"Will Once, the recently released Irish film, turn into this summer's indie hit? It's showing early promise. Starring Glen Hansard, the lead singer of Dublin's the Frames rock band, as an Irish street singer and his sometime musical collaborator, Marketa Irglova, as a classically trained pianist who sells roses on the street, the film opened May 18 on just two screens, both in L.A., to an abnormally high $30,000-per-screen average. An unvarnished ode to musical discovery, Once expanded to 20 screens in 13 cities over the Memorial Day weekend, averaging $21,626 per screen." -- from Sheigh CrabtreeRead More

Stanley Kubrick "always admitted he took too long to make Barry Lyndon," former Kubrick assistant Leon Vitali tells The Reeler's Jamie Stuart. "There was about a year of pre-production, a year-plus of shooting, then he took an awful long time to edit. And by the time it was ready to come out, I would say, the blockbuster action movies had become de rigeur. That was what the people really wanted to see. So when this film came out it was received as strange, slow, completely out of context to what was going on.

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If anyone's going to hire Lindsay Lohan after her latest drunken meltdown, she "might have to be more than sober," reports the N.Y. Times' Sharon Waxman. "She would need perhaps to post her salary as bond, or pay for her own insurance, even on an independent film." And what's so terrible or unfair about that?

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Another big-city newspaper forced to cut staffers, another much-loved editor packing his bags....and not once in this story does the word "internet" appear.

With spooky, half-shaped visions of Roman Polanski's Pompeii flashing in my head, Hollywood Elsewhere visited the actual Pompeii ruins yesterday. I'm very glad I went -- this is the best-preserved ancient Roman city anywhere, covered as it was and frozen in time by tons of ash that spewed out of Mount Vesuvius on August 24, 79 AD. The problem is that I was too cheap to buy a map or go with a tour group, and by the end of our visit I'd come across only one lousy plaster-covered body.

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If the casting rumors are true, Orlando Bloom will play an upstanding engineer named Marcus Attilius Primus in Roman Polanski's Pompeii, which will start shooting in August. The rumor mill is also saying that Scarlett Johansson may be cast as as Cornelia, the "defiant daughter of a vile real estate speculator who supplies Marcus with documents implicating her father in a water embezzlement scheme," according to an Amazon synopsis.

How did Johansson become the dominant period actress of our time? She was right for her role and quite good in Match Point...Read More

In honor of tomorrow's opening of Judd Apatow's Knocked Up, here's a re-run of that HE-vs.-Joe Leydon piece I wrote after seeing it 40 days ago. And that Seth Rogenis-the-new-John-Belushi piece. Doing so conveys as impression I'm linked up to the USA hubba-hubba, which, let's face it, I'm not. Not in the laughing Mediterannean culture of sunny Italy, which is still living in the Bill Clinton internet era. It is easily the biggest and darkest black internet/wifi hole I've ever struggled with in my professional life.

L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein takes a gander at the script for Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones, and thereafter understands "why the film's supporters see it as less of a brooding Little Children-style drama and more of a supernatural thriller, packed with creepy chills and a sense of wonder."

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The Weinstein Company will distribute Woody Allen's Cassandra's Dream, which "has been said to be in a darker vein, similar to Match Point," according to one published report. Forget darker -- it's pitch black, this film. (I happened upon a massive third-act plot spoiler on the Cassandra's Dream Wikipedia page.) The drama costars Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell as two brothers under financial pressure who fall for a femme fatale (Haley Atwell), who steers them into a criminal scheme.

Reader Dennis Costa feels this is "the epitome of the mash-up trailer trend...a downright inspired piece of comedy using Star Wars footage (specifically Vader scenes) with audio clips of other James Earl Jones movies...approaching genius-level...the first three and a half minutes could be the funniest thing I've ever seen," etc. My 1998-level flat screen inside a cafe in Greve (south of Florence about 25 kilometers) doesn't play video so I'm trusting Costa.

Because the $142 million earned by Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End over the Memorial Day weekend opening was the absolute biggest ever, that means that Movie Nation is delighted, Gore Verbinksi and Jerry Bruckheimer are crowned geniuses who are supremely in touch with the hoi polloi, and all the Pirates haters are curmudgeons who need top re-screw their heads on....is that it?

