“There has been a cultural shift in Hollywood where the size of a party doesn’t show how much you believe in a movie anymore. A party is not going to sell movie tickets.” — Rob Moore, Paramount worldwide marketing and distribution chief quoted in a N.Y. Times story by Laura M. Holson called “Hollywood Diet: Cutting Back on the Big Parties.”
There is an entire culture of Hollywood party vampires in Los Angeles, New York and — for the time being — Cannes who will definitely feel deflated after reading this story. I know lots and lots of them. They’re all great to chit-chat with, but they never seem to attend all that many screenings at film festivals. Their days are largely about getting up late, lunching at 1 or 2 pm, getting dressed and around 3 or 4 pm, warming up in the early evening and then…three guesses and the first two don’t count.
Free drinks, hors d’oeuvres and buffet dinners for this crowd are like warm virgin’s blood to Christopher Lee in The Horror of Dracula.

New Line Cinema held a press conference yesterday at the swanky Martinez hotel to promote The Golden Compass, a $180 million action- fantasy pic in the vein of….well, you know. It’s another attempt to deliver a heart-touching, visually-dazzling, all-ages family blockbuster, which is no crime. The director is Chris Weisz, and the costars are Daniel Craig (who showed up) and Nicole Kidman (who didn’t).

It’s a screen adaptation of Philip Pullman‘s novel, which is (what else?) the first book in a trilogy called ”His Dark Materials.” It’ll debut in early December. Here’s hoping it’s as good as The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, which I thought was quite good. I shouldn’t say more, having missed the three footage screenings that New Line presented…sorry.
I left before it was over, and on my way out noticed a certain New Line executive dozing in his back-row seat in the Martinez ballrooom. We’ve all been there, especially those who’ve just arrived from Los Angeles.

Forget Gus Van Sant‘s Paranoid Park, an unfocused, meandering and even dreary look at how a Portland skateboarding teenager (Gabe Nevins) doesn’t deal with his complicity in an impulsive accidental homicide. It’s another atmospheric immersion-into-an-exotic- youth-culture piece with a minimalist plot, but nowhere near as striking or stylistically distinguished as Van Sant’s Elephant and Last Days. I’m calling it his first not-very-good film since Gerry. I’m sorry to say this given the respect I have for Gus, but you can’t hit it out of the park every time.

Famed director Roman Polanski (Chinatown, The Pianist) caused a stir a day and a half or two days ago at the press conference for Chacun son Cinema, the anthology film comprised of 35 shorts by 35 distinguished directors.
The questions were on the banal side (which is not an altogether uncommon thing during this festival), and Polanski, irked by some especially lame inquiry, lost his temper and lashed out at either the questioner or, according to one version I heard, all the journalists in the room, calling them “losers” and whatnot. He then allegedly urged his fellow directors to leave the dais in a show of solidarity, which they declined to do.
Cut to this morning at the Grand Palais. Just prior to the showing of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Polanski’s short, “Cinema Erotique,” was shown, and a pair of journalists to my right and left — older guys — booed when his name came on the screen. I’m on Mr. Polanski’s side in this squabble. I’ve listened to hundreds upon hundreds of deadbeat questions at round tables and press conferences; I’m surprised that dierctors and celebrities don’t lash out more.

Julian Schnabel‘s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which screened for press at the 8:30 this morning, is a passable attempt to render a beautiful, inwardly-directed portrait about what is truly essential and replenishing in life. But the film is neither of these things, and is nowhere close in terms of poetic resonance and emotional impact to Schnabel’s Before Night Falls (’00). It’s sensitively realized and skillfully made, but it’s a movie about a state of nearly 100% confinement that itself too often feels confining.
Alfred Hitchcock attempted a similar-type experiment when he made Lifeboat, which takes place entirely aboard a lifeboat floating on the Atlantic, and yet he kept audiences involved all through it. Schnabel makes his tale as visually intriguing and ingenious as anyone could have, but he’s locked himself into tight a spot, I fear.
Variety columnist Anne Thompson recently wrote that The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is “one of the hottest projects up for sale in Cannes” and that “a lot of distributors are chasing this one.” I don’t think this is the case any longer. The French-language Butterfly is opening in France right after the festival ends, but if I were an American buyer I would steer clear.
An adaptation of the late Jean-Dominique Bauby‘s memoir of the same name, it’s about how the self-satisfied, sophisticated Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) — an Elle editor with a wife three kids and a mistress — is left totally paralyzed after a massive stroke.
Bauby’s condition is called “locked-in syndrome,” which has left him unable to express himself except by blinking his left eye. A much more confining thing, in other words, than poor Chris Reeve‘s condition after breaking his neck
The book was written with the help of a transcriber who recited a frequency- ordered alphabet, waiting until Bauby blinked to indicate the correct letter. Each word reportedly took approximately two minutes to convey, and the book itself took about two hundred thousand blinks to write.
Like the book, Schnabel’s film chronicles Bauby’s sense of day-by-day, minute-by-minute imprisonment and how this condition paradoxically frees him from his previous obsessions and attentions. Schnabel clearly feels that Bauby become a richer, more spiritually fulfilled man after his misfortune, but he didn’t convince me of this. He seems to be saying that we all, in a sense, suffer from locked-in syndrome, and that we need to free our souls and imaginations and so on. That’s definitely a thought worth pondering, but I’d given this matter a lot of thought before sitting down this morning with Butterfly.
Bauby’s book was published on 3.6.97. It was well reviewed and sold 150,000 copies in the first week. But two days after the French version of the book was published, Bauby passed. I don’t think that was such a bad thing, frankly. I’m all for living and fighting until the last, but winking your way through an extremely restricted version of living tests the limits of this positivist philosophy.

