While the film’s fleeting uses of unsimulated sex grabbed most of the headlines when it premiered in the Un Certain Regard strand last week, those brief moments are, if anything,  a distraction from what is one of the most complete thrillers I’ve seen in years, which manages to evoke unimaginable tension with little more than a lake, a car park and a handful of naked Frenchmen.

I’m 90% sure someone has already picked it up for UK distribution, so keep your eyes peeled if you happen to live near one of the half-dozen gay-friendly cinemas in the country. ]]> http://www.ultraculture.co.uk/14230-stranger-by-the-lake-review-cannes-2013.htm/feed 0 http://www.ultraculture.co.uk/14236-as-i-lay-dying-james-franco-10-best-lines.htm http://www.ultraculture.co.uk/14236-as-i-lay-dying-james-franco-10-best-lines.htm#comments Wed, 22 May 2013 04:00:56 +0000 admin http://www.ultraculture.co.uk/?p=14236

“Wherduhgurdah dungahd durgah frin chuhnnin.”

“Mah grirdinun gurhn feridirfun, ger jerminfur.”

“Sermin uhn perriden — prifinoud snigifidden.”

“Ahsarw ferperder Dewey Dell ardergaw sherfinur, ardegeddit.”

“Sinnin per far geddah! Wergereffurdern shamturkin berber ferber.”

“Asur furden wherferdurn, shern tergerferm.”

“Rerberton kirkerfur whur tommibert, krin berber terkin tarr den.“

“Am bett terferstir.”

“Whirgerfortoo Darl, yurmah tergifur churrrr.“

			“Mardifine werkifer turmabar crerrifer brear kermifer.”

If you’re not already familiar with the man, the myth, the legend that is James ‘Jimmy’ Toback, take a quick look around the internet. The blogosphere is awash with tales of the 69-year-old Black and White director’s cack-handed attempts to pick up young (sometimes illegally so) women on the streets of New York, with such classic lines as “I will turn you into a worldwide phenomenon, just like I did with Mike Tyson”.

Choosing to embrace the exposure in a slightly creepy, Nick-Griffin-laughing-in-the-face-of-criticism-on-Question-Time way, Toback set about transforming himself into a sort of pervy folk antihero — a process that saw its culmination last night as his new film Seduced & Abandoned premiered out of competition in Cannes. The documentary sees Toback troll around the Cote d’Azur with longtime friend Alec Baldwin in tow, attempting to convince a succession of film financiers to invest in a godawful pseudo-remake of Last Tango In Paris the pair have cooked up.

The film’s inclusion here is no surprise: you haven’t witnessed true sycophancy until you’ve seen Seduced & Abandoned desperately try to flatter its way to a Cannes premiere over the course of 100 minutes. Toback and Baldwin wander endlessly up and down the Croisette swapping second-hand anecdotes about the place, pausing only occasionally to give Toback time to replenish the drool he expels every time a member of the opposite sex walks past. The festival’s artistic director Thierry Frémaux even appears in the film, rendering his decision to include it in this year’s program a little partisan.

The bulk of the film is built from interviews, most of them only a few minutes long and included here in their entireties. There’s no discernible through line in Toback’s choice of interviewees, and though they come from different areas of the film industry, he asks most of them the same handful of ill-thought-out questions. So while one minute you’re watching Martin Scorsese capably analyse shifting trends within the film industry, the next thing you know you’re sympathising with Bérénice Bejo as she hazards an answer to the same question. (Bejo’s interview is at least a good opportunity to see Toback do the awkward seat-shuffle he performs when resisting the urge to grope any and all women who come within his grasp.)

Seduced and Abandoned‘s basic thesis (if a film that seems to have been thrown together in a single coke-fuelled weekend can be said to have a thesis) is that studio heads and other ‘money guys’ (paging Zach Braff!) are no longer willing to take risks on projects that value artistry over profitability. That might be a valid argument if Toback’s Last Tango pitch had even a hint of promise to it, but as it stands you’re more like to come away relieved that skeezy old fucks like him and Baldwin can’t get their movies made any more.

On the other hand, if Toback and Baldwin set out to prove that nobody is making good movies any more, then this utterly inept piece of filmmaking (in which clips appear in the wrong aspect ratios, title cards are uniformly gaudy and incorrectly kerned, and the soundtrack is a cacophonous mess) should prove just the trick.

