Here is a quite extensive report on the entire 'Cannes' experience, with tons of film coverage, to what it was like with the crowds. Mr Steady here saw it all, and reports on his feelings on the flicks, so sit back and put your finger on the down arrow, cause it's a helluva read...
Ever since the infamous BATMAN & ROBIN (puke!)-controversy I've been visiting your site regularly without ever thinking of sending you something. Living in Europe and writing there for a film magazine, I tend to catch american movies too late for any scoops. But since you asked for reports from Cannes, I'll be glad to send you a quite long one. And since everybody includes a name on your site, I'll introduce myself as Mr. Steady.
I have been coming to Cannes since 1983, but not really for the reasons all the people think of (sun & fame). Instead for me it has always been fun & game to see films and, while changing theaters, stroll around in the sun. This, I have to tell you, is not as easy as one would like it to be. For one, many interesting films are only screened for distributors or journalists eager to participate in round-table-interviews, in which 10 to 20 writers have 15 to 20 minutes to talk with actors and/or directors. And then, much of the productions are not really ready. This year for instance they have been showing 50 minutes of ARMAGEDDON, which was screened to mainly favorable reactions, apart from a teary-eyed speech by Bruce Willis that drew some giggles. Willis himself hopped onto the real stage after the 50 minutes and showed his good sense of humor when he thanked the audience for realizing that they had been watching scenes from a comedy. Now for that event alone, a whole street was shut down, and the horrible french security personal had much fun showing their muscles and unhuman arrogance. There is not a lot of fun left in attending these screenings, because I feel it is enough trouble that you have to deal with the french doormen at every official screening.
Between the shows you then have to deal with the public, and calling them frenetic would be too harmless. Obsessed with seeing some stars, in fact ANY STAR, they gather in droughts outside the Palais (called "The Bunker" ever since its inauguration in 1983) from early morning until late in the evening and scream at the sight of even minor attractions as though they were on a casting call for SCREAM 3. As far as I can tell, America has the Oscar-mania at the Shrine Auditorium or D.C. Pavilion which lasts for up to three days; but please keep in mind that the Cannes hysteria lasts for TWELVE DAYS!! The public behavior can be become downright crazy when a real star appears. When Sharon Stone was expected for the gala screening of THE MIGHTY, a mighty entertaining kid's picture, in which Sharon "only" plays the mom of a brave disabled boy; the sensation-horny spectators in the theater refused to sit down even when the film had already started. Stone arrived five minutes into the show, and you cannot imagine how hysteric the crowd got. There was more light from flashbulbs than from the huge screen. (Same situation at the end of the screening: During the last minutes of the film a lot of people left their seats in order to get as close to the seat of La Stone as possible.) I left as soon as the credits began to roll down, because I wanted to get a good seat for the showing of Todd Haynes' VELVET GOLDMINE, but you couldn't miss the roars and screams of the huge crowd in front of the Palais, when Sharon or, as the linguistically disabled french say: "Sharronn" appeared on the steps. "Who the hell do they think she is?" a bewildered woman muttered to her friend in the line behind me. "They seem to think that she embodies the glamourous Hollywood stardom of the Old Age," answered the other woman, adding: "I certainly don't get it". Well, I behaved and didn't tell them to go have a look in the mirror. Indeed, Sharon is as good as everybody else in the picture (Harry Dean Stanton and Gena Rowlands play the grand-parents of the fat boy who is taught a great deal about life by his new disabled friend; James Gandolfini, who played the bearded bodyguard in GET SHORTY, is convincingly vicious as a violent father).
