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report date: May 14, 2001By JOHN HARKNESS CANNES - Halfway home, and people are whining about the Selection. Well, it wouldn't be Cannes if people weren't whining about something: the weather, the prices, the quality of the selection, the dullness of the parties. We are a cranky lot, especially when we have to watch movies at 8:30 in the morning. I actually found the Miami Film Festival more difficult on that score, because the lack of jury screenings meant we had to go to 9:30 pm showings. I often watch movies in the morning, so 8:30 is a bit much, but not that different from 10 am. But I never, in a non-festival context, go to movies late in the evening. Put me in a comfy chair in a dark room at night and I'm inclined to nap. STUFF I LIKED - Just to stop kvetching, I saw a delightful French comedy in the Market, Amelie From Montmartre, a romantic comedy by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. That's high on the list of phrases I never thought I'd hear - a romantic comedy from the director of Delicatessen and Alien Resurrection. It stars Audrey Tautou, who had a small role in Vénus Beauté but here gets to stretch as a shy young woman who re-routes her quiet life when she realizes her destiny is to help other people, though in extremely odd ways. She's matched by Matthieu Kassovitz, playing a young man who collects discarded photo-booth strips. Kassovitz is best-known in North America as the director of Le Haine and the recent thriller Crimson Rivers, but he has a considerable filmography as an actor in France. Jeunet uses Paris very inventively, mixing the familiar (Sacre Coeur) with the unexpected and treating the streets and buildings as a great big set, altering and repainting at will. The result is the kind of whimsical Paris not seen much lately - a real movie Paris, if that isn't too much of a contradiction in terms. Miramax has reportedly paid a ton of money for this, so it should be coming soon to a theatre or film festival near you. Todd Solondz's Storytelling, which has had a very mixed response, is an odd pairing of two tales. (It was supposed to be three, but there's reputed to be an hour of this film somewhere in Solondz's editing room.) The first involves Selma Blair (Cruel Intentions) as a college student who becomes involved with her writing prof (Robert Wisdom), and the second features Paul Giamatti (Duets) as a failed screenwriter/law student who decides to become a documentary filmmaker and makes a film on troubled youth in the wake of the Columbine murders. The first story is an exploration of taboos and actually includes the worst criticisms one can make of it within its own text. The second is funny and a little horrifying, with outstanding contributions by Julie Haggerty and Lupe Ontiveros, and a memorably choleric one by John Goodman. PACK JOURNALISM - I finally got around to browsing some of the reviews of the expanded Apocalypse Now, and am in a state of shock. Not that they're favourable - when we boomers go looking for validation of one of our fallen idols, we're liable to find it. It's that the reviews could have been dictated by Coppola. They fall right into the line presented by Coppola in the press material, namely that the new material expands the political scope of the film and deepens it thematically, particularly the long scene at the French plantation. What the scene at the French plantation actually does is spell out explicitly all the themes of the picture. This means the viewer is now relieved of the challenge of working out the film's themes on his or her own. Coppola says audiences are now more sophisticated than they were in 1979 and will thus be more tolerant of a longer version than they might have been back then. I wonder what colour the sky is in his world. Oh, and he's said that when the longer version is released in the summer, the original version will be allowed to go out of print and will be superceded by the new one as the official version. So hang onto your DVDs and cassettes of the original. PREVIOUS REPORTS:
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