There’s a cluster of old-world restaurants sitting behind Cannes’ Grand Hotel, which is where I retreated to last night around 9:30 pm — the voice of hard-core Protestant responsibility told me to go back to work but a stronger, louder voice told the Protestant voice to get bent; Orange Wifi Cafe — Friday, 5.18, 9:25 am — that’s Film Stew‘s Sperling Reich in foreground, Village Voice critic Jim Hoberman to the left.; Old Town — 5.18.07, 7:40 am; Orange Cafe volunteer.
I’m just sitting here in the Orange Cafe, blowing off screening ops and trying to catch up (I didn’t file enough stuff yesterday, due in part to the time-swallowing Jerry Seinfeld Bee Movie presentation followed by two late-in-the-day screenings and then a decision to just go for dinner and forget the damn column already) and waiting for Joel and Ethan Coen‘s No Country for Old Men.
Tommy Lee Jones in No Country for Old Men
Only three hours and fifteen minutes remain until the the first Cannes screening, set to unspool at the Salle Debussy, begins at 7:15 pm. I’ve been trying to think of other things and not succeeding. I read the Coen’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy‘s novel earlier this year and found it hard, honed and melancholy, and fortified with a theme (i.e., the dissovling of decency and moral fibre in American culture) that sinks in. Cannes press conference host Henri Behar told me this morning that he worked on the French subtitles, a chore that required his seeing it many times, and says also that it’s “brilliant.”
I’m confused about the name of the brand-new Three Amigos production company — headed, of course, by Alfonso Cuaron, Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu — that has just cut a deal with Focus Features, Universal’s specialty division. Variety‘s story says the company is called Tres, but Indiewire’s story says it’s called cha cha cha. But right-click on the Indiewire portrait photo (which I stole for this story) you’ll see the codeword “tresTRIO,jpg.”
If any of the Three Amigos are reading this and would like a reaction, here’s mine. Please, please don’t call it cha cha cha, which sounds too bon vivant-ish. Tres is just perfect.
The deal says that Focus will finance and sell a package of five movies to be made by Cuaron, del Toro and Inarritu as well as one movie each from Carlos Cuaron and Rodrigo Garcia. Focus Int’d has reportedly has begin pre-sales in Cannes on the first of these films, Cuaron’s Rudo y Cursi, starring Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna. Pic is in pre-production. The other four projects “have already been identified, but have yet to be announced.”
There is suddenly hope for all anti-Ed Zwick partisans, especially those who are grimacing over Zwick’s intention to make a movie out of “Defiance: The Bielski Partisans” by Nechama Tec, a true story of the Polish Bielski brothers who fought Nazi occupiers and wound up saving 1200 Jews from extermination.
A group of Polish anti-Nazi partisans, in the early 1940s, including I don’t-know-how-many Bielski Brothers.
The hope factor has come in the form of a challenge from director Phillip Noyce — a far more accomplished craftsman (Catch a Fire, Clear and Present Danger, Rabbit-Proof Fence) than Zwick with a demonstrated aversion to the emotional underlining and overplaying that Zwick is infamous for — and his intention to make his own Bielski brothers movie.
Noyce will be working from a script by Kathleen McLaughlin, which is based on Peter Duffy‘s “The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Built a Village in the Forest, and Saved 1,200 Jews”.
Noyce has pacted with producers Mace Neufeld and Jonas Goodman, and has secured “the life rights of the key surviving Bielski members including the last living Bielski brother,” I’ve been told. With any luck Zwick will get spooked and decide to base his next mawkishly emotional epic on some other true story. These things never turn out simply or without complication, or course, but it should at least be understood that Noyce’s is the more promising Bielski Brothers project and that Zwick’s represents the dark side of the equation.
I’ve got copies of both scripts. Zwick’s Defiance, dated 5.1.07 and runnning 112 pages, says on the front page that it’s based on Tec’s “Defiance” book and “”the screenplay by Clay Frohman.” McLaughlin’s The Bielski Brothers, dated 9.29.06 and running 119 pages, says it’s based on the Duffy book.
There were three “headliner” Bielski brothers — Tuvia, Zus and Asael. Daniel Craig, I gather, will play Tuvia in the Zwick film. (In Zwick’s script Tuvia is the most impasssioned and super-studly of the three.) A voice is telling me that one of the other two brothers will be played by Sean Penn.
We almost certainly won’t see two Bielski brothers films, of course. Either Noyce or Zwick will wind up folding his tent.
How relevant is the Bielski brothers saga in today’s terms? Obviously a story of impassioned locals fighting a big bad invader has echoes in the battle now taking place in Iraq. But I wonder how relevant this story will seem to younger audiences. World War II happened 60-plus years ago. It’s obviously not their war or their father’s war, but their grandfather’s. One can only repeat the old truism that for story-tellers of all kinds, Adolf Hitler is the gift that keeps on giving.
