Cannes Winners: Romania Has Arrived!
5/27/2007 2:29:10 PM
Indiewire's got the full list of winners.
Palme d'Or: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, directed by Cristian Mungiu
Grand Prix (runner-up): The Mourning Forest (Mogari No Mori), directed by Naomi Kawase
Prix de la Mise en Scene (Best Director): Julian Schnabel for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le Scaphandre et Le Papillon)
Prix du 60th Anniversaire: Gus Van Sant, director of Paranoid Park
Prix du Scenario (Best Screenplay Award): Fatih Akin for The Edge of Heaven (Auf Der Anderen Siete)
Camera d'Or (For best first feature): Meduzot, directred by Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen
Camera d'Or Special Mention: Control, directed by Anton Corbijn
Prix du Jury (Jury Prize) (tie): Persepolis, directed by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud; and Stellet Licht (SIlent Light), directed by Carlos Reygadas
Prix d'interpretation feminine (Best Actress): Jeon Do-yeon for Secret Sunshine by Lee Chang-dong
Prix d'interpretation masculine (Best Actor): Constantine Lavronenko for Izgnanie by Andrei Zviaguintsev
Palme d'Or (short film): Ver Llover, directed by Elisa Miller
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Cannes Report: D'Angelo's Predictions
5/27/2007 1:11:01 PM
Okay, I gotta zip through this, since the ceremony is only about 2.5 hours away as I start typing. As usual, I'll use a Should Win/Could Win format, with more emphasis on who I personally consider deserving than on what will what the jury (which includes Stephen Frears, Maggie Cheung, Michel Piccoli, Sarah Polley and Abderrahmane Sissako) might honor. The latter can rarely be much more than a slightly educated wild guess.
(Bear in mind that I'm playing here by Cannes' spread-the-wealth rules, which means no more than one non-acting prize for any given film.)
Palme d'Or
Should win: Silent Light. In retrospect, the Wack Experiment probably helped me appreciate Reygadas' staggering achievement, since unlike everybody else I wasn't constantly thinking about what a dramatic departure it is from his other two films, and hence was too busy admiring its beauty and purity to question his motives. Had he made this film before Japón and (especially) Battle in Heaven, I suspect the critical response would have been markedly different. (Also, people are using The Canonical Classic It Only Vaguely Resembles as a tiresome crutch.) In any case, no other movie this year — or in several years, for that matter — achieved such a sublime and visually arresting synthesis of the physical, the emotional, and the spiritual. Few other movies have even tried.
Could win: Persepolis. The Palme hasn't gone to a first-time director since Steven Soderbergh won for sex, lies and videotape, but I have the feeling Persepolis' winning (to most people, if not to me) combination of political upheaval and personal memoir will make it seem appropriately au courant. Plus, the opportunity to give Cannes' top honor to an animated film (which I believe would be unprecedented) may be too much for the jury to resist.
Grand Prix (which despite its title is second prize)
Should win: Boulevard de la mort. Many people seem incapable of looking past Tarantino's baroquely stylized dialogue and self-consciously trashy aesthetic to see the avant-garde experiment lurking underneath. That's fine — nobody appreciated Psycho at the time, either. Ultimately, I think the film works slightly better as the second half of the Grindhouse double-bill (where it plays like an afterthought, and thus packs more of a wallop), but its pointed and endearingly hopeful bifurcation of the slasher movie — cleverly disguised as an homage to the gearhead movie — can stand on its own two (bare female) feet. And Kurt Russell deserves some sort of special award just for allowing himself to be built up as a badass and then thoroughly, pathetically emasculated.
Could win: 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days. Just about everybody — even me — agreed that this quietly menacing abortion drama was the festival's most welcome surprise, given how few people even saw director Cristian Mungiu's two previous features. I can't imagine it not receiving one of the top prizes, and the runner-up slot seems most likely.
