Cannes You Dig It? 2009 Film Festival Winners: An Austrian-tatious Party.
The Twitteratti are pecking away the wins at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival that don't involve Jean-Claude Van Damme getting freak-ay with some fan(nes). Michael Moore, pictured, wasn't there. This year's winners:
Do the Michael Haneke Panky! His film, The White Ribbon, won the king shit prize, the Palme d'Or.
You may know the Austrian director from his sadism-happy foreign fare like the awesome Caché (American remake on the way) for which he won Best Director at Cannes in 2005, and Funny Games (American remake already made). It's a (get this) sadistic movie that received mostly tepid applause about a German village that takes place around WWI, and opens with someone falling off a horse. It's a Michael Haneke movie, so nobody's going to really be able to explain it to you (or why you'd want to watch it) until you actually see it.
The best director prize went to an underdog, Filipino director Brillante Mendoza, for his graphic hitman drama Kinatay, a film that was hugely buzzy before the festival, not so much during. Variety more or less said it sucked, and it sounds too much like last year's Gomorra for American audiences to really care.
Finally, British director Andrea Arnold won a second jury prize for her film Fish Tank; she's sharing it with South Korean director Park Chan-Wook (director of the incredible Oldboy. American, Will Smith-helmed remake on the way. Seriously.) for a film called Thirst, about a vampire-priest. No word on what the Vatican or vampire blog Bloodcopy have to say about this, but chances are that it - like anything American film execs would care about at Cannes that isn't in English - will eventually be given the shitty American remake treatment itself. Foreign languages: fail.