Art Directors Guild Award Winners

EXCELLENCE IN PRODUCTION DESIGN (Period Film)
The Great Gatsby- Catherine Martin

EXCELLENCE IN PRODUCTION DESIGN (Contemporary Film)
Her- K.K. Barrett

EXCELLENCE IN PRODUCTION DESIGN (Fantasy Film)
Gravity- Andy Nicholson

Fast Cars and Hangovers

Which long in the tooth franchise thrill ride are you handing your hard-earned dollars this weekend?  And which is gunning for the title of Queen of the Memorial Day Weekend box office race-- boohoo, I'm being catty over billion-dollar franchises.  The contestants for this year are particular muscular and the race is itching with more competitive, testosterone-y drive than ever before.  In one corner, there's Fast & Furious 6, which is inexplicably gaining bigger returns and higher critical acclaim as it ages forward; we can all relax- Fast & Furious 7  has already been set for a go.  Comparison here isn't quite as simple as the previous installment, Fast Five-- released two years ago-- came out in the lower pressure month of April and set a new high for the series.  The combatant is The Hangover Part III, which is overcoming odds on the fact that the last film-- released two years ago in the same weekend-- was felt a poor man's rendering of the first R-rated raunch attack that inexplicably engrossed audiences four summers ago.  Comparison here isn't quite as simple because early midnight showing are opening earlier and earlier these days.  This has been advertised as the final Hangover.  Here's how it stands right now with preliminary Friday numbers coming in:

1. Fast & Furious 6- $36.0 million
2. The Hangover Part III- $15.5 million + $11.7 made from Thursday gross
3. Star Trek Into Darkness- $15.5 million
4. Epic- $10.0 million
5. Iron Man 3- $5.2 million
6. The Great Gatsby- $4.0 million

Here's to the now middle aged men who preside over this holiday weekend!  Many considered it rather silly to have two huge (and expensive) franchise films competing against one another considering they shared the same audience.  However, it's not really even close anymore. In other news, The Great Gatsby broke the $100 million barrier at the North American box office, the first ever Baz Luhrmann film to do so.

The Great Gatsby

"Is it too much?" asks a nervous Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) in the first section of Baz Luhrmann's "Spectacular Spectacular" retelling of the often told F. Scott Fitzgerald novel The Great Gatsby.  The much in question refers to the abundance of flowers that enshroud a living room like a hanging green house that he has anxiously over-prepared for his first meeting in many moons with his longtime obsession and love, Daisy-- played this time by Carey Mulligan.  Of course it's too much, and much can said about the movie itself with its artifice dripping off the walls and burning the holes of the retinas of its audiences.  Yet in that very nature of being too much, Luhrmann and team bring such a forceful and unrestrained visual aesthetic to The Great Gatsby, that in it's over-the-top cartoonish, blaring third dimension, cornucopia of colors spectacle of sight and sound, they uncannily sum up a modernized look at the too much that was the Jazz Age house of mirrors that Fitzgerald was commenting and ruminating about at such rigorous detail.  There's certain hints in the text that demand the Luhrmann Red Curtain Trilogy treatment.  The problem is that while Fitzgerald was in loathe of the artifice while Luhrmann cannot help himself but be ever encapsulated by it.

Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby (which he co-wrote with Craig Pearce) is the fourth cinematic rendering of one of the essentials.  Ever thirty odds years or so, Hollywood summons the courage (despite past mistakes) to hopefully get it right.  The novel has tripped many up before, what with Fitzgerald's somewhat plotless prose evoking near sacrilege status for re-invention along with characterizations that read largely more like ideals than thinking, breathing human beings.  The much maligned 1974 version directed by Jack Clayton (written by Francis Ford Coppola) tried to put a stately touch to the material, but flatlined with the drama, evoking nothing more than a pretty 1920s-era (by way of the 1970s) postcard.  Baz Luhrmann does do something radical with the entombed novel, dubbed by many as the Great American Novel, but it's largely just on the surface.