Best Director
Should win: Gus Van Sant. Who has no chance in hell, since he won this award only four years ago for Elephant. All the same, Paranoid Park was (excluding the Reygadas, as I must) the most audaciously formalist film in this year's Competition, evoking its protagonist's guilty conscience almost exclusively via imagery and sound design. Where other filmmakers — most notably Lee Chang-dong — encouraged their actors to scream and wail their anguish to the Lumière's rafters, Van Sant managed to plumb greater emotional depths simply by training his camera on the rivulets of water flowing from a young boy's hair as he stands, head bowed, in the shower. (That sounds like a visual cliché, I realize, but you've never seen it shot with such bold expressionism.)
Could win: Béla Tarr. The Man from London was received with bridled enthusiasm at best, but there's no question that Tarr directs the holy hell out of it. Alternatively, the jury could decide to honor Reygadas here. Either way, I see this as a consolation prize given to a bold, uncompromising film that nobody could quite bring themselves to love.
Best Screenplay
Should win: Catherine Breillat. Une vieille maîtresse was the most elegant and richly satisfying of this year's several adaptations, which were generally more impressive, in terms of dialogue and structure, than the films written directly for the screen. In particular, she beautifully handles the film's lengthy central flashback, returning us to the present (and its narrator and audience) at precisely judged intervals throughout.
Could win: Joel and Ethan Coen. They always win something (literally — they're six for six at Cannes), everybody loved No Country for Old Men,
and most people equate screenplays with memorable dialogue. This seems like a slam-dunk to me.
Best Actress
Should win: Annamaria Marinca. As the woman in Mungiu's film who isn't four months, three weeks and two days pregnant, but who is determined to help her friend halt the gestation at that number, Marinca gives the sort of fearlessly committed yet unflashy performance that typically fails to win major awards. Truth is, though, for all of Mungiu's formidable talent behind the camera, she's the reason this film is getting raves. Even one false moment would have severed the fragile cord connecting us to this grim predicament, thereby allowing us to shrug it off as Them and Then. She never allows it.
Could win: Jeon Do-yeon. Who is also excellent, though I found her performance much more impressive in the first half of the film, before she's required to go batshit insane. This is a tough category this year, actually — Alexandra's Galina Vishnevskaya is also a strong contender, if only because everyone loves an old Russian woman.
Best Actor
Should win: Fu'ad Aït Aattou. I doubt this guy is on anyone else's radar, but it takes a formidable actor to steal a movie out from underneath Asia Argento. His commanding screen presence is even more astonishing when you think back on the male leads in other Breillat movies, all of whom (with the possible exception of 36 Fillette, which I saw almost 20 years ago and don't remember very well) are strapping hunks of wood. I can't remember the last time I saw a first-time actor carry himself with such assurance in a role that calls for studied, theatrical polish rather than unaffected naturalism.
Could win: Mathieu Amalric. As if any jury or voting body in the world could resist a performance restricted exclusively to voiceover and a single blinking eye. The fact that Amalric has no competition of note — Javier Bardem's role in No Country for Old Men is too small, Miroslav Krabot's in The Man from London too constricted — cinches matters. I'm quixotically hopeful that this award will fulfill any perceived obligation to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the most overrated Cannes film since The Pianist.
Jury Prize (or Hey, Here's Another Film We Really Liked)
Should win: No Country for Old Men. It pains me not to be able to give the Coens' return to form after two weak comedies more love, but this was just too strong a lineup. (By way of comparison, I liked No Country for Old Men better than every film I saw here last year.)
Could win: Secret Sunshine. Though I may well be underrating this one, as the people who love it seem to really love it.
There's also a special Anniversary Prize every five years, which as I recall went to Bowling for Columbine in 2002. I'm just gonna ignore that one, if you don't mind, since it basically amounts to an extra Honorable Mention.
Let's see if I can get these to ScreenGrab before the awards are actually announced (an hour from now as I send it out). If not, you already know how deluded I was.
[For the record, he did, but his editor was too busy goofing off. — ed.]