The positive buzz (mostly from Cannes-covering British journalists) and yesterday’s positive review from Variety‘s Russell Edwards aside, I’ve been told that Anton Corbijn‘s Control — a black- and-white biopic of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, who hung himself at the peak of the band’ s success — is a fairly conventional work.
“It follows the usual form,” a critic friend (and a once-devoted Joy Division fan) said this morning. “It tells Curtis’s story going from one chapter after another….the old ‘and then this happened, and then this happened’ approach.” He also said “it’s too domestic,” which always seems to happens when your source material comes from a widow or ex-wife, in this instance Deborah Curtis and her memoir, “Touching From a Distance”. Plus it mainly focuses on the band playing live gigs, which the critic-fan says is wrong since Joy Division was mainly a studio band.
On the other hand, another respected critic friend says Control is definitely worth catching.
I would have gone to last night’s Director’s Fortnight Control screening at 7 pm, but I had to go to an early screening of Leonardo DiCaprio‘s global-poisoning doc 11th Hour, since I’m taking part in an early-afternoon interview session with DiCaprio and co-directors Nadia Conners and Leila Conners tomorrow at the Hotel du Cap. I have to hold on my review until after the public screening that day, which would be sometime around 2:30 or 3 pm.
Good God, another hambone Ed Zwick movie. Defiance, a WWII-era drama, will star Daniel Craig in a “true story of four brothers in Nazi occupied Poland who flee to the Belarussian forest with a band of Jews and join forces with Russian Resistance fighters.” Craig is flying high these days, but one day he’ll regret this. Once an actor has been through the Zwick grinder, his aura is never quite the same — the coolness factor always cools down. You can’t tell me that Tom Cruise was tickled pink with how The Last Samura turned out; ditto Leonardo DiCaprio in Blood Diamond. These guys know what’ goes; they aren’t fools. The only actor who smelled good after a Zwick film was Glory‘s Matthew Broderick.
I went to the 8:30 ayem press screening of Zodiac this morning just to see how it looked, and what I saw alarmed me. Despite director David Fincher having allegedly checked the print being shown, a slightly distorted version of Zodiac was shown. The Grand Palais projectionist was using a slightly wrong lens, the result being that the images in the film looked a bit more expanded horizontally than they should have.
Jake Gyllenhaal, those first murder victims at Lake Berryessa, Candy Clark, Robert Downey…they all had slightly wider heads that they should have. Every image was just a little bit fatter than the actual proportions of the people, sets and objects that Fincher shot. I’ve seen this film three times, and I know what I’m talking about. Because the image was over-expanded horizontally and because widescreen aperture plates don’t change, this also meant that the sides of the images that Fincher shot were slightly shaved off.
I told the guys at Pheonix what I saw, and one wrote back and said that Fincher “qc’d the movie last night, and I was told that [this morning’s] screening was exactly the same as what David saw and approved, so I’m not sure what the issue is.” I wrote back and said that “whatever Fincher approved, something went a little bit wrong for this morning’s screening. I’ve worked as a projectionist and I know what I’m talking about. The proportion of the images are not quite right. I’m not hallucinating, and I had only one glass of wine last night.”
There doesn’t seem to be anything to write about Cannes-wise except for the jizzy peripheral stuff. That Bee thing this morning ate up three, three and a half hours when all was said and done, and before I knew it it was 2, 2:30 pm. I’ve been at the Orange Cafe for two hours now and barely keeping awake. If ever I needed a super-sized can of Red Bull, it’s right now.
I’ll be seeing two presumably major films in tandem less than 90 minutes from now. First, J.A. Bayona‘s The Orphanage, an “atmospheric thriller” about a kid with a vivid imagination. The thriller-type film, produced by Guillermo del Toro, was acquired at Berlin last February by Picturehouse’s Bob Berney. And then Leonardo DiCaprio‘s global-warming doc The 11th Hour. Seeing the DiCaprio means I have to blow off Control, the black-and-white Ian Curtis suicide flick that’s showing as the Director’s Fortnight opener at the Noga Hilton at the exact same time.
Tomorrow morning at 8 ayem is Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington‘s U2 3D, which is precisely what the title implies. The idea alone of watching a 3D rock concert film at 8 ayem with a double cappucino surging through my system is fairly thrilling.
Dressed in a bee costume, Jerry Seinfeld took two wild rides off the roof of the Carlton Hotel late this morning to promote Bee Movie, the animated DreamWorks feature comedy that opens in November. Seinfeld was hooked up to a long-ass safety wire that stretched from the Carlton roof to the hotel pier some 200 yards away.
