“Taking Woodstock” (2009)
There are many levels on which “Taking Woodstock,” a would-be sweet comedy about a motel owner’s son (Demetri Martin) who helps convince his town to hold the world-changing Woodstock musical festival, doesn’t make much sense. But primarily, it makes no sense as an Ang Lee film: it’s a messy, occasionally heartfelt but unfocused and unsatisfying rag-bag from a filmmaker noted for his precision and elegance. The boos were scattered rather than vitriolic, but even that feels damning —with The New York Times noting that it “lacked the passion of Mr. Lee’s finest films,” the real surprise is that enough people felt strongly enough about it to react vocally at all. But indifference is just as fatal as all-out condemnation, and when the film missed the obvious landmark of Woodstock’s fortieth anniversary and slunk into theaters at the end of summer with little fanfare, audiences failed to get on its groove then either. Critic Melissa Anderson was especially cutting, saying it simply “recycles 60’s tropes” and is full of “inane, occasionally borderline offensive portrayals of Jews, performance artists, trannies, Vietnam vets, squares and freaks,” but even that feels like more passion that we were able to summon for the red-headed stepchild of Lee’s filmography (yes, including “Hulk“).
“Wild at Heart” (1990)
Two murderous lovebirds played by Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern burn through an American wasteland while being pursued by the girl’s psychotic mother and a hitman named Bobby Peru in Lynch’s surprise Palme winner. It was a surprise not only because of its lurid content, but because the critical reception had been so very negative. Roger Ebert called it “dishonest,” while Sight & Sound accused Lynch of being more interested in iconography than character. Which is true, but also the point. Lynch’s stock in Cannes only got worse when he screened “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” there just two years later to even cruddier notices. But “Wild at Heart” had the last laugh —or rather crazed cackle— when the Jury headed by Bernardo Bertolucci awarded it the Palme, and it became anointed as a favorite among Lynch fans almost immediately after those boos had died down (something it would take ‘Fire Walk With Me’ much longer to achieve). With its queasy, graphic scenes of mutilation and perverse sexuality, and its unapologetically pop sensibility, the “Wild at Heart” win retrospectively feels like one of the most surprising and therefore best choices made by the festival.
“The Da Vinci Code” (2006)
There are films that transcend or at least improve upon the trashiness of their source material, and there’s Ron Howard‘s adaptation of the Dan Brown bazillion-seller. Starring Tom Hanks as intrepid, bewigged historical detective Robert Langdon, the film version manages to be just as silly as the book, but also injects a lethal dose of dullness, as though inspired by Brown’s awful prose. And even with the lower bar accorded Big American Star Vehicles in Cannes, the film was was marked by “a storm of incredulous laughter and the owl-looking hooting that French audiences use to expression derision” to quote the Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw. But The Telegraph noted that “the booing brought Cannes to life,” and noted that he and other journalists would swap their favorite groan-worthy “Da Vinci Code” lines like baseball cards (“The Vitruvian Man! It’s one of Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous sketches!”). It was released amid a swarm of downright hateful reviews, but the movie was a big enough hit that it inspired the sequel “Angels & Demons,” which was exponentially sillier (and therefore way more fun) than the predecessor. That film climaxed with a miniature black hole opening up above the Vatican, which amounts to what many critics wished had happened over the Palais for ‘Da Vinci Code”s premiere.
“The Paperboy” (2012)
Were critics right to boo Lee Daniels’ “The Paperboy,” the film for which the term “hot mess” seems to have been coined, when it played at Cannes back in 2012? Well, what would you do if you walked in with no expectations save for the reference point of Daniels’ comparatively understated previous feature “Precious,” and then sat through this garish, overheated melodrama in which a reporter investigates a case involving a death row inmate, his sexpot girlfriend and a hunky neighborhood delivery boy in the steamy deep South? Unusually for this list, “The Paperboy” is as bad as contemporary reviews (our F grade notice included) claimed: a lurid, campy clusterfuck of ideas and plotlines, featuring now-legendary scenes in which Zac Efron’s titular hunk has Nicole Kidman extinguish a jellyfish-induced wound by peeing on him, and then when Kidman brings her lusty convict lover (John Cusack) to orgasm via some sort of telekinesis from across the room. The Croisette is no place for irreverent, sleazy tomfoolery like “The Paperboy,” though the movie is so brazen in its quest to be awful that it practically begs to be rediscovered as a midnight movie. In that context, inappropriate laughter and howls of outrage might even seem like a positive response.
“Irreversible” (2002)
It’s a no-brainer that provocateur Gaspar Noe‘s most controversial work, in which the lives of three carefree Parisians are forever changed after a brutal sexual assault, would elicit extreme reactions. Still regarded as one of the most provocative films ever to debut on the Croisette —it’s a film that detractors insist advocates misogyny, homophobic brutality and worse— it has its vocal defenders, but many of the early notices were almost as savage as the film itself. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw said “only in hungover, sensation-starved Cannes could this extraordinarily unpleasant, crude, fatuous piece of swaggering macho naivety be considered interesting” (yeah, he didn’t like it). As a genuinely transgressive work of underground art, “Irreversible” all but goads its audience to walk out, and with the two most horrific scenes (the fire-hydrant face-smashing and the now-infamous nine-minute rape sequence) occurring before the first hour is up, only the most hardy or desensitized souls remained in their seats to boo. But this can’t have been unforeseen, or even unwelcome, given the film’s subsequent rep as prime extreme cinema. It’s tough to imagine Noe will ever again get a response as deeply fueled by scandal, disgust and fascination —certainly last year’s “Love” got nothing like the notoriety of this film.