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Oh, Bollywood! It’s bigger than ever

Oh, Bollywood! The Indian film industry is definitely showing off its presence in Cannes. And why shouldn’t it? After all, it is the largest entertainment industry in the world! Today I visited the Indian pavilion. A nice space but it is quite small and bare, not doing justice to the powerhouse that the Indian entertainment industry is. The pavilion does light up, however, with parties and receptions.

Left: The royal couple of Bollywood, Abhishek and Aishwariya Rai Bachchan.

Before attending the many scheduled events sponsored by the Bollywood fraternity, I began my day watching “A Proper Violence.” The story of a husband and brother-in-law plotting to kill their wife and sister’s rapist . I must say watching the film was like being on an emotional roller coaster, as you navigated through the suspenseful plot. I spoke with the director Chris Faulisi from Albany County, NY, who was just an intern at Cannes last year. It looks like Cannes opens up a lot of doors for youngsters who are interested in pursuing a career in cinema. I absolutely love it!

Indy in the Riviera sunshine

Chaz Ebert

Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford and George Lucas bring “Indiana Jones” to Cannes. (AP photo)

Dear Roger,

The weather gods smiled on Steven Spielberg and George Lucas for their world premiere of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.” Crowds gathered in the Riviera sun, some of them with signs pleading, “S’il vous plait, I NEED tickets for Indiana Jones!” There was a screening scheduled for 1 p.m., for both the press and the official invitation holders. In the past mixing the two has spelled disaster for a movie so highly anticipated; usually the screenings are separate, so the black tie crowd doesn’t hear the possible snickers of the critics. Today I expected a crowd, so I got to the Palais des Festivals much earlier than usual, but to no avail. The guards told me it was complet!

A teacher wins the Cannes film festival

Chaz Ebert

Director Laurent Cantet accepts the Palme d’Or, surrounded by his cast.

For the first time in 21 years, a French film has taken the top prize at the Cannes film festival, and in a rarity for Cannes, the Palme d’Or was awarded unanimously. The prize could have easily been named “The Golden Apple” rather than the The Golden Palm since it went to “The Class” (“Entre Les Murs”), the Laurent Cantet film about a young teacher who tries to reach his class of primarily immigrant children in a school on the outskirts of Paris. Confronted with their apathy and sometimes outright hostility, he questions them in a Socratic fashion until they begin to ask themselves if perhaps an education might be relevant to them. This film moved me to tears and so of course I thought that, in the grand tradition of Cannes, it had no chance of winning the top prize.

Alone in the ring at Cannes

Chaz Ebert

Mike Tyson in James Toback’s documentary.

CANNES, France — Roger, when we talked about sending you messages from the film festival I never expected that my first would be about a heavyweight boxer. Mike Tyson’s grip was surprisingly gentle when he shook my hand, and his voice soft and polite on stage, but there was nothing gentle, soft or polite about the images onscreen here in “Tyson,” James Toback’s documentary about his life. It is a compelling character study. His life is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.

My Dinner with Clint

Chaz Ebert

Kyle and Alison Eastwood with their father Clint on a big night out in Cannes.

Dear Roger,

I’ve just returned from the official dinner given by the Festival for Clint Eastwood’s movie. I felt like Cinderella at the ball. The dinner was held at the swanky Restaurant La Palme d’Or on the Croisette. I wore my long evening gown just like all the French women wear at night. That’s usually the last thing you want to do after watching movies all day, and most of the American women journalists skip the gowns, but I am a hybrid this year, not quite journalist and not quite guest. Besides, this was a special evening and I wanted to make a good showing for you.

Postcards from Cannes

Chaz Ebert

Clint Eastwood and Angelina Jolie in Cannes.

Postcard #1

Her new movie struck close to home for Angelina Jolie, visiting Cannes in an advanced stage of pregnancy. “Changeling” is based on the true story of a Los Angeles mother whose son disappears in 1928. Months later a young boy found in DeKalb, Illinois is returned as her son by the LAPD, which needs good press at a time of corruption. Problem is, she insists it’s not her son, but the cops pressure her to raise the boy as her own. When she refuses, they have her held against her will. She and Brad Pitt were toasted by her director, Clint Eastwood, at a late-night dinner Tuesday at the beachfront Hotel Martinez, where Jolie said that being a mother “makes the film more personal, because I cannot imagine a mother not being trusted to know her own child.”

