Showing 1-10 of 131 results
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Cannes' line-up promises a big year
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/01/2015
» As is tradition, it will be helter-skelter in Cannes. The archangels will descend on the red carpet while the critics, all few thousand of them, will practice the old sport of vulturism, eyeing the wrecks and picking up the carcasses, when the the 65th Cannes Film Festival begins tonight (a week later than usual to allow the dust of the French presidential election to settle). There are 22 films in Cannes' Competition _ the most coveted contest in the world, sort of _ and most of them are latest works by brand-name directors who will, like futuristic priests, lead us to a prayer at Our Church of Cinema, godly and satanic. To many, the festival is also an annual rite of self-flagellation. Better bring your own whips.
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Moonrise at Cannes
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/01/2015
» Pre-teen love and rainbow eccentricity opened the 65th Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday. Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom served up an unusually amusing, toybox-like fantasy as a curtain raiser to the 12-day festival known for its roll-call of prestigious titles and pensive arthouse fares. But actually, Anderson's film about two 12-year-olds who fall in love and elope captures the dual modality that Cannes has always juggled with masterful trickery: an auteur movie by a brand-name filmmaker, and a dash of Hollywood magnetics and red carpet-worthy cast. This year we'll especially see that a lot more in the next 10 days.
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Cannes Report Day 2
Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/01/2015
» <b>Cannes<br> May 17</b> What I regret most in Jacques Audiard's "Rust and Bone", screening in Cannes Competition on Thursday, is the heartbreakingly brief appearance of the killer whales.
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Cannes Day 5: Love and other nightmares
Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/01/2015
» <b>Cannes, May 20</b>
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Cannes Day 8: Killing me softly
Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/01/2015
» Brad Pitt is here. He plays Jackie Cogan, the typically violent and fashionably cheeky hitman in "Killing Them Softly". The film is so stylised that you thought the director, Andrew Dominik, was actually trying to impress Jean-Paul Gaultier, who sits on Cannes' jury this year. Each murder, by Cogan mostly, is designed to its nano-second detail, with every shard of bullet-shattered glass visible in its fatal, mid-air flight. Amidst the killings and score-settling, Barack Obama, on TV, campaigns for new America and the soundbites constantly tell us how badly the economy is doing. "Killing Them Softly" is a film that's so conscious about its cleverness that it seems less clever eventually, and one of the clever messages it constantly reminds us is summed up in Cogan's last sentence: "America is not a country, it's a business." I wonder if Quentin Tarantino could've made it more subtle, and more comical.
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Cannes, mon amour
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/01/2015
» Love and other nightmares filled the first half of the 65th Cannes Film Festival. There's post-Revolution love from Egypt, and the love that finds its final destiny, as love should, in death. There are the usual sidekicks of love, such as loneliness and the desire to be recognised, in the heart and in the flesh, in one's own territory and in others. It's both helpful and futile to try to find a common theme in the competition titles at the most frenzied and influential movie festival on Earth, but please allow me to indulge in the activity as a cure to the unusually wet weather that has rendered the mood rather gloomy in this war zone of film criticism.
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A glittering showcase of film
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/01/2015
» Cannes Film Festival opens today with Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby, and for the next 12 days the Mediterranean resort town on the French Riviera plays host to the 66th edition of the world's most respected, most influential and most circus-like cine-jamboree. Stars, filmmakers, industry bigwigs and journalists congregate for the annual pilgrimage that celebrates, sanctifies and commercialises cinema to an extent that's both astounding and puzzling.
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All that glitters is not Gatsby
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/01/2015
» This is not unexpected. Baz Luhrmann's modus operandi is never subtlety, and his milking of whatever slim, tenuous, ephemeral material cheerfully goes for full bombast. So The Great Gatsby, enjoyable though not so great, magnifies what F Scott Fitzgerald's book only hints, stresses what's only sprinkled, exteriorises what's inside the mind and in the process makes us see more and probably feel less. A fitting opener of the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday _ and in cinemas across the world this week _ the film revels in excess and almost forgets that all of this is supposed to be a cautionary tale.
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Cannes report: The joyful jury
Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/01/2015
» <b>CANNES, France -</b> One of the great mysteries is how you judge movies.
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