Cannes Film Festival Mini-List Discussion + Suggestions

An ongoing project to survey the best films of individual decades, genres, and filmmakers.
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domino harvey
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Re: Cannes Film Festival Mini-List Discussion + Suggestions

#51 Post by domino harvey » Wed Jun 28, 2017 12:02 pm

Six lists in so far. Fun fact: every single 1968 vote has gone to a different film. I'm starting to see how hard it must be to be Jury president!

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knives
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Re: Cannes Film Festival Mini-List Discussion + Suggestions

#52 Post by knives » Wed Jun 28, 2017 12:05 pm

I'm surprised at that since there's only five films I realistically would have thought would be considered.

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Re: Cannes Film Festival Mini-List Discussion + Suggestions

#53 Post by swo17 » Wed Jun 28, 2017 12:09 pm

Should we each vote for an alternate that would only be counted in the event that no one film gets a first-place consensus?

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Re: Cannes Film Festival Mini-List Discussion + Suggestions

#54 Post by knives » Wed Jun 28, 2017 12:11 pm

Maybe only if. There's no reason to bother second rounding unless we need to.

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Re: Cannes Film Festival Mini-List Discussion + Suggestions

#55 Post by swo17 » Wed Jun 28, 2017 12:13 pm

If he waits right until the end to do that though, it could take some time to hear back from everyone. Meanwhile, my #2 choice is obvious and I could tell it to anyone right now that wanted to hear it.

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domino harvey
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Re: Cannes Film Festival Mini-List Discussion + Suggestions

#56 Post by domino harvey » Wed Jun 28, 2017 12:18 pm

If anyone who has submitted or is planning to submit wants to submit a secondary "compromise" vote for 1968 in addition to your main 1968 vote via PM, feel free to do so

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Re: Cannes Film Festival Mini-List Discussion + Suggestions

#57 Post by zedz » Wed Jun 28, 2017 3:55 pm

I think we should decide it through catfights and tears just like a real Cannes jury.

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domino harvey
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Re: Cannes Film Festival Mini-List Discussion + Suggestions

#58 Post by domino harvey » Wed Jun 28, 2017 5:48 pm

Worst case scenario, in true Cannes Jury President fashion, I pick what I want and tell the rest of you to deal with it

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Re: Cannes Film Festival Mini-List Discussion + Suggestions

#59 Post by the preacher » Thu Jun 29, 2017 3:46 pm

domino harvey wrote:If anyone who has submitted or is planning to submit wants to submit a secondary "compromise" vote for 1968 in addition to your main 1968 vote via PM, feel free to do so
This is my runner-up:

Grazie, zia (Salvatore Samperi)

An unpopular choice, I guess. :P

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domino harvey
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Re: Cannes Film Festival Mini-List Discussion + Suggestions

#60 Post by domino harvey » Sat Jul 01, 2017 12:41 pm

Reminder that lists are due tonight, but as always, that means tomorrow morning when I wake up. You can submit an edited list or any changes til that point too, as I won't have time to start compiling til tomorrow. Get some last minute viewings in!

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domino harvey
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Re: Cannes Film Festival Mini-List Discussion + Suggestions

#61 Post by domino harvey » Sun Jul 02, 2017 3:01 am

Well, I did my best to cram near the end here:

Die Letzte Chance (Leopold Lindtberg 1946) A pair of stranded soldiers attempt to make their way to Switzerland, collecting a coterie of displaced persons in the process. While the film boasts a cornucopia of languages and nationalities represented, the narrative itself is rather tired and indistinguishable from any average Hollywood war programmer— no wonder MGM snatched this one up for stateside release!

De røde enge (Bodil Ipsen and Lau Lauritzen Jr 1946) Fine if unexceptional wartime tale of the Danish resistance. An easy way to pass an hour and a half, but this pales in comparison to its fellow 1946 awardee Muži bez křídel, which also told of Nazi resistance, but with a moral weight and complexity this film doesn’t approach.

Due soldi di speranza (Renato Castellani 1952) Like the Oscars, Italian cinema is way over-represented at Cannes, and head-scratchers like this are Exhibit A. I don’t know if I agree with knives’ assertion that the film possess “sheer Italian-ness,” but it certainly embodies the same frantic and aggressively unfunny schtick from countless other laugh-free Italian “comedies.” Perhaps this is just a cultural gap I will never conquer. I did not find a single minute of this exhausting collection of people yelling at each other amusing, and it would take a lot more than two cents to entice me to watch another Italian comedy on purpose.

