Two movies made about Mark David Chapman’‘s killing of John Lennon, and they both apparently have major problems and are both sitting around in theatrical-release limbo. Is there something about the material that enforces a kind of cinematic curse? I was told late last year by a director friend that J.P. Schaefer‘s Chapter 27, which showed at last January’s Sundance Film Festival with Jared Leto as Chapman and Lindsay Lohan as a girl he befriends in the days/hours leading up to the Manhattan shooting, had been edited and re-edited to little success. And then there’s Andrew Piddington‘s The Killing of John Lennon, a British-produced drama that’s played two or three film festivals since the summer of ’06 and…nothing.

The Cannes jury has officially stiffed the Joel and Ethan Coen‘ highly praised No Country for Old Men, largely, I suspect, because it ‘s not very women-friendly and therefore didn’t go over with the youngish females on the jury — actresses Maggie Cheung and Toni Collette, director-actress Maria de Medeiros and director-actress Sarah Polley. The Palme d’Or went instead went to a deeply admired, very fine abortion movie — Christian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.

The Grand Prix (a runner-up award) was handed to Naomi Kawase‘s The Mourning Forest
Julian Schnabel won the Best Director prize for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and Gus Van Sant…oh, give me a break! Gus wins a special Prix du 60th Anniversaire for his direction of Paranoid Park, his least focused, least arresting, least persuasive film in years? Words fail.
Faith Akin won the Best Screenplay Award for The Edge of Heaven, and Anton Corbijn‘s Control won a Camera d’Or Special Mention. There was a tie for the winner of the Prix du Jury prize — Marjane Satrapi‘s Persepolis and Carlos Reygadas‘ Stellet Licht were the neck-and-neckers.

I’m sitting inside the southern branch of the Venetian Navigator (i.e., the one closer to the San Marco district) as I wait the Cannes Film Festival winners to be announced online. And as we were all taught in school, a watched pot never boils. Tell you what….here are two heavyweight video clips of yesterday’s rainstorm. Watch ’em or don’t.

I never got around to running this pic earlier, and I somehow want to convey that Josh Brolin did especially well for himself during this festival — his stellar performance in Old Men, his breezy and yet bluntly confessional manner with the press last weekend, his hilarious performance in the Coen Bros. Chacun son Cinema short. He was kind of an amiable kick-around guy before who was okay or pretty good in this or that film — now he’s moved up a couple of notches.

No Country for Old Men star Josh Brolin at last weekend’s press luncheon — Saturday, 5.19.07, 1:55 pm.

Everyone’s already linked to this, but having just been through ten days at the Cannes Film Festival I can say with some authority that Shane Danielsen‘s short Guardian piece is one of the most honest assessments of what journalists go through there that I’ve ever read, particularly for these two observations:
(a) “The discomforting and little-known truth is, if you’re a filmmaker in competition, your film’s success or failure is largely decided in about five minutes at the bottom of the steps outside the Salle Debussy or the Grand Palais Lumiere, by about four groups of highly film-literate critics, who tend to cluster according to nationality. There are the Americans, the Brits, the French (with a necessary distance between the Cahiers du Cinema and Positif camps, bien sur) and…miscellaneous.
“They light cigarettes and bow their heads in earnest discussion. The preceding work is discussed, debated, dissected. And for the first few moments, at least, a wary equivocation prevails: few will vouchsafe either extravagant praise or damning condemnation at once. Rather, they wait to see which way the wind is blowing; subconsciously or not, they take the temperature of the crowd.
“But it’s a tough crowd, and if the film in question has proved less than pitch-perfect, those little flaws soon add up. The criticisms accumulate, growing in ferocity, until by the time cigarette butts are being crushed underfoot, a rough consensus has emerged, soon to be graven in stone. C’est merde!
(b) “What is rarely noted is the sheer fatigue that Cannes, more than any other festival, engenders. Your average critic is recovering from a near-toxic combination of too little sleep, too much alcohol, incessant deadlines, mild food poisoning from some dodgy canapes … and, above all, too many movies, watched in too-rapid succession (often five or six a day, separated by 40-minute intervals) to be accorded anything like the consideration they deserve.”

Hollywood Wiretap‘s Liza Foreman has written that the Cannes Film Festival parties and the promotions were sometimes better than the parties, and lists a certain ” black truck advertising Burn energy drink booming music up and down the Croisette” as one of the go-getters.
Let me explain something — the people behind this special promotion were and still probably are agents of Satan. That utterly detestable black truck with its rancid disco-beat music pounding and throbbing like a jackhammer didn’t just give everyone a headache — it exuded a vibe so ugly and repulsive it had to be felt to be believed.
I ran into it right after seeing The 11th Hour last weekend, and I feel ashamed that I didn’t have the nerve to go over and spit a mouthful of beer at the guys driving it and the ersatz Lindsay Lohan babes dancing on the flatbed.

