What keeps Brad Pitt awake at night?

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, June 3, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 0 Comments

The most complex role of his career: ‘This is a man who feels he can’t get ahead and everyone is doing better than him,' says Pitt

In a recent tweet, Steve Martin announced that he was “starting a massive new media campaign to promote the idea that I am ‘famously shy.’ ” Was Martin making a Terrence Malick joke? Hard to say. But that oxymoronic phrase “famously shy” has been attached to Malick’s name a lot lately, ever since the legendary American director shunned the red carpet in Cannes, snuck into his own premiere unnoticed, and didn’t show up to accept the Palme d’Or for The Tree of Life. The movie’s famously famous star, Brad Pitt, along with almost-famous co-star Jessica Chastain, were left to defend and explain their Oz-like wizard to the press, protecting the 67-year-old director as if he were an ultra-sensitive, strangely gifted child. “He’s one of the most humble men you’ll ever come across,” said Pitt, holding court for a group of journalists in a penthouse suite of the Carlton Hotel in Cannes. “He’s a very special man, very sweet—until you get a ball or bat in his hand, and then he’s very competitive.”

Although he’s made just four other movies in four decades (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World), Malick has carved out a singular mystique as the epic poet of American cinema. His films have always doted on nature, with an eye for transcendental wonder. But The Tree of Life goes further. Set mostly in a ’50s Texas suburb, it’s a nostalgic reverie about three boys being raised by a strict father (Pitt) and an angelic mother (Chastain). But its narrative is submerged by wave upon wave of rapturous images. With just traces of dialogue, it unfolds almost entirely as montage.

The film is like a marathon trailer for itself—a symphony of images set to inspirational music and prayerlike voice-over. Midway through, Malick pauses to enact the creation of the universe with a spectacle that plays like a beatific antidote to the cosmic chill of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Malick is the anti-Kubrick. Instead of playing God, he fishes for divinity in glimmers of sunlight, wind and emotion, building a grand canvas from tiny, random moments.

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Opening Weekend: Midnight in Paris, X-Men, Good Neighbours

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, June 2, 2011 at 11:21 PM - 2 Comments

Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams in 'Midnight in Paris'

Something for everyone this weekend: a Woody Allen comedy, a comic book blockbuster, and a semi-precious gem of Montreal noir. But exercise caution. Actors may be smaller than they appear. Take the photograph above, which is misleading. It would suggest that Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams, the adorable stars of Wedding Crashers, are reunited in another romantic comedy. Well, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris is a romantic comedy, with Wilson and McAdams starring as an engaged American couple vacationing in the City of Light. But they’re clearly mismatched from the start, and McAdams’ role—as a shallow, shrewish conservative—is much smaller and less sympathetic than Wilson’s. Canada’s sweetheart works hard to bring  nuance and detail to what is, in the end, a thankless part. It’s yet another instance of her talent being better than her material. Which points to a broader trend: actors being vastly overqualified for the movies they end up in. Look at this weekend’s blockbuster sequel: X-Men First Class. The best thing about the movie is the first-class cast, which includes Michael Fassbender (Hunger), James McEvoy (The Last King of Scotland) and Jennifer Lawrence (A Winter’s Bone).  They do some really fine work here.  But going to an X-Men movie for the character acting is like buying Playboy for the articles. In Hollywood movies these days, it’s pearls before swine everywhere you look. I mean, will Johnny Depp ever desert that damn pirate ship?

Midnight in Paris and X-Men: First Class are both broadly entertaining, crowd-pleasing confections, though each is less that the sum of its performances. Good Neighbours, a Canadian indie film, is a a modest chamber piece, but it’s tautly directed by Jacob Tierney (The Trotsky), with trio of compelling performances by Canadian actors Jacob Baruchel, Scott Speedman and Emily Hampshire. It succeeds admirably on its own terms. Details on all three movies . . . Continue…

Photo gallery: The other side of Cannes

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, May 27, 2011 at 3:12 PM - 1 Comment

With apologies to Bill Cunningham and the Sartorialist, here’s my gallery of non-celebrity fashion in the streets of Cannes.

Click on thumbnails to enlarge

Festival of sirens

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 9:55 AM - 1 Comment

Photograph by George Pimentel/FilmMagic; Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

In Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, which kicked off Cannes, Owen Wilson stars as a Hollywood screenwriter vacationing in France with his fiancée, a shrewish Malibu princess played by Rachel McAdams. He’s a frustrated novelist who dreams of being a writer in the café society of the 1920s. This being a Woody Allen movie, magical thinking produces magic, and our artiste manqué time-travels to the salons of the Golden Age, mixing with the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Picasso—and falls in love with an artist’s muse portrayed by Marion Cotillard. She, in turn, considers her own era a bore, and longs to be transported back to the belle époque of the 1890s. The absinthe is always greener on the other side.

Living elsewhere, of course, is why we go to movies. And the unabashed nostalgia of Midnight in Paris served as a fitting amuse-bouche for the 64th annual Cannes International Film festival, an event where the past could not have been more present. Cannes is the shrine of auteur cinema, “the pinnacle,” as Johnny Depp acknowledged when he dropped anchor to promote Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides—part of the Hollywood sideshow that keeps the media flocking to Cannes. But as blockbuster culture erodes the fragile ecology of the art film, the art-house fortress of Cannes has never seemed more intent on honouring the past. This week it staged a tribute to Jean-Paul Belmondo, whose role in Breathless in 1960 helped launch the French New Wave. And among the 20 features in competition, one film after another conjured nostalgic visions of paradise lost, from a miraculously good black and white silent movie called The Artist, to Terrence Malick’s eye-popping vision of a ’50s childhood (and all of Creation) in The Tree of Life.

That smoky siren played by Cotillard in Midnight in Paris could be a poster girl for this festival—if the official poster was not already adorned by the ghostly image of another icon, a young Faye Dunaway with mascara eyes wide shut and endless legs folded in supplication. This edition of the festival feted a pantheon of mostly male directors—including Lars von Trier, Pedro Almodóvar and the Dardenne brothers—but Cannes has always held a special place in its heart for the Siren. No, not the one on the Starbucks logo, but the sort of screen goddess who embodies the mystique of cinema. Sophia Loren. Ingrid Bergman. Monica Vitti. Marilyn Monroe. We’re still looking for the latest incarnation, in the fiery brilliance of Penélope Cruz or the erotic majesty of Angelina Jolie, but it’s like hunting for a new Dalai Lama.

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Photo gallery: Cannes Film Festival

By Brian D. Johnson - Monday, May 23, 2011 at 12:13 PM - 0 Comments

Here’s a gallery of my photos from 11 days in Cannes, mostly stars at press conferences . . .

De Niro's jury turns 'The Tree of Life' into a Golden Palm

By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, May 22, 2011 at 4:35 PM - 1 Comment

Freshly bearded jury president Robert De Niro talks to the press after the Cannes awards ceremony/photo: Brian D. Johnson

Robert De Niro’s Cannes jury awarded the Palme d’Or to Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life this evening, although the notoriously reclusive director was, predictably, not on hand to accept it. “It was a difficult decision,” said De Niro, who said Malick’s picture had “the size, the importance, the tension that seemed to fit the prize.” He made it clear there was some dissension around the verdict, then hastily added it was not a compromise: “Most of us felt the movie was terrific.” The Tree of Life, which stars Brad Pitt as a strict father raising three sons in 1950s America, grafts a coming-of-age nostalgia piece onto a rapturous epic about the creation of the cosmos. It polarized critics in Cannes more severely than almost any other picture (I liked it).

