Festival Circuit 2022

[Finch]

As per Variety, IFC bought US rights for Corsage.

[yoshimori]

As per Variety, IFC bought US rights for Corsage.

Just saw this too. Good for everyone!

The Abbasi is dreck. Student-level plotting. Here, I can only assume, because it dares to show oral sex in a holy Muslim city. Whatever.

[Finch]

Sony Pictures Classics bought Mia Hansen-Love’s ‘One Fine Morning’ for the US, one of the best reviewed films of the festival this far.

[Finch]

A24 have bought the well-reviewed British film Aftersun for the US and Canada.

The reviews I've seen so far of Crimes of the Future are pretty strong. And what's up with Variety and their "standing ovations" articles? Who gives a shit?

[yoshimori]

The Park feels like the film to beat. I’m not predicting who’ll win the top prize. Juries are idiosyncratic. What I mean is ... the film that'll generate the headiest critical buzz.

Still to come: Denis (tonight) - but the days of Beau travail are long gone, huh? - and Reichardt (Friday). One can hope. With two days left though, it's seems to have been a fairly mid-level, if not lackluster, 75th, iyam.

[DarkImbecile]

I’m putting most of my remaining hopes for something transcendent on Kore-eda, which I believe is tomorrow’s competition premiere

[John Cope]

I'm holding out for Lukas Dhont's Close.

[MitchPerrywinkle]

I'm holding out for Lukas Dhont's Close.

I certainly hope he doesn't drop the ball in the climax with this new film like he did with his debut feature.

I also have hopes for the Denis, even if the last decade of her work has proven divisive (watching Both Sides of the Blade in a crowded theater full of people expecting a typical erotic thriller produced exactly the sort of response you'd expect). Reichardt will be interesting to see as well since I'd consider her last feature to be her best and one of the finest American Indies of the last decade.

[Never Cursed]

Baz Luhrmann's Elvis receives a 10 minute standing ovation, though some remained unimpressed

[domino harvey]

Wait, was it in competition?

[Never Cursed]

No, just a special screening (same as the Hazanavicius, the Garrel, and the George Miller)

[Walter Kurtz]

Baz Luhrmann's Elvis receives a 10 minute standing ovation, though some remained unimpressed

""Colonel Parker ...is possibly the most insufferable movie character ever conceived. The guy makes Jar-Jar Binks seem like Elliott Gould in “The Long Goodbye.” Huh? Isn't that a compliment?

[colinr0380]

The main thing I know about Elvis at this point is that last year's Eurovision song contest winners Måneskin apparently have a song on the soundtrack. Which is high profile but doesn't sound quite as impressive in Eurovision to film crossover terms as 2006 winners Lordi appearing as monsters in Dark Floors, based on an idea from the lead singer.

[brundlefly]

Baz Luhrmann's Elvis receives a 10 minute standing ovation, though some remained unimpressed

""Colonel Parker ...is possibly the most insufferable movie character ever conceived. The guy makes Jar-Jar Binks seem like Elliott Gould in “The Long Goodbye.” Huh? Isn't that a compliment?

Forwarding this to Kathleen Kennedy and subscribing to Disney+ in anticipation.

[yoshimori]

- The Denis is, sadly, awful. She seems to have no sense of rhythm in English and Spanish. The actors seems lost. The film looks drab. Nothing of interest for me.

- Was also frustrated (though less so) by the Kawase Olympics doc. It started quite well, quietly poetic in a way no of the other Olympics film has dared be, but then it devolved into repetitive and superficial politics. Argghhh. She said there were 5000 hours of footage. Some of it, probably much of it, is quite beautiful. She should make it all available to 15 other directors/editorial teams so I can stage a four-round single elimination tournament.

- My favorite "instant reaction" to the Elvis thing was something along lines of: "A 159-minute trailer for a movie about Elvis!"

[Persona]

Baz Luhrmann's Elvis receives a 10 minute standing ovation, though some remained unimpressed

The trailer made it look godawful but then again, I'm not a huge Elvis fan and even less so a fan of Baz.

[Persona]

The reviews I've seen so far of Crimes of the Future are pretty strong.

It's getting a generally amicable if tempered response. A lot of "it's Cronenberg but not functionally dramatic / There are too many ideas and it's not really resolved / Cronenberg plays the hits, nothing new / It's beguiling but minor" and so on. To me it all sounds very much like the critical reception to eXistenZ, which can't help but hype me up as I love that movie dearly (my second favorite Cronenberg). Some of the reviews are listing off "flaws" left and right that sound nothing but appealing to me, at least when it comes to Cronenberg's work.

[Finch]

MUBI bought Close for the UK.

[yoshimori]

Screen Jury Grid now has all but the last two films (Reichardt, Serraille). Only one film averaged 3 or more (out of four) stars. Here’s the breakdown of Competition Films.

