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Scanning Cannes
Apr. 24th, 2009 12:54 pmThis year's lineup at Cannes has been announced, and I see a few things that I hope will come to a theater near me.
Closing the festival is Jan Kounen's Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, which I'm interested in solely on the basis of one other film by Kounen I've seen, which is Blueberry (2004) (aka Renegade on US DVD), his literally trippy adaptation of the Western bande dessinée by Jean-Michel Charlier and Moebius. Kounen is a Dutch-born director who works in France. This new movie is apparently a period piece set in 1913 and 1920 concerning interactions between Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky. Did they have a relationship?
Broken Embraces (Los abrazos rotos) is the new movie from Pedro Almodóvar, who is one of my favorite directors and who has been on a hell of a roll in the past decade. Says an IMDb commenter, 'With the release of his 17th feature film, "Los Abrazos Rotos" (Broken Embraces) Almodovár tells the tale of a blind film director (Lluis Omar) and how he came to lose not only his sight, but also the love of his life (Penelope Cruz).' Cruz gave a great performance in his last film, Volver. Can't fricking wait for this one!
I'm not as big a fan of Hong Kong director Johnnie To as some, but I'll certainly go see Vengeance if I get a chance. It's a Hong Kong/France co-production shot in English, and IMDb says, "A French assassin-turned-chef travels to Hong Kong in order to avenge a murder." With Simon Yam and Anthony Wong in the cast, you can't really go wrong.
Ang Lee's new movie, Taking Woodstock, is billed as a comedy, which is a change of pace for him right there. "A man working at his parents' motel in the Catskills inadvertently sets in motion the generation-defining concert in the summer of 1969." The cast list doesn't include anyone I think of as a big name, which is promising. I've always enjoyed Lee's ability to move between genres.
Terry Gilliam finally delivers The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which as a huge Terry Gilliam fan I've been looking forward to for a long time. This is the movie that Heath Ledger was working on when he died, and his role was rewritten to allow Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, and Jude Law to play the character in the rest of the film. "It tells the story of Dr Parnassus and his extraordinary 'Imaginarium', a travelling show where members of the audience get an irresistible opportunity to choose between light and joy or darkness and gloom." This has all the earmarks of prime Gilliam territory.
Perhaps the most intriguing entry is Michel Gondry's L’épine dans le coeur (The Spine in the Heart?), about which nobody seems to know much, although I've seen one site claiming it's a documentary about his aunt. It has no entry in IMDb yet, so it would seem he was trying to fly this under the promotional radar. (However, I see that IMDb claims that his adaptation of Rudy Rucker's Master of Space and Time is back in "announced" status for 2011, after it had been canceled a year or two ago. Teases!) Gondry's body of work so far is unclassifiable, and I'm interested in pretty much anything of his.
I'm sure there's lots of other great stuff that I'm just too ignorant to take notice of.
Closing the festival is Jan Kounen's Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, which I'm interested in solely on the basis of one other film by Kounen I've seen, which is Blueberry (2004) (aka Renegade on US DVD), his literally trippy adaptation of the Western bande dessinée by Jean-Michel Charlier and Moebius. Kounen is a Dutch-born director who works in France. This new movie is apparently a period piece set in 1913 and 1920 concerning interactions between Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky. Did they have a relationship?
Broken Embraces (Los abrazos rotos) is the new movie from Pedro Almodóvar, who is one of my favorite directors and who has been on a hell of a roll in the past decade. Says an IMDb commenter, 'With the release of his 17th feature film, "Los Abrazos Rotos" (Broken Embraces) Almodovár tells the tale of a blind film director (Lluis Omar) and how he came to lose not only his sight, but also the love of his life (Penelope Cruz).' Cruz gave a great performance in his last film, Volver. Can't fricking wait for this one!
I'm not as big a fan of Hong Kong director Johnnie To as some, but I'll certainly go see Vengeance if I get a chance. It's a Hong Kong/France co-production shot in English, and IMDb says, "A French assassin-turned-chef travels to Hong Kong in order to avenge a murder." With Simon Yam and Anthony Wong in the cast, you can't really go wrong.
Ang Lee's new movie, Taking Woodstock, is billed as a comedy, which is a change of pace for him right there. "A man working at his parents' motel in the Catskills inadvertently sets in motion the generation-defining concert in the summer of 1969." The cast list doesn't include anyone I think of as a big name, which is promising. I've always enjoyed Lee's ability to move between genres.
Terry Gilliam finally delivers The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which as a huge Terry Gilliam fan I've been looking forward to for a long time. This is the movie that Heath Ledger was working on when he died, and his role was rewritten to allow Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, and Jude Law to play the character in the rest of the film. "It tells the story of Dr Parnassus and his extraordinary 'Imaginarium', a travelling show where members of the audience get an irresistible opportunity to choose between light and joy or darkness and gloom." This has all the earmarks of prime Gilliam territory.
Perhaps the most intriguing entry is Michel Gondry's L’épine dans le coeur (The Spine in the Heart?), about which nobody seems to know much, although I've seen one site claiming it's a documentary about his aunt. It has no entry in IMDb yet, so it would seem he was trying to fly this under the promotional radar. (However, I see that IMDb claims that his adaptation of Rudy Rucker's Master of Space and Time is back in "announced" status for 2011, after it had been canceled a year or two ago. Teases!) Gondry's body of work so far is unclassifiable, and I'm interested in pretty much anything of his.
I'm sure there's lots of other great stuff that I'm just too ignorant to take notice of.
