What's with those long Cannes' standing ovations?

I’ve been travelling lately and haven’t had the time to watch movies. So don’t have a lot to comment on. However, the Cannes Film Festival, just ended, always brings a smile to my face. That’s because so many films – seemingly good or bad in terms of future critical and popular appeal – end up getting standing ovations by the beau monde attendees. And not just a brief ovation but ones that last for minutes on end. This year, the haut monde beautiful people gave Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis – the “most talked about” firm at the festival – a seven-minute standing. Critically the movie, Coppola’s swan song for which he spilled $120 mil of his own bread and which stars Adam Driver, has been a bomb with some dubbing it Magaflopolis. Not to be outdone is Kevin Costner’s western epic An American Saga – Chapter 1. As a Brit critic sneered, “The Cannes audience gave it a ten-minute standing ovation, but perhaps they were just trying to get their blood circulating again.” What is it about these longstanding Cannes’ ovations that have been going on year after festival year? I posit the seats are too damn hard in the Grand Theatre Lumiere. Said Reuben Baron of Wealth of Geeks, “At most film festivals, any standing ovation stirs excitement. Not so at the Cannes Film Festival, where audiences will stand up and applaud for literally anything — even for films they also booed. To judge the true hype level for films premiering at Cannes, measure the length of a film’s standing ovation. Nowhere else in the world could a three-minute standing ovation mean “people didn’t really care for it,” but when moviegoers at the prestigious French festival love a movie, they’ll stay on their feet for 10 or even 20 minutes! Critics, the general public, and Oscar voters went on to share the love for some of these films. Others, it seems you had to be there to get into the applauding spirit.”

My upcoming festival schedule? There’s the Windsor Jewish Film Festival at the Capitol Theatre next month June 17 – 20 (see earlier posts about its rescheduling and venue change). And then I’ll have to wait until fall. But what an autumn line-up! I usually head to Montreal for the Festival du nouveau cinema (FNC) - the city’s oldest film festival but with often premier and cutting-edge works, October 9 - 20. Then it will be time to return home for the Windsor International Film Festival (WIFF) Oct. 24 – Nov. 3. And for the first time, Windsor’s under-the-radar but internationally well-regarded avant-garde festival, Media City, in its 26th edition, has been rescheduled this year to Nov. 7 – 11, immediately following WIFF. After being in London last fall and just getting the dregs of the famed BFI maybe, with advance notice, I could scoot over for a few days this year. But it also runs Oct. 9 – 20.  Maybe split the diff between Montreal and London?

Best of the bunch, Frosted over and another Hot Docs misstep

Some of the better films I've watched on Netflix lately have been the Argentinian film Rest in Peace, the French film Nothing to Hide and the US flick The Rewrite. In Sebastián Borensztein’s Rest in Peace (2024) a businessman is caught in a massive debt crisis and has to do something to save himself from the mob. What he does becomes an existential crisis for both him and his family. The film has taut acting and good pacing, shot in Argentina and Paraguay. In Nothing to Hide, this “dramady” is more drama than comedy if only because of what it reveals about the duplicitous character of human nature. The 2018 film by Fred Cavayé uses the metaphor of a full lunar eclipse for the evening of a dinner party, when a group of friends play a game that cuts too deeply into their psyches. (Interesting how even with dubbing rather than subtitles some foreign films can be better than American ones.) In 2014’s The Rewrite (Marc Lawrence) Hugh Grant teams up with Marisa Tomei in a college-setting comedy. I’d forgotten how enjoyable Grant is to watch, one of those actors you never want to miss a movie he’s been in. And he’s great here, the charming, witty and self-denigrating Brit who winds up in a job he never wanted in a backwater town he’d never heard of. Tomei, also a personal fave, plays off him equally, undermining his professional arrogance and giving him the comeuppance he deserves. 

But this film shouldn’t have been released. Jerry Seinfeld’s directorial debut, Unfrosted, came out this month on Netflix. The comedy, starring, again, Hugh Grant,  with Amy Schumer, Jim Gaffigan and Melissa McCarthy, is laughable alright but you’re laughing at it not with it. It’s a Baby Boomer’s delight as a fictional version of how Kellogg’s created everyone’s favorite breakfast joke, Pop Tarts. The entire film has the look of a cartoon. That's part of the point with all those breakfast cartoon characters, interesting how they so appropriately went together during Saturday morning TV cartoons. And while some of the sets are faithfully nostalgic, this flick just tries too be hard to be funny. (Ok, it’s Pop Tarts – we get it!) I felt sorry for Seinfeld with what amounts to a hokey premise and script with the look of a bad college stage play. Likely, all these good actors, their payday made, are trying to put this thing behind them.

Two things occurred to me when watching films from about 10 or 15 years ago, such as The Rewrite and Morning Glory (Roger Michell 2010). One is how better or more professionally dressed people were even that recent time ago. In offices suits and formal wear abound. Nowadays pretty much anything goes, often the uglier the better. The second is age. Many of those actors probably have gray hair now, nor likely dressed as well! And two dead giveaways for films that might seem recent but are many years old are the types of cellphones and desktop computers in scenes, especially those of the heavy boxy look.

Hot Docs, the long running Toronto documentary film festival, not only is in major debt and has suffered a management crisis where some employees walked last year calling the operation a  “toxic” work environment. But it had – just had - to come out and make a statement about the Israel-Hamas War. Of course it was biased to the pro-Palestinian side, the natural position of leftists, and the arts community is made up of plenty of them. According to Honest Reporting Canada, the fest “expressed sympathy for ‘the Palestinian people’ while failing to mention Israel or Hamas, the genocidal terrorist group which started the war, a single time. Equally bad, the statement falsely claimed that Israel is holding Palestinians hostage, a claim without any merit.” Hot Docs has never recovered from the pandemic with audiences down 40 per cent since 2019.