Eternity and a Day (Theo Angelopoulos 1998) A transparent combo of two superior films, Wild Strawberries and the Search (the original, though even more so for the remake I guess), this doesn’t add up to much but it’s an enjoyable way to pass the time. Like most Angelopoulous films, the movie achieves a sustained lilting tone punctuated with unexpected, large-scale images of unshakable power. The highlight for me is the bizarre, fog-soaked border fence, populated with what first appear to be dummies who then slowly begin to move along the chainlink fence as Bruno Ganz wanders up to the gate. An otherworldly and inexplicable moment, and the film gives us a few others that try to come close. Ultimately, however, regardless of pretty accoutrements, the film’s story and impact are too familiar to make this add up to much more than “okay.”

the Go-Between (Joseph Losey 1971) A twelve year old visitor to a British estate finds himself ferrying messages between Julie Christie’s Have and Alan Bates’ Have Not. I appreciated how transparently both sides of the tug of war on the boy are outwardly friendly but still treat him with nothing but disdain and anger once he stops being useful (showing he’s even further down the food chain than the lowly farmhand). The film’s focus on class pressures is oddly insincere— most characters come off well or poor apart from their position in society, not because of it. The film is weirdly rushed in the end, and while the message and outcome couldn’t be more predictable, the film’s embarrassed mad dash to see itself out the door does it no favors. Some nice flavors here and there, but ultimately a little too milquetoast to quite work.

the Hireling (Alan Bridges 1973) Another British class system drama from the same author of the Go-Between, and like Losey’s film, this one is for most of the running time okay but still doesn’t quite add up in the end. Robert Shaw’s chauffeur falls in love with society lady Sara Miles, to predictable results. That’s it. While the impossibility of the union is not hard to predict, I thought the film wasted any potential to make larger gains by throwing everything away in favor of a deflated finale. For the period in history in which it was released, the film is almost ludicrously removed from the class concerns of the then-current climate, and adds nothing new to an already well-trod tradition of films and novels just like this.

La classe operaia va in paradiso (Elio Petri 1971) And here are modern class concerns done right. I didn’t get much out of Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion but this repairing of the director and star Gian Maria Volontè is terrific. Volontè’s perf as the company man factory worker who revolutionizes after an injury is propulsive and bombastic and, like everything else in the film, captured with claustrophobic and disorienting close-ups. It is a film that captures the mania in the mundane and the chaos inherent in breaking with the norms. Highly recommended.

La symphonie pastorale (Jean Delannoy 1946) A married pastor takes in a feral blind girl and ten years later she looks like Michèle Morgan. Complications ensue. The films offers an incredible interlocking of component character complications without any clear “right” or “wrong” answer or solution: the pastor and the girl have fallen in love with each other. The pastor’s wife knows and accepts this with grim fortitude for as long as she can. The pastor is in denial, and uses the girl’s blindness to keep her indebted to him. The pastor’s son, already engaged to another, eventually recognizes the father’s love as well, but not until after he’s fallen for the girl himself. All is already impossibly complicated when the possibility of the girl’s blindness being cured enters the picture, and then things really start to go off the rails.

If this sounds like typical melodrama hysterics, well, that’s what I expected, but it’s not what we get. Rather than amp up empty oppression and misunderstandings, the film gives us a believably hopeless scenario and then puts the screws to its characters, who are caught in a situation they can’t possibly extricate themselves from, but keep trying. The film’s most telling line from the girl: “I say ‘yes’ or I say ‘no’ and I’m still wrong.” It is so rare in a film like this to have no villains or heroes, where every character’s motivations are just and sensible, but often wrong and disastrous for themselves or others. It is a film alive with the complexities of life, not the easy answers of many films along more conventional narrative constraints.
SpoilerShow
Here is why art house films shouldn’t default so readily to copping out with a suicide ending. So many lesser films employ this crutch in a fashion that suggests the filmmakers ran out of ideas and decided to leapfrog into an unearned Deeper Meaning, but here the resolution is apt and appropriate to all that led up to it. And the final image of Morgan is unforgettable:

