One of the reasons it took so long to get rolling today in Cannes (apart from being occupied this morning with seeing Wong Kar Wai‘s My Blueberry Nights, a mystifying shortfall for a respected, world-class director and a full-on mediocrity that comes close to being a rank embarassment) is the absurd wi-fi situation at the American Pavillion and, for what I’ve been told, inside the Grand Palais press room also.
Everyone with a badge has been given a five-digit user ID and a three-digit password, and none of them work. But the AMPAV tech-head volunteers have a list of five-digit and three-digit codes that do work…as long as nobody else tries to log on with the same numbers. Except everyone at the American Pavillion is going up to these volunteers and asking for working code groups and using them, and every time a new person logs on with a given code it kicks off the previous person who used the same numbers.
Right now I’m connected with a 19585 user ID and an 871 password, but if somebody else comes along and logs on with these numbers, I’ll get kicked off. This has happened to me seven times within the past hour, and I in turn have kicked off seven oothers. It’s obviously insane all over here, and the situation won’t be fixed, I’m told, until later this afternoon, which is a euphemism, I’m sure, or sometime tonight or tomorrow morning.
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.”
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.