Other films awarded  included The Artist, a silent romantic comedy in black and white, which took best actor for Jean Dujardin’s wordless performance as a silent film star whose career is ruined by talkies; and Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, which won best actress for Kristen Dunst’s role as depressed bride coming terms with the imminent annihilation of the planet. In accepting her award, Dunst alluded to the controversy that dominated the final days of the festival, saying, “Wow! What a week it’s been.”  She thanked the festival for “allowing our film still to be in competition” after Lars Von Trier was exiled for his inflammatory Nazi comments. De Niro said the decision to ban Von Trier from the festival had no influence on the jury’s decisions, or at least his own views about the film. And he trivialized the festival’s decision to ban Von Trier: “There was some little punishment for the director,” De Niro muttered. “He had to go away or something.”

'Drive' director Nicolas Winding Refn (left) with Ryan Gosling / photo BDJ

Meanwhile, Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn won best director for Drive, starring Canada’s Ryan Gosling. It’s a smart, stylish, ultra-violent action art film. (This is an auteur who cites Texas Chainsaw Massacre as his favorite movie of all time.) Refn thanked Gosling generating the project and commissioning him—a relationship they’ve compared to Lee Marvin getting John Boormann to make Point Blank.  Gosling told the press: “I’ve always wanted to make an action movie or a superhero movie, but I’m happy I did this film.” He added that he and Gosling will team up again next year in a remake of Logan’s Run. “Next time we’ll do a real Hollywood movie. Let’s get into bed with [producer] Joel Silver, because that’s the ultimate bang.” Look out. A new action hero is on the loose, and he’s Canadian.

Belgium's Dardenne brothers, who shared the Grand Jury Prize with Turkey's Nuri Bilge Ceylan / photo BDJ

Two films shared the second place Grand Jury Prize: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, an agonizingly slow drama by Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and The Kid With A Bike, another neo-realist gem by Belgium’s Dardenne brothers, previous Palme d’Or winners.  The third place Jury Prize went to actor-director Maïwenn Le Besco for Poliss, a raucous drama set in a police youth protection unit investigating pedophile crimes. Running to the stage on stilettos, she gave a breathless speech so endless and tearful and over the top it sounded like she was trying to achieve orgasm, rather than accepting bronze. Israeli filmmaker Joseph Cedar won the screenplay award for Footnote, his ingenious and strangely thrilling tale of rival father-son Talmudic scholars—one of my favorites. Finally, the Camera d’Or, awarded to best feature debut by a separate jury, went to Les Acacias, by Pablo Gioregellli, an entry in the Critics Week sidebar that managed to escape me.

The most universally loved film that somehow failed to get a prize was Aki Kaurismaki’s Le Havre, a quiet masterpiece that I guess was too modest to impress the jury. It’s also noteworthy that This Must Be the Place—featuring a stunt performance by Sean Penn in full make-up as a retired rock star—came up empty-handed. “I thought Sean Penn was terrific in it,” offered De Niro, who seemed to have settled on “terrific” as the consolation adjective, “but we as a group had to decide.” Whenever De Niro spoke, he hummed and hawed, as if incarnating the jury’s indecision, while affecting so many of his classic shrug/grimaces it looked like he was imitating himself.

Jury member Jude Law / photo: BDJ

When pushed at the press conference, Jude Law, one of the jury members, listed a bunch of other films that were favourably discussed, including Sleeping Beauty, Le Havre, Pater and Papus Habemus. “And the Pedro Almodovar film,” piped up fellow jury member Uma Thurman. Which left just seven of the 20 features in competition unawarded or unmentioned.

The ceremony itself didn’t break from tradition. It’s always an awkward amateurish affair, the glaring exception to a festival that is organized with military precision the rest of the week. The highlight was watching De Niro fracture the French language, with phrases like “Nous avons décidé the best we could” and “J’espère que c’est okay.”

Terrence Malick's producer accept Palme d'Or for 'Tree of Life' in his absence / photo: BDJ

Silence and scandal in the Cannes bubble

By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, May 22, 2011 at 7:04 AM - 0 Comments

Cannes is a bubble, an opulent bubble of glamour and art that, from the inside, feels like the centre of the cultural universe. It lulls the media horde into fabulous delusion. Faithfully dragging ourselves to the Palais each day at 8 a.m. (to get a good seat), we’ve been assembling as a 2000-plus congregation in the Lumiere cinema, listening to soft jazz and reading the trades as we wait for the lights to go down, trying to remain awake as the  the classic Cannes trailer rolls to the fantasia strains of Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals—a set of red-carpeted steps that rise from an aqua sea, into a sky that turns indigo then black until we’re officially in heaven.

This is life in the bubble. It’s like undergoing mass hypnosis. And as we follow the 11-day program of the official competition, which has it’s own epic narrative, we blog the over-heated triumphs and scandals as if the world hung in the balance—forgetting  that back home all people care about is Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Still, Cannes is a fascinating bubble, a fairy tale cosmos where the usual rules of commercial gravity don’t apply, where directors are more exalted than stars, and where the films light up the zeitgeist.

Even though, on this Victoria Day weekend, I doubt anyone is paying attention,  I feel some reflection is in order while I’m still in the mood. Before the bubble bursts and the red carpet is ripped up. The awards are announced tonight. Best do it now, before Cannes is reduced to a minor sports result.

Overall it was an unusually rich festival. Those hard-core cinephiles who measure the quality of a film by its level of difficulty (for the audience) may have been disappointed. But what made this Cannes competition exceptional was the number of films that bridged the gap between the art house and the audience. The festival premiered several flat-out crowd pleasers with artistic pedigree—from The Artist, a silent black-and-white romcom, to Drive, a customized piece of pulp fiction driven by a mostly silent performance from Ryan Gosling. Even Sean Penn’s half-silent, sotto voce performance as a faded rock legend in This Must Be the Place played to the crowd with its mime-like minimalism.

Silence was à la mode on and off screen. Terrence Malick did not speak a word to the press for the premiere of The Tree of Life, leaving Brad Pitt to do the heavy lifting. Pitt argued, convincingly, that he didn’t see why the architect of a film was also expected to be its real estate agent, selling and explaining his creation. (It goes without saying that stars must do media.) Not everyone was silent, however. As one industry observer quipped, “This festival was the story of the man who wouldn’t talk [Malick] and the Man Who Said Too Much [Lars Von Tier].”

If ever there were an argument for a director keeping his mouth shut, it was the Von Trier scandal, in which Denmark’s auteur provocateur made a string of ill-advised quips about Nazis, Jews and Hitler at a press conference, trigger a furor that hijacked the festival narrative for days. Pedro Almodóvar’s cosmetic surgery thriller, The Skin I Live In, was completely overshadowed because it premiered just before the festival’s board of directors decided to ban Von Trier from the premises. Holed up outside Cannes for the next few days, Von Trier talked to journalists—not about his movie, Melancholia—but about his banishment.

The scandal hurt his movie,  infuriating its distributors and alienating the stars who were ready to promote it (Kirstin Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg). Which is too bad, because despite flaws, Von Trier’s latest work is a powerful, haunting drama. And its image of a ridiculously lavish wedding in a castle by sea overshadowed by a killer planet called Melancholia could be a metaphor for Cannes itself. Depression was certain on the agenda in the films, affecting everyone from the willfully comatose prostitute in Sleeping Beauty to the damaged rock legend played by Sean Penn in This Must Be The Place.

Another prevailing theme was conflict between fathers and sons, notably in The Tree of Life, The Kid With a Bike and Footnote. But perhaps the most startling trend was the strong presence of women. Aside from the fact that four out 20 competition entries were directed by women (compared to none last year), we saw an unusual number of powerhouse performances by women, not to mention a couple of sisterhood spectacles with ensemble female casts—the whores in House of Tolerance and the Arab villagers on strike against their husbands in La Source des femmes.

