Cannes Coverage 2007
NOW's John Harkness covers the beauty and the beast of the Cannes film festival.
Still not tired of Tired Of Waking Up Tired? If so, you'll be able to get your fill of the Canadian new wave anthem this Saturday June 9th when the Diodes take to the free NXNE stage in Dundas Square (Dundas and Yonge) at 3 pm.
It's been 30 summers since the legendary Toronto pop-punkers were the first Queen West combo to release an LP on a major label. To mark the anniversary, the original line-up - as long as you don't count the first drummer and the first two...
CANNES FESTIVAL -- DAY TWELVE
Are we having fun yet?
Cannes, France -- It rained yesterday, briefly and heavily. At the Carlton Terrace restaurant, Joaquin Phoenix stopped the interview/lunch process to admire the rain. "Look at that, man. It's beautiful." Okay.
Not on Sunday, not this morning, the sun is up and high and brilliant, the Mediterranean is azure, with little sailboats scudding across it, now that the rich guys' navy has pretty much weighed anchor. Somehow, the bay is more impressive without, oh, $200 million worth of expensive boats cluttering it up.
Some quick predictions, gathered by talking to...
Cannes, France -- Walking back to my hotel last night after the Japanese film The Mourning Forest, I was crossing Les Allees de Liberte -- basically a packed sand piazza with plane trees where the bocce players gather between the Marina and some restaurants -- when I had the unexpected experience of hearing badly played Ennio Morricone music drifting through the night air. A town band concert!
As someone who admires the purity of the true amateur, it was sort of enjoyable to hear them play.
On the other hand, you'll never appreciate how difficult Morricone's music is to...
CANNES FESTIVAL -- DAY NINE
Cannes, France -- It must be a good festival -- I realized this morning, looking at my dwindling supply of clean socks, that there's only four days left, and I've yet to use the phrase "Only X more days and I'm out of here." Though I do want to get home. after almost three weeks out of the country, I miss my neighbourhood and my stuff and the familiarity of The Second Cup.
OCEAN'S THIRTEEN -- Big crowds in the big room -- there's definitely more accredited press than usual this year.
First,...
Five directors you meet at Cannes -- A Taxonomy
The cinematic god – Legends, generally septuagenarians. How can you tell a cine-god when you see one? At Cannes, Jean-Luc Godard is the Jack Nicholson of directors. He got a five-minute standing ovation from an audience composed almost entirely of critics and filmmakers when he showed up for the premiere screening of Notre Musique a few years back. That’s a five-minute ovation before the screening.
Surviving members of the French New Wave all fall into this category, though very few of them show up – Rivette prefers Venice, Chabrol goes to...
Proof that people are crazy...
Okay, reality-challenged.
According to Screen International, someone has decided that Chilean filmmaker Raoul Ruiz should be financed to make a $36-million historical epic, Love And Virtue. Ruiz is an esoteric auteur who generally makes small art films. His Proust adaptation, Time Regained, is probably his best known and most successful film. But Echo Bridge Entertainment thinks that it's a good idea to bankroll him for more money than any of his films have ever made. I smell a tax write off, but you never really know. Must be a hell of a script.
Colorado will...
CANNES FESTIVAL – DAY SEVEN
Brangelina ! Sighted.
Cannes, France – So I’m muddling through the mobs in front of the Palais last night, wondering “what’s playing that’s drawing this sort of mob to the front of the Palais.” People were running towards the Palais, until they ran into a wall of people and stopped. They can’t all be here for Gus Van Sant. Looked up and saw who was going up the stairs and said to myself, “I need an alternate route.“
This was the Angelina Jolie film A Mighty Heart, with Jolie as Marianne Pearl, the widow...
HEY! WHERE DID THOSE MOVIES COME FROM?
CANNES, FRANCE -- If you train your eye, you can actually peel away the layers of modernity in a cityscape. It's not a superpower or anything. But when you look past the beachfront glitter of Cannes at Festival time, you remember suddenly that this is impressionist country -- the light hits the water at the right angle, and you're looking at a Manet, or that the plane trees by the waterfront are the same plane trees one can see in a Renoir. (My hotel's interior paint scheme is the yellow and blue of Van Gogh's rooms at Arles, and I think I've got...
CANNES FESTIVAL -- DAY SIX
Cannes, France -- Most of the time I face Monday with quiet dread. Not in Cannes. It's Monday, so the tourists have gone home, mostly. The tourists are gone! For the moment -- Cannes straddles two long weekends, so between the 30,000 accreditees and the weekenders, it can get a mite crowded along the Croisette. You can tell the difference because the former look pissed off and sleep deprived and the latter are oblivious to being glared at by people with cell phones surgically attached to their heads. It's actually not as bad the second...
We Get Letters...
CANNES, FRANCE -- Due to a peculiarity of scheduling -- I had no late screenings yesterday and no early screenings today, it's time to answer some of the emails that I get.
"Why haven't you reported on all the cool parties?"
Well, I haven't been to any cool parties. In fact, I haven't been to any parties. I did have an invite to the Jessica Simpson movie launch on a yacht on Friday night, but I declined, because I had to go see the new Coen Brothers movie, despite my misgivings about the Festival's annual scheduling of...
CANNES, FRANCE -- Not having gotten into the press screening of Savage Grace, the new Julianne Moore film that represents director Tom Kalen's first film since 1992's Swoon, I hit the American Pavilion for lunch with some friends. The American Pavilion, the only one of the Pavilion's behind the Palais de Festivals which is not funded by a government agency, charges a membership fee, which you pay because AmPav, as they've rebranded themselves, has decent takeout coffee and the only frappuccino's in Cannes, Starbucks having yet to arrive on the Cote d'Azur. They also have a heavily exploited work force to...
Why Am I Having Breakfast With These People?
Roll out of bed at the luxurious hour of 8:10. The morning press screening is Zodiac, which I saw months ago, but I do have a breakfast thing at Relativity Media. Which is, in essence, a chance to have breakfast at the Majestic Hotel down by the Palais and affirm my existence for DDA, the European publicity company which has spent years studiously ignoring me.
And about three minutes into this event, I realize that DDA still has no idea who I am, otherwise they wouldn't have invited me. This is...
Wednesday, May 16 .... later
My Blueberry Nights
Well, we laboured into the Salle Debussy -- jammed for the 10 am screening so tightly that some of us blue passes who showed up half an hour early wound up way off to the side, peering at Wong Kar Wai's shallowfield compositions as they trailed off into the distance. Some of us.
Moderate glamour for an opening night film -- Norah Jones in her film debut, Jude Law, Rachel Weisz, Natalie Portman, David Strathairn -- but a very odd structure, even by Wong Kar-Wai's undeniably eccentric standards.
At the start of...
CANNES, FRANCE -- After a week's vacation where the sun came out for a grand total of 23 minutes in seven days -- okay, I'm exaggerating, but not much, and nobody goes to London for the sun, I was immensely relieved to arrive in Cannes and actually see the sun shining on the blue Mediterranean. I’ve said it before, if my hotel room had a balcony I’d never leave. -- let's take a look at the Selection for this year's Cannes selection. Now, there are tea-leaf readers out there who can divine the thoughts of programmer Thierry Fremaux and his...
