Cannes ’13: What Is This Thing Called Love?

Love is in the air at Cannes… Or something like that.

With only a couple of competition films left to unspool, the latest hot title is The Life of Adèle  (and whose-alt title is not hot, Blue Is The Warmest Color, which screams queer cinema and should be dropped). The genius of the film is that this “lesbian coming-of-age” film feels like nothing of the kind. It just feels like a coming of age film that happens to have a first love that is homosexual. This cannot be said of Jeune & Jolie, which is inscrutably female or Stranger By The Lake, which is relentlessly male.

The turn-on of the long, graphic, realistic sex scene between the women is what is a turn-on about any sex where partners seek mutuality. (Cannes’ sexuality, unfortunately, has been dominated with men/boys who seem to be unaware of what women respond to sexually. Even with all the good sex in some of the films, incompetence has more screen time.). I honestly have no idea how gay men respond to two female bodies writhing for an extended period, but I think I can say that heterosexuals of both genders would appreciate the sex in this film.

Ultimately, however, the sex is some of the proof, not the pudding in Adèle.

One of the other great decisions—which I wondered about while watching the film—was that it doesn’t linger on the unaccepting voices in Adèle’s life. Nor are they dismissed. The character, it turns out, doesn’t sweat the small stuff. But when things matter to her, they matter quite deeply… no commitment-phobe she.

If you ask, I will tell you that Life of Adèle is my favorite of the “girls gone wild” films (which also include The Bling Ring, Sarah Prefers To Run, Behind The Candalabra, and, to some degree, The Past). But I believe there is room for all of it without dismissing any one of the other films on the basis of expectation.

There has been very little filmmaking that can really be called “bad” with a straight face. The fight is about the choices filmmakers have made about what they want to discuss with their work.

I am a big fan of intellectual consistency and emotional acceptance. In other words, love or hate what you love or hate, but spare —professionally—the claim that there is something broken about the work because you don’t like the message or that it’s superior work because you do like the message.

After all, isn’t the whole point NOT to get caught up in expectations?

DP/30 @ Sundance ’13: We Steal Secrets: The Story Of Wikileaks, documentarian Alex Gibney

DP/30: What Maisie Knew, screenwriter Carroll Cartwright

Cannes IV 2013 (updated)

The pace of knocking out reviews within hours of seeing these films was a part of the festival experience I had willfully forgotten…. and which has quickly been re-illuminated as unfortunate, as best.

I have spent much of the last week reflecting on what would be my ideal experience festival experience would be… and I’m not sure I’m much closer to an answer. The glory of evolving technology offers opportunities, but they are not necessarily anything but variations on the same theme. Fast is fast whether it’s writing on the web or video on the web or Vine or Twitter, etc., ad nauseum.

Is 800 words in 90 minutes better than 140 characters in 90 seconds or is there something better in between?

I’m not unconscious that these are all very real in today’s media space. And I actually think there is validity on the existence of immediate response, even amongst professionals. The problem is that it is often the only form of response… and I consider that a real problem.

And I don’t know the answer… or even know if there is an answer. More than ever, we are in an editor-free role. There is a boss for most of us, but the role of the editor has changed. What we don’t know… gets printed.

Of course, there are all kinds of layers of good, bad, and simply incompetent. There are a lot of people doing their work here (and in Sundance and Toronto and elsewhere) and each has a focus and a perspective and parameters of their self-valuation. And who is to say who is right and who is wrong. You can pick your team, but your sense of “right” has boundaries by the very nature of the beast.

There was a time, not long ago, when a discrete stick of rhetorical dynamite, carefully placed, could move some stuff. Now, once past the artists who want to consider their work, only embarrassment and the avoidance of embarrassment drives change… not the work and not the chatter.

Sometimes you just have to piss in the ocean because you really need to piss. But is that what journalism has become in entertainment? That and the effort to be able to claim that someone even noticed the warm spot in the ocean?

I owe you some reviews. (Twitter gets some quick reactions.). But this afternoon was for ranting, it seems.

Death March
The Last Of The Unjust
Shield of Straw
Omar
CBGB
Behind The Candelabra
Sarah Prefers To Run
Bastards
Only God Forgives
La Jaula de Oro

Trailer: The Wolverine

Looks better than anything I’ve see but Pacific Rim. No?

DP/30: Fill The Void, director Rama Burshtein, actress Hadas Yaron

Weekend Estimates by Cap’n Klady

Cannes Catch Up

I’ve fallen behind, but I can get up.

The Past – Farhadi couldn’t really match A Separation, but he makes clear that he’s not going to slump or get lazy on this follow-up. Weird to say an Oscar nominee is in a star-making performance, but Berenice Bejo puts the world on notice with a turn that is not Peppy, but scrappy, while still taking full measure of her beauty. The film relies a little too much on revealed truths from virtually every character, but still, serious and intimate work.

