Brad Pitt was going to have two movies coming out in the early fall...but no longer. Alejandro Gonzales Innaritu 's Babel (Paramount Vantage, 10.6) is the keeper and Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Warner Bros., 9.15) is not. Warner Bros. publicity confirmed today that they're delaying Jesse James's release until early 2007. This is being done, I've been told, "due to Brad Pitt's shooting schedule for Oceans 13...Read More

This one-sheet for Mel Gibson's Apocalypto (Disney, 12.8) really puts the zap on my head...something like that. Handsome, striking, quietly haunting...an image that sticks and stays. Reactions?

An amusing, well-written, for-some-reason very believable (as far as this stuff goes) AICN review of The Break-Up from "Masswyrm". I believe it because the guy knows how to write, because he has a straight-arrow tone of voice, and because he says he's married (and sounds married). The Break-Up tracking may be upticking (I'm now hearing opening weekend may hit the high 20s) but between this guy's review and Brian Lowry's in Variety, this film looks effin' doomed with the just-make-me-laugh crowd. And maybe, just maybe ...Read More

My read on Warner Bros.'s decision to release Superman Returns two days earlier -- on Wednesday, 6.28 instead of Friday, 6.30 -- is that the marketing cats are figuring Bryan Singer's humungously costly film will be pretty much over and done by the time Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest comes along on July 7th, so why not go for the moolah by stretching out the 4th of July weekend as much as possible? I haven't called my pallies with the tracking reports, but the general expectation is that Superman Returns ...Read More

I didn't even watch the Indiana Jones DVD box set that came out in October 2003, so you can bet your ass I never would've paid for a limited deluxe "Indiana Jones Trilogy" DVD~set inside a "leather-bound box with additional deleted scenes, making-of docs, two large trade paperbacks and several CDs worth of John Williams' scoring"...no effin' way. But had this package been released I would have probably tried to score a freebie from Paramount Home Video or, failing that, tried to convince my homies at West L.A.'s Laser Blazer...Read More

Phillip Noyce's Hotstuff, a stirring South African political drama based on the true story of Patrick Chamusso, an Average Joe laborer who became radicalized under the boot of apartheid in the early 1980s, is now being called Catch-a-Fire, according to a press release sent out by Noyce's office about a filmmaking workshop that Noyce will hold for budding East African filmmakers in mid-August. One presumes that Hotstuff, a term used by an anti-terrorist Afrikaner policeman (Tim Robbins ) to describe Chamusso (Derek Luke), was dumped because of the sexual connotation. Catch-a-Fire...Read More

U.S. journalist to native Parisian journalist: "I'm in Paris for the next three or four days. Any screenings happening tonight, Thursday and Friday? I need to see something new...running out of stuff to write about." Native Parisian journalist to U.S. journalist: "I'll be at the office in one hour and will check if there is something worth seeing. This is traditionally a slow week in terms of screenings, but there may be something."

The full line-up for the Los Angeles Film Festival (6.22 through 7.2) won't be announced until 5.31, but I'm trusting that John Scheinfeld's Who Is Harry Nillson (and Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him)?, which I saw at the Santa Barbara Film Festival earlier this year, will be included. (It's been announced as an offering at next month's Seattle Film Festival, with showings scheduled at Seattle's Egyptian on 6.15 and 6.17). The LAFF roster so far includes The Devil Wears Prada , Little Miss Sunshine, Quinceanera and Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man.

"Driven largely by smaller markets, RV" -- the laugh-free, critically-dismissed Barry Sonnenfeld family comedy starring Robin Williams -- "turned out to have the best legs of any major studio release this year, especially stronger than those of Mission: Impossible 3" -- from Ben Fritz and Dave McNary's 5.30 Variety story, which isn't so much about M:I:3's inability to crack $140 million domestic as the age-old axiom that there's no accounting for taste.

Another pothole and a tough journey for director Baz Luhrman , who's lost the services of leading man Russell Crowe in a forthcoming Australian period epic that reportedly still has Nicole Kidman on-board in the female lead role. I was intrigued when I first read about Luhrman's stated intention to shoot the film's big scenes in the organic, old-fashioned Lawrence of Arabia way, with a minimal use of CGI. Variety's Michael Fleming is reporting that Heath Ledger has "passed" as Crowe's replacement, despite a recent N.Y. Post report saying he's in.

French butchers and their customers are more fully acquainted with their gastronomical savorings -- Wednesday, 5.31.06, 8:05 am.

