Five days ago an AP story reported that Carlos the real-life inmate has trashed Olivier Assayas' Carlos for having mocked his "revolutionary comrades." He needs better information or he's full of merde. The film treats each and every character with the same degree of shoulder-level fairness and honesty.

"The 60-year-old Venezuelan, whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, was speaking by telephone to AFP from the French high security prison at Poissy, outside Paris, where he is serving a life term for a triple murder,"...Read More

I met and spoke with the The Myth of the American Sleepover director-writer David Robert Mitchell just before the noon screening of Carlos, and also with some of the cast members. Myth goes against the grain of your typical teen-relationship flick by being much smarter, better acted, more subtle and not reliant on animal-level humor (or animal-level sensibilities in the seats). I wrote earlier that "nothing feels written or faked...each and every scene has a natural ease and honesty."

(l. to r.) Myth of the American Sleepover director-writer David Robert Mitchell, Jade Ramsey (Ana), Brett Jacobsen (Scott), Nikita Ramsey...

Olivier Assayas' Carlos, which screened earlier today, is a fascinating, never-boring, you-are-there masterwork of a certain type. Not exactly a levitational thing and more in the realm of long triple than a home run, but exquisitely done in so many small and great and side-pocket ways that there's really no choice but to take your hat off and say "sure, yes, of course."

Carlos star Edgar Ramirez (r.) during the OPEC hostage-taking sequence, which occupies a sizable portion of Act Two.

This is a politically crackling, intrigue-filled saga of Carlos the Jackal (a.k.a, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez) with...Read More

Having seen Olivier Assayas' Carlos a couple of weeks ago, Indiewire's Todd McCarthy today posted his review -- an over-the-waterfalls rave that'll probably seem like the most incisive and carefully measured assessment coming out today, as everyone else is writing their reviews as we speak (the big Cannes screening ended about an hour ago) and at best taking stabs at the range and sprawl of the thing as best they can, myself included.

Edgar Ramirez as the infamous terrorist whose life is given an epic treatment in Olivier Assayas' Carlos.

"Carlos is everything Che wanted to be...Read More

Excellent news about David Fincher's Se7en coming to Bluray on 9.14. I remember a couple of details about the Los Angeles all-media screening for this 1994 landmark film. I recall that it happened at the Mann Village, and that Don Murphy was there, and that after it ended a couple of guys on the street were imitating Brad Pitt yelling "what's in the baahhx?"

The Weinstein Co. threw a rooftop party last night for Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine, the time-shifting relationship drama starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams. It's now seven minutes shorter than when it played Sundance 2010. Here's a quote from my 1.26 Sundance Film Festival review: "[It's] a pretty good film, or certainly one made by some undeniably talented folks who would rather shoot themselves than make another relationship movie in the same old way."

Blue Valentine's Ryan Gosling and costar Faith Wladkya (who plays Gosling and Michelle Williams' daughter) doing red-carpet routine at the post-midnight soiree on roof of...

Last night The Wrap's Steve Pond posted an amusing summary about the recent Battle of Biutiful. "At the moment, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's film stands as the second most divisive in the short history of indieWIRE's criticWIRE poll," he reported, "trailing only Harmony Korine's Trash Humpers.

"Among the critics polled, Sasha Stone gave it an A+; Robert Koehler gave it an F. In between: an A, an A-, two C+s, two C-s, and a D+.

"And Anne Thompson, who liked the film quite a bit, was left wondering what its commercial prospects could be: 'This movie will be lucky to...Read More

A nice breakfast and a lot of walking around pour moi before settling down with Olivier Assayas five-and-a-half-hour epic (including, I've heard, two intermissions) at noon. Backsides will be tested, but I'm told it's the genuine shit.

Passing scooters cut into the commentary at times, but otherwise well said by L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turan and Chicago Tribune critic Michael Phillips.

After throwing an anger fit over the inexplicable Biutiful hate vented over the last 28 or 30 hours, I've come to accept that the naysayers are just too numerous and persistent to push back against. Just a feeling that began to sink in about an hour ago.

I'm finally watching David Robert Mitchell's Myth of the American Sleepover -- about a half-hour in -- and it's clearly as sharply cut and well-observed as SXSW reviews have claimed. Nothing feels written or faked. Each and every scene has a natural ease and honesty.

But if I was under fire and taking cover in...Read More

Fair Game director Doug Liman, who arrived in Cannes last night, did an American Pavillion q & a about two hours ago with USA Today's Anthony Breznican. In the clip below he talks about his reasons for casting Naomi Watts as outed CIA spy Valerie Plame, above and beyond physical resemblance.