Two movies made about Mark David Chapman''s killing of John Lennon, and they both apparently have major problems and are both sitting around in theatrical-release limbo. Is there something about the material that enforces a kind of cinematic curse? I was told late last year by a director friend that J.P. Schaefer's Chapter 27, which showed at last January's Sundance Film Festival with Jared Leto as Chapman and Lindsay Lohan as a girl he befriends in the days/hours leading up to the Manhattan shooting, had been edited and re-edited to little success. And then there's Andrew PiddingtonRead More

The Cannes jury has officially stiffed the Joel and Ethan Coen' highly praised No Country for Old Men, largely, I suspect, because it 's not very women-friendly and therefore didn't go over with the youngish females on the jury -- actresses Maggie Cheung and Toni Collette, director-actress Maria de Medeiros and director-actress Sarah Polley. The Palme d'Or went instead went to a deeply admired, very fine abortion movie -- Christian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.

The Grand Prix (a runner-up award) was handed to Naomi Kawase's The Mourning Forest

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I'm sitting inside the southern branch of the Venetian Navigator (i.e., the one closer to the San Marco district) as I wait the Cannes Film Festival winners to be announced online. And as we were all taught in school, a watched pot never boils. Tell you what....here are two heavyweight video clips of yesterday's rainstorm. Watch 'em or don't.

I never got around to running this pic earlier, and I somehow want to convey that Josh Brolin did especially well for himself during this festival -- his stellar performance in Old Men, his breezy and yet bluntly confessional manner with the press last weekend, his hilarious performance in the Coen Bros. Chacun son Cinema short. He was kind of an amiable kick-around guy before who was okay or pretty good in this or that film -- now he's moved up a couple of notches.

No Country for Old Men star Josh Brolin

Everyone's already linked to this, but having just been through ten days at the Cannes Film Festival I can say with some authority that Shane Danielsen's short Guardian piece is one of the most honest assessments of what journalists go through there that I've ever read, particularly for these two observations:

(a) "The discomforting and little-known truth is, if you're a filmmaker in competition, your film's success or failure is largely decided in about five minutes...Read More

Hollywood Wiretap's Liza Foreman has written that the Cannes Film Festival parties and the promotions were sometimes better than the parties, and lists a certain " black truck advertising Burn energy drink booming music up and down the Croisette" as one of the go-getters.

Let me explain something -- the people behind this special promotion were and still probably are agents of Satan...Read More

Fox 411's Roger Friedman reported yesterday that the Cannes jury is said to be "completely deadlocked over which film to choose [for the Palme d'Or], and that no clear favorite has emerged." In other words, some of the jurors want to give it to Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and Butterfly to help it along commercially, perhaps sensing that it'll be facing a difficult sell in the U.S. without it. The other two camps are said to be behind Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men and Cristian Mungiu's ...Read More

The mark of any exceptional film is the won't-go-away factor -- a film that doesn't just linger in your head but seems to throb and dance around inside it, gaining a little more every time you re-reflect. This is very much the case with Anton Corbijn's Control, the black-and-white biopic of doomed Joy Division singer Ian Curtis.

I finally saw Control...Read More

Harvey Weinstein (whom my son Jett overheard snarling at someone the other day in Cannes) talks to Variety columnist Anne Thompson about the financial health of the Weinstein Co., trying to swat down rumors that he and brother Bob are on the ropes.

"Unless you've been living in happy isolation, you know that newspapers face a cascading series of problems. Declining revenues. Declining circulation. Uncertainty about the future. No need to recite the entire litany here, except by way of noting that the words 'layoffs' and 'buyouts' have appeared in far too many stories about too many newspapers lately, including this one." -- Rocky Mountain News film critic Robert Denerstein, in a piece announcing his departure due to the above factors.

I was hoping for something much sharper and smarter from James Gray's We Own The Night, which showed at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday, and which Columbia will be releasing stateside sometime later this year. It's a slam-bang urban action piece by way of a Brooklyn family-ties melodrama...the kind in which everyone bellows their feelings. It's good to see Gray back on his feet after years in movie jail (his last film was The Yards, which opened seven years ago) but this is too often a crude, unsubtle, difficult-to-digest film.

Joaquin Pheonix; Eva Mendes

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Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End has a 37% positive from the Rotten Tomatoes elite. Even MCN's David Poland, who wrote last year that the second Pirates film gave him "joy," says it's "the least of the three films."

If you read the reviews by two of the easygoing friendlies -- N.Y. Daily News critic Jack Matthews, and Variety's Brian Lowry -- you'll realize they're not that friendly. The Chicago Tribune's Michael Wilmington, the Chicago Sun Times' Richard Roeper and the notoriously accommodating Michael Rechtshaffen...Read More

This surfaced last Tuesday and I missed it: The MPAA ratings board has upheld the R rating given to Adam Sandler's I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (Universal, 7.20) for "some crude sexual humor and nudity."

