For me, the standout quote of the press conference for the Cannes Film Festival jurors (held at 2:30 pm) came when a Scandanavian journalist asked for comments about the reported suicide death of Searching For Sugar Man director Malik Bendjelloul, and Nicholas Winding Refn said it was very sad and tragic news, adding that “life is a beautiful gift.” (I vaguely recall his saying “very beautiful” but I wasn’t taking notes.) That immediately struck me as an unexpected thought coming from the director of Only God Forgives, but once I got past this I suddenly reconsidered who Refn might really be deep down. Because I was more than half-convinced after seeing God that he was the proverbial chubby kid who likes to pull the wings off flies.

Reminder: Last November I got an email from Refn‘s assistant, informing that Refn’s wife, Liv Corfixen, “is making a documentary about what life is like married to an artist like Nicolas surrounding the making of Only God Forgives. She has footage of Nicolas reading aloud a portion of your review of OGF that was published on Hollywood-Elsewhere.com and would love to include it in the film. Copied on this email is Nicolas’ producing partner Lene Borglum. She would like to have your permission to use the quote from your review and can answer any questions you have.” My reply: “Funny. Sure, use away.”

The juror chairperson/honcho is director Jane Campion (i.e., white hair). The others are Carole Bouquet, Iranian actress Leila Hatami (A Separation), Willem Dafoe, Gael Garcia Bernal, Nicholas Winding-Refn, director Sofia Coppola, South Korean actress Jeon Do-yeon and Chinese director Jia Zhangke.

There is nothing in Olivier Dahan‘s Grace of Monaco, a precious, rarified tale of French political maneuver and regal appearances, that persuades or reaches out in a dramatic sense or which resembles “life” as most of us know it. It may as well be taking place on the ice planet of Hoth. It’s basically about a socially isolated prisoner, the former Grace Kelly (Nicole Kidman) who became Princess Grace of Monaco when she married Prince Rainer (Tim Roth) in April 1956, chafing against the restrictions of her marriage and title and mulling a return to the screen as the star of Alfred Hitchcock‘s Marnie. (Fate spared her that embarassment.) Right away I was muttering to myself “who cares?” I was chafing against the restrictions that came with watching this film, I can tell you. The word that best applies is “mediocre.” Grace of Monaco is essentially a TNT movie aimed at older women who remember Grace’s car-crash death in ’82 (as traumatic in its time to Princess Di‘s passing in ’97) and who revere the notion of marrying into royalty and all that. I couldn’t have felt less involved. This is one of those movies that you do your best to sit through.

The most arresting sequence, for me, is one in which Kidman/Kelly is shown racing her sports car around winding hairpin turns in the hills above Monte Carlo. On one level it foreshadows the circumstances of Grace’s actual demise in the same area, but it’s shot and cut to closely resemble a similar scene in To Catch a Thief with Kelly driving and Cary Grant riding shotgun. Not a profound moment but nicely done all the same.

Tonight’s La Pizza dinner in Cannes was attended by yours truly, Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Eugene Hernandez (who very graciously and much to everyone’s surprise picked up the check on behalf of FSLC), Deadline‘s Pete Hammond, Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn and Dana Harris, Washington Post critic Ann Hornaday, Variety‘s Peter Debruge (directly across from me) and Justin Chang, Toronto Star critic Peter Howell and Movie City News contributor Jake Howell, among others. That’s Weinstein Co. publicity president Dani Weinstein (dark hair, white pants, dark top) who strolls up to the table and chats with Hammond.

Wednesday, 5.14 update: Johar Bendjelloul, the brother of deceased documentary director Malik Bendjelloul, whose body was found yesterday in Stockholm, has reportedly told Aftonbladet, a Swedish newspaper, that Malik’s death was due to suicide. He added that his brother had “struggled with depression.”

Earlier: During the January 2012 Sundance Film Festival I chatted with Searching for Sugar Man director Malik Bendjelloul, although I’ve forgotten exactly under what circumstance. (It wasn’t during an interview but a social event of some kind.) I remember very clearly that he was a very nice, open and likable guy. 13 months later Sugar Man won the Best Feature Documentary Oscar, and Bendjelloul (along with producer Simon Chinn) strode to the mike and offered a gracious thanks. And now, 15 months after that triumph, the 36 year-old Bendjelloul has been found dead in Stockholm. No cause of death has been reported, but “local police told the newspaper Expressen that it was not being treated as suspicious.” Well, I’m suspicious. 36 year-old guys don’t just keel over. Obviously something happened. Condolences to friends, colleagues, admirers.