THE MIGHTY was one of the very few pleasent surprises of the festival. You see, the main competition is still the heart of the Cannes film festival, although it contains only 24 of the roughly 600 features shown in the little town at the Cote d Azur. This may explain the weird fact that in Cannes you go to see films you normally wouldn't go to even if you were paid for it. Of course, you cannot screen only American films in the main competition (and I sincerely wonder whether you could come up with 20 GOOD NEW US films), and the festival always wants to find a balance between commercial features that allow attractive stars to walk on the red carpet and the arty fare that so many people mistake for "real quality". But this doesn't explain the selection, which is often ludicrous. This year for example, rather than inviting Peter Weir and Jim Carrey with THE TRUMAN SHOW (a rare chance to combine art and commerce AND quality!) or Warren Beatty with BULWORTH, festival director Gilles Jacob went for the out-dated (Mike Nichols' PRIMARY COLORS and Robert Duvall's excellent APOSTLE, which even I had already seen in New York) as well as harmless stuff like Roland Joffes GOODBYE LOVER. Granted, Joffe has been the director of the 86-Palme-d'or-winner THE MISSION (with Robert De Niro), and it is always amazing to see how fabulous Patricia Arquette looks in her various dresses, but this light-weighted thriller farce from Warner Bros. about murder, sex and intrigue comes nowhere near the fun and excellence of L.A. CONFIDENTIAL, the masterpiece that WB reluctantly let Curtis Hanson & Co. take to last year's Cannes fest. In fact, as Variety's Todd McCarthy has pointed out, GOODBYE LOVER may be the first film that is worthwile only as long as Don Johnson sticks around. And from the minute Ellen DeGeneres takes control of the film as a cynical cop, GOODBYE LOVER may still have the looks of a great movie (it was shot by Dante Spinotti, the mesmerizing cameraman of THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS, HEAT and surprise?! L.A. CONFIDENTIAL), but it feels more and more like an above-average TV production.
GOODBYE LOVER may be one of the few movies from that will actually be shown in wide release in the US and the sad thing is that this fact is not a shame on US distributors nor a reason to cry for American audiences. Most of the pictures I saw were ok; nothing great, not too many bad movies. In fact, of the 41 films I saw during the last eleven days (I include GODZILLA, which I will see tomorrow as the closing film of the festival), only one totally bored me (Claude Miller's THE CLASS TRIP) and only one drove me to the exit early (the new film by Hector "Kiss of the Spider Woman" Babenco). I consider myself picky, so I stayed away from the films of Hou-hsiao hsien, Manoel de Oliveira (the almost 90-year-old filmmaker has struck a deal with Golan/Globus!!) or Theo Angelopoulos. Never heard of em? Never mind. I did go to see MY NAME IS JOE, the new film by Ken Loach and although i think Loach is grossly overrated and I certainly detest his overly obedient followers, I do have to admit that I was pleasently surprised by the story of a former drinker who by helping out a friend gets in trouble with the mob.
I also saw John "Deliverance" Boorman's THE GENERAL, the story of an modern Irish Robin Hood, who steals from the rich and manages to trick the police, although Jon Voight is always on his heels. Boorman shot the film in black & white and manages to show both sides of the "hero", who is a funny and clever guy, but doesn't shy away from violence and betrayal. In the end, paranoia und police harassment take away much of the fun he had with his life, and he doesn't look too disappointed when he sees an IRA-killer pointing the fatal gun at him. (I figured this doesn’t qualify as a SPOILER, because the film starts [and ends] with this scene.)
Most of the American films I saw out of competition were not that good, although SLAM did come close. It is another film about boyz n the hood, but admittedly with a different approach: the main character, a pretty sympathetic dealer of "soft drugs", is sent to prison where he ends up between two gangs. The original idea is that he doesn't fight them with guns or knives but with words: he writes rap poems or improvises them on the spot. But will that talent be enough to survive? The same question might be asked about film's chances at the Box Office, but then again, SLAM is one of those typical festival films that have other priorities: They care for their characters and the story-development more than about their first-weekend-grosses. And this alone can be a refreshing sight. It can on the other hand get really frustrating if you keep only seeing this kind of films. One of my most satisfying Cannes experiences to date is one evening in 1987, when after seeing a dozen disappointing artsy-fartsy films in a row, I snuck into a private screening of LETHAL WEAPON. The adrenaline rush caused by that film enabled me to stay alive (and awake) during the next week.
