Authors — Aaron Hillis
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Cannes 2015 Critics’ Notebook 2: Love and Youth
Quick, try to describe Irreversible and Enter the Void writer-director Gaspar Noé without relying on the words “controversial,” “provocateur,” “bad boy” (or, more Gallically put, “enfant terrible“) or “transgressive.” Noé’s latest potential scandal-maker, Love — hotly anticipated after smutty publicity materials teased it as a 3D art-house porno, complete with semen-sticky title treatment — was surprisingly softer and less shocking than anyone expected from last night’s midnight premiere. It’s also callow, shallow and numbingly insipid, despite its explicit mélange of blowjobs, threesomes and orgies. (Seriously, how does one make hardcore fucking more vanilla than Fifty Shades of Grey?) In a two-hour-plus scrapbook of flashbacks and time jumps forward, a […]
by Aaron Hillis on May 21, 2015 -
Cannes 2015 Critic Notebook #1: Standing Tall, Tale of Tales, The Lobster
Could it be, six features deep at the most exalted film festival in the world, that this writer’s favorite film isn’t some scrappy Critics’ Week indie or an ennui-driven Eastern European drama of profound sociopolitical relevance — but rather, the $150-million studio juggernaut Mad Max: Fury Road? Nothing new needs to be said about the most inventive, thrilling, lyrical action flick in ages (considering it’s now opened worldwide) except that it’s radically more feminist than Emmanuelle Bercot’s Standing Tall. Cannes’ first opening night selection to be directed by a woman in nearly three decades, Bercot’s juvenile justice-system drama — a clumsy, histrionic […]
by Aaron Hillis on May 15, 2015 -
Cannes 2014: Diary of a Party Crasher
(Aaron Hillis’ first two festival dispatches can be read here.) The past 11 days are mighty hazy. Double that number and you’ll not only know how many features I’ve seen at Cannes, but the quantity of cocktail mixers, dance-a-thons, karaoke get-togethers, and other costly promotional soirées littering the Croisette that I came into like a wrecking ball. Only two of them actually invited me, but I don’t get shut out of parties at Cannes. Sometimes cinema can wait. “You’re burning the candle at both ends,” chided one of my Cannes flatmates just now, an industrious journalist who sees more films […]
by Aaron Hillis on May 30, 2014 -
Cannes 2014: Maps to the Stars, Clouds of Sils Maria, The Tribe, Adieu Au Langage
That’s Cannes, man. The red carpet’s rolled and stashed; you don’t have to go home but you can’t afford to stay here. Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s three-hour-plus, mixed-reviewed Winter Sleep pocketed the Palme d’Or. Sorry, Naomi Kawase with your so-called “masterpiece” and Xavier Dolan, who said he “deserved” to win top honors, juries are subjective. The more burning issue is when undistributed landmarks like Adieu Au Langage and The Tribe will find their way to your eyes and ears. Until my final take on the 2014 edition of Cannes appears in the next issue of Filmmaker, here are my […]
by Aaron Hillis on May 29, 2014 -
Cannes 2014: Girlhood, It Follows, Red Army, Foxcatcher and Stray Duds
If it weren’t for the inflexible, charmingly antiquated press hierarchies of the Cannes Film Festival, where journalists queue up and get let into screenings by priority of their rainbow badge color (yellow, blue, pink, pink with a yellow dot, and the all-powerful white), it would only be a matter of time before influential Twitter users were accredited. The social media juggernaut of mass brevity — like college, marriage, or colonic irrigation — is not for everyone, but during Cannes, it’s the handiest tool for aggregating kneejerk reactions to what typically shakes down as half of the year’s Most Important Films. […]
by Aaron Hillis on May 20, 2014 -
Three Questions for Jonathan Demme
Academy Award-winning director Jonathan Demme has made Hollywood spectacles (The Silence of the Lambs, The Manchurian Candidate), eccentric indies (Rachel Getting Married, Something Wild), timeless rock docs (Stop Making Sense, Neil Young Journeys) and other unclassifiable delights. At the 12th annual Festival International du Film de Marrakech, Demme’s filmmaking legacy was honored with both a formal tribute, and an invite to give a “masterclass” to an enraptured Moroccan audience. Filmmaker sat down with Demme to discuss his iconoclastic career. Filmmaker: For decades, you’ve been slinking between narratives and documentaries. What interests you more? Demme: I’ve always followed my enthusiasm. If […]
by Aaron Hillis on Jan 9, 2013 -
Marrakech International Film Festival
Less than three hours before this departing journalist had to hail his morning airport shuttle, he’s rumored to have been onstage at a five-star Moroccan hotel nightclub, loosened by too many free scotch whiskeys, guest performing a White Stripes song (supported by a mostly Canadian gig band with scantily clad, former cheerleaders as backup dancers) for an audience best described as “the 1 percent.” Cannes may have its prestigious world premieres and swingin’ Riviera yacht parties, but who knew that the height of film fest luxury — and if you seek it, decadence — lies in the North African desert, […]
by Aaron Hillis on Jan 10, 2012