Factual and emotional truths were the things he adhered to above all, he said. He decided firmly against using any Oliver Stone-like speculation or invention. And he didn't try to emulate the tone or pacing...Read More

Fatigue and whatnot prevented my seeing Lucy Walker's Countdown Zero on my flu-recovery day (i.e., Sunday, 5.16) . I'd try again if there was a makeup screening. For some reason the premise didn't kick in personally until a director friend mentioned a few weeks ago that it's all but certain that terrorists will one day get hold of a nuclear device. And all of a sudden that feeling was there.

I did a ten-minute chat late this morning with Inside Job director Charles Ferguson. It happened at the semi-outdoor (i.e., ceilinged) atelier on the Majestic Beach. Weak sound, so-so photography, decent questions (especially the one about whether some of his rich-banker subjects may have agreed to speak to him because Ferguson himself is a rich guy). Here's my original review.

I began feeling more and more angry yesterday afternoon and evening as it became increasingly evident that a significant percentage of effete critics (i.e., not necessarily a majority) had come down negatively upon Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Biutiful, an immensely sad and highly poetic little film that needs all the intelligent support it can get. And yet certain dweeb types have, it seems, gotten together and decided to diminish it.

Last night the Indiewire team sent out an e-mail stating that the two critical favorites so far are Mike Leigh's Another Year (which I've managed not to see -- sorry) and Charles Ferguson's...Read More

Last night I was called a "tragedy" and "pig-ignorant" and "sad" and "lame" and so on by Glenn Kenny and a small team of like-minded thugs for having dissed Abbas Kiarostami's Copie Conforme (a.k.a., Certified Copy). In their eyes I was guilty of two offenses. The primary was having said that while I appreciated the purity of mood and technique and mise en scene in Kiarostami's latest, I found it to be essentially an entombed and lifeless exercise. The secondary was in having used terms that weren't properly referenced or fully considered enough, or were deemed too hot-dog plain.

What Kenny...Read More

Abbas Kiarostami's Copie Conforme (a.k.a., Certified Copy) is what most hot-dog-eating humans on the planet earth would call a "dead movie." You know...a movie with lofty pretensions and perhaps an echo or two of Yasujiro Ozu that nonetheless lacks a discernible pulse because the director-writer has crawled so far up his own ass that he doesn't know the difference between real sunlight and imaginings of same?

However, if you're a member in good standing of Film Dweeb Nation, a presumably human but possibly alien culture...Read More

This clip from this morning's Biutiful press conference is visually underwhelming, to say the least, but it offers a good explanation from Javier Bardem and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu about what the film is, what they were after and so on. Toward the end of my taping a young festival guy came over and began nudging and whispering that I shouldn't tape during the conference. Sure thing.

My reaction to Stephen Frears' Tamara Drewe, which screened this afternoon at the Salle Bunuel, was immediate and unambiguous -- I hated it. It's one of those satires of a form (i.e., romantic fiction) that doubles back and has it both ways by satirizing and playing it "straight," or straight enough so that romantic fiction fans can themselves double-track by enjoying the cliches at face-value while having a good laugh or snicker. Everybody wins...except people like me.

Gemma Arterton in Stephen Frears' Tamara Drewe.

Boiled down, Tamara Drewe is (a) a comedy by a hip director that's aimed...Read More

The digital loading rates are slow as usual in the Orange cafe (my video was converted to mp4, but You Tube won't even appear) and now I have to get myself to the 1 pm screening of Stephen Frears' Tamara Drewe, which starts in 23 minutes.

At the start of this morning's Biutiful press conference -- 5.17, 11:19 am.

5.17, 11:59 am.

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Biutiful, which ended about fifteen minutes ago, is a sad, deeply touching hard-knocks, lower-depths drama in the tradition (or along the lines, even) of Roberto Rosselini's Open City or Vittorio DeSica's The Bicycle Thief. How's that for high praise out of the gate?

Set among the poor and deprived in Barcelona, it's about love and caring and continuity and carrying on among those who have it toughest, and dealing with guilt and tradition and the approaching of death and all the rest of the stuff that we all carry on our backs.

Every actor is exactly right and spot-on...Read More

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Biutiful will screen in 22 minutes and I haven't left the apartment yet. Some believe that the Barcelona-set drama with Javier Bardem is the last best hope of the festival for a serious home run.