Good (3.0+) Decision to Leave
Above average (2.9-2.7) Armageddon Time, Eo, Tori and Lokitah
Average (2.6-2.4): Pacifiction, Crimes of the Future, RMN, Triangle of Sadness, Nostalgia, Close
Below Average (2.3-2.0): Leila’s Brothers, Boy from Heaven, Tchaikovsky’s Wife, Brother and Sister, Eight Mountains, Holy Spider
Poor (1.9-): Stars at Noon, Broker, Forever Young (Les Amandiers)

[therewillbeblus]

I'm confused, I thought the press screening reaction wasn't so favorable for the Gray? Do these scores reflect something different?

[yoshimori]

And here’re my brief comments on the films I saw, in rough order of preference.

QUITE GOOD
Decision to Leave (Park, Comp). An eccentric, light, even balletic black-widow mystery. Ryu Seong-hie’s retro chic production design is impeccable. She deserves any technical achievement award.

Corsage (Kreutzer, UCR). Occasionally intentionally anachronistic biopic of Empress Sissi. Vicki Krieps is absorbing.

GOOD
Pacifiction (Serra, Comp). Excruciatingly poky, but brilliant, mysterious, beautiful in a kind of low-contrast, strangely lit, long lens, late-middle Fassbindery way. But the last shot ruins everything. It stupidly, bluntly, explains everything that had been vaguely hinted at before, spoiling the political paranoia it had so carefully built up. Soooo sad.

GOODISH
Frère et Sœur (Desplechin, Comp). Not his best work. Cast and crew are both a level below those of Noel, Rois, Esther. But still … Desplechin!

R.M.N. (Mungiu, Comp). I’m not a Mungiu fan, but I think this is his best work so far. Portrait of an anti-immigrationist Romanian village. A lengthy take of a townhall meeting is impressive.

MIDDLING
Jerry Leee Lewis: Trouble in Mind (E Coen, Out of Comp). Crisply edited archival footage. Superficial, perhaps, but fun.

The Silent Twins (Smoczynka, UCR). Was hoping for more, after the intriguing Fuga. All the bits are watchable, but it doesn’t hang to in any traditional (or other discernible-to-me) way.

Coupez (Hazanavicius, Opener). A remake of the ultra-low-budget Japanese indie, One Cut of the Dead, about an ultra-low-budget zombie film crew whose single-take feature is infested by real zombies. You can feel that, for the original Japanese filmmakers, their movie was a kind of do-or-die, you can feel the urgency. For Oscar-winner Hazanavicius, his wife – Oscar-nominated Bérénice Bejo, who plays the director’s wife, an actress! – and his top-flight crew the remake is obviously not so high stakes. Fun enough. But, since I’d seen the Japanese original, it was hard to shake the sense that what I was watching here was a bit of an exercise.

Eo (Skolimowski, Comp). Loose adaptation of Au hazard, Balthazar. Skolimowski (unwittingly?) proves Bresson’s ascetic cinema strategies correct. By supercharging his story (vibrant colors, expressive handheld camera, donkeyvision, swelling music) Skolimowski creates an engaging movie. But no tears.

God’s Creatures (Holmer and Davis, Directors Fortnight). A simple (feminist) story about the hypocrisy inherent in maternal loyalty, simply told. Nothing like Holmer’s earlier, The Fits, for those who know it and hoped for more along those lines.

Tori and Lokitah (Dardennes, Comp). More of the same from les frères belgique. Feels relatively soulless compared to their best work.

Triangle of Sadness (Östlund, Comp). Oh so obvious parody of the super-rich and the wannabes (endless projectile vomiting from the seasick wealthy, lots of sewage leaks in their state rooms). The film’s first chapter – in Carl, a male model, and his also-a-model girlfriend, Yaya, argue for over 20 minutes about who should pay the bill for their meal – has the kind of agonizing tension Östlund is famous for. The rest? Bahhh.

Plan 75 (Hayakawa, UCR). Interesting premise – a national program offers aging Japanese (an economic drain on the country) the equivalent of $1000 and a two night stay in a deluxe resort for, well … dying. Mixed execution. A first film.

Fogo-Fatuo (JP Rodrigues, Directors Fortnight). The crown prince wants to be a fireman. Lots of naked firemen pose as figures from famous artworks. A pleasant enough divertissement.

Crimes of the Future (Cronenberg, Comp). Kind of beyond comment.

Return to Seoul (Chou, UCR). Originally titled, way more appropriately, All the People I’ll Never Be. Charismatic artist-turned-actress Park Ji-min kept me watching. Maybe Chou’s best work, but for me, that’s not saying much.

Close (Dhont, Comp). Well-made, well-acted, but totally predictable. Seems like the cliché fantasy of someone whose love is unrequited, rather than a real, valuable investigation of that problem.

