Podcast: Cannes 1996 Revisit

Nathaniel, Nick, and Joe revisit the Cannes film festival of 1996 (you might wanna quickly check that lineup & those prizes before listening) and the Best Actress race that started there. We also recommend other 1996 goodies that you may or may not have seen... or thought of in years.

Index (43 minutes)
00:01 Intro, Juries, and Crash's audacity prize
03:00 Best Actress: McDormand (Fargo) vs Blethyn (Secrets & Lies) vs Watson (Breaking the Waves)
10:09 Goodbye South Goodbye, The Eighth Day, Pillow Book, and Microcosmos
17:50 Trainspotting, Flirting With Disaster, A Self Made Hero, Lone Star, and Love Serenade
30:07 David Cronenberg's Crash
37:45 We each recommend a few more 1996 titles from Bound to The Long Kiss Goodnight

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversation in the comments. Which 1996 picture have you still not seen? Who got your Best Actress vote that year?

tfw when you're turned on by car crashes

Articles We Mention
• 5 Contentious Cannes Juries 
• Nick's Annual Cannes Project 
• Nick on Cronenberg's Crash 

Cannes 1996. Recommendations

Sundance: Kumiko Hunts "Fargo"s Hidden Treasure

Sundance coverage continues with Nathaniel on the fascinating oddity "Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter"

Meet Kumiko (Oscar nominee Rinko Kikuchi from Babel), pictured above, a mopey Japanese woman in a red hoodie. This picture of her is not quite complete. While Kumiko is a mopey Japanese woman in a red hoodie there's more than just moping going on inside her, however  opaque her inner life remains. She's a quiet "Office Lady" who is miserably depressed and finds consolation only in her pet bunny Bunzo (who steals nearly every moment he's in) and her taste for treasure hunting. The movie, inspired by true events, opens with an, I assume, metaphorical search for a buried videocassette of Fargo. Once Kumiko watches it she becomes convinced that the movie is real and that Steve Buscemi's treasure awaits her in Minnesota. The red hoodie remains but she'll keep piling on other memorable attire over it on her journey from cold urban Tokyo to freezing rural Minnesota, as if the journey itself will protect her, weigh her down, or bury her. Or all three. 

The film's great strength is in its eery expressive visuals whether that's a surreal burst of shifting wet orange light (which turns out to be an airplane being de-iced I think?), odd textural juxtapositions like cloth over static tv screens, or smart visualizations (and sound mixing) which amplify Kumiko's solitude and emotional disconnect. Given the writer/director team's (Nathan and David Zellner) aptitude for mood building and imagery and the sparse dialogue, the film hardly needs to spend as much time in Japan as it does -  I confess that it took me nearly half an hour to settle into its wavelength. Kumiko doesn't always help, remaining a frustratingly impenetrable character. And yet worries about accessibility seem off point since Kumiko herself just can't connect.

The inciting image in "Fargo"

Eventually the movie curdles into something like a dark Asian companion piece to The Purple Rose of Cairo in which Kumiko continually wills the Coen Bros' classic to consume her. It's a tough sit but I found it rewarding and singular, especially in its presentational clinging to old technologies. Kumiko watches VHS, hand sews treasure maps, and despises her cel phone; she just isn't fit for the times, unable to connect in Japan or America. An ignorant but well intentioned old woman underlines this in one brilliantly succinct joke, handing the confused young woman an old paperbook of "Shogun". 

Grade: B+... it really grew on me 24 hours after seeing it
Distribution: I'd say unlikely but you never know.

Percussion. Strings. Winds. Links

For Musical Nerds
BuzzFeed definite proof that The Little Mermaid's Prince Eric was a homo 
The Exploding Kinetoscope best words I've ever read about Judy Garland's For Me and My Gal
Pajiba more of those new photos from Into the Woods

Miscellania
Sillof's Workshop look at these AMAZING custom toys, If Dr Seuss wrote Jurassic Park
Grantland Mark Harris joins me in my eternally losing war against Category Fraud (this time with Daniel Brühl in Rush) and talks Enough Said, too 

The Film Doctor five notes on Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring, now on DVD
L Magazine see, I'm not the only one that thinks Cuarón's Gravity is a disappointment!
/Film wait they're making Fargo into a TV series and it's the William H Macy role that's the lead? Don't they know that people loved that movie because of Chief Marge Gunderson?