— Mike D'Angelo
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Cannes Report: Mike's Drive-Bys
5/27/2007 1:07:29 PM
Before I get to handicapping the awards (in a separate post to follow), a few regrettably quick notes on the Competition films I didn't have the time/stamina/inclination to address earlier, mostly because none of them exactly blew me away.
Tehilim (Raphaël Nadjari). Nobody seems to care much about this Israeli-French co-production, and with good reason. Like François Ozon's Under the Sand, Tehilim (the English-language title is Psalms) observes the emotional upheaval that results when a man mysteriously disappears, in this case following a minor car accident. But where Ozon's film was something of a psychological case study, Nadjari is more interested in the less-than-universal question of how and whether various forms of Judaism are equipped to sustain the faithful under such trying circumstances. For those not inherently interested in that particular subject, he doesn't provide much of a way in.
Import Export (Ulrich Seidl). Charges of miserabilism and exploitation have been filed against Seidl's cross-cultural diptych, which intercuts a pretty but naïve Ukrainian woman's journey to Austria in search of a better life with that of a thuggish young Austrian man's journey to the Ukraine in search of a better life. (They never meet.) The film's use of real-life geriatric hospital patients, many in advanced stages of dementia, is admittedly tough going, but Seidl's unapologetic depiction of cruelty and privation is offset by fleeting (and hence very affecting) instances of warmth and compassion. Of all the films in Competition, this one had the most to say about the world we live in.
Boulevard de la mort (Quentin Tarantino). Whatever your opinion of Death Proof — I'm in the near-masterpiece camp, for the record — this elongated version, which will presumably be made available in the U.S. on DVD, isn't likely to change your mind. We finally get to see Butterfly give Stuntman Mike his lap dance, and there's also a long, fairly inconsequential scene in which he first spots the movie-crew posse outside a convenience store, notable mostly for additional foot-fetishism and the startling moment when the image jumps from b&w to eye-searing color. (Those yellows!) If you found the dialogue insufferable, be advised that there's definitely more of it. If, on the other hand, you reveled in the shifts from discursive to explosive, as I did, then strap in again.
Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Paronnaud). Adapted from Satrapi's acclaimed four-volume graphic novel, an autobiographical account of her childhood and adolescence in Iran and Europe, Persepolis plays like every arthouse-friendly coming-of-age movie you've ever seen: anecdotal, cutesy, and fundamentally inoffensive. Specific political/cultural indictments — namely, the heroine's rebellion during the Islamic Revolution — are carefully balanced by universal moments of family strife and romantic heartbreak, all served up with cozy nostalgic reassurance. What distinguishes the film is its animation style, which faithfully reproduces the novels' stark, jagged monochrome drawings. I'd happily watch it again with the sound turned off.
Alexandra (Alexander Sokurov). I've never understood Sokurov's appeal and apparently never will; even his best-known film, Russian Ark, struck me as little more than a very impressive stunt. His latest film advances the sure-to-be-controversial thesis that war is bad but old women are good, sending a feisty octogenarian (famed opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya) to the Chechen front to visit her grandson, a Russian officer. That's about it, really. She peeks inside tanks and tents; she buys treats for the men in her grandson's unit; she bemoans the state of things in conversation with another elderly woman who lives in the region. Apart from bleaching most of the color from the image — a fairly common ploy these days — Sokurov refrains from his trademark visual distortions, putting all of his eggs in the crinkled, careworn basket that is Vishnevskaya's face.
Secret Sunshine (Lee Chang-dong). Some folks are calling Lee's belated follow-up to Oasis a masterpiece, and it certainly resembles one at the outset. The tale of a widow (Jeon Do-yeon) who moves with her young son to her late husband's hometown, the film putters agreeably along, incisive and observant, until something unexpectedly horrific happens (which I won't reveal), at which point low-key naturalism abruptly gives way to gung-ho melodrama. From there, Secret Sunshine lurches in several different directions, each one less compelling and credible than the one before; let's just say that Jeon gives almost as many distinct performances as Laura Dern does in Inland Empire. In the end, I found the film's dogged descent into madness dramatically unsatisfying, and I never did get a grip on the function of a nerdy suitor played by The Host's Song Kang-ho.