Who know how the awards will go tonight. I’d like to see Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki win the Palme d’Or for Le Havre. However, I’d be neither surprised nor disappointed if Malick wins for The Tree of Life (unlikely according to the gossip), or if Nicolas Winding Refn wins for Drive. Certainly Drive, which owes something to Taxi Driver, is the film closest to the sensibility of jury president Robert De Niro. If, on the other hand, the jury wants to pick the biggest crowd pleaser, that would be The Artist, another decision I’d happily support. If I had to put money on the Palme d’Or right now, I’d bet on The Artist. It is, in some ways, the most conventional diversion of all the major contenders—ironic given that it’s black-and-white and silent. Best actor should come down to a contest between Ryan Gosling for Drive and Sean Penn for This Must be the Place. Gosling should win. And Tilda Swinton is the overwhelming favorite to win best actress for her harrowing role in We Need to Talk about Kevin.

By the end of the day, we’ll have the results. Stay tuned.

Ryan Gosling and Sean Penn heat up Cannes

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, May 20, 2011 at 11:47 AM - 11 Comments

Ryan Gosling at the Cannes press conference for 'Drive' / photo by Brian D. Johnson

In the final lap of competition at Cannes, which wraps tomorrow, the race just heated up between Drive and This Must be the Place—two movies shot in America by European filmmakers. Both have emerged as real contenders for the Palme D’Or, which will be awarded Sunday. And the jury, led by Robert De Niro, will likely end up trying to decide which of their respective stars most deserves the best actor prize, Ryan Gosling or Sean Penn.

In Drive, a noir thriller set in Los Angeles, Gosling stars as an ace stunt driver who moonlights as a getaway driver. The movie is styled with the kind of arty visuals and cutthroat wit that would make Tarantino jealous. Call it Pulp Traction. Directed by Denmark’s Nicolas Winding Refn (Valhalla Rising), it’s a contemporary samurai western, with sparse dialogue, and a quiet tone of hair-trigger suspense that’s snapped by short bursts of extreme, bone-crushing violence. As a noble hero on a mission to save his neighbour (Carey Mulligan) and her boy from a gangland retribution, Gosling combines a sensitive, Zen-like grace with a slow-fused capacity for psychotic brutality. Albert Brooks makes a surprisingly scary villain. And in a bravura performance, Gosling reveals himself as an über-cool action hero reminiscent of Steve McQueen or the young Clint Eastwood. Continue…

Scenes from the 64th Annual Cannes Film Festival

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 1:18 PM - 0 Comments

Lars Von Trier banished from Cannes

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 12:20 PM - 0 Comments

We were filing into the premiere of This is Not A Film, a clandestine video diary made by Iran’s Jafar Panahi while under house arrest, when we heard the latest Cannes bombshell about Lars Von Trier’s “I’m a Nazi” scandal, documented in a previous post (Lars Von Trier: Nazi pornographer manqué). More about the Iranian movie in a moment, but first this bizarre communiqué from the festival brass:

“The Festival de Cannes provides artists from around the world with an exceptional forum to present their works and defend freedom of expression and creation. The Festival’s Board of Directors, which held an extraordinary meeting this Thursday 19 May 2011, profoundly regrets that this forum has been used by Lars Von Trier to express comments that are unacceptable, intolerable, and contrary to the ideals of humanity and generosity that preside over the very existence of the Festival. The Board of Directors firmly condemns these comments and declares Lars Von Trier a persona non grata at the Festival de Cannes, with effect immediately.”

Later  a Cannes press official told me this means that Von Trier’s film, Melancholia, remains in competition for the Palme d’Or, but if it wins a prize Von Trier won’t be allowed to accept it. In fact, from here on in, he is stripped of his festival badge and forbidden to set foot in the Palais, the festival’s headquarters.

This overreaction comes as a shock for two reasons. First, Von Trier issued a contrite apology yesterday for that silly lapse of judgment at the Melancholia press conference, insisting he is, in fact, neither an anti-Semite nor a Nazi. Second, anyone who witnessed the director’s comments was fully aware they were sarcastic. Also, there was a context for them: he was musing about the movie’s allusion to German romanticism, its use of Wagner, and reflecting on his disappointment at discovering that he was not Jewish, and that his family was simply German. Thinking that he could joke about Jews and Hitler and Nazis to the world media without harsh repercussions is idiotic and naïve. But we’ve come to expect that from the Danish auteur provocateur, who seems to combine a flair for outrage with a genuine lack of impulse control. Somehow, the same standard doesn’t apply to Mel Gibson, who walked the red carpet this week to promote The Beaver.

But the ultimate irony of Von Trier’s banishment is that the news broke just as we were sitting down to watch Panahi’s This is Not a Film, a wryly satirical self-portrait of a banned filmmaker. For months Panahi has been confined to his high-rise apartment, awaiting the results of an appeal against a six-year jail term and a 20-year ban that prohibits him from writing a film, shooting a film, or leaving the country. It’s one of two clandestine films in Cannes by Iranian victims of censorship and repression. Both premiered in the Cannes sidebar program, Un Certain Regard, without their directors present. The other is Goodbye, Mohammad Rasoulof, who is also appealing a six-year prison term and a 20-year ban on activities. Continue…

Lars Von Trier, Nazi pornographer manqué

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 11:19 AM - 8 Comments

'Melancholia' director Lars Von Trier with Kirstin Dunst at Cannes press conference / photo by Brian D. Johnson

Lars Von Trier sure knows how to generate publicity. At this morning’s press conference for his competition entry, Melancholia, he did his best to downplay the merits of the film, saying, “Maybe it’s crap. Of course, I hope not. But there is quite a big possibility that this is really not worth seeing.” He went on to joke about how his next project would be an epic hardcore porn movie with Melancholia stars Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, who flanked him at the press conference and acted amused. After 20 minutes of this, I bolted to catch a repeat screening of Aki Kaurismaki’s  Le Havre. I figured that Von Trier was pretty much done. But by the time I got out of Le Havre (which is a gem), there was outrage about Von Trier all over the Internet. However, it was not about anything he’d said when I was there. He had embarked on an incendiary tangent near the end of the press conference. He talked about discovering, to his regret, that he was not Jewish, then mused that he could find some sympathy for Hitler and concluded: “Ok, I’m a Nazi.”

Now, I wasn’t there, but I can only assume the Danish enfant terrible was as serious about this Nazi stuff as he was about making hard core porn with Kirsten Dunst. But you  joke about Jews and Nazis at your peril; just ask Mel Gibson. Von Trier said, “I really wanted to be a Jew and then I found out I was really a Nazi, because my family was German, Hartmann, which also gave me some pleasure.” He went on:

“What can I say? I understand Hitler. I think he did some wrong things, yes absolutely, but I can see him sitting in his bunker in the end. . . I think I understand the man. He’s not what you would call a good guy, but I understand much about him and I sympathize with him a little bit. But come on, I’m not for the Second World War, and I’m not against Jews. . . I am of course very much for Jews. No, not too much because Israel is a pain in the ass. But still . . . how can I get out of this sentence? OK, I’m a Nazi.”

Apparently Dunst and Gainsbourg were no longer amused. But Von Trier couldn’t let go of it. When a journalist charitably tried to bring the discussion back to the movie, asking if he might direct something on a bigger scale, he said, “Yeah, we Nazis … have a tendency to try to do things on a greater scale. Maybe you could persuade me.” He then made a crack about the press conference being the “final solution with journalists.”

It’s a perverse a way to publicize his movie, a sensitive tragedy about the end of the world that could be accused of many things, but is probably the least controversial of Von Trier’s films. Maybe he was trying to make up for it.