Fox 411’s Roger Friedman reported yesterday that the Cannes jury is said to be “completely deadlocked over which film to choose [for the Palme d’Or], and that no clear favorite has emerged.” In other words, some of the jurors want to give it to Julian Schnabel‘s The Diving Bell and Butterfly to help it along commercially, perhaps sensing that it’ll be facing a difficult sell in the U.S. without it. The other two camps are said to be behind Joel and Ethan Coen‘s No Country for Old Men and Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days. The awards will be announced about four or five hours from now.

The mark of any exceptional film is the won’t-go-away factor — a film that doesn’t just linger in your head but seems to throb and dance around inside it, gaining a little more every time you re-reflect. This is very much the case with Anton Corbijn‘s Control, the black-and-white biopic of doomed Joy Division singer Ian Curtis.

I finally saw Control at a market screening last Wednesday night (5.23) at the Star cineplex, and it’s definitely one of the four or five best flicks I saw at Cannes — a quiet, somber, immensely authentic-seeming portrayal of a gloomy poet-performer whom I didn’t personally relate to at all, but whose story I found affecting anyway.
Corbijn, a music-video guy, was obviously the maestro, but a significant reason why so much of Control works is newcomer Sam Riley, who portrays Curtis as a guy who was unable to throw off that melancholy weight-of-the-world consciousness that heavy-cat artists always seem to be grappling with. There is no such thing as a gifted writer/painter/poet/sculptor/filmmaker who laughs for the sake of laughing and does a lot of shoulder-shrugging. Everything is personal, and everything hurts deep down. And Riley makes you feel what it’s like to be a guy who just can’t snap out of it.
This plus the ’70s northern-England atmosphere and Martin Ruhe‘s utterly fantastic black-and-white photography combine in a perfect slam-dunk that amounts to perhaps the finest rock-music biopic dramas I’ve ever seen. How many really good ones have there been? My mind is a blank.
Curtis, the movie says, was a mopey epileptic who couldn’t live with the fact that he’d made a mistake in marrying a domestic mouse named Deborah (Samantha Morton), whose book about Curtis, “Touching From A Distance”, was the basis of Matt Greenhalgh‘s screenplay. Curtis especially couldn’t handle the stress and guilt of an ongoing extamarital affair with a Belgian journalist named Annik (Alexandra Maria Lara).

The guy never heard of double-tracking? Of cutting marital ties but at the same time staying close with your ex-wife and supporting the child you’ve had with her? I don’t see the problem, but this plus the epilepsy sent Curtis over the edge and he wound up hanging himself at age 23.
Before last Wednesday, I had listened to Joy Division tracks maybe five or six times. (Not counting what I heard in 24 Hour Party People.) Now I’m suddenly into them, and am definitely planning on buying one or more of their CDs the next time I’m at Amoeba.
Acquiring the North American rights to this quietly jolting biopic may turn out to be the best thing Harvey Weinstein did during his stay in Cannes…unless he paid too much.
The first word that came my way after the Directors’ Fortnight debut screening a week ago Thursday was “routine,” “overhyped,” “fairly conventional,” “too domestic” and so on. The person who passed most of this along to me is an exceptionally alert critic who obviously has a right to his opinions, but he gave me a bum steer, dammit.
Here’s a Control clip that’ll give you a little taste. Here’s another source for the same clip.

Control star Sam Riley (l.), director Anton Corbijn

The stark black-and-white photography is more than merely attractive. It feels like a fit with the somewhat gloomy aesthetic of the punk and post-punk era, and Joy Division’s music in particular. I can’t stop feeling depressed over the fact that we’re all doomed because life is always assaulting us and pulling us down and giving us pain, etc.
Tony Kebbell‘s portrayal of Joy Division manager Rob Gretton — a nervy, mouthy hammerhead sort, is easily the second best performance in the film. He’s also the sole dispenser of comic relief.
I was suspicious of Control early on due to Greenhalgh’s script being based on Curtis’s book (ex-wives and in-laws are generally the least honest and most sentimental sources when it comes to reconstituting an artist’s life and work), but the film doesn’t feel the least bit sanitized or soft-peddled.
I particularly liked that there’s nothing showy about Control — no big emotional blow-ups or Oscar-bait depictions of agonized primal screams. The opposite, really. There’s a great dark moment when Curtis predicts in a quiet, matter-of-fact manner that his young daughter Natalie will probably hate him when she gets older. (Because he barely pays attention to her.) His wife is staggered that he would say this and says he’s delusional. But Curtis knows what he knows and reiterates that “she will…she will.”
Some guys are born poets and songwriters, and some guys should always wear condoms when sleeping with the girl next door.

Harvey Weinstein (whom my son Jett overheard snarling at someone the other day in Cannes) talks to Variety columnist Anne Thompson about the financial health of the Weinstein Co., trying to swat down rumors that he and brother Bob are on the ropes.