Image
This is also, of course, one of the films singled out by Truffaut in his infamous “Certain Tendency” essay, where it was derisively accused of being another victim of Aurenche and Bost’s screenwriting simplification and bastardization. However, Truffaut was really reacting to what he perceived to be anti-clerical sentiment (I’d call it more accurately “humanity,” but y’know, whatevs), among other biases. Truffaut also objected morally to the above spoilered shot, a baton later picked up to nonsensical extremes by Rivette against Kapo. Needless to say, Truffaut’s anger and youthful arrogance are misplaced here. Regardless, it was nice to finally get around to see another of these (unfairly, in this instance) vilified films and be able to connect a few more dots in understanding and approaching such an infamous inflammatory piece of writing. This list project was mostly a wash in terms of discoveries, but it was worth it to get this gem bumped up in the queue. Highly recommended.

Le Monde du silence (Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Louis Malle 1956) Despite its popularity on release, this film is more or less MIA in the states and it doesn’t take long to figure out why. It’s hard to imagine a modern audience for this film, as those prone to Planet Earth et al docs would surely not make it far into this filmed record of disruption and destruction of naturally occurring ecosystems. Hard to imagine animal lovers making it through the dynamite scene, but even if they did, how many would push through the one-two punch of a baby whale caught in the propellers (and later shot in the head with a rifle on-camera) which is then eaten by a swarm of sharks? And those who made it that long, would they then keep watching as Cousteau’s crew start snatching live sharks out of the water, bringing them on board to beat to death out of frustration? There are some strong visuals and the film is entertaining in its fashion, but the “doc” (much of the ship-set footage is clearly staged) is a last gasp of traditional French colonialist attitudes: these crew-members are not interested in science or discovery, but conquering nature for their own selfish thrills.

María Candelaria (Emilio Fernández 1946) Mexican tale of moral outrage and endless indignities suffered by the titular innocent, the Indian daughter of a prostitute. The film is handsomely crafted (the visual early on of the entire town blocking Dolores del Rio’s entrance into the village with their ships is terrific), but the film lays on the melodramatic excesses on so thick that it comes across as suffocating. I understand the appeals of stories like this that ramp up the injustices as vicarious catharsis for whatever ills an audience is facing, but this makes most Hollywood women’s pictures look relatively restrained in their deck-stacking!

Padre Padrone (the Taviani Brothers 1977) Never have I been so strongly compelled to stop watching a movie than about thirty minutes into this abusive father stereotype mixtape. I see both write-ups in this thread have only referred to this sequence obliquely. Allow me to be direct: I do not ever ever ever EVER need to see a bestiality montage. And yet this film delivers one capped with an even more tasteless (!) sound bridge and walked away with a Palme d’Or and now merits luxury releases from boutique labels. If this is me being unhip or conservative or just not getting it man, so be it. I did not stop watching, mainly so I could have the right to say non-sexually fuck this movie. Beyond this, the film is a trove of low, earthy humor— why yes, we do get scenes centered around shitting, pissing, and farting, thanks for asking— and repeated hammerings of the same Bad Dad ideas. There were plenty of parts of this I didn’t hate, but the lows are black holes of worthlessness and it doesn’t matter.

Peppermint Frappe (Carlos Saura 1968) Dedicated to Bunuel but more indebted to Vertigo, this tale of a doctor suffering from murderous envy over his best friend’s wife is enjoyable and slickly shot (Saura seems to be having his own tormented love affair with 360s) but a bit hollow in the end. Using Geraldine Chaplin to play the roles of both the coquettish object of affection and a “lowly” nurse dolled up to look more like said coquette ends up being a bit of an empty gimmick, with no payout beyond what would have worked for different actresses. The film flirts with some compelling ideas in the moments showing the doc possessing an unusually expansive knowledge of current fashion trends, which he uses to belittle and cow the nurse, but these avenues are only halfheartedly explored in favor of more familiar wronged man revenge theatrics. The film often forgets about Chaplin’s nurse for vast expanses of the film’s running time, leaving her part in the finale muted and less of a payoff than intended. Like a sweet drink, this is fine in the moment but leaves little in the way of lasting impact. FYI as of when I wrote this thumbnail, someone edited the film’s Wikipedia to include what looks to be a college term paper proposal!

