I love this image. I have nothing more interesting or layered or referenced to say than that. It’s better, I think, not to reveal what film it’s from. Not The Wild Bunch — I’ll say that much.

The wisest and most exciting choice to receive the Palme d’Or this evening would be Lars von Trier‘s Melancholia. It would be an artistically respectable decision on its own, but perhaps more importantly the jury would be saying “it’s the work that counts, and not the odd press conference remark.”

Will De Niro, Thurman, Assayas, Law, To and their jury brethren do this? Of course not. They’d be too afraid that such a decision would be seen as a rebuke to the Cannes Film Festival’s decision to excommunicate Von Trier, which of course it wouldn’t be. It would be the ultimate non-political award gesture.

The best guess, apparently, is that Michel Hazanavicius‘ The Artist will take the prize. If that happens I would respectfully call it a cop-out to conventional popularity rather than going with a more substantial film that will seem worth the prize and then some down the road.

As I noted in my initial review, The Artist “is a “highly diverting, sometimes stirring thing…and a job well done.” But it’s not prize-winning good, if there is such a quality. As likable and well-done as it is, it’s not entirely its own unique-DNA, self-realized creation, and the story doesn’t really resolve itself in a way that”means” anything particularly, other than its sunshine reversal of the Star Is Born third-act scheme.

I’m trying to get past having lost 90 minutes of worth of work due to a sudden wifi reboot by the hotel’s server. Otherwise around 1 pm I’ll be moving into a sixth-floor place on rue Gassendi in Montparnasse, where I stayed with Jett in ’08. Followed by the much-awaited visit to the Stanley Kubrick exhibit at the Cinematheque Francais. And then, sometime this evening, a get-together with friends, including Santa Barbara Film Festival chief Roger Durling.

Saturday, 5.21, 11:05 am

Saturday, 5.21, 5:55 pm

The larger glass is an ice-tea concoction, believe it or not. I don’t know how they gave it a foamy head (probably just by hitting a switch on the blender) but it’s very cool.

Saturday, 5.21, 11:25 pm

Like me and almost everyone else, Indiewire’s Anne Thompson is a big Drive fan, and has posted a very nicely framed YouTube chat with star Ryan Gosling. She’s also included links to various thumbs-up reviews.

My favorite review excerpt is from Movieline‘s Stephanie Zacharek: “Drive [is] an unapologetically commercial picture that defies all the current trends in mainstream action filmmaking. The driving sequences are shot and edited with a surgeon’s clarity and precision, [and] [director Nicholas Winding] Refn doesn’t chop up the action to fool us into thinking it’s more exciting than it is. This is such a simple thing.

“Is it really reason enough to fall in love with a movie? Considering how sick I am of railing against the visual clutter in so many contemporary action movies — even some that are very enjoyable are not particularly well-made — I think it is.”

Every Cannes Film Festival I’ve attended has been front-loaded and all but over after six or seven days. But this year’s fest defied that pattern. One of my resultant regrets due to leaving after a mere nine days (ten and 1/2 including arrival and departure days) was missing Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, the latest from one of my favorite directors, Nuri Bilge Ceylan.

And I mean especially after reading Eric Kohn‘s Indiewire observation it “plays like Zodiac meets Police, Adjective…an analytical brain teaser rendered in patient and sharply philosophical terms.

“At two and a half hours, the Turkish filmmaker’s sixth movie is also his longest and most advanced narrative undertaking. However, outlining the plot takes substantially less effort than the extensive viewing experience, as Once Upon a Time in Anatolia only involves a handful of characters.

“Ceylan opens with the prolonged late-night hunt for a dead body in the countryside. A parade of cop cars drift through the darkness, carrying a group of straight-faced middle-aged men. These include prosecutor Nusret (Taner Birsel), commissar Naci (Yilmax Erdogan) and Dr. Cemal (Muhammet Uzuner). Additionally, they have a prisoner in tow named Kenan (Firat Tanis), the apparent lead to discovering the corpse.

