Entries Tagged 'Cannes 2009' | Indie Eye

Entries tagged “Cannes 2009”

Getting closer to the world's first $0 movie.

By Vadim Rizov on 08/21/2009

Filed under: Marketing

There's a history of movies whose low budgets and origin stories are more famous than the films themselves. From his 1992 $7,000 debut "El Mariachi" onward, Robert Rodriguez has practically built a career out of this kind of thing. A decade later, Shane Carruth would make a much better movie -- "Primer" -- for the same number (unadjusted for inflation!), but people didn't talk about his budget as much. That's because all there was (and is, honestly) to Rodriguez is undisciplined fanboy enthusiasm and extreme production ingenuity; Carruth's movie would have been a knock-out no matter its cost. People are... MORE »

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Quentin Tarantino makes war fun again.

By Vadim Rizov on 08/14/2009

Filed under: Coming attractions

Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" comes out next Friday, but the deluge of negative advance press seems to indicate we should be bored already. Quentin! Always with the talking and the self-indulgence and the references. He doesn't make it easy on himself; unlike Wes Anderson, who went from bad-haircut-geek to styled-out, blazer-wearing fashion template in under a decade, Tarantino hasn't learned anything about dealing with the press over his career. He's still prone to telling people what a great writer he is, which never helps. Because "Basterds" has been gestating and promised for an eternity (remember when Adam Sandler was going... MORE »

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"Drag Me To Hell."

By Alison Willmore on 05/28/2009

Filed under: Reviews

By the B-movie ethics of Sam Raimi's "Drag Me To Hell," the torments inflicted on poor Christine Brown are grossly (and grossly) unfair and yet, there's no denying it, also at least a little bit deserved. Christine (Alison Lohman) is the bank loan officer who makes the fateful final call to kick a zestfully unlovable old lady out of her house for failing to keep up on mortgage payments, but she's really just the last dinky cog in the machine, the one put in the disagreeable position of being the human face on a corporate decision. Eyeing a promotion to... MORE »

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Cannes 2009: "Inglourious Basterds."

By Alison Willmore on 05/20/2009

Filed under: Reviews

Spoilers below. Quentin Tarantino's a great writer of dialogue, and no one's more convinced of the fact than Quentin Tarantino. The ratio of talk to action -- not gun fights or explosions, but just people doing stuff -- in "Inglourious Basterds" is, generously, nine to one. Again and again, characters sit down over drinks (whiskey, champagne, milk), and the stakes may be high, but the conversations are meandering and lengthy, and no matter how clever they may get, they end up defeated by their own pace and their writer's inability to let anything go. Even the opening scene, a confrontation... MORE »

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Cannes 2009: "Vincere."

By Alison Willmore on 05/19/2009

Filed under: Reviews

If Giovanna Mezzogiorno wants to be Italy's answer to Angelina Jolie, "Vincere" is her "Changeling," and how unfortunate. "Vincere," directed by Marco Bellocchio, is the story of Ida Dalser, the first wife of Benito Mussolini and mother to his first son, Benito Albino Mussolini. By World War I, Mussolini had finished with her and married Rachele Guidi, resorting to a dictator-style divorce of Dalser by taking her child, dumping her in an insane asylum and having all records of their union effaced, save for the marriage certificate she hid, never to be found. Bellocchio does neither the character nor the... MORE »

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Cannes 2009: "Kinatay."

By Alison Willmore on 05/18/2009

Filed under: Reviews

There are two easy types of film provocation. You can prod an audience with boundary-pushing images -- say, Chloe Sevigny painting Vincent Gallo's tree -- or by testing their tolerance for style or narrative experimentation -- say, Vincent Gallo driving, driving, driving, driving. "Kinatay" (which translates to "Butchered") tries out both, culminating in an act of gruesome violence after a patience-trying buildup of dread and boredom over a long, unlit nighttime car ride. The film's main character is a upbeat teenager who's just married the equally young mother of his baby. Short on cash, he's been dabbling in petty crime,... MORE »

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Cannes 2009: "Vengeance."

By Alison Willmore on 05/17/2009

Filed under: Reviews

We're far enough away from the golden age of Hong Kong John Woo action excess that a little nostalgia is warranted, and Johnnie To's "Vengeance" is meant to fondly recall every operatic slow-mo shoot-em-up of the era, though until that sinks in, it just looks ungainly. Singer Johnny Hallyday, who's often shorthand summed-up as France's Elvis equivalent, plays Francois Costello, a Parisian restaurant owner with a dark past and real talent for wearing a Burberry trench coat with the collar popped. He comes to Macao to avenge his daughter (played by Sylvie Testud, who despite top billing has maybe five... MORE »

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Cannes 2009: "Thirst."