Scarecrow (Jerry Schatzberg 1973) More freewheeling nothingness from New Hollywood, as Al Pacino and Gene Hackman play drifters who aggressively act at each other on their shaggy dog trip to Pittsburgh and promises of rabbits— er, a car wash. At least Easy Rider or Of Mice and Men had authentic bonafides from their creators re: their subjects. Scarecrow feels like a bad first novel trying to be Important, with Symbolism and ridiculous affectations passing as characterization. Take Al Pacino’s lamp, which he carries around in an increasingly dirty white gift box. It is not hard to attach obvious symbolic weight to this lamp and what it represents, but gimme a breaksville: would this character, or anyone in his place, carry this lamp around in plain sight (and never in a bag or any kind of covering) for any other reason than that the screenwriter has decided the Important Symbolic Meaning outweighs logic?

Signore e signori (Pietro Germi 1965) This is the third and last film I will ever see by Germi, an auteur with a comic sensibility that is as far from my own as imaginable. This is comedy as filtered through a worldview currently exhibited by the Incels subreddit: men are either weak cuckolds or cock-strong sexual conquerers; women are duplicitous sluts or henpecking hags; everyone cheats on everyone else, and the status quo remains the same at all costs. Hilarious?

The film is a series of three interconnected vignettes, each somehow worse than the one before. First we get a tale of a man who fakes impotency in order to bed his pal’s wife. Second we get a slovenly husband who leaves his wife for a beautiful cafe waitress (Virna Lisa from How to Murder Your Wife, which comes across like the Feminine Mystique compared to this) and faces societal pushback to his flagrancy. Funny how there’s never any shortage of pretty women just dying to bed married shlubs in these pathetic lad-mag fantasies. And finally, we get a remarkably tasteless number about how five of our main characters bed a fifteen year old girl and then weasel out of responsibility once charges are pressed. In a film with a restraining order on good taste, this one tops itself at the end, when the bougie wife of one of the accused men is raped by the peasant father of the victim and stops during the attack not to protest, but to close her purse. Are you laughing yet???

In fairness, the overall 1966 lineup was dreadful, but awarding this and Un homme et une femme was not making the best of a bad situation.

Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami 1997) Another episode of Iranians in Cars Getting Canonized. I’m somewhere between the extremes of Ebert and Rosenbaum here: I don’t think Kiarostami pulls off anything exceptional, but I admire his consistency of tone and approach, even if it doesn’t add up to much on my end. I think Kiarostami has made far superior films where the audience didn’t have to do quite so much leg work to get their masterpiece (such as Close-Up), so it’s hard for me to entertain deification claims for this film given the film itself.

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Re: Cannes Film Festival Mini-List Discussion + Suggestions

#62 Post by TMDaines » Sun Jul 02, 2017 6:51 am

Shit, I'll submit now I guess. I, as usual, presumed the deadline was on a Sunday night.

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domino harvey
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Re: Cannes Film Festival Mini-List Discussion + Suggestions

#63 Post by domino harvey » Sun Jul 02, 2017 11:20 am

And submissions are now closed, results sometime today

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Re: Cannes Film Festival Mini-List Discussion + Suggestions

#64 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Jul 02, 2017 12:53 pm

domino harvey wrote:Le Monde du silence (Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Louis Malle 1956) Despite its popularity on release, this film is more or less MIA in the states and it doesn’t take long to figure out why. It’s hard to imagine a modern audience for this film, as those prone to Planet Earth et al docs would surely not make it far into this filmed record of disruption and destruction of naturally occurring ecosystems. Hard to imagine animal lovers making it through the dynamite scene, but even if they did, how many would push through the one-two punch of a baby whale caught in the propellers (and later shot in the head with a rifle on-camera) which is then eaten by a swarm of sharks? And those who made it that long, would they then keep watching as Cousteau’s crew start snatching live sharks out of the water, bringing them on board to beat to death out of frustration? There are some strong visuals and the film is entertaining in its fashion, but the “doc” (much of the ship-set footage is clearly staged) is a last gasp of traditional French colonialist attitudes: these crew-members are not interested in science or discovery, but conquering nature for their own selfish thrills.
Isn't this the film being homaged in The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou?