Mind you it's a maddeningly beautiful surface.  For the parties that mysterious nouveau riche billionaire Jay Gatsby throws in the attempt to impress and finally court his longtime love Daisy are a marvelous old-new concoction that serve Luhrmann, the purveyor of Spectacular-sized entertainment as well as the auteur in a manner that gets right into the trenches of the feeling the Roaring Twenties might have evoked for the flappers and all else.  Criticize the filmmaker all you wish for including hip hop tracks to deejay the festivities, the anachronism achieves a blissfully lurid experience coupled with the marvelously decadent production design and costume numbers (each handled courtesy of Luhrmann's partner in more than one ways, Catherine Martin, who will likely be seeing a few more Oscar nominations come her way.)  Filtered together and edited into a sort of blended stew, there's intoxicating and rich high that's achieved.  As Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" hums, fireworks alight the Long Island bay just outside in a perfect symphony of noise and colors.  Bravura and, in at least at the very beginning, digs sharply into the meglo-madness that Fitzgerald was all enraged about in the first place.  Of course, the party must come to an end at some point.

There's the trickiness of the narrative to get through as well.  As in the novel, the film is narrated by Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), this time a la Moulin Rouge! writing the past events in the invented sanctuary of a sanitarium, driven blistering mad by alcoholism and anxiety by what he's experienced.  He's the cousin of Daisy, the prim epitome of old world beauty.  Newly rich in the fortunes of the era, Nick is the also the West Egg neighbor of Jay Gatsby, he is quickly immersed into the hedonistic foreign world of spectacle, glamor and all that which inspired surely a great many soap operas.  Mysteriously befriended by Gatsby as a sidekick to lure Daisy back-- she lives at the other end of the bay in East Egg, directly across Gatsby's grand estate, symbolized by a blinking green light, on which he is frequently staring at.  Part of the narrative struggles of The Great Gatsby preside in the fact that in essence it will always be Nick's story, his memories, an expression of which can encumber the plot as our surrogate is just that-- his burdening plight has little consequence to the tale itself.  Luhrmann tries to correct this, but Maguire's bland and plucky portrait offers little insight.  The likable performer is tad too old for a character this readily eager, and it suggests in an unflattering light his most furtive cinematic period nearly a decade ago before Spider-man became his calling card.

Ushered into pull of this singular Jay-Z-scored take of Jazz Age, Nick becomes foil for Gatsby, and compatriot to Daisy's troupe of Old Money regulars-- golf champ friend Jordan Baker (newcomer Elizabeth Debicki) and her sketchy husband Tom (an excellent Joel Edgerton.)  Tom comes in tow a mistress on the side from the poor section of town-- a woman who has the forthright to call during meals-- Myrtle Wilson (Isla Fisher.)  There's a sequence early on where Nick travails with Tom to a hotel room for assorted shenanigans that at first reads as a scene that may have at first been written atop the Elephant suite in Moulin Rouge!.  So assertive in its debased debauchery, The Great Gatsby takes its time (more so in its overly generous two-and-a-half-hour running time) to settle and breathe from its arch "too much"-ness.  The biggest problem is that when it does so, the drama has run out of steam.

Which leads to perhaps the most nagging concern when trying to adapt The Great Gatsby in the first place.  It starts with the title character himself-- an oblique image of elegance and refined beauty (and a role that suits and tailors an actor like DiCaprio, at least on the surface of things, like a fine toothed comb), but he's merely that-- an image, a symbol, a sacred totem of a lost boy who reinvented himself as a gentleman seemingly for nothing more than to court another beguiling specimen.  Of course, there's a dark belly that scratches that elegant surface (and everybody knows it), but it's still a hardly tangible character to flesh out.  Daisy is even more difficult.  Herself, relegated to a mere supporting idea of beauty and idealism in what is supposed to be a his and her epic romantic drama, can really only a tease, a glimmer of femininity in an adaptation done correctly, a mere cipher can only do so much in her part of a star-crossed love affair.  And Luhrmann's take closely hews Fitzgerald's narrative, visual aplomb taken aside.  The leading actors, themselves finely coiffed and perfectly bred, offer only a whisk of interpretation themselves, which may work for the artifice, but stalls anything close to drama.