Bee Movie star and co-writer Jerry Seinfeld doing the paparazzi stroll on the Carlton pier a little after noon today — Thursday, 5.17.07, 12:105 pm. (The wind and the light showed that Seinfeld has a bit of Rogaine issue — if I were him I’d do something about it before it gains any more ground.)
Footage from the film was shown at the Espace Miramar about an hour earlier, followed by Seinfeld coming up on stage and talking about the film — the why and how of it, the genesis, the plot, the Steven Spielberg connection and so on.
The flying stunt had been rehearsed by Seinfeld and an assistance crew this morning at 5 am. DreamWorks chief Jeff Katzenberg also rode the wire early this morning “just to do it,” according to what Premiere online critic Glenn Kenny told me at the after-party. Seinfeld’s second stunt didn’t go as smoothly as the first, Kenny said. The comedian had a hard time landing smoothly and “was visibly rattled,” said Kenny.
I didn’t take any pics of Seinfeld because I decided to walk over to the rue d’Antibes after the stage show to score one of those heavy-duty, multi-region electric power adapters. (I had bought one at FNAC two days ago, but it gave up the ghost last night in the apartment — don’t ask why.) But I made it back to the luncheon party and took a few shots of Seinfeld and the paparazzi.
The plot is about Barry B. Benson (Seinfeld), a bee who’s not thrilled at the idea of doing just making honey for the rest of his life. (A disillusioned insect who wants to be different…hey, wasn’t this what Woody Allen‘s “Z” was about in Antz?) In any case, Barry gets to leave the hive on a honeysuckle mission in Manhattan’s Central Park, and he eventually runs into humans who try to swat him to death. Naturally.
Barry is nearly all in at one point when he’s saved by Vanessa (Zellweger), a kind-hearted hottie, and he promptly falls in love. Kind of a King Kong-Ann Darrell romance in reverse. Then he decides to talk to her. English, that is. Then he learns about the human honey business, and decides that humans are ripping off the bees in order to do so, and so files a lawsuit to try and prevent this. Honestly, that’s more or less the story. I’m half into it. I like “silly” if the movie really goes for it whole-hog.
Chris Rock, Matthew Broderick, Oprah Winfrey, Sting and Ray Liotta (among many others) voice the other bees and humans who figure in the plot.
I haven’t yet loaded by trusty Wavepad sound editing software since last week’s hard drive crash, so I’m running the Seinfeld chit-chat raw.
At tonight’s really big La Pizza soiree (yes, a second one), thrown by either IHOP’s Jeff Hill or MPRM’s Mark Pogachefsky, or maybe they split the tab, or maybe it was two sit-downs side-by-side. (l. to r.) Warner Independent publicist James Lewis, MPRM’s Karen Oberman and Jessica Kimiabakhsh, MRC’s Brooke Blumberg, and Pogachefsky himself — Wednesday, 5.16.07, 10:25 pm. Hill is pushing Juan Antonio Bayona‘s The Orphanage, Gus Van Sant‘s Paranoid Park, Ocean’s Thirteen and Sony Classics’ Persepolis; MPRM is promoting Ramin Bahrani‘s Chop Shop, DreamWorks’ The Bee Movie (i.e., that Jerry Seinfeld thing), and Leonardo DiCaprio‘s The 11th Hour.
I could sense trouble fairly early on in Wong Kar Wai’s My Blueberry Nights, a horribly written, woefully banal self- discovery mood piece (the word “drama” really can’t be applied) about a young girl (Nora Jones) who leaves her home town of Manhattan and starts job-hopping across the country — waitress gigs in Memphis and I-couldn’t-tell- what-town in Nevada, with an apparently uneventful stopover in Los Angeles — in order to get over a bad case of breakup grief.
That early “uh-oh” comes when Jones, playing a lady named Elizabeth with a certain doleful sincerity, is on the phone with her soon-to-be-ex. She asks him, “Are you seeing somebody else?” and then two seconds later she inquires “who is she?” In other words, the boyfriend (whose voice we don’t hear) has quickly admit- ted to infidelity. Of course, guys never admit there’s another woman without being hammered and prosecuted by their betrayed significant other for hours, if not days or weeks, on end. The male genetic code prohibits it. We all know this. So right away it’s obvious that the human behavior and particularly the human dialogue will not have the cast of reality.
The Blueberry strategy, in any event, is roughly this: the folks whom Elizabeth gets to know and feel for during her episodic journey — a Manhattan pasty-shop owner from Manchester (Jude Law), an alcoholic, deeply depressed beat cop (David Straitharn), the cop’s hysterically alienated wife (Rachel Weisz), a hard- luck Nevada gambler (Natalie Portman) — are all nursing broken hearts, and their combined pathos somehow will prod Elizabeth into relinquishing the mope-a-dope and deciding to look forward and live in the now.
