Deserving of special attention at next month’s Cannes Film Festival, I’m hearing, will be James Marsh’s The King, which stars an English-speaking Gael Garcia Bernal as a discharged Navy guy who comes home to Corpus Christi, Texas, and resolves some long-buried family issues. Marsh co-authored the screenplay with Milo Addica (Birth, Monster’s Ball), whose work I’ve come to admire. The film will be one of the Un Certain Regard attractions. William Hurt, Laura Harring, Paul Dano and Pell James costar. Marsh’s last feature was the startling Wisconsin Death Trip (1999).

Excellent news that Adam Curtis’s The Power of Nightmares, which I wrote about after receiving a muddy-looking tape of it from Telluride Film Festival honcho Tom Luddy last December, is going to have a special screening at the Cannes Film Festival. Luddy was behind this, of course. He lobbied Cannes artistic director Thierry Fremaux along with Fremaux’s good friend Michael Fitzgerald. Director Bernard Tavernier lobbied for the film also. Curtis’ three-hour doc contends that the anti-western terrorists and the neo-con hardliners in the George W. Bush White House are two peas in a fundamentalist pod, and that they seem to be almost made for each other in an odd way, and they need each other’s hatred to fuel their respective power bases but are, in fact, almost identical in their purist fervor, and are pretty much cut from the same philosophical cloth.

In addition to making this site’s machinery chug along, I’m also a filmmaker. No, I’m not plugging anything. But I am in a bit of a bind. If anyone who reads this knows someone who can answer a question about Final Cut Pro exporting audio to OMF, please click on my name and get in touch.

With weeks of Schiavo ’05, the Pope Deathwatch, and now Papal Idol, it’s been a sickeningly religious year so far. When you factor in “The Passion of The Christ“, President Bush, and the gay marriage brouhaha, we’re drowning in zealots. I imagine this will translate into some more “Left Behind” movies, and more flicks geared to the hopelessly faithful. Some might lament the faith-ization of movies, but I argue that American movies are already imbued with a thick religious vibe. The bad guys always lose, good guys win via a deus ex machina, order is restored, Allah hu Ackbar. Ever notice that the bad guys, if really evil, are never allowed to live? The hero defeats him in a one-on-one battle, then refuses to stoop to his level, and lets him live. The bad guy wrestles a gun from a hapless cop, and then the hero is allowed to kill in self-defense. How convenient. And how Old Testament. Real evil lives on, has civil rights, and gets parole in 20-25 years.

There are many, I presume, who will agree with my praise of that killer suspense sequence at the end of Act Two in Sydney Pollack’s The Interpreter, but now I know New Yorker critic Anthony Lane is one of them. Here’s the passage from Lane’s current review: “Still, to be fair, there is one part of The Interpreter that would, without question, have earned [Alfred Hitchcock’s] smile. All the characters are in different places — one agent is following Silvia, another is tailing a Matoban suspect, and Woods and Keller are in a booby-trapped room. (Catherine Keener, by far the driest deliverer of lines in the movie, looks up at an overhead light strung with explosives and says, ‘Now, that’s just rude.’ Imagine Celeste Holm packing heat, and you’re there.) Gradually, Pollack pulls the figures together, [Sean Penn] starts to yell into his phone, and calamity opens its maw. It is one of the smartest passages of action, allegro sostenuto, that I have seen for a long while — as neat, indeed, as the infamous bomb-on-a-bus sequence from Hitchcock’s Sabotage, and true to his faith in the revelatory powers of excitement, in what it means to have movies burst against our nerves.”

Investigative sleuth Mark Ebner spent some time last week hanging with the “Minutemen” in and around Tombstone, Arizona. The Minutemen are a bunch of volunteer border patrol shmoes trying to stop the flow of illegals over the border from Mexico. Ebner’s report will appear in the Globe sometime next week. (There’s no URL link to the story.) Of course, there’s a journey-of-discovery love story in the basic situation, in the vein of Tony Richardson’s The Border (’82). One of the militamen — an unhappy married guy, no kids — falls in love with a Mexican girl with a baby, and ultimately decides to betray the Minuteman ethos in order to help this girl get started in the States and provide a decent future for her son.

