Have you been following the news and disclose from the Cannes film festival this year? Which films are you most excited to see, and why?
I'm not following any of it, but I am kind of following it in that a large proportion of the 4chan/internet fandom space has decided to dedicate itself to "beating" the Cannes festival this year.
Apparently last year there were a lot of "fuck the Cannes festival" comments on some forum for film buffs, and this year that went viral and now it's a big thing. The key part of the mindset is that a large number of the festival's choices are "inauthentic, empty, poseur movies" made by people who "suck the film industry's cock" and that the people who actually make "real films" (e.g. Spielberg, Woody Allen, Tarantino) never get into the festival.
Like, this is in the words of some of these guys:
How dare people believe that simply because so many film critics have waxed poetic about a movie, that that makes it a 'good movie'.
They're out to prove that what the festival actually likes is shallow, ironic, postmodern fuck-you stuff that doesn't have any heart or soul. The way they're trying to prove this is to get a bunch of blue-chip directors together to make a fake trailer for a film called "Blue Is The Warmest Colour," and then find some way to get the trailer into the festival, win, and get these guys' movie screened at Cannes.
Incidentally, the choice of the film was controversial in that it is apparently not some punchy takedown of pretentious film critics like the idea might have you expect. It is, to quote the filmmakers:
Some people may assume that the film is a critique of the Cannes festival, or of serious film critics who award the festival's most prestigious prizes (Palme d'Or). But this is not the case. Cannes is a wonderful, glamorous, nocturnal box of chocolates. We love Cannes. We love Serious Film Critics.
In other words, it's a film explicitly made to appeal to what the filmmakers, being huge internet film nerds, think would appeal to them. It's clear they have no idea whether this is what the judges in Cannes are looking for, but that's OK, because they're just trying to prove something, not win some award.
People can't submit unsolicited stuff to the festival, but I guess the thinking is that the film would get there if the filmmakers submitted as part of some larger package, like a themed shorts block or something? Or, just ask the head of the festival to allow them to show it, and a blue-chip director might make the case for them?
This whole thing is kind of fascinating, to me. The sense of shared experience, of "this is what we like" rather than "this is what what I like" is very compelling. The canny choice of the source material is also kind of funny -- "we can make this film that says 'fuck your awards and fuck your critics' into a pretty good film, which will increase the chances that our film gets recognized by the critics and gets invited to the festival."
There are a lot of takedowns of the film as a film out there, mostly by people who are not amused by this whole project, and the takedowns tend to say things like "who cares whether Cannes likes it, it's going to fail no matter what because it's not a good movie."
So, like, it's funny (and a little depressing) to think of people like me on the internet spending a whole lot of effort on this, when at the end of the day the thing people are going to remember about the film is not "people on the internet spent 10 weeks of their lives making this," it's "people on the internet make a film to prove Cannes is stupid, and Cannes refuses to watch it." Which is obviously going to have a different cultural effect than the "the internet made a film" story.
There's a guy trying to get the Cannes jury to get the judges fired. On the internet. Just as a sort of "yay, we won" I guess?