Funny and still a real disappointment was THE IMPOSTORS, the first solo-directing-job by actor Stanley Tucci. After BIG NIGHT, the fabulous little film about two brothers and their Italian restaurant, Tucci is going for a broad comedy about two bit actors in trouble. It's a film in the Marx-Brothers-on-Sea-tradition. But although Tucci certainly has the right cast (including Oliver Platt as his friend and partner, who has to flee with Tucci from the wrath of the overesteemed actor played by Alfred Molina, as well as Lily Taylor, Isabella Rossellini, Scott Cambpell and Woody Allen in an uncredited cameo appearence), he just doesn't have the gags to fill 100 minutes.
Joe Mantegna meanwhile shines in JERRY & TOM, a small film and the directing debut of Tucci's fellow actor Saul Rubinek (he played the opportunistic writer in Clint Eastwood's UNFORGIVEN). The film chronicles (in flash-backs) the career of a hit man (Mantegna), who teaches his "art" to a "student", who becomes a master of death, but also sadism. This sounds flashier than it looks on screen. Rubinek has thought of clever ways to connect the different episodes visually, but this cannot disguise the fact, that JERRY & TOM works more like a theater play that has several good scenes for great actors like William H. Macy, Charles Durning or Peter Riegert.
The most ambitious genre offering from the market turned out to be A MURDER OF CROWS, written and directed by none other than THE ROAD HOUSE's Rowdy Herrington. It is a cleverly constructed thriller, in which a arrogant lawyer (Cuba "Show me the Money!" Gooding jr.) grows a conscience, turns on his murderous client (brilliantly disgusting: Eric Stoltz), loses his licence, and leaves for Florida. When he runs out of money, he takes the unknown manuscript of a dead man, puts his own name on the thriller about the killing of five lawyers and lands an overwhelming hit. The only problem: The material in the book turns out to be real, and suddenly Cuba jr. is the main suspect in five murder cases. Wow! So far, so good. But then MURDER turns more and more into "The Fugitive in Florida and New Orleans", with Tom Berenger filling in for Tommy Lee Jones. And just when you think that the film is taking a bold and risky turn in its final lap, the film gets too politically correct. Maybe that turn was put in to comfort viewers and get better B.O. But I doubt that it will do the trick.
PHOENIX by Danny Cannon (JUDGE DREDD) is a much more ordinary action film with moral underpinnings, in which Ray Liotta plays a crooked cop with heart again, only this time he is troubled by his own addiction to gambling (leaving him in debt to the wrong people), his unlucky love to Anjelica Houston and his connections to UglyFellas Anthony LaPaglia, Daniel Baldwin and Giancarlo Esposito. The version I saw didn't have end titles but seemed to be finished in every other department. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't really good, either.
And that exactly was the problem with most of the films I saw, be it Nanni Moretti's cinematic diary APRILE (his follow-up to DEAR DIARY), Patrice Chereau's family-drama THOSE WHO LOVE ME WILL TAKE THE TRAIN, or on the American side: Bob Rafelson's agreeable HBO-production POODLE SPRINGS (with James Caan as Phillip Marlowe), the debut feature SLUMS OF BEVERLY HILLS (about a poor family hustling through Bev.Hills), John Turturro's celebration of actors, ILLUMINATA, Paul Auster's appealing but hollow debut feature LULU ON THE BRIDGE (starring Mira Sorvino and Harvey Keitel), maybe the most-hated film of the festival. Jake Kasdan's ZERO EFFECT (starring Bill Pullman), which was D.O.A. in the States, at least tried a little bit different with the old private-eye-formula. And when you compare Nichols' above-mentioned PRIMARY COLORS to Terry Gilliam's weird, but sometimes crazily funny FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, you immediately recognize that the intelligent COLORS, though it deals with all the dirty politics and is way too tidy. (It may have needed more of those violent verbal outbursts by Emma Thompson, like the one on the airport.)
