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If you’ve ever wondered when it was that Michel Gondry, the gifted French director of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” became the world’s most annoying filmmaker, you might say the answer is, “He always was.” Yet no one, including me, quite thinks of him that way. That’s because the few works of his that have come to prominence possess a special combination of facility and charm. I adore “Eternal Sunshine,” a virtuoso movie that bends your brain and breaks your heart at the same time. You might simply choose to characterize it as the masterpiece of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, but the truth is that Gondry directed it ­— the leaps in time, the emotionally convulsive performances of Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet — with a masterful sense of play and gravitational control.

I’ve always heard that the script Kaufman originally turned in was twice as complicated, and...

One of the most delightful experiences at this year’s Cannes Film Festival was Michel Gondry’s dramatic comedy The Book of Solutions, from the Directors Fortnight sidebar. The director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Be Kind Rewind stayed away from the big screen for eight long years after the painful failure of the sloppy melodrama Mood Indigo (2013) followed with his next low budget comedy Microbe & Gasoline (2015). His only project from the past few years was an incredibly witty, heartfelt TV series called "Kidding" with Jim Carrey as Mr. Pickles, a quirky riff on Mr. Rogers. Gondry's new feature film, Le Livre des Solutions, depicts the ultimate turmoil of the moviemaking process – accumulating all of his passion, frustration & fears in a lighthearted, ironic way underlined by the usual melancholic for which he is known. // Continue Reading ›...

It’s been a long time since the last Michel Gondry movie (and perhaps even longer since the last time you actually saw one), but at least the “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” director’s semi-autobiographical new comedy offers a fun — if also fraught and occasionally worrying — explanation for why it took him eight years to follow up “Microbe & Gasoline.”

In “The Book of Solutions,” Pierre Niney plays Marc, an obvious Gondry stand-in who’s deep in post-production on a $5 million film that looks an awful lot like Gondry’s own “Mood Indigo.” And much like Gondry did with that surreal 2013 romance, which was maligned for its messy overabundance of rich ideas, Marc is struggling to find a coherent shape for his would-be opus.

“Anyone, Everyone” already sounds worryingly open-ended and ambitious based on its title alone, and it doesn’t exactly instill confidence in Marc’s financiers...

At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, filmmaker Michel Gondry debuted his first feature film since 2015’s “Microbe & Gasoline,” titled “The Book of Solutions.” So far, the film has earned rave reviews (including our own) and looks to be one of Gondry’s most vital films in quite some time. But according to the filmmaker, “The Book of Solutions” was going to look (and sound) very different when it was initially conceived.

Continue reading ‘The Book Of Solutions’: Michel Gondry Originally Wanted To Make The Film In English & Starring Adam Driver at The Playlist.

When the film you’ve always wanted to make gets shut down by unconvinced producers, you have two choices: you still try to make it, or you make it. This is the case for Marc (Pierre Niney), an impressionable thirtysomething filmmaker, in Michel Gondry’sThe Book of Solutions. In an attempt to get his bearings, the bipolar Marc decides to get off his meds and take all the footage (plus his small crew) to his aunt’s house in the beautiful French countryside in the hope of finishing the film on his terms. The creative juices are flowing, but the work is arduous: how can one keep a seemingly doomed project together when everything is falling apart?

Gondry has retained the playful tone and occasional despair found in his equally whimsical Mood Indigo and The Science of Sleep, even as his newest is, by comparison, more rooted in the realities...

Michel Gondry returns to the Cannes Film Festival for the first time since 2012’s “The We And The I” with “The Book Of Solutions,” his first film in seven years. And in the days before his new movie’s premiere in the Director’s Fortnight section on May 21, Gondry talked with THR and IndieWire about why he took so long between 2015’s “Microbe & Gasoline” and his latest feature.

Continue reading ‘The Book Of Solutions’: Michel Gondry Explains The Real-Life Creative Frustrations That Inspired His First Film In Seven Years at The Playlist.

It’s been seven years since Michel Gondry‘s last feature, 2015’s “Microbe & Gasoline,” a tale of two tinkering teens who build a makeshift vehicle and hit the road for an adventure. Now, Gondry’s next directing adventure emerges on the stuffed film market of this year’s Cannes Film Festival. While plot details are slim, a new Gondry film makes a hot item, and seller Kinology no doubt expects a solid payout.

Continue reading Michel Gondry Returns With ‘The Book Of Solutions,’ His First Film In Seven Years at The Playlist.