My eldest son Jett graduated last weekend from Syracuse University with a major in journalism. The photos arrived this morning. I regret not having been there.

After my Ellen Barkin encounter I went to Lucy Walker's Countdown to Zero, a doc about the proliferation of armed nuclear devices, but didn't see it due to the flu-like thing that's been taking hold within. I promptly went under. Sharon Waxman will confirm this as she was sitting right beside me.

Will you look at that slightly stooped-over posture? Like a mailman at the end of the day. An ex-girlfriend told me a few weeks bacjk to sit up straight and stand up straight. Now I get what she meant. There's nothing cool or soulful in slouching...

For me, Ellen Barkin, the star of Cam Archer's fairly dreadful Shit Year, is movie-star material. Which is why I sat in the front row with my camera and my computer and my touch of a fever at the American Pavillion's panel area and waited to see her, even though she kept everyone waiting for nearly 40 minutes.

Ellen Barkin during this afternoon's American Pavillion panel discussion of Shit Year, which was considerably delayed by Barkin's tardiness.

Barkin, Shit Year director Cam Archer -- 5.16, 12:55 pm.

Having missed yesterday's 4 pm market showing of Taylor Hackford's long-delayed Love Ranch, I tried to get into this morning's 10 am follow-up screening at the Olympia. But no dice -- a publicist stopped me, explaining there was a "no press" policy. Even though they've begun to screen it for journalists back in Los Angeles, according to what an L.A. Times guy told me.

This morning's interference obviously doesn't prove that Love Ranch is a problem movie. It may not be. But if you were repping a really good film, would you tell your publicist to...Read More

There is nothing lower than a third-act plot twist. I'm not saying they don't work from time to time (obviously they do) but putting in an "aha!...didn't see that one coming!" turnaround is the most tedious dramatic device imaginable. Because everyone uses them, and it's gotten to the point that we know some kind of third-act twist is coming. If they weren't so prolific it might be interesting to use one occasionally, but they've become an absolute requirement. And that has made them deadly.

It's my sixth day of humping around Cannes, having arrived last Tuesday, and my system is starting to succumb to the 18-hour work days, as it's done before at previous film festivals at this stage of the game. I don't have a fever, but I'm on the cusp of succumbing to one. My body is telling me that it wants to do as little as possible and get, for the first time, a decent night's sleep. (I've been making do with 5 1/2 to 6 hours so far.) So maybe I'll do that.

After doing a few things, I mean. The American...Read More

Getting older is "a lousy deal," Woody Allen said during yesterday's You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger press conference (which I missed because I chose to see Inside Job instead, which began at the same time). "There is no advantage in getting older. I'm 74 now. You don't get smarter, you don't get wiser, you don't get more mellow, you don't get more kindly...nothing good happens.

"Your back hurts more, you get indigestion, your eyesight isn't as good and you need a hearing aid. It's a bad business getting older, and I would advise you not to do it...Read More

I was reminding myself this morning that it's a sign of weak character to take long showers. Anyone who does this is a soft sister -- a person looking to hide inside the warm amniotic fluid of his mother's womb, which is what a nice hot shower feels like. This realization goes back to when I was in my early 20s. If I happened to notice that a roommate or some guy or girl who was staying over was taking ten- or twelve-minute showers (or worse), I would instantly write them off.

Those who take extra-long hot showers are the same people who...Read More

Yesterday morning I blew off the 8:30 am screening of Mike Leigh's Another Year in order to catch Shit Year -- bad call as it turned out. So I'll be catching it today at a Salles des Soixantieme make-up screening, although I know not precisely when. The Cannes website does a superb job of keeping the schedule hidden from those who lack the skills of a master web detective.

36 hours ago Awards Daily's Sasha Stone, who's doing Cannes for the first time, wrote the following: "Cannes smells like coffee, cigarettes and the sea. On days where it's bright and warm, you are caught with brief glimpses of the white caps in the waves and the reflection of the sun on their surface. Those are the moments you wish you were sipping good rose on someone's yacht, dressed in flowing white linen and watching the peons mill around on shore.

Wall Street 2 star Shia Lebeouf a couple of days ago.

"What I see mostly...Read More

The Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips and the L.A. Times' Steven Zeitchik "offer their breakdown on the opening of the Cannes Film Festival and the drama that lies ahead, in the first of a series of videos from the south of France," etc. They were asking me about upload problems late yesterday afternoon at the American Pavillion. I guess they sorted 'em out.