(a) French apartment-building doors outweigh American ones by, I would guess, a scale or 5 or 6 to 1, and they're a helluva lot taller -- Tuesday, 5.30.06, 4:45 pm; (b) I'm presuming that I missed the news and/or reviews of a U.S. staging of Woody Allen's Adulterers or I'm forgetting what the U.S. title was, but the play was published in France in early '05 and a presentation is happening in Paris...Read More

"I have always had a voice and always known I could sing, but I was too shy to let it come out. I think that is the hardest thing you can do, to sing in front of people. When I finally let go and did it, I realized it is what I am most talented at and what I love to do the most" -- Paris Hilton

There are more to movies than just form -- content counts for a lot. I could list 100 well-regarded movies off the top of my head, docs and features alike, that you could arguably call boring or so-whatty in the way they're shaped and/or paced, and yet they're compelling as hell because of the current inside them. And yet here's a columnist saying Al Gore and Davis Guggenheim's An Inconvenient Truth is "boring" and "not a movie", "feels like it was pretty much assembled, not directed", "Castor Oil is good for you...but that Read More

Two witnesses have told me that Pan's Labyrinth received the longest standing ovation of any film that played at Cannes when it showed last Saturday night. And now Salon's Andrew O'Heir is calling it "hands down the most exciting and original film I've seen here, and the one that had me in tears during its final scenes. Mexican director Guillermo del Toro is best known as the director of such fanboy classics as Hellboy, Mimic and Blade 2, which are cool enough in their way. Pan's Labyrinth is something else again, and something ...Read More

For me, the Shohei Imamura film that seeped in deeper than the others was The Ballad of Narayama. The 1983 film is concisely summed up in this IMDB sentence: "In a small village in a valley everyone who reaches the age of 70 must leave the village and go to a certain mountain top to die." Not what I'd call an enjoyable or soothing film, but an unforgettably strong one. I'm mentioning this because of the news of Mr. Imamura's death from cancer, at age 79.

A sublime little Italian place on rue Lepic, mainly frequented by the Montmartre locals and almost directly across from the apartment building where Vincent Van Gogh lived with his brother Theo (54 rue Lepic) from 1886 to 1887 -- 5.29.06, 5:55 pm.

And (a) there aren't enough blue doors on the front of apartment buildings in the U.S. -- Monday, 5.29.06, 4:45 pm; (b) rue Lepic facing west in the late evening -- Monday, 5.29.06, 11:25 pm; (c) menu at another Italian place in Montmartre -- Monday, 5.30.06, 5:45 pm; (d) remnant of Monday evening's dinner at an Read More

L.A. Times writer Deborah Netburn delivers a sum-up of Marie-Antoinette reactions, including one from yours truly.

Director Clint Eastwood has promised that Flags Of Our Fathers and Red Sun, Black Sand, which will both hit screens later this year, "will attempt to show for the first time the suffering of both sides during 36 days of fighting in early 1945 that turned Iwo Jima into a flattened wasteland. He describes Red Sun, shot in Japanese and with a largely Japanese cast, as his attempt to understand the country's soldiers. 'I think those soldiers deserve a certain amount of respect...Read More

You can now scroll down through the entire present-month's output (in this instance, May's) by clicking on "Choose Month" in the search engine just above "Discland". I'm mentioning this only because you couldn't access all of May in one fell swoop until yesterday. Thanks again to the tireless Jon Rahoi of San Francisco for putting this function in.

Yesterday's Omen forum was fairly interesting. What about Michael Mann's Miami Vice? Here's the trailer...watch it and tell us what you're thinking deep down. Does it look like $180 million or $125 million? Impossible to gauge, obviously, but the word "priceless" could also apply. For me, an urban-based Mann film is a near-guarantee of a first-rate, high-style mood piece. Unless he's wildly off his game, I anticipate seeing this thing three or four times.

Such is the deep-dish appeal of black-and-white CinemaScope (i.e., 2.35 to 1) films, especially when they've been well-mastered for DVD, that even the relatively mediocre ones like The Longest Day stir my interest. Especially with this verdict from DVD Savant that says Fox's Cinema Classics Collection DVD of the film, which came out almost two weeks ago, is "a great improvement over their previous non-enhanced transfer."

The comments that came in yesterday about The Omen (20th Century Fox, 6.6) show that HE readers are down on it. But something tells me that Average Joe moviegoers are going to give it a $20 million-plus opening . It might die the second weekend (if it's what I think it might be, I think it's reasonable to predict that it will die 11 days in), but it didn't cost very much to make, and there's something about the novelty of that 6.6.06 opening that people may get into, or are into already.

Columbia Pictures has hired DaVinci Code screenwriter Akiva Goldsman to adapt Dan Brown's 's "Angels and Demons", another complex European potboiler about brainy Harvard professor of religious symbology Robert Langdon (i.e., Tom Hanks' DaVinci character) uncovering a dark plot. A Guardian story says that "no deals have yet been reached for Hanks and director Ron Howard to work on the film, but it is understood that both would have first refusal of the film." Earth to Guardian: Hanks and Howard won't come within ten city blocks of this thing. Their careers weren't hurt by Read More

You have to look askance considering the source, but Life & Style Weekly reported towards the end of the Cannes Film Festival (when I wasn't paying attention, for two dozen or so reasons) that there's more trouble on the TomKat front. I don't usually get into this stuff, but Katie's reported "you can't stop me!" quote struck me as mildly funny. Why, I can't exactly say...but I smirked. The item comes by way of Jeannete Walls's MSNBC gossip column.