Natural History of Destruction (Loznitsa, Out of Comp). Nothing revelatory. Archival footage for WWII is always a good view. But less (than two hours) is probably more.

2020 Olympics: Side A (Kawase, Out of Comp). Gets bogged down in making its political points re gender and nation. Neither argument is well-made. Spends the great majority of the two hours on just three sports.

Smoking Causes Coughing (Dupieux, Midnight Screenings). Lower-mid-level Dupieux.

La dérive des continents (Baier, Directors Fortnight). Perfectly serviceable comedy about Euro-bureaucracy re immigration issues.

Eight Mountains (Groeningen, Vandermeesch, Comp). Nice 1.33:1 framings. But way too long. Uneven performances.

Showing Up (Reichardt, Comp). Probably her worst film. A portrait of some members of a local Pacific NW art scene. Could easily have been satire, but apparently isn’t.

Elvis (Luhrman, Out of Comp). Peter Bradshaw is right – feels like a “159-minute trailer for a movie called Elvis”. Kinetic, but superficial.

Don Juan (Bozon, “Premieres”). Feels like a movie by Godard’s second cousin. Not especially bad, but …

WEAK
Les Amandiers (Bruni Tedeschi, Comp). Starts of well, with young thespians auditioning for then working on plays for a drama school, but when it segues to their “real lives” and the actory-quality of their performances remains and the cliched, trumped up problems of their personal issues is taken super-seriously, it’s hard to give a shit.

Broker (Kore’eda, Comp). Generic. Devoid of a sense of individual authorship. Disappointing.

Un varon (Hernandez, Directors Fortnight). Some miserabilist atmosphere (Bogota, Columbia). No drive, no drama.

War Pony (Keough and Gammell, UCR). Some miserabilist atmosphere (Oglala Lakota Indian reservation). No drive, no drama.

Tchaikovsky’s Wife (Serebrennikov, Comp). Meandering mess. Lots of money spent on ill-conceived material.

L’envol (Marcello, Directors Fortnight). Mainstream tripe, poorly put together.

Stars at Noon (Denis, Comp). Terrible pacing. Terrible direction of actors. Makes that sparkly space incest movie look like a masterpiece.

Butterfly Vision (Nakonechnyi, UCR). A very weak first film.

I saw the starts of Alma viva, Aftersun, and Godland. None held my attention enough to compel me to finish watching them.

HORRIBLE
Holy Spider (Abbasi, Comp). Comments in an earlier post.

Armageddon Time (Gray, Comp). Comments in an earlier post.

[yoshimori]

I'm confused, I thought the press screening reaction wasn't so favorable for the Gray? Do these scores reflect something different?

It certainly wasn't as favorable as that of the celebrity premiere screening reported above.

The Screen Jury Grid charts something else, the reactions of just ten select critics. Each has his or her preferences, pretty obviously. For the Gray, the scores range the gamut from 1 star (Peter Bradshaw) to 4 stars (Mathieu Macharet), but are, on average, a little bit above the average. If interested, one can find the details by searching "cannes screen jury grid 2022" and looking for the most recent posts. For me, the Screen grid gives a vague sense of others' views. I mentioned it only because it was referenced earlier in the thread.

[Finch]

The Jury Grid doesn't seem to be totally accurate though because Bradshaw actually gave the Gray two stars in the paper. Maybe the one star rating was his initial reaction shared with Screen Daily and he upgraded it to two stars for the Guardian.

[yoshimori]

The Jury Grid doesn't seem to be totally accurate though because Bradshaw actually gave the Gray two stars in the paper. Maybe the one star rating was his initial reaction shared with Screen Daily and he upgraded it to two stars for the Guardian.

Maybe. But it seems The Guardian ratings system is a bit different -- "five stars" are possible there, but a maximum of four for the grid. So maybe that accounts for the discrepancy.

If we care about his opinion -- and I don't think I particularly do, though the summaries of his other opinions on the grid are not often especially problematic for me -- here is some of it:

Headline: Hopkins and Hathaway can’t save this stagy tale of a quasi-Trump

First paragraph: This slightly laborious and self-consciously acted family coming-of-age drama features some perfunctory plot resolutions, and dinner-theatre performances from its all-star cast, including Anthony Hopkins, Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway.

[Finch]

Some of the British critics have never warmed to James Gray (and I find Bradshaw a fairly bland critic) but yes, objectively, we have to acknowledge that other international as well as American reviewers were disappointed by Armageddon Time (I think the title is terrible even while recognising that it's based on a song) as much as the other faction loves it. Personally, I like some of his films but never had any interest in this one, and I'm not sure that even across-the-board raves would have compelled me to go as autobiographical films generally just aren't my cup of tea.