“Ceylan keeps details scant and instead turns up the atmosphere. His capacity for expressive images, often held in lovely, observational long takes, arguably reached its apex with the well-received Climates. However, his skill remains: Most of the story unfolds in heavy shadows punctuated by bright patches of light. The effect is akin to a noir rendered in oil paints.”

Here’s a concurring if slightly more enthusiastic review by N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis.

Tom Hardy as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises: “Greetings from the Humungous! The Lord High of the Wasteland…the Ayatollah Rock ‘n’ Rolla!”

Lifted from a 5.21 post by Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet. The video is a no-go on my iPhone — laptop viewing only, apparently.

An appealing shot, yes, of Drive‘s Ryan Gosling and director Nicholas Winding Rfen, but my strongest reaction was/is to Gosling’s blue tuxedo. Tuxes shoudn’t be gaily colored or frilly or foo-foo or anything but straight black and modestly cut…period. If Cary Grant had worn this kind of tux in To Catch A Thief the film might have bombed.

Ron Dicker is penning a new column for AOL/HuffPo about the financial intrigues of celebrities called The Price of Fame. A tough row, you might think, if his focus ever strays outside the realm of the highest-paid. One thing I’ve never heard from an actor at a press junket: “I did it because the writing wasn’t too bad, but mainly because I needed to put a down payment for the construction of my home in Vancouver.” Column suggestion: “The Straight-Paycheck Role: How Much Whoring Out is Too Much?”

In his review of Curtis Hanson‘s Too Big To Fail (HBO, debuting on Monday, 5.23), Media Life’s Tom Conroy notes the “paradox of [how] good historical dramas can be engrossing and suspenseful even when we already know that, for example, Apollo 13 is going to land safely and Mark Zuckerberg is going to wind up running Facebook.

The docudrama “tells a story that might seem unfilmable — the near collapse of the American economy in 2008,” he writes. “[But] the cast of well-known and, more importantly, skilled actors, though somewhat distracting, helps to make the movie both graspable and gripping.”

For me Paul Giamatti playing Ben Bernanke is a closer in and of itself. Not to mention William Hurt as Hank Paulson and Billy Crudup as Timothy Geithner.

Has it really been 20 years since Michael Tolkin‘s The Rapture? It’s some kind of thinking-man’s horror flick (despite the Wiki page calling it “a psychological-religious drama”), and one of the most chilling and profoundly creepy films ever. I think of it now as a marvellous bitchslap directed at Godfreaks and the religious right. Bill Maher should have somehow referenced it in Religulous.

The Rapture weirded me out on a level that I didn’t fully comprehend at first. So much so that I’ve only watched it twice. It’s not what you’d call a “pleasant” film, but it sinks in and spreads a strange malevolent vibe — a feeling of profound unease, disquiet — into your system.

Mimi Rogers hit her absolute career peak playing a telemarketing swinger-turned-convert who (a) sends her daughter to God with a bullet in the head and then (b) tells God to shove it when He/She is levitating Rogers up to Heaven during the finale.

David Duchovny and Will Patton costarred. I was so taken by Patrick Bauchau‘s performance as a libertine that I sought him out at a party sometime in the late ’90s and wound up interviewing him at his Hollywood home.

It’s only fitting that this minor masterpiece be mentioned in lieu of today’s rapture event, which I presume will be happening sometime during daylight hours in the States. The whackers will naturally want to experience it fully awake; I should think God would be all-too-willing to oblige.

I didn’t mention this in Thursday’s Driver review, but I felt that Bryan Cranston‘s supporting performance as Ryan Gosling‘s mentor-employer is one of the few things in that film that doesn’t quite work. His character basically runs at the mouth in the manner of a meth freak (ironic in lieu of Breaking Bad). The first thing that comes to mind when he starts motor-mouthing is “shut up already.” On top of which Cranston manages to sound like a British or Irish actor trying to do an American accent…queer.