Cannes Report Tuesday, May 21
THE LAST MOVIE STAR
BY JOHN HARKNESS
CANNES - You become inured to stars at Cannes. After you've seen Carole Bouquet inhale a steak at a Rue d'Antibes brasserie, lunched with Ewan McGregor at the Carlton Beach and sat one row behind a well-known New York actor and listened to an extended and obscenity-laced monologue on the general incompetence of his driver and the Hôtel du Cap's maids and how he can't get the New York Times delivered to his door at 6 am like he does at home, there aren't a lot of thrills left.
On the other hand, when Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz show up for something, you know you've got an event, even if the event is basically the screening of a 20-minute trailer. There were rumours - from unusually good sources - that Martin Scorsese's Gangs Of New York would open Cannes this year. Well, that didn't happen, and you could hear the screams from the festival's Paris office halfway across the Atlantic. But there'd be a special event: a Scorsese homage to the recently deceased Billy Wilder with 20 minutes of Gangs. Scorsese would be here on one of the secondary juries anyway.
The tribute was basically a wash - Scorsese made a few minutes of remarks and then we saw some well-chosen Wilder clips. But it was enough to allow the festival to appear to be doing something for the art of cinema, rather than just whoring for Miramax. (Last year's Lord Of The Rings to-do was a pure market event run by New Line, and had nothing to do with the festival per se.)
Gangs looks interesting, though the Miramax-assembled footage was on the order of a trailer, and didn't do the Lord trick of showing an actual extended sequence from the film.
All of which is away from the point of all this, which would be Sharon Stone, who is on the jury this year. As a cautionary note, I'm not sure that someone whose filmography includes Sliver and the remake of Diabolique is any judge of fine cinema.
Anyway, Stone is the jury's touch of glamour, because, aside from David Lynch and his increasingly surreal hair, there's not much for the photogs to snap on the carpet. Anybody know what Bille August or Raoul Ruiz looks like?
Stone attends all the evening screenings (most jury members slide off and catch press screenings, for which they needn't dress), always gives the photographers everything they want, invariably looks fabulous and has not worn the same dress twice, as far as I've been able to determine. Check out some shots from the Gangs Of New York event.
This may not impress the other stars. Yesterday Stone was on the carpet so long that Milla Jovovich got tired of waiting and went over to the railings that keep the fans back and started signing autographs.
In an age when movie stars have the unfortunate tendency to whine about how tough stardom is, Stone sucks up adoration as if it were oxygen - she's worth adoring because she responds to it. How can one adore Johnny Depp or Jodie Foster when they seem faintly embarrassed by the whole thing?
Note to Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein. On the subject of movie stars, Harvey, when photographers start snapping Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz, don't try to edge your way into the photos. Yes, we know you're the money. DiCaprio and Diaz look like visitors from a distant and vastly superior race. Standing next to them, you look like something that lives under a bridge. People will ask, "Who's that guy that Cameron and Leo are ignoring?" Remarkably, having done a Web search this morning, I've not managed to find any pictures of this threesome, though we did see several pictures of Diaz and DiCaprio with director Martin Scorsese (here's one). There's also a streaming video of the walk-up here.
NASTIEST CRITICAL DISMISSAL OF THE FESTIVAL
The pseudonymous Mincente Vinelli in Moving Pictures International on 24 Hour Party People, Michael Winterbottom's film on the birth of Factory Records - "It was made for an extremely specific audience: that is, people who happened to read the New Musical Express between January and October 1978."
ALONG CAME A SPIDER
I'm reserving comment on David Cronenberg's Spider, a portrait of schizophrenia starring Ralph Fiennes, Miranda Richardson and Gabriel Byrne, until I have a chance to see it again. That's not because I'm not sure whether or not I like it - I quite do - but because latter-day Cronenberg, pretty much everything since Naked Lunch, really needs to be seen twice to be appreciated. With Naked Lunch, for example, I didn't realize how funny it was until the second time around.
I will say that, from this relatively early point in the competition, Ralph Fiennes has to be a very serious contender for the best-actor prize - his performance has a tortured inwardness that is rivalled, as a portrait of schizophrenic terror, only by Peter Greene's work in Clean, Shaven. Note to people who liked A Beautiful Mind - Spider is not a film about how schizophrenia means having adventures with your imaginary friends.
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