The Cannes International Film Festival

Category: Spotlight
May 19th, 2008

For competition on Monday, May 19th

TWO LOVERS (1h40) Directed by James Gray

USA

A depressed young man’s life is turned around after he moves back in with his parents and two women enter it – a beautiful volatile neighbor trapped in an affair and the lovely daughter of a close family friend.

Romantic drama stars and falling in love in Brooklyn.

Category: Spotlight
May 19th, 2008

For competition on Monday, May 19th

LE SILENCE DE LORNA (LORNA’S SILENCE) (1h45) Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

Belgium, France, Italy

In order to become the owner of a snack bar with her boyfriend, Lorna, a young Albanian woman living in Belgium becomes an accomplice to a diabolical plan devised by mobster Fabio.
Fabio has orchestrated a sham marriage between her and Claudy. The marriage allows her to obtain Belgian citizenship and then marry a Russian Mafioso willing to pay a lot of money to acquire the same quickly. However, for this second marriage to be possible, Fabio has planned to kill Claudy. Will Lorna keep silent?

Starring Jérémie Renier and Fabrizio Rongione (recently seen in What Makes You Happy), Le Silence de Lorna also stars lead Arta Dobroshi, a young Albanian actress from Kosovo, who has been on a rollercoaster of success since starring in Kujtim Çashku’s multiple award-winner Magic Eye. It’s Dardenne brothers’ sixth film.

Category: Spotlight
May 19th, 2008

For competition on Sunday, May 18th

SERBIS (1h30) Directed by Brillante Mendoza

Phillipines

The title of the edgy drama by Mendoza, which in English means “service” refers to male prostitutes who ply their services to the gay cinema-going clients.

The movie only wrapped this month. Serbis barely made it to the Cannes. Mendoza shot the film in just 12 days and spent only a month in post-production. He sent a rough cut to the selection committee late last month. Still the film is powerful as The Masseur.

Maggie Lee in the Hollywood Reporter:

“Taking place mostly in a porno theater ironically, yet fittingly, named Family, Serbis is part homage to cinema, part intimate domestic drama that vividly details the tangled relations and all-too human frailties of an extended family running a theater in the provincial Philippines. Director Brillante Mendoza continues the neo-realist vein of Foster Child and Sling Shot in Serbis, but displays marked improvement - both the grunge aesthetic and film language now bear his personal handwriting. To this, he adds some bristling sexuality, both gay and straight.”

Howard Feinstein in Screen Daily:

“Since he shifted from production design to directing with The Masseur (2005), a static misfire about a gay massage parlor in the provinces of his native Philippines, Mendoza has made up for lost time by cranking out four films since (including one documentary), all low-budget, showing mastery in a variety of genres.”

Category: Spotlight
May 19th, 2008

For competition on Sunday, May 18th

GOMORRA (2h15) Directed by Matteo Garrone

Italy

Natasha Senjanovic in the Hollywood Reporter:

Powerful, stripped to its very essence and featuring a spectacular cast (of mostly non-professionals), Matteo Garrone’s sixth feature film Gomorra goes beyond Tarantino’s gratuitous violence and even Scorsese’s Hollywood sensibility in depicting the everyday reality of organized crime’s foot soldiers. The characters of the film’s five stories all work for the Camorra - the Neapolitan ‘mafia’ behind over 4,000 murders in 30 years in Italy, and countless illegal activities - and besides being extremely dangerous are relentless, petty and anything but wise.”

Lee Marshall in Screen Daily:

Probably the most authentic and unsentimental mafia movie ever to come out of Italy, Gomorrah is a courageous, bruising and harrrowing ride.”

Jay Weissberg in Variety:

Utilizing a mesmerizing documentary style that studiously avoids glamorizing the horrors, Garrone cherrypicks episodes from Saviano’s muckraking tract, building to a chillingly matter-of-fact crescendo of violence, though interwoven tales tend to dissipate the full force of the criminal Camorra families’ insidious control.