The Death Proof press conference is going to happen at 12:30 pm — 45 minutes from now — and I’m thinking of blowing it off. What’s Quentin Tarantino going to say? “Sorry, but self-referential masturbatory cinema is what I do, and who I am. Every guilty, lowdown cinema-watching impulse that you, the audience, harbor within yourselves, I epitomize and celebrate and in fact have made a wild, rollicking career out of.

The press guide listing for Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof press conference…

“My movies are about nothing from my own personal, deep-down self because I have no personal, deep-down self except for a love of ’70s and ’80s exploitation fringe cinema, exploitation-level actors and adrenalized Hong Kong action aesthetics, which makes me happy but obviously eludes people who aren’t on my elitist, beyond-hip wavelength. But I’m Mr. King Shit so what do I care?
“I am not about absorbing and translating and reconstituting real-life experience, but resuscitating stylistic imitations of life made by genre filmmakers of two and three decades ago. But hey, nobody does stylistic wank-offs better than me. No one has revived more moribund acting careers, and nobody writes trash- talk dialogue with quite the same zing. And I’m pretty damn good at shooting car chases.” (Which is true.)

…and the press conference listing in today’s daily bulletin. Notice the festival’s willingness to go along with Tarantino’s little joke and announce that director Andrei Zviaguintsev will be in attendance, and not himself.

Another Michael Moore q & a, this one with Variety editor Peter Bart at the American Pavillion.

Peter Bart, Roger Durling prior to today’s Michael Moore discussion (moderated by Bart) about Sicko — Monday, 5.21.06, 2:25 pm

Here’s a portion of today’s A Mighty Heart press conference, which included producer Brad Pitt, director Michael Winterbottom, costars Angelina Jolie, Dan Futterman, Archie Panjabi and Irfan Khan (who’s the standout supporting actor in this film).

A Mighty Heart star Angelina Jolie and costar Dan Futterman (i.e., Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Capote) at this afternoon’s press conference — Monday, 5.21.07, 1:05 pm

Brad Pitt

The agreeably shocking thing about Michael Winterbottom‘s A Mighty Heart, which had its first-time-anywhere press screening this morning inside the Grand Palais, is that it’s not a Michael Winterbottom film. Not, I mean to say, a film that has seemingly emerged from the palette and the sensibility of the director of The Road to Guantan- amo, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, 9 Songs, Code 46 and 24 Hour Party People…all but one of which I had problems with to varying degrees.

Instead, A Mighty Heart is a Michael Mann film — a tight, absorbing, sharply assembled investigative procedural. It summons memories of the pacing, the underplayed performances and the sense of swiss-watch exactitude that have come to be associated with Mann’s films. I can’t recall another film in which a name-brand director has so totally abandoned a signature style (wait…does Winterbottom have one?) and just become, in a sense, “someone else.”
A Mighty Heart is about the kidnapping and murder ofWall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl (Dan Futterman), as experienced by his distraught widow Mariane Pearl (Angelina Jolie). It’s handsomely shot (especially surprising given the generally meh photography in Winterbottom’s previous films), intricate and yet surprisingly easy to keep track of, and very deftly edited.
And in it, Jolie has given a completely satisfying and quite admirable performance which feels to me like the best thing she’s ever done. More mature and less showy than her nutter turn in Girl Interrupted (for which she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. The role of Mariane Pearl isn’t exactly a showboat thing (although there’s a very strong grief-venting scene in the third act that everyone will remember). It’s not about histrionics as much as just getting it right and staying with the truth of it — but Jolie’s carefully measured emoting plus her aural and physical resemblances to the Real McCoy make this performance a fairly safe bet for a Best Actress Oscar campaign later this year.

There’s a lot more to discuss here, but I have to get to the longer version of Quentin Tarantino‘s Death Proof, which starts in less than 40 minutes. I’ll try and complete this later tonight, or certainly by tomorrow morning.

HE to Ethan Coen (at today’s press luncheon): “The only speed bump for mainstream audiences in No Country for Old Men, as you know, is your decision to not allow audiences to share in Josh Brolin‘s final fate, as it were.”

Coen to HE: “And that’s a perverse decision, isn’t it?”

HE: “Well, that’s one of the things that give the film artistic authority and distinction, and it either makes people respect it or…”

Cohen: “Or dislike it.”

No Country for Old Men co-director and co-writer Ethan Coen at today’s Miramax press luncehon — Sunday, 5.20.07, 1:55 pm

HE: “Well, we all know that there’s a certain expectation [out there], that when you’ve spent the entire movie with a guy, you wanna…but for me, this is what makes the film extra-special.”

Coen: “And for us too. I mean, it’s just from the novel and [garbled]. But when you get to this point you say, ‘Okay, the movie’s not ultimately about this guy…so what is it about?'”

HE: “About the end of the world, about the good old stuff really coming to an end, about being engulfed by waste and annihilation.”

Coen: “Uh-huh!”

Here’s a sound file of the conversation.

A fast follow-up on the Duelling Bielinski Brothers projects (i.e., Phillip Noyce‘s vs. Ed Zwick‘s). I’ve recevied the following statement from Noyce, to wit: “Historical facts should not be owned or bartered, but it would appear that the life rights of surviving family and Bielski brigade members that our lawyers have maintained for the past several years could mean the following:
“Any other film about the Bielski Brothers” — Zwick’s — “might have to tell the story without retelling any of the incidents described in the personal statements of these real-life characters made exclusively to our research team or contained exclusively in the source material to which we hold the rights.
“Nonetheless, a fiction film inspired by the Bielski Brothers will still leave plenty of room for the remarkable real story to be told.The bravery of the Bielskis should be celebrated over and over. — Phillip Noyce.”