2005 Cannes Film Festival

May is just around the corner, and on the 10th begins The Cannes Film Festival. Looks like a great slate of features in competition this year. Here are the twenty films vying for prizes...

• A History of Violence (David Cronenberg)
• L'enfant (Jean-Pierre Dardenne)
• Where the Truth Lies (Atom Egoyan)
• Free Zone (Amos Gitai)
• Caché (Michael Haneke)
• The Best of Our Times (Hsiao-hsien Hou)
• Broken Flowers (Jim Jarmusch)
• The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones)
• Bashing (Masahiro Kobayashi)
• Peindre ou Faire L'amour (Arnaud & Jean-Marie Larrieu)
• Sin City (Frank Miller & Robert Rodriquez)
• Lemming (Dominik Moll)
• Batalla en el Cielo (Carlos Reygadas)
• Kilomètre Zéro (Hiner Saleem)
• Election (Johnnie To)
• Quando sei Nato non Puoi Più Nasconderti (Marco Tullio Giordana)
• The Last Days (Gus Van Sant)
• Manderlay (Lars von Trier)
• Shanghai Dreams (Xiaoshuai Wang)
• Don't Come Knockin' (Wem Wenders)

Sin City is the only one that has played in The States yet, and there are quite a few of those I'm very anxious to see. Manderlay and Broken Flowers being at the tippy-top of my list, but I also want to see Wem Wenders' Don't Come Knockin', Cronenberg's A History of Violence, Atom Egoyan's Where the Truth Lies and Haneke's Caché. Tommy Lee Jones' feature directorial debut (he did direct a made-for-TV project a decade ago) looks promising, and I'm sure I'll see Gus Van San't's latest. Sadly most of the non-English language films getting much of a release in America depends on how well they do at Cannes. Hopefully they'll all appear here at least on video eventually.

Should be an interesting Festival this year.

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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra

I wonder if there will be any controversy like last year with Michael Moore's film. I'm curious of what Manderlay will be like and what kind of reception it will receive, especially from the american critics.

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The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, "seeing that his work was good".

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They had temporarily escaped the factories, the warehouses, the slaughterhouses, the car washes - they'd be back in captivity the next day but now they were out - they were wild with freedom. They weren't thinking about the slavery of poverty. Or the slavery of welfare and food stamps. The rest of us would be all right until the poor learned how to make atom bombs in their basements.