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It's Ivens' 12 hour long doc on China, commissioned by Zhou En-Lai, then prime minister of China, for exhibition to a Western audience. One of Michael Glowagger's top ten films, rest in peace.

Dunno why the Cannes version is so short (or listed in the fiction section) except that the film is divided up in to many semi-discrete sections.

The IMDb runtime would appear to be more or less correct. This was a 12-hour-plus film consisting of various features and shorts. The Monthly Film Bulletin breakdown is as follows, though apparently some other listings differ...

A Woman, A Family (105 mins)
Rehearsal at the Peking Opera (32 mins)
The Fishing Village (102 mins)
The Football Incident - High School 31 (20 mins)
Behind the Scenes of the Peking Circus (16 mins)
Shanghai/The Drug Store (81 mins)
An Army Camp (57 mins)
Traditional Handicrafts (15 mins)
The Generator Factory (129 mins)
Professor Tsien (13 mins)
The Oilfields (87 mins)
Impressions of a City - Shanghai (6 mins)

As a Cineteca di Bologna supporter, I have mixed feelings about the new restorations scheduled for Cannes. Tag Gallagher has already pointed out some controversy about Angst, whose Italian version wasn't directly supervised by Rossellini. But I am also worried about the three Sergio Leone films. As a matter of fact, the 2009 Cineteca di Bologna restoration of The Good, the Bad, the Ugly had major issues concerning the soundtrack (Morricone's score was also inadvertedly altered), and I wonder if this new resto is going to fix this (Bologna never acknowledged the problems existed). Moreover, in 2007 Cineteca Nazionale already did a beautiful restoration of A Fistful of Dollars, using 2k resolution and Fuji 8511RDI film stock (budget: 300.000 €). Since the film was shot in low resolution Techniscope, I am not sure the new 4k format will actually improve the picture quality. Also, since legal issues prevented access to the 2007 restoration, I am also concerned about the soundtrack: in 2007, Morricone and his personal sound designer reconstructed the 1964 mono mix working on the original sound elements, but who is doing the new Bologna restoration?

FerdinandGriffon wrote:It's Ivens' 12 hour long doc on China, commissioned by Zhou En-Lai, then prime minister of China, for exhibition to a Western audience. One of Michael Glowagger's top ten films, rest in peace.

Out of curiosity, what are the other films in his top 10? (A quick google search doesn't help). Have only seen his Workingman's Death, but that's still one of my favourite documentaries of the last 10 years.

Also, IIRC two parts of that Ivens doc are on the big dvd box set.

kuzine wrote:Out of curiosity, what are the other films in his top 10?

Vivan las Antipodas!, Victor Kossakovsky
The Age of the Earth, Glauber Rocha
All of My Life, Bruce Baillie
Come And See, Elem Klimov
Fata Morgana, Werner Herzog
Forest of Bliss, Robert Gardner
How Yukong Moved the Mountains, Joris Ivens/Marceline Loridan Ivens
In The Mood For Love, Wong Kar Wai
Mothlight, Stan Brakhage
Unsere Afrikareise, Peter Kubelka

Peter Becker is on the Un Certain Regard jury this year.

The opening film, Grace of Monaco, is an embarrassment to the festival and most involved. Sub Lifetime-TV-movie script. Kidman looks uncomfortable, graceless throughout, clearly in need of some direction -- and who thought it was a good idea to cast as Kelly someone as icey cold as she? And even Eric Gaultier's images are often poorly lit and amateurishly framed. The kind of movie that gets off on having found Maria Callas, Alfred Hitchcock, and Charles de Gaulle kinda-look-alikes. Hissed at this morning's press screening.

And the hissing continues in print: Guardian, Sight & Sound, Screen Daily, doubtless many others.

The Guardian review is hilarious

I really dislike a majority of biopics. And this one sounds truly awful.

yoshimori wrote:Kidman looks uncomfortable, graceless throughout, clearly in need of some direction -- and who thought it was a good idea to cast as Kelly someone as icey cold as she?

I thought she would be great casting actually as I never found Kelly (or at least her public persona) particularly warm or inviting. As far as it being an "embarrassment"...well, we've seen Cannes screen many embarrassments and they often are the award winners. Anyway, I just hope this experience will encourage Dahan to release his original, supposedly pitch dark first "director's cut". That's the one I want to see. Hard to imagine how much more of an embarrassment the Weinstein version would have been. I guess we'll find out.

The Sight & Sound review linked above claims that was Dahan's cut that screened.

The S&S review also points out that Dominik Moll's Lemming was an opener once. Totally perplexing, as the film never had superb commercial prospects, even on paper, and is (for all it's oddness and sparseness) slick, pretentious garbage. I wonder why that happened.