By Alison Willmore on 05/16/2009

Filed under: Reviews

"Thirst," Park Chan-wook's plague-vampire-priest-black-comedy-gothic-family-drama-noir, has enough going on for at least an entire other movie, if not two. Its developments are impossible to predict, but that's because half are unnecessary -- by the time clergyman-turned-secular-bloodsucker Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho) and his lover Tae-joo (Kim Ok-bin) are hiding a body in the closet before hosting their weekly mahjong game, I could barely remember how everything started (Sang-hyun volunteers to be part of an experiment to cure a virus killing celibate male missionaries in Africa, and is unknowingly given a transfusion of vampire plasma that staves off the sickness). The disinterest in the... MORE »

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Cannes 2009: "Taking Woodstock."

By Alison Willmore on 05/15/2009

Filed under: Reviews

Some many questions for such a straightforward comedy! Why would the apparently grown-up Elliot spend himself broke supporting his parents' run-down Catskills resort in the first place? Why is his mother so crazy? What's up with the money hoarding? Where did the mafia end up? Did the town actually manage to do anything to fight the concert's arrival? "Taking Woodstock," which was directed by Ang Lee from a screenplay written by James Schamus, is based on the autobiography of Elliot Tiber, which explains some of this messiness -- real life rarely includes conveniently tied-up narrative ends. But when part of... MORE »

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Cannes 2009: "Spring Fever."

By Alison Willmore on 05/15/2009

Filed under: Reviews

Lou Ye was banned from making films for five years by the Chinese government after "Summer Palace" screened at Cannes in 2006 without their approval. Which means it's some sort of act of defiance and bravery, sure, for him to have since then made "Spring Fever," which this year premieres in competition. But the film is pure soap opera under the scarcest sheen of something higher, a love pentagon set in neon-and-concrete Nanjing. Jiang Cheng (Qin Hao) is its central tragic gay, subject to various emotional and physical beatings, who when things begin is traveling with his married lover to... MORE »

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Cannes 2009: "Up."

By Alison Willmore on 05/14/2009

Filed under: Reviews

Pixar's proven, again and again, a miraculous ability to spin cinematic gold out of almost perversely unlikely scenarios, but the beginning of "Up," the opening night film at this year's Cannes, is something else entirely. A boy, Carl, watches a newsreel in a '30s theater about larger-than-life adventurer Charles Muntz, and when making his way home, enraptured with his hero's exploits, he encounters Ellie, a gap-toothed girl who's taken over an abandoned house to play out her own Muntz-inspired imaginings. One minor mishap later, they're fast friends, and from there "Up" cuts to the two, quiet Carl and exuberant Ellie,... MORE »

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Cannes do.

By Alison Willmore on 04/23/2009

Filed under: Festivals

The competition line-up for this year's Cannes Film Festival has been announced! A fair amount of Euro provocateurs -- Lars von Trier, Gaspar Noé, Michael Haneke -- and France in general, and only two American films, the expected Tarantino and the unexpected Ang Lee comedy, which hopefully has more to it than its trailer would indicate. New films from Jane Campion and Pedro Almodóvar and Ken Loach, plus Park Chan-wook's vampire drama (left), whee! Terry Gilliam's "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus" will screen out of competition, as will Alejandro Amenabar's "Agora," with Sam Raimi's "Drag Me to Hell" as a... MORE »

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L'affiche.

By Alison Willmore on 04/22/2009

Filed under: Festivals

This year's Cannes poster, created by Annick Durban and inspired, according to the festival, by "L'Avventura": "A mysterious female silhouette, caught in mid-movement, seems to be opening a window onto the magic of cinema and invites us into a dream..." MORE »

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Opening nights.

By Alison Willmore on 06/18/2008

Filed under: Festivals

Yesterday, the Toronto International Film Festival announced that its opening night film will be "Passchendaele," a $20 million World War I epic from actor/director Paul Gross, whose other helming credit is 2002's "Men With Brooms," as far as I know, the only curling rom-com in existence. Guy Dixon at the Globe and Mail talks with Gross, who based the film on the life of (and stars as) his grandfather Sergeant Michael Dunne: "About two-thirds of the film is set on the home front, so it is a romance that culminates in battle," Gross said. "It is at times epic and... MORE »