“Unless you’ve been living in happy isolation, you know that newspapers face a cascading series of problems. Declining revenues. Declining circulation. Uncertainty about the future. No need to recite the entire litany here, except by way of noting that the words ‘layoffs’ and ‘buyouts’ have appeared in far too many stories about too many newspapers lately, including this one.” — Rocky Mountain News film critic Robert Denerstein, in a piece announcing his departure due to the above factors.

I was hoping for something much sharper and smarter from James Gray‘s We Own The Night, which showed at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday, and which Columbia will be releasing stateside sometime later this year. It’s a slam-bang urban action piece by way of a Brooklyn family-ties melodrama…the kind in which everyone bellows their feelings. It’s good to see Gray back on his feet after years in movie jail (his last film was The Yards, which opened seven years ago) but this is too often a crude, unsubtle, difficult-to-digest film.

Joaquin Pheonix; Eva Mendes

I’ll tell you right now that there’s a mild spoiler or two in this piece.
The most recent high-water marks for family crime films, in my book, are The Sopranos on HBO and The Departed. Gray’s film is nowhere near this league. As vigorous and heated as Night obviously is (the two most thrilling scenes are an invasion of a Russian-mafia cocaine apartment and a car chase/attack scene in the driving rain), the writing is thick and pulp. The story felt imposed upon the characters rather than characters driving the story. I kept getting the feeling that the dialogue wasn’t quite there on the page so the actors were improvising all through it.
A “friend” of the film argues that “what [they] were going for was an archetypal throwback to ’70s filmmaking rather than the more complex literariness of The Sopranos. This is not a ‘modern√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ǭù film’ — it has no metacommentary going on, amd has no literary aspirations. The Departed was complex to a fault (there are several scenes toward the end of that movie that make no sense, but no one cares because it√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s so fun.”
I got into a friendly debate yesterday with this guy, so here’s a list of my quibbles along with his counter-arguments:
Joaquin Pheonix‘s Bobby — a nightclub owne-manager in denial about his familial affinities to a tribe of New York cops, including a hard-nosed detective brother (Mark Wahlberg) and an equally hard-nosed dad (Robert Duvall) — is highly dislikable for the way he refuses to let girlfriend Eva Mendes be involved with anything important– he seems to just wants to fuck her when they’re alone and that’s it.
Counterpoint: “You didn√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t get the impression that Bobby really loved Amanda but knew that his family (who are quasi-racist, remember) would never let her into the fold because she’s a party girl? Bobby sort of knows deep down she’s just not constitutionally able to be a cop√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s wife.”
Would the wounded Wahlberg, admitted hours earlier into a hospital for bullet wounds, have blood oozing out of his cheek and his hair? Don’t hospital staffers constantly dress wounds to keep everything as sterile and germ-free as possible?
Counterpoint: “Wahlberg√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s post-gunshot look is absolutely real. [The filmmakers] did a ton of research — there was a doctor who worked in ICU in the 80s advising. But if it doesn√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t play. it doesn√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t play.”
I know Pheonix has been keeping his family ties a secret in the beginning, but would the Russian mob guys be so stupid as to not have a clue that Wahlberg is his brother?
Counterpoint: “This is the pre-internet age” — Night is set in 1988 — “when people could absolutely keep their familial connections at arm√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s length. In fact, James based Bobby√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s character on a real guy who hid his cop connections. Remember also that he had worked is way up from bartender to manager so there would be zero suspicion. Also, the Russians weren√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t cunning — they were just brutally violent.”
“Would Jumbo, the big tough guy who excels at beating other guys up, really collapse and start weeping like that when Pheonix starts to lean on him, and when the cops grill him?”
CounterpointVadim Nezhinski — what is that, some kind of perverse mirror-image identity of Njinsky, the famed ballet dancer? The movie is full of little “what the fuck?” irritants.
Counterpoint: “I think the fact that these details irritated you is a sign that you just did not buy into the more operatic core emotions this movie is selling.
“Those critics for whom the movie is properly positioned I think will appreciate the movie√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s lack of irony and gratuitous hyper-reality. This is a very basic story where a lot of the emotions are laid bare. We are hoping that because of the car chase, the overall level of detail, and the deliberateness, critics will key in to the Friedkin/Visconti reference points and not judge the movie against a winking movie like The Departed, which I think sometimes gets confused with √ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√ã≈ìsmartness√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢ and √ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√ã≈ìsharpness√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢ but can sometimes exist in an emotional vacuum.
“The most ironic thing of all is that in research screenings The Departed never tested above a 65 (top two boxes — excellent and very good) whereas We Own The Night has tested in the high 80s. So [the team is] definitely confident about word of mouth. Good Night and Good Luck tested at 48; Monsters Ball got a 23 (norms are about 65); In The Bedroom at 25. And then reviewers told audiences those movies were brilliant so they wound up with great exit polls and word-of-mouth. Sheep…”