Charles Ferguson's Inside Job, which screened early this afternoon, is a highly absorbing, meticulously composed hammer doc about the causes of the '08 financial meltdown. Most of us have some kind of understanding of the whys and wherefores, but Ferguson lays it all out like a first-class table setting and makes this titanic crime seem extra vivid.

The American public was robbed blind and is still being made to suffer by an arrogant den of thieves, and the enormity of their power-corridor hustle is almost too vast and labrynthian to comprehend. But Ferguson's doc makes it more...Read More

Woody Allen's You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger is powered by dark whimsy. Set in London, it's a mildly amusing, somewhat chilly film with no piercing performances or dramatic highlights even, as if everything and everyone is on a regulator of some kind. And yet the undertone has a steady and persistent misanthropic flavor. And it leaves you with a kind of "uh-huh, okay" feeling at the end.

Naomi Watts, Josh Brolin in Woody Allen's You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, which screened at 11:30 this morning in Cannes.

It's not a bust -- there's...Read More

For me, Cam Archer's Shit Year is a stew of pretentious monochrome murk. It's one of those narrative-defying, interior landscape art-wanks that younger directors sometimes make in order to get the attention of the art-wank crowd -- producers, other directors, art-gallery owners and journalists who delight in embracing difficult fare.

Luke Grimes, Ellen Barkin in Cam Archer's Shit Year.

It seems to be an attempt to live in the misty, disoriented head of an older retired actress (Ellen Barkin) as she...well, as she does very little. Is having an affair with a good-looking 20something actor (Luke Grimes)...Read More

Cannes journalists have been talking about how jammed Saturday is. The worry obviously isn't about seeing at least four if not five films today, but finding time to file. Most are going to Mike Leigh's Another Year this morning at 8:30 am (45 minutes hence) but I'll be catching the 9 am Directors Fortnight showing of Cam Archer's Shit Year. Then comes Woody Allen's You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger at 11:30 am, and then Charles Ferguson's Inside Job at 1:30 pm. I then have a 4pm choice between Gregg Araki's Kaboom or a market screening of Taylor Hackford's Love Ranch....Read More

A guy who spoke to Sean Penn (and vice versa) mentioned to another who told me tonight at the lavish Abu Dhabi party that Penn has seen Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Biutiful, which screens early Monday morning at the Cannes Film Festival, and that he was melted and creamola-ed and shattered. And that this Spanish-spoken, Barcelona-shot drama is...you know, the absolute total shit. (What do I know? Less than nothing.) And that star Javier Bardem's performance is so good it's on a level of "forget it, hombre!" Are you going to question the reliability of third-hand party chatter?

Well, I guess things don't look so hot right now for the "let it go because Roman Polanski is an art god" argument, do they? Yes, I'll admit it -- the indications are damning. But why did Charlotte Lewis, an actress who hasn't worked since the '90s, wait 28 years to make her statement about RoPo? And is anyone going to claim with a straight face that this wasn't some kind of slick sleaze maneuver orchestrated by the L.A. district attorney's office?

Restoration guru Robert Harris, who orchestrated the immaculate and much-respected 1991 restoration of Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus, has sharply criticized Universal Home Video's soon-to-be-released Bluray of this 1960 epic. Actually, "sharply criticized" doesn't quite describe it. "Torn it a new one" is closer.

The film that Harris painstakingly restored has been turned "into a sideshow pipsqueak, an ugly and unfortunate bit of home video fodder, which would be far better suited to VHS," he writes in a 5.12 Home Theatre Forum posting. "I would suggest a recall. Spartacus on Blu-ray could have been as Mr. Kubrick...Read More

I had this Wall Street 2 press conference clip all loaded and ready to go as I was writing my review this morning, and then accidentally erased it. Better late than never.

There are no facilities inside the American Pavillion, or any of the other pavillions for that matter. So it helps to know about a certain white-tiled room inside the rear entrance of the Grand Palais. It's not advertised, there are no signs, and the French-speaking staffers with the shades and the blue blazers may not tell you -- you just have to know.

Oliver Stone's Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps (20th Century Fox, 9.24) is an intelligent, briskly paced, rat-a-tat financial tale that moves along nicely for the first 75% to 80% of its running time -- not brilliantly but sufficiently, offering a more-or-less decent ride. And then it blows itself up during the last 25 minutes or so.

