Posted on 05/22/2004 11:02:05 PM PDT by My Favorite Headache
CANNES, France - American filmmaker Michael Moore (news)'s "Fahrenheit 9/11," a scathing indictment of White House actions after the Sept. 11 attacks, won the top prize Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival (news - web sites).
AP Photo
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AFP Slideshow: Cannes Film Festival
'Fahrenheit 9/11' Wins Cannes' Top Prize (AP Video)
"Fahrenheit 9/11" was the first documentary to win Cannes' prestigious Palme d'Or since Jacques Cousteau's and Louis Malle (news)'s "The Silent World" in 1956.
"What have you done? I'm completely overwhelmed by this. Merci," Moore said after getting a standing ovation from the Cannes crowd.
The grand prize, the festival's second-place honor, went to South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook's "Old Boy," a blood-soaked thriller about a man out for revenge after years of inexplicable imprisonment.
Moore was momentarily flabbergasted when he took the stage to accept the award, a big difference from his fiery speech against President Bush (news - web sites) after winning the best-documentary Academy Award for 2002's "Bowling for Columbine."
"You have to understand, the last time I was on an awards stage, in Hollywood, all hell broke loose," Moore said.
The best-actress award went to Maggie Cheung (news) for her role in "Clean" as a junkie trying to straighten out her life and regain custody of her young son after her rock-star boyfriend dies of a drug overdose.
Fourteen-year-old Yagira Yuuya was named best actor for the Japanese film "Nobody Knows," in which he plays the eldest of four sibling raised in isolation, who must take charge of the family when their mother leaves.
The directing and writing prizes went to French filmmakers. Tony Gatlif won the directing honor for "Exiles," his road-trip about a couple on a sensual journey from France to Algeria.
Agnes Jaoui and her romantic partner, Jean-Pierre Bacri, won the screenplay award for "Look at Me," their study in self-image centering on an overweight young woman who feels neglected by loved ones. Jaoui and Bacri also co-star.
"Fahrenheit 9/11" won the top award at a festival that sharply divided Cannes moviegoers, who found a solid crop of good movies among the 19 entries in the festival's main competition but no great ones that rose to front-runner status.
While "Fahrenheit 9/11" was well-received by Cannes audiences, many critics felt it was inferior to Moore's Academy Award-winning documentary "Bowling for Columbine," which earned him a special prize at Cannes in 2002.
Some critics speculated that if "Fahrenheit 9/11" won the top prize, it would be more for the film's politics than its cinematic value.
With Moore's customary blend of humor and horror, "Fahrenheit 9/11" accuses the Bush camp of stealing the 2000 election, overlooking terrorism warnings before Sept. 11 and fanning fears of more attacks to secure Americans' support for the Iraq (news - web sites) war.
Moore appears on-screen far less in "Fahrenheit 9/11" than in "Bowling for Columbine" or his other documentaries. The film relies largely on interviews, footage of U.S. soldiers and war victims in Iraq, and archival footage of Bush.
Just back in Cannes after his daughter's college graduation in the United States, Moore dedicated the award to "my daughter and to all the children in America and Iraq and throughout the world who suffered through our actions."
"Fahrenheit 9/11" made waves in the weeks leading up to Cannes after the Walt Disney Co. refused to let subsidiary Miramax release the film in the United States because of its political content. Miramax bosses Harvey and Bob Weinstein are negotiating to buy back the film and find another distributor, with hopes of landing it in theaters by Fourth of July weekend.
Moore said after the ceremony that he expected right-wing media outlets in the United States to characterize his prize as an award from the French, whose government opposed the U.S.-led war on Iraq. He noted that the nine-person Cannes jury that awarded prizes had only one French member and four Americans, including jury president Quentin Tarantino (news) and actress Kathleen Turner (news).
Many Americans now realize the French are "good friends of America who tried to do the right thing and tell us this was the wrong road," Moore said. "We owe the people of this country an apology for the way they were debased and treated in our media."
Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's "Tropical Malady" — widely regarded by Cannes audiences as a snoozer for its elongated scenes of a man wandering a jungle alone, with no dialogue — won the festival's third-place jury prize.
Another jury prize went to Irma P. Hall for her role as an elderly Southern woman who foils a casino robbery in the Coen brothers' crime comedy "The Ladykillers," starring Tom Hanks (news) as the heist's ringleader.
Keren Yedaya's "Or," about a Tel Aviv prostitute in failing health and her teenage daughter, won the Golden Camera award for best film by a first-time director. The U.S.-born Yedaya, who grew up in Israel, gives lectures about the problems of prostitution for government officials and mental-health professionals.
Earlier Saturday, Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene (news)'s "Moolaade," an examination of the ritual of female circumcision that earned rave reviews, won the top prize in a secondary Cannes competition called "Un Certain Regard."
The 12-day festival's closing film — "De-Lovely," Kevin Kline (news)'s musical biography of Cole Porter — screened immediately after the awards. Kline and co-star Ashley Judd (news) then hosted a beach concert featuring Sheryl Crow (news), Alanis Morissette (news), Natalie Cole (news) and other singers from "De-Lovely" performing Porter tunes.
The festival was to wrap up Sunday with encore screenings of award winners and other key movies that played the festival, including a combined, four-hour version of Tarantino's two "Kill Bill" installments.
Save us from this Moore mockumentary, pseudo-truth and foreign-fed b.s.
If you want to watch some real cinema get your hands on a copy of "Caged Heat III." Not only does it incisively point out the sadistic nature of communism in Eastern Europe, but it has hours of intense, girl-on-girl action.
