Wifi for budget-minded American travellers in Rome (i.e., those not staying at four-star full-service hotels) is still, for the most part, a future-tense thing. It took me over four hours of wandering around and getting lost before finding an internet “point” (i.e., walk-in salon) that offers wifi for people carrying laptops. 95% of Rome’s internet environments are still offering 2001 technology with rented flatscreens. Forget wifi — they don’t even offer ethernet cable plug-ins! I asked the guy at the desk if he knows of other operations like this one (which I’m sitting in, just up the hill from Piazza Barberini). “Places like this are rare,” he said with a certain resignation.

Salon‘s Andrew O’Hehir has posted an excellent (if abridged) Fair Game review along with a perceptive, quote-heavy summary of the post-screening press conference. I was poking around online at a Nice Airport departure lounge when I came upon it…nice.

A major critic told me before the start of the Fair Game press conference that Yun Jung-hee‘s performance in Lee Chang-dong‘s Poetry (which I haven’t seen) should, in any kind of fair and just world, win the Cannes Film Festival’s best actress award this weekend. It’s unquestionably superior, he claimed, to Lesley Manville‘s in Mike Leigh‘s Another Year, which many have called the presumed front-runner.

As I would sooner have my teeth pulled out by rusty pliers than watch Michael Bay‘s forthcoming Transformers 3, his decision not to use Megan Fox (as reported yesterday by Nikki Finke) is of incidental interest, at best. It’s a wise one, however, as Fox has nothing — nothing — going on inside. And if you re-read those brutal crew letters about Fox, you can’t help but smirk. Even if they’re only half-true, they explain a lot.

I missed the following comment from Wall Street 2 costar Shia Lebeouf when it was [presumably] posted last weekend, but I want to give him alpha points for trashing ’08’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and, by obvious implication, Steven Spielberg.

“I’d already been involved in a movie where I felt like we dropped the ball on a legacy,” Lebeouf said during last Saturday’s junket. “In that movie, I just felt sort of pigeonholed. Like I didn’t have enough meat to chew on. I just feel like we were trying to enforce innocence on an audience that wasn’t willing. You can’t force things, you know?”

I guess he means that Lucas/Spielberg enforced innocence” by insisting upon….actually, I can’t make that one come together. How does a movie seek to “enforce innocence”?

I can let it go. Any Spielberg protege who breaks ranks and shits on the boss wins points in the HE book.

On his website 30 Ninjas, Fair Game director Doug Liman describes Naomi Watts‘ Valerie Plame as a “truly challenging role because NOCs (government intelligence operatives who assume covert roles in organizations without official ties to their government) are wallflowers by nature…they want to learn about you without you learning about them, and [in so doing will sometimes attempt to be] the least interesting person in the room.

Fair Game star Naomi Watts (l.) director Doug Liman (r.) at the beginning of this morning’s press conference — Thursday, 5.20, 11:36 am.

“Traditionally, this is not the type of character whom audiences fall in love with, or want to follow. Audiences want emotive characters who are interesting to watch. This was a bit of an issue with the characters (Naomi’s in particular) in Fair Game, especially with the producers who were more hell-bent on me doing more traditional emotion with her. I felt very strongly that I wanted her to keep the steel exterior that is so honest to that type of person in real life and the fact that I didn’t have to relent is exactly why I think Naomi’s performance is so extraordinary.

“I was able to be totally true to that steel facade and still create a character that is completely compelling, whom you empathize with and root for. And at the same time, you’re infuriated by her because she just has this steely exterior and won’t let you through it. We’ll see from this point forward whether my choice to insist on this detail was it was the right call.

“It would have been easy to create a fiction that Naomi’s Valerie is an emotional NOC (i.e., non-official cover). That she has this steely exterior but when she comes home and she’s something else. In fiction you can make up anything, but I actually spent time around the real Val and found her completely compelling as a person and she kept that facade no matter what she was doing, and I wanted Naomi Watts’ character to follow suit.