Or so it seemed to me. Some have told me they disagree, but I know (or think I know) when a film is gutting itself emotionally. WS2 does this with a sudden turnabout in the character and actions of Michael...Read More

It was announced earlier today that Olivier Assayas' Carlos, the three-part, five-and-a-half-hour epic about the international bad-ass terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal, will (a) premiere on the Sundance Channel as a three-part mini-series in October, and (b) will then be released theatrically via IFC Films in two forms -- the butt-numbing three-part version (which will screen in Cannes on Wednesday, 5.19) as well as a shorter theatrical cut that will run in the vicinity of three hours.

Every year there are always one or two Cannes market screenings worth catching. I've been hoping all along that Sylvester Stallone's The Expendables would turn up in this fashion, but with no announcement so far I guess not. So the one to see, I suppose, is Taylor Hackford's Love Ranch, which will screen on Saturday (along with four or five other must-sees that day).

Love Ranch is a '70s period drama about Joe and Sally Conforte's Mustang Ranch, with Joe Pesci playing the (in)famous Mr. Conforte and Helen Mirren (i.e., Hackford's wife) plays Sally....Read More

If the people handling or representing Doug Liman's Fair Game are reading this, they should seriously consider showing it to press prior to the first official screening on Thursday morning. A certain percentage will be packing or already gone by Thursday (or by Friday morning, 5.21), so it really wouldn't hurt to show it at one of the commercial cinemas on the rue d'Antibes a day or two earlier. Just saying.

The first screening of Ken Loach's Route Irish, a last-minute addition to the Cannes competition slate, happens concurrently with the big Carlos screening, which pretty much everyone is...

The problem with my Canon Powershot SD1400 is that it always brightens what it captures. This was shot last night around 9:15 pm with dusk beginning to settle in, and that visual mood is clearly missing here. This is obviously ragged and unfocused, but atmospheric capturings are an essential (but under-reported) aspect of the Cannes experience. It's important, I feel, to convey the peripheral vibe.

"The rather distracting debate about Elena Kagan's sexuality reached fever pitch this week," reports Newsweek's Julia Baird, "thanks to a powerfully argued series of posts by gay blogger Andrew Sullivan, who insisted that Kagan's sexual orientation should be a matter of public record if she is going to be confirmed as a Supreme Court judge.

"'It is no more of an empirical question than whether she is Jewish,' he argued. "We know she is Jewish, and it is a fact simply and rightly put in the public square. If she were to hide her Jewishness, it would seem rightly odd,...Read More

Sang-soo Im's The Housemaid, a remake of a 1960 drama of the same name, is a sexual hothouse melodrama made in the spirit of Claude Chabrol and Brian DePalma. It screened at 4:30 in the Salle Debussy, and for the second time in a row I had to sit on one of those half-assed fold-out seats, which are okay for an hour or so and then you begin to feel it.

The DePalma-Chabrol tag means that The Housemaid (a) is about dark currents in...Read More

For whatever reason I never paid attention to this Magnum Gold ice cream commercial that Bryan Singer directed and Benicio Del Toro & Caroline De Souza Correa starred in. It began showing a couple of months ago in France. It just played on a flatscreen here at the Orange wifi cafe. Benny!

I caught this morning's 8:30 am screening of Wang Xiaoshuai's Chongquing Blues -- the general grimness, slow pace and repetition did me in. I tried too late to get into an 11 am screening of Sabina Guzzanti's Draquila -- Italy Trembles, a docu about Silvio Berlusconi. I've just come out of Radu Muntean's Tuesday, After Christmas -- an emotionally rounded, very well acted Roumanian drama about an extra-marital affair and its inevitable consequence. And now I have 15 minutes to make a 4:30 pm screening of Im Sangsoo's The Housemaid. No time to write, much less think things through.

...

I've twice read Mike Goodridge's explanation story about why Bob Berney bolted from Apparition....and I still don't entirely get it. I get the part about Apparition having gradually slid into a weakened financial state due to distribution disappointments such as The Runaways and Bright Star. Then came the coup de grace, he says, when Apparition lost out on distributing Fair Game, the Doug Liman political drama, which apparently led Berney to see the company as a sinking ship.

Indiewire's Anne Thompson has disputed Goodridge's report, saying that the Fair Game deal was "not a factor...Summit always had first crack at...Read More

George Nolfi's The Adjustment Bureau (Universal, 9.17) is some kind of trippy spooky thing starring Matt Damon (wearing one of those abominable straw hats that regimented American conformists wore in the '50s) and Emily Blunt. Based on a 1954 Philip K. Dick short story called "The Adjustment Team," it's about the relatonship between a politician (Damon) and a ballerina (Blunt) being "thrown into disarray by the mysterious forces at work beneath the surface of their virtual world," etc.