Kirsten Dunst in Lars Von Trier's 'Melancholia'

Melancholia is the story of an ill-fated wedding that takes place in a vast seaside chateau surrounded by its own 18-hole golf course. Dunst plays the miserable bride, Gainsbourgh her sister, who is married to the wedding’s benefactor, a cold-blooded tycoon played by Keifer Sutherland. What looms over the entire story, however, is the approach a planet called Melancholia, which is on a lethal collision course with Eart. The film is preceded by an exquisite overture of super slow-mo, painterly images—from Dunst in a vast wedding dress, dragging herself across a golf green and sinking into it like quicksand, to an image of the bride floating like Ophelia.

To be sure, something is rotten in the state of this state of Denmark, but the malaise is cosmic. Continue…

'The Tree of Life', aka 2011: A Space Odyssey

By Brian D. Johnson - Monday, May 16, 2011 at 8:27 PM - 0 Comments

Brad Pitt at 'The Tree of Life' press conference in Cannes / photo by Brian D. Johnson

I hardly know where to begin to talk about The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick’s epic trip into spiritual rapture and boyhood nostalgia. Saw the film yesterday morning, felt duly blown away, then attended the press conference immediately after. The notoriously reclusive director was absent. His excuse: shyness. Which even the moderator found preposterous. This is Cannes, after all, the auteur festival; directors rank higher here than stars. Sean Penn was also absent, on his way back from Haiti and trying to hit the red carpet for the premiere. But his role is a minor one, just a framing device for the story.

Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain, plus some of the production team, were left to hold the fort, struggling to explain the mystery of Malick. Pitt and Chastain co-star as an overbearing dad and a beatific mom in this tale of three sons growing up in a ’50s suburb of Waco, Texas. We know it’s Waco, because we see the sign on a DDT truck spraying white clouds of insecticide that the boys scamper through as if it’s just another lawn sprinkler.

Pitt, who was unusually articulate, defended Malick’s absence. “He sees himself as building a house. I don’t know why people who make things are expected to sell them.” (Though Pitt seems to have accepted that’s part of his job description as a superstar.) The actor went on to explain the logistics of the shoot. For his main location, Malick “started by renting the entire block and dressing it as the 60s.” The cast could roam around and let things happen, while the crew shot with natural light. Pitt said Malick would get up every morning and write for an hour, delivering several pages of script, single spaced to the actors. The child never saw any script. Sometimes Malick would just be “torpedoed” into a scene.

Jessica Chastain / photo by BDJ

Describing the director’s method, Pitt said, “he was like the guy standing there with a butterfly net, ready for that moment of truth to go by. The best moments were not preconceived. They were happy accidents.” In fact, there’s a moment when a large monarch butterfly lands on Chastain’s hand. Usually when that occurs in a movie, there’s a butterfly wrangler. Chastain said it was just one those things that happened.

The Tree of Life‘s narrative is minimal. It’s another Malick landscape movie that goes where no Malick movie has gone before, from a suburban backyard to the outer limits of the cosmos. There are rhapsodic images of boyhood nostalgia and of Creation— stellar cataclysms, erupting volcanoes, churning seas, even dinosaurs.

These are some of Malick’s favorite things: sparklers, sprinklers, rocks thrown through windows, fireflies, a frog tied to a firecracker, curtains billowing over a heating vent, bedtime stories, climbing trees, rolling through tall grass, transparent jellyfish. . . I could go on.

For the record, I loved the movie as an rhapsodic experience, though I’m not sure what  it amounts to. The ending is layered with so many wedding-caked amens that I thought we’d never reach the heavenly afterlife of the closing credits. But if the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, Terence Malick is trafficking in some serious enlightenment. His unfashionable lack of irony and cynicism is astounding, along with his apparent faith that it’s actually possible to achieve a cinematic state of grace—to glimpse the eye of God on camera. Whether or not you’re a believer, it’s a staggering vision.

Brad works the room / photo by BDJ

It's French for blockbuster

By Scott Feschuk - Monday, May 16, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 2 Comments

The Cannes Film Festival is once again showcasing its usual fare of upbeat, crowd-pleasing entertainment. I’ve not entirely been paying attention, but here’s what’s playing so far as I can tell:

Despair and Isolation—Several orphans struggle to comprehend the human condition in a cruel world where the only constants are heartbreak and suffering. Running time: six hours.

Isolation, Despair and also Anguish—Several thinner orphans struggle to comprehend the human condition while wheezing in a crueller world where the only constants are heartbreak, suffering and their leprosy (the skin kind and the social kind). Running time: six hours.

Continue…

Silence is golden

By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, May 15, 2011 at 7:09 PM - 0 Comments

Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Béo in 'The Artist'

After watching too many films about sexual degradation, pedophilia, and parental abuse, it was a tonic to see The Artist this morning. I went into it with some trepidation. Making a black-and-white silent film in 2011 sounds impossibly precious, a whim of cinephilia that’s perverse in its own right. But despite its classic form, The Artist is not an art film, at least not in any restrictive sense. It’s a pure, undemanding delight, sure to entertain any audience that can be dragged into it. And it was met with the most generous applause of any movie screened here so far at the 8:30 a.m. press screenings (which are attended by several thousand journalists).

It’s a French movie, but you’d never guess. This is something I haven’t seen in 17 years of attending the Cannes Film Festival: a French film without subtitles. There are titles, but just the kind of sparse dialogue cards typical of the genre. The whole silent, black-and-white,  square-aspect-ratio thing, by the way, isn’t a gratuitous conceit. It sets up and frames a playful narrative set in late 1920s Hollywood, during the transition from silent films to talkies.

By turns farcial and tender, The Artist is a romantic comedy about star-crossed lovers, they kind who spend most of the movie sadly separated. They are George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a vain silent film star whose career is doomed with the advent of talkies; and Bérénice Béo, an exuberant extra who flirts her way into a small role in one of his films. She goes to become a big star just as he sinks into oblivion. Inevitably, this faux silent picture is flecked with homages to the era. On some level it’s a gender-flipped Sunset Boulevard, with James Cromwell cast as Valentin’s loyal chauffeur. But  the irony is beautifully restrained, and it’s a revelation to see how rich, emotional, and downright riveting a movie without dialogue can be. It’s strange that such an antique form can feel so fresh. This is a movie that you can imagine Woody Allen wishing he he made. Oh yes, there’s also a wildly talented dog in the cast. I’m not a big fan of dogs in movies, but this pooch is something else.

That was the highpoint of a day in which I consumed four movies. The other three were all dramas about abused and messed-up women. Don’t have time to go into details. It’s after midnight and I’ve got to be back at the Palais bright and early to fight the mob that will show up for Terence Malick’s Tree of Life, the most hotly anticipated title in Cannes.

But briefly, in those three films I saw more naked bodies than you can shake a stick at. Almost all female, except for the sick sadist who violated the sick heroine of Code Blue—a weird mix of palliative care and art porn—in a scene of unsimulated masturbation that could not have been less of a turn on. The other two films were: House of Tolerance, a painterly slice of life from the prostitutes’ POV in in a French Belle Epoque brothel—whose employees include The Woman Who Laughs because a permanent smile has been knifed into her face by a  client—and Martha Marcy May Marlene (cool title), a dark drama featuring Elizabeth Olsen in a star-making performance as a fugitive from a dangerous cult who seeks refuge with her sister.

OK. Enough. . . That Tree of Life better live up to its title.

