Watching films at Cannes’s 2300-seat Grand Théâtre Lumière can be a surreal experience, especially when the film in question is unlikely to play anywhere bigger than the Curzon Soho back in the UK. Each morning at 8:30am, the day’s highest profile competition film is screened for the world’s press. Today saw the unveiling of Rust and Bone, the new one from A Prophet director Jacques Audiard.

Starring Marion Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts, and partially shot in Cannes itself, the film tells the story of a recently-unemployed street fighter (!) who forms a friendship with a killer whale trainer (!!) after she suffers a horrific accident at a marine park display gone awry (!!!). It’s about as wild as it sounds, if strangely unaffecting, and features some of Audiard’s most bizarre musical cues yet — how many other directors would dare include Katy Perry’s ‘Firework’, The B-52′s ‘Love Shack’ AND John Cooper Clark’s ‘Chickentown’ on the soundtrack to their sombre French melodrama?

Audiard’s film proved a hit with the critics, and Marion Cotillard emerged as a firm favourite for the Best Actress award — with any luck those pesky topless shots should disappear from the film’s first page of Google results any day now.

Of course, even the most outlandish moments in Rust and Bone would seem hopelessly pedestrian alongside Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie, the film debut of anti-comedians Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim. The market screening I attended started out with an audience of about fifteen people — by the time the credits rolled, there were three of us. Hitting the mark just as often as it misses it entirely, B$M is an unapologetically fan-only experience that might have found more success as a series of YouTube clips than a fully-fledged 94-minute movie. Still, I doubt I’ll see any other movies this week co-starring a Johnny Depp impersonator.

Safely back at the flat, I’m now considering making one of these ‘croissants précuits’ before heading out for tonight’s Competition entry: Austrian sex tourism drama Paradise: Love, the first part in a proposed trilogy from Import/Export director Ulrich Seidl. The weekend looms, so here’s hoping this particular Austrian sex tourism drama is fully equipped to get the party started.

The Cannes Film Festival, like Comic-Con, SXSW and certain parts of East London, is one of those things that’s utterly fascinating to everyone who’s there and completely uninteresting to everyone who isn’t. Knowing this makes covering the festival quite hard — after a bit of trial and error last year, I quickly realised that the vast majority of people who read this blog aren’t interested in a nine-month-early review of the new Nuri Bilge Ceylan movie — so this year, in an attempt to keep things vaguely interesting, I’m going to be doing daily ‘diaries’ instead.

Today began like much of last year’s festival, in a 10am queue in the blazing Cote d’Azur heat. Once again granted the lowest-of-the-low press badge, I stood patiently in the familiar ‘presse jaune’ line and listened to those around me have the same stock conversation about the inefficiency of the queueing system over and over again for 90 minutes. The faintly underwhelming Dictator PR stunt happening just down the road served as a brief distraction, but most of my time was spent fuming at the audacious cunts intent on manoeuvring their way past me in the queue. Finally, with less than two minutes to spare, we were granted entry to the very first press screening Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, the festival’s eagerly-awaited opening film.

My seat to the extreme right of the auditorium wasn’t the ideal vantage point for such a meticulously symmetrical film (see diagram above) but nonetheless I’m happy to report that Moonrise Kingdom is an absolute smash. It’s a gloriously overemotional tale of two pre-teen lovers (newcomers Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman, both awesome) full of lime-soaked scenery and pleasingly stilted 1960s telephone conversations. Wears a little thin at the end but not enough that you’ll care.

Next up was Robert B. Weide’s Woody Allen: A Documentary, which charts the life and career of the septuagenarian director in appropriately fawning fashion. It’s notable for a number of candid interviews with the man himself, as well as lots of footage of him walking around Brooklyn looking bemused in a fishing hat:

It was to be followed by a screening of Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir, but figuring I’d had my fill of ageing auteurs with alarming sexual histories, I decided to head back to the flat. On the way home I received THE MOST CANNES TEXT OF ALL TIME:

Tomorrow promises new ones from A Prophet writer-director Jacques Audiard and Uncle Boonme funster Apichatpong Weerasethakul, so be sure to check back for more captivating tales from the Croisette. If you’re lucky, I might even show you the ridonkulous Spring Breakers poster I spotted out on the beachfront yesterday.