Promise Me This (Emir Kusturica): To my embarrassment, I still haven't seen any of Kusturica's early films (i.e. anything before Arizona Dream), which means that my recognition of his talent is limited mostly to his 1995 Palme d'Or-winner, Underground. Since then, he's become increasingly mired in broad, unfunny slapstick, and Promise Me This is the same rollicking, hyperbolic oompah-fest as was his previous film, Life Is a Miracle, which played in Competition here three years ago to little acclaim and was never been heard of (at least in the U.S.) again. Expect this one to have a similar fate. I lost interest after the 16th instance of someone falling into a hole or flying through a window, which was roughly around the midpoint of reel one.
The Mourning Forest (Naomi Kawase): A sort of therapeutic variation on Tropical Malady, Kawase's gentle two-hander finds an elderly widower (Shigeki Uda) and a staff member at the retirement home where he lives (Machiko Ono) taking a trip into the forest, where they promptly get lost. The man is seeking his late wife's grave; the woman, we gradually come to understand, still feels responsible for the death of her young son, though we're only given stray hints as to how the boy died. Kawase knows how to photograph vegetation, but the substance of her film is unavoidably maudlin. Most egregious by far is a scene in which the grieving mother relives her tragedy — not in flashback, but by projecting what happened then onto what's happening now. Talk to a shrink, lady.
I know, I know — I sound like The Grinch Who Stole Cinema. But that's only because I've already written about the movies I loved — which, for those arriving late, were the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men, Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, and especially Carlos Reygadas' magnificent (and criminally underappreciated, save for a small coterie of U.S. critics) Silent Light. New films by Fatih Akin, Catherine Breillat and Roy Andersson were also quite strong. All in all, this is probably the best year Cannes has had since I started attending in 2002, which makes the forthcoming awards ceremony more intriguing than usual. Speculation to come.
— Mike D’Angelo
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TAKE FIVE: Anime
5/25/2007 5:00:00 PM
The same week that the Cartoon Network tips a whole roster of new animated programs aimed at adults, one of their graduates — Satoshi Kon, creator of the series Paranoia Agent and director of the acclaimed Perfect Blue — debuts his latest big-screen effort, Paprika. The sci-fi-tinged action fantasy features an adult storyline and a built-in audience of fans, but Sony Classics is hoping that America's anime-shy mass audiences follow it past its New York opening on Friday. Here are a few more recommendations for you if the only Japanese animation you're familiar with comes from the pen of Hayao Miyazaki.
URUSEI YATSURA 2: BEAUTIFUL DREAMER (1984)
Like Paprika, this big-screen spin-off of a popular Japanese animated comedy deals with the fallout when the boundary between dreams and reality become blurred. The original Urusei Yatsura series is something of a mixed bag, featuring the often-slapsticky antics of an alien girl attending a far-from-ordinary Earth high school, but Beautiful Dreamer is a different animal entirely: There are plenty of laughs, both lowbrow and high, early on, but it quickly morphs into something very unusual. The subject of dreams yields some extraordinarily eerie, chilling and surreal images, and there are some set-pieces — from a post-apocalyptic series of war games in an empty city to a ghostly parade in the middle of the night — that will stay with you far longer than you'd expect, given their origins.
GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES (1988)
Containing an emotional depth and historical resonance otherwise lacking in much of Japan's genre-driven animation, Isao Takahata's film, based on Akiyuki Nosaka's outstanding novel, is perhaps the most moving and powerful anime ever made. The memoir of a young boy and his sister in Imperial Japan who struggle to survive in the waning days of the Second World War, Grave of the Fireflies is often charming and always affecting, and while it becomes almost unbearably sad in its final moments, it's also an unflinchingly honest portrayal of life in those tragic days, and has been rightly cited as one of the few films to come out of Japan that deals with the war's repercussions for ordinary citizens in a forthright way.