Newsvine is reporting that Blade Runner fans are going to be hustled by Warner Home Video into purchasing two more DVD versions of Ridley Scott's 1982 future-noir. The item isn't written as clearly as it should be, but it seems to say that Scott's "director's cut", which first appeared on DVD in 1997, is "being restored and remastered for a brief DVD reissue in September." Four months later, or sometime in December '06 or January '07, this version will be "deleted" (i.e., withdrawn from the market) and replaced by a 25th anniversary "final cut"...Read More

I presume the rights have already been optioned or bought, but here's an ideal source for a very strong, possibly very commercial and perhaps even award-calibre Ziyi Zhang movie that could be theoretically helmed by Ang Lee or Wong Kar Wai. It's basically an emotional wartime diary, initially serialized in newspapers and recently published in book form, about a real-life North Vietnamese female doctor named Dang Thuy Tram who was killed at age 27 on a Vietnam battlefield in 1970. Seth Mydans's Herald Tribune article...Read More

I didn't get to see all the highly-rated Cannes films, but for what it's worth I agree completely with L.A. Times film critic Kenneth Turan's statement that "perhaps the best of the slighted films [among the Cannes Film Festival award-winners]" was Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth. But as del Toro told me last Thursday evening, Labyrinth's accomplishment was simply being shown in Cannes, given the snobbish attitudes that have long prevailed about films with fantasy-and-FX elements, and that a possible award was never realistically in the cards. "The winners have already been spoken for...Read More

Tracking on The Omen (20th Century Fox, 6.6.06) is expected to uptick this week (as all films do the closer you get to their opening day), but it wasn't looking very good a week and a half ago. What are the gut attitudes among HE readers? We've all seen the trailer and developed a sense of it. Are devil movies over or...? Is there any intrigue in John Moore trying to re-jigger the Richard Donner original (which seems to have been more or less the plan)? How comfortable is everyone with Liev Schreiber playing Gregory Peck...Read More

"Newspapers, which increased rates for movie advertising as other categories fell apart after the dot-com bust, may be partly to blame for the prospect of a paperless movie industry. 'I know everyone is trying to make it come true because the cost of print ads could be considered extortion in some jurisdictions,' said Mark Cuban, who founded 2929 Entertainment, which produces, distributes and exhibits a variety of films. 'Every distributor wants to find the best promotional mix away from traditional media and get a far greater bang for their buck," Mr. Cuban said." -- from David Carr's ...Read More

"This is not a movie that is likely to draw many people who don't agree with its premise," writes Time's Karen Tumulty in her piece that pays a certain attention to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, but is more taken with the ex-Vice President's newfound movie-celebrity aura that came from his promoting Truth at the Cannes Film Festival last week. The above quote essentially passes along the notion that the incontrovertible evidence that global warming has reached a very critical stage is (here we go again) a debatable premise. This is appalling irresponsible horseshitRead More

When the news is sluggish and the domestic releases don't feel all that exciting, run an evergreen piece. This one, amusing and well-reported and written by Newsweek 's Devin Gordon, is about what an expensive cumbersome pain-in-the-neck movie premieres have become in the eyes of studio publicists and talent-reppers. I knew that "a perfectly serviceable premiere can be arranged for about $100,000" but not that "most cost at least three times that." The piece echoes the mixed, not wondrously happy emotions voiced in that Variety...Read More

There's a passage from Adam Gopnik's New Yorker piece about David Andress's "The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) that got my blood going more than all of Sofia Coppola's Marie-Antoinette did. Cannes '06 is history and I'd normally leave this appallingly self-centered film alone, considering the October release date in the States and all, but Marie-Antoinette is playing in Paris right now, and all those metro posters have a way of seeping into your bloodstream. "It was the secret flight of the King's family ...Read More

Strolling across Place Clichy on Sunday evening -- 5.28.06, 9:55 pm.

And (a) Le Divette du Moulin on rue Lepic -- Sunday, 5.28.06, 5:50 pm; (b) Doudingue, a cool little restaurant on the corner to the left, sitting in a centrally located portion of Montmartre's rue Durantin -- Sunday, 5.28.06, 6:30 pm; (c) Near entrance to the metro at Place Clichy -- Sunday, 5.28.06, 9:45 pm; (d) Four of five blocks north of Gare du Lyon -- Monday, 5.29.06, 9:25 am; (e) arched stone entranceway...

"It's a shame," a studio exec told Variety's Nicole Laporte and Ian Mohr in a story about the peril of screening big-studio films at the Cannes Film Festival. "Cannes is a way to get so much exposure in one weekend and accumulate good will in the media. You work for this your whole life, and then the critics make it so awful."

Kudos to Emanuel Levy for alerting the L.A. community in unequivocal terms that Babel is Oscar-worthy and demanding of everyone's attention, etc. Which it is.

A stunning surprise Palme D'Or winner: Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley has taken the big prize, despite a nearly unanimous press consensus in recent days that the winner would be either Pedro Almodovar's Volver or Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu's Babel.

Best Director winner Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu

Loach's was the first '06 Cannes competition film I genuinely admired (I said something about it being Loach's best in a long while, etc.) so there's no argument from this quarter. (The N.Y. Times' Manohla Dargis, noting that Barley...Read More

Variety's Justin Chang on Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth: "...a richly imagined and exquisitely violent fantasy...a fairy tale not even remotely intended for children, this entrancing magical-realist drama concocts a sinister spin on 'Alice in Wonderland' against the war-torn backdrop of 1940s Spain, shifting between two worlds with striking craft and discipline . With its graphic phantasmagorical elements and Spanish-language dialogue, pic will rely heavily on strong reviews and the loyalty of del Toro's fans when Picturehouse releases it Stateside in October."