Depp on Cruz control

By Brian D. Johnson - Saturday, May 14, 2011 at 1:09 PM - 4 Comments

Johnny Depp at the Cannes press conference for 'Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides' / photo by Brian D. Johnson

Johnny Depp doesn’t watch his own movies. And after I dragged myself to an 8:30 a.m. screening of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, I could only think that his morning was better spent than mine. The experience didn’t start well. The damn 3D glasses weren’t working. I wondered, how could that be? First I thought it was the projection, but none of the other several thousand journalists at the screening were fumbling with their glasses. After 20 minutes of dark, blurry images, I left the theatre and handed my glasses to an usher, muttering that they didn’t work.“Oh, monsieur, vos lunettes ne clignottent pas!” Telling me my glasses weren’t blinking. Huh? Then he handed me a fresh pair and, holding them up to the light, showed me that they were were blinking. These are not your granddad’s polarized 3D shades. They’re active-shutter X-pand 3-glasses with lenses that alternately flick on and off at a rapid rate.

So I returned to my seat and found everything crystal clear, including the French subtitles, which hovered annoyingly within touching distance.  Regardless, the movie, directed by Rob Marshall, is an unsightly mess. Don’t get me wrong. I adore both Johnny Depp and Penélope Cruz. Throw in Geoffrey Rush and Ian McSwane and this is one fine cast. But it’s a shame to see actors wasted. Amid the two-hour-plus barrage of chaotic action, there’s scarcely an intimate moment between them. How many swordfights can anyone be expected to endure and not be bored silly? Seen one, seen them all. And why does every Pirates movies need such a baroque tangle of plots with three gangs of people fighting over . . . in this case, the Fountain of Youth. The latest additions to the monster menagerie, by the way, are mermaids. One of them falls in love with a Christian missionary. But most  are man-eating vampires that churn up the sea like extras in an over-populated Jaws sequel.

Pirates 4 joins a growing genre of sideshows at Cannes afflicted by the-press-conference-was-more-fun-than-the-movie syndrome. And you can’t not like Johnny Depp, who is as charming off screen as on. Aside from the fact that he’s a close friend of Keith Richards, and has lived to tell the tale, he’s one of the few superstars who can express a humility that is both genuine and insightful. At a jammed press conference for Pirates, he sat next to Penélope Cruz, his partner in grace, and fielded even the dumbest questions with generosity and wit

. I thought of asking him if he longed make a Pirates Unplugged, where the ratio of action to acting would be reversed, so dialogue would dominate. But I already knew the answer. He would laboriously have to defend the process, and the movie. So instead  I asked, “When you were making little, idiosyncratic films with the likes of Jim Jarmusch, did you ever dream you’d be commandeering a franchise like this? And do you miss the intimacy of those smaller films?”

“I’m lucky. I try and work out a balance, angling toward doing what is true to me. And it just so happens that for 20 years or so I made these films that were considered for the most part failures. Flops. I built a career on flops, so I was quite comfortable in that arena. Then a couple of things hit. It’s a very strange little ride and you get used to it pretty quick. You’ve got a film coming out, ooh, he’s on the list again. Maybe he’s on the list. Producers you haven’t talked to for 15 years call you: “How have you been?” Then that film takes a dump, and then they never call you again til the next one.”

I also asked about Keith Richards, who reprises his role as his dad in a fleeting cameo. “He’s amazing to share a trailer with. I could write a book on that myself one day.”

One journalist asked Depp what it takes to be a good pirate. “I can only speak from my experience,” he said. “I suppose you have to be willing to get fired. The only reason I’m still around is that I was so supported by Jerry Bruckheimer and the director on the first one, Gore Verbinsky, in terms of what I was bringing to the table, character-wise. Let’s say there wasn’t a group of the Disney echelon who had any enthusiasm for what I was doing. They wanted to subtitle me.”

Deadwood‘s Ian McShane, who plays Blackbeard in Pirates 4, offered this note on how he prepared:  “I used to play a lot of music, especially Bob Dylan’s song, Boots of Spanish Leather. The way you act any character, you look at the other character in the eye and try not to trip over your sword. My sword is three times as big as anybody else’s. It was also nice to play an evil character–I’ve played quite a few–but one I could actually see with my grandchildren.” Then he added: “We don’t call them evil characters; we call them complicated characters.”

Inevitably, the stars were asked to compare the experience of working on a low budget and big budget. The answer is always predictable. If you’re promoting a low-budget film, it’s kosher to crap on the whole blockbuster ethic. But if you’re promoting the blockbuster, you say the experience of acting is essentially the same, no matter how many trailers are lined up around the block.  Denying there was any difference between acting in a $12 million movie like The King’s Speech and a gazillion-dollar movie like Pirates, Geoffrey Rush noted, “Whether it’s playing the speech therapist or  the pirate, it’s good that I keep working with people called King George.

As for Penélope Cruz, she and Depp said lovely, flattering things about each other.  Johnny, who’s happy to keep making these movies as long as the audience will have them, said he’d be happy to have  Penélope in all of them, if she were willing. But what spoke louder than their public testimony were the shy, electric glances that flew between them, and whatever it was they whispered to each other off-mic.

Johnny Depp and Penélope Cruz at Cannes press conference for 'Pirates' / photo by Brian D. Johnson

A paralyzed Pope and Talmudic thrills

By Brian D. Johnson - Saturday, May 14, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

Actor-director Nanni Moretti (left) and Michel Piccoli in 'Habamus Papam'

There’s a narrative flow to this festival, as if each of the 20 features in competition is the chapter of a secret novel. TIFF, which presents some 300 films, is a different animal. Most of the action is packed into the opening four or five days, as we are force-fed a glut of potential Oscar nominees. In Cannes, the momentum builds with a dramatic arc that spans the course of the festival. It’s a competition, after all. And, as in figure skating, some of the most potent contenders are often positioned near the end of the event, to leave the strongest impact on the jury. There’s a subtle thematic composition as well. Three films by women were front-loaded into the first two days—a tad patronizing perhaps, as if to dispense of them before getting down to the serious business of male auteurs—but they were all provocative, intriguing and oddly related.

Now it’s back to the male ego with a vengeance. Yesterday we saw two competition entries, from Italy and Israel, that both dealt with biblical orthodoxy and the burden of conferred glory.  Nanni Moretti’s Habemus Papam stars 85-year-old French legend Michel Piccoli as a cardinal who’s elected Pope and is paralyzed by performance before he can get to the window overlooking St. Peter’s Square.  Footnote (Hearat Shuylayim), by Israeli director Joseph Cedar is a tale of two Talmudic scholars, a father and son, whose rivalry is inflamed when one of them receives a major prize–I know, the premise sounds deadly, but it’s an exhilirating film, and the I’ve seen here that’s really excited me.

I’m a longtime Nanni Moretti fan. His Caro Diaro (1993) is one of my all-time favorites, and this comedian’s detour into drama, The Son’s Room, won the 2001 Palme D’Or for its raw portrait of a couple facing the death of a child.  Habemus Papam presents a delicious premise: the Pope who feels he’s unworthy for the job. And the movie has brilliant, hilarious and tender moments. Moretti casts himself as a non-believing shrink who tries to psychoanalyze the new Pope in the Vatican, with all the Cardinals watching. It’s such a delicious set-up that you’re dying to see that relationship take over the film. But then it would become The Pope’s Speech; not Moretti’s style. Instead, the Pope escapes into the streets of Rome, rides the bus incognito, and contemplates his failed ambitions as an actor. The film become The Old Man and the (Holy) See. And as the narrative takes some perverse turns, it’s almost willfully underwhelming.

Shlomo Bar Aba as the father in 'Footnote'

Footnote, on the other hand, makes magic from a more dubious premise. It’s hard to describe what’s so good about this Talmudic intrigue, the story of a purist father who resents his son’s success. But with stunning visuals, a  stabbing score reminiscent of Hitchcock composer Bernard Herrmann, and some devastating twists, there is nothing pedestrian about Footnote. Laced with comic irony, it has the kinetic thrust of a noir thriller, while plumbing the bottomless depths of parental conflict and the quicksand of moral relativism. It even adds some sly grace notes about Israel’s culture as an armed camp, with scenarios of high security at the gates of academe. Footnote unfolds like an O’Henry story on steroids, and is almost certain to win something before the festival is over.

