97  65th Festival De Cannes

Cannes Day Seven: “Killing Them Softly” with “Angels’ Share”

Cannes Day Seven: “Killing Them Softly” with “Angels’ Share”

PanARMENIAN.Net - Day Seven at Cannes Film Festival started with a mystery.

The Oscar winner Adrien Brody was spotted enjoying the company of a mystery blonde while partying in Cannes, France last night.

The 39-year-old actor appeared to have been successful in his bid to chat up the platinum haired beauty.

She was seen leaning in closer and closer to the Midnight in Paris star as the evening wore on.

Adrien and the object of his affection kept things PC during their evening out. They certainly did not indulge in any steamy public displays of affection, Daily Mail reported.

The Pianist star made his first foray into the modelling world earlier this year when he walked the runway for Prada Men's Fall/Winter 2012 collection.

“Killing Them Softly” at Cannes

Brad Pitt doesn’t want his new film, the crime tale Killing Them Softly, to be viewed as an attack on President Obama, The Hollywood Reporter said.

Meeting with the press at the Cannes Film Festival where the movie is having its world premiere May 22, Pitt did acknowledge the upcoming November elections, saying, “I think we’re going to see more negative ads than ever before, and I certainly don’t want this film to in any way be mistaken for that.”

The subject came up because in adapting George Higgins’ 1974 novel Cogan’s Trade to the screen, director and screenwriter Andrew Dominik has set the action in 2008, the year of the mortgage meltdown and financial crisis in America. Pitt plays a killer-for-hire who’s called in to settle scores when a couple of minor hoods raid a card game. As the small-time gangsters fall upon each other, it all plays out against both the larger financial crimes taking place on Wall Street as well as that years presidential campaign.

The movie specifically references Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, in which he spoke of the promise of America. But though some may read that choice as a critique of what Sarah Palin likes to call that “hopey, changey stuff,” Pitt insisted that is not the case.

“I was there that night in Chicago when Obama won. It was an amazing night, people out in the street, connected,” the actor, who also produced the film, said. He argued that he sees the use of Obama’s words in the film “not as a cynical look back at a statement of failure but as a real expression of hope.”

He and Dominik also both insisted that it’s coincidental that the Weinstein Company will release the film in the U.S. on Sept. 21 just as the presidential campaign is heating up.

Dominik, who previously directed Pitt in the 2007 Western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, explained that as he started adapting the novel, “I realized it was a story about an economic crisis,” and he couldn’t resist drawing comparisons to the mortgage collapse that led to the 2008 crisis.

Speaking of crime films in general, he said, “I always feel that crime films are about capitalism because it is a genre where it is perfectly acceptable for all the characters to be motivated by the desire for money. In some ways, the crime film is the most honest American film because it portrays Americans as I experience a lot of them, in Hollywood, as being very concerned with money.”

Killing’s specific story, he added, “is about a crisis in the economy and the people who have to clean it up.”

As for the larger mortgage meltdown, Pitt couldn’t resist interjecting at one point: “It was criminal by the way, and there still haven’t been any criminal repercussions for that.”

Brangelina’s matrimonial plans

As for other burning questions of the day, one journalist interrupted all the filmmakers’ talk of crime and violence, character and politics, to ask Pitt whether he and his fiancé Angelina Jolie have set a wedding date.

“We have no date,” Pitt responded. “We actually, really truly have no date.”

Angels and Scotch whisky

Ken Loach’s competition film The Angels' Share is a poetic expression for the small quantity of Scotch whisky that evaporates through the sides of the cask during maturation. It is something that time takes away from us for the very best of reasons; a welcome loss in the long, dark process of improvement.

It is also the name of Ken Loach’s smokily satisfying new comedy; the sole British contender for the Palme D’Or at Cannes this year. It is a crime caper set on the west coast of Scotland, complex on the palate but with a lasting toasty finish, and framed by one of the social realist, working class narratives that Loach has made his trademark. Imagine Compton Mackenzie had written Sweet Sixteen and you'll be on the right track.

Screen newcomer Paul Brannigan is a wholly convincing 20-something muddle of wisecracks and frustrations as Robbie, one of a group of young offenders who work in a court-mandated ‘community payback scheme’ supervised by the jocular foreman Harry (Loach regular John Henshaw).

Much like his fellow hoodlums, Rhino (William Ruane), Albert (Gary Maitland) and Mo (Jasmin Riggins), Robbie is a Saltire-waving, chest-beating Scot, but has no meaningful connection to the land or culture he claims to love. For him, whisky is just an effective way of making Coca-Cola alcoholic, and he pronounces ceilidh ‘seelick’.

But when Harry offers him a dram of a rare single malt to celebrate the birth of his son, Robbie has a very literal spiritual epiphany. He and his friends twig that the proceeds from a single barrel of the stuff, liberated from a sleepy highland distillery, would give all four of them enough money to clear their debts and start afresh. Behind Harry’s back, a plan starts to take shape.

Loach and his regular screenwriter Paul Laverty won the Palme D’Or in 2006 for The Wind That Shakes The Barley, but this is a subtler, less inflammatory piece. Laverty, who grew up in Glasgow, and Loach’s cast have a fine ear for the trickling, glugging rhythms of modern Scots, scorching expletives and all. Every scene is a pleasure to listen to; many are also knee-slappingly funny.

Meanwhile, cinematographer Robbie Ryan, who should have solid support on the Cannes jury from his regular collaborator, the director Andrea Arnold, bathes the film’s many convivial moments in a golden, tannic light. This is British comedy at its warmest and most pleasurable; cask strength, unfiltered and neat, The Telegraph said.

Day Eight

Cannes Day Eight will feature Brazilian helmer Walter Salles’ “On the Road.” Based on a novel by acclaimed Beat Generation's poet Jack Kerouac, "On the Road" follows the journey of an aspiring New York writer Sal Paradise. After the death of his father, Paradise meets Dean Moriarty, a wild and infectiously charismatic ex-con. They hit it off immediately.

Determined to avoid the pitfalls of a narrow, prescribed life, Paradise hits the road, joining Moriarty on what evolves into a life-changing physical and emotional odyssey. Thirsting for freedom, they discover the world, the ecstasy of experience, the connectedness of humanity and ultimately themselves.

Also to be screened is Leos Carax’s “Holy Motors” starring Denis Lavant as a man who travels between multiple parallel lives.

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
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