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

The incredible hunk

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, January 7, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 4 Comments

Bardem with Penélope Cruz at the Cannes film festival in May 2010, Bardem unleashes the most powerful performance of his career in ‘Biutiful’ | Yves Herman/Reuters, Everett Collection

Hollywood is thick with fine actors and glamorous stars, but there’s one thing that’s even rarer than a good original script: the kind of strong leading man who takes your breath away. One contender after another has proved lacking. Tom Cruise has become a freak, a machine-like movie star whose vanity overrides his sex appeal. Johnny Depp is adorable, but seems content to play a pirate for life, and when given a shot at cracking Angelina Jolie’s cool in The Tourist, he looked like he couldn’t wait to get back to his ship. Jolie’s mate, Brad Pitt, seems strangely neutered. Canada’s Ryan Reynolds inherited the title of Sexiest Man Alive, but he has yet to prove it onscreen, and now even Scarlett Johansson isn’t buying it. Leonardo DiCaprio shook off his stigma as Titanic’s teen heartthrob, and matured into a formidable actor, but he seems allergic to romantic roles. Same deal with George Clooney. For a while, he appeared to be the Great White Hope, so boldly debonair and adult, until we began to notice that his career was virtually devoid of love scenes.

Continue…

Together at last

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, December 9, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 4 Comments

Illustration by Adam Cholewa

Vince Vaughn and Kyla Weber
The 39-year-old Wedding Crashers star shed his Hollywood swinger reputation by marrying a 31-year-old former Calgary realtor in Chicago in January. The couple, now expecting their first child, met through mutual friends in 2008 and quickly became fixtures at Chicago Black Hawks games before Vaughn sealed the deal with a US$125,000-ring.

The NHL and Stan Lee
The legendary creator of Spider-Man, Iron Man and X-Men, joined forces with the National Hockey League in October to form Guardian Media Entertainment LLC,  a platform for 30 “Guardians,” one for each NHL team. The project, to be unveiled in January, isn’t set in the world of hockey but “organically and authentically incorporates various NHL elements.” Climb down Spider-Man, Slapshot-Man is coming.

Continue…

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.

TIFF '09: On the red carpet

By macleans.ca - Friday, September 11, 2009 at 11:05 AM - 0 Comments

Click on each image to enlarge.

Penelope Cruz flees Cannes

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, May 21, 2009 at 7:50 AM - 0 Comments

Pedro Almodóvar (left) with Penélope Cruz and co-star Lluís Homar promote 'Broken Promises' in Cannes (photo by BDJ)

Penélope Cruz cut short her visit to Cannes in yesterday. She cancelled an entire day of media interviews for Broken Embraces, her new movie with director Pedro Almodóvar, which premiered in competition here Tuesday. On Monday Cruz had cancelled out of a party to promote her upcoming musical, Nine, complaining of food poisoning. By the time she got to the press conference for Broken Embraces the next morning, she had upgraded her condition to the flu—although she hastened to add it was just a “normal flu.” Then yesterday she fled Cannes two days ahead of schedule, which led one industry insider wondering if she might be pregnant. We don’t want to start any unfounded rumours. There has been Internet chatter about her being pregant before—three years ago, when Internet star-watchers detected a “baby bump” in photographs. And last year, Cruz, who’s involved with Vicky Christina Barcelona co-star Javier Bardem, had mused publicly about her desire for a family. So there you have it—a heap of unsubstantiated celebrity gossip. So don’t ever say it’s all high art and film criticism at BDJ Unscreened. . I’m just trying to do my bit.

The unbroken embrace of Almodóvar and Cruz

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, May 20, 2009 at 8:21 AM - 0 Comments

Pénélope Cruz and Lluís Homar in 'Broken Embraces'

Earlier this week I was interviewed by CBC Newsworld, and was asked what movie I was most looking forward to in Cannes. Without hestitation I said it was Pedro Almodóvar‘s Broken Embraces: the Spanish director is my favorite filmmaker in the world at the moment and his work has amazing consistency. It’s partly a matter of taste, but to my mind no one else has his talent for combining narrative dexterity with visual design, reckless imagination with measured control. From the pitch of the performances to the choice of score, Almodóvar is one of those rare maestros who can make an ode to motherhood as hot as Hitchcock, and a noir melodrama insanely credible. No matter how wild his stories get, he grounds them in bluntly realist performances. He channels erotic energy, gay or straight, as if it was his lifeblood. And he loves to get involved with his actors. As he told a press conferernce yesterday: “If necessary I will play all the parts on the set. In fact I’m very shy, even if I don’t appear that way, but I’m prepared to play all the parts. In one of my films I even performed cunnilingus on an actress in order to show the actor how to play the part.” That’s translated from a French translation of him speaking Spanish–a case of too many tongues perhaps–but that’s what he seems to have said.