The line-up for this year’s Film4 Summer Screen — the world’s only properly good outdoor film program — has just been announced and as ever, it’s awash with brilliance. Better yet, this year’s season is the longest yet, running a Westminster-council-upsetting fourteen nights. I dare you to process the following words without weeping:

		Thursday 8th August
		About Time
		Friday 9th August
		What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
		Saturday 10th August
		Mean Girls / Carrie / The Loved Ones
		Sunday 11th August
		The Untouchables
		Monday 12th August
		Guys and Dolls
		Tuesday 13th August
		The Way Way Back
		Wednesday 14th August
		Kes
		Thursday 15th August
		Throne of Blood
		Friday 16th August
		Predator / Gremlins 2: The New Batch
		Saturday 17th August
		Badlands / Raising Arizona
		Sunday 18th August
		Crazy, Stupid, Love.
		Monday 19th August
		The Red Shoes
		Monday 20th August
		Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
		Monday 21st August
		Prince Avalanche

David Gordon Green’s Prince Avalanche and Sundance favourite The Way Way Back will both have their UK premieres at Summer Screen, while the Opening Night screening of new Richard Curtis joint About Time — which looks a bit shit but does at least have Domhnall Gleeson in it — is what’s known in the industry as a ‘world first’.

Tickets go on sale on Wednesday for Somerset House members and two days after that for the proles. It’s not for me to tell you what to book, but the teen movie triple seems as good a place as any to start.

There’s a title card on the front of Arnaud Desplechin’s Jimmy P. (Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian) indicating that the film — a portrait of the relationship between a Native American war veteran (Benicio Del Toro) and his French psychoanalyst (Mathieu Amalric) — is based on a true story. They needn’t have bothered: like so many of its ‘actual events’ brethren, the film’s far too banal to be fiction.

It’ll be interesting to see how distributors around the world tackle the issue of the film’s amazingly clunky title. They could revert to its more utilitarian working title Jimmy Picard (the full name of Del Toro’s character) or drop the particulars entirely and go for Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian, which has a touch of War Horse literalism to it. On the other hand, maybe only the current title, with its baggy parenthesis and awkward medial full stop, can fully convey just how graceless the film really is.

I realised ten minutes into the screening that I could have been down the road watching Blue Ruin, rather than the worst film of Cannes 2013 so far.

There’s a lot of fuss made over films that manage to ‘get inside the mind of a criminal’, as though the average cinemagoer might be so unimpeachably ethical that only a storyteller of the highest order could persuade him or her to empathise with a wrong ‘un. Such films cast their audience members as complicit in some act of lawlessness, by aligning them with the perpetrators’ actions, motives and emotions. In Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, that process takes all of 30 seconds, and is so utterly convincing that I’m still not sure whether any of the film’s supposed antiheroes did anything wrong.

As they roam from celebrity home to celebrity home, looting Louboutins and posing for photographs with Paris Hilton’s self-portrait-covered pillow cases, there’s rarely a sense that anything much is at stake. Leader of the pack Rebecca (Emma Watson’s Nicki is more of a comic foil) makes something of a catchphrase out of her frequent reassurance that “everything’s fine”, and most of the time I was inclined to agree with her. After all, the valuables the gang steal go habitually unnoticed by their complacent owners, their celebrity victims have — in many cases — got where they are today by methods scarcely more upstanding, and of course, it’s not stealing when rich, white people do it.

In the minds of the eponymous Ring, breaking into Orlando Bloom’s house and stealing a gold watch is more or less akin to going to a party at his place and taking a photograph of his fridge — it’s a memento, not a cause for legal action. The first name terms they use for the likes of Paris, Demi and Ashton are a glaring clue that there’s no particular division between victim and perpetrator here — both groups exist within the same amorphous Hollywood bubble. So when Marc asks Rebecca, “if I ever became not your friend any more, would you rob me?”, the answer is irrelevant. Some other Rebecca will.