"One reason for joy [at this year's Cannes Film Festival] is that word 'art,' which isn't always mentioned in the same breath, much less the same paragraph, when Americans talk about movies," writes N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis in a good sum-up piece about the best snob highbrow films that have played there.

"One of the sustaining pleasures of Cannes is that it allows you to immerse yourself fully from early morning to evening in the kind of aesthetically adventurous, intellectually exhilarating cinematic practices that end up in the American art-house ghetto or being shut out of theaters completely."Read More

"Amid the glamour and the French Riviera sun, more and more Wall Street banks, private equity firms and hedge funds are coming to the 12-day Cannes festival -- the world's largest international film market -- to try to arrange and finance entertainment deals," Liza Klaussmann reported yesterday for the N.Y. Times.

And yet, despite the story's solid writing and sturdy reporting, it instantly put me to sleep. Money guys in suits put people to sleep the world over every day and night...boring, boring, boring...Read More

Woke at 4:30 am and then drove for eight hours -- 7:30 to 3:30 pm. I've been in Venice for about five and a half hours now, and it's really great the way almost nothing about this town changes. I feel too whipped to file anything tonight, but I'll jump into it tomorrow morning. Venice is a fairly dead wi-fi environment, I can tell you that.

This French condom commercial isn't just hilarious and brilliant, but nicely subversive. An ad like this could never, ever play in the States. Or could it?

My ten days of trying to cover the hard-slamming Cannes Film Festival, which has always involved 18-hour work days broken up by sleep periods of five or six hours, has wound to a close, even though the festival will continue for another three days including today -- Friday, 5.15. I've been hanging with Jett, who reviewed and covered for the Boston Pheonix...Read More

Bella Tarr's very slow-moving The Man From London, a Cannes entry, "epitomized what is known as a 'festival film,' i.e., one made for no known audience apart from the already converted disciples of a cult director," Variety's Todd McCarthy has observed. "One version of hell for me would consist of being trapped inside the insular world of this film for eternity."

I was hoping for something much sharper and smarter from James Gray's We Own The Night, which showed at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday, and which Columbia will be releasing stateside sometime later this year. It's a slam-bang urban action piece by way of a Brooklyn family-ties melodrama. It's good to see Gray back on his feet after years in movie jail (his last film was The Yards, which opened seven years ago) but this is too often a crude, unsubtle, difficult-to-digest film.

I'm going to say right now that there's a mild spoiler or two...Read More

Miramax Films has acquired Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a beautifully made, French-language film that inspires guilty thoughts of escape. Variety is reporting that the distributor paid "midway between $2 million and $3 million for North American rights." People of taste will go, but Miramax has its work cut out.

Here's a recording of a chat I had yesterday afternoon with Malcolm McDowell and producer-director Mike Kaplan about their documentary, Never Apologize, which is basically a capturing of a one-man show that McDowell performed in Ojai not long ago about his long, warm, nurturing relationship with director Lindsay Anderson, who directed McDowell in If..., O Lucky Man! and Brittania Hospital. I have to get in line for a 7 pm showng of James Gray's We Own The Night, but I'll share a few comments about the film tomorrow.

One of the pithier comments from this afternoon's Ocean's Thirteen press conference came from star George Clooney when he responded to a far-too-serious inquiry about the declining state of screen- writing. "I'm so glad you asked that question about this film," he replied, adding that Ocean's Thirteen was "clearly a cry for peace."

Ocean's Thirteen-ers at this afternoon's press conference (l. to r.) Ellen Barkin, Steven Soderbergh, George Clooney, producer Jerry Weintraub, Brad Pitt -- Thursday, 5.24.07, 2:32 pm

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"The head's-on favorite to win the Cannes Filjm Festival's Palme d'Or, at least to judge from the critics' poll published by Le Film Francais, appears to be the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men. It's the one film that's attracting support from both the highbrow critics (Positif, Les Inrocks, Le Monde) and the more popular press (Studio, L'Express, Le Point, Premiere)." -- from Dave Kehr's analysis on www.davekehr.com.

Support for Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly...Read More

A "very trusted" source has told Collider's Steve Weintraub that producer Jerry Bruckheimer wants to bring back The Lone Ranger and that he's going to enlist his Pirates crew to make it happen. If true, this is an obvious non-starter for the simple fact that westerns haven't mattered for decades. What's this going to be, The Wild Wild West with virtue? I know, I know -- it's easy for someone like me to take potshots, but if this film comes to pass, you know it isn't going to be Open Range. Better idea...

