Cannes Man

1996 comedy

Rating: 8/20

Plot: Big-shot producer Sy Lerner makes a bet with a buddy that he can take any individual his buddy picks and turn him into the talk of the Cannes Film Festival. Enter Frank, a cabbie with no film experience except for some work in a video store. Sy dubs him Sy Lerner and takes him to meet some other big shots, introducing him as screenwriter Frank Rhino, writing of Con Man.

Here's a cheap one. I'm surprised so many big names (Depp, Hopper, Del Toro, even Chris Penn!) agreed to be seen in something so crappy. As a parody, it falls flat. There's nothing especially biting here and not a single laugh. A lot of the crappiness, however, is because of sub-genre inconsistency. It's uneven as a mockumentary, seeming more like a traditional and cheaply-made narrative with a bunch of interviews and poor narration thrown in. Francesco Quinn (Frank Rhino in this and Anthony Quinn's son in the real world) provides that narration. His performance was awkwardly bad, terrible even. I looked him up because he seemed familiar, and I imagine that's because he was, in a completely different sort of performance, terrorist Syed Ali in season two of 24. He was also in Platoon. Seemingly, Cannes Man (or Con Man or apparently and goofily Canne$ Man) was filmed with a scant script. A lot of the interviews seem to be select samples from much longer improvisational ramblings, and a lot of the dialogue feels more spontaneous. But for the most part, it seems as if the director gave the talent an instruction to improvise but with a "Don't Even Think About Saying Anything The Least Bit Funny" rule. An extended cameo involving Sy and Frank visiting Jim Jarmusch and Johnny Depp is probably the funniest part of the movie, but that might be the reason why it seems to clash with the rest of the story. This movie thinks it's just so clever. It isn't.