It's not that I'm hostile, but I'm deeply uninterested in the low-rent culture of Mexican wrestlers and why they can't reveal their faces by taking their douchebag masks off and how some or most of this crap fits into Nacho Libre, blah-blah. No offense to first-rate feature writer Lewis Beale, who wrote about all this for the N.Y. Times, but I couldn't finish the piece.

More Chris Doyle-trashing-Martin Scorsese stuff, this from a fall '05 issue of Filmmaker magazine. (Thanks to JD for passing it along.)

Cinematographer Christopher Doyle

I'm a tiny bit surprised to read that Pedro Almodovar's extremely fine Volver is favored to win the Palmes D'Or this evening. My reading in Cannes was that it was in a neck-and-neck race with Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu's Babel, but whatever. The difference between the two is that the air starts leaking out of the Volver balloon towards the end after it "gives up the ghost", while Babel holds true and steady all the way, and ends on a sublime and touching note.

Shiloh Nouvelle Jolie-Pitt -- definitely one of those born-to-affluent-hip-parents names, but it has a nice lyrical ring to it -- the other side of the valley from Jason Lee's naming his kid Pilot Inspektor. Brangelina's child arrived last night -- Saturday, 5.27 -- in Namibia, Africa.

Hollywood Wiretap has relayed a surprising trashing of Martin Scorsese's modus operandi these days as well as his forthcoming The Departed, not from some renegade blogger but from the deeply respected cinematographer Christopher Doyle. Doyle reportedly spoke to Hong Kong-based writer Saul Symonds, and his comments were passed along by Grady Hendrix, who writes an Asian film blog for Variety. Doyle is quoted as saying that "it makes me very sad to see Marty and so many others genre-fying and gentrifying...Read More

I don't precisely recall when I started hearing good things about The Break-Up (which immediately makes my recollection a bit suspect), but it was sometime in February or March. It was vague but positive, and if you'd told me that come late May this Vince Vaughn-Jennifer Aniston dramedy (can it really be called an out-and-out comedy after Brian Lowry's Variety review?) would be getting slapped around pretty badly...Read More

Priced at only $20 bills, Ridley Scott's four-disc "director's cut" DVD of Kingdom of Heaven, which streeted last Tuesday, seems like one the greatest values and bargains out there right now...an absolute must-own for folks like me, certainly. The truckloads of material seem staggering...not just Scott's preferred 194-minute cut, which I reviewed out of a commercial showing at Laemmle's Fairfax last January, but a motherload of extras including a three-hour, six-part documentary called "The Path to Redemption". If the doc is anything like the one that accompanied the DVD of Scott's Matchstick Men...Read More

Kevin Smith on the wowser, emotionally rousing response to Clerks II after Friday night's Salle Debussy showing in Cannes, which ended with an eight-minute standing ovation...guess I shoulda stuck around. The word "triumphant" does not seem wholly inappropriate.

Le hype de Superman Returns seems pretty well cranked in Paris this week...bus ads, metro ads...a fairly persistent presence -- snapped on Isle de la Cite (facing south) on Saturday, 5.27.06, 6:55 pm.

And with not much else to do or say today (i.e., having decided to mostly take the day off and just wander around), a passel of non-movie-related pics: (a) lean over the catch of the day on a bed of ice, and the aroma fills you up and does more than intoxicate, at a fish market on rue Lepic -- Saturday, 5.27.06, 3:25 pm; (b) sanitation engineers...Read More

This is definitely burying the lead, but the $65,000-per-screen opening of An Inconvenient Truth on 4 screens, which MCN's Len Klady is calling "the strongest exclusive opening of the year," lifts my heart more than the $44.6 million Friday that X-Men 3 achieved...although you really have to say "wowza!" 'bout that. And yet (and I know what this is going to sound like, but I have to say it) there's something a wee bit disspiriting...just a wee...Read More

"So did those who boo perhaps have a Yankee accent? Or British, Italian, or Austrian? Who can say? The important point is that Marie-Antoinette was not hated. The daily 'critics' jury' of Screen International, a cross-section of nine international critics, gave it 2.44 points out of a possible 4; it's tied for fifth out of 14 films. In another poll, Michel Ciment rated it worthy of the Palme d'Or. I've also noticed that opinions on the film seem to be growing more favorable as time passes ." -- Roger Ebert in his 5.25 column...Read More

I'm figuring more like $90-something million for the 4-day X-Men 3 gross...just a hunch.

Got into Paris five hours ago -- it's 1:07 ayem on Saturday -- and the wi-fi in the apartment doesn't work. (Merde.) It can't work unless you provide a user name and passsword, and of course the guy who's renting the place to to me didn't think to provide this info. (And when I called him at his place in Brooklyn to get this vital data he went, "Uhhm...I don't know it offhand...ask the woman who gave you the key," etc.) But now that I've settled down, I love the dueling impressions on the '06 Cannes Film Festival by the Hollywood ReporterRead More

Uh-oh...wait a minute...Variety's Brian Lowry has panned The Breakup...sorry, The Break-Up: "Misleadingly marketed as a boisterous comedy, The Break-Up may be the first 'last-date movie' -- the one you see with someone that you're about to dump. Sporadic rays of sunshine emanate from the broad and gifted supporting cast, but the core story is almost relentlessly unpleasant, like sitting through a dinner party where the host couple does nothing but bicker."

