Cannes, Day 3 05/18/2012
May 17, 2012 Cannes, Day 3: Ron Mann making Robert Altman doc By Liam Lacey Globe and Mail Update Toronto filmmaker announces film about legendary director of 'M*A*S*H' I ran into Canadian documentary filmmaker Ron Mann the other night. He's got an announcement here in Cannes for his new documentary. The subject is Robert Altman, the late, great iconoclastic director of M*A*S*H, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Nashville and Gosford Park, among other films. The documentary will follow Altman from his childhood in Kansas City, Mo., to his 2006 honorary Oscar (he died later that year), and will be co-produced with Altman's widow, Kathryn Reed. There's a lot of material to cover. After he returned from the war, where he flew bombing missions in the Pacific, Altman settled into a busy career making industrial films: "More than 60 of them," said Mann. "And tons of TV work." The project was officially announced today in Variety, with Reed issuing a release calling Mann "the perfect choice to examine and celebrate Bob's monumental life and art. I have no doubt Bob would be happy and may well be smiling right now." The television shows Altman made included everything from Alfred Hitchcock Presents to Bonanza and Combat! episodes. In fact, Altman was well into his 40s before he got his big break with the antiwar comedy, M*A*S*H. One interesting connection between Mann and Altman: Mann made the film Grass, on the history of pot in the United States; and Altman, a board member of NORML (the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) was an enthusiastic pot advocate. I met Altman, briefly, 15 years ago when the Cannes festival was celebrating its 50th anniversary and held a dinner for all directors who had been in competition. (Ingmar Bergman, by the way, declined to attend). I was stuck in a corner, far from the action, with some Greek and Italian and American journalists. I recall that one of them decided he was offended by the name Starbucks, reasoning that the coffee chain was trying to appeal to people obsessed with celebrity and money. It didn't seem polite to correct him: ("Well, there's this character in a novel called Moby-Dick ..."). Seated next to me was a young native American woman, whose name I don't remember but who turned out to be Altman's assistant. Every half-hour or so, either Altman or Reed kept leaving the famous-directors' table to come over and check in that she was enjoying herself. And at the end of the evening, they even thanked me for keeping her company. For someone who had a slightly curmudgeonly reputation, Altman certainly seemed to treat the people close to him well. Add Comment Cannes, Day 2: The jury is in(scrutable) 05/17/2012
May 16, 2012 Cannes, Day 2: The jury is in(scrutable) By Liam Lacey Globe and Mail Update Film festival jury members promise open-mindedness, and it's mind-numbing Back in 2001, Terry Gilliam wore a T-shirt to the Cannes jury press conference that read "Can be bribed." As he sensibly explained, "I think that will knock through all the confusion and angst one suffers when trying to choose the best. I am going to choose the one whose producer pays me the most money." For the record, that's the last time anything interesting happened at a meet-the-jury press conference here. This year's jury members were so careful to have "no preconceptions" and to be "open-minded" about the films that it seemed they shared the same script. The jury includes actors (Ewan McGregor, Emmanuelle Devos and Diane Kruger), directors (Alexander Payne, Andrea Arnold and Raoul Peck), a Palestinian actress/director (Hiam Abbass) and a fashion designer (Jean Paul Gaultier). They are led by 58-year-old jury president Nanni Moretti (The Son's Room), who has brought six films to Cannes over the years. These are the ones who will pick the Palme d'Or and other prizes out of 22 films in competition. But Haitian director Raoul Peck, who was briefly his home country's Minister of Culture in the 1990s, went out of his way to promise he wouldn't do anything exciting. He had read, he said, a pre-Cannes article that deemed him "to be an activist." "I would like to assure everyone that this is not the case." Something interesting almost happened when British director Andrea Arnold was asked about the lack of women directors at this year's festival. She almost took the bait, but backed off. "There are just not many women film directors," she said. "Cannes is a small pocket that represents how it is out in the world." Ewan McGregor added that Cannes was "an amazing platform" and a "huge springboard" for first-time directors, though, as with women, there are no first-time or unknown directors represented in these year's competition. Perhaps Moretti doesn't really favour all these displays of transparency. He compared the Cannes jury to the conclave of cardinals who pick the Roman Catholic Pope, the subject of his competition comedy from last year, We Have a Pope, (which opens in Canada on June 2.) He acknowledged he had trouble adjusting to the recent Cannes practice of having a press conference after the awards, where the jury defends its decisions. A few years ago, he said, "there were two remaining taboos in the world - the silence after the awards and the conclave. Now it's just the conclave." Still, Moretti promised to be as open-minded as ever at the final conference. "Perhaps we'll say something diplomatic and bland," he said. "Perhaps not." Bollywood 101 05/16/2012
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10 Cannes films I can't wait to see 05/12/2012
