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mfunk9786 wrote:"Just buy the rights, what's the worst that could happen?" - Mark Cuban

domino harvey wrote:If the jury has any integrity, they'll award Von Trier any of the prizes just to spite such an unbelievably stupid overreaction

MichaelB wrote:(Granted, at {Kaurismaki's} worst - Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses - he's borderline unwatchable).

MichaelB wrote:the blink-and-you'll-miss-it final shot of Lights in the Dusk where he turns the film's entire mood on its head in less than a second.

knives wrote:

MichaelB wrote:the blink-and-you'll-miss-it final shot of Lights in the Dusk where he turns the film's entire mood on its head in less than a second.

Well I sure as hell missed it. How could he have turned it around from that extreme?

"Don't look at the surfaces," says Dr. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) during one of the more sane moments in Pedro Almodóvar's fantastically nutty The Skin I Live In. His words sum up Almodóvar's core motif: the organic relationship between layers of emotion and trauma. The Spanish director melds his consistent themes of conflicted sexual identity, family struggle, and interconnected paths with an unsettling combination of warm compositions and sinister desires. The combination is unsettling and fascinating.(...)While many have deemed The Skin I Live In beautiful but hollow, the assertion ignores the fact that Almodóvar insists on reveling in multiple façades despite the consequence. The outlandish dialogue, the obsessive focus on video monitors, and the juxtaposition of multiple faces in any one frame proves Almodóvar's law of surface-level desire. There's also paintings covering Ledgard's mansion, all contorting limbs and faceless bodies, ciphers trying to regain their slipping identity. The Skin I Live In constructs a colorful and dynamic purgatory for the fragmented human versions of these drawings, men and women gracefully sliding toward a rude mental awakening. There descent is intoxicating.

After seeing his impotent and droll remake, Hara-kiri: Death of a Samurai, it's clear Takashi Miike understands little to nothing about what made the original so sharp. His textured but hollow 3D adaptation changes small but key plot elements, disavows the original's pressurized pacing, and eliminates the mystical qualities of the story's bookend sequences. Miike seems to be lost in a forest of iconography, unwilling to engage the complex ideas forming their foundation. Once the film jettisons backward in time to investigate the man's vengeful motivations, it's easy to pinpoint where Miike goes terribly wrong. Instead of structuring the labyrinthine story like a mystery (as the original masterfully does), he proposes the entire flashback sequence as an extended and sluggish melodrama. This decision resolutely brings the entire momentum of the film to a sudden halt. While Kobsayashi jumps back and forth in time to juxtapose the rage causing this fractured perspective, Miike is more interested in conventional and laborious cause and effect. (...)Coming off the invigorating 13 Assassins remake, Mike's complete and utter failure is by far the most disappointing revelation at Cannes. My belly hurts.

Nothing wrote:Poor Lee Chang Dong! Wanted to give the Critics' Week Prize, bravely, to Snowtown, but was neutered by hs jury, including two of the worst journalists in the business, Scott Foundas and Nick James...

Nothing wrote:Lee Chang-dong was President of the SDLC Jury this year.

knives wrote:Pardon the ignorance, but what exactly did Kusturica do? The best I can find is that he's made and been involved with a lot of propaganda films.

mfunk9786 wrote:Replace "drunk" with "stupid" and you've got it.