While the Sicilian Mafia has drawn the lion’s share of media attention over the years, it’s the Camorra families of Naples who have really created an oligarchy of power and violence, controlling lives and entire economies not just in Italy but worldwide - their profits are estimated at over $233 billion per year…. But Garrone is clearly more interested in how the average inhabitant becomes drawn into the cycle of corruption and violence. Wads of cash regularly turn up in Gomorrah, but the trappings of wealth are nowhere to be seen: no fancy villas, no flashy jewels or expensive meals, since the Camorra’s dough never really trickles down to the foot soldiers.”

Category: Spotlight
May 17th, 2008

is the president of the jury at the 61st annual ,

Sean is a regular at Cannes. He won the best actor award here for She’s So Lovely, as well as he showed his own movies The Pledge and The Indian Runner here.

He will lead a jury made up of Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men), American actress (V for Vendetta), Iranian comic book artist Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis), Italian actor-director Sergio Castellitto (My Mother’s Smile), French actress Jeanne Balibar (Clean), Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Tropical Malady), French director Rachid Bouchareb (Days of Glory) and German actress Alexandra Maria Lara (Downfall).

The winners will be announced May 25.

Category: Spotlight
May 17th, 2008

For competition on Saturday, May 17th

ER SHI SI CHENG JI (24 City) (1h52) Directed by Jia Zhangke

China

This year this is the only Chinese movie to compete for Palme d’Or.

Jia Zhang Ke is a graduate of the Beijing Film Academy. He is best known for the internationally acclaimed films Still Life and The World. His 24 City is a story about three beautiful women’s fate in the process of China’s urbanization after 1958.

The former airplane-engine plant, known as Factory 240, employed 20,000 workers until it ceased production and was converted into a condominium complex called “24 City.”

Set in 1960s, 1980s and present day China.

Category: Spotlight
May 17th, 2008

For competition on Saturday, May 17th

LINHA DE PASSE (1h48) Directed by Walter Salles, Daniela Thomas

Brazil

This is a story about four brothers from a poor family living in urban jungle of São Paulo. They need to fight to follow their dreams in the Brazilian ghetto.

This year in Cannes there’s a strong South American contingent. Walter Salles, the great filmmaker whose The Motorcycle Diaries I adored, should definitely have a Palme d’Or.

In 1998, his small drama Central Station came out of nowhere to become sensation and got two Oscar nominations. Walter Salles’ Behind The Sun was nominated for Golden Globe Award.

LINHA DE PASSE is co-directed with Daniela Thomas from a script she wrote with George Moura (Moro No Brasil)

Here is the official movie synopsis:

Sao Paulo. 20 million inhabitants, 200 kilometers of traffic, 300,000 messengers on motorcycles.
At the heart of one of the toughest, most chaotic cities in the world, four brothers try to reinvent themselves in different ways.
With the backdrop of Brazil in a state of emergency, every single one is looking for a way out.”

Category: Spotlight
May 16th, 2008

For competition on Friday, May 16th

ÜÇ MAYMUN (Three Monkeys) (1h49) Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Turkey

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan has already done two films Uzak (Distant) in 2002 and Climates in 2006.

He is perfectly positioned to win a prize at Cannes this year. He earned reputation of a new worldclass filmmaker.

An ostensibly routine noir-style psychological thriller vaults into the realms of high art in competition contender Three Monkeys,”

writes Jonathan Romney in Screen Daily.

Category: Spotlight
May 16th, 2008

For competition on Friday, May 16th

UN CONTE DE NOËL (2h30) Directed by Arnaud Desplechin

France

With , Jean-Paul Roussillon, Mathieu Amalric.

Category: Spotlight
May 16th, 2008

For competition on Thursday, May 15th

WALTZ WITH BASHIR (1h27) Directed by Ari Folman

Israel

Documents the filmmaker’s journey toward discovering the truth about an Israeli Army mission he participated in during the first Lebanon War of the early 1980s that left him with a loss of memory about the events. The long-forgotten images begin to resurface as the director interviews old friends and comrades around the world.