 May 11, 2012 Liam Lacey: 10 Cannes films I can't wait to see By LIAM LACEY From Saturday's Globe and Mail At the annual French film fest, the excitement is in the unseen and unknown The excitement of the Cannes Film Festival is the anticipation of seeing films that, in most cases, no one has seen - outside of the actual filmmakers and Cannes director Thierry Frémaux and his selection committee. And there's a sense that anything can happen. Last year, for example, all the talk focused on Terrence Malick's long-gestating The Tree of Life, which went on to win the Palme d'Or, yet it was an obscure black-and-white silent French film from Cannes, The Artist, that would end up winning the best picture Oscar. Arguably, this year opens a relatively narrow window on the cinematic world: There are only two films from Asia in the official competition, one from Latin America and none by women - but at least there's a healthy mixture of new and old directors trying new things. Here are 10 Cannes films I can't wait to watch. Cosmopolis David Cronenberg (Canada) Some David Cronenberg fans were disappointed with the restraint of his last film, A Dangerous Metho, about the birth of psychoanalysis, but they should feel better about this absurdist story. Adapted from Don Delillo's 2003 novel, the film follows a young billionaire (Twilight's Robert Pattinson) making a one-day journey across Manhattan in his limousine to get a haircut against a background of global financial collapse, seductions, assassination attempts and automobiles. The pedigree cast includes Juliette Binoche, Paul Giamatti, Samantha Morton, Jay Baruchel, Sarah Gadon and Mathieu Amalric. Rust & Bone Jacques Audiard (France) A master director-in-waiting, Jacques Audiard impressed audiences with his early thrillers of damaged souls, Read My Lips (2001) and The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2007), and dazzled them with 2010's stark prison drama AProphet. His new film, based on Canadian author Craig Davidson's short story, is about a homeless man who falls in love a marine park killer whale trainer who has a bad accident. The cast here includes Marion Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts. Killing Them Softly Andrew Dominik (USA) Killing Them Softly is based on George V. Higgins 1974 thriller Cogan's Trade, about a professional enforcer (Brad Pitt) investigating the heist of mob money from a poker game. Higgins' novel has been praised for its crackling, hardboiled dialogue, and the New Zealand director, Andre Dominik, who previously made The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, a brooding 2007 Western, has grown in stature over the past five years. The cast includes James Gandolfini, Ray Liotta and Richard Jenkins. Amour Michael Haneke (Austria) There are reports that Michael Haneke initially cancelled this film after he saw Sarah Polley's Away from Her. Best known for his bracing dramas of complicity, media and civilized violence (Code Inconnu, Cachet, Funny Games), Haneke's latest is about love put to the test by illness. When an elderly woman (85-year-old Emmanuelle Riva) suffers a stroke, her husband George (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and daughter (Isabelle Huppert) struggle to cope. No Pablo Larrain (Chile) Not in the official competition (it's in the Directors' Fortnight sidebar), this is the most eagerly anticipated South American film in the festival, an historical black comedy about an ad executive's campaign to oust Chile's Augusto Pinochet. Director Pablo Larrain (Tony Manero, Post Mortem) is one of Chile's most exciting directors, and this - the conclusion of a trilogy about the dictator - stars Gael Garcia Bernal, which might provide the break through he deserves. Mud Jeff Nichols (USA) With his Sundance breakthrough, Take Shelter, Jeff Nichols established himself as one of the best new American directors. His latest film is about the friendship between a fugitive (Matthew McConaughey) and the 14-year-old boy who helps him escape from a Mississippi island to get to his girlfriend, Juniper (Reese Witherspoon). There's enough southern gumbo here to whet the appetite, along with a role for Nichols' favourite collaborator, Michael Shannon. On the Road Walter Salles (USA/France/Brazil) Frances Ford Coppola has been working on getting Jack Kerouac's Beat Generation classic adapted for the screen for 30 years, and now he serves as executive producer, with Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) in the director's chair. Relative newcomers Garrett Hedlund and Sam Riley star as poet adventurers Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise in the search for "It," with a cast that includes Kirsten Stewart, Kirsten Dunst, Viggo Mortensen, Amy Adams, Steve Buscemi and Terrence Howard. Laurence Anyways Xavier Dolan (Canada) Quebec wunderkind actor/director/writer/editor Xavier Dolan's first feature, I Killed My Mother, took a raft of prizes at Cannes and established his name around the world. His follow-up, Heartbeats, was a luscious-looking if somewhat slight love-triangle drama. Now, at 23, he returns to the Un Certain Regard sidebar with what looks like his most ambitious film so far, the story of a man (French actor Melvil Poupaud) who, on his 30th birthday, tells his fiancée that he wants to become a woman. Running at more than two and a half hours, this is Dolan's longest film, and his first with non-Canadian actors, including French actress Natalie Baye, a veteran of films by Godard and Truffaut, as Laurence's mother. Like Someone In Love Abbas Kiarostami (Iran) The Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami stepped out of his home culture deftly with the Italian-set Certified Copy in 2010, so perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise to see him in the land of Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu, with this Japanese-language feature about the relationship between an old professor and a young student who moonlights as a prostitute. Curiosity abounds. Post Tenebras Lux Carlos Reygadas (Mexico) The title is Latin for "after darkness, light," and the cryptic synopsis - a semi-autobiographical "expressionist painting" in which "reason will intervene as little as possible" - doesn't entirely shed the obscurity. Carlos Reygadas, a former United Nations lawyer-turned-director (Japon, Silent Light), brings some of his world-travelling experience to bear here in this film, set in several countries but also focusing on a man named Juan who lives with his family in the Mexican countryside. Could this be the Mexican answer to The Tree of Life? The Cannes Film Festival runs May 16-27. Watch for Liam Lacey's daily reports from the festival on Globeandmail.com. | Kim Zog's Story
Kim sees films as art, not just a pass time. She searches for the articles you won't find in one group anywhere else. ArchivesCategories |
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