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domino harvey
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Re: Cannes Film Festival Mini-List Discussion + Suggestions

#65 Post by domino harvey » Sun Jul 02, 2017 2:05 pm

Image

THE CANNES TOP AWARD WINNERS LIST

01 Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese 1976) 9 (1)
02 the Third Man (Carol Reed 1949) 9 (1)
03 Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola 1979) 7 (3)
03 Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino 1994) 8
05 the Cranes Are Flying / Letyat zhuravli (Mikhail Kalatozov 1958) 7 (1)

05 Taste of Cherry / Ta'm-e gīlās (Abbas Kiarostami 1997) 8 (2)
07 the Wages of Fear / Le salaire de la peur (Henri-Georges Clouzot 1953) 8
08 Rosetta (Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne 1999) 7 (1)
09 the Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola 1974) 7
10 La dolce vita (Federico Fellini 1960) 7 (2)

11 Rome Open City / Roma, città aperta (Roberto Rossellini 1946) 5 (2)
12 4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days / 4 luni, 3 săptămâni şi 2 zile (Cristian Mungiu 2007) 7
13 the Leopard / l gattopardo (Luchino Visconti 1963) 6
14 Umbrellas of Cherbourg / Les parapluies de Cherbourg (Jacques Demy 1964) 6
15 Viridiana (Luis Buñuel 1961) 5

16 the Tree of Life (Terrence Malick 2011) 4
17 Blue is the Warmest Color / La Vie d'Adèle: Chapitres 1 et 2 (Abdellatif Kechiche 2013) 5
18 the Piano (Jane Campion 1993) 5
19 Blowup (Michelangelo Antonioni 1967) 6
20 Barton Fink (Joel Coen 1991) 4

21 Brief Encounter (David Lean 1946) 5
22 Miss Julie / Fröken Julie (Alf Sjöberg 1951) 5
23 Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier 2000) 4
23 Farewell My Concubine / Bàwáng bié jī (Chen Kaige 1993) 4
23 the White Ribbon / Das weiße Band, Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (Michael Haneke 2009) 4


1968 Honorary Grand Prix: A Report on the Party and the Guests / O slavnosti a hostech (Jan Němec)
1968 Honorary Prix du Jury: the Firemen’s Ball / Hoří, má panenko (Milos Forman)


ALSO RANS
Paris Texas, the Ballad of Narayama, Wild at Heart, Elephant (1), Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, If…, Tree of Wooden Clogs (1), Kagemusha, Under the Sun of Satan, the Eel, I, Daniel Blake, Winter Sleep, La symphonie pastorale, Padre Padrone, M*A*S*H, sex, lies & videotape, Amour, Othello, the Class, Missing, All That Jazz, the Knack… and How to Get It, Muži bez křídel, the Working Class Goes to Heaven, the Tin Drum, L’enfant

ORPHANS
Antoine et Antoinette, the Best Intentions, Black Orpheus, Chronique des années de braise, Die Lezte Chance, Due soldi di speranza, Eternity and a Day, Friendly Persuasion, Gate of Hell, the Go-Between, I caso Mattei, La stanza del figlio, Marty, Miracle in Milan, the Mission, O Pagador de Promessas, the Pianist, Secrets and Lies, Underground, Une homme et une femme, Union Pacific, When Father Was Away on Business, the Wind That Shakes the Barley

Key: # of ballots the film appears on, out of fifteen total submissions / (# of ballots with the film as Number One)

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Re: Cannes Film Festival Mini-List Discussion + Suggestions

#66 Post by knives » Sun Jul 02, 2017 2:33 pm

Thank you Dom. I'm curious to see a defense from the person who voted for Chronicle of the years of Fire given the thrashing we did on it in thread. Also for the sake of honesty here's what I didn't have time to see before the end: Antoine et Antoinette, The Square, I, Daniel Blake, Dheepan, The Eel, Man of Iron, Othello, The Hireling, The Mattei Affair, The Silent World, The Birds, the Bees, and the Italians, Red Meadows, Portrait of Maria, Pastoral Symphony, Neecha Nagar, The Last Chance, Iris and the LT., and The Turning Point.

For '68 it is: The Castle, Charlie Bubbles, Doktor Glas, The Girl on a Motorcycle, Grazie, zia , I protagonisti, Joanna, Kuroneko, Les Gauloises bleues, The Long Day's Dying, Mali vojnici, Peppermint Frappé, The Red and the White, Tuvia Vesheva Benotav, Trilogy, and Zywot Mateusza.

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Re: Cannes Film Festival Mini-List Discussion + Suggestions

#67 Post by domino harvey » Sun Jul 02, 2017 3:23 pm

Colin, Anderson's film is indeed heavily indebted to the Cousteau flick, though that movie's mere existence is a different kind of cinematic violence!

