UNDERGROUND (Emir Kusturica, France/Germany/Bulgaria/Czech Republic/Hungary/Serbia)
Screened in the main competition
The Palme d’Or winner, and it’s easy to see why: the film’s study of war’s effect on the 20th Century is spiked with humor, black as the heart of a collapsed sun, that repeatedly knocks it around the head with a psychotic carnivalesque flair. Everything from its use of music (which is pure genius) to its frequently inexplicable blasts of almost surreal touches in the characters and mise en scène make it the one film in competition that truly feels like nothing else. On the downside, the film is not short – the easiest version to find is 164 minutes, a half-hour shorter than the Cannes cut – and it tends to repeat its points enough that even the whiplash swings from one tonal register to the next aren’t enough to keep it from feeling bloated. I also feel like my knowledge of Balkan politics makes it hard for me to honestly judge it (it was the locus of enormous controversy at home). But misgivings aside, this is a deliriously watchable movie, sober topic and all. 9/10
ED WOOD (Tim Burton, USA)
Screened in the main competition
A tribute to one of cinema’s most disastrously inept oddballs from one of its most successful, and one of the two possible correct answers to the question, “What’s Tim Burton’s best movie?” An unrestrained love for old movies and the gaudiest kitsch of the ’50s permeates every set, performance, and note of Howard Shore’s superlative score, leaving it less a straightforward biopic of the notorious low-budget director Edward D. Wood, Jr, than an inside-out journey through his dementedly sunny worldview – the movie about Ed Wood that Ed Wood would have made if he had all the talent in the world instead of none whatsoever. It’s also a bittersweet reminder of the days when Johnny Depp’s quirky excesses served to finding shockingly real character truths, and when he and Burton fed off of each other’s creativity rather than indulged each other’s laziness. Energetically and stylistically, it’s one of the most flippant and giddy entries in its genre, but its dopey frivolity is the very reason it’s more honest and insightful than damn near all of them. 10/10
THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU’RE DEAD (Gary Fleder, USA)
Screened in Un Certain Regard
An especially pure early example of that most quintessentially ’90s cinema, the Bald-Faced Tarantino Knock-Off. Interesting primarily in that it possesses what might be the single most sedate performance ever given by Steve Buscemi, this story of five career criminals led by Andy Garcia is marred by forcibly eccentric dialogue and inorganically weird characters, on top of the more obvious shortcoming: the story the film tells simply isn’t terribly compelling and outside a few individual scenes, it doesn’t have any opinion, either artistic or philosophical, on the events it depicts. Though I do admire Fleder and screenwriter Scott Rosenberg’s willingness to let the story develop at its own pace and through its own side channels. Warped title notwithstanding (a lift from Warren Zevon), the film lacks the bent humor of even the most flailing wannabe Tarantino pictures, and it has barely a trace of visual style or filmmaking energy, which not merely permits but practically begs us to notice how little substance it has as a story. Hopelessly bland through and through. 5/10