Presumably the acclaim for Moll's previous film Harry, He's Here To Help and the long wait for a new film led to that? Plus the presence of Charlotte Rampling? Isn't the opener more about kicking things off with a bang with known quantities? If Star Wars Episode III can be an opener, I don't see why Lemming couldn't.

Peter Bradshaw wrote:I can now actually imagine a creepy science-fiction short story about someone going back to prehistoric days in a time machine, killing a tiny trilobite, and then coming to the present to find everything the same, only now it's Naomi Watts playing Grace and Nicole Kidman playing Diana.

I'd actually quite like to see the alternate universe films in which Watts and Kidman swap roles between scenes in the style of that Bob Dylan film! Though as ever The Simpsons got there first in an episode in which Marge feels so glamorous that she says that she feels like "Princess Di and Princess Grace smashed together!"

Soothsayer wrote:The Sight & Sound review linked above claims that was Dahan's cut that screened.

This article indicates that there is a third cut, an earlier one, prior to the fight with Weinstein:

(Dahan's original director's cut was far darker than either cut and is no longer in play.)

colinr0380 wrote:Presumably the acclaim for Moll's previous film Harry, He's Here To Help and the long wait for a new film led to that? Plus the presence of Charlotte Rampling? Isn't the opener more about kicking things off with a bang with known quantities? If Star Wars Episode III can be an opener, I don't see why Lemming couldn't.

I dunno, a surefire commercial barnstormer like a Star Wars movie seems like a much more obvious choice to me than a modestly scaled and somewhat glacial third feature by a semi-acclaimed maybe-auteur. And isn't Charlotte Rampling an expected, overfamiliar presence in Euro-pudding these days?

Edit: Oddly enough, a forum search showed that the only board member to have ever praised Rampling's performance in Lemming was yours truly, a performance that I now have no recollection whatsoever of. Shows how certain films sour in the memory.

Mike D'Angelo on the first and second day of Cannes

Chuffed to see such warm reactions to Mr. Turner across the board. Has got to be a strong contender for one of the main prizes.

It already sounds like a leader for Best Actor, no?

Yes, was thinking that as well. Unless there are a handful more great films coming up, it might even be up for the Palme D'Or or Mike Leigh for Best Director. Bill Pope's cinematography looks stunning as well. Sony Pictures Classics already bought the US rights prior to Cannes so this bodes well for a Blu-Ray in early 2015.

Spall was excellent -- lots of top-quality grunting. And Pope was at his best. For my money though, the movie could've used a bit more focus, was maybe 45 minutes too long. And a couple of the major side characters, like Turner's housekeeper/FB, were badly cast or directed. Lots of very pretty pictures here, but I don't feel I need to see the film again.

The Sissako was probably his best, fwiw. The first two Un certain regard features, Party Girl and That Lovely Girl, however …

Atom Egoyan must be hoping that other critics like The Captive more than Peter Bradshow did.

Yikes, sounds like two high profile misses in a row for Egoyan. That review makes it hard to believe any movie with that plot could be any good

Geoff Andrew on THE CAPTIVE via Twitter: "Atom Egoyan’s The Captive a complex, sometimes tense drama about paedophile kidnapping: heavy on metaphor and distancing irony." Hmm...

A Fistful of Dollars will be screened at Cannes 67, but the new so-called "restoration" has given rise to some controversy, since this masterpiece had already been properly restored in 2007. Here a press release by Ripley's Film:
http://www.facebook.com/notes/ripleys-h ... 5272305056

It’s not enough to present a masterpiece from the past -- not in the society of the “event.” Some piece of news has to be built around it. A film, at least, needs to have been just restored. What if it didn’t need to be restored? If it has already been restored? That’s no big thing. The frenzy of the scoop has no memory. As often happens, A Fistful of Dollars has now been “re-restored” by the CINETECA DI BOLOGNA for a presentation at the Festival de Cannes.

There are some obvious second thoughts about the use of public funds to “save” films whose safety has been already guaranteed for a long time rather than to save others that would arouse less media attention. Beyond these thoughts, it remains to be said that Sergio Leone’s masterpiece, restored years ago by RIPLEY’S FILM and CENTRO SPERIMENTALE DI CINEMATOGRAFIA - CINETECA NAZIONALE, was already presented at the opening of the 64th Venice Film Festival in 2007, playing to broad media coverage. The difference is that then the restoration was done on the film philologically – i.e. respecting not only the content of the work but also the support that it was put on originally, as must be done for a work of art.

Mike D'Angelo's second Cannes report

He's disappointed with The Captive as well:

The Captive combines the most pretentious aspects of an art movie with the dumbest aspects of a thriller, and is doomed to satisfy neither audience. (A24 just picked it up for U.S. distribution, though, so you’ll have a chance to see for yourself.) It’s hard, I must admit, to see how anything other than misplaced loyalty could have inspired its selection for Cannes.