AKIRA (1988)
Some fans of the genre refer to this grotesque, stunning sci-fi drama as the Citizen Kane of anime. It's not that, quite, but Katsuhiro Otomo's masterpiece is one of the most important films in anime history; while it didn't single-handedly kick-start the American interest in Japanese animation, it netted a larger audience than the genre has managed before or since. The action-packed tale of a hapless member of a near-future biker gang who becomes infused with massive psychic powers as the result of a government experiment gone awry, Akira delivers plenty of thrills, but perhaps its biggest achievement is the full use of the big screen; most previous anime films betrayed their genesis in comics or the small screen, but Akira takes complete advantage of its bigger canvas.
METROPOLIS (2001)
Though this film (directed by anime veteran Rintaro and written by Akira's Katsuhiro Otomo, based on a comic by the late, legendary Osamu Tezuka) isn't a remake of Fritz Lang's silent classic, it does borrow its name and many of its theme: a sprawling, elaborate futuristic city; a problematic division of labor between machine and man; and the problems that arise when a human allows himself to develop emotional ties to a robot — and vice versa. Likewise, in its exploration of the ties between intelligence and emotion, it recalls Blade Runner more than a little. But all these elements take a back seat to the gorgeous animation and the astonishing, unusual design of the film; Metropolis looks like nothing that came before or since.
JIN-ROH: THE WOLF BRIGADE (1998)
Hiroyuki Okiura (a student of Mamoru Oshii, whose cyberpunk classic Ghost in the Shell was a massive anime hit a few years before) made an impressive debut with this so-cool-it's-chilly story of an alternate Japan. In Okiura's grim, oppressive world, the Axis won the Second World War, and Japan was occupied for several years by their former German allies — who left behind a legacy of brutality, paranoia and hatred. Set against this context (and illustrated in darkly beautiful style, with an unsettling combination of contemporary flair and Nazi-era trappings), a policeman begins a doomed romance with a young girl.
— Leonard Pierce
Previous Take Fives:
May 18, 2007: Gambling Movies
May 11, 2007: Hip Hop Documentaries
May 4, 2007: Posthumous Movies
April 27, 2007: Wrestling Pictures
April 20, 2007: Directorial Brothers
April 13, 2007: Hitchcock Remakes
April 6, 2007: Rappers Turned Actors
March 30, 2007: What’s That Strange Music I Hear?
March 23, 2007: Both Sides of the Camera
March 16, 2007: Meta Serial Killers at the Movies
March 9, 2007: Cash Rules Everything Around Me
March 2, 2007: What’s Your Sign?
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Vlad the Impaler Blows a Hole Through the Stockinged Head of David Lynch’s Wild at Heart
5/25/2007 4:15:00 PM
One of the unnerving things about writing the Impaler column is how much time I spend ripping apart filmmakers I actually like/love. Maybe someday I'll get around to ripping around the late Andrei Tarkovsky a much-needed new asshole, but in the meantime I'm reduced to slaying...David Lynch. This is not fair: Lynch gets primary credit for turning me into an artfag at the mere age of 13, when I was transfixed enough by The Straight Story's long takes to go twice. (Yeah, that was my first Lynch. Weird, I know.) Since then, I've absorbed all of Twin Peaks, slogged through his (thoroughly underwhelming) short films, gotten up early on a hungover Saturday to see Lost Highway, etc. You get the idea: My devotion is real.
So it was with real disappointment that I showed up at MoMA a while back to fill in one of the few remaining holes in my Lynch knowledge. Now, let's not be overly hasty: Future historians will debate whether or not Lynch jumped the shark with Inland Empire (answer is yes, by the way), but you can't claim that Wild At Heart is nearly as underwhelming. For one thing it reminded me of a time when Nicolas Cage wasn't tolerable at best, but downright praiseworthy: His All-American bozo act is unimpeachable, and then there's his climactic about-face. Pre beat-down by motorcycle gang: "What is it you faggots want?," delivered with maximum bluster. After beat-down: "I apologize for calling you gentlemen homosexuals," in a tone that suggests machismo which feels it's erred not in its fundamental homophobia, but merely in misjudging the gentlemen's sexuality. Maybe you just had to be there, but I was the only person LOLing in the theater, and I felt bad.
