All The Love You Cannes

Though Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master will be (predictably) absent, this years lineup for the Cannes Film Festival is enough to make any film fan drool:

Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson), Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg), Killing Them Softly (Andrew Dominik), Amour (Michael Haneke), Lawless (John Hillcoat), The Paperboy (Lee Daniels), Like Someone In Love (Abbas Kiarostami), The Angels' Share (Ken Loach), Vous N'avez Encore Rien Vu (Alain Resnais), On The Road (Walter Sallas), The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg), Rust & Bone (Jacques Audiard), Me and You (Bernardo Bertolucci), Hemingway & Gellhorn (Philip Kaufman), Dracula (Dario Argento), The Legend of Love & Sincerity (Takashi Miike), Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir (Laurent Bouzereau)

And let's not forget the new 4+ hour cut of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America!

So who wants to pay to send us to France so that we might better serve you all with first-hand coverage? Anybody? Anybody? Bueller?

On Women & Cinema

At last year's Oscars, everyone was celebrating Kathryn Bigelow becoming the first female Best Director winner for her film The Hurt Locker. And while we at Cinema Nerds were as pumped as anyone to see this victory for the fairer sex, the nagging question remains: How many years will it be until the NEXT female winner?

The upcoming Cannes premiere of We Need to Talk About Kevin will beLynne Ramsay's first film since Morvern Callar in 2002. This isn't to say that she wasn't trying during all those years betwen. Several years were spent working on an adaptation of Alice Sebold's book The Lovely Bones before it fell apart and became a Peter Jackson film.

This narrative of years and years between films isn't unique to Ramsay. On average, women filmmakers have to wait twice as long between films as male filmmakers. Only now is Allison Anders making her follow-up to 2001's Things Behind The Sun, and in order to do so she and her co-director had to call upon the assistance of fans through Kickstarter.

In an ironic twist, it has become far easier for a woman to be successful producing pornography, than making mainstream cinema. So what is the solution? What is a sister to do?

Some say the solution is to have more female executives so that they can green-light female fronted films. But then you must remember that the job title "Studio Executive" is one of the least secure in the world. It's a constant revolving door. One flop and you're out. A female executive is most likely going to do the same thing a male executive would do - play it as safe as possible.

I got it! The solution is to get more people to go see films made by females! Perhaps, but what about the women who want to make movies outside of the conventional genres? It's one thing to get a whole mess of people to go see an action film or a romantic comedy, it's another thing entirely to get people to plunk down their money for a film about a woman coming to terms with the fact that her son shot up his school. Back to square one.

We Need to Talk About Kevin clip 1 by Flixgr

So what IS the solution? Not really sure. Maybe there isn't one. This is after all just a film blog. We are simply just stating the depressing facts as we see them. Does that make you angry? Good! Prove us wrong!

Now get your ass out there and do something about it!

Pedro's New Skin

Check out this creepy teaser for Pedro Almodóvar's upcoming The Skin That I Live In which marks his reunion with Antonio Banderas and is set to premiere at Cannes in the next few weeks! Fortunately Sony Pictures Classic has already picked up US distribution rights so we shouldn't have to wait too long to see what devilishness Pedro has cooked up!

La Piel Que Habito Teaser by Flixgr

An Honorable Use of 3D

Oh if only this 3D craze would just die already! It's a gimmick, it isn't the future of cinema and in a few years we'll all be watching "I Love the 2000s" and laughing at how silly we all were. You don't need to see The Great Gatsby in 3D! 

That being said, there are some filmmakers out there who could potentially do interesting things with 3D. Jackass 3D was fascinating for it's use of cutting-edge technology to document such crudely simple gags and I cannot wait to see what Martin Scorsese accomplishes on Hugo Cabret. 

Another artist who I am intrigued to see work in 3D, is Japanese wild-man Takashi Miike, who will be debuting his remake of Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai at the upcoming Cannes Film Festival.

The fact that Miike seems to have mellowed in recent years actually makes his decision to use the format all the more interesting. His earlier films like Ichi The Killer and Dead or Alive were so relentless that use of 3D would likely turn your brain to Jell-O. But as evidenced by this teaser trailer, Hara-Kiri seems to be a film content to take its' time. 

Ideally this will mean action sequences that are much more visceral, because they have been earned through slow build-up. A good Samurai film is one that takes its' time finding the perfect moment to STRIKE! This should also be used as a guiding principle for 3D filmmakers. Not everything needs to be a peak. Sometimes you need valleys.

Round Up The Usual Suspects...

As if we needed another reason to wish we were in France...

This morning the official line-up for the 64th annual Cannes Film Festival was announced. The festival will open on May 11th with the out of competition premiere of Woody Allen's Midnight In Paris. 

As expected, Terrence Malick's long awaited The Tree of Life will finally make its' premiere here after several years in the works. Also in the, "everyone saw it coming" file: Festival favorite filmmakers Pedro Almodóvar,  Lars Von Trier and Gus Van Sant will debut their newest works on the croisette.

In the "far less predictable" column we find Japanese madman Takashi Miike's new film Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai as well as Nicolas Winding Refn's crime-thriller Drive.

This year's lineup also seems front-loaded with controversial subject matter. Von Trier and Miike are legendary provocateurs and Almodóvar's The Skin That I Live In is a rape/revenge film with sex reassignment surgery at its' center. But perhaps this year's lightning-rod of controversy will be Lynn Ramsay's adaptation of We Need To Talk About Kevin which follows a mother coming to terms with her son and the fact that he shot up his school.

Though there are few true surprises in the lineup, this year's slate of films is nothing to scoff at. Check back often for updates as we deliver coverage so good that you'll find it hard to believe that we're thousands of miles away.

il vient...