Like Father, Like Son – I am a Kore-eda guy and this film is right in his wheelhouse. What happens when two families find out their 6-year-olds were switched at birth? Beautiful, lyrical agony. Nature or nurture? Opportunity or massive loss? And how do we treat each other when faced with when deciding to give away or accept a loved one?

Inside Llewyn Davis – The Coens are amongst the finest craftspeople in film today. They create worlds and characters in them that are transportive… every time. So who is Llewyn Davis and why do you want to spend the time to get to know him? Well, the answer has to be greater than the Coens’ magic tricks. And it will be. But like every Coen Bros movie, the key to getting the full flavor is marination. And I want to experience the film again before making pronouncements. I have had a clue about the depth of the text on most Coen films the first time through, but never a full understanding. And so, I will put my arrogance aside, at least for a few days, until I experience it again. Until then, suffice it to say that the acting is brilliant, from the absolute lead Oscar Isaac, through all the supporting roles (Carey Mulligan plays comedy as well as she plays she plays drama). The place and time are absolutely real without being showy about production design and costumes. And the script is neither precious nor excessively cruel.

Michael H – Profession: Director – Having shot Haneke 3 times in the last 3 years, knowing how he handles questions, I was thrilled to watch someone else try to get the answers in this doc, which is on set for Amour, but covers other films as well. What I got was a portrait of the man I see, in and around my interviews. Serious, but charming, funny, and crystal clear about his work. I saw a man who respects the work so much that he seems harsh at times, but who is also open with his smile, laughter, and passions. And as an added pleasure, the doc has extended interviews with the stars of Amour, getting from them what I have seen in no other interviews for the film. A must-see for all film lovers interested in what’s behind then image of one of the greats.

Duran Duran by David Lynch – Pure joyous kitsch. One of the great Eurotrash pop bands of the 80s, whose sound is more unique and complex than you might remember, meets the great avant-gardist, Lynch. Shot, it seems for a live-streaming event sponsored by AmEx, Lynch seems to have taken the footage and scrapbooked it, every frame with some form of wild overlay (including digital smoke at the end of every song). I’d cut 2 or 3 songs from “the new album,” as the running time is near 2 hours, but for most of the concert, when the music is unfamiliar, Lynch makes it fun and when the songs are familiar, Lynch adds more fun. The only disappointment was the group’s great Bond theme, which is great live, but which Lynch seemed to avoid messing with. I was looking forward to guns and girl dolls. But still, great fun.

Miele – For me, one of the well-intended, well-made minor films of the festival. As interesting as it was to have a supermodel who self-androgynizes herself while doing the job of helping people euthanize themselves, that bold choice demanded equally hold hurdles. Truth is, it would have been a great role for young Valeria Golina – the filmmaker here – who is a great beauty, but who brings a great natural emotional kink. Adjani, in her prime, would have worked. I don’t want to blame this actress. She is quite good at doing what she does. I just thought she was miscast. And the movie is hers, from start to finish. The result is a bit chillier than compelling, even as she cracks.

Jimmy P – What was one of the great French filmmakers of the near-farce with deep emotional layering doing in The Menninger Clinic in the 40s with a Native American stripped of emotion and a Frenchman trying to draw him out using methods that were questioned back then, but were not odd enough today to make anyone in the audience uncomfortable? I don’t know. My guess is that someone handed him a book that intrigued him just as he wanted to make an English-language film, then two great actors said “yes” and the train rolled. But there just isn’t anything revelatory here. Performances are excellent. Matthieu Amalric is grand. Benicio is real. But oy… mental pain caused physical pain. Yes… and?

The Congress – Love Ari Folman. Didn’t get this movie. At all. Something to revisit, but I felt like I had seen all these ideas before… many in the 70s… mostly in flop movies. (shrug)

Stranger By The Lake (Cock du Lac) – I don’t know why there is a gay porn film in the festival, in spite of many long lingering shots of the lake and the whooshing trees. And don’t try the “well, if it was naked women, you’d like it angle,” since if these were naked women, it would not be at the festival. All those complaining about the Ozon might want to consider how not remotely pornographic that film was in comparison. Even last year’s Paradise:Love isn’t close to the degree of graphic imagery, either simple nudity or sexual activity. And, in this case, to what end? Maybe this will be the Rosa Parks of queer cinema to some, but I don’t grade on a curve. If you are going to make me into a cinema urologist, there better be a better reason than “because no one else has done so before.” Is it all a big AIDS metaphor, with cruising, bareback sex and love that quickly turns deadly? Maybe. But the metaphor is tortured, if you ask me.

