97  65th Festival De Cannes

Cannes Day Ten: first Grand Prize, Marxism and false teeth (video)

Cannes Day Ten: first Grand Prize, Marxism and false teeth

PanARMENIAN.Net - Cannes film festival Day Ten: During the premiere of Lee Daniels' “The Paperboy” one of the guests lost false teeth on the red carpet.

The false teeth are assumed to belong to the prominent actor Jean-Louis Trintignant, with no confirmation issued yet.

Critics Week's Prize goes to "Aqui y alla"

Antonio Mendez Esparza's "Aqui y alla" has won the Grand Prize in the Critics Week section, which takes place simultaneously with the Cannes Film Festival. Organized by the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics, Critics Week is devoted to the up-and-coming directors' first and second films, TheWrap reported.

"Aqui y alla" centers on a man who returns to his village after years of working in the United States; according to the film's website, it is "a story about hope, and the memories and loss of what we leave behind."

Three of the other six features included in Critics Week also won awards. "Sofia's Last Ambulance," a documentary from Bulgarian director Ilian Metev, won the Visionary Prize. "Les Voisins de Dieu" ("God's Neighbors") and "Los Salvajes" ("The Wild Ones") were honored by Gaul's Society of Authors, Directors and Composers and ACID/CCAS, respectively.

Now in its 51st year, Critics Week is the oldest section that runs concurrently with the Cannes Film Festival. It screens seven features and seven shorts each year, and has showcased early work from such filmmakers as Bernardo Bertolucci, Ken Loach and Jacques Audiard.

amfAR Cinema against AIDS Gala

Stars promised hugs, kisses, a massage - and a vampire bite - in a glamor-filled auction to raise money to fight AIDS.

Hoping to encourage bidders to open their wallets for items at Thursday's amfAR gala in the south of France, celebrity presenters offered some extra enticements. Heidi Klum offered a massage, Diane Kruger donated the services of her boyfriend Joshua Jackson, "Vampire Diaries" starlet Nina Dobrev said she'd willingly bite a bidder and Chris Tucker did a mini Michael Jackson dance routine.

Janet Jackson, Alec Baldwin, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Kylie Minogue, Gerard Butler and Kim Kardashian also attended the black tie event at the exclusive Hotel Du Cap overlooking the sea.

When the final hammer slammed down at the end of the night, the celebrity sales people had reached a total of nearly $11 million dollars, a record for the charity dedicated to HIV and AIDS research.

Though many references were made to the troubled European financial climate - Aloe Blacc took to the stage to sing "I Need a Dollar," while Jessie J performed "Price Tag" - austerity measures were not encouraged. Diners were pressed to empty their bank accounts, examiner.com reported.

”Russian “Fog” at Cannes

The tenth day at Cannes fest featured Ukrainian director and former documentary-maker Sergei Loznitsa's “In the Fog”. Loznitsa scored a succès d'éstime with his first fiction feature My Joy, which was in competition in Cannes two years ago. Now he has returned with a mysterious, compelling and grim story from the Nazi-Occupied Soviet Union in 1942, shrouded in the fog of war, the fog of fear and the fathomless fog of European history - comparable, perhaps, to Elem Klimov's 1985 film Come and See, The Guardian reported.

It is a second world war story about something with which few war movies concern themselves: the banal and poisonous disgrace of collaboration that the Nazis visited on every corner of the Reich,

Fans of old-school Soviet cinema may find these wintry forests and fatalistic characters a touch over-familiar, but the film repays patient viewing as it evolves into an engrossing, nuanced, philosophical drama. Though hardly blockbuster material, In The Fog (V Tumane) should attract a niche global audience with its intellectual gravitas and technical prowess, The Hollywood Reporter says.

24 hours in limo

After a strong run of films during the past decade, David Cronenberg blows a tire with Cosmopolis.

Lifeless, stagey and lacking a palpable subversive pulse despite the ready opportunities offered by the material, this stillborn adaptation of Don DeLillo's novel initially will attract some Robert Pattinson fans but will be widely met with audience indifference, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

DeLillo's short, chilly 2003 book adopted a Ulysses-like format of a man's journey across a city in a single day to presciently foresee the anarchic “Occupy” mentality rising up to protest the financial shenanigans of the ultra-rich.

The means of conveyance is a white stretch limo; to those in Cannes who have seen Leos Carax's controversial, much wilder Holy Motors, in which the central character wends through Paris in a day in the same vehicle, the coincidence begs the question of whether Carax knew about DeLillo's novel.

By contrast, Cronenberg's film is remarkably prosaic, confined through long stretches to the dark and narrow interior of the car, only to be concluded by a static half-hour final scene that feels like a two-character Off-Off-Broadway play.

Cronenberg on making the film…

"I read it and two days later I said, 'Yes, I would love to do this'. It took me only six days to write the script, and that's because the book was fantastic. The dialogue was just beautiful and perfect and what you see in the movie is almost word-for-word what's in the book," digitalspy.co.uk reported.

Pattinson on preparing to star in “Cosmopolis”...

"I spent two weeks in my hotel room worrying and confusing myself. I went round to [David's] house and he said, 'It doesn't really matter. Let's just start, something will happen'.

"What I liked about this script was its lyricism and the rhythms of it. I didn't want to change a single word of the script, even the punctuation. That made it easier, it's like you're doing a song instead of a movie. It freed you up, if you're trying to do something in a cerebral way it becomes about ego and it's silly. Actors aren't supposed to be intelligent!"

Cosmopolis and Marxism

“While we were making the film, things happened that were described in the novel, Rupert Murdoch received a pie in the face, and of course there has been the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, after we finished shooting. I had to change very few things to make the story contemporary,the only difference is we used the Yuan instead of the Yen. I don't know if DeLillo has stock accounts but he should: he has a remarkably perceptive vision of what is going on and how things are going to turn out… The film is contemporary, while the book was prophetic.

The power of money, the way it shapes the world. In order to deal with it, I didn't need to make thorough research into the world of finance. Its agents are everywhere to be seen. They are on television, in documentaries, in the papers. They do and say what DeLillo wrote, their behavioural patterns are just like Eric Packer's.

To me, the reference to Marx isn't trivial. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx writes about modernism, about the time when capitalism will have reached such a degree of expansion that society will go too fast for the people, and when the impermanent and the unpredictable will rule. In 1848! And this is exactly what you get to see in the film. I often wondered what Karl Marx would have thought about the film, because it shows a lot of things he had foreseen,” Cronenberg writes about the film.

Day 11…

The last day of Cannes film festival will feature Jeff Nichols's “Mud”.

Mud is a coming-of-age drama centered on two 14-year-old boys who encounter a mysterious fugitive hiding out on an island in the Mississippi. Intrigued by the man, the boys enter into a pace to help him evade capture and reconnect with the love of his life.

Marina Ananikyan / PanARMENIAN News
28  17.05.12 - 65th Festival De Cannes. Day 1
25  18.05.12 - 65th Festival De Cannes. Day 2
31  19.05.12 - 65th Festival De Cannes. Day 3
24  20.05.12 - 65th Festival De Cannes. Day 4
31  21.05.12 - 65th Festival De Cannes. Day 5
22  22.05.12 - 65th Festival De Cannes. Day 6
33  23.05.12 - 65th Festival De Cannes. Day 7
42  24.05.12 - 65th Festival De Cannes. Day 8
21  25.05.12 - 65th Festival De Cannes. Day 9
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