It's still wintry here in NYC (groan) but Spring technically arrived a little while ago which means that the Cannes film festival is right around the corner. Here are three pieces of news involving the festival which will run from May 8th to May 19th.
The Poster
This year's poster, pictured above, is a quad rather than a horizontal for some reason. Usually they come in both formats or are just horizontal. It's based on the work of stills photographer Georges Pierre and the Jean Luc Godard film Pierrot Le Fou (1965). That's two posters based on Godard films in fairly quick succession. Last year's poster featured 1960s Italian sex symbol Claudia Cardinale but the year before that the poster was in tribute to Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (1963)! 'Maybe Cannes ought to look beyond the 1960s and Godard sometime soon?,' he suggested with ribbing affection.
Opening Night film and the Netflix controversy after the jump...
The Opening Film
This year the honor goes to Asghar Farhadi's Spanish-language feature Everybody Knows starring real life married superstars and Oscar winners Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem. Watch the trailer above. It'll be interesting to see what happens with this film at the Oscars. It's not in English which automatically is an obstacle. On the other hand it is headlined by two movie stars that Academy voters really love (each with 3 nominations and a win), features one actor voters are also surely familiar with (Ricard Darín, Argentinian superstar and a mainstay of the Spanish language submissions year after year), and a director the voting body has recently become obsessed with in Asghar Farhadi. Farhadi has won two Foreign Film Oscars in just the past seven years. Can this one make it three? And which country gets to submit it? Iran could claim it, we suppose, due to Farhadi's involvement and because the nationality of the director tends to matter quite a lot in that process and rulings. But couldn't a case also be made that Spain could submit it given that it takes place in Madrid and Cruz and Bardem are headlining and Spain helped fund it? Or it will be stuck somewhere in limbo and become one of those films that's a non-issue in the foreign film category (usually due to strange rulings or lack of submission) that ends up nominated in regular categories instead of the foreign language category like, oh, Talk to Her or Europa! Europa! or Three Colors: Red.
The Controversy
Remember last year at Cannes when there was a mini-brouhaha when Pedro Almodóvar expressed discomfort with honoring films that might not be shown in theaters? The internet got in a silly uproar and, typically, sided with Netflix, which this man right here (me, writing) thinks is a shortsighted alliance born of convenience.
[POSSIBLY INCOHERENT RANT FROM MY SICK BED] I love Netflix in some ways but they are 100% lying when they say they are '100% about the cinema' as Ted Sarandos ridiculously claims whilst complaining about Cannes. The company has made concerted efforts over the past years to move away from streaming cinema and to get rid of their back catalogue of films, and to push television productions and only recent television at that instead, as well as push their own original content which there is more and more of. Nothing wrong with that but please be honest about it! AND they're trying to get rid of movie theaters which means that basically everything they make is meant for small screens now.
Again, there is nothing wrong with this other than the incessant lying about why they're doing any of it and what it is they're doing. They're trying to get rid of the competition. Plain and simple. It's basic boring profit-driven capitalism. They are already the leader in streaming so they want the other avenues of access and forms of entertainment to dry up (like the older traditions of cable television and movie theaters) since they aren't anywhere close to #1 there. So far they're doing a great job of being a disrupter but it's not for our benefit. It is solely for theirs.
I've read some people online suggesting that the Netflix is correct and Cannes (and the Oscars) needs to lighten up about what is dubbed "cinema". I'm curious about the practicalities of these particular arguments, or if anyone making the argument has thought it through. How would we distinguish between movies and TV for example, if all distribution formats are deemed the same? Whether or not any of us like, it the separation is embedded in contracts of virtually everything that's been made. Unions have different rules about them. They pay differently. There's language in most contracts about the rights issues as something shifts from medium to medium. Different companies have different pieces of different revenue streams. Etcetera. It's going to be a legal nightmare if Hollywood ever fully caves and decides that TV and Cinema are the exact same thing. I bet you anything we lose access to a shit ton of important art in both mediums due to legal issues involving blurred lines in the future and who owns what and in what distribution format it's allowed to be shown and who profits if people are able to access it and so on and so on. I never ever enjoy losing art, because losing art is losing history and culture. [/END OF POSSIBLY INCOHERENT SICK RANT]
Cannes did offer to let Netflix show their films out of competition (as many filmmakers and studios have done for decades), but Netflix is petulantly dubbing this "disrespectful" to their filmmakers (Hmmm, does this mean it's been disrespectful to the multiple studios and hundreds of filmmakers who've done this for decades before Netflix was on the scene?) So no Netflix titles in France this summer. Which means Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, Paul Greengrass’s Norway, and Jeremy Saulnier’s Hold the Dark aren't coming as well as two Orson Welles related projects.
I fear people's deep love for both Netflix and the current ever-growing Disney empire (a different topic in a lot of ways but the same one in one key way) will end in tears. There's a reason why the government wrestled control of movie theaters away from movie studios in the early days of Hollywood back when the government was more responsible about preventing monopolies. Monopolies are bad even when they feel convenient. You don't want only two or three companies calling every shot about what you can get and how you can get it, trust! Netflix has already proven that they cannot be trusted to give us access to cinema -- they've offered less and less of it over the years unless they created it themselves, while purging the back catalogues of older classic titles which cost them money (again -- they are absolutely not pro-cinema, they're just pro-money) suggesting that they're more of a studio now than the content channel they began as so naturally they'd want to cause trouble for the other studios, including damaging the one source of revenue that they don't benefit from at all (moviegoing).