Bonfire of the Vanities: the Diana conspiracy film

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, May 13, 2011 at 4:41 PM - 0 Comments

Sometimes the press conference is better than the movie. Vastly better in the case of Unlawful Killing, a controversial documentary that suggests Princess Di was murdered and tries to prove there was a conspiracy to cover up the facts of her death. The British press has already created huge buzz around the film with outraged reports that it includes a photograph of Diana in the car wreck that was deemed unfit for publication in the U.K. Consequently a high-powered crowd of press showed up for the film’s premiere in the Cannes market—it’s not in the festival’s official program, and now that I’ve seen it, I can understand why.

The photograph is a red herring. It’s just a fleeting image of Diana in the wrecked car, and is not in the least exploitative. But the film is another story. Without actually accusing Prince Philip of plotting Diana’s demise, it paints him as a former Nazi bedfellow—and the shadowy villain behind a racist mafia of a monarchy that wanted her out of the picture. The epic inquest into Diana’s death is portrayed as a sham, and the media are pilloried for ignoring scandalous evidence and misrepresenting the jury’s verdict. Even if such views are music to your ears, it’s hard to warm to Unlawful Killing.

Neither good journalism nor good filmmaking, it’s a shrill, shabby polemic that does a disservice to its own point of view. Serving up interviews with Piers Morgan, the late Tony Curtis and a psychologist who diagnoses Philip as a psychopath, it unearths no fresh evidence—something British director Keith Allen freely admitted at a press conference that turned into a total circus. It took place at the lavish Grand Salon of the Carlton Hotel, the same regal venue where Angelina Jolie held court for Kung Fu Panda 2 the previous day. Clearly, this is one of those fishy documentaries with serious money behind it. The first question was: whose money?

Mohamed Al-Fayed’s money, as it turns out. After failing to get financing from U.K. broadcasters, Al-Fayed paid for the entire budget of Unlawful Killing. How much was that? The director, who also had to be prompted to remember names of prominent characters in his film, said he had no idea. Then, out of the wings, a heavy-looking Brit who said he represented Al-Fayed suddenly appeared to inform us that the Arab tycoon, and father of Diana’s late suitor, put up £2.5 million (roughly $5 million).

Shortly before that, I’d asked the director: “As a filmmaker doing a ‘forensic’ piece,’ why did you not indicate your relationship with Mr. Al-Fayed in the film, and the fact that he financed the film?” Allen looked baffled, as if it had never occurred to him that a lack of transparency would mar the credibility of a movie that portrays its benefactor as a grossly maligned saint. He said mentioning Al-Fayed’s involvement would “interrupt the flow.” Then he added: “I think you’ll find that there are an immense number of films coming out in America that were financed by the Mafia and there’s no reference [in those films].”

I went on to ask Allen about a scene in which Al-Fayed burns the royal coats of arms that once adorned his Harrods store, in view of his son Dodi’s mausoleum. It appears that the film crew is the only “media” on hand to capture the bonfire.

“That was a set up for the film, no?” I asked.

“No, he was going to do it, and I filmed it,” said the director. “The action didn’t take place because I was making a film. I actually recorded what happened.”

“But if you wanted to present a credible forensic analysis,” I asked, trying a new tack, “Why were you so strident in your condemnation of the monarchy as ‘gangsters with tiaras’?”

“It’s an observation.”

To be fair Allen—an actor who’s also the father of singer Lily Allen—admitted he wasn’t trying to do journalism or documentary, just raise some questions.

But the fun was just starting. Next, British author Martyn Gregory, author of Diana, the Last Days, stood up and launched into a diatribe: “I must say I was really, really disappointed with the film. It regurgitates everything Mohamed Al- Fayed has being saying since the year 2000.” Throughout the press conference Gregory kept jumping up to quarrel with Allen, until the moderator had to give him a lecture on the value of English civility.

In the film, Allen brands all British journalists as establishment toadies controlled by sycophantic employers vying for knighthoods. There were a lot of Brit journalists in the room, and one of them made the valid point that they wouldn’t be there if they were as censorious as he suggested. And one politely asked why there were no dissenting views in the film, at least to give it the impression of balance.

Allen said he thought they’d get expressed without his help. He also wondered if his film would ever play commercially in the U.K. His lawyers have asked for 87 cuts to make it palatable to insurers. A number of them concern accusations that the inquest into Diana’s death was a deliberate cover-up, which leads him into contempt of court territory.

The most jaw-dropping moment in the press conference occurred when a British journalist, curious about the director’s personal stake in the material, asked him if he’d ever met Diana. No, he had not. “But my son and daughter have. Years ago my ex-wife, Alison, had produced a movie called Hear My Song which was chosen as a royal premiere. And bless his heart, Alfie, my boy, it was the first time he had ever worn a suit, a little black velvet suit. He was putting on his trousers and he caught his cock in his zip. I had the awful job of having to unzip him and pull his penis out. Very painful. And I’ve got a wonderful photograph of Princess Di bending over and talking to Lily and Alfie, and laughing. I asked why—my son had told her about what had happened to his penis.”

Cherchez la femme—and Angelina, crayoning femme fatale

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 7:46 PM - 3 Comments

Emily Browning at the 'Sleeping Beauty' press conference in Cannes / photo by Brian D. Johnson

Each year we come to Cannes, hoping to be shocked, surprised, possibly blown away—but expecting at the very least to see the values of conventional cinema turned upside down. That usually happens here, up to a point. In Cannes, high art is placed on an Olympian altar, while Hollywood fare provides the tacky floor show, safely sequestered out of competition. But one area where Cannes has too often fallen into lock step with Hollywood is in its deference to the pantheon of Male Genius. Last year there was not a single female director in the main competition. Ah, an oversight, no doubt. This year, as if to shake up the optics, if nothing else, the competition has opened with three movies in a row from female directors—Sleeping Beauty, We Have to Talk About Kevin, and Polisse—each of which throws down a provocative gauntlet to conservative notions of motherhood and sexuality.

And we’re not even counting The Beaver, Saint Jodie Foster’s ritual cleansing of Mel Gibson, which is programmed out of competition. Or Kung Fu Panda 2, which DreamWorks showcased in Cannes this week, even though it’s not even dignified by an out-of-competition slot in the official selection. It, too, is directed by a woman, Jennifer Yu, and marketed by the unparalleled celebrity of Angelina Jolie.

Cherchez la femme. At the end of Day Two, that could be the rallying cry of Cannes. Last night I collared festival director Thierry Frémault at the opening night party at the Majestic Beach for Midnight in Paris. I asked if he was making a statement with this opening fusillade of films by women. It was midnight, and Frémault—in a hurry to get to the VIP area, where Rachel McAdams and Michael Sheen were exchanging fond looks—seemed as if like he was about to brush me off. Then he shrugged, grinned and said, “Oui, un peu!”

The trifecta of women’s films kicking off the festival are attention-getting. Sleeping Beauty, a feature debut by Australian writer Julia Leigh, is an erotic/narcotic, fable that doubles down sexual taboos by exploring a pedo/necrophilia demimonde. An endlessly naked Emily Browning stars as a twentysomething waif who looks 15, in a Story of O/Belle de Jour tale of a university student who is paid to be drugged unconscious and ravished by filthy rich dirty old men. (If a male director, like Atom Egoyan, had made this film, he would have been crucified.) Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, adapts Lionel Shriver’s prize-winning novel about the tormented mother of a demon-seed boy whose idea of high school excellence is mass murder. And Polisse, by French actress-director Maiwenn is about a raucous squad of child services police in Paris who investigate pedophilia while negotiating their own torrid relationships. (I could have done without the lingering shot of the teenage rape victim’s stillborn baby.)