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Re: Cannes Film Festival Mini-List Discussion + Suggestions

#68 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Jul 02, 2017 4:19 pm

Yes, but it does suggest that those bookending movie screening scenes in Life Aquatic are the Wes Anderson-world version of a Cannes film festival premiere!

I might as well throw into this post that it looks as if I was the one responsible for what appears to have been the solitary number one vote for Elephant :D I love that film and its compassionate yet abstracted and detached perspective (especially in a world where Pure Flix's more emotive Christian film take on the 'real life events' of the Columbine shooting, I'm Not Ashamed, now exists) and this project only confirmed that more. Plus I was motivated by the fear that it would end up trailing behind Fahrenheit 9/11 or something equally unappealing!
Last edited by colinr0380 on Sun Jul 02, 2017 5:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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domino harvey
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Re: Cannes Film Festival Mini-List Discussion + Suggestions

#69 Post by domino harvey » Sun Jul 02, 2017 4:50 pm

My list with orphans highlighted

01 Apocalypse Now
02 Pulp Fiction
03 Miss Julie
04 Farewell, My Concubine
05 La dolce vita
06 Taxi Driver
07 Black Orpheus
-- kinda stunned at this one getting orphaned. Do we not like it anymore? Did I miss another meeting?!
08 the Conversation
09 Blue is the Warmest Color
10 the Piano
11 Viridiana
12 La symphonie pastorale
13 the Cranes Are Flying
14 Paris, Texas
15 the Wages of Fear
16 Umbrellas of Cherbourg
17 the Working Class Goes to Heaven
18 4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days
19 Muži bez křídel
20 Gate of Hell
-- classic wacko last slot filler. This could have gone to any other number of good but not great films remaining, but here we are

Ended with 69/93 seen, just short of my goal of seventy. Ah well. I wish I hadn't felt compelled to really start tackling these til near the end, but better late than never. I still have plenty of other titles I didn't get to, so one of these days I'll weigh in on some more (and I'm more apt to first get to dozen or so 1968 titles I back-burnered in favor of the main list), though I don't know that I'm in a rush to see some of my still-MIA titles

1968: Report on the Party and the Guests, with Petulia as the alternate (9/28 seen) -- speaking of, I just pulled this out of storage:

Image

I wasn't intending to award a Jury Prize for the 1968 category, but it ended up being so close that I felt it only fair (plus I didn't hate the runner up!)

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Re: Cannes Film Festival Mini-List Discussion + Suggestions

#70 Post by knives » Sun Jul 02, 2017 4:58 pm

I like Black Orpheus well enough, but aside from the music I'm not sure I find any of it particularly great. Maybe a rewatch is due?

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Re: Cannes Film Festival Mini-List Discussion + Suggestions

#71 Post by zedz » Sun Jul 02, 2017 5:25 pm

Thanks Dom.

I actually found the field surprisingly weak, with a number of films I don't especially like from directors I do. (Good as Taste of Cherry is, it wouldn't have even made my top ten Kiarostami films, Eternity and a Day would rank somewhere near the bottom of Angelopoulos' features for me, and I can think of half a dozen Dardennes movies I like better than their two Palme winners.)

I struggled to stretch my top ten into a top twenty, and this is what I submitted:

Tree of Wooden Clogs
The Leopard
Viridiana
Winter Sleep
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Under the Sun of Satan
A Taste of Cherry
The Ballad of Narayama
If
Miss Julie

Padre Padrone
The Wages of Fear
Othello
The Eel
Elephant
Rosetta
Blow Up
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
Eternity and a Day
Farewell My Concubine

My 1968 vote went to The Red and the White, with A Report on the Party and the Guests as my alternate.

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Re: Cannes Film Festival Mini-List Discussion + Suggestions

#72 Post by zedz » Sun Jul 02, 2017 6:51 pm

Since we're very unlikely to ever do an 'Alternate Palme' list, and I was curious to see what better films were beaten by the sometimes lacklustre official choices, here's my own personal Palmes for the last forty years. Caveat: for the first five years, my coverage in terms of viewing is quite patchy, so there may well be undiscovered masterpieces lurking in the official selection. 1979 and 1981 are particularly frustrating in this regard, as I'm not especially keen on my default picks for those years.

