Cannes Film Festival
‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona’ Reviews
This 61st Cannes Festival is marked by Woody Allen’s return to the Croisette to present his latest film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, starring Scarlett Johansson, Penelope Cruz, Rebecca Hall and Javier Bardem, out of Competition. The quintessential Manhattan director is a veteran of the official selection, with Match Point (2005), Hollywood Ending (2002), New York Stories (1989), Radio Days (1987), Hannah and her Sisters (1986), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Broadway Danny Rose (1984), Bonjour Monsieur Lewis (1982), and Manhattan (1979).
As its title indicates, the story is set in the sizzling Catalonian capital. Vicky and Cristina, two young Americans with different attitudes towards love, have come to spend the summer in the Spanish sunshine. They find themselves swept up in a surprising series of sexual adventures with a charismatic artist, Juan Antonio, who is still bound to his ex-wife, the impetuous Maria Elena…
“When I began writing the script,” recalls Allen, “I had no other intention than to write a story in which Barcelona would be a key character. I wanted to spotlight a city I love a lot. In addition to its fabulous beauty, it is imbued with a very romantic atmosphere. Places like Paris or Barcelona are the only ones where a story like this one could be conceived.”
Regarding the casting, Woody Allen explained: “From time to time, in my professional life, I meet an actress whose qualities inspire me. Scarlett is very intelligent, sexy, and gifted, and she can play a wide range of parts. She also has a sharp wit, and comes up with verbal inventions that dazzle me. As for Penelope, she is a force of nature, like Maria Elena. She’s beautiful, and incredibly sexy in a way that is hers alone. And, of course, she’s an amazing actress. Obviously, I had everything I wanted.”
“The only parts of Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona that really and truly feel alive and crackling are the Spanish-language scenes between Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz. These two, portraying a pair of identically tempestuous, self-obsessed painters whose marriage has fallen apart due to an overabundance of heat and impulse and Spanish vinegar, are dynamite together. They create spark showers when they rage and taunt and rekindle their mutual hunger.” The problem? A “persistent, obnoxious, unwanted and thoroughly unnecessary narration track… There were boos.” writes Jeffrey Wells.
‘Blindness’ – Mixed Reviews
”Blindness may well be the bleakest curtain raiser in the history of the festival, a nightmarish parable of the apocalypse, directed by the Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Meirelles and just as impressive in its way as his career-making City of God.”
“Blindness is a drum-tight drama, with superb, hallucinatory images of urban collapse. It has a real coil of horror at its centre, yet lightened with finely judged touches of gentleness and even humour. It reminded me of George A Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids and Peter Shaffer’s absurdist stage-play Black Comedy, showing humanity groping in the darkness. This is bold and masterly filmmaking from Meirelles: popular entertainment with challenging ideas.” – The Guardian
“Blindness feels like a curious mix of highbrow literary aspirations and lowbrow genre fiction,” “It’d be easy to dismiss Blindness as Dawn of the Dead for NPR listeners or Outbreak for grad students…. But while Blindness can be faulted for many things, it also has to be respected for its ambition, craft, and effort; Blindness shows us a world of wide-eyed sightlessness, and it does so through a fierce vision that only occasionally loses focus.” – Cinematical
Variety finds it “an intermittently harrowing but diluted take on José Saramago’s shattering novel. Despite a characteristically strong performance by Julianne Moore as a lone figure who retains her eyesight, bearing sad but heroic witness to the horrors around her, Fernando Meirelles’ slickly crafted drama rarely achieves the visceral force, tragic scope and human resonance of Saramago’s prose.”
Cannes 05/16 – Arnaud Desplechin’s ‘A Christmas Tale’ and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s ‘Three Monkeys’
Arnaud Desplechin’s ‘A Christmas Tale’
In the first US sale of a Competition title at Cannes, Wild Bunch has sold Arnaud Desplechin’ s A Christmas Tale (Un conte de Noël) to IFC.
The family drama, which screens here on Friday, stars an ensemble cast including Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Amalric, Chiara Mastroianni, Emmanuelle Devos, Anne Consigny and Melvil Poupaud.
Arnaud Desplechin has made a movie rife with dire family secrets, ghosts and tortured survivors. “Un conte de Noël” is a wild Christmas story set in cold, provincial northern France.
Catherine Deneuve is regal Junon, the mother. She and her husband, Abel, played by Jean-Paul Roussillon, are having their children over for the holidays. Joseph, their youngest, died as a child of a rare genetic illness, but his memory hovers over the household. There is a daughter played by Anne Cosigny, who seems to live in perpetual mourning.
Then, there are the surviving sons and their women: Chiara Mastroianni plays the wife of Ivan, (Melvil Poupaud), and Emmanuelle Devos, a passing fancy of Henri, the tormented, unloved son, (Mathieu Amalric). His parents conceived him in the hope that, through a bone marrow transplant, he could save Joseph, but he failed, and thus failed to win their love. He has come home to wreak some havoc.
This Christmas celebration starts with a terrible conundrum: Junon discovers she has the same fatal disease that killed her son; she can only be saved by a transplant from somebody who shares the gene. Who will it be? It is Henri, the unloved son who has inherited his mother’s bad blood.
Junon tells him that she doesn’t love him. And Henri is not devastated because this is an old story: He is the child who survived, he can never make it.