'Sleeping Beauty' director Julia Leigh

At a press conference for Sleeping Beauty, Browning, 22, said she had no problem whatsoever with being naked on screen, as if it barely warranted talking about—although the film has fetish gear to rival Eyes Wide Shut and more arty nude tableaux than anything by Peter Greenaway. I asked director Julia Leigh a question about the the male gaze, and how her film tried to redirect that, which she never quite answered. Midway through, Leigh pointed out that Browning’s mentor, Australian director Jane Campion, was sitting among the journalists. Later she told me that even though this was Leigh’s first film, she’s an ardent cinephile and knows way more about movies than herself.

This morning, I was forced to choose between the Panda 2 press conference and one for We Need to Talk About Kevin, featuring the lethally articulate Tilda Swinton as the mother-in-hell. I thought the latter would be more interesting, but like any self-respecting media slut, I obeyed the summons of Hollywood royalty and headed down to the Carlton Hotel to pay homage to Queen Angelina, who was flanked by competing jokers Jack Black and Dustin Hoffman. Continue…

Woody wanted Rachel McAdams "at any cost"

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 4:27 PM - 1 Comment

Woody Allen and Rachel McAdams at the Cannes press conference for 'Midnight in Paris'/ photo by BDJ

Day One at the Cannes Film Festival is jam-packed. We begin with a press screening for the opening night gala, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, followed by three back-to-back press conferences. The French used to believe in lunch. Hey, it’s a new world. Woody explains how he struggled to come up with a script to match his title, Midnight in Paris; then Bernardo Bertolucci, recipient of an honorary Palme D’Or, mused fondly about Last Tango in Paris; finally we had our ritual audience with the Cannes jury, whose president, Robert De Niro, was about as responsive as a waiter in Paris, as he lived up to his legendary capacity to say absolutely nothing in as few words as possible.

Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, by the way, didn’t show. The French First Lady, who has a recurring cameo in Allen’s film as an amiable tour guide, sent her regrets. When Allen was asked how he came to cast her, he said, “One morning I was just having breakfast with the Sarkozys and she walked into the room and she was very beautiful and very charming and charismatic. I said ‘Would you like to be in a movie? A small role, just for fun.’ She said I would like to be in one of your movies because I’d like to tell my grandchildren one day I was in the movie.’ She was everything I hoped she would be. She’s not a lawyer or a diplomat even though she’s married to a political man. She’s from a show business background. She came in and did the part very gracefully. It was fun. It was a nice experience for her, I’m happy to say. She was very happy with how the film came out and very happy with the way the cameramen filmed her.”

We never got to ask Woody how he just happened to be having breakfast with the Sarkozys.

For Woody Allen, Cannes is by now almost as familiar as Manhattan. Midnight in Paris, his 44^nd movie, is his fifth to open the festival. Like Vicky Cristina Barcelona, it’s another postcard-pretty valentine of auteur tourism, with Americans falling into foreign hands, though it lacks the character work (or fireworks) of VCB. But it was warmly received here. With its unabashed francophilia, it could have been made for Cannes, and who knows, maybe it was. Midnight in Paris is, quite proudly, a mere bagatelle, a lightly satirical conjuring of 1920s Paris, set in the context of a crumbling 2010 marriage between two well-heeled American tourists, Gil (Owen Wilson) and Inez (Rachel McAdams). Time travel makes it happen.

Wilson’s naturally disingenuous, slightly stammery delivery makes him a perfect Allen surrogate. McAdams, who has a habit of being consistently better than her material, shines in an unsympathetic role as his nagging fiancé—Canada’s sweetheart is cast against type as a Republican who’s overly impressed by their shallow friend, pedantic know-it-all played by Michael Sheen. Wilson plays a familiar Allen protogonist, a frustrated novelist who worships the past and is aching to escape the hackdom of Hollywood screenwriting success. He deserts Inez and her friends each each night to walk the streets of Paris—where at the stroke of midnight he’s magically spirited away into the émigré salon-monde of the ‘20s. He mingles with the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dali, Buñuel, Picasso and Gertrude Stein, and falls for a dreamy Marion Cotillard, the next best thing to Edith Piaf. Aside from the abrasive chemistry between Wilson and McAdams, the movie’s pleasure lies in its greatest hits parade of coy cameo impersonations, from Alison Pill’s Zelda Fitzgerald to Adrien Brody’s Salvador Dali. Around every burnished corner of this closeted period film is a fresh surprise. Welcome to Woody Tussaud’s House of Wax.

Allen has become a casting virtuoso. He can get Oscar winners like Brody, Cotillard and Katherine Bates to fill out minor roles. But at the press conference he positively gushed about landing Owen Wilson: “Owen is the opposite of me. I’m very Manhattan, very East Coast. Owen is very West Coast. He personifies that in his whole demeanour. He’s relaxed and he’s a beach lover and this gives the character an enormous dimension that I could never have given it, nor could I have written it for another actor.”

I asked Allen if Wilson’s rom-com romance with McAdams in Wedding Crashers had anything to do with him pairing them again. “I’d seen Rachel in a film with Owen years ago,” he said, as if the title escaped him, “and I thought she was sensational. She was beautiful and sexy and funny and a wonderful actress, and I wanted to work with her. And the opportunity came up. I didn’t like the fact that they had worked together before. That was a negative to me. I figured people will think, ‘Oh, it’s Owen and Rachel again.’ But I felt there’s nothing I could do about it. They’re both great and I want them both. I wanted to get Rachel at any cost, and I was very lucky to get Owen. I’ve always been lucky with casting. The truth in casting is to hire great people, let them do what they do, don’t interfere with them too much, and then when they’re great, take credit for it. I’ve done this for many years and it works like a charm.”

Juliette Binoche talks about 'orgasmic' takes in Certified Copy

By macleans.ca - Friday, March 25, 2011 at 1:40 PM - 0 Comments

Opening weekend: Wall Street 2, Never Let Me Go

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, September 24, 2010 at 12:16 PM - 0 Comments

You can see Carey Mulligan, the Oscar-nominated star of An Education, in two movies opening this weekend: she has a thankless supporting role opposite Shia LaBeouf in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and lead role in Never Let Me Go. They’re wildly different, and there’s not question which is the better film. Oliver Stone’s Wall Street sequel is a messy, bombastic spectacle—a morality tale as midway ride. Its chief asset is Michael Douglas, whose remarkably shaded performance somehow survives Stone’s sledgehammer direction. Based on the Kazuo Ishiguro novel,  Never Let Me Go is a sublimely measured, achingly beautiful drama, anchored by superb performances from Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield.

I saw Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps last May in Cannes. The morning after the film’s premiere I joined Stone, Douglas and Mulligan in round-table interviews in a windblown cabana at the opulent Hotel Du Cap. Here’s my video of the gang, who were clearly in morning-after mode, especially Stone:

And here are more candid clips of Carey Mulligan, who seems unsure about the movie after seeing it the night before in Cannes:

There’s a lot of of talented actors onscreen in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, but they’re defeated by Stone’s heavy-handed script.  Aside from Douglas’ shape-shifting reinvention of Gordon Gekko, which is almost worth the price of admission, the other characters are steamrolled into stereotypes, from LaBeouf’s ambitious trader to the Gekko 2.0 tycoon played by Josh Brolin. The brilliant Frank Langella has an incandescent but short-lived role as the old-school mentor to the young trader played by Shia LaBoeuf.  Mulligan, cast as Gekko’s estranged daughter—and LaBoeuf’s girfriend—is wasted. That said, even though Stone rivals Michael Moore as a propagandist, and overloads his dialogue with so much aphoristic messaging that it ceases to be credible, he’s a compelling visual showman. And there’s a curious paradox here: Stone’s movie is a putative critique of capitalism gone mad, yet it revels in the opulence of the world it’s trying to tear down. Like a bloodthirsty anti-war movie. That said, there’s some fun to be had in this over-ripe melodrama, and no matter what you think of Money Never Sleeps, at least it’s not dull.