A hopeful Bollywood actress at Cannes

Red carpets, glitz, glamour, and path-breaking works in global cinema are what I expect out of the 2010 Cannes Film festival. With this being my very first time at the event my expectations are based on years of reading articles about the festival in magazines and newspapers.

It is surreal that I am a part of this event and am able to gather my own impressions of it. Two films that I am really interested in this year are “Another Year” by Mike Leigh and “Udaan” by Vikramaditya Motwane.

Dr. Haneke’s diagnosis

Jim Emerson

Michael Haneke, Austrian experimenteur.

UPDATED (03/15/08)

Selected interviews: From Adam Nayman’s interview/review with “Funny Games” director Michael Haneke in Toronto’s eyeweekly:

“I’m trying to impart in my films what mainstream movies work to take away,” explains Haneke in an exclusive interview. “Namely: reality. I’m making movies that are inconsumable. And I can only do that by portraying the suffering of the victim, rather than the enjoyment of the perpetrator.” […]

Haneke says that he had always conceived “Funny Games” as an assault on American films, and that the remake merely serves to place the action in its correct context. (It also creates severe cognitive dissonance; my eyes kept scanning the impeccable, palpably Euro-art-house compositions for subtitles.) Over the past decade, American genre flicks have only grown more sadistic.

“This makes my film even more up-to-date than it was before,” laughs Haneke. So what about the trailers, which make the film look like the very dreck it means to critique?

“If that kind of marketing brings in the audience that I want to reach, then that’s fine,” says Haneke. “The bigger the audience, the better… every filmmaker feels that way. The difference [between myself and other filmmakers] is that I am not willing to make any concessions within the films themselves.”

The Elements of Style

Jim Emerson

“Even to a writer who is being intentionally obscure or wild of tongue we can say, ‘Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand!'”

— Strunk & White, “The Elements of Style” (musical adaptation by Nico Muhly)

I love it when artists known for their work in one medium show a passionate investment in another. Over the weekend I stumbled upon composer Nico Muhly’s blog. This is the guy who studied with John Corigliano and Christopher Rouse, made two albums of his own music (Speaks Volumes and Mothertongue), and has collaborated with Philip Glass, Björk, Antony and the Johnsons, Bonnie “Prince” Billy (aka Will Oldham, of “Old Joy” and “Wendy and Lucy”) and Grizzly Bear, among others. And he’s the composer of the scores for “Choking Man,” “Joshua” and “The Reader.” (The middle one is actually a pretty good movie.)

What we talk about when we talk about film criticism

Jim Emerson

Matt Zoller Seitz’s “The House Next Door.”

I feel strongly that film, and film criticism, are two sides of the same coin, each essential to the experience of the other. Without both sides, the coin itself couldn’t exist in three-dimensional space (and certainly wouldn’t be worth anything!). If movies are just forgettable eye exercises, patterns of light and shadow and sound that have no artistic or psychological or cultural significance, then what is there to analyze or criticize? And if the unexamined life is not worth living, then I don’t see how the unexamined film is worth watching.

Last Saturday, I was supposed to have been on a panel called “Why Film Critics Matter” at the Port Townsend Film Festival in Washington State, organized by Kathleen Murphy. And I would have been, if it hadn’t been for a scheduling misunderstanding. As it turns out, I was still in Toronto. But I sent Kathleen some thoughts to share on the panel, and I’d like to share ’em with you, too. This e-mail was composed after a lunchtime conversation with one of my favorite movie bloggers, Girish Shambu, and what we talked about was still reverberating in my head, so I want to thank him for his substantial contributions to this train of thought:

* * *

It’s Friday, I’m still at the Toronto Film Festival which winds up this weekend, and I just got back from lunch with Girish Shambu, a movie blogger based in Buffalo, NY. I’d never met Girish before — I’ve known him only through his blog, and the community of bloggers who contribute to critical discussions of movies on one another’s sites (including my Scanners blog) — and I’ve never been more excited about the future of film criticism than I am at this moment.

First, let me explain what I mean by “film criticism.” In traditional, mainstream print media (mostly newspapers and magazines), it is usually thought of as reviewing. Newspapers run their critics’ reviews of movies that are entering theatrical release in their local market. This is the most common, and narrowest, definition of what “film criticism” can be — part consumer guide (a recommendation on a binary or sliding scale from positive to negative), part reportage (what the story’s about, who’s in it, who directed it), and, if you’re lucky, part film appreciation (how the movie functions as an assemblage of images and sounds).