This being a Sofia Coppola film, there are plenty of cameos, but for once they’re all completely justified. When the gang go to an LA club and spot Paris Hilton, shortly before they first investigate her living quarters, we realise that we’re essentially watching a documentary. Sure, Hilton is acting (sort of) and the kids aren’t actually members of the 2008 Hollywood crime syndicate from which the film takes its name, but the dynamic is largely the same. Tomorrow, Israel Broussard, Katie Chang and Claire Julien will be hot properties, and by June they’ll probably wind up back in the same club the scene was shot in, only this time as genuine VIPs. The lines they snort here might be a synthetic substitute, but who’s to say what went down at the film’s Cannes premiere the other night? Coppola must surely be awake to the self-reflexivity of all of this, not to mention the irony of poking fun at Paris Hilton, perhaps the only poster child for nepotism more widely cited than herself.

The late cinematographer Harris Savides locates the film somewhere in the intersection of a Ruben Östlund film and The Sims — all cold distance and static emptiness — but that does little to disguise the fact that this is Coppola’s most brazenly involved film to date, a mess of autobiographical ideas so dense that all pretence of objectivity is soon eradicated. It’s no wonder the bad guys are hard to pick out of a line-up.

It was a clear-cut case, with no suggestion of wrongdoing on Grant’s part, but not satisfied with simply absolving his subject, writer-director Ryan Coogler goes to great lengths (and employs considerable artistic license) to characterise him as a sort of latter-day Jesus, who fills his time exclusively with acts of the utmost virtue. This doesn’t make Grant feel especially human, and — worse still — seems to imply that the crimes perpetrated against him might have been somehow justifiable had he been anything less than a saint.

Here are just ten of the altruistic deeds he commits in the film’s opening hour:

When it comes to social networking, I pride myself on remaining at the forefront of progress. At last year’s Cannes Film Festival, I documented my time spent queueing in the rain for Romanian arthouse dramas with a heady mix of tweets, Facebook messages and Instagram filters. This year I’ll also be making use of Vine, and — in an effort to prove that even the most impractical of technologies can be co-opted in the name of humblebragging — Snapchat.

If you’re not yet familiar with 2013′s greatest social barometer, please:

Snapchat is an app for iOS and Android that allows you to send images of your genitals playful video clips to your nearest and dearest, with the unusual caveat that the files delete themselves as soon as they’ve been viewed. This unique service has quickly become a hotbed of genital imagery artistic creativity across the globe.

And so, I’m giving Ultra Culture readers the opportunity to receive images of my genitals exciting coverage of the Cannes Film Festival direct to their phones for the next nine days, via this distinctive new medium. To count yourself among the lucky few, simply…

Click here to tweet me your Snapchat username.

Let’s not let this slip away like we did Words with Friends.

By now, we’re all pretty much up to speed with the fact that Tom Hanks is a nice man, which is perhaps why he rarely attempts to convince us otherwise on screen. In Captain Phillips, as in so many other Hanks vehicles, he’s basically just a stand-up guy at the mercy of factors beyond his control — in this case: lack of weaponry on-board freighter, Somali pirates, Paul Greengrass.

For a while it was quite endearing to see Hanks stick so rigidly to playing blameless protagonists. His career was a bit like the first season of Entourage: entirely devoid of jeopardy and all the more intoxicating for it. But like that show, Hanks’s schtick started to wear thin as the years went by, and by the time E got engaged at the end of Season 6 he wrote, directed and starred in the dramatic black hole that was Larry Crowne, it was no longer satisfying to watch him constantly do the right thing all the time.

Has a SINGLE engaging screen character EVER worn a rucksack?

The easiest way to chart the deterioration of Hanks’s on-screen energy is to examine the names of his characters. Where his 80s career gave us such sublime handles as Lawrence Whatley Bourne III, Sherman McCoy and Detective Pep Streebeck, recent years have yielded the featureless monikers Thomas Schell, Robert Langdon and — of course — cheery old Mr. Crowne up there.

So just in case Hollywood finds itself short of ideas in the coming months, here are a handful of additional roles that they’re welcome to cast Hanks in:

The first half of Lars von Trier’s impossibly exciting two-part sex odyssey Nymphomanic, starring — amongst others — Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgård, Christian Slater, Kate Ashfield, Willem Dafoe, Shia LaBoeuf, Jean-Marc Barr and Uma Thurman, will be released in the UK by Artificial Eye at some point within the next long while. The film failed to make the March submission deadline for this month’s Cannes Film Festival, so it’s still unknown when and where it’ll premiere.

In case it’s gone over your head, the parentheses represent a vagina.