Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Cannes Demain

The official line-up of the 63rd Cannes Film Festival will be announced in France tomorrow afternoon, or at the crack of dawn in the States. I haven't really been keeping up on who's got films in the can right now, but according to The Guardian, the latest from both Mike Leigh (Another Year) and Alejandro González Iñárritu (Biutiful) have been confirmed to play at the festival, though it wasn't specified as to which section they'll be screening in. Leigh and González Iñárritu have both won Best Director prizes for Naked and Babel respectively; Leigh also won the Palme d'Or in 1996 for Secrets & Lies... so it sounds likely that both of their films will end up in competition. The good news about the new González Iñárritu film is that he's finally dumped screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, who is more than likely the one to blame for the tedious interconnected narrative devices of Amores perros, 21 Grams and Babel. Other directors with films "ready to go" or close to include Abbas Kiarostami, Terrence Malick, Stephen Frears, Jean-Luc Godard, Hong Sang-soo, Julian Schnabel, François Ozon (who really seems to be churning them out lately), Woody Allen (who has always been churning 'em out), Cristi Puiu, Oliver Stone (meh) and of course Béla Tarr (who claims The Turin Horse will be his final film). As you may have read, Tim Burton will be the jury president this year, which is scary for many reasons, so we'll just hope the rest of the jury is lined with insolent artistes. We'll see what will replace genital mutilation, POV ejaculation, hip hop dancing teens and Nazi killing as the emerging trends of this year's gala. The 63rd annual festival will be underway on 12 May with Ridley Scott's Robin Hood kicking things off.