Film

Cannes 2013 highlight? (Photo: Bérénice Bejo, Tahar Rahim in Asghar Farhadi’s The Past) So far, what’s the most memorable event at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival? Perhaps the screening of Asghar Farhadi’s Palme d’Or competitor The Past, starring The Artist‘s Bérénice Bejo (replacing Marion Cotillard) and A Prophet‘s Tahar Rahim? Variety‘s Justin Chang called Farhadi’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning A Separation "an exquisitely sculpted family melodrama in which the end of a marriage is merely the beginning of something else, an indelible tapestry of carefully engineered revelations and deeper human truths." (Scroll down to check out The Bling Ring cast Cannes 2013 photos.) Or perhaps Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davies, which impressed The Independent film critic Geoffrey Macnab with "the sure-footed way the Coens combine comedy, music and brooding film noir elements"? Or maybe the fact that Carey Mulligan had two major films screening at Cannes: the aforementioned Inside Llewyn Davies and, out of competition, the festival’s opening-night gala movie The Great Gatsby? Or perhaps, as reported in The Guardian, the highlight of sorts of this year’s Cannes Film Festival was The Bridge TV series producer Lars Blomgren remarking, "I have always worked in both [film and television] and I think it is film that will have to change. A lot of creativity has moved over to TV." If that weren’t all, Blomgren added that he prefers Cannes’ TV festival Mipcom to the town’s more renowned film festival because Mipcom "is more focused and there is less b.s." Jewelry heist: Cannes’ own The Bling Ring But no. So far, the 2013 Cannes Film Festival’s most memorable event — or at least the one with the biggest real-world repercussion — had little to do with moving images screened in a darkened room. Shortly after the premiere of Sofia Coppola’s real-life-inspired The Bling Ring, starring Harry Potter‘s Emma Watson as one of a group of teenagers who stole about $3 million worth of goods from the homes of Los Angeles’ rich and famous, a jewelry heist worth more than €300,000 took place at the Cannes’ Hotel Novotel, located not far from the Palais des Festivals. According to reports, the jewels were stolen from the hotel room of an employee of Swiss jeweler Chopard, which makes the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or and other trophies. Shades of Alfred Hitchcock’s French Riviera-set To Catch a Thief, starring Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. The latter, by the way, is the subject of The Weinstein Company’s upcoming Grace of Monaco, whose trailer was presented by Harvey Weinstein himself at the festival. Speaking of Weinstein, not even he has come up with a jewelry heist as a tie-in to one of his Oscar-contending movies. Don’t expect him to do so this year either, as The Bling Ring will be released (on June 14) by A24 in North America. Claire Julien (The Bling Ring) poses inside a Lamborghini Gallardo Spider at the Cannes Film Festival The Bling Ring cast: Taissa Farmiga, Katie Chang, Sofia Coppola, Emma Watson, Israel Broussard at the Cannes Film Festival’s ‘Movie Star Lounge’ in the Carlton Hotel Emma Watson of The Bling Ring in the Carlton Hotel’s ‘Movie Star Lounge’ The Bling Ring‘s Claire Julien, Taissa Farmiga, Katie Chang, Sofia Coppola, Israel Broussard, Emma Watson photos: Annalisa Flori / Getty Images. Bérénice Bejo, Tahar Rahim in Asghar Farhadi’s The Past photo: Cannes Film Festival. This post was originally published at Alt Film Guide (http://www.altfg.com/). Not to be republished without permission.

We had a chance to sit down with Simon Pegg, Alice Eve and John Cho to talk about Star Trek Into Darkness, dogs in the Star Trek universe and the sci-fi film as the new Western.

Star Trek Into Darkness was expected to open somewhere around $100 million for its first four days, but it ended up falling $15 million short. Should Paramount be worried with Hangover 3 and Fast & Furious 6 on the way next weekend?

Blood Ties is too big for its own good. Director and co-writer Guiilaume Canet simply runs out of running time and while he does a great job establishing his characters there simply isn't enough room for them to breathe in a film that work far better as a television series than a 144-minute film.

