Short film Palme d'Or Cannes, a youth boxing match in Mexico City, skillful observational close-up filmmaking to wordlessly get into the subjective state of the boy at the center. I was happy to see it open up to the street at the end. 16mm/colors nice!
The best program I attended in Cannes was a collection of restored shorts by Artavazd Pelechian attended by the filmmaker himself. I hadn't re-visited these shorts in a number of years, I would always show the THE BEGINNING in film class alongside Guy Maddin's HEART OF THE WORLD as a way to show different maturations and approaches to the montage style. Watching in chronological order in stunning restorations from Bologna, nothing in Cannes felt as lucid or vital as the…
In the early afternoon on September 11th, 2001, Pauly Shore, standing outside the Toronto International Film Festival press office, handed me a flyer invitation to a rough cut screening of something entitled You'll Never Wiez in This Town Again (later retitled Pauly Shore is Dead). The festival had suspended its activities and everyone was scrambling to figure out what they should do. Shore, in the middle of this chaos, saw it fit to announce (I quote verbatim): "We're screening our…
Östlund just pulled a Haneke in Cannes, which makes sense. Haneke is the dominant influence at the festival these days, or at least he was the last time I was there, in 2017, when several filmmakers in the competition seemed to be tipping their hats to him: Ramsay, Akin, Zvyagintsev, Lanthimos, Östlund, and Mundruczó. Richard Brody called some of these filmmakers the Hanekets, and the Cahiers du cinéma wrote, in an editorial: "The official program is truly a program, in…
