Yesterday was a great travel day — everything happened on time, no delays, etc. — until my Air France flight landed at Charles DeGaulle airport in northeast Paris at 6:15 am. Alas, my suitcase didn’t make the overnight trip across the Atlantic with me, and I didn’t find this out until it was too late to make my 8:20 am Easy Jet flight to Nice. I filled out the lost-luggage form and got on a bus for Orly Airport, where the next Easy Jet flight was leaving at 10 am.
But the traffic on the peripherique (the freeway that circles Paris) was hell, and by the time we arrived two hours later the 10 am flight had left. Great. I should have just taken the train into Paris and taken a Metro down to where you get the RER in the St. Germain district and trained down to Orly. This would have taken 80 0r 90 minutes, tops.
Then I realized I’d left my beautiful little Canon camera (plus the wide-angle lens I bought in Manhattan three or four years ago) on the Air France flight from Dulles to CDG. I filled out the lost-item form, but we all know the name of that tune. The people who are hired to clean out planes after they’ve landed are scavengers. They find something valuable, they take it home and give it to their son. I’ll be taking photos with my iPhone camera until further notice.
I finally left on a Nice flight from Orly at 3 pm. I sat between a nice old French couple in the third row and slept the whole way, but we all know how it feels to be unwashed and sleep-deprived and agitated by the French. Every time I come here I’m reminded how much I hate the impossibly slow and bureaucratic French way of doing things. Especially the way they’ve got it set up so you can’t get a cab at an airport unless you follow the exact proscribed procedure. Thanks a lot, guys! Go to New York someday and see how it’s done.
I took a bus from Nice airport to Cannes, got my pink-with-yellow-pastille pass, went to the apartment and couldn’t get in. The guy I’m renting from hadn’t read my e-mail about the expected arrival time. I got into the building, though, and left my stuff in an electrical circuit closet on the 1st etage (i.e., second floor).
I walked down to La Pizza for the usual journalist sit-down. Last night’s revellers included Cinematical‘s James Rocchi and Kim Voynar, former Premiere.com columnist Glenn Kenny, Variety‘s Anne Thompson, the Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell, and the Envelope‘s Pete Hammond.
I went to the Sofitel on the marina (free wi-fi in the lobby) to file, but I was so shagged and skanky I barely had the energy to even read e-mails, much less compose a pithy but heartfelt essay about my miserable first day in France. Got to bed around midnight, and woke up at 4:30 — couldn’t sleep. The pre-dawn hours are so peaceful in a big town. I love walking around and smelling the night air and taking pictures, etc. I went over to the Carlton (more free wi-fi) and set up shop in the lobby, and that’s where I’m writing this thing from. No coffee until 7:30 am, they say.
Fernando Meirelles‘ Blindness is the festival’s first film. It will screen at 10 am — two and a half hours from now. There’s some kind of Kung Fu Panda stunt happening on the Carlton pier at 10 am, but I won’t get to that due to Blindness. There’s also a blogger’s discussion thing at the American Pavillion at 4 pm. (I’m told that David Poland, who refuses to attend this festival, will be participating by video from Los Angeles.) There’s also a 7 pm showing of Ari Folman‘s animated Waltz With Bashir.
I’ve got a list of parties to go to, but we’ll see what happens. I know from experience that my only chance of eating anything nutritious is to gorge on party food.
At the not-yet-begun Cannes Film Festival “there is lots of speculation about Oscar potential for new Cannes entries from past academy nominees and winners like Fernando Meirelles, Atom Egoyan, Charlie Kaufman, Walter Salles, Steven Soderbergh, Clint Eastwood, Woody Allen and others, although the sad fact remains that since it won, no film other than Marty has gone on to win the Best Picture Oscar after also nabbing the Palme d’Or — and that was in 1955!” — from Pete Hammond‘s first Envelope column from Cannes.
While announcing that David O. Russell‘s Nailed is shooting again after last week’s SAG-mandated shutdown due to actors not being paid, Variety‘s Dave McNary and Anne Thompson are reporting that the film’s financier, Capitol Films, and its indie distributor subsidiary Thinkfilm appear to be on wobbly financial footing.
Thinkfilm “is known to owe substantial amounts to media outlets, among others,” the story says. It adds that “problems emerged Thursday when ThinkFilm execs suddenly discovered there was no money for Friday newspaper ads for Then She Found Me.”
The story says that lawyers for multi-hyphenate Alex Gibney threatened to take ThinkFilm into bankruptcy after the company failed to pay him his fees — including his Oscar bonus — after winning the Academy Award for his docu Taxi to the Dark Side.”
Sources also say “the company was going to announce an acquisition from Senator Entertainment this week but then canceled its press meetings.”