1977 3 Women (Altman)
1978 The Tree of Wooden Clogs (Olmi)
1979 Woyzeck (Herzog)
1980 Loulou (Pialat)
1981 Man of Iron (Wajda)
1982 Moonlighting (Skolimowski)
1983 L'Argent (Bresson) - a very strong year, with El Sur (Erice) and Nostalghia (Tarkovsky) breathing down its neck
1984 Voyage to Cythera (Angelopoulos)
1985 Mishima (Schrader)
1986 After Hours (Scorsese) - sorry, but The Sacrifice is one my least-loved Tarkovskys
1987 Wings of Desire (Wenders)
1988 A Short Film About Killing (Kieslowski)
1989 Do the Right Thing (Lee)
1990 Tilai (Ouedraogo) - also very tempted by the thawed out The Ear (Kachnya), but I find it hard to consider it a 90s film.
1991 Van Gogh (Pialat)
1992 An Independent Life (Kanevsky) / The Quince Tree Sun (Erice) - hey, if the festival proper can have the occasional tie, so can I
1993 Farewell My Concubine (Chen)
1994 Through the Olive Trees (Kiarostami) - I allowed this to barely edge out A Confucian Confusion (Yang)
1995 The Convent (de Oliveira)
1996 Goodbye, South, Goodbye (Hou)
1997 Happy Together (Wong)
1998 Flowers of Shanghai (Hou)
1999 Time Regained (Ruiz)
2000 Yi Yi (Yang)
2001 What Time Is It There? (Tsai)
2002 The Son (Dardennes) - a very tough choice, with Demonlover (Assayas), Unknown Pleasures (Jia) and Russian Ark (Sokurov) all deserving the award, and I couldn't bring myself to allow a four-way tie.
2003 Uzak (Ceylan)
2004 Tropical Malady (Weerasethakul)
2005 Three Times (Hou)
2006 Colossal Youth (Costa)
2007 Zodiac (Fincher) - though I was very tempted to go with An Old Mistress (Breillat) instead.
2008 The Headless Woman (Martel)
2009 The Time That Remains (Suleiman)
2010 My Joy (Loznitsa)
2011 Melancholia (Von Trier)
2012 Holy Motors (Carax)
2013 Only Lovers Left Alive (Jarmusch) - with A Touch of Sin (Jia) a close second
2014 Winter Sleep (Ceylan)
2015 The Assassin (Hou)
2016 Sieranevada (Puiu)

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domino harvey
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Re: Cannes Film Festival Mini-List Discussion + Suggestions

#73 Post by domino harvey » Sun Jul 02, 2017 7:44 pm

1989 Do the Right Thing (Lee)
I think few would argue against Lee's film being superior, but Soderbergh winning ushered in a new era of American independent cinema and allowed Soderbergh to get consistent work since. Lee's film didn't need the Palme like Soderbergh's did

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zedz
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Re: Cannes Film Festival Mini-List Discussion + Suggestions

#74 Post by zedz » Sun Jul 02, 2017 8:01 pm

domino harvey wrote:
1989 Do the Right Thing (Lee)
I think few would argue against Lee's film being superior, but Soderbergh winning ushered in a new era of American independent cinema and allowed Soderbergh to get consistent work since. Lee's film didn't need the Palme like Soderbergh's did
I only slightly begrudge Soderbergh the win (and more because his film set the tone for a whole lot of really bad Sundance indies to follow than for any particular flaws in sex, lies. . .), but I always got the impression that he squandered practically all of his goodwill with Kafka, and most of his best work came after a hard-fought critical and commercial second chance in the late nineties (starting with Out of Sight), at which point he really figured out - in a way very few contemporary American directors have managed - how to have a prolific, artistically creative, commercial enough career in Hollywood.

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domino harvey
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Re: Cannes Film Festival Mini-List Discussion + Suggestions

#75 Post by domino harvey » Sun Jul 02, 2017 8:07 pm

Indeed, but he never would have been able to fail upwards without the initial blank check afforded by sex's success. And Kafka is pretty much as awful as any of the go-to sophomore slump films one thinks of (Southland Tales, &c)-- thank God he got that out of his system early, then peddled through some flailings before taking a page from Hitchcock and giving the people what they want in a way that still embodies the artistic merits one strives to impart on their work (which Soderbergh still vascilates between in his awareness of his commercial versus experimental projects)

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