The 2006 Cannes International Film Festival, which was to close yesterday with the awards ceremony, began with a thunderous dud and did not improve much until its second week.
The much-anticipated world premiere of The Da Vinci Code, which opened the festival on May 17, was more of a media event than a memorable film experience, universally scorned by the traditionally demanding mob of international critics who come to Cannes.
While Ron Howard's film version of Dan Brown's blockbuster novel shrugged off the bad reviews and was playing to packed theaters around the world, the Cannes festival took a little longer to recover.
The only true highlight of the festival's first week was Spanish director Pedro Almodovar's brilliant ghost story Volver, starring Penelope Cruz.
Volver is a magnificently-filmed, brilliantly-written tale about three generations of women and involves betrayal, murder, incest, the relationship between mothers and daughters -- and a very lively ghost.
It was immediately pegged as the favorite to win the coveted Palme d'Or for best film of the festival, and Cruz, in a sultry and deeply emotional performance, remains a hot contender to win the best actress award.
Not until the second week did the festival present a film and an actress that could rival the two. But Babel, directed by Mexico's Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, provided Cannes with a much-needed dose of cinematic brilliance.
The film stars Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and a host of excellent actors from Japan, Morocco and Mexico and could be described as a human globalization drama.
A complex tale of interrelated stories on three continents, Babel boasts a magnificent performance by Japanese actress Rinko Kikuchi, playing a deaf-mute teenager frustrated by her inability to communicate with the people around her.
It was hardly surprising that the two favorites for the Palme d'Or were made by film makers from Spanish-language countries, since five of the 20 films selected to vie for the top prize came from Spain and Latin America.
The festival's second week provided several pleasant surprises, such as Paolo Sorrentino's A Family Friend, a black comedy about an ugly, unscrupulous, deeply cynical loan shark living with his sick, domineering mother.
Former Palme d'Or winner Nanni Moretti's mordant The Caiman scored points as a fierce attack on former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi that uses a touching domestic drama as foundation.
The festival's dark horse may very well be Days of Glory, by Franco-Algerian Rachid Bouchareb, which deserves a prize for being the most important film to screen here this year.
The tale of four North Africans who volunteer to leave their homelands to liberate France from Nazi occupation in World War II, Days of Glory is certain to provoke a lively debate on the role of foreigners in French history and in French society today.
All three films feature strong performances by male actors.
In The Caiman, Silvio Orlando is excellent as a down-on-his-luck movie producer desperately trying to save his career and his marriage, while in The Family Friend Giacomo Rizzo, as Geremia the "golden-hearted" usurer, manages to be both vulgar and vulnerable.
Sami Bouajila contributes an impressive performance to Days of Glory as an ambitious Algerian corporal who protests against the discrimination his men suffer in the French army.
Another strong male performance was that of French actor Jean- Pierre Bacri, who portrays the venal, opportunistic mayor of a beach resort town in Nicole Garcia's otherwise humdrum Charlie Says.
Two other films that may have impressed the Cannes jury, which this year is headed by Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai, are Ken Loach's poignant Irish rebellion film The Wind that Shakes the Barley and Andrea Arnold's stark first feature Red Road.
American films were among the biggest disappointments of this year's Cannes festival, with Richard Kelly's eagerly awaited Southland Tales drawing most of the critics' displeasure.
Sofia Coppola's pop film biography Marie Antoinette, starring Kirsten Dunst, was greeted by a chorus of boos during its first screening, though it was too lukewarm a film to merit any strong reaction.
And Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki's Lights in the Dusk, a Chaplinesque story about loneliness, was too slight and suffered greatly through comparison with his The Man Without a Past, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2002.
But the nine-member jury often works in mysterious ways, and no Cannes film festival is complete without an awards decision that leaves critics speechless.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would