Screen Daily: Ari Folman’s animated documentary could easily turn out to be one of the most powerful statements of this Cannes and will leave its mark forever on the ethics of war films in general. … This is not only a tremendously potent antiwar movie but also a formidable moral indictment of Israeli conduct at that time.

Guardian: This film is remarkable, for one, in the very fact that it exists at all: It is a mea culpa, created by someone intimately connected with events. Director (and central figure) Ari Folman doesn’t attempt to evade, soft-pedal or make excuses. He presents the film as therapy; his own attempt to recover the blocked memories of what actually happened. In doing so, he himself makes an explicit connection between the death camps Jews had fled in Europe, and the refugee camps in which Palestinians were housed and brutalised in Lebanon. Folman isn’t pulling any punches.

Cinematical: Where Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis” (to which this film will be inevitably, if somewhat inaccurately, compared) used stark black-and-white animation based on Satrapi’s graphic novels to tell the history of one girl growing up during the Iranian revolution, “Waltz With Bashir” uses vivid, hand-drawn animation to bring to life interviews Folman conducted with friends who were involved in the Lebanese war in the early 1980s to bring to life harrowing memories of death, guilt and regret.

Variety: A subject that might, had it been made conventionally, have repped just another docu about a war atrocity, is transmuted via novel use of animation into something special, strange and peculiarly potent in “Waltz With Bashir.” … Although less immediately accessible than “Persepolis,” another mature-aud-skewed cartoon with which this is bound to be compared, “Bashir” could dance nimbly round arthouse niches offshore.

The Los Angeles Times: Folman’s basic message is hardly unfamiliar: No good can come from a bunch of frightened, disoriented boys carrying far too much live ammo. But most of us have yet to see the particulars of this conflict (culminating in the 1982 massacres at Sabra and Shatila refugee camps), nor have we been privvy to the nuanced and guilt-ridden memories of its perpetrators/survivors. The storytelling is lumpy and misshapen, but the film’s shocking ending is as affecting as it is abrupt.

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Miss Provocateur

  • Stirring things up!

  • Did you ever provoke a fight with your guy? You love getting on his nerves because that makes him so obscure and funny – “cute” so we say. No, you’re not sadistic. Just the fact that after the make up, it feels so sweet to be the conqueror- to have the feeling of power! To feel the situation is under your control - to cause a fight and then to stop it. Isn’t it just so dramatically sweet to push the edges once in a while?

    I love pushing his triggers. Some may think I’m an evil witch, but I’m simply making our relationship tempered, exciting, resolute, pert.

    If you intentionally get into a fight with him – you are not sick in a head (and no, you’re not just a bitch). Scientists say that a healthy relationship is a relationship where there are arguments, and any argument needs a solution, right? That takes out our negative energy and brings us closer.
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  • A Good bye to Ruslana

  • Prologue

    Once upon a time there was a little girl who was just like a real princess, but no one knew that she was a princess. She grew up and became a very successful model. She lived up on the Manhattan tower and had almost a prince like boyfriend. One day she got tired of others not seeing that princess inside her. Ruslana Korshunova killed herself. She jumped off that high evil tower.

    Parable

    During my journey to Tibet I was lost. It was actually the reason why I went there. I was there to try to discover my soul. I will not get into details about my journey; there is only one meeting I have to tell you about.
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  • Breaking Rules

  • No matter how obvious it sounds most of the rules have been created long before us. By rules I mean systematized experience of previous generations, like handshakes and etiquette, and things like going for a social smoke. There is a rule that ladies go in first into any door except the elevator.

    But rules are a need for the sense of stability around one. Society needs rules to forecast the effect of a cause, to have at least some confidence of the future. And this is what disappoints people. This is when they lose their confidence because things appear not the way they expected them to be. Those who were really dependent on expectations suffer from facing the world that is unpredictable, that the rules they believed in didn’t work at some turning point.

