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A friend saw Andrew Stanton‘s WALL*E (Disney, 6.27) and says it’s (a) sort of an animated Jacques Tati film in the vein of Mon Oncle, in part because there’s almost no dialogue for the first 45 minutes or so, (b) it’s a kind of companion piece to An Inconvenient Truth in that it’s a strong message movie, set in a ruined post-apocalyptic world, about how we’re killing our world with poisons.

You might think from the trailers that it’s basically a robot love story, but that ain’t the half of it. It’s “not your typical wheee, happy, up-up-up animated family entertainment,” the friend says. “Once again, Pixar is pushing the buttons. It has a lot more on its mind.”
WALL*E is this little robot going around in this huge junkyard that used to be the earth, now inhabitable due to some toxic poisoning, saving remnants of what life once was. He’s obsessed with Barbra Streisand‘s Hello Dolly and plays these clips over and over,” he says. “The story later shifts its base to this massive shopping-mall space station, a floating planet of some sort with all these overweight fat people who can’t walk on their own, moving through a giant mall…an exaggeration of our culture today.”

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I’ve come up with a new reason to leave movies before they’ve ended. Over the last two days I’ve left two as they got into their third acts because — I’m being serious — I liked them so much I didn’t want their endings to spoil them.
I did this with a showing of Clint Eastwood‘s Breezy at the Aero on Sunday night. This wasn’t the main reason I bailed last night on the last 15 minutes of You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, but it was an underlying one.
You’re liking the film, it’s going well, everything’s working…so why mess with the possibility of the ending screwing everything up? Leave 15 minutes before it ends, ask your friends what happens, and then catch the whole thing on DVD three or four months hence. Especially if the film in question is a drama that’s subtly telegraphing that some kind of heavy or unpleasant turnaround is just around the corner. Or if some guy is sitting next to you and ruining everything by saying “wow!” when hot girls in hot underwear make a brief appearance. Get out while the going is good.
Obviously this is an incredibly lowbrow attitude for someone such as myself. I’m not confessing to it with any pride or suggesting in any way that I’m going to watch films with this attitude henceforth. I’m just saying that over the last 48 hours I’ve left two films that I liked, and that my reason or doing so made sense to me, and that it left me in peace.

So which rides have been destroyed by the Universal fire? Has City Walk been affected? Any decent photos posted? No time to process this, having gotten off the ferry and now behind the wheel of a rental on 95 north.

Getting on on Air France 777 now (1:03 pm), having missed the 10:15 am flight. (Don’t ask.) Before every flight, I cross myself and ask God Almighty not to seat me next to a morbidly obese person. There are at least two whales in line right now, and I’m feeling a very slight apprehension about this. There are thousands of people in Paris who look well-fed or stocky or fat, but I’ve seen no Jabbas. You might expect otherwise in a foodie city like Paris, but nope.
Update: No fatties but Doug Liman is on my plane. He’s returning from a trip to three African countries, at least one or two of which (Rwanda or Uganda or both) proved to be fairly dangerous. He told me was arrested once, and possibly twice. I admire the cojones of anyone willing to risk the worst to order to encounter things unique, surprising, challenging. We talked about the red-clay color of Uganda’s dirt. Liman’s boot laces were untiedcand flopping around as we walked and talked. He was wearing a round-brimmed straw hat.

5.26.08, 10:05 pm. This seems more like 8:15 or 8:30 pm by U.S. standards, I agree, but the time is right.