Now that's what I call film-making!
Al Qaeda would also like to give Moore an award. He can pick it up at Abu Ghraib prison.
They all have blood on their hands as far as I'm concerned. Earthly rewards.
I detest democrats. They sit around hoping and praying for disaster to befall our country and our President. If the disaster isn't disastrous enough, they have to make it worse. They want the country to fail, our President to fail, our military to fail . . . then and only then will they find happiness. WHAT A BUNCH OF EVIL BAST--DS!
The fact is, this was a political award from his fellow travelers, pure and simple.
The mere fact that they felt it necessary to disabuse concerned cinema watchers/foreign media of the notion that it was a political award just shows you where their true intentions lie in coming to this decision.
I don't happen to agree with your characterization of Tarantino though. Even though I have yet to see the "Kill Bill" franchise, I've watched a lot of the films he's directed or wrote up to this point in time, e.g. Pulp Fiction, Natural Born Killers, etc., and think that he's pretty good insofar as his particular cinematic niche is concerned.
In fact, "Jackie Brown" is probably one of the best action dramas that was made in the '90s. I suggest that you rent it if you ever have the opportunity.
The only thing that annoys me about Tarantino is my obnoxious acquaintances continual reference to him when trying to come up with an analogous physical archetype.
Telling me that I look like Quentin Tarantino is not a compliment in my judgment. And, if it's meant as an insult, than I think that they should be able to think of something a little bit more creative.
>>then and only then will they find happiness
I wouldn't bet on it....They have an infinate supply of negativity...When the country goes down the shooter - they'll blame it on capitalism and install a Marxist dictatorship.
Someone set them up the ringer
Maybe they should have been forced to watch a Merchant-Ivory film for a few hours.
I am disgusted to hear of Moore's twisting of a fine , provocative science fiction story. (But if the critics praise a movie or book,I will USUALLY dislike it; now why is that?)
17. The public has a right to know about Hillary's cattle trades, but George W. Bush's driving record is none of our business.
No, in fact George Bush's driving record was public, otherwise that yahoo up in Maine would have never found out about his little episode up there. Besides, I don't think George Bush was ever bribed thru a driving ruse.
18. You support states' rights, which means Attorney General John Ashcroft can tell states what local voter initiatives they have a right to adopt.
Not sure what you are referring to there, but it has long been established that states cannot intrude on Constitutional Rights. I think we may have fought a Civil War over that one. I guess its okay with you when big government libs use the fed government to grind their heal into the states but federal power is the worst thing in the world when Republicans are in control, isn't it?
19. What Bill Clinton did in the 1960s is of vital national interest, but what Bush did in the '80s is irrelevant.
Unless Bush was openly protesting his country on foreign soil during wartime I can't really argue with this statement.
20. Trade with Cuba is wrong because the country is Communist, but trade with China and Vietnam is vital to a spirit of international harmony.
And who led the charge for trade with Vietnam? None other than the Manchurian candidate himself, John F'n Kerry! I'm not sure the label "Communist" really fits the Chinese anymore. Based on their recent economic activity, I'd call them a "capitalistic dictatorship" whose dictators happen to be Communists. Other than that, I can't really argue this one except for perhaps citing the Monroe doctrine with regard to Cuba.
Michael has been grasping a conspiracy theories since the day the planes hit. I think Michael even bought into the "Timothy McVeigh - white guys" hijackers in the first couple of days. He also admits that his world was shattered as he was completing "Columbine" and here this massive attack was carried out without any guns.
I found this on Ray Bradbury's website but no quote from Ray himself:
On censorship, Bradbury is very clear in the F451 dialogues (Montague, Faber, and Beatty) that the main problem was not top-down censorship, but bottom-up laziness.
04/04/03
Author Ray Bradbury thinks Michael Moore's title will confuse people with his classic sci-fi novel Fahrenheit 451 and he wants Moore to change it. "He can't have my title," said Bradbury. "We've got an important film coming out [Fahrenheit 451], the book's having its 50th anniversary in October. If he wants his movie to be an homage to me, why not title it, 'Bradbury, where the hell are you now that we need you?'" (Variety)
Jackie Brown is probably his best because it follows a narrative structure more than the other post modern attempts at films depicting violemce for violence's sake.
Certain scenes are memorable in Pulp Fiction but entertaining or enlightening...not at all. Purely ego driven manic and distressingly meaningless drivel driven by good performances...and that's about it.
USA Today contacted me, will run my letter to the editor on this topic in the next day or two...
I can understand your larger point. A lot of the stuff he directs is merely a carbon-copy of lame Japanese/Southeast Asian cinema.
I remember having a drawn-out, utterly pointless conversation with my brother one time about a particularly dreadful piece of Japanese filler. He claimed that "Ichii the Killer" was an extraordinary cinematic experience; I attempted to refute his argument by deliberately delineating all of the major failings of this film, the chief one being that it was total piece of crap.
We weren't able to come to an agreement but I was satisfied that I had pointed out the glaring failures of this film.
"Jackie Brown" is by far the best Tarantino flick out, most likely for the reasons cited in your post.
Why did you bother to bite your tongue? I would have said:
"Dudette, where's your brain?"
http://www.pabaah.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=494&mode=&order=0&thold=0
USA Today printed my letter to the editor in today's paper...
exactly, ignoring won't work...must confront this threat head on!
My letter to editor in USA Today:
http://www.pabaah.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=494&mode=&order=0&thold=0
Well stated.
thx
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