One other thing: the free computers at the American Pavillion all have European keyboards. How do you type the @ sign again? How? Which key do I hit? Maybe Julie Sisk and her partners are trying to encourage American journalists to be less xenophobic and get with the European sensibility, etc. You can eventually be fluent with European keyboards, but until that happens it takes you 75% more time to write stuff.

I finally crashed at 3 ayem Wednesday. I guess I needed the rest because I slept right through my triple-alarm system and didn’t wake until just before noon, which caused me miss the 1 pm DaVinci Code press conference and before that the 11 ayem press screening of Paris Je’taime. I met the Daily Mail ‘s Baz Bamigboye and Fox 411’s Roger Freidman just after the press conference in the Palais stairway, and they both agreed the p.c. was dull and flat, like the movie. Film Stew’s Sperling Reich (whose site went down today from all the DaVinci Code review traffic) said the same thing. Tom Hanks didn’t want to be there, they all said…he looked drained. There was one direct question about the bad reviews, and it wasn’t answered but deflcted. DaVinci producer Brian Grazer thanked Friedman after the conference for panning the film in a kind way, i.e., less viciously than most critics.

“The thing to remember about the Cannes press, especially the film critics, is that they are global, sophisticated, pretentious and quite often vicious. They love to slam the seats at a press screening, or hiss a movie during the closing credits. That level of rejection did not occur [at Tuesday night’s DaVinci Code press screening]. But there were uncomfortable waves of titters throughout the film tonight, and when the BIG REVEAL comes, there was outright laughter.” — Anne Thompson on her RiskyBiz blog…and I have only this to add: Anne’s descriptions of the visiting Cannes press omits the fact that most of them are quite perceptive, selectively or otherwise. I’ve never known the Cannes gang to dump on a movie for the sheer perverse joy of dumping on a movie. If a movie has anything impassioned or startling or subversive to offer, somebody here will pick up on this and run it up the flagpole. But there’s nothing in The DaVinci Code that raised anyone’s temperature. It has one notable offering — Ian McKellen‘s 15-minute explanation scene (it’s nearly a soliloquy) of the biggest coverup of all time…but that’s it. All to say that the pans that came out of last night’s screening were not a result of temperament or pissy attitudes or predispostions.

This was first posted way back when, but it’s another great trailer re-scramble…very funny.

Hissing Balloon

Ron Howard’s The DaVinci Code, which screened for the press Tuesday night at the Salle Debussy, has its intriguing moments. But it’s a fairly flat sit. A camera crew came up to me after the screening and I said, “It’s not that deep. In fact, it’s not that good. In fact, it’s kind of plodding. In fact…”
I shrugged my shoulders and said it wasn’t painful, because it isn’t. But it sure as hell doesn’t lift off the runway. I didn’t hate it, but I was never that aroused.

Audrey Tatou, Tom Hanks in Ron Howard’s The DaVinci Code

I can see devout Christians seeing it this weekend out of natural curiosity, or maybe to piss themsleves off. I can see it hooking those who aren’t hip to the story. (There must be a few people who don’t know it.)
It has a few chases, a couple of killings, one or two 180 character turns…but it’s Howard’s worst film since Far and Away.
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The story is about a massive coverup, but Columbia Pictures’ decision not to screen it until tonight was a coverup also. A smart one. They knew (even if they don’t admit it) that critics would piss on it and there was nothing to be gained, etc.
The fact that it’s a faithful translation of a pulp best-seller will satisfy many millions, I realize. But it doesn’t doesn’t do what Clint Eastwood’s The Bridges of Madison County did for Robert Waller’s novel, or what Coppola’s The Godfather did for the original Mario Puzo novel.

On the steps of the Salle Debussy after the DaVinci Code screening — Tuesday, 5.16.05, 11:08 pm.

The DaVinci Code is basically a very brainy Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew-styled mystery movie that gradually leads to a debunking of the myth of Jesus Christ’s divinity, and a corresponding salute to the power and spiritual connectedness of women…two in particular.
A critic friend was calling it tedious and boring, but it’s not that bad. It putters along and does the thing that the 50 million people who’ve read Dan Brown’s novel are probably expecting it to do.
For all the controversy and anti-Christian establishment stuff and the discussion of Jesus and Mary Magdeleme’s relationship and their having had a daughter it’s just not that echo-y, and it’s talky as shit for two and a half hours. Sifting through clues, seeing past the obvious…wait, another clue! How could I have missed that?
There’s a pretty good explanation-of-the-biggest-coverup-in-history scene that Ian McKellen (doing his usual rascally eccentric nutter thing) pretty much nails on his own. McKellen! Boss man!

Festival guys putting up DaVinci Code banners in main lobby of Grand Palais — Tuesday, 5.16.06, 3:45 pm.