Review-ish: Star Trek: Into Darkness (spoiler-free)

I would still argue that the low standards that met JJ Abrams first Trek reboot were a result of a pleasurable gimmick… “Star Trek Babies.” “Hey! Spock gets laid! Kirk has daddy issues! It’s the same, but different enough to be fun again!” Never mind the lame villain, the illogic, and the meaningless flares that match the incomprehensible visuals.

Something happened on the way to this sequel… nothing. No one told JJ that it had to be better. Just keep going.

So for two acts, you have shockingly beautiful images directed with so little skill that you can’t really tell who is in any room, much less what ships or people are in what space during action sequences.

The opening sequence says it all. Lots and lots of cool imagery and not a whit of logic or real excitement. Why does Kirk mess with the primitive culture by stealing their religious figure? Why are they running? Why wasn’t Spock beamed in? Why are the Enterprise folks even considering breaking fundamental rules… or are we not expected to notice because the movie starts mid-Indiana Jones rip-off? (Oh yes, JJ proves yet again that he can’t hold Spielberg’s 40-year-old jock.)

But on top of breaking the Prime Directive, how about they break it AGAIN?

To be honest, this didn’t bother me that much until thinking about it later. I was too busy being frustrated by the crappy framing and Abrams’ sheer disinterest in making action scenes flow so the audience can anticipate and therefore stay engaged. He directs like a TV guy, where action is too expensive and audiences are fine with visual shortcuts. That’s with a $3-million-an-hour budget, not a $100-million-an-hour budget.

It wasn’t until the 3rd act that I got really angry in the theater as I watched.

Let me be clear… I generally like the acting. Loved Cumberbatch as Didi’s Brother (attempt at avoiding a not-so-significant spoiler). I was fine with the overall story, though it gets so convoluted at times, you need a f-ing guidebook.

But the details of the third act showed a lack of respect, perhaps a contempt, for the source material. There are a ton of good to weak winks at the audience about the older versions of Trek. But in this third act, it gets giddy with onanistic love about just how much more clever this team is than Roddenberry’s. And about 20 minutes before the end, I was in full disgust mode.

And then, they add laziness to insult by going the full Iron Man Three, devaluing any of what seemed to be truths of the “episode” and new series. As in, if Tony Stark just needed to decide to get the metal out of his chest all of a sudden, Fuck You.

I hope that there is a “Trek Babies 3″ with someone who can shoot a movie doing it. Rian Johnson, maybe?

These are movies. It’s all a game. I get that. But drama has rules and all I am demanding is a little effort to honor them. Vader was Luke’s father. Batman’s dead girlfriend stayed dead. And the Titanic sunk at the end. In JJ’s world, Luke turns out to be Vader’s father and Leia is only a half-sister, so Luke can bang her and mock Hans endlessly about “sloppy seconds.”

Hisssssssssss… terical.

DP/30: Erased, actor Aaron Eckhart

Cannes Day 2: Girls Just Wanna Have… (Part 2 of 2)

The second half of the Girls In Trouble Cannes combo (though there was a rancid Gondry cherry on top) was Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring. And this is what I saw…

A combination of Somewhere (but without the sliver of light that Elle Fanning brought to it) and Marie Antoinette’s happy vulgarity. The combination is odd, as even the pop music party that Coppola is known for is actually off the beat here. I would go so far as to suggest that Ms. Coppola may well have cut off the natural rhythms of the music with the intent of hitting a discordant note.

In fact, I think Bling was shot and cut to avoid the clean, easier to swallow, MTV aesthetic in which the girls think they live.

To make The Bling Ring more “fun” would be, I think, to buy into what Coppola is clearly sick of being sold. I’m not sure the strategy always works, but I can’t imagine a better choice. This is a film about imitated success and deluded images of achievement.

It is—Word of the Day—banality cloaked in champagne and expensive shoes. The fact that Paris Hilton doesn’t realize that the joke is, well, her, is the perfect measure of Coppola’s success. There is no “there” there because, in fact, there is no “there” there. How entertaining is that meant to be?

I love the unspoken hierarchy that the group starts to place on the expanding number of celebrity homes. Paris is always The Best Place To Be. By the time they get to Megan Fox’s nice, but average house, it’s downright boring.

Another interesting part of the film is just how minor the ambitions of the group are, aside from doing as they please. I don’t approve, but I am pretty sure that Coppola found just the right note of vacuousness in this film.

There is also a fascinating absence of sex in a film loaded with drugs and money and good-looking young people. A couple of the six or so blingers seem to have a sex life… but most seem to be a false in that as in their image polishing.