Elephantitis
Finally, MNPP reminded us that we can all get our Alexander Skarsgard loincloth dreams back on since his Tarzan flick is no longer (apparently) in development hell. Word is that Christoph Waltz is the villain now. Many will greet this as very good news but this makes me sad. It's not that Waltz isn't a good actor but remember how lame it was the last time he was a threat to pachyderms?

Who wants to go back to there? I do not. And I even kinda liked that movie more than most but Waltz was not the why. How about a few more surprises in casting, Hollywood? Aren't there literally a hundred famous actors in Waltz's age range that might be a fun curveball as the villain? But instead we're going to get somebody who already abused elephants. (sigh)

Top Ten 1990s

I promised longtime TFE super fan Ryan that I would one day write up a big top ten of the 90s piece although THIS IS NOT IT. This is like those tossed back "shots" of past decades wherein we tell each other our favorites. I'll tell you my ten favorites which are wildly unstable and could be replaced by anything in the "with apologies to" list if I'd ranked on another day. Well, not the top three. I mean... let's not get crazy.

1. The Piano (Jane Campion)
2. Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson)
3. Thelma & Louise (Ridley Scott)
4. Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson)
5. Beauty & The Beast (Trousdale & Wise)
6. All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar)
7. Trois Coleurs Trilogy (Krystof Kzielowski)
8. T2: Judgment Day (James Cameron)
9. Fargo (The Coen Bros)
10. Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino)

Most of them weren't even nominated for Best Picture. (Sigh). Oscar is so...

With apologies to 15 more. Let's call it a top 25: 
Being John Malkovich, Titanic, [safe], Howards End, The Thin Red Line, Se7en, The Truman Show, Schindler's List, The Silence of the Lambs, Postcards from the Edge, Edward Scissorhands, The Grifters, Waiting for Guffman, Husbands and Wives, and Election.

other "favs" if not all of them as 'respectable':
Death Becomes Her, Babe, Ed Wood, Dead Man Walking, Strictly Ballroom, Tie Me Up Tie Me Down, A League of Their Own, Addams Family Values, Bullets Over Broadway, Reality Bites, Queen Margot, Clueless, Romeo + Juliet, My Best Friend's Wedding, Wings of the Dove, Celebration, The Idiots, High Art, Velvet Goldmine, Run Lola Run, My Own Private Idaho, Priest, The Fisher King, Leaving Las Vegas and The Last of the Mohicans.

P.S. After Jurassic Park (best shot tomorrow night!), I promise we'll leave the 90s behind and come back to the now. So get it all out of your system in the comments!

Previous Top Ten Quickies
1930s | 1950s | 1970s | 1980s

True Grit's Masculine Ideal

I thought this was noteworthy. It's an argument from Anita Sarkeesian that Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) in True Grit is not a feminist character. I admire Anita's sand, to borrow a phrase from the film in question.

The points are pretty well made (though I'm not sure the existence of character arcs has much to do with masculine or feminine anything) and it's true that pop stories often labelled as 'girlpower' are really just drag exercizes. Though some, like Kill Bill which is visually referenced (negatively), do have relatively complicating issues involving the femaleness of their protagonists which I don't think she's giving enough credit to.

Still it's an interesting conversation to have and interesting even within the confines of the Coen Bros filmography. By Anita Sarkeesian's standards Fargo's Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand), for example, is just about as feminist a creation as the movies have ever dreamed up... and that's even excluding her ginormous pregnancy. She never adopts "male" values so much as just making her way through a hostile violent world by her personal truths and unique cooperative funny relatively peaceful spirit.

She really is one of the best movie characters of all time. We love Marge, you betcha.