Day: April 19, 2005

I realize this makes me sound like Sydney Skolsky, but I’m hearing excellent things about March of the Penguins, a French film said to have drop-dead beautiful photography. The director-cowriter is a guy named Luc Jacquet, and it’s about a flock of emperor penguins on their annual trek across Antarctic and all the classic life rituals and survival challenges they go through. A critic friend who’s seen it says this Warner Independent release “will do for those tuxedoed Antarctic dwellers what Winged Migration did for birds in flight.” The version that’s been screened so far has the original schlocky French soundtrack (my friend says parts of it “sound like Bjork gone Muzak, along with character voices for Mommy, Daddy and Baby penguin”), which is being trashed. Hipper sounds are being put in its place along with “a natural-science narration.” (I’m not supposed to reveal the name of the big-name actor who will read it). Pic will open on 6.24.05 in New York, L.A., San Francisco, Boston, Chicago and D.C., and expand in mid-July.

Deserving of special attention at next month’s Cannes Film Festival, I’m hearing, will be James Marsh’s The King, which stars an English-speaking Gael Garcia Bernal as a discharged Navy guy who comes home to Corpus Christi, Texas, and resolves some long-buried family issues. Marsh co-authored the screenplay with Milo Addica (Birth, Monster’s Ball), whose work I’ve come to admire. The film will be one of the Un Certain Regard attractions. William Hurt, Laura Harring, Paul Dano and Pell James costar. Marsh’s last feature was the startling Wisconsin Death Trip (1999).

Excellent news that Adam Curtis’s The Power of Nightmares, which I wrote about after receiving a muddy-looking tape of it from Telluride Film Festival honcho Tom Luddy last December, is going to have a special screening at the Cannes Film Festival. Luddy was behind this, of course. He lobbied Cannes artistic director Thierry Fremaux along with Fremaux’s good friend Michael Fitzgerald. Director Bernard Tavernier lobbied for the film also. Curtis’ three-hour doc contends that the anti-western terrorists and the neo-con hardliners in the George W. Bush White House are two peas in a fundamentalist pod, and that they seem to be almost made for each other in an odd way, and they need each other’s hatred to fuel their respective power bases but are, in fact, almost identical in their purist fervor, and are pretty much cut from the same philosophical cloth.

In addition to making this site’s machinery chug along, I’m also a filmmaker. No, I’m not plugging anything. But I am in a bit of a bind. If anyone who reads this knows someone who can answer a question about Final Cut Pro exporting audio to OMF, please click on my name and get in touch.