It's been an awfully long time since Academy Award-winning writer/director Michel Gondry ("Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind") made a full-length film. The last ones were "Green Hornet" in 2011, "Mood Indigo" in 2013, "Microbe & Gasoline" in 2015, and a lot of shorts and music videos since then, as well as the TV series "Kidding." Our long, dry spell is at an end though, according to Deadline. Gondry is reportedly working on a new film called "The Book of Solutions" ("Le Livre Des Solutions"), and he will be taking it to Cannes to sell with French company Kinology. 

Pierre Niney ("Frantz") will star in...

The post The Book Of Solutions: Michel Gondry is Finally Making Another Movie appeared first on /Film.

We’re still a couple of weeks out from The Boys returning with its second season, but based on the footage we’ve seen so far, it certainly looks as if we’re in for another wild ride. One that may even top the first run of the show, which was one of the best things that we’d seen on television in a long time.

Of course, trying to predict how something as crazy as The Boys is going to end up is a fool’s errand, but let’s not forget that it won’t be the only new thing arriving on Amazon Prime in September. Far from it, in fact.

Earlier today, the streaming service announced their entire line-up of new titles for next month and it’s a meaty list, comprising both films and television shows. And though The Boys may be the highlight for many...

An election season is fast-approaching in the U.S. So for its new releases in September 2020, Amazon Prime is bringing back one of its most political shows.

The Boys season 2 premieres its first three episodes on September 4. Though the show on its face is a superhero story, viewers of season 1 will know it’s really about America’s troubling embrace of entertainment with fascism. Sounds fun and not at all terrifying right before a presidential election!

That’s not the only bleak Amazon original on the schedule for September. British TV adaptation Utopia arrives on September 25. This Gillian Flynn-produced series follows fans of a comic book who believe it predicts…world-ending pandemics. Darn it. Amazon’s only original film this month is a…documentary about voter suppression from Liz Garbus called All In: The Fight for Democracy. Yikes.

For those of us who want to relax with some ‘member berries,...

Michel Gondry‘s imagination is never hampered by the size of the endeavor, and while we haven’t had a feature from the director since 2015’s “Microbe and Gasoline,” he’s kept the creative juices flowing with a charming iPhone shot short for Apple, and ads for FedEx and Chobani. However, it looks like Gondry is about to start working on some big canvases again.

The director recently swung through Montreal to present his L’Usine de Films Amateurs, where he leads a small class through making a no frills movie, from conception to completion.

Continue reading Michel Gondry Reveals New Projects Including Beyoncé Video at The Playlist.

Next time you’re partying late at night and trying to decide on what to imbibe, allow Michel Gondry to help make up your mind. The “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless” mind director has directed a new ad for Bacardi.

Read More: Michel Gondry Directs White Stripes Video for ‘City Lights’ — Watch

“After dark we come,” begins the cool-sounding narrator. “The night shepherds leading their flock. The grey shirts and the still-in-work-shirts united against all dress codes. The glow gals illuminated by a thousand likes.” Other hip groups singled out for praise: the lords of the playlist, careless dancers, the fashionably late who will forever be just five minutes away, ice maidens braving the cold, midnight feasters and last-train sprinters. All of them, we’re assured, are the night.

Read More: Michel Gondry’s Mysterious Career: How He Keeps Making Movies Even When Nobody’s Watching

Gondry’s most recent...

Michel Gondry’s latest film “Microbe and Gasoline,” about two friends who embark on a road trip across France in a vehicle they built themselves, premiered at last year’s New York Film Festival before being released in limited release this past July. It received mostly positive reviews from critics who praised Gondry’s restraint in contrast to his usual fantastical whimsy. Now, Gondry has returned with another directorial effort, only this time it’s a music video for the now-defunct modern blues group The White Stripes.

Read More: Michel Gondry’s Mysterious Career: How He Keeps Making Movies Even When Nobody’s Watching

Jack White, one half of the White Stripes, recently shared a previously unreleased White Stripes track entitled “City Lights,” which will appear on his career-spanning new compilation album “Acoustic Recordings 1998-2016.” Gondry apparently whipped up a music video for the song “as a gift,” according to a press release,...

Michel Gondry made his first movie 15 years ago, and he never really stopped, although most moviegoers will struggle to name them all. It’s a pretty short list — he’s directed another feature every two to three years—but his playful oeuvre, which includes large-scale and minuscule productions in both English and French, follows such a jagged path that Gondry has himself become a living paradox: While his name conjures a unique handmade aesthetic and surreal, dreamlike experiences of lost souls, his output wanders so much that his films easily slip below most people’s radars.

“I feel forgotten sometimes,” he said during a conversation in New York last week. “It’s a bit disorienting.” The occasion for the conversation provided a perfect example of that disconnect: a new Gondry movie few people have heard about. At the end of last year, “Microbe and Gasoline,” Gondry’s eighth feature, had yet to land U.