Leaving Cannes late this afternoon on an Easy Jet flight to Paris. I'll be missing the past-midnight screening of Kevin Smith's Clerks 2, which happens about nine hours from now, and the Pan's Labyrinth party being thrown tomorrow evening by Picturehouse. Plus whatver opportunites that may exist for makeup screenings. I'm very, very sorry I never caught Joon-ho Bong's The Host , a South Korean monster movie that N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis went for in a big way. But there's plenty of stuff to get into in Paris.

Cinematical's James Rocchi on the Cannes films he's walked out on. I don't know if walkouts are worth it over here. If the film is a stinker and you haven't got anything pressing to get to for an hour or so, just nod out. It's easy with the 19-hour days and the pounding pace of it all.

The opening-weekend predictions on X-Men 3, dead certain to be the #1 film over the coming Memorial Day weekend, are being modified. I was hearing a week and a half ago that the four-day total could be way way up there. Now Variety is saying that The DaVinci Code "will suck away a chunk of the adult audience and will likely keep X-Men from reaching the boffo $85.6 million bow of X2 three years ago. Fox will be very pleased if it reaches that figure over four days, instead of the three it took X2."

"To be honest, Paris Hilton is my perfect model. She has charm and is classy. She has everything. We have nothing, really." -- 15 year-old Claudia Sorrentino in Cannes, quoted by Reuters reporter Kerstin Gehmlich in a piece about young girls who stroll the Croisette in hopes of getting noticed by rich or half-connected Eurotrash guys, and perhaps becoming a faux-VIP for an hour or two if she wangles an invite into the right party and chats with a celeb, or at least gets her picture taken.

However much the Breakup tracking upticks, which, as expected, it is now doing, Vince Vaughn's staunchly alpha-male rat-a-tat-tat smartass schtick is an absolute must-have...as long as the movie he's in agrees with and salutes who and what he is. Is that movie The Breakup? An above-average portrait of the 36 year-old comedy star by USA Today 's Susan Wloszczyna pretty much lays iton the line as far as Vaughn's pre-Breakup situation through a quote by Jon Favreau...Read More

Words about the powerlessness of film critics in this Guardian story that's mainly about the critic-proof DaVinci Code.

The great Guillermo del Toro, director of the extremely well-received Pan's Labyrinth, following our Martinez Hotel chat -- Friday, 5.25.06, 12:15 am.

(a) (l. to r.) Lying's Jena Malone, director M. Blash, Chloe Sevigny, director Gus Van Sant at a post-screening dinner at Indochine, where the most elegant and gastronomically pleasurable affair of the 2006 Cannes Film Festival was hosted last night -- Thursday, 5.25, 10:50 pm; (b) Spread from Pan's Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro's note-and-sketch journal...Read More

"Sharon Waxman's piece about the end of Used Guys is good, but there may be another reason for its demise: Jim Carrey has gone flakey, to put it mildly. He's been telling everyone who will listen, journalists included, how he's tired of doing the madcap comedy that made him wealthy. More alarmingly, he's been babbling about his fascination with the number 23 -- he's actually making a movie by that name -- and how he thinks it connects with everything in the world. Maybe he's on to something, but maybe he's become just ...Read More

So it turned out that two youngest American filmmakers with films in competition here -- Southland Tales's Richard Kelly, 31, and Marie-Antoinette's Sofia Coppola, 35 -- got slammed the hardest. Had to hurt. For what it's worth, the Southland Tales...Read More

"It's Marie Antoinette gets bored, Marie Antoinette goes shopping, Marie Antoinette gets laid" -- a Cannes critic quoted by Variety's Alison James and Adam Dawtrey.

Back on the blue wi-fi couch on the outdoor press balcony, and I've seen Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth. But I can't enthuse about it online until after the official press screening on Saturday. If I don't hold off a couple of U.S. publicist pals will be sent to the guillotine...mais non!

The Palme D'Or never means much in terms of U.S. box-office, but at least bestows a stamp of esteem amogn critics. The winner, as everyone has acknwoledged, will be either Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu 's Babel or Pedro Almodovar's Volver. I'm a Babel...

I'm sitting in the outdoor balcony area adjacent to the press room, and there's a wonderful cool breeze coming off the bay. The air smells fresh and vaguely salty, the sky is the clearest blue and flecked with little white cloud puffs. It's amazing what good weather and a little rest can do for your outlook...for everyone's. It's 11:25 am, and I'm off to see Pan's Labyrinth.

View from the Palais press terrace -- 5.24.06, 3:25 pm.

And: (a) Lying duo Molly Hassell and M. Blash aboard the Big Eagle cocktail party for their film -- Tuesday, 5.23, 5:55 pm; (b) Shortbus guys Paul Dawson and PJ DeBoy (or is it the other way around?...sorry) at Tuesday's Lying party; given my sentiments about the film, I didn't feel quite right about attending Wednesday night's Marie-Antoinette party...something of a spot decision; (c) Just before a tour bus nearly ran me down -- Wednesday, 5.24.06, 7:55 am; (d) Hotel Splendid.

