PopGap #05 Recap: Cannes Prize Winners

For "Cannes Winners" month I watched the Top 20 movies, according to Flickchart, which have won major prizes at the Cannes Film Festival and that I had not yet seen. Without doing any analysis of the data, I feel like this was, by far, the PopGap list with the highest quality overall. I admired parts of even my least favorite movies from the list, and only really hated parts of two out of 20 movies. I even liked Solaris, which I was dreading. The lowest rating I gave any of the movies on this list was a 4/10, while eight out of the 20 entered my Flickchart Top 500.

Here's how I ranked May's movies, from best to worst:

1. HARAKIRI (1962) — 97.93%
2. BRIEF ENCOUNTER (1945) — 97.12%
3. THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (1964) — 96.73%
4. WOMAN IN THE DUNES (1964) — 96.45%
5. VIRIDIANA (1961) — 91.34%
6. THE WAGES OF FEAR (1953) — 89.41%
7. A PROPHET (2009) — 85.83%
8. 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS (2007) — 85.16%
9. PERSEPOLIS (2007) — 68.64%
10. THE PIANIST (2002) — 67.10%
11. THE LEOPARD (1963) — 64.87%
12. THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER (1974) — 55.62%
13. Kagemusha (1980) — 54.14%
14. Z (1969) — 49.92%
15. THE LOST WEEKEND (1945) — 49.86%
16. MON ONCLE (1958) — 42.98%
17. IF.... (1968) — 42.96%
18. SOLARIS (1972) — 40.61%
19. PARIS, TEXAS (1984) — 17.30%
20. ALL THAT JAZZ (1979) — 13.33%

What did I learn?

I learned that it's possible to fall in love with a movie (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) even after severely disliking its first half-hour. I learned that I need to watch more Japanese movies from the 1960s. I learned that Tatsuya Nakadai is one of my favorite actors. I learned that if I don't write my reviews within a day of watching a movie, they will start to get backed up, and I'll have to write nine reviews in last three days of the month. I learned that, even though there were some low points, I trust Cannes far more than I trust the Academy Awards (although both are susceptible to utter garbage like Life is Beautiful). I learned that I don't need to fear Andrei Tarkovsky (but I don't need to be friends with him, either).

In the next few days, I'll post our theme for June, which will feature 10 movies that are new to me & 11 that I need to re-watch. And I think all of them (except one) are close-to or under two hours each (sigh of relief).

References

Here are the four Flickchart filters I used to generate May's list:

• The Best 'Cannes Grand Prix' Movies
• The Best 'Cannes Grand Prix du Festival International du Film' Movies
• The Best 'Cannes Jury Prize' Movies
• The Best 'Cannes Palme d'Or Winning' Movies

Most of my progress through this list was live-tweeted here:
https://twitter.com/popgap

This list is posted to Letterboxd here:
https://letterboxd.com/dorrk/list/popgap-2015-05-cannes-winners/

I also put all these movies into an Amazon "aStore:"
http://astore.amazon.com/wirecreative-20?_encoding=UTF8&node=10

You can keep track of my up-to-date Flickchart here:
http://www.flickchart.com/Charts.aspx?user=dorrk