The more devastating the declarations of the lack of love between parents and children, and among the siblings, the more you sense another current running through this family.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s ‘Three Monkeys’
A familiar name in Cannes, – he presented the short Cocoon in 1995 and feature films Distant in 2003 and Climates in 2006, all in Competition – Nuri Bilge Ceylan is back on the Croisette with a dramatic feature entitled Three Monkeys. With a plot loaded with the violence of complicated events, the Turkish director focuses on the four-member family, who want desperately to stay together by not confronting the truth, thus qualifying the film as a fable like ‘three monkeys’ from which the title was drawn.
We previously wrote about Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s ‘Üç Maymun‘ (Three Monkeys) HERE
41 Kung Fu Pandas – Jack Black at Cannes
The animated movie Kung Fu Panda with voices of Jack Black, Jackie Chan, Dustin Hoffman, Lucy Liu, Angelina Jolie had its premiere yesterday at Cannes Film Festival, out of competition, of course.
Jack Black and 40 Kung Fu Pandas kicked off the Cannes Film Festival yesterday, and here’s some photos:
‘Hunger’ – Steve McQueen – Cannes 2008
‘Hunger‘ is showing at the Cannes Film Festival 2008, opening the ‘Un Certain Regard‘ category, from British director Steve McQueen, the artist who hit the headlines recently with his design for a postage stamp that replaced the Queen’s head with the faces of soldiers killed in Iraq.
Turner Prize-winnng British artist Steve McQueen makes his big-screen debut with Hunger, an account of the 1981 hunger strike in Northern Ireland’s Maze prison.
The film follows the last six weeks in the life of Republican Bobby Sands, who died during the strike.
It plunges viewers into the world of the early 1980s H-Blocks uprising and of republican prisoner Bobby Sands (played with formidable force by Michael Fassbender), who died 66 days into a hunger strike.
The film depicts the hellish conditions in the prison, not only through the experiences of the hunger strikers but also through the prison wardens with whom they were in constant battle.
McQueen is best known for his film installations, which are usually projected on to gallery walls. One of the most famous of these is ‘Deadpan’, a recreation of a Buster Keaton stunt.
Synopsis:
Raymond Lohan wearily follows his normal routine: an ordinary man doing the job of a prison officer in the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland, 1981. Working within one of the infamous H-Blocks, where republican prisoners are on the Blanket and No-Wash protest, is a living hell for both prisoner and prison officer.
A young, new prisoner Davey Gillen is brought into this environment for the first time. Although terrified, Davey resolutely refuses to wear the prison uniform – he is no common criminal. So joining the Blanket protest, he shares a filthy cell with another ‘non-conforming’ republican prisoner Gerry Campbell. Gerry, hardened to the horrific realities of Maze life, guides Davey through the daily routine, he trains him how to smuggle items and exchange ‘comms’ (communications) with the outside world, passing them on to their H-Block leader Bobby Sands at Sunday Mass.
Cannes 2008 – Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir
Playing in the Official Selection, Israeli director Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir, a documentary about the Israeli Army mission in the first Lebanon War of 1982, is a major revelation.
Waltz with Bashir documents the struggle of the filmmaker, Ari Folman, to come to terms with the gaps in his memory surrounding the part he played in the first Lebanese war and the 1982 massacre of Palestinian civilians in the West Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.
An animation that is visually bold and politically combustible, it’s based on the director’s own experiences as a draftee soldier. The film begins with him confessing to a friend about a recurring nightmare in which he is chased by savage dogs. This is interpreted as being something to do with his military past, a past he has blocked out over subsequent decades.
Synopsis:
One night at a bar, an old friend tells director Ari about a recurring nightmare in which he is chased by 26 vicious dogs.
Every night, the same number of beasts.
The two men conclude that there’s a connection to their Israeli Army mission in the first Lebanon War of the early eighties.
Ari is surprised that he can’t remember a thing anymore about that period of his life.
Intrigued by this riddle, he decides to meet and interview old friends and comrades around the world. He needs to discover the truth about that time and about himself.
As Ari delves deeper and deeper into the mystery, his memory begins to creep up in surreal images…
Ari Folman – Director / Screenplay
Yoni Goodman – Animation
David Polonski – Cinematography
Max Richter – Music
Waltz With Bashir official site
Cannes: Arnaud Desplechin’s ‘A Christmas Tale’ is first competition sale to US
In the first US sale of a Competition title at Cannes, Wild Bunch has sold Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale to IFC.
The family drama, which screens here on Friday, stars an ensemble cast including Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Amalric, Chiara Mastroianni, Emmanuelle Devos, Anne Consigny and Melvil Poupaud.
Produced by Why Not, it will be released by Bac in France.
Furthermore, Wild Bunch has closed a Japan sale on Steven Soderbergh’s Che Guevara films to Nikkatsu – the double-feature is also running in Competition.
Deals on Ken Loach’s Eric Cantona-related project – reported yesterday – have closed with Icon in the UK, Diaphana in France and Bim in Italy.
Bim has also picked up Gaspar Noe’s Enter The Void and Radu Mihaileanu’s The Concert.
Also in Italy, Medusa has taken Woody Allen’s as-yet untitled new film starring Larry David and Evan Rachel Wood. Disney has picked up rights to Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo On The Cliff By The Sea in France and the US.
Separately, IFC announced it has taken US rights to Joshua Safdie’s Directors’ Fortnight comedy The Pleasure Of Being Robbed, which will get its international premiere here on May 23. IFC’s vice-president of acquisitions and production Arianna Bocco negotiated the deal with Josh Braun of Submarine Entertainment.
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