Cannes Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Tim Burton on the set of Corpse Bride, Photo credit: Derek Frey
This is really Tim Burton's year: first with his MoMA exhibition, then the March release of his 3D Alice in Wonderland, and now the announcement that he will head up the Cannes Jury panel. Granted, the Cannes Jury Prez doesn't actually choose the movies that will be seen at Cannes -- tant pis! -- but his presence will surely affect what prizes are given out, whether for better or for worse. The real question is what he will lean towards, which will become even more a topic of discussion once the festival films are announced.

As Guy Lodge at InContention notes, "Following this announcement, some will try to draw convenient conclusions about what type of films now have an advantage in this year's competition. But while the jury president can certainly exert a lot of influence on the race -- it's widely assumed Isabelle Huppert tipped the balance towards her former collaborator Michael Haneke last year, while Tarantino openly favored Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004 -- a safer rule of thumb, particularly when a filmmaker is in charge, is that the winning film will have little in common with the president's own oeuvre."

Meanwhile, the festival president Gilles Jacob told Variety, "He's a magician of visual delights who turns the screen into a faery wonder. We hope his sweet madness and gothic humor will pervade the Croisette, bringing Christmas to all. Christmas and Halloween." So perhaps we can hope for a little strangeness among the bronzed beauties and paparazzi this year.

Either way, this is a real feather in the cap for a filmmaker who was once an introverted artist growing up in ultra-suburban Burbank.

Sony Pictures Classics didn't waste any time hob-nobbin' on la Croisette or catching a 3D showing of Up before buying shelling out some francs for new movies on the opening day of Cannes. SPC snatched up Michael Haneke's latest discomfort-fest The White Ribbon (which is also in competition for the Palme d'Or), as well as the dramatic romance Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky. According to IMDb, The White Ribbon's plot is as follows:

"Strange events happen at a rural school in the north of Germany during the year 1913, which seem to be ritual punishment. Does this affect the school system, and how does the school have an influence on fascism?" Creepy!

The official Cannes site has more information:

"A village in Protestant northern Germany. 1913-1914. On the eve of World War I. The story of the children and teenagers of a choir run by the village schoolteacher, and their families: the baron, the steward, the pastor, the doctor, the midwife, the tenant farmers. Strange accidents occur and gradually take on the character of a punishment ritual. Who is behind it all?"

Haneke most recently remade his own movie Funny Games in English just in case us dumb Americans didn't fully grasp our own preoccupation with violence and our own culpability in violence just by watching it. Previous films include The Piano Teacher, an adaptation of the book by Elfriede Jelinek starring Isabelle Huppert as a piano teacher who likes to self-harm her hoo-hoo, among other things, and Benny's Video, starring one of the actors from the original version of Funny Games as a teen who films himself shooting a girl with a pig-slaughtering gun.

Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky will probably be the better date movie of the two, but hey, I'm not here to judge what you see on your dates.

Pixar's Up -- typically magical according to the few who've seen it at exclusive sneaks -- is "premiering" to much anticipation on May 13th. At Cannes. In France. If you're offended that a bunch of cheese-eating surrender monkeys are seeing what is likely to be the best film of the summer before red-blooded Americans, don't fret: there's a way that you, yes you, could see the movie on May 11th, two whole days before the Frenchies.

It'll cost you 125 bucks, or $100 if you're a member of the San Francisco Film Society, which is sponsoring the screening at Pixar's headquarters across the Bay in Emeryville, CA. In any case, less than a plane ticket to Europe. And though I won't be shelling out the cash (despite the fact that the press screening isn't likely to happen until a couple days before the film's release on May 29th), I can vouch for the Pixar screening room as a fantastic place to see a movie. Oh, and if you have $250 to spare for a "VIP" ticket, you can get a guided tour of Pixar beforehand.