Set in the mid '50s, it's some...Read More

I caught a film late yesterday afternoon that I need to maintain silence about until tomorrow morning. But it turned me around so I texted a couple of people about my feelings when I emerged, and then I went into the Orange Cafe to fiddle around and ran into Awards Daily 's Sasha Stone. We subsequently met Inside Job co-cinematographer Svetlana Cvetko and editor-screenwriter David Scott Smith for a nice noisy dinner around 9:30 pm.

A Robin des Bois fireworks display on the Majestic pier -- 5.12, 10:55 pm.

Washington Post critic Ann Hornaday, I learned,...Read More

Every year I run one of these Orange Cafe videos -- an attempt to convey the sense of meditative solace and and safety and serenity, even, that working here provides. It's the emotional and spiritual ground zero of the festival, for me.

Indie publicist Adam Kersh (formerly of 42West) sent me this video of Daddy Longlegs co-director Benny Safdie in a recent sandwich-board attempt to attract attention for his film, which opens Friday, 5.14 on one screen at the IFC Center. "Benny took to the streets last weekend to make sure he had a few more people on his side as Daddy Longlegs goes head-to-head with Robin Hood (opening on 3,000+ screens)," etc.

Daddy Longlegs is a movie about fathering, or more particularly "a swan song to excuses...Read More

I wasn't picked and therefore didn't ask Russell Crowe about a perception that Robin Hood is either sympathetic to or in league with tea-bagger sentiments (i.e., against oppressive governments that don't respect Average Joes and tax without giving anything back, etc.). And Crowe dodged a question about what Robin Hood would be for or against in today's political world.

He did, however, convey his usual disdain for mainstream media (i.e., "you people"), and particularly its ownership/control by corporations (and its resultant obsession with trivial bullshit)....Read More

I've emerged from my second Robin Hood screening with my initial reactions intact -- it's an expertly made, handsomely shot, very well acted film with a story that deserves at least some favor for not doing the same old Robin Hood sha-la-la.

And I was even more taken this time because the projection and sound at the Salle Debussy are unmistakably better than at Manhattan's Lincoln Square, where I saw it the first time. It really does matter if a film looks and sounds its very best.

Ridley Scott's Robin Hood is the first screening of the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, starting at 10 ayem. Give it another go or hunker down in the Orange press room and wait for the 12:45 pm press conference? Scott won't be there due to knee surgery, but I intend to ask Russell Crowe about perceptions that it's a tea-bagger movie, or at least that it panders to tea-bagger sentiments.

If I was a commercial airline pilot, I would dodge the Iceland volcanic ash by flying to Europe in the style of Slim Pickens' Major Kong in Dr. Strangelove, maintaining an altitude of no more than two or three hundred feet. "If we was flyin' any lower we'd need sleighbells on this thing..."

It was decided at last night's La Pizza gathering that Quentin Dupieux's Rubber, an 85-minute film about a killer tire with psychic powers, is probably worth seeing. It'll be shown here as a special Critics' Week screening (La Semaine de la Critique) sometime soon. Just don't ask me to supply the date, time and location. I got enough aggravation.

Dupieux directed, wrote and shot it. The cast is headed by Stephen Spinella, Roxane Mesquida, Jack Plotnick, Wings Hauser, Ethan Cohn and Charley Koontz.

"I'm still naïve enough to believe that there is still room for...Read More

After two or three hours of half-sleep on the plane, the basic strategy when you first get here is not to take naps and stay up until 11 pm or midnight so you'll at least sleep through the night. I stayed up until just before 1 am last night, and then awoke at 4 am -- brilliant. My New York body doesn't know what's happening. The little apartment, at least, is quite pleasant. It's been repainted and re-furnished, and the wifi is much better than it was last year.

Tuesday, 5.11, 10:05 pm. In a pinch, iPhone pics...

Of sleep, I mean. On last night's NY-to-Nice jet. Sleep so near to waking it barely deserves the name. And then the Nice-to-Cannes A8 bus line decided not to provide extra buses to accommodate the influx of festivalgoers. (Naturally!). So after hanging around for an hour or so the bunch of us split two cabs. 80 euros divided by three -- jacked.

Waiting for a slacker bus at Nice Airport -- (l. to r.) Indiewire critic Eric Kohn (green T-shirt), Washington Post critic Ann Hornaday, Indiewire columnist/commemntator Anne Thompson, USA Today Anthony Breznican. (If you don't look...