It's unfortunate as the supporting characters, while many of whom are given significantly lesser roles than in the novel, create vivid and exciting portraits that feel lived-in to Luhrmann's master set piece as well as grand ciphers to Fitzgerald's world as originally created.  Edgerton is absolutely watchable and rich as Daisy's philandering husband, opting big to match the set design, but distilling a hard Old Money flare to his line readings.  Fisher, as well as Jason Clarke (Zero Dark Thirty) as her cuckold dim bulb of a husband are reduced so greatly in the film, that the third act drags along on the wisp of circumstance, but the two actors game as can be.  Dedicki as Jordan is vivacious and offers plenty of presence despite limited screen time-- in the novel she's upgraded to Nick's lover, here she's more of first mate which plagues a question only round aboutly hinted at-- may the great romance of The Great Gatsby truly lie in Nick's eternal fascination of Gatsby himself.  That may have been the cork needed to wipe the cobwebs of the dusty masterwork in the first place.

That may have been something.  Alas, Luhrmann seems only interested in the unlocking The Great Gatsby in familiar ways, perhaps afraid of offering, ahem, some sense of narrative discovery to a property nearly one hundred years old.  I certainly hope it doesn't seem like I'm hating on this grandly shaped film, because I quite enjoyed it, I just wasn't immersed in it the way that only a compelling drama can.  There's a singular, bewitching, maddening beauty to The Great Gatsby, of which Luhrmann excels in driving at.  There's also a twinge of possibility of what it may have been had the filmmaker partook dramatic license to the same degree on which he does visually.  B-

Cannes Film Festival

The line-up for the 2013 Festival de Cannes is currently being announced.

OPENING FILM:

• The Great Gatsby (USA)- directed by Baz Luhrmann- out of competition

IN COMPETITION:

• Behind the Candelabra (USA)- directed by Steven Soderbergh- Soderbergh's HBO film about the relationship between Liberace (Michael Douglas) and his much younger boyfriend (Matt Damon.)  Rumored to be Soderbergh's final film; Soderbergh won the Palme D'Or for his breakout film, sex, lies and videotape.
• Borgman (The Netherlands)- directed by Alex van Warmerdam
• Grigris (France)- directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun
• Heli (Spain)- directed by Arnat Escalante
• The Immigrant (USA)- directed by James Gray- Gray's romantic drama stars Joaquin Phoenix, Jeremy Renner and Marion Cotillard and tells the story of an immigrant woman and a dazzling musician.  Gray previously visited Cannes with Two Lovers, also starring Phoenix.
• Inside Llewyn Davis (USA)- directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen- The Coen Brothers return to Cannes (their first trip since No Country For Old Men in 2007) with their latest revolving around a 60s-era folk singer.  Stars Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan and Justin Timberlake.  CBS Films picked up the film for a fall release.
• Jeune et Jolie (France)- directed by Francois Ozon- The director of Under the Sand and 8 Women returns to Cannes with his latest, described as a portrait of a 17-year-old girl in four songs and four seasons.  Charlotte Rampling co-stars.
• Jimmy P. (Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian) (USA)- directed by Arnaud Desplechin- Cannes regular and French filmmaker Desplechin (A Christmas Tale) makes his English language debut starring Benicio Del Toro and Mathieu Amalric.
• La Grande Bellezza (France)- directed by Paolo Sorrentino- The story of an aging writer who bitterly recollects about this lost youth.  Sorrentino is no stranger to Cannes with This Must Be the Place (which starred Sean Penn as an aging rock star) and Il Divo, which won the Jury Prize in 2008.
• La Vie D'Adele (France)- directed by Abdellatif Kechiche
• Michael Kohlhass (France)- directed by Arnaud des Pallieres- French period drama starring Mads Mikkelsen.
• Nebraska (USA)- directed by Alexander Payne- Payne returns to Cannes (he previously brought About Schmidt in 2002) with his latest family-strewn drama, this one stars Bruce Dern, Will Forte and Stacey Keach.  Paramount plans to release this film sometime later this year.  Curiously many reported Nebraska wouldn't be ready in time for Cannes.
• Only God Forgives (USA)- directed by Nicolas Winding Refn- Refn's follow-up to Drive, which earned him the Directors Prize at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, is a grisly noir with Ryan Gosling and Kristin Scott Thomas.  The trailer has already elicited fan boy excitement and is due for release stateside, courtesy of Radius/TWC this summer.
• The Past (The Netherlands)- directed by Asghar Farhardi- Farhardi follows-up the Oscar-winning A Separation with another tale of marital strife starring Berenice Bejo and Tahar Rahim.  Coincidentally, Cannes passed on the opportunity to screen A Separation two years ago.
• Shield of Straw (Japan)- directed by Takashi Miike- From the director of 13 Assassins.
• Soshite Chichi Ni Naru (Like Father, Like Son) (Japan)- directed by Hirokazu Koreeda
• Tian Zhy Ding (South Korea)- directed by Khang Ke Jia
• Un Chateau en Italie (France)- directed by Valera Bruni Tedeschi- Drama about a family forced to sell their family home.
• Venus in Fur (France)- directed by Roman Polanski- Drama concerning an actress trying to convince a director she's perfect for a part; based on the play by David Ives.  Polanski won the Palme D'Or in 2002 for The Pianist.