"I understand why some might not like Marie-Antoinette, but the idea of people actually booing it is the most hilariously hypocritical thing I've heard at Cannes this year. At least half the competition films that I've seen, many of them French, have been dull, turgid and labored. Obviously
Marie-Antoinette doesn't invite emotional responses as strongly as Lost In Translation did, but Coppola seems to be being criticized for what she hasn't made, as opposed to recognizing what she has. I think it's a mistake, if not grossly unfair, of you to somehow paint the film as a failure...Read More

"I don't know if you'd heard reports of this, but prior to last night's preview screening for X-Men 3 there was a trailer for Snakes on a Plane and the audience went BALLISTIC! You could tell they were hip to it cause the cheering started as soon as the single word "Snakes" went up, and just thundered all throughout the fairly short teaser, which featured a few fleeting glimpses of snakes, passengers in jeopardy, and Sammy J. I think the idea that SOAP fever is dying down is bollocks. This thing is just getting warmed up." -- Max Evry...

I have this idea that Sharon Waxman's N.Y. Times story about 20th Century Fox execs pulling the plug on Used Guys, the Jim Carrey-Ben Stiller-Jay Roach comedy, isn't just well reported. It's also, I suspect, a sign of the times, a turn in the road...a shot heard round the Hollywood world. The $112 million budget meant that Used Guys would "be one of the most expensive original comedies ever made...Read More

Enjoyed a nourishing talk Tuesday night at the Babel party with Pan's Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro. I'm seeing GDT's film tomorrow (Thursday afternoon), chatting formally with him on Friday afternoon. Guillermo said he's honored that a film such as his (i.e., fantasy, wild imagination, special effects ) is playing at Cannes, but he also believes the festival prize winners have pretty much been decided at this point. (Volver, Babel, et. al.) Naturally he's rooting for Babel, being a close Innaritu friend and ally from way back.

An Inconvenient Truth opens in Los Angeles and New York today. (I think.) Eli Pariser's www.moveon.org says "how it does on opening weekend will determine how the movie is received in the press and even how many other cities get to see it." He's right, and if you want to help pledge to see the film and urge your friends, etc.

Maybe it's my fault due to an overly complex paragraph, but that Hollywood Wiretap story that quotes my Marie-Antoinette review got it slightly wrong. I didn't say that "the scene that seemed to most rile the crowd was one 'in which French agitators shout angry epithets outside the bedroom of the reviled French queen.'" I made an analogy between French malcontents shouting epithets at Kirsten Dunst's character in the film and the angry booers at this morning's screening "as Sofia Coppola's film ended."

Steps of the Palais prior to Tuesday morning's Babel screening -- 5.23.06, 8:05 am.

And some others: (a) American traffic cops will ride mountain bikes, but I doubt if they'd ever putter around on cute scooters like these -- Tuesday, 5.23, 3:25 pm; (b) Emerging Arists Film Festival honchos Max Ryerson and Thomas Ethan Harris, whose launch party happened a week ago last Tuesday (5.16) in Monte Carlo; (c) The Lying trio on a Big Eagle yacht late Tuesday afternoon: Jena Malone, writer/director M. Blash, Chloe Sevigny...

Sony Pictures Classics has partnered up on Persepolis, an in-production animated feature based on Marjane Satrapi 's comic-book autobiography (which was written in two parts). SPC announced their distribution deal with the producers at a Tuesday lunch at the Carlton Beach restaurant.

Kathy Kennedy (far left in this group photo and the one above) is the project's executive producer. Marc-Antoine Robert and Xavier Rigault...Read More

Blood of a Lady

In a reflection of a scene in Marie-Antoinette (Columbia, 10.13) in which French agitators shout angry epithets outside the bedroom of the reviled French queen, loud boos were heard inside the Grand Lumiere theatre this morning as Sofia Coppola's film ended.

Boos have greeted Cannes screenings before and they've allegedly been louder in years past (or so Roger Ebert told me as we filed out of theatre), but not even Richard Kelly's heavily trashed Southland Tales got this kind of reception.

Kirsten Dunst in Sofia Coppola's Marie-Antoinette

The N.Y. Post's "Page Six" column has quoted that downbeat- tracking item I wrote last Saturday about The Breakup, along with a Universal spokesperson saying that "Wells doesn't understand tracking" [and that] "for a romantic comedy, the numbers are very encouraging...Read More

Babel is Booming

Alejando Gonzalez Innaritu's Babel, which press-screened this morning, is, I believe, a lock to win the Palmes D'Or. Everyone seems to be feeling this, spreading it around. If it doesn't win, fine -- it'll still be an incredibly vivid and brilliant film -- but I'll be greatly surprised.

Babel (Paramount Vantage, 10.6) is an incredibly shrewd work in the sense that it's shaped in a way that keeps you fully absorbed, and yet gradually awakened to the fact that there's a greater whole coming together than what is indicated by gathering sum of story and scenes.

