Alec Baldwin delivered a good, believable pitch for Rise of the Guardians, an animated Paramount/DreamWorks feature that was promoted this morning at the Espace Miramar. Director Peter Ramsey and costars Chris Pine and Isla Fischer also took the stage following 3D product reel (which looked highly engaging and polished and whatnot), but Baldwin brought it home. He was his usual quippy, sardonic self, but mainly he convinced that Rise is a cut or two above the usual family stuff and far from a parent punisher.

I thought I might see James Toback‘s cameras shooting Baldwin at this event. I wrote two days ago that he and Baldwin are currently shooting a semi-improvised feature called Seduced and Abandoned, about raising film funding during the Cannes Film Festival.

Rise of the Guardians, which was also product-reeled at Cinemacon, will open on 11.21.12. It’s based on William Joyce‘s The Guardians of Childhood book series, and is basically the leading mythical figures of childhood — Santa Claus or “North” (played by Baldwin), the Easter Bunny (Hugh Jackman), the Sandman, Jack Frost (Pine) and the Tooth Fairy (Fischer) pooling forces to defeat or at least neutralize the Bogeyman (Jude Law).

I tried to ask if Baldwin and his costars were allowed or encouraged to improvise as they recorded their voice parts, but the lady with the mike wouldn’t call on me, possibly because she said no photography when she began the show and I ignored her. When they say “no photography” they really mean “no flash photography.”

Just the usual start-of-the-press-conference HE footage. No big deal. But attempts at uploading this and another video and 14 or 15 photos today were truly agonizing — crap wifi at the American Pavillion, getting kicked off Orange Cafe wifi, one thing after another. Tomorrow I’m going to purchase 12 days of Grand Palais wifi, which is said to be bulletproof, for 95 euros. Eugene Hernandez says it’s “worth every zero.”

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The Orange Cafe was the streets of Calcutta after the Moonrise Kindgom press conference so I retreated to the American Pavillion…mistake. After 90 minutes the wifi crapped out right in the middle of two video uploads and now it’s slower than molasses in February, even for no-big-deal JPEG uploads. I really hate this.

So now I have to start all over again but there’s no point because it’s 3:20 pm and I have catch Laurent Bozereau‘s Roman Polanski doc at 4 pm, and it’s playing the Salle Bazin which always means lines.

Here are are my Moonlight Kingdom tweets, at least:

Tweet #1: “Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom is a typical Anderson thing — an exactingly composed, super-dollhouse, movie about perfect compositions.

Tweet #2: It’s a Little Romance about Sam and Suzy, each 12 years old with eyes only for each other. But cavorting behind a quirky, ultra-dry filter.

Tweet #3: “But the real Moonrise romance is between Wes and his ultra-exacting, needle-precise compositions — sets, costumes & shots refined to a T.

Tweet #4: “Very fairy-tale-ish, very precisely composed, kind of masterful. And emotional as far as it goes. But all within a vacuum.”

Tweet #5: “Are there genuine emotional currents running through (or under) “Moonrise”? Yeah…but mainly in the last third.”

Tweet #6: “Wes is kinda Jacques Tati, whose films we’re also about Tati and his style and mood strokes. Enjoy the film & story but mainly look at me.”

Sony announced yesterday that they’ve hired Aaron Sorkin to adapt Walter Isaacson‘s biography of the late Steve Jobs for a feature to be produced by Scott Rudin, Mark Gordon and Guymon Casady. In so doing they’re declaring that they don’t expect that the Ashton Kutcher biopic to really get it or do it. They expect their film to be the definitive screen version, and with Sorkin writing it…most likely.

I probably would have bought the Bluray of Kenneth Lonergan‘s Margaret (Fox Home Video, 7.10) for its own sake, but now it’s really essential with the 186-minute cut included with the 150-minute theatrical version. Which I want to see with as fresh an attitude as I can muster. The longer one, I mean.

Will Margaret‘s 186-minute cut acquire the status that Leone’s full-length cut of Once Upon A Time in America has? (Not to be confused with the four-hour-plus version that will show in Cannes in a few days’ time.)

The big news is that MCN’s David Poland is here this year…not a rumor! Another big story is that there are two market screenings of Jeff Nichols‘ Mud this week (tomorrow at 2 pm and on Friday at 6 pm), which I’d love to quietly attend and hold my reactions until the official Cannes screen date on Saturday, 5.26, but the Wearefilmnation guys keep telling me “nope, sorry, we can’t.” And of course the journos all got together this evening at La Pizza, but that happens ever year…meh.

Tuesday, 5.15, 8:35 pm.

There’s a Rise of the Guardians breakfast and press conference tomorrow morning at 8:30 am, followed by a 11 am screening of Wes Anderson‘s Moonrise Kingdom, and then a 1 pm press conference. At 4 pm Laurent Bozereeau‘s Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir will screen at Salle Bazin. Filing time for an hour or two follows and then, at 9:30 pm, Yousry Nazrallah‘s After The Battle.