I wouldn’t recommend the ‘version longue’ however.

Fuck off.

Fuck off.

Fuck off.

Fuck off.

Fuck off.

Fuck off.

Fuck off. ]]> http://www.ultraculture.co.uk/11701-this-needs-to-stop-right-now.htm/feed 0 http://www.ultraculture.co.uk/11670-film4-summer-screen-2012-line-up.htm http://www.ultraculture.co.uk/11670-film4-summer-screen-2012-line-up.htm#comments Fri, 11 May 2012 13:48:09 +0000 admin http://www.ultraculture.co.uk/?p=11670

The line-up for this year’s Film4 Summer Screen has just been announced and as usual, it’s a thing of beauty. Pitch-perfect double bills, classy Italian neorealism and not a single bad film (as far as I know) in the bunch. Just look at this bloody masterpiece:

		Thursday 16th August
		On the Road
		Friday 17th August
		The Birds
		Saturday 18th August
		Enter the Void / Don’t Think
		Sunday 19th August
		The Watch
		Monday 20th August
		Apocalypse Now
		Tuesday 21st August
		Bicycle Thieves
		Wednesday 22nd August
		Paris, Texas
		Thursday 23rd August
		Pretty in Pink
		Friday 24th August
		Boogie Nights / Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
		Saturday 25th August
		Sexy Beast / Drive
		Sunday 26th August
		Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
		Monday 27th August
		Lawless

On the Road and Lawless will both have their UK premieres at Summer Screen, while the Sunday night screening of The Watch – previously known as Neighborhood Watch – is a ‘People’s Premiere’, whatever that is.

Tickets go on sale a week today from here. If you want to see a film in my glorious presence, I’ll almost certainly be coming along to Enter the Void, Boogie Nights and Pretty in Pink – I’ll be the one cringing at every single thing that comes out of Duckie’s fucking stupid mouth.

Alright, look Warner Brothers — you don’t like me, but I really like you (can’t wait for the new Batman by the way) so I’m gonna try and help you out with this Dark Shadows thing.

Working with Tim Burton can’t be easy. Sure, his last project made in excess of a billion dollars and became the 10th highest grossing movie of all time, and he can generally be relied upon to deliver a marketable product with a family-friendly MPAA rating (he’s only made one R-rated movie in the last decade), but once he gets an idea into his head, he cannot be stopped. So if he wants to make a black-and-white, Winona-Ryder-starring, stop-motion animation about a reanimated dog, Disney haven’t got much choice in the matter. And if he comes to you asking for $105 million to adapt a mostly forgotten 1960s soap opera for modern audiences, what are you supposed to say? ‘No’?

So you greenlight, cast and shoot the movie, and so far everything’s looking good. Johnny Depp’s great as Barnabas Collins, the fish-out-of-water 18th Century vampire who awakens in 1972. An ensemble cast including Michelle Pfeiffer, Jonny Lee Miller and Eva Green all suit their respective roles to a tee. It even looks nice, with Amelie cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel offsetting Burton’s signature gothic palette with some much-needed blues and reds. And screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith’s campy soap-opera-style twists are simply to die for. But there’s a problem.

The reviews start coming in. They’re bad. They call the film ‘unfocused’, ‘incoherent’ and ‘a desecration’. You start to realise that they might be right — in its devotion to the original show and its evident love of the soap opera form, Dark Shadows makes almost no attempt to reward cinema audiences. Its Darkplace-style narrative complexities are simply too offbeat for a film with such mainstream ambitions.

But don’t worry — we can save this. With minimal reshoots and a small cash injection (I’m thinking $25 million if we drop the effects-heavy scenes and Depp takes a pay cut), Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows can easily become the greatest 12-part television series of the 21st Century.