OUT OF COMPETITION:

• All is Lost (USA)- directed by J.C. Chandor- Survival story starring Robert Redford from the writer/director of Margin Call.
• Blood Ties (USA)- directed by Guillaume Canet- Crime drama about two brothers on opposing sides of the law.  Clive Owen, Mila Kunis, Zoe Saldana, and in her second Cannes film of 2013, Marion Cotillard, star.

UN CERTAIN REGARD:

• The Bling Ring (USA)- directed by Sophia Coppola (opener)- Previously reported.
• Anonymous (Iran)- directed by Mohammad Rasoulof
• As I Lay Dying (USA)- directed by James Franco- Franco directs and adapts the William Faulkner novel.
• Bends- directed by Flora Lau
• Death March- directed by Adolfo Alix, Jr.
• Fruitvale Station (USA)- directed by Ryan Coogler- Given an extended title since winning the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award and being snapped up by the Weinstein Company, Fruitvale will tour Cannes before entering art house cinemas this summer.
• Grand Central (France)- directed by Rebecca Zlotwski
• La Jaula de Oro (Spain)- directed by Diego Quernada-Diez
• Les Salauds (France)- directed by Claire Denis- The legendary Denis (White Material, Beau Travail) returns to Cannes with her latest.
• L'Image Manquante (France)- directed by Rithy Panh
• L'Inconnu du Lac (France)- directed by Alain Guiraudie
• Miele (Italy)- directed by Valeria Golino
• Norte, Hangganan ng Kasaysayan (The Philippines)- directed by Lav Diaz
• Omar (Israel)- directed by Hany Abu-Assad
• Sarah Prefere La Course (Canada)- directed by Chloe Robichaud

Special screenings:

• Otdat Konci – Taisia Igumentseva
  
• Seduced and Abandoned – James Toback
  
• Week of a Champion – Roman Polanski
  
• Stop the Pounding Heart – Roberto Minervini
  
• Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight – Stephen Frears
  
• Max Rose – Daniel Noa

Midnight screenings:

• Blind Detective – Johnnie To
  
• Monsoon Shootout – Amit Kumar

CLOSING FILM:

• Zulu (France)- directed by Jerome Salle 

"The Great Gatsby" Heads to Cannes

Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby will be the opening film at this years Cannes Film Festival, out of competition.  Luhrmann is no stranger to Cannes-- Moulin Rouge! famously (and rather opulently) opened the 2001 film festival (coincidentally Moulin Rouge! was once slated to open the fall of 2000 before being pushed into the summer of 2001, not unlike Gatsby.)  It marks a coup for festival director Thierry Frémaux, who coincidentally took charge of Cannes the year Moulin Rouge! debuted, with this selection following the announcement of Steven Spielberg as the head of this years jury.  Gatsby will open in the United States on May 10th, making its Cannes presence a moo point (Cannes begins on May 15th), but it will mark the European leg of the 3-D adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's most famous novel (which was written in France nearby the Cannes Film Festival site.)  This marks the third straight American film to open the festival after Midnight in Paris and last years Moonrise Kingdom.

Now, naturally, the attention turns to what will headline the competition.  Deadline offers worthy suggestions.

The Great Gatsby teaser

Baz Luhrmann returns this Christmas with his adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan in 3-D.  If he can turn his Moulin Rouge! magic on here, than Baz will rue all the talk that this can't work...

Until then, I remain skeptical.