God forbid that the Democratic primary fight goes to the Denver convention (which of course it won’t), but watch this climactic scene from Franklin Schaffner and Gore Vidal‘s The Best Man (’64) and ask yourself which of the two present candidates — Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama — is closer to the character of Cliff Robertson‘s Joe Cantwell and which somewhat resembles Henry Fonda‘s William Russell? (Thanks to HE reader John Muller for passing this along.)

Before zotzing Picturehouse and Warner Independent, Warner Bros. management “did look at various permutations of keeping the companies in discussion,” the Hollywood Reporter‘s Gregg Goldstein and Borys Kit wrote last night, including having Picturehouse chief Bob Berney and WI honcho Polly Cohen co-manage a merged specialty division, “something the execs agreed to do shortly after the New Line absorption was announced, Cohen said.”

“The decision to cease operations was made only about a week ago, and many inside the company were caught off-guard — including Cohen, who said she was having meetings about a merged division with Berney as recently as Friday. She said she was informed about the decision Wednesday, and she dismissed word that the decision was made earlier than then. ‘I doubt they’d pull a whole Truman Show on me,’ she said with a laugh. ‘I’ve been at Warners so long they say derogatory things about me in front of my face.’
“‘It was similar to what happened at New Line. Warners made both of them (Cohen and Berney) jump through hoops for weeks,’ says a Berney associate.
“‘They said, ‘Will you streamline your staff? — OK.’ ‘Will you use the Warner Bros. distribution network? — OK.’ With every obstacle they threw at them, they came back with a PowerPoint presentation on how to deal with it. It’s almost like they wanted Bob to quit.’
“‘Bob wasn’t getting a lot of calls from other studios since the New Line announcement was made, but he was getting a lot from people with venture capital,’ the colleague added. ‘Now the call volume is getting really crazy.’

Did the cautious-to-a-fault John Edwards say “I just voted for him on Tuesday” or “I just voted for ’em on Tuesday”? The man is a hedger, a tap-dancer, a slick operator, an angler-dangler with no balls.

Here, sequentially, are some of the Cannes Film Festival day-by-day highlights:

Wednesday, 5.14: Fernando Meirelles‘ Blindness (comp.).
Thursday, 5.15: Pablo Trapero‘s Leonera and Ari Folman‘s Waltz with Bashir (comp.) along with Mark Osborne and John Stevenson‘s Kung Fu Panda (non-comp), Steve McQueen‘s Hunger and de Bong Joon Ho, Leos Carax and Michel Gondry‘s Tokyo! (Un Certain Regard).
Friday, 5.16: Arnaud Desplechin‘s Un Conte de Noel and Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Uc Mayman (comp.) along with Allison Thompson‘s The Third Wave (Seance Speciale) and James Toback‘s Tyson (Un Certain Regard).
Saturday, 5.17: Walter Salle‘s Linha de Passe, and de Jia Zhangke‘s Er Shi Si Cheng JI (comp.) along with Woody Allen‘s Vicky Cristina Barcelona and de Na Hong-jin’s The Chaser (non-comp.), and Daniel Leconte‘s C√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢est dur D√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢etre Aime par des Cons (Seance Speciale).

Sunday, 5.18 Matteo Garrone‘s Gomorra and Brilliante Mondoza‘s Serbis (comp.), plus Steven Spielberg‘s non-comp Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Indiana Jones et le Royaume du Crane de Cristal) at 1 pm, plus Wong Kar Wai‘s Ashes of Time Redux (Seance Speciale) plus Raymond Depardon‘s La Vie Moderne and Antonio Campos‘ Afterschool (Un Certain Regard).
Monday, 5.19: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne‘s Le Silence de Lorna and James Gray‘s Two Lovers (comp.), plus an hommage for Manuel de Oliviera, plus Pierre Scholler‘s Versailles and Ruben Ostlund‘s De Ofrivilliga (Un Certain Regard) plus Marco Tullio Giordana‘s Sanguepazzo, referred to parenthetically as Une Histoire Italienne (Seance Speciale).
Tuesday, 5.20: Clint Eastwood‘s Changeling and Kornel Mundruczo‘s Delta (comp.) plus Emir Kusturica‘s Maradona by Kusturica (non-comp.), plus Marina Zenovich‘s Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired and Terence Davies‘ Of Time and the City (Seance Speciale), plus Amat Escalante‘s Los Bastardos and Jean-Stephane Sauvaire‘s Johnny Mad Dog (Un Certain Regard).

Wednesday, 5.21: Steven Soderbergh‘s Che and Lucrecia Martel’s La Mujer Sin Cabeza (comp.), plus Jennifer Lynch‘s Surveillance (non-comp.), plus Quentin Tarantino‘s Lecon de Cinema (Seance Speciale) plus Bent Hamer‘s O√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢ Horten and Matheus Nachtergaele‘s A Festa da Menina Morta (Un Certain Regard).
That’s eight days’ worth — enough for now. I’ll get to Thursday and Friday’s films (5.22 and 5.23) tomorrow or later today. They include Phillipe Garrel‘s La Frontiere de L’Aube, Atom Egoyan‘s Adoration, Charlie Kaufman‘s Syndoche, New York, Laurent Cantet‘s Entre Les Murs, Wim Wenders‘ Palermo Shooting, and Abel Ferrara‘s Chelsea on the Rocks.

