Today was the busy day for films we wanted to see (although I felt we could have squeezed in Ten Canoes as well). We started off with an 11:30 screening of Richard Linklater’s Fast Food Nation. It was a ticket event as it was in the Grand Theatre Lumiere (the main venue at Cannes), and we had them (we were trying to get them for the 10pm premiere but they were gone even before lowly accreditees like we even got a look in), but we were a little concerned the tickets said formal dress and we didn’t fancy tuxedos at that time of the morning. We took a chance and, as it happens, jeans and a polo shirt was enough. The theatre was huge and we were in the balcony, which meant we were looking down on the screen, which is an odd sensation.
The movie is a fictional narrative about a marketing executive at a fictional burger company (Mickey’s) who is sent of to investigate how cow shit is getting into their new ‘The Big One’ burgers. There are other sides to the story told through the eyes of illegal immigrant workers, but it’s essentially an anti-fast food movie designed to shock and digust. Personally, it didn’t really tell us much we didn’t know already and I doubt it’ll stop people eating fast food for an instant, but that’s not to say it wasn’t a good movie.
Next up was Taxidermia, a film with a strange synposis:
Three stories. Three ages. Three men. Grandfather, father, son. One is an orderly, one is a leading sportsman, and one is a master taxidermist. One desires love, the other success, and the third immortality.
We didn’t stay for it all, as it just seemed to be about shocking the audience. The first section was about some sex-obsessed private who kept having fantasies and masturbating (on screen), the next (the sportsman) about some guy who was in the Bulgarian fast eating team and how he wanted to be the best, then we left. It was shot beautifully, but it had no real story, characters we couldn’t identify with and a general desire to shock people with disgusting and perverse images.
Last, was BOFFO!, a film about making films in Hollywood. It was a nice, if sometimes cheesy, self-promoting, back-slapping documentary about how and why people make movies in Hollywood. It has some big names giving their view about what makes a good film, if there is a formula, what they try and make, etc. It was intereting and light enough to allow us to end the evening on a high.
Yesterday’s screening of Kaze no tani no Naushika was excellent, a great film and well worth a look, you can see why Myazaki has such an international following, and this was a film he did in 1984. 2-D animation certainly isn’t dead and it showed that a good story could easily hold an audience and that the stunning visuals of 3-D are not essential.
Tomorrow I think we’re going to be trying to get tickets for Southland Tales (directed by Richard Kelly, who also directed Donnie Darko), partly because we want to see it and partly because we want to wear the tuxedos we’ve bought and shipped over here. We’ll also try and take a look at: An Inconvenient Truth, a film of Al Gore presenting evidence of climate change and Monte-Cristo, a 1929 silent film version of The Count of Monte Cristo.
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