All in all, seven films that I hadn't seen before will stay with me for a longer while. (I went back to see BULL DURHAM again, as well as THE TERMINATOR for at least the 12th time, but only for the 2nd time in English!! and Preston Sturges' MIRACLE OF MORGAN'S CREEK, but since I had seen all of them before, I do not count them as revelations.) One of the seven "new" films was pretty old: THE MAN WHO LAUGHS dates back to 1928, stars Paul Leni as the man who has been operated on in his childhood on the order of a mean king so that he ALWAYS has to smile, becomes a circus-freak and resembles The Joker. Not only because of that the film looks very much like a work (or a story) by the great Tim Burton, who should definitely try to see this movie in order to secure the rights for a remake. For once this would be a great source for a remake!
The top french film was THE DREAM LIFE OF ANGELS, directed by the 41-year-old debutant Eric Zoncka: The story of two totally different young women and their (mis)adventures with men.
I also liked the Italian comedy LA VITA E BELLA by Roberto Benigni, already reviewed on your site. Benigni manages the impossible: mixing comedy with the horrible facts of the 2nd World War.
The other four films (including THE MIGHTY) strangely enough all deal with family life, most of them being dysfunctional. In Hal Hartley's graphic AND poetic film HENRY FOOL, the title character joins an unhappy family in Queens and discovers the writing talents of the seemingly retarded Simon Grim, who later goes on to win the Noble Prize for literature! Funny, touching, as well as clever, Hartley has made his best film since SIMPLE MEN. (Now if only he could cut it down from 137 to about 120 minutes)
Even stranger is the community in HAPPINESS, Todd Solondz' follow-up to WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE, a gritty and surprisingly graphic film about three sisters and their intertwingling fates. Starting with a startling pre-credit-scene, in which Jon Lovitz is having a disastrous dinner with one of the sisters, Solondz ironically proves, that happiness is indeed in all the places where you can find it. Now, making a comedy about themes such as death, castration, masturbation, failure and, worst of all, child molestation, appears to be a weird, if not sick idea. But by doing so, Solondz manages to disturb and entertain us, and he sheds some light on the darkest sides of human nature. (It's going to be interesting how happy the MPAA will be with HAPPINESS.) You cannot easily get the ideas and provocations of this film out of your system. And this is, by new definition, a rare quality in today's cinema. Solondz' film would also be prize-worthy according to the standards set by the impressive jurors of the competition (among them heart-stoppers like Winona Ryder, Sigourney Weaver and Lena Olin), who before the festival had unanimously agreed that they were looking for films that would move their hearts and work their minds; now if only HAPPINESS had been in competition! Instead, the entry from the Sundance film festival was shown in the Director's Fortnight, a non-competetive side-bar, that otherwise lacked quality this year, but has already showcased the early work of filmmakers like Coppola, Cassavetes, Jarmusch or Wenders, as well as the master of them all: Martin Scorsese. Almost 25 years after MEAN STREETS was shown in Cannes, Scorsese was the president of the jury, and although jury duties always involve shabby political compromises (legend has it, that 94-prez Clint Eastwood wanted PULP FICTION to win and didn't care for anything else), I tend to take this year's awards much more seriously than I use to. I only hope that Scorsese awards the daring Danish entry FESTEN, a project that is risky in technical and narrative as well as in plot terms. The film tells in raw, shaky pictures (entirely shot with hand-held cameras) the story of a family fest that turns awfully sour. The patriarchic father turns 60, and on this day his most successful son reveals all the shocking mis-doings of his father. More should not be said, but if this film gets a US distribution, it could and should be titled SLAUGHTERHOUSE FEST although you won't see one drop of blood.
P.S.: Just saw GODZILLA; and thought it was very much ok. Nothing sensational (although the FX really rule), but totally entertaining, and I suppose that is its raison etre. I was somewhat disappointed that the Zillas resemble the Rexes so much, and that the film is so loud that so can't even hear the audience laugh in between. I also still don't think that the film was the fitting exclamation mark to this festival. But so what, I had a good time. Now I can be looking ahead to all those films I really have high hopes for: THE TRUMAN SHOW, SNAKE EYES.