My Dusseldorf-from-Berlin plane touched down in Nice at 1:50 pm. 45 minutes to retrieve bag from carousel. 25 minutes waiting for and then loading onto the bus. Bus left Nice Airport 40 minutes ago and we’re currently slogging through traffic — another 5 or 10 minutes. 110 minutes, all in. Not awful…okay, it ‘s fine.

Update: Waited 25 minutes to get into pass-dispensing portion of the Pslais only to be told at the gate that no bags are allowed inside, and that I’d have to lug my gear back to the Place Maritime and leave them there. Par for the French course.

My Berlin-to-Nice plane (by way of Dusseldorf) leaves in a half-hour or so. I’m due to arrive at 1:45 pm. Then comes the sluggish ground transportation to Cannes. And then the press badge pickup and dropping off the bags and whatnot. And then the 7:30 pm gathering at La Pizza. So not much filing until later tonight. Maybe some photos around dinner hour.

Let me get this straight: Alfonso Cuaron‘s allegedly groundbreaking Gravity, an IMAX-filmed 3D space drama that wrapped principal photography roughly eight months ago, won’t open later this year but sometime in 2013 because of competition for IMAX screens from Skyfall and The Hobbit and one or two others?

That sounds to me like 2001: A Space Odyssey being bumped out its April 1968 release slot because of competition for screens from Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang or…you know, something of that calibre.

The vision of Alfonso Cuaron doesn’t make way for safe audience-pleasing franchise films from Sam Mendes or Peter Jackson…c’mon. Especially with George Clooney and Sandra Bullock toplining. Methinks there’s possibly a bit more to this than the availability of IMAX screens.

Variety’s Andrew Stewart is reporting that Alan Rickman has landed what sounds to be his first truly decent role in years…maybe…as downtown Manhattan showman Hilly Kristal in CBGB, which Randall Miller (Bottle Shock) will direct from a script by Miller and Jody Slavin.

Playing a guy like Kristal will allow Rickman to go all madman and ticky and impassioned and tough at the same time…if the script is any good. My concern is that I saw Bottle Shock two or three years ago at Sundance and I didn’t exactly levitate.

I was a half-hearted CGBG attender in the mid to late ’70s. (I wasn’t hip enough to even stick my head in the place before 1975.) I never saw the Ramones or Blondie there, but I caught a Television set once (Tom Verlaine, “See No Evil”), and the great Patti Smith one time. (I also saw her in Westport and in Paris in ’76.) I’ll never forget her singing “Time Is On My Side” — that was heaven. I also remember catching Wendy O. Williams and the Plasmatics

I never wanted to know that CBGB & OMFUG stood for. I just loved the raunchy, rude sound of it.

I have to get hold of the first two or three episodes of The Newsroom (HBO, debuting 6.24) as soon as possible because this looks so effing great I can’t stand it. The three trailers indicate this is the new Network. Creator-producer-writer Aaron Sorkin gets to say everything he thinks under the cover or guise of televised drama, and therefore: “We were not attacked by Muslims — we were attacked by sociopaths.”

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The Blues Brothers was about John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd riffing on the white-guys-playing-the-Chicago-blues concept, which was originally personified with utter sincerity by the scowling, grittily-posed, Rayban-wearing Paul Butterfield Blues Band. The Blues Brothers were nervy and funny when I first saw them perform on Saturday Night Live in April 1978, and they doubled down on that when I saw them live at Carnegie Hall later that year (or was it ’79?). But the coolness went all to hell with the release of John Landis‘s The Blues Brothers (’80).

What was it about The Blues Brothers that obliterated and suffocated? Oh, I don’t know. Maybe the fact that it was an unfunny, over-emphatic, overproduced super-whale that was made on cocaine (or so the legend went)?

I asked Landis about this wildly inflated, pushing-too-hard aspect when I interviewed him in ’82 for an American Werewolf in London piece. It was over breakfast at an Upper East Side hotel (Landis was hungrily wolfing down a plate of scrambled eggs and home fries), and I said that the “enormity” of The Blues Brothers seemed “somewhat incongruous with the humble origins of the Chicago Blues.”

That hit a nerve. “It wasn’t supposed to be a documentary about the humble origins of the Chicago Blues!” Landis replied. But the essence of the Chicago blues wasn’t about flamboyant energy and huge lavish musical numbers and car chases or mad slapstick, I said. And you movie seemed to take that Paul Butterfield current and amplify it beyond all measure or reason. Okay, I didn’t literally say all this to Landis but that was the basic implication. (I wasn’t impolitic enough to cal it “a cocaine movie” but that’s what it damn sure felt like.) As Landis argued with me the Universal publicist sitting at the table started making “no, no” faces, indicating that I should tone it down.

On any case I mostly hated The Blues Brothers from the get-go, and here it is 32 years later and I still hate it. And now Press Play‘s Aaron Aradillas has written an essay about it called “Cruel Summer.”