Friday, May 18, 2007

Bienvenue a Cannes...What Were You Thinking, TCM?

I don't know if any of you watch TCM, but the other night they aired their newest documentary Bienvenue a Cannes all about the Cannes film festival. Normally, I love their documentaries. Their recent Brando one was immensely fascinating and really peaked my interested in him again. I also loved their one about famed movie producer Irving Thalberg a couple years ago and then there are the ones about Garbo, Bette Davis and Clara Bow (among many others) that were fabulous to the extreme. So, naturally I was really anxious to watch this new documentary and imagine my surprise when it sucked as badly as it did. I thought the film would be more of a history of the festival, but the only thing in the past that it covered was the '68 cancellation and the French New Wave directors (Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Tuffaut) protesting during that aborted festival. A lot of the film was about Harvey Weinstein bragging about how much his films that won Palme d'Or's (1989's sex, lies and videotape, 1994's Pulp Fiction, 2004's Fahrenheit 9/11) changed the face of filmmaking (or something along those lines....he really is an ass). Really, the documentary was more concerned about the atmosphere of the current Cannes festivals (red carpets and the nightlife....ooooh, riveting). The only thing that was halfway interesting was the small section about the festival juries and the politics that goes on with it. If only they had centered this documentary about the history (which I know very little about and would have loved to learn about) then I would have been more interested. Here's hoping TCM's next one doesn't suck this bad.

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