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Twelve Cool Films from the Cannes Film Festival
The Cannes Film Festival is in the books, and there are some cool things that happened at the 70th iteration of this super-prestigious festival. This will be a causal post where I touch on a few of the things that interest me and therefore should interest you (because I am very often right). Obviously, I haven’t seen any of these films, so my excitement is completely based on word-of-mouth from the festival and other murmurs. I’ll recount the winners of the awards, then mention the other flicks that have me excited at the very end.
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The Hilarious “Mindhorn” Blends Crime with Irreverence and Dry British Wit
Are you re-watching episodes of QI and startling yourself with how often you remember the answers? Do you have a VPN set up to watch 8 Out of 10 Cats? Are you slightly angry that my previous question didn’t conclude with “Does Countdown”? This hackneyed rhetoric is just a way for me to say that if you enjoy British comedy, then Sean Foley’s Mindhorn is definitely for you. Even if you’re not crazy about the Brits and their particular brand of whimsy, you’re likely to find something to enjoy in this weird little farce.
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“War Machine” is Imbalanced, Has Too Few Barbs
The satire is the most fragile of all the genres. Drama fails or succeeds on the strength of very definite qualities like story, character, and pathos. Comedy has leeway with its execution on account of its casual tone, as even the blackest comedies have a jokey kernel. Strict genre fare or action is even more forgiving: as long as the film hits a few key points, we enjoy the parts that hit, and dismiss the parts that miss (i.e., the recent Mad Max, which is awesome yet fairly bereft of story). But with satire, if certain elements are missing – a unifying vision, a stylistic conceit, or even a single performance – then the product just feels off. So is the case with War Machine, the Netflix film from Brad Pitt’s production company Plan B Entertainment. Though the satirical aspirations of this send-up of the War on Terror are apparent and welcome, there are simply too many missteps.
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“Dr. Strangelove” and the Absurdity of the Politically Powerful
A Year of Masterpieces: The Filmography of Stanley Kubrick
Introduction
Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is a satirical masterpiece. In this piece, we will discuss the germination of the great film and then detail how the director combines a serious camera (Part I), genuine but exaggerated characters (Part II), and a farcical tone (Part III) into one of the greatest condemnations of the military state of all time. Kubrick’s aim is simple: to subvert the grim seriousness of the Cold War by showcasing the absurdities that arise from taking concepts like “mutually assured destruction” and “nuclear deterrence” to their logical conclusions.
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Inside Out 2017: A Date for Mad Mary
This movie is fantastic! One of my favorite things about getting screeners is being blind-sided by something awesome, and “A Date for Mad Mary” definitely counts!
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Inside Out 2017: Mansfield 66/67
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Inside Out 2017: Handsome Devil
Here’s a wonderful little Irish flick I got to review as part of TIRFF. Now, it’s showing at Inside Out!
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“Alien: Covenant” – a Muted Echo of a Once-Great Franchise
The Alien franchise has been limping along since the early ‘90s, and a covenant with God herself can’t save it from the paucity of original thought on display in Ridley Scott’s latest shade of a film. Alien: Covenant builds a great starting point, but squanders everything near the end of the first act, and it simply isn’t cohesive or confident enough to recover. Faint echoes suggest that the terrifying magic of the xenomorph may still be alive, but they never stand out above the background noise.
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Yay for Giant Hippo-Pig Trailers: Bong Joon-Ho’s “Okja”
Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho is not subtle when it comes to the themes of his films, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Snowpiercer isn’t so much an allegory for class warfare – it is class warfare, just set on the science fiction environment of an ever-moving train. The Host is the venerable monster-movie warning that our careless destruction of the planet will come back to bite us – literally in this case. And so, Okja continues in that same vein. This Netflix exclusive will compete for the Palme d’Or at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, and then will be available for streaming on June 28th.
Check out the trailer below:
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The Time Has Come to Make a Choice: The Strong Volition of “The Matrix”
The Matrix is replete with allusions to classic philosophical ideas. The plot references Plato’s Cave and the world of forms, Descartes’ First Meditation and the evil demon, and Hilary Putnam’s “brain in a vat” scenario – all ruminations on the nature of reality and the possibility that we only perceive an illusion. The film also considers the tension between free will and determinism, mostly conveying its stance on this fundamental philosophical issue not through long-winded discussion, but through an essential tenet of Romanticism: the plot hinges on the genuine choices made by its characters.
Film Criticism and Fiction Writing by Derek Jacobs