Posted by Moises Chiullan: Just as Jeff boarded a plane to Cannes, Deadline Hollywood posted the news that Bob Berney abruptly resigned from his post at Apparition.

This came completely out of the blue, shocking Bill Pohlad and the entire Apparition staff. Apparition has abruptly cancelled plans to attend Cannes as a buyer, since Berney was the only one empowered to make deals. This means au revoir to Apparition touching anything, in the market or otherwise. According to Finke's sources, Tree of Life is still an Apparition movie and coming in the fall as planned.

My wild, unfounded speculation: could the...Read More

Gate 6, Delta Airlines, JFK, 9:06 pm. Several Cannes-bound journalists waiting for the same flight to Nice -- Eric Kohn, Richard Corliss, Anthony Breznican, Ann Hornaday, Anne Thompson, Jim Hoberman, Lou Lumenick, Duane Byrge, etc. Plus Oliver Stone, N.Y. Film Festival honcho Richard Pena. Boarding has nearly begun. Radio silence until 7:30 am New York time or thereabouts.

Last weekend New Orleans radio/movie guy Dave Dubos discovered a 1980 issue of Films in Review in which he found a review by yours truly of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. At the time I was working as a host at a Lincoln Center restaurant for money, and writing reviews for nickels and dimes.

Last night Matt Zoller Seitz asked his Facebook pallies which movies, foreign or domestic, past or present, do they think were most strongly influenced by Fritz Lang's Metropolis? Blade Runner, Brazil and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, of course...but what else?"

Certainly the most glaring in today's realm is Steven Spielberg's Minority Report. And the image of those guys trudging along in grim formation inside the big factory was also appropriated by Spielberg for the finale of Close Encounters when he showed...Read More

Delta/Air France has delayed my Nice flight by three hours -- an 8:30 pm departure rather than 5:40 pm. That's okay, I suppose. It affords a little more time to attend to last-minute clean-ups and tweedly-deedlies. My Nice arrival will now be at 11:10 am Tuesday. 2:35 pm update: Delta now says the flight is leaving at 9:30 pm tonight and arriving in Nice at 12:10 pm. Do I hear a 10:30 pm flight and 1:10 pm arrival? Can we go for 11:30 pm departure and a 2:10 pm arrival?

D*HOLLYWOOD has posted one-sheets for two Cannes 2010 films -- Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Biutiful and Olivier Assayas's Carlos. I'm sorry but the latter is almost comically bad. It's akin to those ludicrous internet photos of the devil's face being formed by smoke from one of the 9/11 explosions. It's the kind of thing that Cannon Films might have gone with in the mid '80s. Dump it.

Doug Liman (Fair Game) will soon direct a 3D Three Musketeers -- apparently intended to be a kind of goofball japey Eloi-friendly version in the vein of Sherlock Holmes. This is a futile endeavor in the sense that no one -- no one! -- will ever out-score or out-attitude Richard Lester's The Three Musketeers ('73), which is coming out on a new DVD on 6.1.10. So Liman's film is double-doomed by way of comparison and the cousin-of-Sherlock Holmes continuity factor. Okay, he'll probably make a better Musketeers than Stephen Herek's version -- big deal.

No Lena Horne obituary will be candid enough to say this so I will. She was the first African-American actress-performer to inspire tumescence among mildly racist white guys of the 1940s and '50s. Horne was a great singer with wonderfully soothing pipes, but she was plain hot besides. The racist joke used to go, "Who would you rather do -- Kate Smith or Lena Horne?"

HE reader Kevin Bowen is wondering if Iron Man 2 might have worked better if it had ended with a cliffhanger in the vein of The Empire Strikes Back. One of the reasons that this second Star Wars film is so highly regarded is that it's the only franchise actioner in the history of cinema in which the main characters do nothing but lose, lose and lose. Their only heroic accomplishment is escaping with their lives...barely.

"Would Iron Man 2 be a better film if it went the Empire Strikes Back route and had Tony Stark/Iron Man lose, with the third film available...Read More

The Cannes Film Festival has added Ken Loach's Route Irish, a romantic triangle drama set in Liverpool and Iraq, to the competition slate. Written by Paul Laverty, it's about two ex-soldiers in love with the same lady. Pic includes "a number of action sequences employing stunts and pyrotechnics -- a rare terrain for the British helmer," says Variety. Chris Menges is the dp. Boning scenes will most likely be subtle or bypassed entirely, given the usual wont of older directors.