The Hitman has a long lineage in Hollywood. Of course, because the Hitman’s primary occupation is the extinction of human life by violent means – be it shooting, knifing, or other more extreme methods – this precludes him from adhering to standard Hollywood Code which stipulates that film protagonists must be likable and/or sympathetic. There are two typical remedies to this quandary – 1.) Make the Hitman a side character or 2.) If choosing to make the Hitman your principal character, romanticize the situation, play it for comedy’s sake or make him “empathetic” within his own context. And this brings us to the main character of the just-released Iceman, Richard Kuklinski, bewilderingly based on a real person. After seeing The Iceman I did a little research on the real-life Kuklinski and learned he was considered as much a serial killer as a contract killer – a man who killed somewhere between 100 and 250 people, partly for varying crime families who sought his employment and partly for the sheer thrill it provided him. Shudder. Director Ariel Vromen, however, who wrote the script with Morgan Land which they based on Anthony Bruno’s non-fiction book, choose to essentially make Kuklinski a full-time family man and part-time hitman. Consider the opening scene. It is not, crucially, of Kuklinski killing someone, though that turns up quickly in the second scene. No, it is a scene of Kuklinski taking his future wife Deborah (Winona Ryder) out on their first date, where she fiddles with the teensy cross around her neck as if trying to get the okay from above about this guy across the table. The scene establishes him as being genuinely caring (he opens the door for her), a stingy conversationalist and a liar – he tells her he puts together movie reels for Disney when, in fact, he puts them together for porn films as part of a mob run outfit. The latter is how he comes into contact with mob moss Roy Demeo (Ray Liotta) who shuts down the porn film ring but senses potential in this Kuklinski as a thug when he shoves a gun in his face and he does not react. So, to make ends meet, considering he has his wife and now two daughters at home, Kuklinksi begins taking human lives to make a living, though with a caveat – he does not kill women and children. This leads directly to his undoing and eventually an uneasy alliance with another skeezy hitman (Chris Evans) who drives an ice cream truck which gives him a convenient place to tuck away dead bodies. Kuklinski is played by Michael Shannon in another of his seemingly ceaseless string of virtuoso performances. I can only imagine there are few things in this life more frightening than Ray Liotta thrusting a gun in your face – film fakery or not. Thus, you have to hire a actor capable of not flinching when it happens. Clearly this is why Vromen and his producers hired Shannon. He stares down Ray Liotta and wins. If that isn’t Academy Award worthy, nothing is. This might lead the reader to suspect that Shannon parades about this decade-jumping crime story (from the sixties to the seventies to the eighties, his suits and facial hair getting louder) like a preeminent badass, but Shannon wisely retreats from playing to convention or caricature. Although the film makes it clear that Kuklinski’s family is what drives him to this untraditional vocation, it also attempts to make no apologies (even though Kuklinski makes a sort-of apology in the film’s last scene) for the character nor ask the audience to put on rose-colored classes and view him with empathy. That is daring. Shannon, miraculously, lets us in behind the hard-boiled veneer while simultaneously not granting us much access to the inner-workings of what makes him tic. A key scene late as events around him are piling up and spiraling out of control takes place on an elevator where, in a way I struggle to describe, we can see – very nearly literally

The titular character of Alex van Warmerdam's Borgman does not have horns, nor does he command grotesque demons spawned from hellfire. Emaciated, clothed in rags with long hair and a beard, he actually looks a lot like Jesus at first. But since he's being hunted by a priest with a rifle when we first meet him, it seems pretty safe to assume that he's more likely the exact opposite of the son of God. The gun doesn't do much good, and while some of the priest's posse has a bit more luck with a spear, Borgman's underground clubhouse type lair, complete with a periscope and escape tunnel gives him the upper hand from square one. Off he flees through the woods, and eventually, to the... [Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]

James Toback and Alec Baldwin had an idea for a film and they took it to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival in search of funding, Seduced and Abandoned is the result of their search and it's yet another eye-opening look at how the films you see today first found their footing.

Normal 0 false false false EN-IN X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-IN; mso-fareast-language:EN-IN;} Red River, humorously referred to as a ‘cow opera’, remains a gripping Western, if not for anything else, for its breathtaking scope and audacity. Its themes of gargantuan human ambitions, male ego, masculinity and father-son duality, with Biblical overtones and veiled commentary on the stomping march of capitalism, were accentuated by an alternately classical and revisionist Western framework. It was also the first time that the two quintessential American icons, Howard Hawks and John Wayne, teamed up. The film begins with Tom Dunston (Wayne), a searing individualist, breaking out from his group to start his own cattle ranch. Many years later, with the economic slowdown brought on by the Civil War, he plans to take his herd of around 10,000 cattle nearly a thousand miles across the country, from Kansas to Texas, in the search for a better beef market. Joining him, among others, is Matthew Garth (Montgomery Clift), his surrogate son. With the cattle drive, at once the height of human ambition and the depth of human folly, began a jaw-dropping odyssey that was as much physical as it was psychological in the way it brought out the worst in Dunston and the best in Garth, and tested the limits of all. And when Garth eventually rebels against the increasingly draconian Dunston, after a spectacularly staged stampede, darker dimensions got added to the epic and tense narrative. The happy resolution of the conflict was perhaps the sole blemish of this masterpiece. Wayne’s powerful turn as the bitter, dictatorial and imposing anti-hero would rank as second only to his superlative performance in Ford’s The Searchers.Director: Howard HawksGenre: Western/Revisionist Western/Psychological Drama/EpicLanguage: EnglishCountry: US

A small ginger tom cat has taken Cannes by storm after a feisty appearance in the Coen brothers' acclaimed Inside Llewyn Davis.

I'm in Cannes so all I can list are the films I've seen and the reviews I've written along with the films I'm about to see and the reviews I'm about to write, so it's up to you, what did you watch this week?