But let's not beat about the bush: Wild At Heart isn't just a bad movie, it predicts everything bad in Lynch's future movies. And by everything I mean Rammstein. I don't know when or where Lynch got fascinated by loud guitars with men growling in a way that's supposed to be fierce but comes off silly, but Nicolas Cage bonding with a heavy group of players who look like misplaced session players (and who apparently only play metal and Elvis classics) just reminds me that Lost Highway — otherwise one of the most terrifying films ever made, and maybe Lynch's masterpiece — will be almost rendered comical at certain moments by the ridiculous repeated extracts of Rammstein.
Wild At Heart also predicts The Straight Story — which isn't a bad thing, actually. This was the first time Lynch had a chance to openly attempt to outdo Days Of Heaven (something Straight Story arguably does), and there's one golden hour shot here that's pretty awesome. But there’s also sunshine the rest of the time, and therein lies the rub: The dictionary definition of Lynchian, whenever it's coined, will surely include darkness and shadows. Wild At Heart is sunny from beginning to end — a brightness of visuals that leads to perhaps the only time people acting in a Lynchian mode seem to be obnoxiously overplaying (this means you, Diane Ladd).
And then there's the whole question of Lynchian. Granted, at the exact moment that Wild At Heart's color palette seems to be attempting a redefinition of what a Lynchian film can achieve, Lynch piles on quirks that were already ossified in 1990. The prime offender here is a scene in a hotel lobby, just before Ladd finds out that Harry Dean Stanton's been killed: The frame is cluttered by not one, not two, but no less than three quirky bit players — who haven't had significant appearances before and don't appear again. One of these people is old, and another has a British accent; this constitutes their "quirkiness." It was David Foster Wallace's seminal essay on Lost Highway which pointed out that Lynch's sense of humor (his overt jokes, not his unsettling frissons that can cause uneasy audience laughter) is fundamentally unsophisticated, relying on broad humor about deafness and French accents. So it goes here. First you have 3 "quirky" people standing around a lobby for no good reason, and the next thing you know we have 3 hours of Inland Empire — the very definition of aimless Lynchiana — on our hands.
— Vadim Rizov
Previous Vlad the Impaler takedowns:
- April 13, 2007 -- The African Queen
- March 29, 2007 -- Aguirre, the Wrath of God
- March 23, 2007 – Close-Up
- March 8, 2007 – Sullivan’s Travels
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Exploring The Guardian's “Another View” Column
5/25/2007 3:45:00 PM
During a brief visit to Cannes I only had time to watch one film, Zodiac, which I thoroughly enjoyed and which as far as I could tell seemed quite accurate to the Robert Greysmith books. The Guardian occasionally runs a column, "Another View", which is a short piece written by a professional commenting on a film set in a field their set in. Today it’s Detective Chief Inspector Tony Boxall, who talks about his impression of Zodiac from a professional point of view.
Previous Another Views have focused on a Restaurant Owner talking about Fast Food Nation, a Mayan Archaeologist on Apocalypto, a Poker Player on Casino Royale) and most entertainingly, a Pagan commenting on the Neil LaBute remake of The Wicker Man (which was covered on Screengrab last year).
— Faisal Qureshi
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Cannes Report: D’Angelo Reviews James Gray’s We Own the Night
5/25/2007 2:45:00 PM
Thoughts I had during We Own the Night, in roughly the order they occurred to me:
- Hey, an American film. And no opening credits, despite an evocative opening montage of still photos depicting NYPD headbanging and drug-trade residue. Wonder who this could be?
- Joaquin Phoenix as a slick dude running a club in 1988 Brooklyn. Eva Mendes as his hot girlfriend. And lots of Russian mobsters. Who's into the multiculti stuff? I need more information.
