This morning Deadline‘s Andreas Wiseman actually described the new additions to the 2018 Cannes Film Festival as “very exciting.”
Let me tell you what exciting would be. Exciting would be an announcement that the three big no-show Netflix titles — Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma, Paul Greengrass‘s Norway and Orson Welles‘ The Other Side of the Wind — will screen following a surprise resolution of the Cannes-Netflix dispute.
I’m intrigued by the addition of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s The Wild Pear Tree (competition) and Kevin Macdonald’s Whitney (midnight), but not so much by Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built (sans competition), Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (screening on closing night) and Ramin Bahrani‘s Fahrenheit 451 (midnight).
HE’s Jordan Ruimy has heard that Ceylan’s film is “slow as molasses and his most experimental movie,” and that Cannes accepted the film “with reservations.”
No one was a greater Von Trier fan than myself during the period of Breaking the Waves (’96), The Idiots (’98), Dancer in the Dark (’00), Dogville (’03) and The Boss Of It All (’06). But Antichrist, Melancholia and the Nymphomaniac films underwhelmed. I’m sensing shock and brutality from The House That Jack Built, which isn’t a competition film — unusual for Von Trier.
The Gilliam won’t screen until after the awards ceremony on the evening of Saturday, 5.19. My plane back to the States (actually to Dublin) leaves that night at 11:35 pm so I guess not.
Bahrani’s 99 Homes, his Florida real-estate movie with Andrew Garfield and Michael Shannon, was a predictable slog; ditto At Any Price, the Dennis Quaid-Zac Efron father-son drama. You can see what Fahrenheit 451 is up to at a glance — same 99 Homes dynamic only with Michael B. Jordan in the Garfield role.
McDonald’s Whitney doc may be dismissible unless he’s straight-from-the-shoulder about Whitney Houston‘s drug problems, and especially her self-destructive relationship with Bobby Brown. I’m getting tired of people tippy-toeing around the facts.
