Cannes 2016

[Trees]

NEON ratings fell through the floor after that press screening.

[Alphonse Tram]

Wow, the Penn seems to have gone down well!

"Sean Penn's THE LAST FACE: worst in show. Preening business-class aid effort. Palme d'Or for arm-twisting. Oscar for sanctimony"

"Sean Penn's THE LAST FACE would have worked better as a charity single."

"Penn is your Facebook friend who keeps posting photos of himself smiling with black children. This is the album that drives you to block him"

"THE LAST FACE: Liberian warlords are a slightly greater menace than Sean Penn, but it's close. Either way, this is a crime against humanity."

"Sean Penn's THE LAST FACE: awful. Pompous romance with human suffering as wallpaper. Pleads empathy with Africa. Zero real black characters."

[domino harvey]

I'm not surprised, the Gunman was likewise tone deaf and brain dead on similarly Important social matters and that wasn't even Penn fully at the reins

[Trees]

Penn squandered one of the best pieces of non-fiction intellectual property in the last 25 years, Into the Wild. That was all I needed to know about him as a director.

[Finch]

"Penn is your Facebook friend who keeps posting photos of himself smiling with black children. This is the album that drives you to block him"

That was hilarious.

Keeping fingers crossed for a warm reception for Elle.

[beamish13]

Keeping fingers crossed for a warm reception for Elle.

Same here. Beyond Hollow Man, though, Verhoeven has never disappointed me, so I'm incredibly excited.

[colinr0380]

The rather blunt Sean Penn approach to filmmaking seemed apparent as early as the segment he directed for the September 11 film, in which Ernest Borgnine (who really saves the segment) plays a widower living literally in the shadows of dementia denial until the destruction of the Twin Towers lets light into his apartment, allowing him to mourn the passing of his wife as the scales fall from his eyes. After that, I couldn't imagine ever being shocked by heavy handed metaphors in a Sean Penn film again!

[Finch]

The Pledge was good, though.

[beamish13]

The Pledge was good, though.

Indeed. The Indian Runner is an absolute classic, and Into the Wild is phenomenal.

[Finch]

Couple of sales news:

Toni Erdmann sold to Soda Pictures for the UK and Sony Pictures Classics in the US; Sony also bought Verhoeven's Elle and the Studio Ghibli co-production The Red Turtle which got great reviews in the UCR section.

Artificial Eye/Curzon have pre-bought Lars von Trier's upcoming serial killer film The House That Jack Built.

Amazon bought US rights for Ashgar Fahardi's The Salesman.

Strand Releasing bought Alain Guiraudie’s "Staying Vertical.

A24 bought American Honey, the new Arnold, in the US; Focus Features in other territories.

[Finch]

Neon Demon press conference in which Refn says Lars Von Trier "is over the hill"

[Trees]

Neon Demon press conference in which Refn says Lars Von Trier "is over the hill"

That press conference is pretty strong evidence that it's probably better to take the Terrence Malick approach and keep your mouth shut and let your work speak for itself. Embarrassing.

[jojo]

Neon Demon press conference in which Refn says Lars Von Trier "is over the hill"

That press conference is pretty strong evidence that it's probably better to take the Terrence Malick approach and keep your mouth shut and let your work speak for itself. Embarrassing.

I don't know, going from that article it seems more like there's an element of playfulness to their jabs at each other.

[FrauBlucher]

Amazon bought US rights for Ashgar Fahardi's The Salesman.

Cohen Film Group is handling theatrical distribution for Amazon and probably blu/DVD as well.

[Trees]

Neon Demon press conference in which Refn says Lars Von Trier "is over the hill"

That press conference is pretty strong evidence that it's probably better to take the Terrence Malick approach and keep your mouth shut and let your work speak for itself. Embarrassing.

I don't know, going from that article it seems more like there's an element of playfulness to their jabs at each other.

Watch the video. Cringe-worthy. #-o

[Forrest Taft]

Ugh. Refn reminds me of Miguel Ferrer in the executive bathroom scene in Robocop.

[Alphonse Tram]

It looks like The Last Face has the dubious honour of being the lowest ever rated film on the Screen International critics grid. By contrast, it seems Toni Erdmann may be the highest ever recorded?

[yoshimori]

Done. Summary of my favorites below.

Recommendable, at least in some way: Refn, Jarmusch, Ade
Interestingish: Fukada, Serra
Watchable: Puiu, Mackenzie, Bellocchio, Verhoeven, Guiraudie, Dardennes
The rest were, for me, either meh, weak, embarrassing, unseen, or impossible to assess.

Overall, I’d say this year’s fest was disappointing given the promise of the line-up (see, above all, Arnold, Dumont), but on par with the (poor) recent iterations. Still, nothing at the level of P'tit Quinquin (my 2015 favorite) or Post Tenebras Lux (2012), or even Only God Forgives (2013) or Chronic (2014).

[nosy lena]

happy to see that Elle is getting good reviews, excited to see it.

[Finch]

Glad and happy about the good reception, apparently, for Elle. Paul Verhoeven getting the Palme D'Or for Best Director? Pretty please?

Indiewire: “the 77-year-old filmmaker has delivered his most contained work in years, a dark comedy about sexual urges and other passions closer in form to 1973’s Turkish Delight than anything he’s made since.”