Well, I saw the director’s new movie yesterday and, sadly, I wasn’t blown away. A perpetual bridesmaid in Cannes, Almodóvar’s overdue to win the Palme d’Or—but I’m not sure if this is the movie that will do it for him. Continue…

Newsmakers: The White Album

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 9:10 AM - 0 Comments

The blizzard began with Michelle Obama’s creamy Jason Wu confection that completed a top-of-the-wedding-cake tableau with the tuxedoed new President, and continued, days later, with Anne Hathaway’s Grecian glam at the Screen Actors Guild Awards. At Washington balls and on Hollywood red carpets, white is hotter than red, fresher than black. And for good reason: the luxuriously impractical hue assures the showstopping entrance enjoyed by brides on their big day. Plus, no shade better shows off every hour logged with the trainer—especially when it’s shiny as the beheaded Valentino that Jennifer Aniston wore to the Oscars, which, at five kilos, itself provided a workout. White demands and rewards impeccable craftmanship, as illustrated by Marisa Tomei’s amazing homage to New York’s Chrystler Building, and it’s the brand new antidote to doom and gloom. Like Penélope Cruz brandishing her Oscar, it shouts: “This is my big day”—even when everyone else is wearing it.

Click here for the gallery of dresses.

Newsmakers: The White Album gallery

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 9:05 AM - 0 Comments

Film Review: Penélope bares all for Sir Ben in 'Elegy'

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, August 22, 2008 at 6:26 PM - 0 Comments

Finally back in the saddle after a luxuriously long absence, I’m returning = with a fresh palate. For almost a month, I didn’t set foot in a movie theatre. Saw a bunch of stuff on DVD—Michael Mann’s big screen version of Miami Vice was an especially guilty pleasure—but I’m just now catching up on some the movies I’ve missed. I did see Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona in Cannes, but last night I was happy to see  it again (as a date movie with my wife). It’s even better than I remembered, and best enjoyed as a summer treat rather than under the harsh scrutiny of Cannes. Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz are dynamite, and this could be the comedy that finally wins Woody back his audience 16 years after mortifying them by leaving Mia Farrow for her adopted child, who’s now virtually middle-aged.

Among this weekend’s releases, meanwhile, Penélope Cruz pops up again in Elegy, a May-December romance with Ben Kingsley. It’s worth a look. And for an more exotic tale of romantic havoc, I highly recommend Tuya’s Marriage, a Chinese film about a Mongolian shepherdess that won the top prize, the Golden Bear, at the Berlin Film Festival.

Elegy

May-December romance has become a staple of the art house. It carries a frisson of intellectual eros, conveniently pairing a young beauty with an aging thespian. And as youth worships genius and genius worships youth, these bittersweet romances have a fatal symmetry. They are inevitably doomed. The tone is elegiac. And the protagonist is is almost invariably the male—very often an artist of some sort who is finally forced to confront his own mortality in the adoring eyes of a woman he can never fully possess.

In recent years, we’ve seen a variety of Serious Actors tackle such roles: Anthony Hopkins as a college professor seduced by a gum-snapping Nicole Kidman in The Human Stain (2003); Peter O’Toole as a septuagenarian actor who courts a teenage punk in Venus (2006); and, most memorably, Frank Langella as washed-up novelist who’s waylaid by a literary vixen in Starting Out in the Evening (2007).

Elegy, starring Penélope Cruz, and Ben Kingsley offers the latest spin on the May-December genre, and if it bears some resemblance to The Human Stain, that’s because it, too, is based on a novel by Philip Roth, The Dying Animal, and Kingsley’s character, a libidinous professor named David Kepesh, seems closely related to Coleman Silk, the libidinous professor played by Hopkins in The Human Stain. Hey, it’s a small world.

But a couple of things distinguish Elegy from Venus or Starting out in the Evening. First, although he’s in his 60, Kingsley’s Kepesh is hardly a tired old geezer. He’s a fully functioning sexual animal at the top of his form, a predatory prof with the good sense never to hit on his female students until after he’s graded them—then he singles out his prey at his annual post-semester cocktail. Continue…

Samll Balls

By Steve Maich - Monday, June 30, 2008 at 10:58 AM - 0 Comments

La première étoile: The entire nation of Spain! Viva Espana! Spain Spain Spain! Land of fine hams and lovely weather! Also, really good at soccer! Hurrah!

Two minutes for… Indecision. Really Mats, It’s not that hard. I know that the trendy thing to do, these days, is to go all Niedermayer, and spend the summer on a deck someplace, doing a Hamlet impression. But really…you’re a multi-millionaire athlete, and there’s really only one question to answer: do you want to play or not?  Kindly come up with an answer while there is still one lonely strand of DNA in my being that gives a crap.