The truth is, I need to see it again to really get a handle in it. I am pretty sure Coppola was working in negative entertainment space. As the ring heads into their fifth or sixth robbery, shot only from a distance like rats in a maze, I was convinced that there was more than the surface of the surface on this film.

For the record, Emma Watson is pretty much perfect the whine of Alexis Neiers. You will love to hate it. And the star of the film really is the group’s ringleader, played by Katie Chang, who is a real find. But this is a director’s film, love it or hate it. Good performances all around, but it is Sofia’s show, first and last.

Cannes Day 2: Girls Just Wanna Have… (Part 1 of 2)

Day Two of the festival continued to drip from the sky and on the screen as teens in trouble (or are they?) was the theme of the day.

You couldn’t really pick two more different views of teenage girls than Francois Ozon’s Young & Beautiful and Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring. The first is an intimate eight months with a 17-year-old, observing and never forcing her subtext to the surface, any more than one can with any 17-year-old girl. The other is all about surface, as a group of teens (all but one a girl) say everything they think all the time… but with nothing of significance to say, simply vomiting up their fame-driven view of happiness and success.

Interestingly, in both films, a male character who is conscious, but not really ready to express wisdom, is the “narrator,” if you will, or at least the point of entry.

Jeune & Jolie (Young & Beautiful) is another Ozon drama that is as dry as his campy films are wet. It’s hard to write about the film without spoilers, as the piece watches a young woman make choices that the audience is never quite able to anticipate. From the very first shot, in which she is being watched on a private beach cove from a distance, deciding whether she might dare to take her top off to sunbathe, to the very end, in which she engages a “ghost” of herself, the whim and pain of youth is really all that guides her.

I expect that many writers will have a hard time getting over an often-naked beauty as anything but exploitation, not unlike people unable to get past Richard Pryor’s language. There is a prudish attitude amongst many seemingly hip people that is spiked by the idea of a film actually addressing sexuality without clear (perhaps harsh) judgements. This is one reason I love Ozon as a filmmaker. He tells stories that almost no one else does, about people who have power or assets or confidence. He does not artistically abandon these people because they “have no right” to complain… who might be unsympathetic because they don’t suffer “the right way.”

For me, what completely clicked in Young & Beautiful – and I saw it twice on the day – is that it captured the terse, illogical, stuttering, passionate, dispassionate, disappointed, angry, thrilling journey of a young woman who is profoundly empowered by the birthright of her looks. Really, it isn’t that much different than other girls’ struggles. It’s simply heightened by the peculiar asset of her looks and the choices she makes.

Moreover, the film speaks to the ongoing struggle of many women with this power… the unspoken truths, the changing roles, the wildcard in a life. No woman in the film is living a life completely on the surface.

So far, the response of female critics I have heard from and read has been dismissive. But not to put too fine a point on it, this story may seem absurd and unreal to some, but I know more than one of these women. I grew up with a slew of them. And their seemingly high-drama turn can be, in reality, quite banal.

It is as obvious and unimaginably convoluted as… well… women. And I mean that in much the way I would suggest that men tend to be much simpler, lacking the mystery that makes women irresistible to the heterosexual male (which is no excuse for male self-indulgence, another issue altogether).

The discussion of Ozon’s sexuality is an interesting one, which is unlikely to be much engaged. He makes a lot of movies about female power, whether the dramas or the high camp. Does the inclination of the filmmaker matter when it comes to putting the work in perspective? Hmmmm…

Star Trek Babies 2: Spoiler Space (Spoilers)

BYOB: Gone Francin’

Cannes Day One: Drizzling

And so, on the morning of Day Two, a look back at Day One.

As the week progresses, the bubble we each travel in begins to dissipate. But on Day One, familiar faces, remembering the rhythm of the year before, trying to make good choices, getting the wireless and phones to work right, getting over the hotel room… It’s the first day at rich kids boarding school.

The Great Gatsby had already been popped for those of us in the U.S, bubble, so there was a sense of ennui to go with the steady drizzle from the start. I, personally, was not done with Gatsby, and after viewing the first hour again, I am still not done with Gatsby. I lean on the positive side of the meter for the film and re-viewing the first hour pushed me closer to the possibility of loving the film. I saw in in a WB screening room and seeing it on the big screen, even from a bad seat,was a better experience, scene after scene.

The biggest revelation for me was that it was much funnier than I remember. Luhrmann laid in a whole bunch of Easter egg references which I really hadn’t connected with the first time through, particularly in music choices (not just the existence of Jay-Z).

Luhrman remains one of the lazily discarded filmmakers of this era. Critics just won’t look past the surface much, almost angry at him for his ambitions. Anyone can fairly hate anything… if they have made a real effort to engage it first. I think there are a bunch of writers out there who just refuse with Luhrmann… on false principle.