Last night Sasha Stone and I mulled over the Cannes Film Festival winners and the Nanni Moretti factor. (Boxoffice.com’s Phil Contrino, as ever, was doing a family thing.) A story passed along from this or that character’s point of view is never just that — it’s about their POV as well as mine because I’m in the middle of it, sitting in my seat. Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link.

The headline obviously refers to facing the fact that this happened in a way that doesn’t mince words or images.

Michael Haneke‘s Amour, a highly admirable, very well realized drama that led me to wonder which form of suicide I should choose when I get older, has won the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or. Congrats to Haneke and Sony Pictures Classics, which will distribute Amour in the States.

The Grand Prix was won by Matteo Garrone‘s Reality….really? And Carlos Reygadas won Best Director for Post Tenebras Lux? Can someone please tell me what’s going on here? This is fairly close to ridiculous. Reality was just passable and not much more. Reygadas is respected with his share of followers, but Lux sucked and mainly pissed people off.

The “bad guy” who urged the jury to make these calls, I strongly suspect, or refused to go along with other preferences (he allegedly hated Holy Motors) is Italian director Nanni Moretti.

Cristina Flutur and Cosmina Stratan shared the Best Actress prize for their performances as former best friends in Cristian Mungiu‘s Beyond The Hills. And Mungiu won for Best Screenplay.

Benh Zeitlin‘s Beasts of the Southern Wild won for Best First Film — congrats! And Ken Loach‘s The Angels Share won the jury prize.

Wells to Landlady: “An hour ago a thief smashed a window in the next-door building stairwell, climbed onto the outdoor balcony and may have tried to break into the apartment. He left a half-consumed beer bottle that probably has fingerprints. You’d better report this to the police, and definitely call the owner of the building next door and make sure the smashed window is promptly repaired. As long as it’s shattered security is nonexistent.”

Read more

I’ve agreed to submit to a kind of monk-like withdrawal from the hurly burly for three days — Tuesday, 5.29 through Thursday, June 1. Never mind why. Suffice that while I’ve had the occasional sluggish day since HE went hourly-daily in April 2006, I’ve taken no days off during that time. So I’ll be mostly off the treadmill for these three days, but to keep things going I thought I’d offer HE readers a shot at running an essay or a review or any kind of rant or recollection or looking-forward piece — you name it as long as it has something to do with features or Blurays.

Just keep submissions to 1000 words or less, and please send photos to go along with the article, sized to 460 pixels wide. Send them to me today and tomorrow, and they’ll start posting on Tuesday. If you’re a journalist and want to double-post a new article on HE as well as your own site, fine — just make it special. Anyone can say anything except for LexG-type stuff about libidinal matters. And absolutely no rightwing pro-Romney stuff of any kind.

In fact, that’s a topic to write about. Now that the 2012 campaign is about to kick in to full gear I’m thinking it’s time for another Stalinist purge of all Duluoz Gray-like hammerhead rightwing contributors. I did this in ’08 as I just couldn’t stand providing a forum for conservative scum, and I would be able to stand it this year either. What does everyone think about this? Throw the bums out or let it ride?

Where is Bob “all ’50s and ’60s films must be Blurayed at 1.78 or 1.85” Furmanek when we really need him? Is he going to let this outrageous British Film Institute Bluray of John Cassavetes Shadows stand unchallenged? Because it’s being presented at 1.33, and that’s a blatant defiance of Furmanek’s belief that all non-Scope movies were presented at 1.85 starting in April 1953. C’mon, Bob — either the 1.85 rule was applied across the board or it wasn’t. No exceptions, no side-stepping.

For a good 20 or 30 minutes six or seven drunken animals were joking and bellowing under my second-floor bedroom window this morning, starting around at 5:30 am. They eventually woke me up. If this happens tomorrow I’m pouring a pan of water out of my window and right onto their heads. Prague’s Stare Mesto has become a Ground Zero for submental 20something louts — German, French, British, American. The pestilence is everywhere. Plus they’ve been spray-painting the bases of several old buildings with moronic slogans…cool!

Read more

To some it wasn’t obvious that the part 3 syndrome (followup to a sequel to an original) would automatically diminish interest in Men in Black 3. Obviously not to a great extent — $19.6 million yesterday plus an $18 million Friday for a likely $56 million for the three-day weekend and $70 million including the Monday holiday — but how did anyone calculate it would make $90 million over four days?

Quality has nothing to do with an opening weekend haul. It’s always about lazy-brained Joe Schmoe expectations based on marketing. If you want to know how a film will do, ask the dumbest, least educated friend you know to drink nine or ten beers and eat junk food and then go to bed late after hitting several bars. At 7 am go over to his home and wake him up — “Whuh?” — ask him what he thinks about a film opening in two or three days time. Whatever he grunts out in his gunked-up, half-comatose state will tell you just about everything.

If you had asked this guy about MIB3 last Tuesday or Wednesday, he would have said, “Yeah, I don’t know, I guess so, I’ve heard Brolin’s good…but fucking part 3?”

If you want to be right on top of the movie-exhibition world as it existed three or four weeks ago in the States, Prague is clearly the place to be. I’m written Expats.cz film critic Jason Pirodsky and Prague Post critic Andre Crous to ask if they’ll share info about critics’ screenings and email addresses of the publicists who arrange them. Prometheus, at least, opens on June 7th — one day before it opens in the States (but eight days after it opens in Paris).