Who’s got tickets? Wimbledon. Big day on the grass courts. So big, in fact, even I have heard of several of the players in action: Federer, Nadal, Murry.  And, courtesy of the great sports time machine: The Williams Sisters! I thought they were full time fashion designers by now

Fun police: A swimmer has swum faster than any swimmer before. Splendid. Good for you Michael Phelps. You are the envy of aquatic animals everywhere. But I still share the late, great, George Carlin‘s view.  Swimming is not a sport.  Swimming is a way  to keep  from drowning.

Extra bases:

Kevin Lowe is quietly building an interesting team in Edmonton. Newest addition Lubo Visnovsky from the L.A. Kings gives them some real fire power on the blueline, especially is Souray can find a way to stay healthy…. Chipper Jones is hitting .394 at the end of June, and is heading for a (hopefully-brief) stay on the DL. Get healthy chipper, and make a run for .400….   Let me say that I love Manny Ramirez. But manny is starting to act even crazier than usual. And it’s not that endearing “isn’t Manny so wonderfully strange?!?” kind of crazy. It’s, like, unstable crazy.  If I’m Terry Francona, I want to fix that….  No…No…No…No…Noooo!

Why Woody isn't up for a ménage-a-trois

By Brian D. Johnson - Saturday, May 17, 2008 at 7:08 PM - 0 Comments

At the Cannes press conference for Woody’s Allen’s new comedy, Vicky Cristina Barcelona—which features a ménage-a-trois involving Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson—I couldn’t resist asking Woody the obvious question, even the answer was equally obvious:

“The ménage a trois, the threesome, is a classic and enduring male fantasy,” I ventured, tickled to be serving as Woody’s straight man in a packed house. “I’m wondering, Mr. Allen, if that is fantasy of yours, and if you’ve ever wanted to make it happen?

“It’s hard enough to get one person,” replied Woody, drawing a big laugh from the room. “In trying to figure out solutions in life, two actually tends to make it more complicated than one. The characters in this movie, the chemistry was right, so they were able to handle that situation and make work for them even though it’s for a brief period of time. In real life, most people could not survive that situation in a serious way because it’s too complicated and has too many emotional complications that would be too difficult to surmount. In film you can do it because I’m dealing with larger-than-life characters—Penélope and Javier, two artists who are crazed and have a larger-than-life view of things. But in real life most of us petty people could never handle anything like that. And as I was saying before it’s hard enough to get a relationship that will work out with one person, but with two it becomes geometrically. . . fatal.”

In case you’re curious, despite the voluptuous casting, the sex in Vicky Cristina Barcelona is very tame and tasteful. Which did not prevent a Sunday Times journalist from asking Cruz if she “had any qualms about the lesbian kiss scene.” (A lesbian kiss between movie stars is always news on Fleet St.) Cruz did not rise to the bait, saying she was “not inspired” by the question. “I’ve been asked the question four times today and I didn’t give any answer because I didn’t have any answer, and I thought, ‘What would Woody say?’

Asked why he shot a movie in Barcelona, Allen said, in so many words, that it was a working vacation: “The people in Barcelona called and said are you interested in making a film there. And I said sure. I love Spain, I love Barcelona. My wife and my children would love to spend the summer in Barcelona So I wrote something set in Barcelona. If somebody called from Norway or Venice or Stockholm or God knows where I probably would have agreed to it just as readily, but this was a golden opportunity for me because I happen to have a continuing fondness for a number of cities in Spain and Barcelona is certainly my favorite.”

A solicitous female journalist from Ubekistan, predicted Allen’s latest film would do very well in Central Asia, because men already are into the idea of having more than one wife. Encouraged by the notion of plotting films as tourist junkets, and touting the beauty of actresses in her part of the world, she made her pitch: “I really hope your next film you will plan to do in Russia or in Central Asia.

Allen looked dumbfounded.

“You’re asking me if I plan to shoot in Russia? . . . No plans at the moment. But I’ll tell you an interesting story. Years ago I visited Russia with my family. I went to Leningrad. I was planning on being there for five days. I was there for about two hours and I went to the travel agent in the hotel and said, “Get me the first reservation out of here. I don’t care where it goes.’ I had a terrible, terrible time when I was there. I haven’t been back since then. I’m told it has greatly changed. But I’m a fearful traveller. And it would take a lot to get me back to Russia.”

Photo Gallery: Toronto Film Festival 2006

By Jeff Harris - Tuesday, September 12, 2006 at 1:51 PM - 0 Comments

Juilette Binoche epitomized the “blonde bombshell” look at Breaking and Entering
premiere, along with co-star Jude Law — who had an impish grin for festival paparrazzi. The Dixie Chicks came to town with a hot documentary that followed the backlash after their dig at President George Bush. From Ashton Kutcher to Zach Braff, see all the celebs that invaded Toronto this past September.

Click here for exclusive photo gallery.