HR: “It’s as if Michael Haneke woke up one morning, took his funny pills, and decided to make a sadistic French farce,” writes Jordan Mintzer in the Hollywood Reporter, “and the result is a movie that will finally bring Verhoeven back into the spotlight after a decade-long absence.”

Elle “opens up with a sexual assault and then cleans off the blood ahead of a posh restaurant dinner,” writes the Guardian‘s Xan Brooks. “‘I suppose I was raped,’ Michelle (Isabelle Huppert) casually remarks to her friends… Playing the role of Michele Leblanc, a moneyed Paris games executive, Huppert gives a performance of imperious fury, holding the audience at bay, almost goading us to disown her. Audaciously, Elle presents her not so much as a victim but as the casualty of a world she is very much a part of; maybe (still more troublingly) an accessory to. Inside her sleek office, Michele strolls disinterestedly past a scantily-clad model striking a brutalized pose. Her top-selling game allows its user to take the role of a hulking orc rapist, penetrating a damsel from behind with a snaking tentacle…. Elle is uproarious, galvanic and guaranteed to spark debate.”

PS.: Slant Magazine's critic is also very impressed

[Finch]

Looking at the graph above, what on earth is the distinction between poor and bad? Are they talking about films they thought bad and films they actively hated? If so, the terms used needed to be clearer.

Also, they should have only picked one critic per country, and that would have allowed for a truer representation of the spectrum of critics.

[Andrew_VB]

That said, it does seem like the Mungiu stock has risen a bit, from slightly below average to slightly above. [It's sixth place, now, on the micropsia and rurban polls; fifth on the Screen jury grid, for example.] I myself found it to be watchable, but hardly memorable, on par with his other work, fwiw.

that's how i felt about the mungiu too. it wasn't bad, but i didn't find it as compelling as either of his other films which were each my favorite of their respective years.

[Oedipax]

I really loved Rester Vertical, it's easily my favorite out of the six films I've seen so far. A wonderfully bizarre and absurdist take on parental anxiety and (unsuccessfully) repressed sexuality, a bit like Guiraudie's riff on Eraserhead with the world of two new parents growing progressively more strange and unfamiliar. Somehow it manages to feel truthful and emotionally engaging even as the events grow more and more ridiculous and untethered from any kind of recognizable reality. The only film from the festival so far that I'm itching to see again.

La fille inconnue I also thought was quite good - much better than the reviews had led me to expect. It's rather understated, but the emotion is certainly there, just not heightened in the traditionally expected manner. It's weird that people have described it in terms of flatness and affectlessness, as if that were automatically a negative. It's not even as flat as Bresson, for instance; it simply feels closer to how such events might actually occur in real life. No grand moments of emotional catharsis, even when those moments arrive - the moment passes and the world carries on. Thematically I take it as being about guilt, the guilty conscience of Europe, where no one seems to be directly to blame and yet everyone is somehow implicated. It's also about kindness and helping others, how the act of helping someone in need can be simple sometimes and others, quite complex. It's lovely how much emotional complexity the Dardennes manage to wring out of the simple act of Jenny tapping the sleep button on her iPhone.

La Tortue Rouge starts off well enough (beautiful mix of animation styles from scene to scene and even within the same frame), but eventually runs out of steam as its attempt at wordless universality ultimately falls a bit short, at least for me. A classic case of wanting to like something more than I really did.

Aquarius was somewhat underwhelming, though it's a perfectly decent film. It does overstay its welcome quite a bit, not really justifying its epic three-part structure with any major sense of resolution or insight by its end. For me, the film goes to great lengths maintaining a certain ambiguity about Clara's situation; is she in the right, or is she in the wrong? Has she stagnated or is she upholding tradition? Does the development represent the change she has resisted making in her life, or simply capital running ram-shod over the little guy? Ultimately, the film gives us a clear and pointed signal that becomes more of a political point (one I happen to fully sympathize with) than any major character insight. In fact, it more or less erases the ambiguity and complexity Filho spends the bulk of the film building up.

The Handmaiden was very energetically made, easy on the eyes, but ultimately a somewhat unsuccessful riff on the narrative shuffling Tarantino so often trades in: long acts, jumps in time, shifting perceptions of characters' intentions throughout, seeing the same events from multiple perspectives, each time given a different meaning by the additional insights we're given. All that is fine enough, but the film's attempts to shock with de Sadean depravity end up rather underwhelming, and while the film's use of two strong female leads is presumably meant to be empowering, the film still carries a strong whiff of male fantasy. It's not every day a happy ending involves a nude lesbian make-out and postcard shots of the moon and the sea with ben-wah balls clanging triumphantly on the soundtrack. Gutsy, perhaps, but the ending (like the ben-wah balls) rang false to me.

Lastly, Julieta, a perfectly good Almodovar film that is, if not quite up to the heights of his best work, certainly a step in the right direction and a welcome return for Almodovar (as the French pull-quote has it) to making intimate portraits of women. Beautiful color cinematography, sharp editing, and a very successful handoff between the two leads portraying the same character.

[Black Hat]

I remember reading Cannes was planning to do a tribute to Prince, does anybody know what it was or attend?

[domino harvey]

Holy shit, that Toni Erdmann snub has to be one of the biggest Cannes shockers in recent memory