ROUND UP: Cannes Pros & Cons, Big Deals, and Opening “Up”

A scene from “Up.” Image courtesy of the Cannes Film Festival.

Whether, or how, Cannes matters didn’t change the fact that the festival did indeed kick off today with the world premiere of Pixar’s latest, “Up.” The first animated film to open the festival was, it seems, an almost unqualified triumph. Reporting on the screening, indieWIRE’s Eugene Hernandez writes that the film “is a grand visual spectacle on a big screen, pulling viewers into a striking three dimensional world and eschewing the sort of visual sight gags found in typical 3-D movies. Quite emotional at times, some viewers had to wipe tears from beneath their 3-D glasses today while experiencing the emotional story of an aging man and a young boy who set out on a dramatic adventure together.” Echoing his praise, Daniel Kasman, blogging in the Auteurs Notebook, calls it “the animation studio’s simplest, truest, and strangest film yet,” while the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw notes that the film got the festival “off to the most sublime flying start… It really is a lovely film: smart, funny, high-spirited and sweet-natured, reviving memories of classic adventures from the pens of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne, and movies like Frank Capra’s ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ and Albert Lamorisse’s ‘The Red Balloon.’”

Meanwhile, the business side of the festival got off to a busy start - suggestively a notch in the “does matter” column. Before opening night came to close, four major acquisitions were announced, two of them care of Sony Pictures Classics. The distributor snagged the U.S. rights to both Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon” and Jan Kounen’s “Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky”, the festival’s closing night film.  A few hours earlier, IFC announced a reunion with “4 Months” director Cristian Mungui, acquiring “Tales From The Golden Age,” which Mungui co-directed with Ioana Uricaru, Hanno Hoefer, Razvan Marculescu, and Constantin Popescu. And finally, indieWIRE buzzed about Bob Berney’s as-yet-unnamed company taking on Jane Campion’s Cannes competition title, “Bright Star.”

Finally, for those of you discovering Cannes for the first time this year (or still unsure quite how to negotiate the experience despite multiple visits), filmmaker Gabriel Fleming blogged 15 quick steps on how to survive Cannes without really trying.

Be sure to check back here at indieWIRE for ongoing coverage of the Cannes Film Festival. You can also track any of the competition titles on indieWIRE’s freshly launched Cannes film pages.