The “aha!” she finally absorbs seems to have something to do with realizing how much worse off everyone else is than she, along with the futility of letting hurt be the dominant chord. The problem is that there’s no giving a damn about any of it, particularly since Elizabeth’s new attitude leads her back to a possible relationship with the flirtatious Law, with whom she spends the first third of the film with, trading sad memories and little bon mots of bittersweet regret about bruised feelings and whatnot.
There’s just no investing in Law these days — every character he plays feels like a sly, gently calculating hound — and it’s impossible not to feel cynical about any female character in any movie hooking up with this smoothie because you know where it’ll all eventually end up.
Most of the “trouble” moments in My Blueberry Nights are rooted in the script by Wong and Lawrence Block. I can’t remember the last time that a film co-written by a major director was the cause of so much internal groaning. (I made no sounds during the screening although I did lean forward a lot, often with my hands covering my face.) There’s a lot of precious talk about abandoned apartment keys and blueberry pies, and way too many line that begin with the word “sometimes.” As in “sometimes the thing you’re running away from is the very thing that will save you. This line line isn’t literally spoken used in the film, but you get the idea.
Allusive wounded-heart dialogue has been woven into Wong’s films before, of course, but there’s a big difference between reading it via subtitles and hearing it spoken in English. All I can say is, the Blueberry dialogue is so bad that it makes the talk in Wim Wenders and Sam Shepard‘s Don’t Come Knockin’, which I saw and didn’t much care for in Cannes last year, seem much, much better in retrospect, and that’s saying something.
The only player who delivers any sense of scrappy believability is Portman, but even she can’t overcome the H.M.S.Titanic vibe flooding this thing. Strathairn is one of our very best character actors, and yet his portrayal of drunkenness here is painfully actor-ish. Weisz, working with a stagey Memphis drawl, is nearly as bad, and I never thought I’d say this about an actress as talented as she. They’re all sad pawns in this thing, having almost certainly agreed to appear in My Blueberry Nights on the strength of Wong Kar Wai’s exalted rep.
I don’t know which is worse — the whole waitressing-in-Memphis section of the film, or the endless soul-searching section with Law in the pastry shop. But put ’em together and wham, you’re looking at your watch and going “holy bejeezus, this is dreadful.” It’s time for Kar to say “okay, it didn’t work” and hightail it back to China. He doesn’t get America (he’s not the first foreign-born director to distinguish himself in this regard) and he sure as shit doesn’t get how people talk here. He was never obliged write or use “realistic” dialogue, of course, but every director has to be careful to use lines that don’t constantly defeat a skilled cast.
Even Darius Khondji‘s photography is irksome, or maybe the way Wong’s editing just makes it seem so. There are two or three shots of milk (or melted ice cream) cascading over a collapsed slice of blueberry pie, the heavy-handed allusion being semen making its way through a woman’s inner cavity. And there are several passages with “fake” slow motion, as if Wong only realized in post-production that he could give the film a more dreamllike quality with this technique.
The biggest howler comes when Jones goes into a Las Vegas hospital to ask whether Portman’s con-man father has died or has told a friend to pass along a message that he’s dead in order to get his daughter to pay a visit to a hospital he’s been staying in. Jones learns he’s actually left the earth from a couple of doctors. After describing what caused the dad’s demise, he tells Jones, “You should have come earlier.” Yes, she should have. That way she and Portman could have spoken with him because, you know, he wouldn’t have been dead.
“Periodically — about twice a year, by my calculation — someone tries to breathe new life into the movie musical by putting together a lavish song-and-dance spectacle like the ones they used to make, full of big numbers and bigger emotions. (See, most recently, Dreamgirls and, before too long, Hairspray.) Against this trend, Once, a scrappy, heart-on-its-sleeve little movie directed by an Irishman named John Carney, makes a persuasive case that the real future of the genre may lie not in splashy grandeur but in modesty and understatement.
“Filmed with more efficiency than elegance on the streets of Dublin, Mr. Carney√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s movie, a favorite at Sundance earlier this year, does not look, sound or feel like a typical musical. It is realistic rather than fanciful, and the characters work patiently on the songs rather than bursting spontaneously into them. But its low-key affect and decidedly human scale endow Once with an easy, lovable charm that a flashier production could never have achieved. The formula is simple: two people, a few instruments, 88 minutes and not a single false note.” — from A.O. Scott‘s N.Y. Times review.
So far, the Fox Searchlight release has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating. Some cream-of-the-cropper will eventually ding it — the best movies always take hit or two — but it’ll be fascinating to read whatever complaints or reservations may be in the offing. Here’s KennethTuran‘s L.A. Times rave.
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