Steven Soderbergh‘s Che, my choice for the most exciting and far-reaching film of the Cannes Film Festival, didn’t win the Palme d’Or this evening. Lamentable, dispiriting news. Instead the jury gave the coveted top prize to Laurent Cantet‘s justly admired Entre Les Murs. I was wandering around Montmartre when the news broke, and when I heard it I just swore to myself and put it out of my mind and kept waking. I didn’t have my computer with me and I didn’t care.
At least the gifted Benicio del Toro won the Best Actor prize for his portrayal of Che Guevara in the twin Soderbergh films.
Cantet has everyone’s respect, but to me his films have always seemed more quietly admirable than arousing. I’ve never gotten a lightning-bolt charge from anything he’s done. I just feel let down about this, knowing what a Palme d’Or win might have done to at least partly help Che‘s chances in finding the right U.S. distribution deal. I’m obviously thinking politically, and this just doesn’t feel right. Sean Penn and the jury members went with their idea of the best film of the festival, and that’s cool. Entre Les Murs will play at elite art theatres when it opens in the U.S. for two or three or four weeks. Connoisseurs of first-rate French cinema will pay to see it. Terrific.
Congrats to Matteo Garrone‘s Gamorra, which everyone liked for the most part, for winning the Grand Prix. And double congrats to Three Monkeys‘ Nuri Bilge Ceylan for winning the Best Director prize. A Jury Prize went to Paolo Sorrentino‘s Il Divo. Sandra Corveloni won Best Actress for her work in Walter Salles‘ Linha de Passe, and the Best Screenplay award went to Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne‘s Lorna’s Silence. (Sorry, but I don’t agree with that one at all — the Lorna story did not end on a satisfying note.) The Cameras d’Or prize went to Steve McQueen‘s Hunger.
The jury obviously wanted to be magnanimous by giving a little something to everyone. They succeeded.

[Final Nice Airport post before 7:15 pm Easy Jet flight to Paris.] I heard some scuttlebutt this afternoon about which films and filmmakers might win some Cannes Film Festival awards on Sunday evening, the principal buzz being that Steven Soderbergh‘s Che may — I say “may” — be in a favoring position to win the Palme d’Or.
The talk is that jury honcho Sean Penn is presumed to be advocating the Soderbergh, in large part because of his lefty political views. The Che downside, I’ve been told, is that Spanish-speaking cineastes up and down the Croisette are said to be down on it because of the “accent salad” rap — i.e., complaints that very few in the cast of Soderbergh’s film speak with a convincing Cuban accent. (Referring, I presume, to The Argentine.) No telling how jury member Alfonso Cuaron feels about this.
The other pro-Che factor, according to Envelope columnist Pete Hammond, is that Harvey Weinstein is vocally pushing for it with jury members.

I’ve just emerged from the semi-nourishing, semi-tortured Fellini-esque Chinese box mindfuck-dreamscape that is Charlie Kaufman‘s Synecdoche, New York…and the press conference is just starting. [Ten minutes later] Kaufman has just explained the title’s pronunciation: Syn-ECK-duh-kee. At least that‘s settled.

“When I was in school I’d go to an art house and everyone there would be in their 60s. Today I go and they’re all in their 80s.” — Roadside Attractions’ Dustin Smith at today’s independent distribution panel at the American Pavillion (which doesn’t have wifi as we speak).

The second half of Che, also known as Guerilla, just got out about a half-hour ago, and equally delighted although it’s a different kind of film — tighter, darker (naturally, given the story). But I’ve been arguing with some colleagues who don’t like either film at all, or don’t think it’s commercial. Glenn Kenny and Kim Voynar feel as I do, but Anne Thompson is on the other side of the Grand Canyon. Peter Howell is in the enemy camp also.

I know I predicted this based on a reading of Peter Buchman‘s script, but the first half of Steven Soderbergh‘s 268-minute Che Guevara epic is, for me, incandescent — a piece of full-on, you-are-there realism about the making of the Cuban revolution that I found utterly believable. Not just “take it to the bank” gripping, but levitational — for someone like myself it’s a kind of perfect dream movie. It’s also politically vibrant and searing — tells the “Che truth,” doesn’t mince words, doesn’t give you any “movie moments” (and God bless it for that).
It’s what I’d hoped for all along and more. The tale is the tale, and it’s told straight and true. Benicio del Toro‘s Guevara portrayal is, as expected, a flat-immersion that can’t be called a “performance” as much as…I don’t know, some kind of knock-down, ass-kick reviving of the dead. Being, not “acting.” I loved the lack of sentimentality in this thing, the electric sense that Soderbergh is providing a real semblance of what these two experiences — the successful Cuban revolution of ’57 and ’58, and the failed attempt to do the same in Boliva in ’67 — were actually like.
Oh, God…the second half is starting right now. The aspect ratio on the second film is 1.85 to 1, but the first film was in Scope 2.35 to 1.