I'll be honest: this was tempting. Ultimately I decided that a three-week lead wasn't worth a hundred bucks to me. But maybe it is to others, and tickets are still readily available as best I can tell. If you're going let me know so I can live vicariously through you.

UPDATE: Here's the trailer in Quicktime quality.

Of all the films I'm looking forward to this fall, Blindness ranks fairly high up there. Canadian distributor Alliance has just made available a full trailer that proves to be fairly intriguing, as an optometrist (Mark Ruffalo) and his seemingly immune wife (Julianne Moore) cope with an inexplicable epidemic of sight loss.

I'm a sucker for most anything vaguely apocalyptic, and while this very well could turn out to be akin to watching the first act of Children of Men through a milk-filled mask (which I've done, mind you), the prestige behind the project* says otherwise. We have acclaimed screenwriter Don McKellar adapting Nobel-Laureate José Saramago's novel, with Academy Award nominee Fernando Meirelles directing a cast that also includes Danny Glover, Gael Garcia Bernal, Alice Braga, and Sandra Oh.

I must say, going off that taste and last spring's teaser, I still like the look, sound, and feel of this one, especially Moore's little retort (you know the one), and that's not to mention that any trailer which employs John Murphy's underrated score from last year's Sunshine to set a rightfully ominous tone is always fine by me. We'll get to see (sorry) what trials and tribulations await the world on September 19th.

*Not to mention Rocchi's review of the film from its Cannes world premiere.

Odd Horten (Bard Owe) knows who he is and what he does. He's a driver for the train, and has spent so many years on the same route that he knows it instinctively; he has his work, he has his life. But in Bent Hamer's O' Horten, which played in the Un Certain Regard selection this year at Cannes (and has since been picked up for distribution by Sony Pictures Classics), Horten has to face the fact that his life, as he knows it, is changing; he's hit retirement age, and he simply has no clue what to do next.

Hamer's earlier films had a finely-tuned capacity for observation, perhaps best demonstrated in Eggs (1995) and Kitchen Stories (2003); Hamer's English-language debut, Factotum (2005), took the boozy, woozy prose of Charles Bukowski and put a little air and space in it, turning the alcohol-fueled anger of Bukowski's words which, on the page, hit like a shot of cheap whiskey and turning them into something smoother and finer with the smooth burn of regret going down. In O'Horten, Hamer's back in Norway, and still crafting careful, considered portraits of day to day life, but ones which nonetheless have a deadpan comedy to them, a careful and humane sense of the absurd.

If I had one wish and one wish only, I think I'd like to be Javier Bardem throughout the duration of filming Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the latest film from writer-director Woody Allen. A new trailer for the flick has just debuted over at Moviefone, and while it's kinda hard to make out what's going on in the movie (there's no dialogue; just music), this definitely looks steamy, romantic, dramatic and, ahem, hot. Starring Javier Bardem, Scarlett Johansson, Penélope Cruz and Rebecca Hall, Vicky Cristina Barcelona marks Allen's first film shot in Spain and it revolves around a painter (Bardem) who winds up "involved" with two American tourists (Johansson and Hall). Cruz plays Bardem's jealous ex-girlfriend, and if the final shot of the trailer is any indication, she definitely takes her jealousy to the next level.

Based on early buzz, there's apparently a sexy threesome scene between Bardem, Johansson and Cruz in the film, as well as a little back-and-forth kissing between Johansson and Cruz (which is teased in the preview). Needless to say, the 2008 Festival de Cannes is the perfect place to premiere such a film -- and our own James Rocchi and Kim Voynar are currently on the ground in France, itching to bring you tons of coverage later this week (including a review of this seductive-looking film).

Check out the trailer above (or over on Moviefone) and let us know what you think below. Vicky Cristina Barcelona arrives in theaters on August 29.