This is the fourth year I’ve stayed in a third-floor apartment at 7 rue Jean Mero, located in the heart of Cannes’ old section, so I kinda know the neighborhood a bit. And I’m telling you that the city engineers have all but ruined rue Meynadier, which parallels rue Felix Faure, by installing overly bright bulbs in the hanging street lamps. Why kill the charm of nightfall? To help women and older people feel safer, I’m guessing. There used to be this thing called darkness that would settle down and take over when the sun went down. It existed for many, many centuries and somehow people coped with it. And then 21st Century zombies came along and decided to get rid of it. Rue Meynadier used to be a nice shadowy little street — I was there, I know — but that’s gone now. The powers-that-be have flooded it with something that almost looks like indoor mall lighting.

If you think any visiting journalist or critic is excited about seeing Olivier Dahan‘s Grace of Monaco tomorrow morning, think again. This trouble-plagued historical drama is certainly among the most unexciting if not unwelcome openers in the history of the Cannes Film Festival. In an interview with Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn, Cannes topper Thierry Fremaux admits that “of course we said no to great filmmakers….we have seen 1,800 movies for the selection, which means 1,740 times we say ‘no.'” And yet he said “yes” to Grace of Effing Monaco and, for that matter, Nicholas Winding Refn‘s Only God Forgives, which played last year?

Fremaux has also seemingly undermined the credibility of an explanation offered last month by Fox Searchlight’s Stephen Gilula about why Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu‘s Birdman isn’t playing the Cannes Film Festival, i.e., because it “won’t complete post production until late May or early June.” In Kohn’s article Fremaux says Fox Searchlight flat out “declin[ed] to submit” Birdman and therefore “decided to bypass” Cannes. That sounds to me like he’s saying Gilula was fibbing.

H.R. Giger‘s groundbreaking production design for Ridley Scott‘s Alien (’79) was organic and porous and oozy…giant rib-cage interiors and moist reptilian leather and gloopy saliva drippings. I don’t know or care which way Giger personally swung but his work was fairly gay and throbbing and meat-lockerish. In one fell swoop Giger erased all those smooth antisceptic sci-fi space-travel imaginings that began with the Flash Gordon serials and The Day The Earth Stood Still and Forbidden Planet and….sorry, I fell asleep. No disrespect or anything. I was lying on the bad as I wrote this on the iPhone and I dropped off…sorry. In his own glistening meat-and-bone way Giger’s realm was almost certainly influenced by the paintings of Francis Bacon, whether he copped to it or not. (Ditto Tim Palen‘s Guts.)

Comparing the new Criterion Bluray of Howard Hawks‘ Red River to the Masters of Cinema Bluray that came out late last year, DVD Beaver’s Gary W. Tooze, a somewhat deranged but highly enthusiastic grain advocate, writes the following: “[The Criterion version] is quite different from the Masters of Cinema Bluray. The UK disc is darker (richer black levels), more visible damage, less information in the frame and, significantly, more textured grain. I appreciate the grain. So the Criterion is ‘lighter’, smoother and likewise gives a very strong video presentation — but a different, crisper one. It would probably come down to personal preference.” Probably?

“No skyscrapers blow up, no cities are leveled, and while the White House and a football stadium suffer some serious structural damage, the wholesale destruction of human civilization is kept to a refreshing minimum in X-Men: Days of Future Past,” writes Variety’s Justin Chang. “[This is] just one of several respects in which this strikingly ambitious yet intimately scaled entertainment distinguishes itself from so much of its comicbook-movie kind.

“Back at the helm of the Fox/Marvel franchise he successfully launched 14 years ago, director Bryan Singer stages a stealth reboot by introducing a playful time-travel element to the ongoing saga, bringing two generations of mutantkind together in a story that toggles cleverly (if not always 100% coherently) between the political tumult of 1973 and a not-so-distant dystopian future.

Last night a Wall Street Journal story by Gautham Nagesh reported that recent widespread concerns about the end of net neutrality are being finessed to some extent. “The head of the Federal Communications Commission is revising proposed rules for regulating broadband internet,” Nagesh reported, “including offering assurances that the agency won’t allow companies to segregate web traffic into fast and slow lanes.”

“The new language by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is an attempt to address criticism of his proposal unveiled last month that would ban broadband providers from blocking or slowing down websites but allow them to strike deals in which content companies could pay them for faster delivery of Web content to customers.

If it costs a mere $13.99 for an HDX (i.e., high-def) version of Sullivan’s Travels on Vudu, how do I justify spending 17 pounds or $28 dollars on an Arrow Region 2 Bluray (out 5.26) of same?