking forward to seeing how Garfield does it. Good summer fare, from reports.

Johann

07-04-2012, 08:22 AM

MOONRISE KINGDOM really was a treat to watch.
It's a classic. Right out of the gate. I knew it with the opening scenes.
Hilarious and unique movie thru and thru.

Kaw-Liga was a wooden Indian. Made of knotty pine.
Man, seeing that kid in his canoe, fleeing the scouts, loaded for bear- I laughed hard.
Hank Williams on the soundtrack. Wow. The romance between the two kids was priceless.
His corn-cob pipe, they way they dance, his telling her to "continue" when she reads to him- it's a heart-tugger.

Romance like those two have is light years better than Twilight or any other Rom-Com.
I believed in their love. Their little slice of camping heaven was torn down by dowdy parents- Capulet and Montague style.

Viva Passione!

Chris Knipp

07-04-2012, 11:11 AM

Splendid statement, Johann. Vivid praise. Thank you! You bring this amazing piece of work back to life. I need to see it again soon.

Chris Knipp

07-04-2012, 12:00 PM

Several new releases in Paris this week. Our two American hits, THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN and TO ROME WITH LOVE, were not well received by the French critics but a tiny indie picture shot in Mississippi, unreleased here, did well critically. Highest honors went to the edgy and wildly surreal French film, in competition at Cannes, Leos Carax's HOLY MOTORS.

À l'affiche cette semaine... [some of these are UGC blurbs]
Bons plans
HOLY MOTORS
de Leos Carax
Une ode au cinéma et aux comédiens, par l'enfant maudit du cinéma français. Un des films remarqués du Festival de Cannes, cette année.
"An ode to the movies and actors, by the bad boy of French cinema. One of the most talked about films of the Cannes Film Festival this year."
This is the one that Mike D'Angelo rated through the roof and talked a lot about.
ALLOCINÉ rating 4.2. Higher than any of the others I just listed, of which the highest was THE AVENGERS (4.0).

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN
de Marc Webb
Changement de casting mais toujours aussi spectaculaire. Laissez-vous prendre dans sa toile!
"New cast but just as spectacular as ever. Let yourself be caught in his web!"
The Paris critics have not been enthusiastic about the new SPIDER-MAN.
ALLOCINÉ: 2.9. Ouch! Even ON THE ROAD got 3.0. They felt it needed to be more original and astounding to compete with the Sam Raimi films and found this retreeam limited and lacking in boldness. A few felt the warmth of the romance and admired Garfield.

A PART DES ANGES
[Engish title: THE ANGEL'S SHARE]
de Ken Loach
[UGC email:] Nous vous rappelons notre valeur sûre de la semaine dernière. L'insubmersible Ken Loach est toujours au rendez-vous, alliant avec maestria engagement social et humour.
"We remind you of our good value from last week. The indomintable Ken Loach is always on hand, masterfully matching social consciousness and humor."
ALLOCINÉ: 3.4
This did well at Cannes but Mike D'Angelo felt it was overrated there. His Tweet on it: "The Angels' Share (Loach): 56. Puckish light commercial comedy with some big laughs and a Hollywood-ready contrived plot. Mild fun."

TO ROME WITH LOVEA
de Woody Allen
ALLOCINÉ: 2.7.
Again, ouch! Looks like the French have abandoned their adored Woody this time. LES INROCKUPTIBLES calls this "the laziest of Woody's Euromovies." They have not received our American hits well this week.

INSIDE by Andrés Baiz. Thriller in Spanish from Colombia.
ALLOCINÉ 3.0.
Some viewed it as a standard thriller that tells a tense tale but keeps the social background and characgter development too thin. The English titles of this is THE HIDDEN FACE, Spanish, LA CARA OCCULTA (The Dark Side) . Summary: "A Spanish orchestra conductor deals with the mysterious disappearance of his girlfriend."

SUMMERTIME by Matthew Gordon.
An indie "southern Gothic" American coming-of-ager set in Mississippi, No US release yet. This was reviewed by VARIETY at the Berlinale Feb. 2011 and he wrote, "A low-key cousin to films like Ballast' and 'Shotgun Stories' pic captures the rhythm and texture of its environment but is too understated in the telling, owing largely to an ensemble of non-pro locals who look the part but lack the charisma to make us care. "
ALLOCINÉ: 3.5.
Described as a "promising debut."

Johann

07-04-2012, 01:26 PM

Wes Anderson's newest is the best film I've seen so far this year.
It's a lock for a Best Picture nomination. Even now in July.
It's an amazing movie, alright.
A match struck in a dark cave.
My faith in cinema is always tested, but movies like this one bring it all back home.

I had a grin or a smile or a smirk on my face for the entire movie.

Chris Knipp

07-04-2012, 04:21 PM

I was grinning all through, or smiling. It does that, makes you smile.
It is the best American film of 2012 so far, and I don't know what competition it will have. I need to start a "Best Movies of 2012...so far" list.

Here it is:

BEST MOVIES OF 2012 SO FAR (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3304-Best-movies-of-2012-so-far&p=28097#post28097)

Chris Knipp

10-25-2012, 12:51 AM

Released Oct. 6, 2012 in NYC. This has 16 reviews listed on Metacritic and a collective rating of 81. That puts it in the top 30 or so critically rated films of the year. Of narrative features it's one of a much smaller number.

The official US trailer of SISTER is on YouTube here. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIw2ARdPGmw) Exclusive clip from the film here. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=-Z5YXHmeYxU&feature=endscreen)

Jeff Lipsky's Adopt Films is the US distributor. Check out Adopt Film's rolling release schedul (http://www.adoptfilms.net/sister)e throughout the US and see if it is coming to your area.

Make every effort to see this great film.

Note Kacey Mottet Klein was in Meier's first film HOME, he had never acted and was discovered for this film, and she liked him so much she decided to write a film for him and that became L'ENFANT D'EN HAUT (SISTER). He was 8 in HOME and 12 when they made SISTER.

http://imageshack.us/a/img141/129/kaceymottetkleindsc0594.jpg
Kacey at an early public appearance after
the release of HOME.

Jeff Lipsky is hoping that SISTER will be Switzerland's entry for the Best Foreign Oscar and they will campaign for Agnes Godard to be nominated for Best Cinematographer. If she won she would be the first woman to win this award.

http://imageshack.us/a/img248/8825/52274536620033675913711.jpg
From Facebook, Kacey in front of a poster of his film. Probably in Paris at the time of release there.