Word: winterbottom
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...pretend sex, to mirror the spectacles of fake violence in summer action pictures, but genuine, clinical whoopee. The French led the way, with the sex-splatter epic Baise-moi and Catherine Breillat's Romance. Now comes the first film (actually, digital video) by a respected British director--Michael Winterbottom, whose works include Welcome to Sarajevo, Jude and 24 Hour Party People...
Whenever a fiction film goes hard-core, the artifice of character and story disappears, and the movie instantly becomes a documentary record--something between a stag film and a nature special on Nova. Realizing this, Winterbottom dispenses with most of the standard narrative props: there's no Other Man, no mistaken identity, no quest. Matt and Lisa are not really people, in the multiplex-movie sense. They are performers, like the band members, working in public for our pleasure. The only drama is that, omigod, they're doing it! And one of them, O'Brien, is a professional actor. (Stilley...
...cusp of commercial success, but Curtis, an epileptic who was tortured by his failing marriage, took a sad shortcut to musical immortality. The band's most famous single, Love Will Tear Us Apart, became the singer's memorial-stone epitaph. The story has so far spawned two films - Michael Winterbottom's 2002 24 Hour Party People and a new movie based on a book by Curtis' widow, which begins filming later this year...
...these fascinating acts of cinematic aggression, which either skirt hard-core or plunge right in, Breillat strips her heroines to the bleeding soul. Anatomy of Hell, Breillat's latest, is notorious for the objects--a rake, a lipstick case, a tampon--used as sexual implements. Across the Channel, Michael Winterbottom (Jude, Welcome to Sarajevo) tries to span the chasm separating serious cinema from hard-core with his new 9 Songs. Here the sex is explicit but tender, less a porn-film workout than a view of two people trying, for a while, to become...
...program lacked anything, it was an old-fashioned film scandale. In another venue, Fahrenheit 9/11 might have done the trick; but since nearly everyone at Cannes is left wing, the debate was minimal (except for Godard, who impishly said the film would help re-elect Bush). British director Michael Winterbottom's 9 Songs, with its hard-core porn elements, showed only in the Marché du Film, so it was ineligible for an Outrage award. So Cannes settled for annoying the American right. Even before the Palme d'Or was announced, two participants on stage praised Moore's film...