“In Fair Game though, it’s the Joe Wilson character that is the more movie star role, because he is loud, colorful, charismatic and opinionated. It’s no wonder that Sean Penn, after winning an Academy Award, picked this character over the hundreds of others he was offered, because Joe Wilson is an amazing character with the kinds of traits that are appealing to a masculine movie star. And Valerie is a little bit of a cipher and to make matters worse, Watts has to be on the screen with Penn while he’s getting to play this incredibly colorful, charismatic character and she has to play the cipher and somehow still steel the movie because it is her movie.”

Thursday, 5.20, 11:37 am

I’m standing with photographers in the nearly-packed Salle de Conference with the Fair Game press encounter about to happen, but I have time to say this: Fair Game is a stirring, suspenseful and immensely satisfying adult drama, brilliantly directed and written and acted, especially in the latter case by Sean Penn and Naomi Watts.

I’ve been hoping to like it all along, but the complexity and intelligence brought to bear upon the story of Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame vs. the Bush administration — a tale of courage, cowardice, betrayal and bureaucratic denial all wrapped up into one — still came as a surprise.

Everyone who’s been taking shots at me for seeming too interested in or optimistic about Fair Game will now have to grovel and eat crow. I’m expecting reader posts to that effect. You know who you are.

I really and truly wasn’t expecting it to be quite this deft and assured. It seems to me like a revival of the spirit of the paranoid Alan Pukula of the ’70s with governmental-spook flavorings that harken back to Costa-Gavras and John LeCarre (or, more particularly, the British TV adaptation of Smiley’s People).

This is Doug Liman‘s best film by far, a Best Picture nomination waiting to happen, and a possible Palme d’Or. Really.

I asked Liman at the press conference about cynical expectations I’ve heard and read that delivering a crisp and complex political-emotional drama on the level of Pakula or Costa-Gavras was perhaps beyond the reach of the guy who directed Mr. and Mrs. Smith and especially Jumper. Liman recognized there was reason for people to think this given past career “mistakes,” but said “this is the kind of film I’ve always wanted to make.” Obviously proud and satisfied, and good for that.

Cheers also to co-screenwriters Jez Butterworth & John-Henry Butterworth, who’ve managed to weave together a mountain of facts, scenes, reportings, emotional moments, anecdotes, milieus and atmospheres into a wonderfully rich and complex whole that has a theme and a point.

Few things in life make me happier or deliver a better all-is-right-with-the-world feeling than grade-A films which expose right-wing scumbaggery with just the right amounts of care, precision and restraint. In this sense seeing Fair Game has been an especially delightful way to end my Cannes 2010 experience.

“The general vibe that Get Him to the Greek has in common with The Hangover could make it a surprise moneymaker,” says HE’s Moises Chiullan. “This is the ‘let’s get fucked up and have fun’ flick that MGM was hoping Hot Tub could be. All they need to do is sneak it in college towns and the big cities during the week of release and they’re good.”

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,” the story says.

“‘There have always been a lot of films and books about me, that have told a lot of bullshit about me,’ he said, explaining that this time he was protesting on behalf of ‘his comrades martyred in the revolution.’

Carlos will see Carlos “when it is broken up into a mini-series on French television station Canal Plus, but he has already seen extracts and his lawyer has threatened legal action to prevent its general release.

“‘I’ve read the screenplay, [and] there are deliberate falsifications of history, and lies,’ Carlos complained, speaking in a call to reporters visiting the office of his French lawyer Isabelle Coutant-Peyre.”

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 (Ady), Claire Sloma (Maggie) and Amanda Bauer (Claudia). Taken around 11:10 am at the American Pavillion.

It goes without saying that a teen movie of this calibre is doomed to fail because it’s not coarse or stupid enough….kidding! Well, half-kidding. I’d like to at least see it do better than She’s Out My League. What is it about under-25 Eloi seeming to prefer movies packed with tedious cliches and sometimes even recoiling when something fresh and true and semi-original (like Myth) comes along?