The Cannes Film Festival official screening schedule went up yesterday with the press screening schedule expected to post sometime tomorrow.

The rundown identifies Steven Soderbergh‘s The Argentine and Guerilla as a single film called Che that runs 4 hours and 28 minutes. Meaning, obviously, that as far as Cannes is concerned, the two-movie concept is out the window in favor of presenting a single epic-sized film with an intermission.
Che is showing to the press on Wednesday morning, 5.21 — a relatively late berth as the hot-ticket films tend to show at the festival within the first five or six days. Soderbergh presumably asked for a late-as-possible slot in order to give him extra time for final tweaks, as the the film’s inclusion at Cannes was in doubt until the last minute due to an editing crunch. The black-tie public viewing will happen that evening at 6:30. With all the introductions and applause moments, it will finish close to five hours later. An after-party will follow.

Thanks to Variety‘s Anne Thompson for the initial YouTube post/link, and kudos to dialogue (i.e., subtitle) writer and stand-up comedian James Adomian. This isn’t as funny as the collapse of HD-DVD video, but it’s close.

Hitler/Clinton: “The superdelegates were supposed to trump the fucking voters! And now you tell me those fat fucks are waddling over to worship that dandy Obama, lke he’s the second coming of Jimi Hendrix? Meanwhle what do we have to show for the millions wasted on get-out-the-vote? A bunch of old-fuck retirees and illiterate dropouts too stupid to punch a ballot with their fat little fingers?”
“You should’t blame the voters,” an adviser warns.
Hitler/Clinton: “They are losers…marshmallow-shaped dykes!” Adviser: “It doesn’t look good to attack your supporters.” Hitler/Clinton: “My supporters are the dumbest fucks in the country! Still bitching about NAFTA. I’m so sick of drinking whiskey with those pigs! What other working-class photo ops do they expect nme to do? Take a shit in a fucking outhouse? The DNC has thwarted my destiny! That faggot-loving Howard Dean blocked my path at every step! I’m the one who said from the beginning we should set Dean up with a hooker sting, like they did to Spitzer!”

That “All Things Considered” interview I did with NPR media reporter David Folkenflik two days ago will be linkable online by roughly 7 pm this evening. It’s not just me talking — it’s three or four movie critics including, I think, former N.Y. Daily News critic Jack Mathews. The piece is called “Movie Critics Disappearing from Newsrooms.”

In early April I wondered if anyone cares enough about Carol Reed‘s Outcast of the Islands (1951) to put it out on DVD. Those dedicated wackdoodles at the Criterion Collection, say. Well, hail hail rock ‘n’ roll because Outcast will air on Turner Classic Movies come Friday, August 22. August is traditionally TCM’s one-star-per-day month and that day will be devoted to Outcast star Trevor Howard. The complete August schedule (with some other interesting rarities) is viewable here.

After reportedly trying to forge some kind of amicable, foward-looking merger between Picturehouse and Warner Independent, Warner Bros. management has suddenly thrown up its hands and is getting out of the “dependent” business altogether, it was announced about an hour ago.
WB president & COO Alan Horn released a statement that seems to translate, when you boil the snow out of it, into the following: “Sorry, but we’ve come to realize that running a Fox Searchlight- or Paramount Vantage-type operation just isn’t our bag. Our hearts were sort of into this, but now they aren’t. Things change. Besides, we’ve got New Line for the smaller stuff. We’re into maximizing revenue and building broad genre franchises, and…you know, making or releasing movies for people who read reviews and enjoy provocative subject matter just isn’t worth it to us.”
The actual statement reads that “with New Line now a key part of Warner Bros., we’re able to handle films across the entire spectrum of genres and budgets without overlapping production, marketing and distribution infrastructures …after much painstaking analysis, this was a difficult decision to make, but it reflects the reality of a changing marketplace and our need to prudently run our businesses with increased efficiencies. We’re confident that the spirit of independent filmmaking and the opportunity to find and give a voice to new talent will continue to have a presence at Warner Bros.”
So except for Clint Eastwood‘s Gran Torino and the occasional lucky-accident movie that may rank as award-worthy, Warner Bros. seems to have basically taken itself out of the quality-driven prestige movie business.
I wonder what really happened? What led to the breakdown of the merger talks?
It turns out that Defamer‘s Stu VanAirsdale was fairly close to the money when he reported that Picturehouse may soon be shut down, and that Anne Thompson‘s Variety story about the same situation was less correct, especially in reporting that Picturehouse chief Bob Berney and Warner Independent prexy Polly Cohen are “likely” to accept a bicoastal power-sharing arrangement that will preside over a merged operation,” i.e., Warner Indiepicturehouse.

Glenn Kenny, one of the country’s finest film critics and a brilliant writer to boot, has been cut loose by Premiere.com. “What this means for this blog is still up in the air,” he wrote this morning. “I’ve got meetings this afternoon in which such things are to be negotiated. In any case, I now join the ever-growing ranks of film critics without staff positions. I very much hope to keep this blog going…and get some good freelance work, quick. Anybody with ideas in this area should contact me at glennkenny@mac.com. Hope to be in touch again soon. Thank you, you’re the best goddamn audience a blogger could ever have.”