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.”

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.”

“I remember seeing Greenwich Village from seven feet up in the air growing up as a kid, because he’d have me on his shoulders and we’d be tripping around. And at a time before underground and independent film became a hot idea, then a dirty word, then a hot idea again as it is nowadays, my dad was making films that influenced a generation of filmmakers.'” — Robert Downey, Jr., speaking four days ago about his director dad, Robert Downey, Sr., at the “Time 100″ celebration at Lincoln Center.

This is an opportunity to pay tribute to “I can crawl again!” — my favorite line from Greaser’s Palace (’72), my all-time favorite Robert Downey, Sr. film. Every now and then that line comes to me and repeats in my head, over and over.
Here’s another great scene:

“I’d almost forgotten I existed. Being selected by Cannes has done wonders for me. I thought working again might have a negative effect and I nearly turned it down, but it’s been quite the opposite. My heart beats anew.” — British director Terrence Davies, director of Of Time and City, a low-budget, personal documentary about the changes in Liverpool since his childhood, speaking to the Guardian‘s Jason Solomon.

That’s a great line about Davies forgetting his own existence. He’s not just saying he’d forgotten or given up on the idea that he existed — mattered — as a filmmaker of some consequence within the British film industry, but that he’d stopped thinking of himself as an entity at all — that he’d so completely surrendered himself to feelings of drift and nothingness that he had actually stopped saying “I am.” An amazing thought. Worthy of Kant or Kafka.