A nice way, all in all, for ThinkFilm to start to the Cannes Film Festival, no? The company’s newly promoted president Mark Urman “will be in Cannes looking at movies, going to meetings and answering a lot of questions,” the Variety story says. “But it doesn’t look like he’ll be buying.”
The concerns about wind and rain delaying the flight didn’t pan out. Air France #39 is pulling away from Dulles gate #42 as we speak. We be cool. Two wailing babies in my section. Isn’t it fair to put crying babies and their parents in the luggage area below the seats? I’m speaking as a father of two boys. I’ve been there. I used to be mortified when my kids disturbed others.
A much younger Bill O’Reilly (as he looked, I’m guessing, a good 12 or 15 years ago) showing a little temper on Inside Edition. Pretty funny, I feel. Video provided by the College Humor guys.
Sunday’s post about Steven Soderbergh finishing Che at lower Manhattan’s Post Works is “wrong,” a trustworthy tech guy says. “Not sure who led you down that road. They should get their shorts yanked.
“Both films are being finished at Technicolor,” he says. “Tim Stipan of Technicolor Creative Services New York did the DI, and the DCDM for Cannes is being done at Technicolor Creative Services in London. And Technicolor Madrid is doing the filmout and video mastering.”
Post Works, he says, was merely “given some work by Technicolor” that involved “doing some Quick Time files.” How demeaning! Technicolor, he says, has been working with Soderbergh since principal photography on the Che Guevara films. The two films, he adds, are being prepped for Cannes by Technicolor.
Two of my all-time favorite movie titles are I Dismember Mama, which was used for a 1974 slasher film, and The Importance of Being Ernest, the title of a script for a Jim Varney “Ernest” film that was unfortunately not used. And I’ve always loved Out of the Past, the quietly haunting title of Jacques Tourneur‘s legendary 1947 noir with Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer.
I’m also partial to Se7en, Freddie Got Fingered, Platoon and Earth Girls Are Easy because they make the movies sound like they pretty much know exactly who and what they are.
But I strongly disliked Something’s Gotta Give, the name of Nancy Meyers’ 2003 romantic comedy with Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson, because any film using a Johnny Mercer song title, I figured, will almost certainly be “schmaltzy,” “staid,” “overly insulated,” etc. Which the movie was, of course..
Nonetheless, Josh Friedman‘s L.A. Times profile of Seth Lockhart and Jamil Barrie, the co-owners of TitleDoctors, suggests that Something’s Got to Give — a title apparently originated by the Ant Farm’s Andy Solomon — was one of the great movie-title decisions so far because the film went on to earn $267 million, and that the title “probably didn’t hurt.” Well, it did hurt with guys like me. I’m just saying.
The piece says that an alternate title that was kicked around for Will Smith‘s Hancock was Tonight He Comes. (And comes and comes.)
The worst titles of all time? The Human Stain, WUSA, To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar, The Silver Chalice, Eegah, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever and Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo.
Posts will be few and far between starting tomorrow morning due to last-minute running around before heading out to JFK for the flight to France. I may be able to tap some stuff out while waiting for this or that plane. The Big Black-Out period begins around 5 pm Eastern with the departure from Washington, D.C. (I went for a cheaper flight that entailed flying there first from JFK) to Charles DeGaulle. All in, it’ll be catch-as-catch-can for 18 to 20 hours. The thing to do during long flight periods, I’ve found, is take a lot of photos.
Steven Spielberg‘s long-delayed Abraham Lincoln movie, which I’ve been writing about for nearly three years as an example of Spielberg’s capacity for endless fence-sitting when so inspired, may finally roll sometime in early 2009. Variety‘s Michael Fleming, responding to a Spielberg comment made to the German weekly magazine Focus, reported today that the directing “will return his attention to an epic project about the 16th president” after shooting Tintin in the fall.
Great — heavy rain and wind will begin in the NYC area starting tomorrow morning. Maybe my Paris flight will be delayed and I can miss the Easy Jet flight I’m supposed to take from Paris to Nice two hours after I land at 6:15 Tuesday morning. Yeah!
“I don’t know who I am,” former heavyweight champ Mike Tyson says to N.Y. Times contributor Tim Arango in a 5.11 piece about James Toback‘s Tyson, a pared-down but altogether touching doc that will show later this week in Cannes. “That might sound stupid,” Tyson continues. “I really have no idea. All my life I’ve been drinking and drugging and partying, and all of a sudden this comes to a stop.”
The line this most recalls, of course, is the one from Wim Wenders‘ The American Friend, spoken to Dennis Hopper‘s Tom Ripley character: “I know less and less about who I am, or who anyone else is.”
