Seed NewsvineDid Cannes Fuck Up A Little This Year [After All]?
For the most part, the Cannes Film Festival has been the benchmark for film festivals. It's got all the glitz and glam of a Hollywood awards show minus the Jonas Brothers. It's a stretch of days where an auteur has more mass appeal than Ryan Reynolds. If there is a sense of juvenile sarcasm in my diction, then congrats on having a set of perceptive reading eyes.
In past years, films that have won prizes from the Cannes jury went on to a live a shelf life of noted greatness and were brought up amongst lovers of the cinema and teachers and mentors within extensive movie dialogue. Anyone who knows the names Dardennes, Haneke or Koreeda is someone who actually LOVES movies. There are of course some common household names that make bill throughout the years: Coen, Anderson and Tarantino. Even when a big film winner from a Cannes fest goes on to North American financial and mainstream success (for example Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" or Polanski's "The Pianist"), it is considered a welcome feat and not "selling out." Why? Because they played with the big boys. Other artists from parts of the world we would otherwise never bother learning about. And they won.
However, 2009 marked the fest as a time when vagueness was probably confused with greatness. Two films in particular spurred up the biggest hub-bub: "Thirst" and "Kinatay."
Ebert wrote in his Cannes blog about the fest in retrospect: "Has there ever been a more violent group of films in the Official Selection? More negative about humanity? More despairing? With a greater variety of gruesome, sadistic, perverted acts? [...] And most of these films were not over quickly. Not that there's something wrong with a film running over the invisible 120-minute finish line, if it needs to, and is a good film. I regret that not all the 21 films in this year's selection were good. And that's not just me."
It wasn't. In fact, when Director Park Chan Wook collected the Special Jury Prize for his "Thirst" there were actual boos that could be heard in the distance. So why award him the prize? Is there the frightening possibility of an overlap between distribution deals and jury award merit now? You know the whole, 'If you really want this film to have overseas distribution, then it might help to slap a "WINNER OF THE..." thingamajig on that poster' kind of dialogue happening between some studio guy and a jury member with interest. Ah, but now I'm just letting my colorful imagination take the best of me.
And what about Brillante Mendoza's "Kinatay." It hasn't been released in the States yet, but this guy won the Best Director award for it. So if it turns out to be lackluster, I just might cry. And Ebert's warning doesn't look to hopeful: "The 2009 feature film jury awarded some reasonable prizes, and then lost its mind. In my opinion the Mendoza film "Kinatay" deserved no award [...] But why in heaven's name would you give him the award for best direction? The second half of his film is an illustration of directorial monomania--a willingness to drive audiences from the theater not so much by the violence (rape, beheading, vivisection) but by the directorial style itself."
Oh yeah, and "Kinatay" is about these shady cops kidnapping a woman and cutting her into little pieces I believe.
Let's see.
