Cannes 2009: Dancing in the snow

Gasp.

Breathe in, breathe out. Pause. Excitement building. No..must breathe again.

Who am I kidding....

YAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Cannes 2009 line-up is announced and that means, once again, the film festival year has officially kicked off!!!!!

Joy. Joy.

And the line-up is absolutely mouth-watering. Of course it is, it always is. And I am willing to bet all the critics lucky enough to see these films will once again complain about how substandard Cannes is this year, about how Cannes used to be better decades ago. Blah. Don't care. The point is these are the movies I rather see any day given the pathetic choices hogging multiplexes across my snowy city -- yes that is not a typo, there is snow on the ground despite it being end of April.

So...the line-up:

Opening film: Up (Pete Docter and Bob Peterson)
Closing film: Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (Jan Kounen)

In competition:

Bright Star (Jane Campion)

Spring Fever (Lou Ye)

Antichrist (Lars von Trier)

Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé)

Face (Tsai Ming-liang)

Les Herbes folles (Alain Resnais)

In the Beginning (Xavier Giannoli)

A Prophet (Jacques Audiard)

The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)

Vengeance (Johnnie To)

The Time That Remains (Elia Suleiman)

Vincere (Marco Bellocchio)

Kinatay (Brillante Mendoza)

Thirst (Park Chan-wook)

Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodóvar)

Map of the Sounds of Tokyo (Isabel Coixet)

Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold)

Looking for Eric (Ken Loach)

Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino)

Taking Woodstock (Ang Lee)

Out of competition

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (Terry Gilliam)

The Army of Crime (Robert Guédiguian)

Agora (Alejandro Amenábar)

Comments:

Absolutely delighted to see that Mendoza has gotten his film into this year's competition as well, following last year’s Serbis. He remains the only director I have chatted with from the above list. Ok, it was not really chatting but me mostly gushing over how great his films Slingshot and Foster Child were :)

Even more thrilled to see that Alejandro Amenábar has a new film out. I am a big fan of his work and have seen all his previous 4 features -- his Open Your Eyes is a personal favourite (remade into Vanilla Sky) plus admired his first feature Thesis.

I will have more to say in upcoming days. But for now, just delighted :)