I've just been invited to see Craig McCall's Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff, on Sunday, 5.16 at 7:45pm -- six days hence -- at the Salle Bunuel.

My favorite Cardiff-shot films (in this order): John Huston's The African Queen, Richard Fleischer's The Vikings, John Irvin's The Dogs of War, and King Vidor's War and Peace. Oh, and I've always had a liking for the look of Girl on a Motorcycle, that late '60s soft-porny leather-zipper thing with Alaine Delon and Marianne Faithful.

Cameraman screened at the BFI in London last week. It...Read More

Didn't play this trailer until yesterday. Apparently decent, mildly appealing, amusing attitude, etc. Supernatural revenge saga by way of Pale Rider and High Plains Drifter. But what's with the the gopher hole in the right cheek? If I'd produced, I would have said "look, I get it, maimed by a branding iron...but I don't want the star of my movie walking around with a grotesque hole in his cheek. Eastwood would have never gone for that in his day. It would scare away the ladies."

President Obama will certainly nominate Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, according to an MSNBC news story written by Pete Williams that posted an hour ago.

"They stand so low / you got to pick 'em up just to say hello." -- Randy Newman.

Here's what I wrote on April 10th: "President Barack Obama's likely nominee to replace retiring Chief Associate Justice John Paul Stevens is said to be solicitor general (and former Harvard Law School dean) Elena Kagan.

"The general understanding is that she's (a) quite brilliant, (b) ideologically centrist if not conservative (Salon's...Read More

Instead of waiting for Wednesday's Cannes showing, several critics jumped the gun on Robin Hood today. First came Empire, and then Variety and The Hollywood Reporter stepped in with a little wham-bam, and then came Indiewire's Todd McCarthy. And some of them have grumbled a bit, and nobody is quite doing cartwheels in the lobby.

I'm thinking I may as well throw my own two cents in. I mean, the fences are down and this movie needs a friend.

Hasn't the general Average Joe anticipatory reaction been "what...another Robin Hood? Already? How long...Read More

The talk already is that the American Pavillion is going to be known as year as Shit Year Central with a Cam Archer interview (shared with Myth of the American Sleepover's David Robert Mitchell...go, Adam Kersh!) on Saturday the 15th and a Shit Year "Industry in Focus" panel the following day with Archer, costars Ellen Barkin and Luke Grimes, and producers Jay Van Hoy and Lars Knudsen. Get your Shit Year right here!

Seriously, where's the usual smattering of name-level guests? Apart from Barkin, I mean? Who did the bookings?

I noted last week that I found Robert Downey, Jr.'s appearance in Iron Man 2 irksome. All that base and mascara and tanning spray, and that prissy Van Dyke beard. Today I finally put my finger on it -- he has a bit of that Cesare Danova-in-Cleopatra thing going on. That's the only notable Van Dyke beard performance I could think of, but there must be others. I only know (or feel, at least) that in Downey's careful clippings and waxy skin something icky this way comes.

(l. to r.) Robert Downey...

Isn't a movie that fans the flames of the old "William Shakespeare didn't really write all those plays" controversy a kind of literary birther flick, in a sense? Roland Emmerich's currently rolling Anonymous, which alleges that Edward De Vere (Rhys Ifans) was the actual author, strikes me as such.

Team Anonymous on the muddy Elizabethan set: (l. to r.) Mark Rylance, screenwriter John Orlov, Vanessa Redgrave, Roland Emmerich, Joely Richardson, Rafe Spall, David Thewlis, Rhys Ifans.

Pic is nonethless being called a "political thriller." A friend who's read John Orloff's screenplay says "this is the best...Read More

A 5.8 clip of Seymour Hersh speaking on 4.24 at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Geneva about how Barack Obama is being "dominated by the military" on "Iran, Afghan and Pakistan," is "following the policies of Bush and Cheney almost to a fare-thee-well," and is "in real trouble."

I'll put up with chilly, buffeting Santa Ana winds for a day -- but not two. Blowing my hair all to hell, putting scarves and sweaters and winter coats back into use. Eff you, Mother Nature. It's early May, summer beckons and it's like Montana in early March.

The image on the left -- i.e, a red-haired Monica Vitti mildly intrigued by the idea of physical congress with a certain someone as she pauses at a bedroom door -- is what comes to mind when I think of Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert ('64). The cover of the upcoming Criterion Bluray, by contrast, is the monk version of same. Monks are averse to sex; they wear brown robes and sandals, pray a lot and tend to the goats in the barn. They respect Vitti, of course, but they also fear her.

(l.) the Read More