In Contention

Tag: Chatroom

  • Watching and waiting: Guy’s best and worst of 2010

    What kind of year was 2010 at the movies? You tell me. It’s virtually impossible to find one yardstick to measure 365 days of cinema for a collective audience whose interests seem ever more segregated.

    If your film interests are covered largely by the multiplex, chances are 2010 was an unusually unrewarding year for you, challenging even Hollywood’s standard quota of déjà vu — unless, of course, you’re an animation fiend, in which case there was a broad enough range of carefully crafted work to keep you happy.

    If you tend to bypass the mall on your way to the arthouse, however, there was any amount of adventurous indie and world cinema, both newly unveiled and backlogged from previous years, to chew on — if, of course, you’re privileged enough to live in a regrettably narrow radius. And if you’re an Academy voter sifting through the crop of generously campaigned prestige fare, 2010 looks rather like the usual, only a little more so.

    For me, 2010 was both immeasurably improved and somewhat complicated by the festival circuit — access to which is a luxury I shall never take for granted, but also one that inevitably skews my sense of how the film yearbook reads in the real world. When you’ve had access to most of the big-ticket winter warmers by early autumn, and when the likes of Cannes afford you a head start of many months or even years on certain international art films, things rather lose their shape.

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  • CANNES: ‘Outrage,’ ‘The Princess of Montpensier,’ ‘Black Heaven’

    Nothing quite clicked into gear today, I’m afraid – the one screening I really wanted to make, Xavier Dolan’s warmly received sophomore feature “Heartbeats,” filled up before I could get in the door, while the films I did see made for a pretty uninspiring day’s viewing.

    I’m usually quite a stickler for taking notes during festival screenings – overlapping and psychotically askew, given my minimal mastery of night-writing, but notes nonetheless – but today the notepad stayed largely unblemished. That usually means one of two things: I’m too lost in the film to keep jotting, or it simply provokes no thoughts from me whatsoever. Guess which one applies today.

    I’m afraid it was with a mostly clear conscience that I sacrificed an early evening screening of Jia Zhang Ke’s “I Wish I Knew” in order to attend the swish London Film Festival shindig at the Palais Stephanie Hotel. (Yes, any big festival teems with parties for other festivals – just drink your champagne and go with it.) I confess I didn’t get on that well with Jia’s previous feature “24 City,” and guessed the new film would be in a similar vein – friends’ reports suggest that was a good guess.

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  • CANNES: ‘Chatroom,’ ‘Aurora’

    Far be it from me to tell Thierry Fremaux et al how to run a festival – though I’ve programmed some pretty wicked DVD marathons in my time, I’ll have you know – but the scheduling at Cannes this year has been haphazard, to say the least. Today, for example, served up no Competition titles whatsoever, with only two Un Certain Regard titles to keep “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” (which I hardly expected to emerge as my favorite film of the day) company on a Friday night.

    Cut to me drawing up my viewing schedule for tomorrow, frantically calculating the pros and cons of around eight different titles I want to see, and I can’t help wishing they’d spread the weekend wealth a little. Mike Leigh’s “Another Year” and WoodyAllen’s “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” are the two major attractions, of course, but I’ll be sorry to miss Cam Archer’s “Shit Year” in Director’s Fortnight. That’s just the morning menu: later on, we get buzzy new titles from Gregg Araki, Xavier Dolan, Charles Ferguson and Mahamet-Saleh Haroun … there will be, if not blood, some heavy-hearted cross-outs.

    Not that I was much in the mood for further screenings after today’s slightly gruelling back-to-back triple-bill, one-third of which found me hunched on the stairs of the Salle Debussy theater as press packed out this afternoon’s screening of Hideo Nakata’s “Chatroom.” (They’d regret their enthusiasm before long.)

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  • CANNES PREVIEW: The best of the rest

    Okay, so you’ve combed through the 19 films in the Competition lineup for Cannes 2010, and you still haven’t found much to get excited about? Fret not. You wouldn’t know it to read most media coverage of the festival, but the Competition is only one course at the Cannes buffet – and not necessarily the most filling.

    Surrounding it are a host of alternative sidebars, both competitive and simply exhibitory, ranging from glossy out-of-competition Hollywood premieres to independent strands yielding more familiar names than the casual festival-watcher might expect. In today’s preview, I’ll pick out some potential highlights from the non-Competition hinterlands.

    The ones you’ll hear the most about, of course, fall into the Out of Competition category, a refuge both for arthouse attractions that fell between the cracks in the selection process (chief among them, Olivier Assayas’s five-hour Carlos the Jackal study “Carlos”) and big-budget studio pictures seeking the prestige of a Cannes stamp without the risk of actually competing.

    Here you’ll find the star-laden pair of Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” and Woody Allen’s “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” – both projects that have me worried for different reasons, but neither of which you really need me to remind you about.

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