- Mark Wahlberg is Phoenix's brother. Mark Wahlberg is a cop. Robert Duvall is their dad. He's also a cop. What movie did Phoenix and Wahlberg star in together? Did they? This seems really familiar somehow.
- Dialogue is a little on-the-nose. Visuals are purely functional. Theme seems to be family loyalty. Damn, I have no freakin' idea whose movie this is.
- Oh, I see, it's The Godfather in reverse. Instead of the good son who gets sucked into the family's criminal enterprise against his will, we have the bad son who gets sucked into the family's commitment to law and order against his will. That's kind of an interesting idea, at least if it weren't being spelled out so clumsily.
- Okay, whoever this is just pulled off one hell of a gripping suspense set piece. I can't remember the last time I saw an undercover sting operation that went so hellaciously awry.
- THE YARDS! Phoenix and Wahlberg were both in The Yards. And The Yards was at Cannes that year, I'm pretty sure, though I saw it at Toronto. I'm almost positive it was at Cannes. Could this be James Gray? Russian mobsters in Brooklyn, that's right out of Little Odessa. It must be James Gray. Has he even made a film since The Yards? That was seven years ago. I'd forgotten he even existed.
. This may top Death Proof for the year's most amazing car chase. Is Gray capable of something this kinetic? How did nobody ever think to stage a car chase in a torrential downpour before?
- I should do a ScreenGrab post in which I just lay out the exact thought process I'm going through while watching this one blind. I can incorporate some review-type stuff in there as well. Or will that make me look like a dork? Too late, probably.
- This film is clunky but it's also very heartfelt. Feels throwbacky in a mostly good way. I think it could actually stand to be longer — parts of it seem rushed. Too much plot, too few incidental but telling details.
- Is he really gonna end on that exchange? That would be kind of ballsy in its sheer earnestness.
- He is.
— Mike D’Angelo
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An Interview with the Man Who Brought You the Star Wars Lozenge
5/25/2007 2:00:00 PM
To celebrate the film’s 30th Anniversary, BBC Entertainment correspondent Kevin Young finally lost his Star Wars virginity and logged the entire experience at the BBC website. This got me thinking of all other Star Wars tie-ins, and I rediscovered this little item made just before the film's 20th Anniversary to sell you the British Lozenge, Tunes:
It was produced just after Pepsico had paid Lucas a then record breaking $2 Billion for exclusive licensing rights to Star Wars. But Mars Corp. (the manufacturer of Tunes) managed to get a tie-in by Lucas digging the original idea. Needless to say, PepsiCo wasn't happy with this at the time.
The director for this advert was Vadim Jean, then best known for the low budget comedy, Leon, The Pig Farmer and more recently for the Martin Short Vehicle Jimmy Glick in Lalawood. I interviewed him about his involvement with the commercial.
How did you first get involved in the campaign?
The way it works is that you get approached by the agency and they have a look at your previous work. If they like it, they ask you to come in and talk to them about how you would do it. When I saw the script, I thought: “This is excellent”. Every boy film maker’s dream really is to do Star Wars. A formative film really, for so many of us. I basically went and said: “We’ll make it exactly the same as the film.” Down to the precise framing of the shots, shooting it in cinemascope format, etc. So that when people switch on the TV and see the commercial, they’ll think they’re watching footage from the film. Until one of the guys says: “Maybe you should try one of these?”
And that was really what they were hoping for, so we tried to speak to Gil Taylor, the film’s original cameraman, and we watched the particular scene in the council chamber over and over and over again. The Production designer did the plans for the set, just from watching the video, because we couldn’t get the original plans. And we just tried to match it as faithfully as possible. And the costumes are the real costumes, sent over from Lucasfilm. They liked my work and they liked the idea that I suggested that we do it exactly as the film.
Did you use Gil Taylor on this as well?
No. He was very old, about ninety. No, I used a cameraman called Ivan Bird, who very carefully matched the whole look of the film.
The helmet appears pretty small, compared to what appears in the films. How do you respond to that?