Alejando Gonzalez Innaritu's Babel, which press-screened this morning, is, I believe, a lock to win the Palmes D'Or. It's an incredibly shrewd and brilliant film about all of us...about frailty, interconnectedness, aloneness and particularly parents and children. It exudes compassion and acute precision with every frame, shot, edit and line of dialogue. I fucking loved it.

It's one of those "small" portraits of humanity writ large...and like I mentioned in my Inarritu interview a week and a half ago, it becomes larger and richer and more poignant the more you think about it.

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X-Men 3 is a Brett Ratner coarsening of a action franchise that had more than a touch of class -- wit, smarts, well-sculpted characters -- when Bryan Singer was directing. But of course, everyone knew this was in the cards when Rattner was hired, and if you accept the downgrade as the way of the corrupted world it's not that bad to sit through. One of the beefs I have with the Ratner is the same I had with Singer's first installment, which is Hugh Jackman...Read More

"It doesn't have a sales agent. It was shot in digital video by a rookie director and cost less than $1 million. But it could prove itself one of the unexpected success stories of the Festival de Cannes." So begins an Anne Thompson story in the Hollywood Reporter about M. Blash's Lying, which has, I believe, something to do with the telling on un-truths. I've been watching for it because my friend Tricia van Klaverman produced it with about seven others. Playing in the Directr's Fortnight section, it stars Chloe Sevigny, Jean Malone, Leelee Sobieski, Maya Goldsmith...Read More

The first 20 minutes of World Trade Center, which was shown last night at 10 pm at the Salle Debussy, is smooth, well-cut, understated and pro-level all the way. But as I suspected, it doesn't feel very much like a Stone film...not this portion of it, at least. One of the most urgent, hyperkinetic, go-for-it directors of the late 20th Century has chosen to go tasteful, respectful, and understated (no shots of the planes hitting the towers, only one glimpse of a jumper...Read More

Read Andrew C. Revkin's N.Y. Times piece about Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth (Paramount, 5.24 limited) and tell me if you detect a skeptical, slightly patronizing tone in some portions of it, as I do. Example #1: "The frustrations of a man whose long-sought goal remains out of reach are vividly on display in the [film during the] first few minutes." (This is a skewed observation...Read More

Back from the less-than-elegant but somewhat entertaining- passable-not painful X-Men 3...thank the gods for the wondrous Shakespearean energy and laser-like performing precision of Ian McKellen...Magneto forever! ...3:15 pm Cannes time...working on a review and e-mailing about events and interviews over the next four days, which is the time I have left here (not counting the remainder of today)...and incidentally...

Sitting in the Orange Wi-Fi cafe with 40 or 50 other journalists...Read More

For only the second time in seven days, I allowed myself to sleep past 6:30 ayem so I'm only just starting. It's 11:10 now and I have to pack up and get over to the X-Men 3 screening at the Lumiere, which I feel obliged to see in a half-resigned, half-teeth-gritting way. More postings later...kind of a uneventful Monday, and that's fine for a change.

After the regrettable but inescapable duty of writing my reactions to Southland Tales (which could, it seems to me, be trimmed and refined and re-shaped to its benefit, so there's another critical-reaction chapter yet to come...I hope), I shuffled out of the Palais and down the Croisette to a very pleasant HBO beach party, with the blustery winds buffeting the see-through plastic barriers that had been draped around three beach-facing sides of the tent. mPRm's Michael Lawson and James Lewis were hosting, and I had a pleasant shmooze with senior vp media relations Nancy Lesser...Read More

California Dreamin'

Richard Kelly's Southland Tales, which had its first public screening this morning inside the Cannes Grand Palais, is a very long throw of a surreal wackazoid football -- a stab at a great, sprawling GenX apocalyptic nightmare about an Orwellian police state running things a couple of years from now.

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This is an "old" (i.e., three days old) piece, but it's worth quoting from regardless. It's Entertainment Weekly critc Owen Gleiberman lamenting that United 93 didn't take in any more than $30 million domestically (which isn't that awful , considering how much people everywhere were talking about not seeing it. "I...found the experience of United 93 to be scary, inspiring, and cathartic...Read More

Richard Kelly's intensely political, surreal and audacious Southland Tales screened at the Grand Palais this morning, and it's time now to head over to the press conference, which begins in five minutes...

A journalist has an issue with the Breakup and Omen tracking figures that I passed along yesterday (or perhaps with the way I interpreted them) and he wants to know who passed them along to me. He mentioned a name, and has said if I don't reply that he'll feel free to interpret that for what it may imply. In short, he's looking to out a source. I won't reveal my source and feel it's odious beyond measure for a fellow journalist to threaten what he's threatened. I replied that NRG Tracking is NRG tracking is NRG trackingRead More

An L.A. industry friend reports there was "applause following the World Trade Center trailer in Westwood's Festival theatre just before the Friday night at 8 pm showing of The DaVinci Code. The theatre was sold out...and everyone I met afterwards, your basic LA moviegoer, liked the film. DaVinci is clearly a crowd-pleaser and more of a guilty pleasure than critics are willing to admit. Akiva Goldsman's script and particularly his dialogue are beyond tedious and painful, but Tom Hanks...Read More