The two boys of Microbe and Gasoline are pre-naturally wise, casually uttering profound truths about sadness, pain, and time, but the smartest observation comes when one says, “I can’t decide whether you’re a genius or an idiot” to the other. The answer is a mixture of both, and that’s the beauty of Michel Gondry’s interpretation of the classical coming-of-age story: over and over, Gondry allows his characters to fail, but he doesn’t use these sequences as signposts about cosmic consequences. Rather, it’s a thoughtful recognition that growing up isn’t a series of wish-fulfillment scenarios, but a time to fall on your face and pick yourself up.

Daniel (Ange Dargent) is a soft-spoken, shaggy-haired-artist-type who gets along better with his crush, Laura (Diane Besnier) than the other boys. He’s treats the present with a wistful resignation, but he’s barely able to deal...

It feels wrong to say that the man responsible for something as achingly tender as the high-concept romantic masterpiece Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is only getting personal with his work now. And yet, French director Michel Gondry's new comic adventure Microbe and Gasoline may just might be the wizard of whimsy's most intimate picture to date. Drawing on his own experiences as a Gallic grade-school hooligan tinkering with homemade contraptions, he's filtered his memories of childhood into a buddy comedy that bridges the gap between how it happened,...

Fans of his work may revel in the high-concept surrealism of director Michel Gondry’s filmography, while other audiences not attuned to his style may find it abundantly aimless and self-referential. Either way you look, Gondry’s filmography, music video and commercial entries reflect the work of an undeniably smart, adventurous filmmaker. His latest film “Microbe & Gasoline” reflects a bit of a departure for the 53-year-old director: There are still houses on cars and planes flying backward, but unlike the fantasy intrinsic to films like “The Science of Sleep” or “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” this story involves two young teens (largely drawn from Gondry’s youth) constructing their dreams into reality for themselves.

What does it mean to show these dreams cinematically? How can a director get there? And how is the understated “Microbe & Gasoline” still as much a Michel Gondry movie as he’s ever made?

Last week,...

The Independence Day weekend tends not to be a big one for specialized audiences. Upscale viewers, particularly in the biggest cities, often pursue other interests, many of them out of town. But prime theaters still need new product, offering opportunities for new releases to take their shot.

The best among the limited openers this weekend was the Polish-French nun story “The Innocents” (Music Box), bucking the recent trend of weak subtitled films. Next best among the limited new releases was the heart-tugging Sundance autism documentary “Life, Animated” (The Orchard) which nonetheless opened a little below some other recent docs.

Going wider initially was “Our Kind of Traitor,” the latest John le Carré thriller, which fell short of Roadside Attractions’ “A Most Wanted Man” two years ago.

Read More: Arthouse Audit: A24’s ‘Swiss Army Man’ Slices ‘The Neon Demon’

The limp second week expansion of “Swiss Army Man” (A24) showed...

Microbe And Gasoline (Microbe et Gasoil) Partizan Films Reviewed by: Harvey Karten, Shockya Grade: B Director: Michel Gondry Written by: Michel Gondry Cast: Ange Dargent, Théophile Baquet, Diane Besnier, Audrey Tautou, Vincent Lamoureux, Agathe Peigney Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 5/21/16 Opens: July 1, 2016 What a delightful little piece! Michel Gondry, whose “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” hints of the writer-director’s surreal bent, as that movie deals with two characters who seek to erase memories of each other from their minds, now tackles the really special time of adolescence. Two teens, Daniel (Ange Dargent), called Microbe because of his small shape, and Théo (Théophile Baquet, called Gasoline because [ Read More ]

The post Microbe and Gasoline Movie Review appeared first on Shockya.com.

Greta Gerwig will present Maggie's Plan with Julianne Moore, Ethan Hawke, Maya Rudolph, Travis Fimmel and Rebecca Miller Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Nanni Moretti, with John Turturro for Mia Madre, and The Lobster director Yorgos Lanthimos, Rachel Weisz and Ariane Labed will appear today, while Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson discuss The Forbidden Room on both nights.

Thomas Bidegain's take on John Ford’s The Searchers, Les Cowboys, and star Finnegan Oldfield plus Michel Gondry for Microbe & Gasoline (Microbe Et Gasoil) will appear later in the week. Jia Zhangke with Zhao Tao will present Mountains May Depart and Walter Salles for Jia Zhangke, A Guy from Fenyang.

Two documentaries with their subjects appearing - Robert Frank joins Laura Israel for Don't Blink: Robert Frank and Brian De Palma blow in with Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow for De Palma. Michael Moore for Where To Invade Next and My Golden Days...