Tom Hanks does a decent job — he’s a very likable and self-assured actor — and is good at maintaining his dignity and handling some fairly clunky dialogue at times. (Akiva Goldsman has to take some responsibility.) Audrey Tatou handles herself fairly well in the awkwardly-written role of Sophie. Better than I thought she would, I mean.
Paul Bettany as a maniacal, self-flagellating Opus Dei whack job in monk’s robes gets very trying after his first couple of scenes. (It may be those Alaskan husky contact lenses he’s wearing.) Jean Reno plays the world’s most boringly obsessed, one-note Parisian cop.
There’s a big surprise that I won’t divulge, but anyone who doesn’t guess it at least an hour before it comes isn’t paying attention.
I can report that when the big surprise is divulged (by Hanks, in a single line of tepid, on-the-nose dialogue), the smarty-pants audience laughed.
It was the only laughing-at-the-movie moment, but when I heard the chuckles and guffaws, I knew. This movie is going to be toast with discriminating movieogers as the word starts to get out and it moves along into the second and third week. It’s not going to make money hand over fist with urban blues after the initial curiosity surge.

Paul Bettany, Audrey Tatou

We all know DaVinci is going to make a shitload this weekend — $60 million, $70 million. Everyone has decided to see it and that’s that. A lot of people are pretty taken with mysteries and a lot of them are devout Christians. But even the die-hards are going to say to themselves, “Man, this movie is not cooking.”
There was zero applause when it ended, and very few stayed in their seats to watch the credits.
It’s 1:30 a.m. Wednesday and I’m whipped — I have a headache and my vision is hazy-misty from fatigue and my ass hurts from sitting on a too-low, too-hard couch — but I wouldn’t sleep very well if I didn’t tap something out.
The screening ended two and a half hours ago, or about 11 pm. The press rooms are closed at that hour, so I had to scrounge around Old Town for an hour before I found a working wi-fi location. I went to two places that claimed to have good wi-fi but didn’t…pain in the ass.

Three or four weeks after 9/11, Oliver Stone said during a New York Film Festival panel discussion that he’d “like to do a movie on terrorism…it would be like The Battle of Algiers…perhaps it’s an old formula, but if it were done realistically it could be a fascinating procedural.”

“You would see the Arab side,” Stone continued, “and you’d see the American side, and [if it’s done right] people will respond and they will go. I don’t buy this thing that everybody just wants to see Zoolander .” And now, some four years and eight months later, this still from Stone’s forthcoming World Trade Center (Paramount, 8.9) has hit the web and…well, what else is there to think? Obviously Stone still thinks of Ben Stiller‘s fashion-industry parody (which I half-liked as a film and really liked as a script) as an emblem of something puerile.

“The sound of failure is silence,” DreamWorks marketing maven Terry Press tells L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein in one of his best pieces in a long while — a study of what it’s like, psychologically and emotionally, when your movie flops. “When you have a hit, your phone starts ringing at 6:45 a.m. and never stops,” says Press. “In failure, there is a deafening silence. No calls from distribution, no calls from journalists, no calls from the filmmakers. It’s the Hollywood version of bird flu. You feel like everyone is saying, ‘Get my mask out. I don’t want to be near any failure germs.’ Even your own relatives don’t call.”

Another here-comes-The DaVinci Code piece, with another look at how it’s being sold to Christians, hostile and otherwise…researched and written by Peter J. Boyer for The New Yorker.

Yes, yes…no one has seen The DaVinci Code yet and it’s very unusual for Columbia to hide it as they have, but they’ll be showing it here in Cannes about four and a half hours from now and the head-down marketing angle will obviously be moot after that. I’ll try and bang out some kind of a reaction piece as soon as I leave the Palais screening room (I think it’s the Debussy) at 11 pm or thereabouts, but I don’t know how lucid or well-phrased I’ll be at that hour. Sharon Waxman‘s N.Y. Times piece says the first-weekend projections “range from $70 million to over $100 million,” so if it makes $60 or $65 million that will be seen as a shortfall.

Hollywood Elsewhere has arrived in Cannes to the sound of blaring trumpets. It’s bright and sunny, but there’s also a strange hazy quality in the air. That’s how life looks when you’re totally jet-lagged. Pulled into town on a big white bus about five hours ago. I adore my sleeping quarters (i.e, two single beds in a small room that is slightly bigger than a two-man cell at the L.A. County jail), but that’s what you get when you shell out the big bucks.

I picked up my press pass an hour or so ago, and now I’m sitting in front of a wireless flat-screen at the press room at the Palais. Several others are here also. The balcony is shaded this year with six “Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves” white tents, and there are lounge-like seats (blue fabric over padded seating, wood panelling) and tables under them…classy. And there’s Wi-Fi everywhere…great. I have to pick up my tickets for the DaVinci Code soiree tomnorrow night and then decide what to do before the DaVinci Code screening at 8:30 pm. What I need to do between now and then is crash for a couple of hours. I got about two hours of sleep on the plane last night, if that.

My interview piece with Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu, the director of Babel, went up Sunday night and yet it’s been pushed down by other stories and items fairly quickly since then. I just want to make sure it has its day in the sun.