Here’s my favorite review of the film, by Screen Daily‘s Howard Feinstein.

The recording is typically loose and unrefined. I could have chopped off the flat portions if I’d had an extra hour to kill, but I didn’t. I never do. It is what it is.

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 a no-bullshit, this-is-what-it-was, rock-solid authority in every line and scene and performance — no Hollywood crap of any kind, no comic relief and nothing artificially heightened. And it boasts a riveting, never-alienating but never-sympathetic lead performance by Edgar Ramirez, whom I know from relatively recent roles in Che and The Bourne Ultimatum (in which he played a bad guy who cut Matt Damon a break at the end).

It’s essentially a portrait of a hard-charging, true-believing, very impressive type-A asshole who loved guns and blowjobs and Marlboros and being forceful and committed, and who enjoyed a kind of haunted celebrity for a few years during the 1970s when anti-capitalist revolution and terror were in fashion, at least in some overseas circles.

Carlos doesn’t exactly throb with emotional poignancy or resonance, or deliver what you might call a ground-level universal theme. All it “says,” really, is the same thing that any film about a terrorist or a gangster says, which is basically “live hard, burn brightly and enjoy the passion and thrills while you can, pal, because you’re looking at an early death or being sentenced to a very long jail term before you hit middle-age.”

But then it’s hardly fair to expect this kind of film — an exacting, fact-based account of the life and times of a fierce and somewhat chilly sociopath who doesn’t laugh or smile much or pet kittens or make friends with homeless children — to swim in streams of emotionality or meditation, even. Like Che, Carlos is simply about “being there” and believing everything you hear and see, although it delivers much more in the way of urgency and tension and thrills that Steven Soderbergh‘s film did. It occasionally settles down for brief periods, but it never drops the ball.

Carlos director Olivier Assayas (l.) and star Edgar Ramirez absorbing applause inside the Grand Lumiere following this afternoon’s screening.

I told a video crew on my way out of the screening that I’d be interested to see if Assayas can make the shorter U.S. theatrical cut — reportedly expected to come in around two and a half hours — work. I don’t see how it can. I would think that this version would have to be at least three hours, although even that sounds like a difficult feat. All I can say is that when the intermission came at the end of Act Two, which was somewhere close to the three hour mark, I was fully engaged and in no way yearning for a time-out.

The final act, being about changing times, the ebbing of leftist revolutionary fervor and Carlos-friendly governments in the ’80s, the collapse of communism and Carlos losing his headline-grabbing favor as the world’s most audacious terrorist, is the least engrossing. But again, it’s never dull — just not as charged.

There’s one recurring element that Carlos doesn’t quit on and is almost fanatical about, and that’s cigarettes. So many effin’ Marlboros and Gitanes are smoked during this thing that I felt as if my own lungs were aching with first-stage cancer by the time it was over. Everyone except the Muslim characters, it seems, is also gulping whiskey in every other scene. No Frescas, Cokes or Perriers — straight booze all the way.

Ramirez, who resembles the younger real-life Carlos, has a face that could almost be Johnny Depp‘s if Depp gained 20 or 25 pounds. He also looks a bit like Nick Lachey (i.e., Jessica Simpson‘s ex) and Neville Brand, who played Al Capone on the old Untouchables series. As with any noteworthy performance Ramirez never seems to be “acting.” That’s also how Benicio del Toro‘s Che Guevara played, of course, and yet Benicio was delivering a somewhat warmer, gentler fellow. As Soderbergh depicted him, I mean.

The story is the story is the story. I always go to the appropriate Wikipedia page after seeing any kind of history-based film, and this was no exception. In fact, do that now.

The real Carlos is now doing a life sentence in La Sante prison, which is located in the 14th arrondisement of Paris. I wonder if he has TV privileges (probably) and whether or not Assayas or IFC’s Ryan Werner will send him a DVD of the long version, and whether Carlos and his cellmates (including Manuel Noreiga) will be allowed to watch it together in the TV room. Throw in some soft drinks and a couple bags of tortilla chips…why not?