The Breakup (Universal, 6.2), Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston's romantic discord comedy, isn't tracking. With only twelve days to go before opening, that means the game is pretty much over. Definite interest is at 30, 1st choice is 5...it's finished. I'm told that while audiences enjoy Vaughn in an off-the-wall mode, they don't want to see him in semi-romantic parts. This is bad news for Aniston also because now she's 0 for 4 -- Derailed, Rumor Has It , Friends with Money...Read More

Tracking on John Moore's The Omen (20th Century Fox, 6.6) is in the toilet. Definite interest is 19, definitely not interested is 18, and first choice is 2. It didn't cost very much to make so it won't be a bringer of financial doom if it doesn't fly, but that 18% definitely not interested figure basically means forget it...Read More

The DaVinci Code earned a hefty $28.6 million on Friday , and a rival studio (i.e., not Columbia, the domestic distributor) is projecting a $78,790,000 weekend. The question is what it will do on weekend #2 and #3, especially with X-Men 3: The Last Stand expected to go through the roof when it opens next Friday. Brett Ratner's sequel is going to make over $100 million over the 4-day Memorial Day weekend ...Read More

The Inconvenient Truth press conference in Cannes' Grand Palais ended at 5:30 pm, or about an hour ago. The question-receivers, naturally, were Al Gore, director Davis Guggenheim, producer Laurie David, producer Lawrence Bender and two others whose names I can't remember.

Some highlights: (a) As things began moderator Henri Behar asked Gore how he should be addressed, and Gore replied, "Your Adequacy...Read More

A good (if short) N.Y. Times piece by Pat H. Broeske about the two upcoming movies -- Minnie Driver's The Virgin of Juarez and Jennifer Lopez's Bordertown -- that focus on the mystery of 400 killings of women in the Juarez area.

"You studio assholes have been lording it over us all this time and we licked your backsides, but [now we] are in the most insecure media job market in decades while you drive around your Hummers and pay lip service to environmentalism and complain when your second maid is sick and worry about paying for your next $20,000 vacation, and if kissing your asses isn't going to help us secure our positions and we see people getting famous (if relatively poor) by selling mean-spirited gossip on the web , guess where we are going?" -- David Poland ...Read More

Four days into the Cannes Film Festival (the fifth night is tonight -- Saturday, 5.20) and here's the tally sheet: no major explosions, one widely agreed-upon stink bomb (Ron Howard's The Da Vinci Code); a couple of missed screening ops (on my part, I mean); a pair of strong and exciting efforts from the masterful Ken Loach (The Wind That Shakes the Barley) and the great Pedro Almodovar (Volver), with my personal preference leaning toward the latter; a thrashingly emotional, jizz-sticky, psycho-therapeutic homoerotic love story from John Cameron Mitchell called Shortbus ...Read More

Hollywood Elsewhere managed five or six minutes of face time with An Incovenient Truth star and 2000 Presidential election victor Al Gore yesterday evening at the Paramount Vantage launch party. Maybe a minute of opening pleasantries and praise (love the film, seen it three times, definitely the most important film of the year bar none), and then a compliment about the writing and delivery of Gore's opening narration. Gore's recollection of standing on the bank of a slow-moving river (presumably somewhere near his home in Tennessee) turns into a serene and unforced riff...Read More

Oh, and by the way: Jerry Seib's Wall Street Journal piece about An Inconvenient Truth (Paramount Vantage, 5.23 limited) reports that "when the movie was previewed at the National Geographic Society's headquarters in Washington, an official there noted that the widespread reaction among Geographic employees who had seen the film earlier was: 'Do you think he'll run again for president ?' Mr. Gore responded with a dismissive wave of his hand." But this notion has been on the lips of Cannes journalists also. Everyone in liberal circles seems to be saying that the 2008 Democratic Party nomination is a ...Read More

The great Ian McKellen was at the cocktail gathering prior to last night's showing of the Dreamgirls footage (and again -- the more I think about it, the more kick-assy it seems...director Bill Condon has never directed a big-league musical before, only dramas...but the footage told me he has a great instinctual knack for making this sort of material fly...the photography, cutting, singing and performances were all knockout-plus).

Anyway, I asked McKellen about the rumored Magneto movie, and he said that vague rumors ...Read More

John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus at the Salle Bazin at 11 a.m. this morning (32 minutes from now)...big-deal press conference for An Inconvenient Truth happening at 4:30 pm, leaving a three-hour window for some filing prior to this...missed Andrea Arnold's Red Road yesterday...three journos told me it's a bit of a mixed enterprise, not quite there, etc., but two others called it riveting and very special...every fourth day here you need to downshift and stop running around or you'll lose it entirely... for me and (I suspect) almost everyone else here, Saturday is that day.

Uhhmm, okay...I wasn't hip enough to get the joke at first, but I do now. (Finally.) I received a screening invite by e-mail yesterday evening (on 5.19) that I found "curiously touching" (as I wrote in my initial posting). "I feel for these guys on some level," I said. The invite read as follows, typos included: "Please you will come to this...Read More

The special thrill and value of flying six thousand or so miles to Cannes to personally witness, in part, the rooty-toot-toot Dreamgirls shebang that happened tonight at the Martinez Hotel (which I enjoyed very much, by the way -- the four scenes that were shown were seriously killer wham-bam)...where was