Imagine it: an all-star cast, directed by Tim Burton, camping it up in a shamelessly melodramatic, perversely high-budget, relentlessly unpredictable soap opera extravaganza. The blogosphere will have a field day. It’ll be like that time James Franco appeared on General Hospital. Times a million. And with the runtime cut down to 30 minutes apiece, those pesky complaints about structure and narrative coherence will simply float away.

I know part of you probably just wants to make your money back, write the film off to experience and move on, but remember: complacency is the greatest enemy of success. Take the things that Dark Shadows has going for it, and build on them, rather than simply slapping them across the poster in the hope that they’ll make the film’s failings go away. Remember: Eva Green’s breasts will only get you so far. ONLY SO FAR.

So call me. Let’s make this happen.

I was still at primary school when Napster first hit the internet, so its impact on my musical education went pretty deep. A friend and I would routinely meet at his place after school to while away the hours typing what we thought were ‘funny words’ into the search field and downloading tracks at random. I discovered a lot of bands this way, but none was more formative than the Beastie Boys. From that very first listen of Brass Monkey, to my much-anticipated purchase of Licensed to Ill at the Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street (it had a Parental Advisory sticker!) to my very first gig — Wembley Arena on the To The 5 Boroughs Tour – the Beasties always felt like my own little secret. In reality of course, they were selling millions of records.

If I felt a particular affinity for Adam Yauch, a.k.a. MCA, it was probably because of his devotion to filmmaking. He directed the majority of the band’s music videos, including iconic promos for Shake Your Rump, So What’cha Want and Three MCs and One DJ (see above) under the name Nathanial Hörnblowér. When the Criterion Collection approached the band in 2000 with the idea of putting together a music video anthology, Yauch spent months assembling hundreds of different audio and video tracks to ensure that the disc would be as comprehensive as possible. Produced when DVD was still in its infancy, it remains one of the most inventive, ingenious applications of the format and is — to this day — the only Criterion release available in the UK.

He directed two films — basketball documentary Gunnin’ for that #1 Spot and the incredible Beasties Boys concert movie Awesome, I Fuckin’ Shot That! — and in 2006 founded Oscilloscope Laboratories, an independent distribution and production company that’s since brought films as diverse as Exit Through the Gift Shop, Wuthering Heights and Wendy & Lucy to wider audiences. His mega-meta semi-autobiographical short Fight For Your Right Revisited last year assembled an ensemble cast that Robert Altman would find intimidating.

And all of this while continuing to perform with one of the greatest hip hop groups of all time. It’s safe to say the world just got a little bit less dope.

Winner of the Documentary Audience Award at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, Buck explores the life of ‘cowboy, teacher and philosopher’ Buck Brannaman. To celebrate the release of the film on DVD next Monday, Revolver Entertainment — the twisted hive mind that brought us this utterly bleak spectacle — organised a ‘ride-in screening’ of the film on Wednesday. Here’s some blurb from the press release:

To celebrate the release of new film BUCK at cinemas this week and on DVD from Monday the world’s first screening for horses was held yesterday. Over 20 horses and their riders saddled up and rode into the stable screening room to enjoy this real life documentary on Buck Brannaman – the real life ‘Horse Whisperer’. Popcorn was served in nosebags!

This obviously raises a number of important questions: where are these popcorn-laden nosebags? Why are they not visible in any of the promotional images provided? Did the riders really sit there for 88 minutes watching the entirety of Buck on horseback? Wouldn’t that get a bit uncomfortable? And most importantly, WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE?

Here’s some baffling footage from the event:

I’m going to go ahead and say it: this didn’t happen. It didn’t. Twenty horses did not get together in a stable and watch a documentary. Oliver was not ‘glued to the screen’. Saph did not ‘love it to bits’. This is a stunt in the most cynical, pointless, insulting sense of the word. The photograph featured above doesn’t even show the riders watching the actual movie — it’s a promotional still.

What’s worse is that Buck - like Sleeping Beauty – is probably a pretty decent film. It’s got 88% at Rotten Tomatoes for fuck’s sake. It doesn’t need this shit. Can’t we save the equine screenings for films that could really use the leg up, like that new Miley Cyrus one about texting? Or Keith Lemon: The Movie?

