Before before she flew to Cannes on Sunday, Variety‘s Anne Thompson got Michael Moore on the phone to talk about the early-bird attacks on Sicko, his health-care doc that will screen in Cannes within a few days, and particularly Moore having taken ailing workers from Ground Zero in Manhattan to Cuba for free medical treatments. Here’s Fred Thompson‘s National Review attack piece. Here’s Moore’s official responses so far, and a bunch of links besides.

Paulie Walnuts‘ adoptive mom died on The Sopranos the night before last, and what else? A.J. got into some pronounced gangster action and “Christophuh” upped the ante on his end, but storm clouds aren’t assembling overhead and nothing is really happening in any kind of knockout-punch way, and it’s looking more and more like the Big Finale won’t actually materialize.
L.A. Times writer Mary McNamara has written that “the entire [final] season has seemed pure prologue, spotlighting one force, then another, which may or may not be the agent of Tony’s doom,” and also that “the rumor is that there will be no final cataclysmic event.” It’s almost as if Sopranos creator and producer David Chase is getting off on not delivering the whopping chest-punch thing that the fans have been waiting for. The season hasn’t ended so it’s too early to call him obstinate and perverse, but…

Something sudden and surprising did happen. My Lufthansa flight from JFK — due to leave the ground last night at 8 pm, but delayed an hour — arrived a little late in Munich, and I missed my connecting flight to Nice, which I had only a half-hour to get to. I was one of the first passengers off the plane and I ran through the airport like Peyton Manning, but the passport line and the re-scanning security process slowed things down considerably.

The only decent option is to take a short flight to Basel, Switzerland, and then I’ll have to get off and grab another jet (on another airline) to Nice, getting me there around 5 pm. The Cannes press office is open until 8 pm, however, so at least I’ll get myself credentialed so I can make the first screening tomorrow morning at 8:30.
The first social function of the festival happens tonight at La Pizza, a big noisy restaurant that serves great pizza and offers a view of the Cannes marina. I’m meeting the Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell, Variety‘s Anne Thompson, Toronto Film Festival communcations chief Andrea Grau, Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling, and the Hollywood Reporter‘s Gregg Goldstein for food and drink at 7:30.

A 12 year-old girl and her conservative grandparent custodians have filed a redstate-bluenose lawsuit over a substitute teacher showing Brokeback Mountain to a class of eighth-graders. My God…exposing 12 and 13 year-olds to a discreet dramatization of a tragic gay relationship? Not to mention saturating their heads with the perverse notion that life is short and we should all go for the gusto and the passion while we can? I’m thoroughly disgusted.
Edward Klein, an Oregon reader who sent me the link, says that “if true, the teacher was way out of line to show this film to this class, but the girl suffering ‘psychological distress’ seems extreme at best. Her grandparents are religious conservatives and have complained about inappropriate reading material, which makes my liberal antenna stand up.”

“Tarantino before its time…long, florid dialogue punctuated by grotesque violence followed by more long, florid dialogue and then more grotesque violence.” — Telluride Film Festival honcho Tom Luddy describing Norman Mailer‘s Tough Guys Don’t Dance (’86). The quote is from a Mark Singer New Yorker piece about a Tough Guys Don’t Dance reunion that happened last year. (I was the in-house Cannon publicity press-kit writer at the time, and I got to interview Mailer at some length while working on the notes for the film. I was always pleased that fate allowed this to happen.)

“It is the first time in eight years that I haven’t got an acting job which I am immediately going in to,” Orlando Bloom tells The Scotsman‘s Garth Pearce. “I celebrated my 30th birthday in January and it feels different. It is less urgent. It is now time for reflection and to ask myself: ‘How much living do you want to do?’ As much as working has been my life, there is now a shift in my priorities.”

In other words, Bloom is in a career lull. Things haven’t been happening for the guy since the Big Tumble-Down of ’05 when Kingdom of Heaven, in which Bloom had the lead role, bombed (despite the director’s cut of that Ridley Scott film being a near-masterpiece), and then Elizabethtown, which Bloom also carried on his shoulders, turned into the biggest high-expectation wipeouts of all time. In essence, the industry jury was deliberating two years ago whether Bloom was in fact a leading man, and now they’re really deliberating this.

I’ve taken video-editing tutorials from four different people (one in L.A., three in NYC), and at least some of it is seeping in. I’ve been a little hesitant about posting video, but I think the key to getting past that is just admitting that some of the early MPEG4 files are going to be borderline inane. No, wrong description…how about underwhelmingly austere? I took this today not with the video camera that I’ll be using in Cannes but with the Canon A540, my no-big-deal digital photo camera that has a video option.

If you liked Hearts of Darkness, Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper‘s renowned 1991 documentary about the arduous making of Francis Coppola‘s Apocalypse Now, you may also have a place in your head for Coda: Thirty Years Later, an informal sequel to Hearts of Darkness that is “partially” about Coppola filming Youth Without Youth in Romania two years ago.
Peter Nellhaus‘s Green Cine Daily report on the doc, which Nellhaus saw Sunday night at Miami’s Colony theatre, has a lot of good reporting, including a remark that “much of the footage shown from Youth Without Youth is bathed in golden browns” and another that “visually, [Coppola’s] new film will remind some of the first two Godfather films.”
“The prime difference between Hearts of Darkness and Coda,” Nellhaus observes, “is that Apocalypse Now was filmed in desperate circumstances, while Coppola’s profitable wine business now allows for him to return to filmmaking on his own terms.”
In other words, the newer doc is going to be less interesting because it’s about filmmaking with a certain comfort factor, which means it obviously won’t have the grueling real-life drama that made Hearts of Darkness such a fascinating ride. Pressure and desperate circumstances are obviously difficult things to live through, but they pay off like a slot machine when they’re part of a documentary.

It’s a tough job lining up discussion panels at the American Pavillion during the Cannes Film Festival, since talent usually only flies into Cannes for brief 24-hour periods (the barrage of invasive paparazzi attention is soul-deflating) and their publicists are always first and foremost hooking them up with major media outlets, with AmPav panels often regarded as a low priority. Roger Durling, director of the Santa Barbara Film Festival, has nontheless rounded up My Blueberry Nights director Wong Kar Wai, Sicko director Michael Moore, Mister Lonely director Harmony Korine and New Line honchos Robert Shaye and Michael Lynne to talk about New Line’s 40th anniversary.

Pete Hammond doesn’t think that recent announcement about Francis Coppola‘s Youth Without Youth having its world premiere at the RomaCinemaFest in late October necessarily means that it won’t show up at Telluride Film Festival a month and a half earlier. “Telluride doesn’t advertise its films in advance and gets movies all the time before their official ‘world premieres’ at Toronto or other places because of that reason,” he reminded me yesterday. “To call something a ‘world premiere’ means nothing to Telluride, which just wants to show good movies. Brokeback Mountain premiered at both Venice and Telluride at the exact same hour a couple of years ago even though Venice had it billed as a world premiere.”