26 May 2015

CANNES 1995: DAY 10

About the project

UNDERGROUND (Emir Kusturica, France/Germany/Bulgaria/Czech Republic/Hungary/Serbia)
Screened in the main competition

The Palme d'Or winner, and it's easy to see why: the film's study of war's effect on the 20th Century is spiked with humor, black as the heart of a collapsed sun, that repeatedly knocks it around the head with a psychotic carnivalesque flair. Everything from its use of music (which is pure genius) to its frequently inexplicable blasts of almost surreal touches in the characters and mise en scène make it the one film in competition that truly feels like nothing else. On the downside, the film is not short - the easiest version to find is 164 minutes, a half-hour shorter than the Cannes cut - and it tends to repeat its points enough that even the whiplash swings from one tonal register to the next aren't enough to keep it from feeling bloated. I also feel like my knowledge of Balkan politics makes it hard for me to honestly judge it (it was the locus of enormous controversy at home). But misgivings aside, this is a deliriously watchable movie, sober topic and all. 9/10


ED WOOD (Tim Burton, USA)
Screened in the main competition

A tribute to one of cinema's most disastrously inept oddballs from one of its most successful, and one of the two possible correct answers to the question, "What's Tim Burton's best movie?" An unrestrained love for old movies and the gaudiest kitsch of the '50s permeates every set, performance, and note of Howard Shore's superlative score, leaving it less a straightforward biopic of the notorious low-budget director Edward D. Wood, Jr, than an inside-out journey through his dementedly sunny worldview - the movie about Ed Wood that Ed Wood would have made if he had all the talent in the world instead of none whatsoever. It's also a bittersweet reminder of the days when Johnny Depp's quirky excesses served to finding shockingly real character truths, and when he and Burton fed off of each other's creativity rather than indulged each other's laziness. Energetically and stylistically, it's one of the most flippant and giddy entries in its genre, but its dopey frivolity is the very reason it's more honest and insightful than damn near all of them. 10/10


THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU'RE DEAD (Gary Fleder, USA)
Screened in Un Certain Regardx

An especially pure early example of that most quintessentially '90s cinema, the Bald-Faced Tarantino Knock-Off. Interesting primarily in that it possesses what might be the single most sedate performance ever given by Steve Buscemi, this story of five career criminals led by Andy Garcia is marred by forcibly eccentric dialogue and inorganically weird characters, on top of the more obvious shortcoming: the story the film tells simply isn't terribly compelling and outside a few individual scenes, it doesn't have any opinion, either artistic or philosophical, on the events it depicts. Though I do admire Fleder and screenwriter Scott Rosenberg's willingness to let the story develop at its own pace and through its own side channels. Warped title notwithstanding (a lift from Warren Zevon), the film lacks the bent humor of even the most flailing wannabe Tarantino pictures, and it has barely a trace of visual style or filmmaking energy, which not merely permits but practically begs us to notice how little substance it has as a story. Hopelessly bland through and through. 5/10

17 comments:

  1. "...one of the two correct answers to the question, 'What's Tim Burton's best movie?"

    Now, you can't just say something like that without giving us the other one! Is it too much to hope that the second answer is Big Fish?

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  2. Michael - Surely, it could only be the masterpiece of ugly art direction and gaudy production design that is Alice in Wonderland!

    In all honesty, the real answer probably rhymes with Bedward Jizzerglands.

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  3. Is "Bedward Jizzerglands" the porn version?

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  4. I know Edward Scissorhands is the odds-on favorite but my heart and soul desperately hope it is actually Batman Returns. Tim Burton was so beautiful back in the day it makes me weep for what we've lost.

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  5. I assume the other answer is "Also Ed Wood".

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  6. Personally, Ed Wood is my pick for best Burton flick and was almost my choice for the ACS fundraiser. Depp's performance, all wide -eyed gormless enthusiasm, is perfect and the entire movie is just absolutely stuffed with a crazy love of making movies. Is this movie that made me want to become a filmmaker, and only this movie that makes me regret that I did not.

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  7. The porn parody name is actually Edward Penishands.

    But that is, absolutely, the one I had in mind. I can never decide which of those I love more, but there's no question to me that they're on a completely different level than Batman Returns or Mars Attacks! or Beetlejuice, all of which are movies that I unabashedly love in their own right.

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  8. Remember when Tim Burton made good movies

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  9. Big Fish and Ed Wood ate so far above the rest of his catalog it's absurd.

    And I love Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, and Mars Attacks! but they're not close.

    I also dn't really know how I feel about Batman Returns, honestly, even after all these years.

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  10. Yeah, Jeremy, I remember when. WAY back in the long-lost days of 2012, as a matter of fact. Or even 2014, if you're a fan of Big Eyes (and Tim wasn't, but 72% of Tomatometer critics were).

    This diabolical "Tim Burton is nothing but a useless hack who used to be good but now endlessly remakes the exact same movie every single time and constantly forces talentless assholes like Helena Bonham Carter-Burton and Johnny Depp down our unwilling throats" meme which saturates practically all online discussion of Burton for the past few years is an oversimplified half-truth at best, and sometimes descends all the way to practically being libel.

    Especially since lots of people (not the fellow I'm responding to, but many MANY others) are SO obsessed with Burton's alleged nepotism in constantly using Depp and Carter in the same roles in every film; if you actually stop to count, both actors have been in less than half of his overall ouvre. Neither one of 'em has starred in Burton's last two movies, nor are scheduled for his next upcoming projects.

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  11. I'm sorry, but nothing the man has directed has inspired any kind of real passion in me since....Sleepy Hollow, back in 2000? Like, Frankenweenie aight in a 6/10 kind of way, but I mean...this dude made Ed Wood and Edward Scissorhands at one point, classic films. Now its like we're fighting over the best table scraps.

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  12. Of course, I actually really liked Things To Do when I saw it twenty years ago.

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  13. Looking ahead, I can see that Johnny Depp really had a banner year at Cannes '95, didn't he?

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  14. Just a little reminder that Tim has said that Edward Scissorhands is his favorite Tim Burton film (and said that either that or Ed Wood are the only answers he accepts to that question):

    http://antagonie.blogspot.mx/2012/05/best-shot-edward-scissorhands.html

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  15. I claim for myself the merit of consistency.

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  16. Incidentally, should you be offered the opportunity to watch EDWARD PENISHANDS (for instance at a campus-wide music festival/drinking party/attempt by a deeply uncool student body to prove its mettle as partiers, which features porn projected in the main auditorium of the Technical Institute), do NOT take advantage of that opportunity. It's an exceptionally unpleasant experience, and you're unlikely to last more than 20 minutes.

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  17. Regarding Burton, for a mostly-great movie, Sweeney Todd seems to get very little credit. There are a lot of good directorial choices that makes me wish Burton would try another musical. He feels very alive during a lot of the numbers - Poor Thing and By The Sea especially. Though then again there are choices like "cutting out the chorus" that makes me not quite so sure.

    Whatever strengths Frankenweenie had as a movie, I was perhaps unreasonably irritated by the fact that his character designs for animation haven't changed at all since he was a student.

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