Year: 2010

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 never seem to work in low light.

Snapped toward the end of last night’s La Pizza gathering. L.A. Times contributor Pete Hammond didn’t make it due to a late connecting flight from Germany; ditto Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, who arrived on a volcano-delayed flight from Zurich.

What’s this fucking thing? I’ll tell you what it is. It’s a French praying mantis. You’re supposed to hang it from a hook in the ceiling and then use the plastic clothes pins, etc. I think it’s hideous — I could imagine it appearing as a kind of walking plastic octopus in a Tim Burton stop-motion film.

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 at the camera you don’t get identified.)

And then I picked up my press pass and got the keys to the apartment and so on. That’s it — there’s nothing to say beyond that and I’m too shagged to think stuff up. Maybe later.

The person who designed this festival bag did so with the idea of agitating honorable straight men, none of whom would dream of walking around town with this shiny thing dangling from their shoulder unless they had no other choice.

Definitely the way to watch Avatar — on a six-inch-wide flatscreen on the back of someone’s seat.

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 sudden nature and timing of this be related to the now-expected Burkle/Weinstein/Miramax deal being announced in the coming days?

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 those red-jumpsuit drones preparing to board the mother ship. It made no sense at all (many things in Spielberg’s films fail to make sense or add up) except as a Langian thing.

Metropolis was also a major influence upon Klaus Nomi.

The most completely and fully restored version of Metropolis so far is now playing at the Film Forum.

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 for vindication?,” Bowen asks.

“I’m going to say yes. Iron Man 2‘s biggest problem is that the bad guys aren’t particularly threatening or challenging. Mickey Rourke is underdeveloped, and Sam Rockwell, God love him, is too goofball to be a threat. The minute we see robots we know they can never beat a human in a movie.

“If the villains had been more genuinely menacing, the film would be better. If we ended the film with Stark stripped of his suit in captivity or left for dead somewhere, with his rival and his robot army in charge of a fictitous ‘world peace,’ we could have had a cliffhanger worth discussing for a couple years.

“Instead we get just another bland CGI shoot-em-up without much imagination.”