Or better yet, let’s just stop acting like five-year-olds and admit that horses aren’t capable of cinematic appreciation. Neither are cats for that matter, but at least they look cute in the glasses.

When it comes to independent, Casper Van Dien-starring horror movies I wouldn’t normally be particularly interested in, a little .gif goes a long way.

The full trailer for The Dark Knight Rises finally hit the internet this morning and set the blogosphere alight in a blaze of isolated dialogue, dissonant piano and context-free effects shots. It doesn’t look like I’m going to get much else done today, so here’s a breakdown:

0:09 – This is the first live action movie to utilise the jazzy new DC Comics logo (which does somewhat call into question the authenticity of my exclusive back in December) and I for one am a big fan. I do, however, find it slightly unsettling that the C in the logo doesn’t match the C in the word ‘COMICS’ underneath. Sort it out.

0:11 - As with all good Batman films, the action begins with a cityscape at sunset. The desolate striking of a piano confirms the tone as ‘sombre’.

0:13 – We meet Bruce Wayne, who’s grown a load of facial hair since we last saw him, probably because beards are cinematic shorthand for ‘reclusive’. Personally, I reckon he should carry the hirsute vibe across to his alter-ego. Maybe then he can be the hero Gotham needs, am I right?

0:24 - “There’s a storm coming,” murmurs Anne Hathaway over silent footage of planes being torn apart. Because if there’s one thing we’ve learnt from a decade’s worth of Chris Nolan films, it’s that he fucking loves a good cross-cut.

0:28 – “I’m adaptable,” she reassures a disappointingly clean-shaven Bruce. In case you haven’t gathered yet, this conversation is metaphorical.

0:34 - Now, I know a lot has already been said about this, so I’m not going to go off on one, but I am slightly concerned about Nolan’s decision to record all of Bane’s dialogue on one of those little pens with a built in microphone.

0:43 - I’m starting to get tired of the piano now. JGL’s face is emotive enough, I don’t need my sense of tragedy ramped up by a slowed-down version of Gary Jules’s cover of Mad World.

0:49 – I’m imagining this is one of the film’s more major set pieces, possibly involving one bridge filled with prisoners and one bridge filled with inexplicably idealist civilians, more than happy to sacrifice themselves and their children to preserve a strict moral code.

1:03 - Here’s Bane again, sounding about 200% more intelligible and 15000% more ADR’d as he promises Bruce that his “punishment must be more severe”. Maybe he’s planning on walking into his eyeline.

1:09 - The speed with which the little kid in the trailer draws this chalk bat symbol is truly astonishing. I’ve been trying to replicate it for the last twenty minutes and I’m genuinely not sure if it’s possible. This is the closest I’ve got.

1:20 - Topical financial chaos is topical.

1:30 – “I won’t bury you. I’ve buried enough members of the Wayne family.” It’s good to see Alfred’s still getting all the juiciest emotional lines. Let’s have more of this and less “the lam-bor-gee-nee then” nonsense.

1:32 - Does anyone — ANYONE — actually keep track of what movie trailer intertitles are saying? We all blindly accept their presence, but when each one is 20-30 seconds apart in the midst of overlapping dialogue and fast-cut action sequences, how are we supposed to keep track of what they’re actually telling us? For those who care, The Dark Knight Rises‘s titles read:

HOPE IS LOST
FAITH IS BROKEN
A FIRE WILL RISE

They’ve got the workings of a nice haiku there.

2:05 - Well, there it is, and I can’t pretend I’m not massively excited about it too. But wait, before we go, there’s just time for the obligatory ‘funny bit after the title’, which given how entirely laugh-free this trailer has been, should be a refreshing change of pace:

2:08 – “My mother warned me about getting into cars with strange men,” says Hathaway, making way for Bale’s hysterical final line: “Where we’re going we don’t need roads.” “This isn’t a car.”

2:13 – A policeman stares up into the night sky in awe as Batman illustrates that indeed it is not a car, but a…

2:15 - … plane with the ability to fuck up continuity.