Well, you have to talk to George Lucas, because it was the one he gave us. All the costumes are supplied by Lucasfilm, so we were in their hands. So if they tell us that that's the original, then who am I to say it’s not? If you run the commercial alongside the scene in the film, I think you’ll find it pretty close.
How’s your relationship with Lucasfilm?
Very good. They love it apparently. They had approval of it, and they’re delighted. They said it was the most faithful bit of licensing they’ve ever done. I’m very happy with that.
What are the differences you find between directing a feature and directing an ad?
Time, of course. The hardest thing is time, you have no time in a commercial. So for example, we’ve actually got a forty second cut of the commercial, which literally shot by shot is completely faithful to the scene in the film. The way that Darth Vader comes in through the room, there's a counter tracking shot, which takes him across from the entrance, when he comes in with Peter Cushing to the point in the table where they sit. And I shot that. In case they did a cinema version. The shot is exactly the same length in time. It counter tracks and brings him to the table, and the reason it isn’t in the commercial as it went out on Television is simply time. It’s very hard to put a developing shot into a commercial, because you suddenly find you’ve got no time left. So your images have to be very dense to tell the story very concisely.
— Faisal Qureshi
Permalink : http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/screengrabblog.aspx?id=107e11742#11742 |
Cannes Report: D’Angelo Reviews Catherine Breillat’s Une vieille maitresse
5/25/2007 1:00:00 PM
I must confess that my heart sank a bit this morning when the words "un film de Catherine Breillat" appeared, as her confrontationally explicit essays on gender dynamics (Romance, Fat Girl, Anatomy of Hell) tend to leave me cold. Nor was I especially psyched to see more of Asia Argento, who had already snarled her pseudopunk way through Boarding Gate and Abel Ferrara's hilariously awful Go Go Tales. But Une vieille maîtresse, which translates as An Old Mistress ( "old" in the sense of "former" or "longtime"), while very much in keeping with Breillat's thematic interests, turns out to be an adaptation of an 1851 novel by Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly — a sort of Dangerous Liaisons minus the duplicity. This means that while the characters frequently have explicit sex, they do not, as Breillat's original characters are wont to do, suddenly start shoving random objects up their vaginas or offer cups of their menstrual blood as apéritifs.
Argento is impressively restrained in her ferocity as the title character, Vellini, who has no intention of renouncing her hold on a penniless gambler with whom she's been entangled for 10 years, even though he's about to marry a fabulously wealthy young beauty (Breillat discovery Roxane Mesquida) with whom he's sincerely in love. But it's first-time actor Fu'ad Aït Aattou, as the preposterously pretty male object of desire, who gives the film's genuinely revelatory performance, fully embodying the fatal combination of arrogance and frailty that gives this story of noble putrescence its bite.
That the battle of wills fizzles to a close just when you're expecting a conflagration is presumably a flaw of the source material; all the same, this is the rare period drama that feels at once faithful to its era and thoroughly modern. (Although the shot in which you can quite clearly see one of Argento's several tattoos through several coats of base is perhaps a bit too modern.) Breillat's ardent fans may well feel betrayed, responding only to the moment when Vellini hungrily laps the blood from her lover's gunshot wound; to my mind, this film cuts deeper than her more willfully outrageous efforts, precisely because it's populated by people who, deeply fucked up though they are, retain their sanity.
— Mike D’Angelo
Permalink : http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/screengrabblog.aspx?id=107e11735#11735 |
Video of the Day: Bring Me the Head of Charlie Brown
5/25/2007 12:01:00 PM
What if Sam Peckinpah had directed a Peanuts cartoon? I found this totally twisted bit of spoof animation while searching for a clip of Joel McCrea in Ride the High Country (for our 20 Most Unforgettable Death Scenes list this week). It’s been giving me nightmares ever since.
Apparently it was directed in 1986 by then-CalArts student Jim Reardon, who would go on to work on The Simpsons. (There's more info here.)
Extremely well-done, and extremely creepy. Watch at your own risk.
— Bilge Ebiri
Permalink : http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/screengrabblog.aspx?id=107e11725#11725 |