Sorry to be the bearer, but Ocean's Thirteen (Warner Bros., 6.8) is nothing to drop your socks for or go "hell, yeah!" about. I just came out of the 11 a.m. Cannes press screening, and my reaction was that flat-hand gesture where you kind of wiggle it and go "okay, yeah... meh."

No journalist I've spoken to thus far is doing cartwheels over this thing. No, take that back -- one major-publication guy thought it was better than Ocean's Twelve. But then I have fairly skewed tastes (I found the Julia-Roberts...Read More

The reviews are just starting to trickle in but Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End has a 40% positive Rotten Tomatoes rating thus far. My favorite trash quote is from a review by the Philadelphia Weekly's Sean Burns, to wit: "Such a tangled thicket of overwritten, labyrinthine mythology, backstabbing betrayals and mixed motivations that a massive chunk of the running time is devoted to characters standing around on boats, trying like hell to explain the plot to one another."

Quentin Tarantino's stand-alone Death Proof -- running 114 minutes, or 27 minutes longer than the version that showed in the second half of Grindhouse -- is a slightly tangier and more filling thing, but it's not what I would call significantly enhanced. There are several marginal augmentations -- Vanessa Ferlito's lapdance for Kurt Russell's "Stuntman Mike" is the most significant -- but none of them make you go "whoa!"

The best part of this enjoyably trashy tribute pic is still the car-chase sequence, but it's the same version that appeared in Grindhouse...Read More

Variety's Robert Koehler told me an hour ago in the press room that Serge Bozon's La France, a World War I musical with Sylvie Testud, Pascal Greggory and Guillaume Depardieu, is the best Director's Fortnight film he's seen by far. (He had just come from the screening.) Will HE get around to it? Doubtful, but at least I'll be looking for it down the road. I will, however, finally see Anton Corbijn's Control, the black-and-white Ian Curtis suicide flick, at 6 pm.

I've now seen Juan Antonio Bayona's The Orphanage twice, which is perhaps an irresponsible thing given all the movies and events to be absorbed at the Cannes Film Festival. But it's such a deliciously haunting and rousingly effective work that I couldn't resist. Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men is the best all-around film I've seen here, but The Orphanage is a very close second (with Michael Moore's Sicko and Michael Winterbottom's A Mighty Heart running third and fourth).

The Orphanage director Juan Antonio Bayona

The Arizona Daily Star's Phil Villarreal caught Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End the other day and says, "Man, is piracy paranoia ever getting out of control!

First, he says, "Disney held just one screening in the state of Arizona, meaning I had to drive up to Tempe. Second, they wouldn't let me bring my DS into the theater, I guess for fear I would somehow record the screening with my innocent little video game machine.

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In a N.Y. Times story today (5.22) about Michael Moore's Sicko, reporter Liza Klaussmann says that TWC honcho Harvey Weinstein, a supporter of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, "tried to persuade Moore to revise the film's depiction of Mrs. Clinton."

The story explains that "the early part of the film unrolls as a virtual love letter to Mrs. Clinton, chronicling her efforts as first lady to stage an overhaul of the health care system, but the tone changes as the film proceeds, lumping her among the members of Congress who, Sicko contends, are financially beholde...Read More

A sloppy writer named Jolly Roger put up an Ain't It Cool review last Sunday...Sunday!...of Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End. He basically called it "darker" in the way that the final Star Wars prequel triology was darker than the first two. If the first two Pirate pics "reeled you in as being fun and quirky with skeleton pirates, funny monkeys, waddling Jack, an Octupus man and sword fights," he says, "this film throws most of those light and colorful perceptions out the window."

"There has been a cultural shift in Hollywood where the size of a party doesn't show how much you believe in a movie anymore. A party is not going to sell movie tickets." -- Rob Moore, Paramount worldwide marketing and distribution chief quoted in a N.Y. Times story by Laura M. Holson called "Hollywood Diet: Cutting Back on the Big Parties."

There is an entire culture of Hollywood party vampires in Los Angeles, New York and -- for the time being -- Cannes who will definitely feel deflated after reading this story...Read More

New Line Cinema held a press conference yesterday at the swanky Martinez hotel to promote The Golden Compass, a $180 million action- fantasy pic in the vein of....well, you know. It's another attempt to deliver a heart-touching, visually-dazzling, all-ages family blockbuster, which is no crime. The director is Chris Weisz, and the costars are Daniel Craig (who showed up) and Nicole Kidman (who didn't).

It's a screen adaptation of Philip Pullman's novel, which is (what else?) the first book in a trilogy called ''His Dark Materials.'' It'll debut in early December. Here's hoping it's as good as Read More