With five nominations, it looks like Superbad will be the star of the 2008 MTV Movie Awards, and its three jubilant male leads -- Michael Cera, Jonah Hill, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse -- deserve the kudos. But one major talent behind the whole affair has stayed relatively anonymous while these young up-and-comers bathe in the spotlight: Director Greg Mottola. The erstwhile independent filmmaker, responsible for some of the best installments of Arrested Developed and Undeclared, launched his career a solid decade before the rise of Judd Apatow with a charming little low budget comedy called The Daytrippers. Starring Stanley Tucci, Hope Davis, Liev Schreiber, Parker Posey and a host of other fantastic character actors, the film follows a wildly dysfunctional family over the course of a single day, as Davis, playing a worrisome housewife, tries to track down her unfaithful husband (Tucci).

Mixing warm humanity with pitch-perfect screwball timing, Daytrippers marked the sort of debut that told you a filmmaker had a big career ahead of him. After a modest premiere at the Slamdance Film Festival, it landed at Cannes, barely got a theatrical release and promptly vanished thereafter. Mottola turned to TV work, and slipped out of the film scene for a good ten years. These days, it's no easy task to track down Daytrippers on DVD -- you can nab second-hand copies on Amazon for decent rates, but not a single retail outlet carries it. Aside from the occasionally airings on cable, the movie has vanished.

When you're dealing with one of the most controversial figures of 20^th century counterculture, it's important to take your time and get things right. That's exactly what Steven Soderbergh appears to be doing with his two upcoming Che Guevara biopics, The Argentine and Guerilla. While both movies looked like they were set to premiere at next month's Cannes Film Festival just a few weeks ago, Variety now reports that Soderbergh is still tweaking the final cuts-and doesn't want to unveil one movie without the other.

Judging by the polarizing figure at the center of the story, that's probably a good thing. Since Soderbergh envisioned these two films as a single unit, it wouldn't make sense to reveal one half of the saga and let people start tearing into it. Considering Fidel Castro's recent retirement, this essential component of Cuban history seems especially relevant, but that's not enough to develop interest in it (topicality didn't help Steven Spielberg's Munich). It's hard to keep audiences interested in a story that stretches across two movies, as we learned with the muted reaction to Clint Eastwood's second Iwo Jima film. Soderbergh will need to get strong reactions to both movies early in the game if they're going to have any success in theaters.

A new trend seems to find these big summer blockbusters premiering at the early summer film festivals. Last year, Spider-Man 3 took over Tribeca (and I'd expect the Tribeca folks to try to woo Iron Man to premiere this year), and films like Ocean's 13 premiered at the Cannes Film Festival a couple weeks later. Now, Fox News says folks from the Cannes festival are in talks with Steven Spielberg's reps in an attempt to premiere Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull at the festival this May. While it will debut only a week or so prior to the official release here in the states, it will give those attending Cannes the jump on getting the first reviews out there.

Cinematical will hopefully be at Cannes again this year, though accreditation is always tight and always up in the air. If Indy does premiere at Cannes, it will likely be the talk of the festival and we assume folks like Spielberg, George Lucas, Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Shia LaBeouf and Karen Allen will be on hand to walk the red carpet. I imagine those peeps heading to Cannes in May just found a new reason to get excited. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull officially arrives in theaters on May 22.

There's almost always some controversy around the Best Foreign category at the Oscars. This or that film doesn't make it in because of some minutae of the rules, and critics (and sometimes, directors and producers) howl in protest. When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the nominees for the category this year, though, it was a bit different. The loudest howls of protest were not over the films excluded for various obscure rules, but over the exclusion of Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu's Cannes winner, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (aka, "that Romanian abortion film." )

The Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips wrote on his Talking Pictures blog recently (originally posted February 5, and rerun today) about the film's exclusion. Phillips writes that the film was third on his own Top Ten list for the year, saying, "It is a rare film indeed that shows you so much in the way of dire circumstances, yet does not exploit or cheapen the human factor." Phillips talked to Mungiu about the film for this post, and the director has some rather astute things to say about some specific decisions he made with regard to the filmmaking.