“Wow…real diamonds. They must be worth their weight in gold.” — Marilyn Monroe’s Sugar Kane Kowalczyk upon receiving a gift of a diamond bracelet in Billy Wilder’s and I.A.L. Diamond’s Some Like It Hot.

Danish director Lone Scherfig (Italian for Beginners) was all set to start shooting the high-profile World War II drama Good in Berlin, starring Hugh Jackman as a literature professor seduced by the Nazi propaganda, when she apparently suffered some nasty accident and had to drop out. Looks like instead she’ll segue into directing the semi-biographical Erik Nietzsche: The Early Years, surrounding the misadventures of a rebellious film student. And who was it that had the Danish cinematic community in stitches with his pseudonymous screenplay? You guessed it: Lars von Trier. But why did the director give away such a small personal screenplay? “It’s a self-centred, vanity project” he told ScreenDaily.com. “[Scherfig] can give the main character a little love and some understanding.” But if von Trier feels he was unable to do this himself as a director, does this prove once and for all that he’s a sadist, or a masochist? — Nic Kockum

After The Empire Strikes Back, George Lucas had a chance to enter the pantheon of great human storytellers. Go ahead, laugh…but his Star Wars movies brought him to the edge of greatness. After his first two and even after the disappointment of Return of the Jedi, all Lucas had to do was a great prequel trilogy. Had he blown us away with Episodes I – III, he would have joined…brace yourselves… Shakespeare, Kurosawa, the Brothers Grimm and the others in the Hall of Stories. His influence on movies and marketing is not in dispute. I’m saying the stories themselves were good, and had potential to be great. His characters, their universe, the backstory…they bored into our minds until they became archetype. Jedi-ism is even a recognized religion in some places. He was right there and he blew it. Like the Wachowski brothers, he had a chance to make something great…bigger than him, bigger than all of us. Something to last into the future. Had he made a cohesive six-story epic that excited and held our fascination, he’d be in, and they’d still be talking about The Force and Darth Vader a thousand years from now. But like the makers of The Matrix, Lucas is going down in flames. Of all the storms creative people weather in their lives, why must the hardest be success?

This sounds a bit sappy coming from me, but warmest, cutest and most irresistably affecting film I’ve seen this year? Marilyn Agrelo’s Mad Hot Ballroom, hands down. I can’t imagine this professionally shot, superbly edited documentary not ending up as one of the five nominees for a Best Feature Documentary Oscar…but it’s early yet. (Honestly? I think it’s going to win.) I showed it to my UCLA Sneak Preview class a few weeks back and the mostly older crowd melted in their seats. It recently played the Cleveland Film Festival and the Chicago Documentary Film Festival and picked up audience awards at both. New Yorkers should try to catch the big outdoor screening in Battery Park on 4.24 being organized by the Tribeca Film Festival.

Anyone stuck for a place to crash during the Cannes Film Festival needs to drop me a line. There’s room for at least one and maybe even two in the large apartment I’ll be staying in, which is near the eastern side of the Croisette. And the price is right.

I was in my local Pavillions last night and as I was standing at the checkout stand I saw I don’t know many cereal boxes with promotional plugs for Stars Wars, Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith. This is standard marketing for a big tentpole movie aimed at kids, but right away I could feel the irritation starting. Then I went home and watched the new trailer again (see? the cereal boxes worked!) and re-connected with my old feelings about this series. Trailers always tend to emphasize the familiar, but this one, to me, seems to promise that Revenge of the Sith will be absolutely no different and all of a tonal piece with the previous two Star Warsfilms…same pacing, same tone, same constricted dialogue, etc. George Lucas has been saying this is a much heavier film and don’t take the kids, etc., but unless he had some kind of secret DNA or personality transplant operation in Switzerland a couple of years ago, Sith will surprise or upset no one. But at least we’ll finally get to figure out how Hayden Christensen’s Annakin gets to grow as big and mountain-like as Dave Prowse was in Episodes 4, 5 and 6…and how a kid with the worst nasally Canada accent in the history of motion pictures gets to suddenly sound like a synthezied James Earl Jones.