    So they say that only fools learn through their own mistakes. Don’t you remember your mom telling you not to stick your tong out and put it against the metallic balcony railing when it’s freezing cold outside? Why did I skip my SPSS class with that macho from senior class? All of my friends were telling me he was a player and had nothing else in his head except for getting laid. Why do we learn things only after we go through them? This is what humans are like.
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  • Be what You want to Be

  • What do you call it when you feel something against your will? When the call of that something inside you starts ripping your self - esteem in pieces while your consciousness tells you to stop.

    I never had it when I was a child.

    I always felt what I wanted and I always wanted that what I felt.

    Being used to getting what I want I am stuck. Stuck in the position like being lost in the desert. There’s nowhere to go. I can’t deny what I feel but I also can’t afford to feel it. It’s against my beliefs and values. Hum… fuck the beliefs. I don’t care.

    No more. The human mind is such control-freak. It kills me. And if I continue it will sound like a confession to you and this is the least I want to do.
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  • Sex Agenda

  • Inspired by “fuck” conversation last Saturday, which is a very delicate subject.

    All of us, living in a fast growing temper of big cities are busy. We go to work, go to college full time, or have kids to take care of. There are plenty of things to do. When crazy week days are over we have yoga or tango classes, and shopping to do aside the chorus, french classes and getting a good sleep.

    When is there time for sex?

    The right answer would be - there is always time for sex. But the stress and busyness lead some couples to pencil their intimacy. It is logical, simple and hot to know that your schedule after works has a mark “Ryan 8 pm”. It is exciting to feel the anticipation, but on the other hand do we feel it is comfortable to set up our special moments with an important person for us on a basis of a scheduled task? It seems awkward to plan it, it is out of style, especially for femme-fatale like me, but even when sex is spontaneous, in every woman's head it is always planned. (wink!)
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  • Punked!

  • I got sms from a friend of mine which said “I heard you were robbed last night and the robber gave you two choices: you either had to give him your phone or suck his dick… I see you still got your phone…”

    I thought that was stupid but hilarious and sent it to another friend of mine. He didn’t reply and I totally forgot about it. Well, I had to call him up for some business this morning and as he answered the phone he told me he was robbed last night.
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  • Barefoot

  • I remember one rainy morning when I was sitting on the backseat of my Mercedes. My driver picked me up earlier than the usual. I wasn’t mad at him, no. I thought it was great so I could get to the office earlier than the usual. But when I got into the car I asked him if we could drive around for a bit. I like rain. I wanted to go to the park and have a cup of espresso at the patio outside the café on the bridge.

    I asked him to wait for me and he walked me carrying the umbrella. I hate it cause when he does it he always sings “Under my umbrella, ella-ella-ella…” Rihanna’s song, you know. It’s cute but he makes me smile and I don’t like that. He’s my driver. That’s it. He’s supposed to take me where I want, not make me smile.
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  • Which one are you?

  • Preface: My last article made few men, whom I asked to read it, say it was bitchy to compare them with dogs, so this time I decided to distinguish women into a few different groups. I got the idea from a friend of mine who I think is more or less an expert in women. Sorry girls if you will find yourself offended when realizing this is who you can be sometimes.

    Woman has always been a mystery to men. It is difficult to predict the way she will act in a certain situation. Whether she will through a scandal and tell all the girls, or will she keep it low. May be it will clear few things up and will surely make you smile.
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  • The hunting season is open!

  • Men - hunting is a very special elite kind of sport among women. Even golf and horse riding lose their pathos and sophistication next to it. In this hunt there are three simple elements: “v” – victim, “w” – woman and the most important one – “d” – desire.

    This kind of activity keeps you in a good shape and helps you stay in a positive frame of mind for many years. But being a real Venus and Artemis at the same time is hard work.

    Factors, such as weak self - restrain and lack of knowledge of the way to handle the male kind may become more complex when completing the mission. But nevertheless, it is time to start the season.
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    Last time I was there was for K-Fed’s birthday party on March, 21st. He got fucking drunk! That night I changed my mind on what I thought of him. I thought he was a little better than that. Sorry, won’t tell you the details…
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