Never Let Me Go

(from left) Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield in 'Never Let Me Go'

Here is an exotic hybrid. We’ve got Alex Garland, the writer of The Beach, adapting a celebrated dystopian novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. I haven’t read the Ishiguro novel, but those who have are a bit shocked to see that the story’s horrifying premise, which remains mysterious for much of the book, is explained at the end of the first act. I suppose that makes it fair game for plot summaries, but I’m not going to do that here, because I appreciated the jolt of revelation that came early in the film.  Let’s just say that the story is set in England, and concerns a love triangle among three former school mates (Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield) who acquiesce to a grim and preordained destiny. The three leads are superb. Mulligan’s performance doesn’t come as a surprise, but who knew that behind the Pirates of the Caribbean damsel lurked  such an intriguing actress. (David Cronenberg, who cast Knightley in his Freud/Jung biopic, A Dangerous Method, has been raving about her, and here you can see why.) As for Garfield, he’s the next Spider-Man, but between his performance in this film and in The Social Network (opening next week), he may be overqualified for franchise work. Never Let Me Go is science fiction that plays as pure realism, with no techno gimmickry, and barely any explanation of the premise. Director Mark Romanek conjures visions of mortality via elegiac images of England’s cozy landscape and haunting architecture. He lets the film unfold as a delicate mood piece, sustaining a tone of aching beauty with remarkable control. This is a film you don’t watch so much as inhabit.

Noomi Rapace, Dragon Girl

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, July 8, 2010 at 10:59 AM - 0 Comments

Noomi Rapace stars as Lisbeth Salander in the Swedish adaptations of Steig Larsson’s Millenium trilogy—including The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (now out on DVD) and The Girl Who Played With Fire, which opens July 9. Last May I filmed her as she held court on a balcony in Cannes.

Talking about how ‘We never talk’

By Brian D. Johnson - Monday, May 31, 2010 at 12:59 PM - 0 Comments

Everett Collection

Cinema never gets more serious than it does in Cannes. This year’s festival (May 12-23) was dominated by movies on a mission, including a spate of political dramas that subverted clichés about terrorism—Fair Game, Route Irish, Of Gods and Men, Outside the Law and Carlos. But perhaps the most radical trend to emerge from Cannes, at least among English-language films, was the raw exploration of a more intimate, but equally volatile, political arena: love and marriage.

If you go to the multiplex looking for emotional truth, you usually have to fight your way through the contraption of a romantic comedy, or the sludge of a chick flick. So it’s a thrill to come across movies that offer pure, stripped-down scenarios of domestic life. That was the case with some of the strongest entries in Cannes, notably Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine, Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, and Mike Leigh’s Another Year. In each case, though the directors are men, female characters drive the agenda, which tends to address the most chronic complaint in a marriage: we never talk.

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A Thai ghost story wins the Palme d'Or

By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, May 23, 2010 at 3:22 PM - 2 Comments

A scene from Palme D'Or winner 'Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives'

It was a victory of dream over reality.  At the closing ceremony of the Cannes Film Festival, a jury led by Tim Burton awarded the Palme d’Or to the most surreal of the 19 features in compeition: Lung Boonmee Raluek (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives). Directed by Thai filmmaker  Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Tropical Malady), it’s Thailand first film to win the top prize in the 63-year history of what amounts to the Olympics of world cinema. The runner-up Grand Jury Prize went to Des Hommes et des dieux (Of Gods and Men), directed by French filmmaker Xavier Beauvois, based on the true story of the 1996 murder of seven Christian monks  in Algeria by Islamic extremists. The unofficial prize for the competition entry that received the most critical acclaim yet was competely snubbed by the jury goes to Mike Leigh’s Another Year, a masterpiece of domestic realism.

I didn’t see it coming, but in retrospect it makes sense that Burton would annoint a film about magic, populated by phantoms, forest creatures and spirits. In accepting the Palme D’Or the Thai director inverted Oscar protocol: instead of thanking God, he thanked “all the spirits and all the ghosts in Thailand–they made it possible for me to be here.” (In fact, as I noted in a previous blog, the director’s visa was trapped in the red zone of Thailand’s civil war. I’m not sure which ghost released it, but at one point Cannes executive Thierry Fremault asked one fo the producers if he’d like him to phone President Sarkozy. ) And at the dinner where the producer regaled us with that anecdote, he seemed strangely confidant that his film would, in fact, win the Palme. It certainly will need all the help  it can get to find an audience in North America. The Thai movie unfolds as a slow-paced, animist hallucination–challenging art house fare of the first order. What did I think of it? Well, it’s the kind of film I would love to like. But while I was impressed by its rigour, ambition and beauty, it left me unengaged. Just not my cup of Thai.

Burton’s jury, meanwhile, split the Best Actor award between  Javier Bardem for Biutiful directed by Alejandro GONZÁLEZ IÑÁRRITU and Elio GERMANO in La Nostra Vita (Our Life), directed by Daniele LUCHETTI. Which is mystery to me and an insult to Bardem. Although not everyone was a fan of Biutiful, it’s a virtuosic display of talent. Like a lot of critics, I thought Our Life was dreadfully mediocre, and Germano’s acting simply wasn’t in the same league as Bardem’s towering performance. But the highlight of Bardem’s acceptance speech, and of the night, was his passionate valentine to Penélope. Calling her “my friend, my love,” Javier finally made it official as Cruz watched beaming from the audience, controlling her tears.

The prize for Best Actress went to Cannes royal Juliette Binoche–her photograph adorns the festival’s official poster this year. Binoche won it for her performance in Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy , which was indeed quite the feat. As she told me in an interview a couople of days ago, she felt she was driving the whole film. And no wonder. Her  Iranian director didn’t speak English (the language of the script) and her co-star in this walking-talking two-hander had never acted before. Like several others at the Cannes podium, Binoche produced a card bearing the name of Kiarostami compatriate filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who is in the ninth day of a hunger strike in an Iranian prison.

Among the other awards, the best director prize went to Mathieu AMALRIC for TOURNÉE (On Tour), who directed his own starring role as a French impresario who takes an American burlesque troupe on raod in  France. Giving his cast credit for co-directing it, he brought five of these Felliniesque women onstage to share the honour. The second runner-up Jury Prize went to the first movie from Chad ever to play in Cannes,  Un Homme qui crie (A Screaming Man) directed by Mahamat-Saleh HAROUN.

The stagecraft of the awards presentation–unlike the rest of this elegant festival–is always charmingly awkward, a spectacle of missed cues and bumbling exits. Bilingual host Kristin Scott Thomas, a Cannes regular, presided over the ceremony. And one of the funnier moments occurred as Atom Egoyan, chair of the Cinefondation short film jury, waited to announce the prize with co-presenter Michelle Rodriguez. As Rodriguez rattled on semi-coherently about this and that, beginning with a reminder that she was the helicopter pilot in Avatar–”You probably caught a glimpse of me in this 240-minute short film set in Pandora”–Egoyan looked on with an increasingly perplexed expression on his face, before finally getting his chance to launch into French and announce the winners.

For the complete list of Cannes winners, go to: 2010 Cannes Awards.